Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator by enrique moradiellos i.b.tauris, 264 pages, $30 Not long after the successful Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain, removed a photograph of Adolf Hitler from his desk in the Pardo Palace in Madrid. He promptly replaced . . . . Continue Reading »
Seventy-five years ago, Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friend Christian Probst were executed for opposing Hitler’s Third Reich. Continue Reading »
Not every modern assault on the sanctity of human life is traceable to Hitler. There are many other paths off the ethical cliff. Continue Reading »
Misconceptions abound on the relationship of Nazism and Christianity. Continue Reading »
Pope vs. Hitler opens by asking whether Pius XII really was “Hitler’s Pope,” as John Cornwell notoriously alleged, or rather, as Riebling’s book maintains, Hitler’s implacable enemy. Cassel includes critics, and not just supporters, of Pius XII. But his film makes clear where the hard evidence lies. Continue Reading »
Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitlerby mark rieblingbasic, 375 pages, $29.99 During the Second World War, the Third Reich was opposed by local partisans and ad hoc military and civilian organizations. The Nazi authorities disseminated so-called anti-terrorism propaganda, referring . . . . Continue Reading »
One year before Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis on the morning of April 9, 1945, he wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge: “What keeps gnawing at me is the question, ‘What is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?’” To that question we must now pose . . . . Continue Reading »
Every spring, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, those who died under Nazi persecution are honored in ceremonies throughout the world; and those who survived it recall what they experienced. Anita Weisbord is among them. Continue Reading »
Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II by michael burleigh harper, 672 pages, $29.99 World War II—the bloody denouement of the “Thirty Years War” of the first half of the twentieth century—is in the popular imagination a “good war,” but the English historian Michael . . . . Continue Reading »
For decades controversy has raged over the absence of any specific reference to Jews, or to their persecution by the Nazis, in Catholic Church statements between 1933 and 1945. In addition to historically justified questions, we have seen endlessly repeated charges against the Church and Pope Pius . . . . Continue Reading »
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