Robert Gellately Bücher

Zwei Weltkriege, die russische Revolution, Aufstieg und Fall des „Dritten Reichs“, der Holocaust - zwischen 1914 und 1945 brechen große politische Katastrophen über Europa herein und verändern die Gesellschaft von Grund auf. Im Zentrum der Katastrophen stehen drei Diktatoren: Lenin, Stalin und Hitler. Während über die Verbrechen und Grausamkeit der Letztgenannten Einigkeit besteht, wird Lenin bisweilen als „guter Gründungsvater“ eingeschätzt. Zu unrecht. Der renommierte Historiker Robert Gellately beweist in seiner Studie Lenins verheerende Rolle für die jüngere Geschichte und liefert damit den Schlüssel zu einem besseren Verständnis des großen Weltenbrands.

Wie gelang es dem NS-Regime, sich die Kollaboration ganz normaler Deutscher mühelos zu sichern? Nach dem Krieg wollte kaum jemand in Deutschland etwas von den Konzentrationslagern, von Terror und Mord gewusst haben. Es schien, als hätten nur wenige »willige Helfer« im Verborgenen die von Hitler befohlenen Verbrechen begangen. Robert Gellately beweist anhand bislang vernachlässigter Dokumente das Gegenteil: Nach dem Willen der nationalsozialistischen Machthaber sollte das Volk informiert werden. Sie nutzten die breite Zustimmung der Deutschen zu »Recht und Ordnung«, um mit genau geplanten Strategien die Menschen an Verhaftungen, Polizeiwillkür, Ausgrenzung und Verfolgung ganzer Bevölkerungsgruppen zu gewöhnen – und zur Mithilfe - sei es durch Zustimmung, Denunziation oder aktive Mitarbeit - zu veranlassen.

This book examines the everyday operations of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. How were the Gestapo able to detect the smallest signs of noncompliance with Nazi doctrines, especially 'crimes' pertaining to the private spheres of social, family, and sexual life? How could the police enforce policies such as those designed to isolate the Jews or foreign workers with such apparent ease?

A thought-provoking assessment and documentation of one of the most terrible periods in history - the rise and fall of the Nazi Party.

Nazi ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and culminated in the Second World War and the Holocaust. In this book, Gellately addresses often-debated questions about how Fuhrer discovered the ideology and why millions adopted aspects of National Socialism without having laid eyes on the leader or reading his work.

A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader. Even astute observers like George F. Kennan concluded that the United States and Great Britain should view Stalin as a modern-day tsarist-like figure whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, not in ideology. Now Robert Gellately uses recently uncovered documents to make clear that, in fact, the dictator was an unwavering revolutionary merely biding his time, determined as ever to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond, and that his actions during these years (and the poorly calculated Western responses) set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Gellately takes us behind the scenes. We see the dictator disguising his political ambitions and prioritizing the future of Communism, even as he pursued the war against Hitler. Along the way, the ascetic dictator’s Machiavellian moves and bouts of irrationality kept the Western leaders on their toes, in a world that became more dangerous and divided year by year. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, <i>Stalin’s Curse</i> is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of the Soviet dictator.