Second World War

South Africa and the War

In September 1939, writes J.V. Woolford, a British war in Europe seemed alien to many Dutch South Africans, but General Smuts changed the country’s mind.

New Light on Hitler’s Youth

Thin, pale, solitary, a day-dreamer, opinionated, rebellious, with sudden bursts of energy that quickly evaporated, D.C. Watt writes that Hitler as a boy is a strange forerunner of the would-be world-conqueror.

‘A brutally tough place for brutally tough people’

The court martial and acquittal of a senior British Intelligence officer accused of presiding over abuses of German prisoners during the Second World War highlights failings in intelligence policy and accountability, says Simona Tobia.

Gobineau and the Aryan Myth

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.

Lessons of the Holocaust

To be present where so many are now absent offers students a profound insight into the realities of history, argues Tom Jackson.

The Spanish Blue Division

For nearly three years, 45,000 Spanish soldiers served under German command on the Russian front. By Gerald R. Kleinfeld and Lewis A. Tambs.