The Second World War remains today the most seismic political event of the past hundred years, an unimaginable unpheaval that impacted upon every country on earth and is fully ingrained in the consciousness of the world's citizens. Traditional narratives of the conflict are entrenched to such a degree that new research takes on an ever important role in helping us make sense of World War II. Aiming to bring to light the results of new archival research and exploring notions of memory, propaganda, genocide, empire and culture, Routledge Studies in Second World War History sheds new light on the causes, events and legacy of global war.
By Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
May 31, 2023
This book explores the consequences of the latest political shifts in Central Eastern Europe: the rise of right-wing parties and, among other things, politics becoming more invested in history. These phenomena coincide and overlap with the democratisation of history by turning the past into a hot ...
By Jesús Casquete
May 05, 2023
To disentangle the National Socialists’ path to power in Germany, one must attend to the discursive strategies and liturgical practices employed by its emocrats, or manipulators of emotions. The apotheosis of martyrdom in the National Socialist propaganda template is far from being a marginal ...
By Richard Carrier
September 26, 2022
This book analyses why the Italian army failed to defeat its Greek opponent between October 1940 and April 1941. It thoroughly examines the multiple forms of ineffectiveness that plagued the political leadership as well as the military organisation. Mussolini’s aggression of Greece ranks among the ...
By Silvia Tarabini Fracapane
August 01, 2022
Based on never previously explored personal accounts and archival documentation, this book examines life and death in the Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims from Denmark. "How was it in Theresienstadt?" Thus asked Johan Grün rhetorically when he, in July 1945, ...
By Pothiti Hantzaroula
May 30, 2022
A historical investigation of children’s memory of the Holocaust in Greece illustrates that age, generation and geographical background shaped postwar Jewish identities. The examination of children’s narratives deposited in the era of digital archives enables an understanding of the age-specific ...
By Anson Rabinbach, Stefanos Geroulanos, Dagmar Herzog
May 06, 2022
A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects ...
By Alexander Henry
December 24, 2021
There is a popular notion that the Italian armed forces of the Second World War were an inferior fighting force. Despite the vast numbers taken prisoner, detailed studies of the experiences of these soldiers remain relatively uncommon and the value of this group to furthering our understanding of ...
Edited
By Carol Rittner, John K. Roth
July 23, 2020
The growing field of Holocaust studies confronts a world wracked by antisemitism, immigration and refugee crises, human rights abuses, mass atrocity crimes, threats of nuclear war, the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, and environmental degradation. What does it mean to advance ...
By Beata Halicka
May 28, 2020
The incorporation of German territories east of the Oder and Western Neisse rivers into Poland in 1945 was linked with the difficult process of an almost total exchange of population and involved the taking over of a region in which the Second World War had effected an enormous level of ...
By Natacha Chevalier
April 20, 2020
Based on deep analysis of Mass Observation wartime diaries, Food in Wartime Britain explores the food experience of the British middle classes in their own words throughout the course of the Second World War. It reveals that, while the food practices of the population were modified by rationing and...
By Raimund Bauer
October 14, 2019
Throughout the Second World War, the term ‘Europe’ featured prominently in National Socialist rhetoric. This book reconstructs what Europe stood for in National Socialist Germany, analyses how the interplay of its defining elements changed dependent on the war, and shows that the new European order...
Edited
By Maria Björkman, Patrik Lundell, Sven Widmalm
May 23, 2019
The book investigates the rather neglected "intellectual" collaboration between National Socialist Germany and other countries, including views on knowledge and politics among "pro-German" intellectuals, using a comparative approach. These moves were shaped by the Nazi system, which viewed ...