De rooms-katholieke Kerk als machtsinstituut vanaf de kruistochten en Katharen tot heden.

This country`s most distinguished historian of the Second World War ... Overy`s book is easily the best account of Europe`s descent into the death and destruction that were Hitler's element` Michael Burleigh, Evening Standard

24 August 1939: The fate of the world is hanging in the balance. Hitler has ambitions to invade Poland and hopes Stalin will help him. The West must stop them. If they fail, the world will go to war.

Richard Overy`s dramatic account re-creates hour-by-hour the last days of peace, as politicians and the public braced themselves for a war they feared might spell the end of civilization.

Je kunt wel generaliserende aannames doen, maar zelf vind ik het nog altijd zinvoller om te horen wat mensen zelf te zeggen hebben", aldus journalist en wetenschapper Nikki Sterkenburg. Ze heeft altijd al een fascinatie gehad voor ontoegankelijke werelden, of het nu om die van bankiers, accountants (ook die hebben het nodige te verbergen), jihadisten of radicaal- en extreemrechtse activisten gaat. Sterkenburg wil weten wie zij zijn, wat hen beweegt en hoe ze te werk gaan. Zeker nu ze niet langer makkelijk te herkennen zijn aan een swastika (hakenkruis) op de arm, maar juist hun activisme combineren met een baan en een rijk sociaal leven buiten de beweging. 3 jaar lang volgt ze ruim veertig radicaal- en extreemrechtse activisten. Van nazi`s met wehrmachthelmen in de keuken tot de moskee-bezetters van Identitair Verzet en de oprichters van Erkenbrand. Ze bezoekt demonstraties, besloten bijeenkomsten en borrels en interviewt mensen thuis. "Maar dat mag je niet zeggen" is een beklemmend verslag waarbij je wordt geconfronteerd met de enge, radicale vooroordelen van anderen, maar ook met die van jezelf.

Begin dit jaar verscheen "Bloemen van het kwaad", een door Paul Damen verzorgde, meer dan 500 pagina's tellende bundeling van gedichten door 33 dictators, met telkens een toelichting en een korte biografie. Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, allemaal schreven ze gedichten. Te vaak vroegen lezers: moet Geert Wilders er niet bij, als dictator in de dop? Als definitief antwoord daarop nu, van dezelfde auteur, de bijlage "Gedachten over de Grote Geert", waarom Wilders wel of niet een dichtende dictator is.

The Battle of Stalingrad was not only the psychological turning point of World War II: it also changed the face of modern warfare. From Antony Beevor, the internationally bestselling author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem.

In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five-month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost, then, in an astonishing reversal, encircled and trapped their Nazi enemy. This battle for the ruins of a city cost more than a million lives. Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides, fighting in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has interviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including prisoner interrogations and reports of desertions and executions. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable.

Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle.

Beschrijving van de gebeurtenissen tijdens de laatste weken van Adolf Hitlers leven.

Over de opkomst en heerschappij van Vladimir Poetin

September 1938. In power more than five years, Hitler unilaterally dismantled the Treaty of Versailles, provision by provision, daring Britain and France to stand up to him. Earlier that year, he forced Austria into his Third Reich without firing a single shot. Now his sights were set on Czechoslovakia.

It was in this dangerous climate that the first anti-Nazi coup was born. The plot was spearheaded by Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster, and its members included top German military leaders, the Berlin police, local troop commanders, civil authorities, religious leaders, and a group of resisters whose names have been wiped from the pages of history. Their mission was to kill Hitler and to overthrow the Nazi regime.

Using British and German sources and previously unknown documents in the Military History Institute of the U.S. Army War College, historian Terry Parssinen has documented this conspiracy. Illustrated with photographs and maps, this highly provocative work is narrative history at its best.

The Hitler who arrived in Vienna in 1907 was a young aspiring artist; the man who left six years later was a hate-filled dictator in the making, destined to plunge the world into war. Jones' look at Hitler's formative years provides a startling and insightful picture into the future Fuhrer, examining his career as an artist, his acquaintances, and his developing political beliefs. Jones also explores the Vienna of those fragile years before World War I, a home to an amazing array of artists, thinkers, and future leaders, including Sigmund Freud, composer Gustav Mahler, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Communist leader Leon Trotsky, painter Gustav Klimt, composer Arnold Schoenberg, and many others. In this remarkable setting, where the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were running out and suicide became a widespread trend, Jones shows how the tumultuous period left a significant mark on the young Hitler.

Annotation. No historical event has exerted more influence on Americas postWorld War II use of military force than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Informed by the supposed grand lesson of Munichnamely, that capitulating to the demands of aggressive dictatorships invites further aggression and makes inevitable a larger warAmerican presidents from Harry Truman through George W. Bush have relied on the Munich analogy not only to interpret perceived security threats but also to mobilize public opinion for military action. In The Specter of Munich, noted defense analyst Jeffrey Record takes an unconventional look at a disastrous chapter in Western diplomatic history. After identifying the complex considerations behind the Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler and the reasons for the policys failure, Record disputes the stock thesis that unchecked aggression always invites further aggression. He proceeds to identify other lessons of the 1930s more relevant to meeting todays U.S. foreign policy and security challenges. Among those lessons are the severe penalties that foreign policy miscalculation can incur, the constraints of public opinion in a modern democracy, and the virtue of consistency in threatening and using force. The Specter of Munichconcludes that though todays global political, military, and economic environment differs considerably from that of the 1930s, the United States is making some of the same strategic mistakes in its war on terrorism that the British and French made in their attempts to protect themselves against Nazi Germany. Not the least of these mistakes is the continued reliance on the specter of Adolf Hitler to interpret today's foreign security threats.

Argo by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio - the declassified CIA story behind the Oscar-winning film

WINNER OF BEST PICTURE AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS, THE BAFTAS AND THE GOLDEN GLOBES

Tehran, November 1979. Militant students stormed the American embassy and held sixty Americans captive for a gruelling 444 days. But until now the CIA has never revealed the twist to the Iran Hostage Crisis: six Americans escaped.

The escape plot was run by Antonio Mendez, head of the CIA's extraction team and a master of disguise. Mendez came up with an idea so daring and potentially foolish that it seemed destined for Hollywood... and indeed it was. He invented a fake sci-fi film called 'Argo' (from the actual name of the CIA mission, a reference to Jason and the Argonauts). After announcing the production to the movie industry, Mendez put together a team of real 1970s Hollywood actors, directors and producers - along with covert CIA officers. They would travel to revolutionary Iran under a foreign film visa, and while 'scouting locations' throughout the country they would track down the six Americans who were hiding out. After giving them false identities as part of the film crew, they would spirit them back across the border.

One part 'Ocean's 11' and another part 'Black Hawk Down', Mendez's mind-bogglingly complicated and risky gamble paid off: each escapee was extracted without a shot being fired. Mendez is considered one of the greatest officers in CIA history. The story of this, his greatest mission, has never been told.

Now an acclaimed film directed by and starring Ben Affleck, with Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and John Goodman'

Antonio Mendez was cited by Richard Clarke as one of the top two or three CIA agents in history. He received the CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit, the Trailblazer Medallion and the Intelligence Star - for his rescue of six Americans from revolutionary Iran. He and his wife, also a famed agent, were technical consultants on the television series 'The Agency' and founding board members of the International Spy Museum in Washington.

Matt Baglio is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist. His writing appears regularly in the Daily Mail and the Associated Press.

Based on Nixon s overlooked recordings, New York Times bestselling author John W. Dean connects the dots between what we ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened
Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA s widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate.
In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President
Nixon know and when did he know it?
Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon s recorded conversations, and more.
In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America s worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time."

Studie over de Sovjet-Unie in de jaren 1938-1968 in de vorm van een verhaal over Sovjet-burgers en -bestuurders die onder het communisme een veelbelovende toekomst tegemoet lijken te gaan.

Verslag van het functioneren van de Duitse contraspionagedienst in Nederland tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog en van het gebruik dat zij daarbij maakten van de Nederlander Anton van der Waals.

Reconstructie van de moord in 1941 op de joodse inwoners van het Poolse dorpje Jedwabne door de Poolse inwoners van het dorp.

One of our most eminent historians presents a powerful look at the buildup to and aftermath of one of the most decisive moments of the Second World War - Kristallnacht - not only for the Jewish population suddenly identified as a group to be destroyed, but also in terms of the international response it inspired and its larger implications. In Kristallnacht, Martin Gilbert seamlessly combines a moving account of the suffering of the victims of the Nazi regime with a sophisticated analysis of the gradual process, which made the horrors of the Third Reich possible. Broadening his canvas, Gilbert also powerfully depicts how the rest of the world failed Europe's increasingly desperate Jewish population: in the aftermath to Kristallnacht almost every country was asked to help; most would not do so, despite the transport of a staggering 10,000 German Jewish children to Britain.

Een familie van fanatieke nazi's hield van haar als van hun eigen dochter. Zelf werd ze verliefd op een Duitse ingenieur die tot in de laatste dagen van de oorlog Messerschmitts fabriceerde. De Volksduitse uit Polen Annie Gmitruk vertelde niemand wie ze werkelijk was: Mala Riva Kizel, een joods meisje uit een groot orthodox gezin uit Warschau. Terwijl haar familie werd omgebracht in de vernietigingskampen van Belzec en Treblinka, wist Mala door een mix van veerkracht, geluk, charme en een liefde voor taal te ontkomen aan Duitse soldaten, antisemitische Poolse boeren en een Oekraïense verrader die haar Jiddisch had horen praten in haar slaap. Via Israël belandt ze uiteindelijk in Nederland. Daar woont ze nu nog altijd. 'Liever dier dan mens' is de reconstructie van de onwaarschijnlijke overlevingstocht van een uitzonderlijke vrouw. Haar herinneringen brachten Van Os naar mensen, archieven en plaatsen waar de inktzwarte twintigsteeeuwse geschiedenis van Polen en Duitsland zich in al haar gruwelijke details openbaart. Deze reconstructie leest als een roman en tegelijk als aanklacht tegen de obsessie, van toen en nu, met identiteit en nationaliteit.

Verslag van de zoektocht naar het vooroorlogse Poolse stadje Nasielsk, dat de grootvader van de Amerikaanse auteur tijdens een vakantie in 1938 op film vastlegde.

When Adolf Hitler seized Vienna in the Anschluss of 1938, he called the city a pearl to which he would give a proper setting. But the setting he left behind seven years later was one of ruin and destruction--a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wasteland.Here is a grippingly narrated and heartbreaking account of the debasement of one of Europe's great cities. Thomas Weyr shows how Hitler turned Vienna from a vibrant metropolis that was the cradle of modernism into a drab provincial town. In this riveting narrative, we meet Austrian traitors like Arthur Seyss-Inquart and mass murderers like Odilo Globocnik. Proconsuls like Joseph Buerckel, who hacked Austria into seven pieces, and Baldur von Schirach, who dreamed of making Vienna into a Nazi capital on the Danube--and failed miserably. More painfully, Weyr chronicles the swift destruction of a rich Jewish culture and the removal of the city's 200,000 Jews through murder, exile, and deportation. Vienna never regained the global role the city had once played. Today, Weyr concludes, only the monuments remain--beautiful but lifeless.This is not only the story of Nazi leaders but of how the Viennese themselves lived and died: those who embraced Hitler, those who resisted, and the many who merely, in the local phrase, "ran after the rabbit." The author draws on his own experiences as a child in Vienna under Nazi rule in 1938, and those of his parents and friends, plus extensive documentary research, to craft a vivid historical narrative that chillingly captures how a once-great city lost its soul under Hitler.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched a massive three-pronged attack on the Soviet Union, and in days his troops were within reach of Moscow. The attack was stunning, but Stalin's response was even more astonishing. During the invasion, the mighty Soviet military stood in place while its soldiers were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands.
Drawing on a wealth of newly available documents, from classified Politburo papers and diaries of key generals to diplomatic cables and secret police memos, the Russian historian Constantine Pleshakov paints a startling portrait of Stalin, one of history's most feared despots, as a vulnerable and paralyzed leader. Refusing to believe that the Germans would strike first, despite repeated warnings, he continued to supply them with war materials in the days before the attack, then tied his generals' hands in the crucial first hours of the invasion. For more than a week, while Hitler rolled over Soviet territory, Stalin cowered in his dacha, leaving the country rudderless and -- as Pleshakov reveals here -- nearly losing power. The Red Army's effort to regain the territory lost in those first ten days cost more than 10 million Soviet lives.
Stalin's Folly is a dramatic hour-by-hour account that sheds light on an enigmatic and ruthless figure while providing a new and far deeper understanding of Russian history.