Second World War

In deciding on the Reoccupation of the Rhineland, writes D.C. Watt, Hitler said that he went forward “with the assurance of a sleepwalker...” His practical calculations proved to be “entirely justified.”

The Field Marshal who had led his country to independence in 1918, writes Oliver Warner, was called upon twice to defend his own creation during the Second World War.

A man of obsessions, a passionate racialist with a romantic belief in the virtues of the ‘sturdy peasant farmer’, Quisling ruled war-time Norway as a devoted pupil of the Nazi government.

The suffering of prisoners of war at the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War has coloured the British view of the conflict in the Far East. Clare Makepeace highlights a little known aspect of the captives’ story: their quest for compensation.

Many German professional soldiers, writes F.L. Carsten, were staunch opponents of the Nazi regime.

In September 1939, writes J.V. Woolford, a British war in Europe seemed alien to many Dutch South Africans, but General Smuts changed the country’s mind.

Thin, pale, solitary, a day-dreamer, opinionated, rebellious, with sudden bursts of energy that quickly evaporated, D.C. Watt writes that Hitler as a boy is a strange forerunner of the would-be world-conqueror.

Adam Zamoyski describes how the Poles under German occupation were experts in subversion.

The court martial and acquittal of a senior British Intelligence officer accused of presiding over abuses of German prisoners during the Second World War highlights failings in intelligence policy and accountability, says Simona Tobia.

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.