When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains


Ariana Neumann - 2020
    He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened. When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated, and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined. When Time Stopped is a detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. In uncovering her father’s story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.

Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File


Alan Levy - 1994
    Simon Wiesenthal spent four and a half years in Mauthausen concentration camp during the Second World War. With the exception of his wife, all his immediate family were exterminated, and he himself ended the war a living skeleton. Since then, he has achieved international renown for his tireless tracking down of Nazi war criminals—including his capture of Eichmann, the "desk murderer" who masterminded Hitler's Final Solution, and Stangl the overlord of Treblinka—and for his pursuit of Mengele of Auschwitz, the dreaded "Angel of Death." To this day his work continues, his motivation simply expressed in the words: "Justice, not vengeance." The accounts of inspired detective work that lie behind Wiesenthal's successful apprehension of the fugitives reads as excitingly as any thriller, but Alan Levy's book is much more than that. It is an award-winning examination of the work of one of the greatest Jewish figures of the twentieth century. 8 pages of black-and-white photographs bring to life this gripping account of the life-long pursuit of justice by the man who declared "So long as the criminals are free, the war has not ended for me." "Wiesenthal has played his part in a disturbing episode of post-war history. [A] readable and intelligent book."—The Times (London)

Motherland: Growing Up With the Holocaust


Rita Goldberg - 2014
    In a deeply moving second-generation Holocaust memoir, Goldberg introduces the extraordinary story of Hilde Jacobsthal, a close friend of Anne Frank’s family who was fifteen when the Nazis invaded Holland. After the arrest of her parents in 1943, Hilde fled to Belgium, living out the war years in an extraordinary set of circumstances—among the Resistance and at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation—that the Guardian newspaper judged “worthy of a film script.”As astonishing as Hilde’s story is, Rita herself emerges as the central, fascinating character in this utterly unique account. Proud of her mother and yet struggling to forge an identity in the shadow of such heroic accomplishments (in a family setting that included close relationships with the iconic Frank family), Rita Goldberg reveals a little-explored aspect of Holocaust survival: the often-wrenching family and interpersonal struggles of the children and grandchildren whose own lives are haunted by historic tragedy.Motherland is the culmination of a lifetime of reflection and a decade of research. It is an epic story of survival, adventure, and new life.

Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler's Blitzkrieg Upon the World


Bevin Alexander - 2010
     In 1940, as Nazi Germany spread its wings of war, France stood secure in the knowledge that they possessed the largest, most formidable, and best-equipped army in Europe. France also had a stalwart ally in Britain and the support of Holland and Belgium. But they were all about to face a new kind of enemy who fought a new kind of war. In this book, expert military strategist Bevin Alexander examines the groundbreaking martial concepts developed by three brilliant generals- Erwin Rommel, Erich von Manstein, and Heinz Guderian. Their plan was to unleash the power of the tank, grouping them into juggernauts that would slam into-and through-enemy lines, as aircraft supported them and ground forces swept in behind them. It was the Blitzkrieg. And it alerted the world that the deadly might of Germany could no longer be ignored...

The Pendulum: A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past


Julie Lindahl - 2018
    Out of the unbearable heart of the story--the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations--emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth. In a remarkable six-year journey through Germany, Poland, Paraguay, and Brazil, Julie uncovers, among many other discoveries, that her grandfather had been a fanatic member of the SS since 1934. During World War II, he was responsible for enslavement and torture and was complicit in the murder of the local population on the large estates he oversaw in occupied Poland. He eventually fled to South America to evade a new wave of war-crimes trials. The pendulum used by Julie's grandmother to divine good from bad and true from false becomes a symbol for the elusiveness of truth and morality, but also for the false securities we cling to when we become unmoored. As Julie delves deeper into the abyss of her family's secret, discovering history anew, one precarious step at a time, the compassion of strangers is a growing force that transforms her world and the way that she sees her family--and herself.

Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History


Jackson J. Spielvogel - 1988
    Provides a balanced approach in examining Hitler's role in the history of the Third Reich. KEY TOPICS: Coverage ranges from the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and growth of Nazism as well as the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Traces the rise of Hitler and the growth of the Nazi party in the context of the political, economic, and social problems of Weimar Germany. Presents Hitler from the perspective of the influences on his early development, character traits, oratorical skills, and his messianic pretensions. provides an analysis of Hitler's ideology based on extensive quotations from his writings and speeches. examines the social composition and membership of the Nazi party and its leaders. New topics include material on: culture and society in Nazi Germany; youth in Germany during World War II; an in-depth look at the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in Germany. MARKET: Appropriate as a reference book for history, political science, and literature professionals.