Jews Under The Axis 1939 1942

Provides a comprehensive history from the rise of fascism in 1922 to its defeat in 1945. The author uses statistical evidence to document how the Italian social climate changed from relatively just to irredeemably prejudicial. He demonstrates that Rome did not simply follow the lead of Berlin.

This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country - in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps.The essays presented here consider Jewish resistance to be resistance by Jewish persons in specifically Jewish groups, or by Jewish persons working within non-Jewish organizations. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis - acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying. These attempts to remain physically, intellectually, culturally, morally, and theologically alive constituted resistance to Nazi oppression, which was designed to demolish individuals, destroy their soul, and obliterate their desire to live.

Professor Penkower's latest book, Decision on Palestine Deferred, offers the first sustained, documented account of Palestine and the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War. Firmly grounded in three decades of archival research, his spirited narrative offers a fascinating cast of characters against the backdrop of the larger Middle Eastern context. The latter relates to Jewish and Arab activities during the War, the grave threat of Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, U.S. interest in Saudi Arabian oil, and the effort to achieve Arab unity. Zionism's shift to viewing the United States as the center of decision making in international affairs, and hence the Archimedean point for forging Jewry's destiny, occurred in these same six years. British anxieties about imperial security, while administering the Palestine mandate by means of a stringent immigration quota, jostled with the first American steps taken to formulate a stance vis-à-vis Palestine, and the region as a whole. The differing approaches of Churchill and Roosevelt to the Palestine imbroglio are also explored, as are the varied avenues that were then championed within the Jewish camp. The impact of the Holocaust, with both governments breathing the very spirit of defeatism and despair, surfaces throughout.

"Graphically demonstrates how disbelief, indifference, antisemitism, and, above all, the political expediency of the West doomed a powerless European Jewry to Hitler's 'Final Solution' ... Charts the free world's tragic failure to respond decisively to the Holocaust."--Back cover.

This book investigates the intent and policy of Nazi Germany in the Arab world from 1933 to 1944. It analyzes Germany's support for continued European domination of the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East and Germany's rejection of truly sovereign Arab states in those regions.

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.