Confronting the Nazi past

Michael Burleigh, author of The Racial State: 1933-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991) has assembled twelve historians from Germany, Britain, America and Israel to present the latest research on the urgent debate about the Nazi past from today's perspective. Confronting the Nazi Past looks at a range of subjects including Nazism and high society, forced labour in the Volkswagen factories, 'gypsies' and the Nazi state, the position of the German working classes under the Nazi dictatorship, the treatment of homosexuals in the Third Reich, the Intelligentsia and the 'Final Solution', the position of women and the propaganda for 'family values'. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 has brought about a new Germany - but to inherit the rewritten future the account with the past has to be squared, the crimes of the Third Reich have to be settled into 'history'. With access to hitherto unavailable material, historians represented in this book are now able to 'confront the Nazi past' with new information and revised insights.