Richard Bessel Livres

Even today, the Third Reich-the regime that instigated the most destructive war in modern history-evokes powerful images of fascination and horror. Yet how were the lives of the ordinary German people of the 1930s and '40s affected by the politics of Hitler and his followers? Looking beyond the catalog of events, this intriguing book reveals that daily German life involved a complex mixture of bribery and terror; of fear and concessions; of barbarism and appeals to conventional moral values employed by the Nazis to maintain their grip on society. Eight leading historians present essays that shed fresh light on topics as familiar as the role of political violence in Nazi seizure of power and the German view of Hitler himself. It also focuses on lesser-known aspects of life in the Third Reich, such as village life, the treatment of "social outcasts," and the Germans' own retrospective view of this period of their history.

In the beginning of 1945, Germany experienced the greatest outburst of deadly violence that the world has ever seen. As many as a million people died violent deaths in January alone. That stark fact provides the starting point for this book, which examines Germany's emergence from the most terrible catastrophe in modern history. When the Second World War ended, millions had been murdered; millions of survivors had lost their families, homes and health; cities and towns had been reduced to rubble and were littered with corpses. Yet people lived on, and began rebuilding their lives in the most inauspicious of circumstances. This is the story of Germany in 1945, a story of life after death. Bombing, military casualties, territorial loss, economic collapse, social disintegration, and the processes of denazification gave Germans a deep sense of their own victimhood, which would become central to how they emerged from the trauma of war and total defeat, turned their backs on the Third Reich and its crimes, and focused on their own personal concerns. Germany's transition to a period of relative peace, prosperity and civilized behaviour is the hinge on which Europe's twentieth century turned. For years we have concentrated on how Europe slid into tyranny, violence, war and genocide; this book describes how humanity began to get back out.

Druhá svetová vojna bola určujúcou udalosťou dvadsiateho storočia, ktorá za sebou zanechala milióny mŕtvych a prekreslila politickú mapu Európy takými spôsobmi, že sa to dodnes dotýka osudov prakticky celého ľudstva. Táto vojna nemala obdobu nielen z hľadiska svojho rozsahu, ale predovšetkým z hľadiska príčin, ktoré ju vyvolali. Na rozdiel od predchádzajúcich územných a politických nezhôd mala vojna vyvolaná nacistickým Nemeckom ideologický charakter a bola vedená s cieľom vymazať zo zemského povrchu celé národy a kultúry. Richard Bessel vo svojom diele dokazuje, že rasová nenávisť nebola vedľajším produktom, ale hnacou silou nacizmu. Nacizmus - neoddeliteľný od vojny - zničil starú Európu, a tak "pomohol" vytvoriť svet našej súčasnosti. Táto myšlienkovo prenikavá, hodnoverná a čítavá kniha je provokatívnou a presvedčivou vedeckou prácou.