Bøger af Peter Longerich

The definitive study of Hitler's role in the greatest act of genocide of the twentieth century. The Holocaust differs from other genocides in recent history for one main reason: there is no other example in which a minority was annihilated systematically and as completely as possible on the orders of a head of state and through the apparatus of government. To reconstruct Hitler's central role in the Final Solution represents a particular challenge. Hitler treated the murder of the Jews as a matter of the utmost secrecy and was careful wherever possible not to leave behind any written orders. Wherever his instructions on this matter are recorded he has used codified language. He kept away from the implementation of the orders and feigned ignorance, even to his closest friends and colleagues. Under these conditions, the surviving source material can only be described as fragmentary. The aim of the book is to offer documentary proof of Hitler's central role in the murder of the European Jews. In order to achieve this aim, various documents and fragments of documents have been pieced together and the codified language of the dictator deciphered.

Mit der vorliegenden Arbeit über die Presseabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes (AA) soll nun diese ungleichgewichtige Darstellung korrigiert und ein wesentlicher Bereich des NS-Propagandaapparates erschlossen werden. Zu diesem Zweck ist eine ins Detail gehende Darstellung der Organisation der Abteilung und der weitverzweigten Aktivitäten des von ihr in Konkurrenz zum Propagandaministerium im In- wie im Ausland aufgebauten Presselenkungsapparates beabsichtigt. Instrumente und Methoden der von der Abteilung betriebenen Pressearbeit stehen im Mittelpunkt dieser Untersuchung.

From the authoritative biographer of Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, a culminating work on the commanding figure of the Third Reich