The Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565846540 ISBN 13: 9781565846548

Publisher: The New Press, 2002

Synopsis

Including original contributions from distinguished European and American historians such as Saul Friedländer, Omer Bartov, John Dower, Christopher Browning, and Marilyn Young, Crimes of War surveys wartime atrocities committed by the United States, Germany, and Japan across the twentieth century. The book presents startling new evidence of the killing of unarmed Koreans by American troops at No Gun Ri, of atrocities committed by Nazi soldiers on the Russian front, and of Japanese barbarity in China during World War II. Emerging from these accounts is a distinctive, repeated pattern, which typically includes a half-century of denial before the truth is confronted.

About this title

About the Author:

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Professor of European History at Brown University and the author of Erased, Mirrors of Destruction, and Hitler’s Army, among other books.

Atina Grossmann is a professor of history at the Cooper Union in New York. She is the author of Reforming Sex and Jews, Germans, and Allies, which was awarded the American Historical Association’s George L. Mosse Prize and the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library in London.

Mary Nolan is the author of Visions of Modernity and is a professor of history at New York University.

From Library Journal:

This collection of essays acknowledges the "unprecedented memory boom" in studies concerning responsibility for Nazi-era crimes. A recent exhibition of photographs in Hamburg, War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-44, shocked the many Germans who still believed in the relative immunity of the regular German army (Wehrmacht) in contrast to the more egregious crimes of the Holocaust, and it serves as a leitmotif of the book. The essays, mainly by European and American historians, include studies of the role of women in wartime Germany as well as the problem of guilt and denial in Japan and the most recent allegations of civilian massacres during the Korean War at No Gun Ri. The nuanced study of Japanese opinion offers an excellent account of the relation of guilt and contemporary politics, yet, excepting the short introduction, the essays beg many questions about the nature of collective guilt, public acknowledgment, and political rehabilitation. Indeed, the final chapter on No Gun Ri implies the strained comparison of the Holocaust and a single wartime episode. Still, for its examination of German guilt and contemporary belief, this book is recommended for larger public and university libraries. Zachary T. Irwin, Penn State Univ., Erie
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1565846540
• ISBN 13: 9781565846548
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Bartov Omer, Nolan Mary