Books
The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution
By Tan Heçheng. Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. A spasm of extreme radicalism that rocked China to its foundations in the mid- to late 1960s, the Cultural Revolution has generated a vast literature. Much of it, however, is at a birds-eye level, and we have very few detailed accounts of how it worked on the…
Read moreNot in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust
By Roger Frie. Even as the Holocaust grows more distant with the passing of time, its traumas call out to be known and understood. What is remembered, what has been imparted through German heritage, and what has been forgotten? Can familiar family stories be transformed into an understanding of the Holocaust’s forbidding reality? Author Roger…
Read moreRestos humanos e identificación. Violencia de masa, genocidio y el “giro forense”
Edited by Sévane Garibian, Élisabeth Anstett y Jean-Marc Dreyfus. Language of publication: Spanish Human Remains and Identification presents a pioneering investigation into the practices and methodologies used in the search for and exhumation of dead bodies resulting from mass violence. Previously absent from the discussion of forensic practices, social scientists and historians here confront historical and…
Read moreThe Making of a Gentleman Nazi: Albert Speer’s Politics of History in the Federal Republic of Germany
By Baijayanti Roy. At the Nuremberg Trial and through his bestselling books, Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and minister, could successfully project an image of himself as the «gentleman Nazi». Using hitherto unexplored archival sources, this book looks at those aspects of his career that Speer retrospectively manipulated (e.g. his resistance to Hitler’s Nero order), to…
Read moreThe Trial That Never Ends: Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ in Retrospect
Edited by Richard J. Golsan and Sarah M. Misemer. The fiftieth anniversary of the Adolf Eichmann trial may have come and gone but in many countries around the world there is a renewed focus on the trial, Eichmann himself, and the nature of his crimes. This increased attention also stimulates scrutiny of Hannah Arendt’s influential and…
Read moreTranslating Guilt: Identifying Leadership Liability for Mass Atrocity Crimes (International Criminal Justice Series)
By Cassandra Steer. This book seeks to understand how and why we should hold leaders responsible for the collective mass atrocities that are committed in times of conflict. It attempts to untangle the debates on modes of liability in international criminal law (ICL) that have become truly complex over the last twenty years, and to…
Read moreHuman Rights after Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes
By Dan Plesch. Human Rights after Hitler reveals thousands of forgotten US and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for twenty-first-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the Nuremberg…
Read moreUnderstanding Atrocities: Remembering, Representing and Teaching Genocide
Edited by Scott W. Murray. Understanding Atrocities is a wide-ranging collection of essays bridging scholarly and community-based efforts to understand and respond to the global, transhistorical problem of genocide. The essays in this volume investigate how evolving, contemporary views on mass atrocity frame and complicate the possibilities for the understanding and prevention of genocide. The…
Read moreConstructing Genocide and Mass Violence: Society, Crisis, Identity
By Maureen S. Hiebert. This book addresses two closely related questions: what is the process by which the relatively short and violent genocides of the twentieth century and beyond have occurred? Why have these instances of mass violence been genocidal and not some other form of state violence, repression, or conflict? Hiebert answers these questions by…
Read moreThe Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy
By Steven Remy. During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven…
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