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Shortly after her brother, Stormy, is convicted of the brutal murder of a classmate, seventeen-year-old Lizzy Greiner is found dead in an abandoned mountain shack, the result of an apparent suicide by fire. Next to Lizzy’s charred body, investigators find several of her journals, safely stored inside a fireproof box. It soon becomes evident that these journals contain a narrative that Lizzy wanted the police to read, the truth that she wanted them to know. Detective Russ Buchanan is tasked with determining the veracity of her narrative, including Lizzy’s belief and obsession that the mysterious and murderous Lantern Man is haunting the mountains near her family’s house. He interviews f...
Hermann Langbein was allowed to know and see extraordinary things forbidden to other Auschwitz inmates. Interned at Auschwitz in 1942 and classified as a non-Jewish political prisoner, he was assigned as clerk to the chief SS physician of the extermination camp complex, which gave him access to documents, conversations, and actions that would have remained unknown to history were it not for his witness and his subsequent research. Also a member of the Auschwitz resistance, Langbein sometimes found himself in a position to influence events, though at his peril. People in Auschwitz is very different from other works on the most infamous of Nazi annihilation centers. Langbein's account is a scrupulously scholarly achievement intertwining his own experiences with quotations from other inmates, SS guards and administrators, civilian industry and military personnel, and official documents. Whether his recounting deals with captors or inmates, Langbein analyzes the events and their context objectively, in an unemotional style, rendering a narrative that is unique in the history of the Holocaust. This monumental book helps us comprehend what has so tenaciously challenged understanding.
Hans Koch changes his identity in Germany to protect himself from persecution. "Taken in by Lena Richter, the wife of a rising star in the SS and renamed Hanna, she is determined to make the best of her new circumstances ... As the end of the war nears and Ernst Richter is ordered to destroy all evidence of war crimes, Hanna throws caution to the wind in an effort to save a single life and by doing so, her soul."--Excerpted from back cover.
During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post–Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing. The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides. Purchase the audio edition.
The Trial of a Nazi Doctor examines the life of Franz Bernhard Lucas (1911-1994), an SS camp doctor with assignments in Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Stutthof, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. Covering his career during the Third Reich and then his prosecution after 1945, especially in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Andrew Wisely explores the lies, obfuscations, misrepresentation, and confusions that Lucas himself created to deny, distract from or excuse his participation in the Nazi’s genocidal projects. By juxtaposing Lucas’s own testimonies and those of a wide range of witnesses: former camp inmates and Holocaust survivors; friends, colleagues, and relatives; and media observers, Wisely provides a nuanced study of witness testimonies and the moral identity of Holocaust perpetrators.
After over half a century of secrecy, a Swiss bank safe was opened, it contained the long-lost research notes of Josef Mengele, as well as those of his chief assistant in Auschwitz. They had been deposited there by the assistant who himself had been a Jewish doctor. Sent to Auschwitz, he was forced to participate in Josef Mengeles gruesome human experiments. Following the war, he completely disappeared, assuming a new identity and shrouding himself in silence. He did write his story down, but ordered the documents to be sealed away until decades after his death. With the release date drawing closer, his granddaughter, a well-connected Vatican doctor, wanted to have the documents examined b...
The essays selected for the first part of this volume offer an insight into the development, as distinguished from the history, of international humanitarian law. The focus of the majority of the works reprinted here is on an analysis of the adequacy of the law as it stood at the time of the respective publication and in the light of existing contemporary armed conflicts and military operations. Thus, the reader is afforded an in-depth look at the early roots of international humanitarian law, the continuing relevance of that body of law despite advances in weapons technology and the efforts to progressively develop it. International humanitarian law's development cannot be considered in isolation from its principles. The essays selected for the second part of the volume deal with the two fundamental principles underlying all of international humanitarian law: humanity and military necessity. The articles on the principles of humanity include reflections on the famous Martens Clause, and the analyses of military necessity take no account of 'Kriegsraison'. Moreover, they offer proof of the customary character of the principle of distinction in land, air and naval warfare.
This monograph examines and analyses the phenomenon of non-binding instruments (also known as 'soft law') in the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law. It covers the benefits and drawbacks for States and non-States actors as well as their effectiveness and development in the context of armed conflict.
The book offers a detailed analysis on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A book needs to be written on this to make sense, from a theoretical perspective, why this invasion has occurred and what the main actors are pursuing. The originality rests on testing main international relations theories: realism, liberalism and constructivism to the war that emerges with the practices and approaches during the Cold War to date from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Soviet Union (and now Russia) and Ukraine. The monograph commences with a historical overview of NATO and how it has engaged in expansionism policy to further contain Russia in contemporary international affairs with the accession of additional former Soviet states. This helps to explain the current Russian invasion of Ukraine that would attract great readership. The main argument presented rests on the pursuance of realist interests by NATO, Ukraine and Russia for containment, national security interests and as a response to the security dilemma respectively. This has served as the main catalyst of this conflict that has made diplomacy, international law and collective security measures problematic to implement.