The Nuremberg Fallacy: Wars and War Crimes Since World War II

DAVIDSON, Eugene

Macmillan

The making of Adolf Hitler

Macdonald Jane's

A new contribution to the baffling history of Adolph Hitler seeking to explain how a foreign-born, uneducated, and marginal politician could reach such heights of power and inflict such devastation on the world. Davidson maintains that Hitler's ascent was due largely to Germany's economic and political malfunctioning and that the leader's ability to revive morale and outmaneuver opposition facilitated his rise. However, the ruthless character of the man also manifested itself in fateful errors of judgment that led to his destruction. The sequel to The Making of Adolf Hitler continues the author's careful scholarship and attention to detail. Includes photographs. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler

History

Europe

Univ of Missouri Pr

The harsh Armistice terms of 1918, the short-lived Weimar Republic, Hindenburg's senile vacillations, and behind-the-scene power plays form the backbone of this excellent study covering German history during the first three-and-a-half decades of the century.

The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazism (Volume 1)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

University of Missouri

The "definitive one-volume study of Nuremberg," The Trial of the Germans is now available in paperback. An astute observer of the Nuremberg trial, Eugene Davidson has struggled with the issues it raised: Was it a necessary response to the heinous crimes of the Third Reich? How were Germany and the Germans capable of such extraordinary evil? Was the trial just, given the claims that the defendants were simply serving their country, doing as they had been told to do? And if not just, was it nonetheless necessary as a warning to prevent future crimes against humanity? Davidson's approach to these and other large questions of justice is made through examination of each of the defendants in the trial. His reluctant, but firm, conclusion is: "In a world of mixed human affairs where a rough justice is done that is better than lynching or being shot out of hand, Nuremberg may be defended as a political event if not as a court." Some sentences may have seemed too severe, but none was harsher than the punishments meted out to innocent people by the regime these men served. "In a certain sense," says Davidson, "the trial succeeded in doing what judicial proceedings are supposed to do: it convinced even the guilty that the verdict against them was just."
Faulty as the trial was from the legal point of view, a catharsis of the pent-up emotions of millions of people had to be provided and a record of what had taken place duly preserved for whatever use later generations would make of it.

The Trial of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (Volume 1)

Available for the first time in paperback, The Nuremberg Fallacy examines the inherent shortcomings of the Nuremberg "rules of war" and the War Crimes Tribunal's impossible expectations. In 1946, the Tribunal declared all aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity illegal. Yet the period since World War II has witnessed an unprecedented number of armed conflicts. In light of recent crises, including those in Rwanda, Bosnia and Serbia, and the Middle East, it is clear that the issues explored in The Nuremberg Fallacy are as relevant today as they were at the time of the book's first publication a quarter century ago.In this volume, Eugene Davidson continues his investigations begun in The Trial of the Germans (University of Missouri Press), which studied the Nuremberg trials themselves, by focusing on five major conflicts since the end of World War II: the Suez crisis of 1956; Algeria's war of independence; Israel's recurring (and ongoing) battles with its Arab neighbors, complicated and worsened by intervention of the superpowers; the wars in Southeast Asia; and the Soviet Union's suppression of Czechoslovakia and other border states of Eastern Europe.By exploring the roots and ramifications of these five conflicts, Davidson is able to chart the crosscurrents between large and small states, between individual nations and the United Nations, between the rules of Nuremberg and the significantly older rules of self- interest. The result is a thoughtful and thought-provoking study of the dynamics of war and peace in the post-Nuremberg world.The rules of war proclaimed at Nuremberg—observing the flag of truce, prohibiting attacks on surrendered enemies, treating prisoners of war and civilian populations humanely—have become virtually irrelevant in modern guerrilla warfare. If anything, Davidson suggests, conditions have actually become worse than they were before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.The continuing importance and relevance of The Nuremberg Fallacy is best summarized in the final sentences of Davidson's text: "The survival of a nation cannot be successfully entrusted to simplistic formulae or to principles that reflect unworkable doctrines. No computers have been programmed for the wisdom that remains essential for survival. People still have to provide that from their own inner and outer resources, no matter how far the weapons may seem to have outdistanced them."

The Nuremberg Fallacy (Volume 1)

Military

Offering much more than a detached historical account of the "German miracle"—a ruined, war-torn nation evolving within a decade into the most flourishing country in Europe—Eugene Davidson delves into this intriguing story as a "participant observer." Drawing on countless interviews with Germans and Americans of various backgrounds and perspectives, from High Commissioner's office personnel to occupation troop GIs, storekeepers to housewives, Davidson insightfully conveys the atmosphere of postwar Germany and the role of the American occupation in achieving the nation's economic miracle.
The Death and Life of Germany examines the transformation of Germany, focusing on such key episodes as the unprecedented war-crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the almost unceasing attempts of the Western Allies to cooperate with the Russians, the startling effects of the currency reform and Marshall Plan aid, the break between East and West Germany that culminated in the Berlin airlift, the heroic East German uprising of June 17, 1953, and the eventual formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.
Davidson traces the progress of thought among Germans and Americans alike as their conceptions of postwar Germany gradually evolved and the leaders of a new, democratic West Germany emerged from the ashes of defeat.
The strength of Davidson's research and analysis and the continuing relevance of this important volume make The Death and Life of Germany an invaluable addition to the collections of scholars and general readers interested in the evolution of postwar Germany.

The Death and Life of Germany: An Account of the American Occupation (Volume 1)

Eugene Davidson’s final book, The Narrow Path of Freedom and Other Essays, examines historical instances of man’s inhumanity to man, providing poignant insight that we can profit from as we contemplate an ongoing battle against terrorism. A superb essayist, Davidson here displays an extraordinary range. Long a student of international relations, he writes of the Nuremberg trials after World War II and, as the book’s title indicates, of the narrow path of freedom that the democracies have had to travel during the last half century. The path allowed little stumbling, lest they would fall into the errors that disgraced the dictatorships. Davidson wears his wisdom lightly, delighting a reader with touches of humor and with wry, startlingly appropriate comparisons. A second set of essays examines the idea of history as it has survived into our present time, including what Davidson describes as the “thin coat of higher learning” in a commencement address in which he advises young men and women to listen to dissent and make up their own minds. As Davidson says, “The war of ideas is far from over, and every coming generation will have to bear its own share of the burden in the endless struggle for the survival of freedom.”Last is a group of reminiscent essays. One recounts a friendship with the historian Charles A. Beard, who proposed to the young Davidson that he call him Uncle Charlie. In another Davidson plumbs the personality of a major figure of the Nazi era, Albert Speer. He also discusses the pathetic and perhaps demented Ezra Pound, whose genius as a poet may have been questionable but whose ability to survive was remarkable. The Narrow Path of Freedom and Other Essays is a valuable guide for all who try to keep the idea of freedom alive. The pieces in it are nothing less than a triumph—historical, literary, philosophical. By confronting the idea of history—what the past should mean—Davidson gives us a book that will last well into our already turbulent new century.

The Narrow Path of Freedom and Other Essays (The Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy) (Volume 1)

World

The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler, which includes dozens of photos from German collections, covers literally every aspect of Hitler's life from his success after he came to power in 1933 to his self-destruction. Renowned author Eugene Davidson describes in detail Hitler’s stratagems in reviving morale and undoing the inequitable treaties imposed on Germany after World War I and his shrewd moves to take advantage of the fatal miscalculations of the coalition that had been aligned against the Reich. Once Hitler had brutally improved Germany's desperate state, there followed mortal errors and fateful mistakes of judgment arising from his own inadequacies. Compelling, well-researched, and eminently readable, The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler strives to explain how and why Hitler's empire collapsed from his own actions. Available only in the USA and Canada.

The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler (Volume 1)

The Death and Life of Germany: An Account of the American Occupation

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