According to Nekrich, the enmity between Germany and the Soviet Union has been greatly exaggerated. Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources (including much from recently declassified Russian archives), Nekrich explores the clandestine military collaboration for training, arms testing, and the manufacture of poison gases that continued to the beginning of the Hitler era.

Cataclysms is a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop. Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis, Cataclysms chronicles twentieth century history as a “universal civil war” between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West. Diner’s interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and “ethnic cleansing,” situating the Holocaust at the core of the century’s predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.

How do established powers react to growing competitors? The United States currently faces a dilemma with regard to China and others over whether to embrace competition and thus substantial present-day costs or collaborate with its rivals to garner short-term gains while letting them become more powerful. This problem lends considerable urgency to the lessons to be learned from Over the Horizon. David M. Edelstein analyzes past rising powers in his search for answers that point the way forward for the United States as it strives to maintain control over its competitors. Edelstein focuses on the time horizons of political leaders and the effects of long-term uncertainty on decision-making. He notes how state leaders tend to procrastinate when dealing with long-term threats, hoping instead to profit from short-term cooperation, and are reluctant to act precipitously in an uncertain environment. To test his novel theory, Edelstein uses lessons learned from history’s great powers: late nineteenth-century Germany, the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, interwar Germany, and the Soviet Union at the origins of the Cold War. Over the Horizon demonstrates that cooperation between declining and rising powers is more common than we might think, although declining states may later regret having given upstarts time to mature into true threats.

Finland and Hungary both fought on the losing side in WWII. Yet the former was able to resist the overwhelming power of its Soviet neighbour, while Hungary, whose status was uncertain until 1947, was not. Could the revolt of 1956 have been a turning point? How did the Helsinki Accords contribute to the end of the Cold War?

How Hitler came to Power describes how, what amounted to a conspiracy of German military and industrial cliques, and in particular members of the pre-First World War Pan German League, manipulated Allied leaders and misrepresented the Treaty of Versailles to further their ambitions. It was they who created the conditions which let Hitler come to power. Economic historian Sara Moore is the author of Peace without Victory for the Allies, 1918-1932 (Berg 1994). In her new book she skilfully details how America and the Allies failure to secure an ‘unconditional surrender’ allowed factions within the German ruling elites to portray their country’s military defeat as a stab in the back by weak liberal politicians. They shared beliefs in Bismarck’s legacy of ‘blood and iron’, the ideology of the ‘master race’ and Germany’s destiny as a world power. Millions had voted for democracy and pacifism in 1928. This angered members of the Pan German League, such as newspaper magnate, Alfred Hugenberg and his former employer, Gustav Krupp. The pursued their nefarious schemes to undermine the Weimar Republic with zero regard for the human cost. Real Politik ruled. Moore reveals that Germany was world’s largest exporter in 1931 and its Reichsbank full of funds, when it pointed to the misery of its people and asked for a moratorium on its reparations payments. Foreigners worried about Germany’s huge number of unemployed and feared that the country would be overcome by Bolshevism but their fears were groundless because, unknown to them, Krupp had secretly concluded a contract in which he agreed to assist Stalin in modernising his armed forces provided that Stalin ordered the German Communists to vote with the extreme Right instead of the Left in the German Reichstag. Krupp also helped Stalin create and organise giant collectives to pay for his weaponry. Demoralised by taxation, mass unemployment and misinformation the German people finally lost their faith in democracy and in 1932 voted to support Hitler. Only a short time later Hindenburg allowed him to become dictator. Yet Krupp, Hugenberg and the Pan Germans who helped Hitler’s rise to power seem to have escaped censure for eighty years.

"A book of great importance; it surpasses all others in breadth and depth."--Commentary If the past century will be remembered for its tragic pairing of civilized achievement and organized destruction, at the heart of darkness may be found Hitler, Stalin, and the systems of domination they forged. Their lethal regimes murdered millions and fought a massive, deadly war. Yet their dictatorships took shape within formal constitutional structures and drew the support of the German and Russian people. In the first major historical work to analyze the two dictatorships together in depth, Richard Overy gives us an absorbing study of Hitler and Stalin, ranging from their private and public selves, their ascents to power and consolidation of absolute rule, to their waging of massive war and creation of far-flung empires of camps and prisons. The Nazi extermination camps and the vast Soviet Gulag represent the two dictatorships in their most inhuman form. Overy shows us the human and historical roots of these evils.

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