Confronting the Nazi Past

The Nazi Period in German history is an object of academic historical inquiry and detailed scholarly research: it is also a live and painful issue for thousands of Germans and other Europeans, the explanation of why they have no relatives or children. Is it possible in the 1990s for the Nazi period to become 'history'? Or does its terrible human legacy prevent any easy assimilation into the 'past'? Did Hitler's regime have a 'modernizing' impact on German society? Is it conceivable to detect rational goals even in the regime's policies of racial extermination? How does the Third Reich compare with other examples of twentieth-century barbarity - before and after? What happened to the victims of the Nazi persecution after 1945? Have they been successful in securing compensation? What pathologies and mind sets predated or survived the years of Nazi rule?Michael Burleigh, author of The Racial State: 1933-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991) has assembled twelve historians from Germany, Britain, America and Israel to present the latest research on the urgent debate about the Nazi past from today's perspective. Confronting the Nazi Past looks at a range of subjects including Nazism and high society, forced labour in the Volkswagen factories, 'gypsies' and the Nazi state, the Nazi dictatorship, the treatment of homosexuals in the Third Reich, the Intelligentsia and the 'Final Solution', the position of women and the propaganda for 'family values'.