Sean McMeekin Bücher

Auch 100 Jahre nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg bleibt die Schuldfrage umstritten. Sean McMeekin hat jahrelang Archive durchforstet und diplomatische Intrigen untersucht, um Russlands Rolle im Krieg zu analysieren. Sein Ergebnis ist brisant: Die wahren Drahtzieher waren in St. Petersburg. Russland nahm bewusst das Risiko eines Kriegs in Kauf, um strategisch wichtige Landengen am Schwarzen Meer zu sichern. Die aktuelle Krim-Krise zeigt, dass Russland bei der Durchsetzung seiner territorialen Ansprüche nicht von Konflikten mit der Weltgemeinschaft abgehalten wird. McMeekin belegt, dass russische Staatsmänner durch gezielte politische Entscheidungen den Krieg im Nahen Osten mit auslösten, um auf Kosten des Osmanischen Reichs das Territorium zu erweitern und ungehinderten Zugang zu den Schwarzmeerengen zu erhalten. Frankreich und England in einen Krieg gegen Deutschland zu manövrieren, erschien als beste Möglichkeit, dieses Ziel zu erreichen. Russland war das Land, das am meisten Druck ausübte, um die Eskalation zu forcieren. Doch der entfesselte Konflikt forderte auch Millionen russischer Opfer. McMeekins Studie fordert eine Neubewertung der Schuldfrage und argumentiert, dass Russland ebenso verantwortlich für den Ausbruch des Krieges war wie Deutschland.

Am 28. Juni 1914 wird der österreichische Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand erschossen, was zunächst als Randnotiz erscheint, aber einen Konflikt entfesselt, der in den Ersten Weltkrieg mündet. Die Frage, wie der Krieg über Nacht ausbrechen konnte und wer die Drahtzieher waren, steht im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung. Der US-amerikanische Historiker Sean McMeekin entdeckte in Berlin unbekannte Aktennotizen und Depeschen, die belegen, dass vor allem russische und französische Interessen den Konflikt vorantrieben. Die entscheidenden Wochen zwischen Juni und August 1914 werden minutiös recherchiert und dokumentiert, spannend wie ein Thriller. Der Erste Weltkrieg stellte die größte Katastrophe in Europa dar, doch viele historische Hintergründe blieben lange im Dunkeln. Während Experten oft den deutschen und österreichisch-ungarischen Militarismus verantwortlich machen, zeigt McMeekin mit neuen Quellen, dass die aggressivsten Kriegstreiber aus Russland und Frankreich kamen. Neben dem österreichischen Außenminister von Berchtold und dem deutschen Reichskanzler Bethmann Hollweg spielten auch der russische Außenminister Sasonow und der französische Präsident Poincaré eine entscheidende Rolle. Die fesselnde Erzählung beschreibt den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs vom ersten blutigen Akt bis zum Kriegseintritt Englands und wie eine kleine Gruppe von Männern den Verlauf des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts prägte.

In this remarkable, ground-breaking new book Sean McMeekin marks a generational shift in our view of Stalin as an ally in the Second World War. Stalin's only difference from Hitler, he argues, was that he was a successful murderous predator. With Hitler dead and the Third Reich in ruins, Stalin created an immense new Communist empire. Among his holdings were Czechoslovakia and Poland, the fates of which had first set the West against the Nazis and, of course, China and North Korea, the ramifications of which we still live with today. Until Barbarossa wrought a public relations miracle, turning him into a plucky ally of the West, Stalin had murdered millions, subverted every norm of international behaviour, invaded as many countries as Hitler had, and taken great swathes of territory he would continue to keep. In the larger sense the global conflict grew out of not only German and Japanese aggression but Stalin's manoeuvrings, orchestrated to provoke wars of attrition between the capitalist powers in Europe and in Asia. Above all, Stalin's War uncovers the shocking details of how the US government (to the detriment of itself and its other allies) fuelled Stalin's war machine, blindly agreeing to every Soviet demand, right down to agents supplying details of the atomic bomb.

In a major reinterpretation, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notion of the war's beginning as either a Germano-Austrian pre-emptive strike or a miscalculation. The key to the outbreak of violence, he argues, lies in St. Petersburg. Russian statesmen unleashed the war through policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East.

WINNER OF THE BARBARA JELAVICH BOOK PRIZE 'Sean McMeekin has written a classic of First World War history ... This superb and original book is the reality behind Greenmantle' Norman Stone The Berlin-Baghdad Express explores one of the big, previously unresearched subjects of the First World War: the German bid for world power - and the destruction of the British Empire - through the harnessing of the Ottoman Empire. McMeekin's book shows how incredibly high the stakes were in the Middle East - with the Germans in the tantalizing position of taking over the core of the British Empire via the extraordinary railway that would link Central Europe and the Persian Gulf. Germany sought the Ottoman Empire as an ally to create jihad against the British - whose Empire at the time was the largest Islamic power in the world. The Berlin-Baghdad Express is a fascinating account of western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It explains and brings to life a massive area of fighting, which in most other accounts is restricted to the disaster at Gallipoli and the British invasions of Iraq and Palestine.

A bold, gripping history of the first month of World War I When an assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, no one could have imagined the shocking bloodshed that would soon follow. Indeed, as award-winning historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for the actions of a small group of statesmen in the month after the assassination. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, these men sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A deeply-researched account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of the month that changed the course of the twentieth century.

"Drawing extensively on recently opened Moscow archives, McMeekin chronicles Munzenberg's political career throughout the 1920s and 1930s. He describes how Munzenberg parlayed his friendship with Lenin into a media empire, leveraging his corporate ventures against the currency of his reputation in the Kremlin. He explains how Munzenberg's mysterious financial manipulations outraged Social Democrats and lent rhetorical ammunition to the Nazis and how, by the last years of the Weimar Republic, Munzenberg and his Nazi counterpart Joseph Goebbels were firing off reckless propaganda salvos, feeding a destructive spiral of lies that poisoned the political atmosphere irrevocably.".

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. A little over a month later the world was engulfed in the bloodiest conflict mankind had ever seen. How did such tragedy unfold so quickly?

"Between 1911 and 1923, a series of wars--chief among them World War I--would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. It is a story we think we know well, but as Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history, we know far less than we think. Drawing from his years of ground-breaking research in newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives, The Ottoman Endgame brings to light the entire strategic narrative that led to an unstable new order in postwar Middle East--much of which is still felt today"--