Lynn H. Nicholas

To be a child in mid-twentieth-century Europe was to be not a person but an object, available for use in the service of the totalitarian state. Very soon after Adolf Hitler came to power, policies of eugenic selection and euthanasia began to weed ill or disabled children out of the New Order by poison, gas, and starvation. Defect-free good blood children were subjected to an education based on racism, propaganda, and the glorification of the Fuhrer, and were deliberately deprived of free time that would allow independent thought or action. Once the war began, Nordic-looking children were kidnapped from families in the conquered lands and subjected to Germanization. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of bad blood childrenJews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians(were separated from their families and condemned to forced migration, slave labor, sadistic experiments, starvation, and mass execution. At the end of the war, uprooted children of every origin wandered the bombed-out cities and countryside, some having been taken from home at such a young age that they did not know where they had come from or even their own names. Millions surged into and out of DP camps, exploited by political and religious groups, while the Allies and the fledgling United Nations tried mightily to put families back together and to find new homes for the orphans.All the riveting narrative skill and impeccable scholarship that distinguished Lynn Nicholass first book, The Rape of Europa (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction), are present in her study of these terrible crimes against humanity. To research this story she has delved into the governmental and military archives of many nations, and has interviewed countless individuals. She shows the relationship of the deadly Nazi policies to the brutal tactics used in the USSR in the 1930s and to their rehearsal in the Spanish Civil War, and vividly describes the abject failure of Hitlers campaign to plant Germanizing colonies in the conquered nations. She gives us the stories of survivors of ghastly war-spawned famines(in Greece and Russia in the 1940s, Holland in the Hunger Winter of 1945, and Berlin in the Airlift year of 1949(and of British, French, and Dutch childrenwho were evacuated to the countryside; boys and girls sent alone from Europe to England on the Kindertransports; the teenaged soldiers of the Reich; the small veterans of the quarries, the factories, and the camps as well as those who survived in lonely hiding.In Cruel World Lynn Nicholas shows us clearly, and with passionate empathy for the innocent victims, the crimes against children that inevitably result when ideology overwhelms humanity. This powerful book, as it recounts the waking nightmare that enmeshedthe lives of Europes boys and girls, bears witness to our own responsibility to the children of the twenty-first century.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardThe real story behind the major motion picture The Monuments Men. The cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall--not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reichs war on European culture and the Allies desperate effort to preserve it.From the Nazi purges of "Degenerate Art" and Goerings shopping sprees in occupied Paris to the perilous journey of the Mona Lisa from Paris and the painstaking reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy, The Rape of Europa is a sweeping narrative of greed, philistinism, and heroism that combines superlative scholarship with a compelling drama.

Los personajes que aparecen en este apasionante libro van desde Adolf Hitler y Hermann Goering a Gertrude Stein y Marc Chagall, además de las obras maestras del arte universal, de Leonardo Da Vinci a Pablo Picasso, de los tesoros de Troya a Paul Gauguin... Y la historia que se cuenta es la del sistematico saqueo de obras de arte por parte de los nazis durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Mientras en Alemania purgaban el “arte degenerado”, los nazis saquearon museos y colecciones privadas a lo largo y ancho de Europa: de Francia a la Union Sovietica, de Italia a Polonia... Este libro investiga esta rapiña de obras de arte, la desaparicion de cuadros valiosisimos y la posterior recuperacion por los ejercitos aliados de otras piezas robadas. Rebosante de historias fascinantes, desde el peligroso viaje de la Mona Lisa bajo las bombas hasta el descubrimiento de la coleccion privada de Goering oculta en unas minas de sal, El saqueo de Europa es mucho mas que un simple ensayo historico. Con una habilidad narrativa mas propia de un novelista que de un erudito, la autora nos presenta un relato fascinante, lleno de testimonios desgarradotes, sobre una epoca terrible, y sobre la rapacidad, barbarie, coraje o heroismo del que son capaces los seres humanos. “Impresio