Results by title

353 books match the query 'World War II' and 6 start with j

cover of J. D. Salinger and the Nazis

J. D. Salinger and the Nazis

Eberhard Alsen

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

Before J.D. Salinger became famous for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye and infamous as a literary recluse, he was a soldier in World War II. While serving in the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Europe, Salinger wrote more than twenty short stories and returned home with a German war bride. Eberhard Alsen, through meticulous archival research and careful analysis of the literary record, corrects mistaken assumptions about the young writer's war years and their repercussions. Though recent biographies and films claim that Salinger regularly participated in combat, Alsen cites military documents showing that his counterintelligence work was well behind the front lines.

Alsen, a longtime Salinger scholar who witnessed the Nazi regime firsthand as a child in Germany, tracks Salinger's prewar experiences in the army, his work for the CIC during significant military campaigns, and his reactions to three military disasters that killed more than a thousand fellow soldiers in his Fourth Infantry Division. Alsen also identifies the Nazi death camp where Salinger saw mounds of recently burned bodies. Revealing details shed light on Salinger's outspoken disgust for American military leaders, the personality changes that others saw in him after the war, and his avoidance of topics related to the Holocaust.
[more]
cover of Japanese Empire in the Tropics: Selected Documents and Reports of the Japanese Period in Sarawak, Northwest Borneo, 1941–1945

Japanese Empire in the Tropics

Selected Documents and Reports of the Japanese Period in Sarawak, Northwest Borneo, 1941–1945

Ooi Keat Gin

Ohio University Press, 1997

Although the Japanese interregnum was brief, its dramatic commencement and equally dramatic conclusion represented a watershed in the history of the young state of Sarawak.

In recent years, there has been a groundswell of interest in the war years, culminating in an attempt at reassessment of the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia by Western and Japanese scholars as well as by those from Southeast Asia.

Presented here in a two-volume edition is a history of the Japanese occupation of Sarawak narrated through the compelling testimonies of the actual participants based on their recollections, memoirs, and correspondence.

[more]
cover of Jerome and Rohwer: Memories of Japanese American Internment in World War II Arkansas

Jerome and Rohwer

Memories of Japanese American Internment in World War II Arkansas

Walter M. Imahara

University of Arkansas Press, 2022

Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II, the federal government rounded up more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent—both immigrants and native-born citizens—and began one of the most horrific mass-incarceration events in US history. The program tore apart Asian American communities, extracted families from their homes, and destroyed livelihoods as it forced Japanese Americans to various “relocation centers” around the country. Two of these concentration camps—the Jerome and Rohwer War Relocation Centers—operated in Arkansas.

This book is a collection of brief memoirs written by former internees of Jerome and Rohwer and their close family members. Here dozens of individuals, almost all of whom are now in their eighties or nineties, share their personal accounts as well as photographs and other illustrations related to their life-changing experiences. The collection, likely to be one of the last of its kind, is the only work composed solely of autobiographical remembrances of life in Jerome and Rohwer, and one of the very few that gathers in a single volume the experiences of internees in their own words.

What emerges is a vivid portrait of lives lived behind barbed wire, where inalienable rights were flouted and American values suspended to bring a misguided sense of security to a race-obsessed nation at war. However, in the barracks and the fields, the mess halls and the makeshift gathering places, values of perseverance, tolerance, and dignity—the gaman the internees shared—gave significance to a transformative experience that changed forever what it means to call oneself an American.
[more]
cover of Jewish Claims Against East Germany

Jewish Claims Against East Germany

Angelika Timm

Central European University Press, 1998

This is the first comprehensive history of Jewish negotiations with East Germany regarding restitution and reparations for Nazi war crimes. Angelika Timm analyzes the politics of old and new anti-Semitism and the context in which they grew under the officially propagated ideology of antifascism.


Investigating the mass of unpublished, newly available archival data from the United States, Israel, and the former German Democratic Republic, and more than forty personal interviews, Timm fills a critical gap in the scholarship on postwar Germany. She analyzes the role of the Holocaust and the image of Jews in the historical consciousness and political culture of East Germany and chronicles the efforts of Jewish organizations, especially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, to negotiate reparations with the East German state. The unique relationship between ideology and Realpolitik defined the manner in which East Germany confronted the crimes of its past and allowed anti-Semitism to reemerge.

[more]
cover of Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation

Jews in Nazi Berlin

From Kristallnacht to Liberation

Edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Though many of the details of Jewish life under Hitler are familiar, historical accounts rarely afford us a real sense of what it was like for Jews and their families to live in the shadow of Nazi Germany’s oppressive racial laws and growing violence. With Jews in Nazi Berlin, those individual lives—and the constant struggle they required—come fully into focus, and the result is an unprecedented and deeply moving portrait of a people.

Drawing on a remarkably rich archive that includes photographs, objects, official documents, and personal papers, the editors of Jews in Nazi Berlin have assembled a multifaceted picture of Jewish daily life in the Nazi capital during the height of the regime’s power. The book’s essays and images are divided into thematic sections, each representing a different aspect of the experience of Jews in Berlin, covering such topics as emigration, the yellow star, Zionism, deportation, betrayal, survival, and more. To supplement—and, importantly, to humanize—the comprehensive documentary evidence, the editors draw on an extensive series of interviews with survivors of the Nazi persecution, who present gripping first-person accounts of the innovation, subterfuge, resilience, and luck required to negotiate the increasing brutality of the regime.

A stunning reconstruction of a storied community as it faced destruction, Jews in Nazi Berlin renders that loss with a startling immediacy that will make it an essential part of our continuing attempts to understand World War II and the Holocaust.

[more]
cover of Justyna's Narrative

Justyna's Narrative

Gusta Davidson Draenger

University of Massachusetts Press, 1996

Written during World War II, Justyna's Narrative is a compelling account of the Krakow Jewish resistance. From February through April 1943, Gusta Davidson Draenger (aka “Justyna”) composed the narrative on scraps of paper smuggled into her prison cell. Between sessions of torture and interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, she recorded the activities and spiritual aspirations of the clandestine group of young Jewish idealists who forged documents, acquired weapons, and committed acts of defiance against the Nazis.

[more]