Surprisingly early in the Second World War - long before an Allied victory was assured - people began to plan for its aftermath. They were haunted by memories of what happened a generation before - when the millions of soldiers killed on the battlefields of the Great War had been eclipsed by the millions more civilians carried off by disease and starvation when the conflict was over. They were determined that this time around the ceasefire would not be followed by a civilian disaster. Confronted by an entire continent starving and uprooted, and with the help of a new UN body to aid the populations of Europe and Asia, Allied planners did not single out victims of the Nazi death camps for particular attention, but devised strategies to help all 'displaced persons' - as they had become known by 1943. Most of the fifteen million foreign labourers in Germany were speedily repatriated. But a million-and-a-half people - Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Yugoslavs - refused to go home. It took the Allies seven years to resolve this problem. They had to create the state of Israel, alter the whole basis of their immigration policy and let thousands of war criminals go free. This book offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World War II. Unlike most recent writing about the 1940s, it assesses the events and personalities of that decade in terms of contemporary standards and values. In particular, it shows that the tragic consequences of war were understood not in terms of genocide, but of displacement - of millions of people deprived of their homes and often forced to work for the Germans.

The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War

BEN SHEPHARD

Bodley Head

After the Great War, the millions killed on the battlefields were eclipsed by the millions more civilians carried off by disease and starvation when the conflict was over. Haunted by memories, the Allies were determined that the end of the Second World War would not be followed by a similar disaster, and they began to lay plans long before victory was assured. Confronted by an entire continent starving and uprooted, Allied planners devised strategies to help all 'displaced persons', and repatriate the fifteen million people who had been deprived of their homes and in many cases forced to work for the Germans. But over a million Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Yugoslavs refused to go home. This book offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World War II. Unlike most recent writing about the 1940s, it assesses the events and personalities of that decade in terms of contemporary standards and values. This the true and epic story of how millions ultimately found relief, reconciliation and a place to call home.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Vintage Books USA

A War of Nerves

History

Military

Pimlico

How did the human brain evolve? Why did it evolve as it did? What is man's place in evolution? In the final decades of the nineteenth century, these questions began to occupy scientists. With Darwin's theory of evolution now accepted, modern neuroscience began. Headhunters traces the intellectual journey of four men who met at Cambridge in the 1890s and whose lives interlinked for the next three decades - William Rivers, Grafton Elliot Smith, Charles Myers and William McDougall. It follows their voyages of discovery, taking the reader from anthropological field studies in Melanesia and archaeological excavations in Egypt to the psychiatric wards of the First World War. Their work ranged across fields that today carry a variety of labels - neurology, psychology, psychiatry, zoology - but which for these men formed part of the same enquiry: the search for a science of the mind. A narrative-driven work of intellectual history and a compelling biographical study, Headhunters explores the big ideas about the brain, the nervous system and man's place in history.In the process the book reveals how science actually works - the passions, the irrational flashes, the moments of insight; the big ideas that work - and the big ideas that turn out to be wrong. Acclaimed historian Ben Shephard takes the reader on an extraordinary intellectual journey - and arrives at some very modern destinations.

Headhunters

Medical Books

Medicine

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Books by BEN SHEPHARD