As Hitler consolidated his grip on power in Germany during the 1930s, thousands of intellectuals, Jews, Communists, artists, and dissidents found themselves under increasing pressure to leave. As the Nazis filled the booming concentration camps with their various opponents, many of these justly frightened targets of Nazi repression fled Germany for safer harbors beyond the reach of Nazi influence or control. But as the decade progressed, the sphere of "safe harbors" diminished, and in a decade of Depression, xenophobia, and rising national chauvinism, these refugees faced hostility and suspicion nearly everywhere they went. Among these refugees were writers and poets like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, playwrights like Bertolt Brecht, scientists like Albert Einstein, and a wide range of others including people like Anna Seghers, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodore Adorno. Some of these refugees -- the lucky ones, in light of what happened to many of those who were forced to remain in Nazi Europe -- made it to the United States.

But the United States was also wrestling with a Depression; racism and anti-Semitism were facts of American life, and red scare paranoia already had developed a tradition in this country closely connected to anxieties about immigration and cultural modernism. However bright the intellects with which these refugees might be gifted, or however shining their intellectual and cultural achievements, they remained for J. Edgard Hoover and the FBI dangerously "Other", and therefore dangerous and suspicious. In this book Stephan documents the extensive surveillance, both legal and illegal, that the FBI pursued in attempting to identify the potential national security risk posed by these refugees, who after all were mostly from Germany, although in many cases they were Jews, Socialists, or Communists who had no sympathy with that detested and thuggish National Socialist regime. However, J. Edgar Hoover did not make much distinction between Nazis and Communists as far as the potential security threat was concerned; to Hoover, these refugees might be seen as "Communazis" -- thus the title. It is also depressing to see how some of these refugees turned on others, working as informants for the FBI, intensifying the web of suspicion and paranoia under which these hapless refugees were forced to exist.

As far as I am concerned, this extensive FBI surveillance of refugees and dissidents from a brutal, racist regime was both deplorable and useless (it is telling that Hoover saw the fact that many of these refugees were wanted by the German police as a mark against the refugees -- even if the police were the notorious Gestapo). But even if the reader does not share my view on this, the reader will find in the pages of Stephan's book highly informative. It is a useful documentation of the systematic national police surveillance of private individuals, which occurred as part of the development of the national security state apparatus that emerged during and after the Second World War. Whatever one's views of Hoover and the FBI, one will find this book a valuable addition to studies on domestic police surveillance against real or potential political dissent.

An absolutely invaluable resource for anyone interested in German literature. I thoroughly recommend it.

well i thought that the book was good, and even though it was introduced to me in high school, i think that maybe it is for the more mature crowd. if you can get passed the text then you will really enjoy the book. it is best to read the book along with its footnotes. not only is it a little easier on the reader, but it is also more enjoyable when you can actually understand what it is you are reading. but over all the book was excellent. i think of it as one of marlowe's greatest works.

Hjalmar Schacht has been reviled by many as the man who financed Hitler's plan for world war. In fact he was tried at Nuremberg for that very thing. But he was acquitted (by the skin of his teeth!). Here he presents his view of what he accomplished as President of the Reichsbank (at two different times) and as Minister of Finance -- and why he quit. Although autobiographies of those who knew Hitler and worked with him are generally self-serving to acquit themselves of blame, Schacht's is one of the most believable. For those of us who know nothing of the machinations of world economics, this book is a fascinating, and easy to read, presentation.

I found this paperback clearance priced at $5. This is a book that is part history, and partly inspirational. It tells in a series of vignettes the stories of 64 Germans who resisted the Nazis and paid the ultimate price for it. Some are famous, some are not. Many of these sketches quote from their letters and diaries as they faced death: Eastern Front soldier Michael Kitzelmann was horrified by what he saw done in Poland after the German invasion, and quickly became an opponent of the regime. He was eventually executed for undermining morale. From his diary, as he awaited execution:

"I pray to Jesus the Crucified, who has led the way through the most bitter pain. And He answers me: 'If you will be My disciple, take up your cross and follow me.!'

"But I appeal to Him: 'Lord, I am still so young, too young for such a heavy cross; I have not lived my life, all my hopes, plans and aims are unfulfilled.' And he says: 'Behold, I too was young, I had yet to live my life, and as a young man I carried to cross and sacrificed my young life.'"....

"Now I live the life of a hermit. My day's work consists of praying, reading the Bible, occasionally scribbling something in my diary or writing letters. It is very painful, this separation from life, from the past, from all fond hopes and plans and particularly from my nearest and dearest. It is terribly hard to submit wholly to God's will in such agonising circumstances; but the only attainable comfort is to hold out to the end despite all suffering...."[pp. 30-31]

Motivations were varied: some were young socialists; some were conservatives, appalled by the horrors of what the Nazis were doing in the name of the German government; most were Christians who recognized the Nazi movement for what it was. From the Nationalist Party's Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin's 1932 pamphlet against the Nazis:

"Religion alone stand between us and National Socialism, and always will. We believe that faith in God and obedience to His Word must permeate our public life; National Socialism holds a fundamentally different view, and let me say that questions of dogma have nothing to do with it. What it comes to is that Hitler regards as the basis of policy- the fact that he may occasionally say something else does not alter the case-the race and its demands. This is a crude form of materialism, and quite incompatible with Christianity. According to his theories, it is the duty of the state to encourage not ability, but racial characteristics. He reduces the state to the level of a cattle-breeder, and shows that he is quite incapable of understanding its character and obligations....

"What have we in common, spiritually, with National Socialism?"[p. 168]

Many of these were men and women whose only crime was to speak against evil, but many were men and women of action as well. Some were participants in the von Stauffenberg plot against Hitler. One of the socialists, Anton Schmaus, expected problems from the SA (brownshirts) early in the Nazi regime:

"[T]he SA forced their way into the house late that evening. They kicked his mother, who barred their way, and knocked her down. Anton was woken by her cries for help and found himself at the top of the stairs confronted by the SA. He told them to get out of the house, otherwise he would shoot. They took no notice, and closed in on him; and so as a last resort he pulled out a pistol. According to the police report of 5 July 1933, File No. IAdVI, three storm troopers were badly wounded and later died in hospital and a fourth was fatally wounded by a shot from one of his companions."[pp. 4-5]

Schmaus turned himself into the police, hoping for a proper trial. The SA demanded Schmaus from the police, who still had the courage to refuse the SA demand. The police escorted Schmaus to Berlin police headquarters, but along the way, 30-40 SA surrounded Schmaus and his police escort, and shot and killed him.

The individual steps forward from the ranks to sacrifice himself for others: this is the theme which emerges from the photographs taken at the trial, which underlies this whole story of resistance to tyranny, which is the embodiment of the Christian spirit and which finds expression in the great part played by the Christian Churches in the struggle with National Socialism. After describing the formation of a movement that called itself "Protestant National Socialists" or sometimes "German Christians," Leber describes how the Nazis took advantage of a widespread desire within Protestant Germany to unify the existing denominations:

"But it soon became clear that [the Nazis] regarded the Churches as useless bourgeois institutions and merely hoped to exploit them for their own purposes and to present the picture of the progressive assumption of power in a pseudo-Christian frame.... In May 1934, at a synod in Barmen, the Confessional Church was founded. This was not a territorial Church, but a movement within the Protestant Church to counter the false doctrines which threatened it. At this point the regime dropped even the 'German Christians' and from then on state measures were directed not at the reconciliation of the Church with the National Socialist Weltanschaung, but at the subordination of all things Christian.

"The attempt to oppress the Catholic Church was at first a little more circumspect and the negotiations which followed the Reich Concordat of 1933 gave some protection for the time being. But attacks on the Church, and the persecution of those who professed allegiance to it, steadly increased; and the Papal Encyclical With Grave Concern, which was read to the faithful from the pulpits in 1937, was tantamount to a declaration of war. Both Churches suffered confiscation, restriction and persecution, and both challenged the policies and ideologies of the state. They opposed the biological creeds and the idolising of the German people. They protested against the Oath of Allegiance and its claim to impose unconditional obedience not to God, but to man, and against the anti-Christian teaching given to the young, the arbitrary methods of the Gestapo, the horrors of the concentration camps and the ill-treatment of the population of occupied territories. They also protested most violently against the murder of incurables."[pp. 187-188]

Annedore Leber was there. She was the widow of the prominent Social Democrat leader Julius Leber, executed by the Nazis.

This is a fascinating and powerful work, well-written (or at least well-translated). It is history, and it is inspiring -- evidence that even in the darkness of Nazi Germany, where the full weight of the propaganda machinery of modern media was turned to the task of enforcing ideological conformity, there were those willing to do to fight against an evil that did not personally threaten them. We owe it to those who died in the defense of human dignity to not let these courageous men and women be forgotten. BUY THIS BOOK!

Current wisdom is that shareholder value should be the guiding light for corporate management. The US is following this lodestar. US companies outperform all other so who can quarrel with this? European companies are following the US example. The author wonders if companies are digging their own graves by doing so. Her arguments may not be watertight but they make you sit up and think. She correctly states that a company's success is dependent on innovation. There is no evidence that concentrating on shareholder value is best for innovation. The blossoming of the electronics industry is not based on the free market or entrepreneurship or shareholder value. The foundation was enlightened procurement by the Department Of Defence. IBM, INTEL and DEC all owe their success to "buy only American" defence orders according to her analysis. She also shows that the stock market only plays a very small role in providing capital for investment. Most funding comes from depreciation and retained earnings. Equity issues are only important to buy out owners and to allow companies to acquire other ones. An interesting analysis shows that the benefit of an acquisition almost always accrues to the shareholders of the acquired company and almost never to the acquiring company. Institutional investors (and raiders) are the only shareholders with influence. Their only interest is share performance. They have aligned their interest with that of top management through stock options and bonus plans depending on share performance. Company managers can now become very rich when increasing the value of the shares. As the average tenure of a CEO is around five years, it leads automatically to a short-term perspective. She believes that there is more to the economic value a company can produce than shareholder value. This point is not dealt with in any detail other than the emphasis on innovation and organisational learning that are long-term processes. One interesting point is the difference between German and Japanese companies on the one hand and US on the other. US companies do not see it as an objective to upgrade the job opportunities for its employees. In the past companies offered good pay for relatively simple jobs. The company attitude is to move these jobs to low cost countries and make the employees redundant. Most of the redundant people have to take lower paid service jobs. She believes that companies can and should follow a different path and enrich the kind of work the company can offer and invest in the education of its employees. She gives no real-life examples of US companies that have successfully done so. The different path taken by German is described very lucidly. Even though German companies have made much greater effort than American companies in upgrading its workforce, they face other problems. Financing pensions is big problem, so is the restructuring of the banks. Getting the "upgraded" specialists at all levels to work as teams across specialist borders is very difficult. This book presents many thought-provoking challenges to readers that believe in shareholder value and the free market without any reservations or concerns.

I used to read many books to my young friend Annie, and this retelling of the story of Hansel and Gretel was one of my favourites. The illustrations were so vivid and haunting, I wanted to cut them out and frame them. It felt like there was a much larger world in this book, and through the illustrations and the simple but oddly compelling narration you see just a little of it. One picture especially has always remained in my mind-- the boy and girl running hand in hand down wide steps, out of enormous pillars from some forgotten temple or palace in the middle of the wood. There is such a sense of wonder, age, forgotten grandeur added to the natural beauty surrounding the children. It's a short book, and as I say, it's simply told-- but perfectly told. The minimal dialogue adds a sort of Oriental simplicity which sets off the lavish pictures. Sometimes I like to imagine that I am walking through the dark flower-filled woods, riding on the back of the wonderful sea dragon, running up the white steps, pacing the halls of the old masters of the wood and hearing the echoes, watching the moss grow on the stone.

While Wagner was writing his opera Siegfried, Cosima von Bulow left her husband to join Wagner. From that day until he died, Cosima (soon to be Cosima Wagner) kept a detailed, daily journal of life with "R" (as Cosima calls him).

This book is an abridgment of those complete diaries, and a mere 1/4 the length of the original.

Martin Cooper, who translated the full length original, did the editing for this abridgment, and he did an admirable job. He captured the "important" stuff, while leaving out all the detail. If you just want to read about Wagner, but are not interested in all the fluff, this book is for you. Learn about Wagner the man without all of the usual hyperbole.

Those who are interested in the diaries but are put off by its 2000 pages now have a good alternative. It can be highly recommended to everyone except specialists. If you are a Wagner aficionado, however, you will want to get your hands on the full-length original.

Professor Hadley's 1995 historiography of a century of writings about the German U-Boat in history, cinema and fiction is a groundbreaking account. For the first time the ordinary reader is able to see a country's entire efforts in a popular and complex field of work. The reader is also allowed into the worlds of the veteran, the theorist, the writer, the publisher and filmmaker, and the commercial and academic scenes they inhabit. By simply using a chronological approach, Hadley covers almost all the books, documentaries, novels, and much other media about the U-Boat from 1895 to 1995. He however does more than compile a large set of book reviews. Hadley places each book in a theoretical framework, of interest to both the literary academic and the general reader. He places each work in the context of its times, the other works of its era, and the changing social, emotional and political situation. We are given in this few hundred pages a history of Germany's relationship to the sea, to its armed forces, and above all its submarine forces and men, in a book open to all yet firmly grounded in literary theory and academic study. Apart from a few subjects not covered [such as books about other navies, and a brief equivalent discussion of other national naval genres], there is little to criticise in it. Hadley for one does not link or compare controversies in the English-speaking maritime world with those of the German scene. Hadley's privileged position as a Canadian naval historian and professor of German literature combine in the book of a lifetime. No-one in this subject has done this before or since.

Out of the dozen or so WWII ETO US bomber force narratives I've read, Koger provides the best balance between detail and the big picture. Arriving halfway through 1944, he missed most of the devastation wrought by Luftwaffe fighters, finding the flak to be the primary enemy. With the decline of the fighter threat, however, came the increase to 35 missions per tour.

Indeed, Koger does a good job of articulating his evolving emotions, starting with uncertainty and confusion on the first few missions, gaining confidence through the next few, achieving a near cockiness on the middle missions, and the gradual grind of rising anxiety eventually nearing "flak happy" status.

Kroger's social outings with British girls are good reading, as well. The ultimate irony is his relationship with a British WAAF stationed at a flak battery!

One significant differentiation from other narratives: as a bombardier, Koger spent a lot of time actually looking out and down through the plexiglass, watching and observing the missions with somewhat greater detail than usual. His love of the very nose of the B-17 almost got him killed on one landing...

All-in-all, a very worthwhile read for WWII history enthusiasts.