The bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

The Gleiwitz case reconstructs in detail the 1939 surprise attack by a Nazi unit on the radio station in Gleiwitz, a German town on the Polish border. This attack was blamed on Polish forces, thus served as Hitler's justification for marching into Poland and starting WWII. It shows how facts and opinions can be manipulated and how people are made to accept lies, murder and war. To depict fascism, director Gerhard Klein and his Czech cameraman, Jan...

Hamburg, Germany 1934: An executioner is needed. Teetjen (Erwin Geschonneck) makes the biggest mistake of his life. Because his butcher shop is facing bankruptcy, he agrees to execute a group of political prisoners for the Nazis. Once this becomes known, Teetjen's life falls apart. The Axe of Wandsbek was the only DEFA film made by Falk Harnack, a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter who was interested in exploring the involvement of the middle class...

Traces Hitler's life from his childhood in Austria to his final days in Berlin, exploring how his promises of prosperity and power along with anti-Semitic rhetoric allowed him to lead the nation of Germany into World War II.

"The long-held picture of German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal wives and cheerleaders for the F|hrer, pales in comparison to Lower?s incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young German women she places, for the first time, directly in the killing fields of the expanding Reich."--Amazon.com.

The story of an apolitical working-class family that nevertheless gets drawn into collusion with Nazi policies. Rotation was awarded the Golden Leopard at the 1954 Locarno Film Festival and is ranked by film critics as one of Germany's 100 Most Important Films. Rotation portrays a German family and its support for Hitler during the Nazi period. The apolitical mechanic Hans Behnke considers joining the Nazi party to improve his financial standing....

A look at the lives of the descendants of Hitler's top officials and how they are dealing with the legacy of their infamous relatives.

"Within weeks of Germany's invasion of Poland, the brutal realities of occupation rob Zosia Lewandowska of the man she loves. As ghetto walls rise and the occupiers tighten their grip on the city of Kraków, Zosia meets Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a pharmacist who dares to operate a pharmacy in the heart of Kraków's ghetto. Determined to help, no matter the cost, Zosia joins Tadeusz and his staff as they risk their lives to aid the Jewish people trapped...

"After talking her way into a job with Dan Mansfield, the leading investigative reporter in Chicago, rising young journalist Jules Roth is given an unusual-and very secret-assignment. Dan needs her to locate a painting stolen by the Nazis more than 75 years earlier: legendary Expressionist artist Ernst Engel's most famous work, Woman on Fire. World-renowned shoe designer Ellis Baum wants this portrait of a beautiful, mysterious woman for deeply personal...

Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodge-podge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed...