Between 1939 and 1947 the county of Janów Lubelski, an agricultural area in central Poland, experienced successive occupations by Nazi Germany (1939-1944) and the Soviet Union (1944-1947). During each period the population, including the Polish majority and the Jewish, Ukrainian, and German minorities, reacted with a combination of accommodation, collaboration, and resistance. In this remarkably detailed and revealing study, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz analyzes and describes the responses of the inhabitants of occupied Janów to the policies of the ruling powers. He provides a highly useful typology of response to occupation, defining collaboration as an active relationship with the occupiers for reasons of self-interest and to the detriment of one's neighbors; resistance as passive and active opposition; and accommodation as compliance falling between the two extremes. He focuses on the ways in which these reactions influenced relations between individuals, between social classes, and between ethnic groups. Casting new light on social dynamics within occupied Poland during and after World War II, Between Nazis and Soviets yields valuable insight for scholars of conflict studies.

antly, the pact laid the groundwork for Soviet control of Eastern Europe, a power grab that would define the post-war order. Drawing on memoirs, diaries, and official records from newly opened Soviet archives, The Devils' Alliance is the authoritative work on one of the seminal episodes of World War II. In his characteristically rich and detailed prose, Moorhouse paints a vivid picture of the pact's origins and its enduring influence as a crucial turning point, in both the war and in modern history.

Organized in the immediate aftermath of World War II to try the former Nazi leaders for war crimes, the Nuremberg trials, known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT), paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this immersive new history of the trials, a central piece of the story has been routinely omitted from standard accounts: the critical role that the Soviet Union played in making Nuremberg happen in the first place. Hirsch's book reveals how the Soviets shaped the trials--only to be written out of their story as Western allies became bitter Cold War rivals. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers the first full picture of the war trials, illuminating the many ironies brought to bear as the Soviets did their part to bring the Nazis to justice. Everyone knew that Stalin had originally allied with Hitler before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung heavy over the courtroom, as did the suspicion among the Western prosecutors and judges that the Soviets had falsified evidence in an attempt to pin one of their own war crimes, the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, on the Nazis. It did not help that key members of the Soviet delegation, including the Soviet judge and chief prosecutor, had played critical roles in Stalin's infamous show trials of the 1930s. For the lead American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and his colleagues, Soviet participation in the Nuremberg Trials undermined their overall credibility and possibly even the moral righteousness of the Allied victory. Yet Soviet jurists had been the first to conceive of a legal framework that treated war as an international crime. Without it, the IMT would have had no basis for judgment. The Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting against Germany--enduring the horrors of the Nazi occupation and experiencing almost unimaginable human losses and devastation. There would be no denying their place on the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Once the trials were set in motion, however, little went as the Soviets had planned. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg shows how Stalin's efforts to direct the Soviet delegation and to steer the trials from afar backfired, and how Soviet war crimes became exposed in open court. Hirsch's book offers readers both a front-row seat in the courtroom and a behind-the-scenes look at the meetings in which the prosecutors shared secrets and forged alliances. It reveals the shifting relationships among the four countries of the prosecution (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the USSR), uncovering how and why the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg became a Cold War battleground. In the process Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a new understanding of the trials and a fresh perspective on the post-war movement for human rights.

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Pre-publication subtitle: Soviet-German military cooperation in the interwar period.

A ground-breaking study that looks at why European nations sent troops to take part in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.

In May of 1945, there were more than eight million “displaced persons” (or DPs) in Germany—recently liberated foreign workers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as eastern Europeans who had fled west before the advancing Red Army. Although most of them quickly returned home, it soon became clear that large numbers of eastern European DPs could or would not do so. Focusing on Bavaria, in the heart of the American occupation zone, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism examines the cultural and political worlds that four groups of displaced persons—Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish—created in Germany during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The volume investigates the development of refugee communities and how divergent interpretations of National Socialism and Soviet Communism defined these displaced groups. Combining German and eastern European history, Anna Holian draws on a rich array of sources in cultural and political history and engages the broader literature on displacement in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies. Her book will interest students and scholars of German, eastern European, and Jewish history; migration and refugees; and human rights.