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Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.53083094
EAN: 9780679454649
ISBN: 0679454640
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 656
Publication Date: May 10, 2005
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: May 10, 2005
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
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 Führer, 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” children—Jews, 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 Nicholas’s 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 Hitler’s 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 children who 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 enmeshed the lives of Europe’s boys and girls, bears witness to our own responsibility to the children of the twenty-first century.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A truly horrifying, but necessary read
Perhaps the forgotten horrors of the Nazi debacle: the fate of the children not just during the war but afterwards. The book does an excellent job of adding just enough Holocaust history to keep the reader aware of the horrors surrounding the mistreatment of the children. It is not enough that 1.5 million children perished at the murderous hands of the Nazis: millions more were orphaned, displaced. The book is extremely well-written and researched. If there is a weakness it is that it does not ... Read More
Rating:  - Disorganized, repetitive...
For those who are just now studying the history of Europe in the last mid-century, this all-embracing book on the impact of Nazi planning on all children may be a good place to start. For someone like me who has been reading about this stuff for about five years now (since being introduced to the medical ethics of Nazi use of children in medical school), this book tended to be an adequate rehash of a lot of information I had been introduced to in other books. Those books such as 'When Medicine Went ... Read More
Rating: - If it had just ended with the Nazi's....
No one will ever know the number of children killed, injured or made to suffer during World War II. The number of children simply vaporized in the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the fire storms in Tokyo or Dresden will never be known. Tragic as these incidents are, the deliberate actions of the Nazi's stand out with a particular cruelty because they were deliberate, the active policy of the Government that should have been in charge of their welfare, not their death.
In this ... Read More
Rating: - True-believers who killed
If you need a reminder of the continuing hurt to families caused by World War II, direct your browser to www.its-arolsen.org . The site, in a complex of buildings in Arolsen, Germany, houses an organization called the International Tracing Service. ITS was established by the Western Allies in 1943 to help cope with the millions of human beings in Europe uprooted by World War II. The work of the ITS and its 15 miles of files continues to this day as people continue to attempt to discover what happened ... Read More
Rating: - A complet quilt
Lynn Nicholas's "Cruel World" has tied together so carefully,and in such a scholarly way, all of the threads...the complete facts, the stories, the horrors of the millions of people from so many countries who suffered and were killed by the Nazis...into a complete quilt that will, hopefully, be required reading in all of our schools and colleges. This is a must read.
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