Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras main figures.

In the past three years, three important new books have reassessed Hitler's life, beliefs and actions. Two of the authors, Volker Ulrich and Peter Longerich, are historians of Germany who are German. The third, our guest for today's interview, is British. In his new book Hitler: A Global Biography (Basic Books, 2019), Brendan Simms  offers us a different Hitler, one much more focused on global capitalism and on the Anglo-American world than either Ulrich of Longerich.  Simms argues that fears that Germany would lose the economic and demographic competition with Britain and especially the US sat at the heart of Hitler's world view. Anti-Semitism, fears of German particularism, scientific understandings of race, all of these appear in Simms' portrait of Hitler. But they are joined by a constant fear that the American system was simultaneously seductive and corrupting, and that Germans and Germany would not be able to resist. This, Simms argues, drove many of Hitler's decisions, especially in the 1920s and 30s.

We had some technological problems getting connected for the interview and had only 30 minutes to talk. But Simms does a marvelous job using that time to lay out the broad outlines of his argument and to sketch in some of his main lines of defense. It's a fascinating interview. Not everyone will agree with his conclusions. But at the least the book will prompt a stimulating debate about the role of the west in HItler's thinking.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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Trade between belligerents during wartime should not occur. After all, exchanged goods might help enemies secure the upper hand on the battlefield. Yet as history shows, states rarely choose either war or trade. In fact, they frequently engage in both at the same time.

To explain why states trade with their enemies, in Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines (Cornell UP, 2025) Dr. Mariya Grinberg examines the wartime commercial policies of major powers during the Crimean War, the two World Wars, and several post-1989 wars. She shows that in the face of two competing imperatives—preventing an enemy from increasing its military capabilities, and maintaining its own long-term security through economic exchange—states at war tailor wartime commercial policies around a product's characteristics and war expectations. If a product's conversion time into military capabilities exceeds the war's expected length, then trade in the product can occur, since the product will not have time to affect battlefield outcomes. If a state cannot afford to jeopardize the revenue provided by the traded product, trade in it can also occur.

Dr. Grinberg's findings reveal that economic cooperation can thrive even in the most hostile of times—and that interstate conflict might not be as easily deterred by high levels of economic interdependence as is commonly believed. Trade in War compels us to recognize that economic ties between states may be insufficient to stave off war.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers.

Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. And World War II did not deliver lasting peace: instead, the Soviet Union and United States emerged as hypermilitarized superpowers that would create arsenals of nuclear weapons, resulting in a decades-long Cold War standoff and subsequent violence across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth offers a revisionist history of World War II, revealing it was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its execution, and imperial in its outcomes.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into "exotic domains" where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world beyond Europe as a part of their daily lives.

An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) reorients our understanding of the relationship between imperial Germany and its empire in Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). Colonialism had an especially significant effect on shared interpretations of the Heimat (home/homeland) ideal, a historically elusive perception that conveyed among Germans a sense of place through national peculiarities and local landmarks. Focusing on colonial encounters that took place between 1842 and 1915, Adam A. Blackler reveals how Africans confronted foreign rule and altered German national identity. As Blackler shows, once the façade of imperial fantasy gave way to colonial reality, German metropolitans and white settlers increasingly sought to fortify their presence in Africa using juridical and physical acts of violence, culminating in the first genocide of the twentieth century.

Grounded in extensive archival research, An Imperial Homeland enriches our understanding of German identity, allowing us to see how a distant colony with diverse ecologies, peoples, and social dynamics grew into an extension of German memory and tradition. It will be of interest to German Studies scholars, particularly those interested in colonial Africa.

Dr. Adam A. Blackler is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and settler-colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) looks carefully at the literary structure and aesthetic elements of Weber’s arguments, considering how the texts offer an “allegorical resource for thinking sociologically.” Kemple argues that the formal structure of Weber’s ideas is inseparable from the content, and that understanding one is crucial for understanding the other. As a way into that formal structure, in each chapter Kemple offers an ingenious visual diagram that acts as a kind of “talking picture,” simultaneously evoking the cinematic elements of Weber’s own work and giving readers another tool for engaging the performative aspects of it. Kemple’s book is particularly attentive to the ways that Weber’s performance is shaped by a close engagement with the work of other writers, musicians, and thinkers, from Goethe and Tolstoy to Machiavelli and Martin Luther, and from the Bhagavadgita to The Valkyries. In addition, Marianne Weber – Max’s “wife, intellectual partner, and posthumous editor” – is an important presence throughout the book in helping us understand and read Weber’s work anew. Kemple’s thoughtful and beautifully written analysis helps us understand not just Weber’s own work, but also the value of that work for attending to issues of our own present.

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June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied northern France is one of the most consequential days of the 20th century. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, historian and author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate, brings them all together in a one-of-a-kind, bestselling oral history that explores this seminal event in vivid, heart-pounding detail.
The story begins in the opening months of the 1940s, as the Germany army tightens its grip across Europe, seizing control of entire nations. The United States, who has resolved to remain neutral, is forced to enter the conflict after an unexpected attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. For the second time in fifty years, the world is at war, with the stakes higher than they’ve ever been before. Then in 1943, Allied leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet in Casablanca to discuss a new plan for victory: a coordinated invasion of occupied France, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Failure is not an option. Over the next eighteen months, the large-scale action is organized, mobilizing soldiers across Europe by land, sea, and sky. And when the day comes, it is unlike anything the world has ever seen.
These moments and more are seen in real time. A visceral, page-turning drama told through the eyes of those who experienced them—from soldiers, nurses, pilots, children, neighbors, sailors, politicians, volunteers, photographers, reporters and so many more, When the Sea Came Alive “is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful—and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever” (Chris Bohjalian)—an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

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The German Democratic Republic has come to stand as a symbol of communist tyranny, a source of Cold War nostalgia and socialist kitsch, and a failed alternative to the worst excesses of 21st century capitalism.

In this book, Ned Richardson-Little delves into the central contradictions of the GDR state: This book illustrates the fault lines of GDR society, the worldviews and experiences of not only those who ruled the GDR, but also those who rebelled against the strictures of state socialism, and those in between who sought a normal life under dictatorship.

The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a succinct and comprehensive history of East Germany that traces its story from the country's origins as the Soviet Zone of Occupation after World War II through key events such as the 1953 Uprising, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Helsinki Accords, and the collapse of state socialism in 1989. Some of the themes explored include the memory of Nazism and national identity, everyday life under dictatorship, including consumerism, sexuality, and racism, the global politics of the GDR, the diversity of dissenting voices, and the competing visions for East Germany's democratic future.

Guest: Ned Richardson-Little (he/him) is a Research Fellow in Department V: Globalizations in a Divided World at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF), in Germany. He is a historian of modern Germany, with a focus on the GDR, socialism, far-right extremism, and the history of international law and international crime. He is the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (2020), and co-editor of Socialism and International Law (2024).

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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This book explores the extraordinary story of Jewish POWs in German captivity during the Second World War - extraordinary because of the contrast between Germany's genocidal policy towards Jews on one hand, and its relatively non-discriminatory treatment of Jewish POWs from western countries on the other. The radicalisation of Germany's anti-Semitic policies entered its last phase in June 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union; during the following four years, nearly six million Jews were murdered. In parallel, Germany's POW policies had gone through a radicalisation process of their own, resulting in the murder of millions of Soviet POWs, of Allied commando soldiers, and of POW escapees, with Adolf Hitler eventually transferring in July 1944 the responsibility for POWs from the Wehrmacht to Heinrich Himmler, in his role as head of the Replacement Army. And yet, despite all this, Jewish POWs from western countries were usually not discriminated against and were treated, in most cases, according to the 1929 Geneva Convention. Jewish Soldiers in Nazi Captivity combines memoirs, letters, and oral histories with Red Cross camp visit reports and other archival material to challenge the accepted view of the Holocaust as an indiscriminate murder of all Jews in Europe and will help to reshape our understanding of the Holocaust and of Nazi Germany.

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What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veterans?  

Michael Geheran's wonderful new book Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Cornell UP, 2020) tries to understand how Jewish participation in World War I shaped their lives in 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He uses a seemingly never-ending supply of diaries, letters, journals and other sources to paint a compelling picture of the ways in which German Jews understood their identities and influenced  their interactions with Germans and with the restrictions imposed by the Nazi Government. It raises new questions about how to periodize the Holocaust and how to think about the role of Germans--both civilian and military--in the persecution and elimination of German Jews.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

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On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army tore through Soviet territory and rolled over the Red Army, scoring some of the most dramatic victories in military history--until the blitzkrieg bogged down during the approach on Moscow. At the spearhead of the attack was General Heinz Guderian, one of the most celebrated and controversial commanders of the war, who commanded a tank group in the center of the German front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Guderian's Panzers reconstructs Barbarossa from the perspective of Generaloberst Guderian and his 2nd Panzer Group. With the German war machine at the height of its martial prowess in June 1941, Guderian's group of 250,000 men and 900 tanks rapidly broke through the Soviet frontier defenses and thrust some 600 kilometers into Soviet Russia in a matter of weeks--in doing so playing an integral part in the successful encirclement (cauldron) battles of Belostok-Minsk (June/July 1941) and Smolensk (July/August 1941); each of these battles resulting in the loss of several Soviet armies and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Despite having sustained alarming losses of personal and equipment in these opening battles, Guderian pushed his men, and himself, to even greater achievements, culminating in the triumphant cauldron Battle of Kiev in the Ukraine (September 1941) that obliterated Soviet Southwestern Front and resulted in the capture of over 600,000 Red Army POWs. It was, perhaps, Germany's greatest victory in WWII, and Guderian had made it happen.

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