Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored.

Anzio was one of the greatest battles of World War II-a desperate gamble to land a large amphibious force behind German lines in Italy in the hope that the war could be shortened by capturing Rome. It also turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. military history. Based on extensive research into archives, photos, letters, diaries, previously classified official records, & scores of personal interviews with surviving veterans of the 45th Division, The Rock of Anzio is written with an immediacy that puts the reader right onto the battlefield & shows us war through the eyes of ordinary men called upon to perform extraordinary deeds. Contents: Introduction. Early History & Training. The Invasion of Sicily. Saving the Salerno Beachhead. Ordeal in the Apennines. Agony at Anzio. Breakout from the Beachhead. The Liberation of Rome. The Invasion of Southern France. Cracking the Maginot & Siegfried Lines. Into the Heart of Germany. The Liberation of Dachau. Epilogue & Postscript.

The odyssey of Herbert Zipper covers most of the 20th century. Born in Vienna in 1904, his life has spanned three centuries: from the 19th century world of the Habsburg Empire, through the 20th century horrors of Dachau, Buchenwald, and the Manila of World War II, to the emerging 21st century in China. Throughout his remarkable journey Zipper, a composer, conductor, concentration camp survivor, and educator, has maintained a spirit of achievement and optimism that contradicts his experiences. This is a story of the triumph of human will and the human spirit and, as such, is both fascinating and instructive.

A well-written, fascinating portrait of Bruno Bettelheim that seeks to uncover the entire man with all his flaws and all his virtues.

Who was Bruno Bettelheim? The brilliant discoverer of a unique method of treating psychotic children, justly acclaimed the world over? Or the brutal and despotic bully who was denounced after his death by former students and patients? In her quest to understand this puzzling and powerful man, Nina Sutton spent five years tracing Bettelheim's footsteps from Vienna to Los Angeles, via Chicago, Basel, and Jerusalem. She interviewed students and colleagues, friends and enemies, and uncovered rare documents, including Bettelheim's letters from Buchenwald and Dachau.

Most significantly, he was a therapist driven by an almost magical idea: that from an absolute evil, Nazism, could be drawn the salvation of deeply disturbed children. Sutton shows how Bettelheim discovered his life force in the concentration camp and then tried to use his own aggression as a lightning rod for the self-destructive anger and violence seething within the children in his care. Probing deep into his past and into the scandal that broke out after his suicide, she reveals how care and brutality, commitment to truth and a passion for fairy tales, could coexist in this exceptional man.

A book that will fundamentally enrich our knowledge of human nature, the organization of power, and the execution of terror.--Der Spiegel During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation, terror labor, and the business- like extermination of human beings. Based on historical documents and the reports of survivors, the book details how the resistance of prisoners was broken down. Arbitrary terror and routine violence destroyed personal identity and social solidarity, disrupted the very ideas of time and space, perverted human work into torture, and unleashed innumerable atrocities. As a result, daily life was reduced to a permanent struggle for survival, even as the meaning of self-preservation was extinguished. Sofsky takes us from the searing, unforgettable image of the Muselmann--Auschwitz jargon for the walking dead--to chronicles of epidemics, terror punishments, selections, and torture. The society of the camp was dominated by the S.S. and a system of graduated and forced collaboration which turned selected victims into accomplices of terror. Sofsky shows that the S.S. was not a rigid bureaucracy, but a system with ample room for autonomy. The S.S. demanded individual initiative of its members. Consequently, although they were not required to torment or murder prisoners, officers and guards often exploited their freedom to do so--in passing or on a whim, with cause, or without. The order of terror described by Sofsky culminates in the organized murder of millions of European Jews and Gypsies in the death-factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. By the end of this book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be conceived as a product of modern civilization, where institutionalized, state-run human cruelty has now become possible with or without the mobilizing feelings of hatred.

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were worked to death by the Nazis under a brutal system of slave labor in the concentration camps. By 1942, this vast network of slavery extended across all of German-occupied Europe, but the whole operation was run by a surprisingly small staff of bureaucrats--no more than 200 engineers and managers who worked in the Business Administration Main Office of the SS. Their projects included designing and constructing the concentration camps and gas chambers, building secret underground weapons factories, and brokering slave laborers to private companies such as Volkswagen and IG Farben.

"The Business of Genocide powerfully contradicts the assumption that the SS forced slavery upon the German economy, demonstrating that instead industrialists actively sought out the Business Administration Main Office as a valued partner in the war economy. Moreover, while the bureaucrats who oversaw Holocaust operations have often been seen as technocrats or simple "cogs in the machinery, " the book reveals their ideological dedication, even fanatical devotion, to slavery and genocide in the name of National Socialism.

In this major and comprehensive work, hailed by Le Monde as a "monumental study", Hermann Langbein shatters the myth that all prisoners of concentration camps during World War II passively let themselves be slaughtered. A prisoner himself and one of the leaders of resistance at Auschwitz, Langbein painstakingly documents the detailed account of the history of the camps and the story of resistance. Spanning the initial years to the chaotic weeks before liberation, Against All Hope is the first systematic presentation of organized resistance. Deeply moving, it is an unforgettable testament to the resilience and determination of the human spirit. As the camps were being established, Langbein examines the composition of the initial prisoners; a mixture of political prisoners (Reds), convicted criminals (Greens), Jews, and "anti-socials" and reveals the brutal struggle for camp domination between the Reds and Greens. With analytic detail, he presents the history and nature of the individual camps and the inmate self-government. In "The Actors", Langbein recognizes for the first time the various inmate groups, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Russians, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies and Jews, and how they related to resistance. Langbein portrays the incredible impossibility of resistance against the all-powerful total domination of the Nazi camp administration. The prisoners were to be morally broken, psychically disabled, and even physically destroyed. To resist against this systematic demoralization, its isolation from the rest of the world, and its intention to exterminate, was inconceivable. Through chronic malnutrition, beatings, torture, and the permanent terrorism ofthe SS, the prisoners were led to believe "there is only one way out of here: through the chimney". And yet, resistance, individual initiatives and organized action, to aid fellow inmates, to escape, to revolt, to thwart manag