Studies in History. From the table of contents: The Revolutions in Byblos and Amurru during the Amarna Period and their Social Background; The Validity of Prefectual Edicts in Roman Egypt; An Anatomy of Anti-Semitism: Peter the Venerable's Letter to Louis VII, King of France; An Armenian King at the Court of Richard II; The Anglo-Druze Connection, 1841; The Struggle for Zionist Military Involvment in the First World War; Britain, Palestine and the Middle East, 1939-1945: Some Concepts and Misconceptions; Radical Jewish Intellectuals and the "New Deal"; and more.

Marie Vassiltchikov was twenty-three years old when she arrived to Berlin and found a job in the Foreign Ministry's Information Department. There she worked closely with a hard core of anti-Nazi resisters who were to be actively involved in what has come down in history as 'the 20^th July Plot'. Her diary contains a day-by-day description of Count von Stauffenberg's abortive attempt to kill Hitler and of the reign of terror that followed. In addition, her diaries detail the bombing of Berlin, the daily life in Berlin and her own journey from privilege to near-death at the end of the war.

324 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, good condition: general wear to jacket.

Olga Piickler, Tatiana and I spent the New Year quietly at Schloss Friedland. We lit the Christmas tree and tried to read the future by dropping melted wax and lead into a bowl of water. We expect Mamma and Georgie to appear any minute from Lithuania. They have announced their arrival repeatedly. At midnight all the village bells began to ring. We hung out of the windows listening — the first New Year of this new World War.

This is an account of life, attitudes and events in Cairo during World War II. Wartime Cairo was a cosmopolitan cauldron in which eccentricity and indulgence flourished side by side with a sometimes-desperate struggle that nearly lost Britain the war. In wartime Cairo crosscurrents of Arab nationalism clashed with the last gasp of British imperialism. Embracing a cast of colourful characters like King Farouk, Orde Wingate, Randolph Churchill, Olivia Manning and Lawrence Durrell.

An Egyptian, looking at his country in the late nineteenth century, did not have to be a passionate nationalist to reach the conclusion that it was being run for, and by, foreigners.

A.S. Helm was a soldier in the 2nd New Zaland Expeditionary Force during World War II. In this book - Fights and Furloughs in the Middle East - he gives an account of the early days of the Division and many aspects of active campaigning in Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Crete, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Irak and Iran. He enables the reader to appericiate something of the life of a soldier, and in addition, the recordings of actual experiences and observations about the conditions and characteristics of the people of the countries through which he had an opportunity of traelling.

301 pages, hardcover, no dust jacket, good condition: tight book with some age signs to pages and cover. Rare book.

In September 1939 I was working in the Invercargill Post Office Savings Bank, and it was from there that I enlisted in the First Echelon entering camp as a signalman in the New Zeland Divisional Signals.
(A.S. Helm: Fights and Furloughs in the Middle East, page 3)

The Second World War was a crucial period in the history of Jewish Palestine. This book recounts the events of that period of time. By way of background, the author describes how and why Britain moved from the pro-Zionism of the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the essentially pro-Arab policy of the 1939 British White Paper. The major themes of the World War II era are dealt with in careful detail: the Jewish reaction to the White Paper; the intricate interrelations between the various Jewish underground movements; the Palestine Jewish volunteer movement to the British Army; the development of the Palmach; and the internal disputes in the Zionist movement. Translated from the Hebrew.

The parties were invited to the London Conference. After the precedent of the intervention of the Arab states in ending the Arab strike in October 1936, their representatives were invited to the discussions on this occasion. Thus the representatives of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Transjordan, and Yemen arrived in London at the beginning of 1939. Britain sought to influence the Palestinian Arab extermists through the mediation of the Arab governments whose attitude toward the Palestine question seemed moderate.
The main difficulty arose over the composition of the Palestinian Arab delegation. The British government could not invite the mufti himself, the escaped leader of the armed rebellion against England, without losing face.

From 1941 to 1944 Martin Bormann kept a record of Hitler's table-talk. These informal conversational monologues usually took place towards the end of the day, at the meal table, when Hitler was joined by his cloest colleagues and chiefs of staff, for whom, in such relaxed circumstances, he would expound his theories and opinions. Hitler's range of subjects prove to be astonishingly and frighteningly large, and he delivered pronouncements on everything from Wagner to the downfall of Christianity, his love for dogs to his respect for Stalin. With an introductory essay on The Mind of Adolf Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

Saturday, 5th July 1941
What we need is a collective view of people's wish to live and manner of living.
We must distinguish between the Facist popular movement and the popular movement in Russia. The Facist movement is a spontaneous return to the traditions of ancient Rome. The Russian movement has an essential tendency towards anarchy.

A biography of Hannah Senesh,  the Jewish heroine who volunteered for a rescue mission in Europe during World War II, and was catured and excecuted at the age of 23.

The roar of the airplane made it impossible for them to talk. They sat silently, stiffly, weighed down by their weapons, their parachutes, their bulky winter clothing. In forty minutes, they would be over Yugoslavia, and the first part of their mission would begin.
There were four of them. Reuven, Yonah, Abba and Hannah. Four young Jews on their way to Hitler's Europe. Each of them had been born there, in quieter times. Each had escaped and found safety in Palestine. But now, on the thirteenth of March, 1944, they were going back.

Unteroffizier Laupert, leader of the regimental pioneer platoon's 1st Squad, came rushing out the makeshift battalion command post and ran toward the truck around which his squad had gathered.

221 pages, Hardcover, fair condition: age spots on pages.

This is the story of an army that fought a battle unlike any that was ever fought in the history of the world. Its soldiers had no uniforms, no guns, no cannons, no planes, and no tanks.

The story of the Einsatzgruppen and its role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces", organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. In this account the author profies the eastern campaign's architects as well as its "ordinary" soldiers and policemen.

In the spring of 1941 a police academy in Pretzsch, a town on the Elbe River about fifty miles southwest of Berlin, became the site of a sinister assembly. Several thousand men from the ranks of the SS—the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel, or defense echelon, a police and security service that answered directly to Adolf Hitler and operated outside the constraints of German law—were ordered to report to Pretzsch for training and assignment. They were not told what their assignment would be, but their commonalities offered a clue: many of them had served in SS detachments in Poland, which Germany had invaded and occupied in 1939, and preference was given to men who spoke Russian.

Five days before the third anniversary of the war, on Saturday, August 29th, 1942, to be exact, an event occurred which electrified and thrilled Palestinian Jewry. It was an insignificant event in itself, but to Palestinian Jewry it was heralded as a portent, a sign that recognition had come, if tardily. Parade, the excellent weekly illustrated paper published in the Middle East by the Public Relations Department of G.H.Q., contained on p. 10, 11 and 19, a full-size illustrated article entitled: "Hitler's First Victims Hit Back."

Albert Speer was the undisputed master of the German war machine, and the one responsible for conscripted foreign labor in the Third Reich. When Speer was captured and sentenced at Nuremberg--after becoming the only defendant to plead guilty--he started keeping a secret diary, much of it on toilet paper. After 20 years of imprisonment, he turned the 25,000 of the smuggled pages into a book.

An American soldier in white helmet and white shoulder straps leads me down the basement corridors to a small elevator. Together, we ride up. A few steps down another corridor, a door opens, and I am standing on a small platform in the Nuremberg courtroom.

Could the allies have destroyed the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, saving the lives of tens of thousands of Holocaust victims? Could the allied forces have cut the railway lines leading to Auschwitz, disturbing the transportation of the Hungarian Jews to their deaths? For years these questions have been debated. This book brings together the key contributors to this debate, with new and original articles by eminent historians of World War II and the Holocaust, and a selection of the most important documents and aerial reconnaissance photos from 1944.

350 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, good condition: clean and tight copy. ISBN 0-312-19838-8.

For more than three decades after the end of World War II, the question of why the allies did not bomb the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, or the rail lines leading to it, was a footnote to history. A few survivors and a few scholars raised the question - but almost no one paid any attention to it.

This book presents the remarkable figure of Enzo Sereni. Sereni was born in 1905 to a distinguished Italian Jewish family. In 1927, he and his wife became the first Italians to "pioneer" in Palestine. In the early 1930s, he began his career as an emissary of the Zionist movement, first in Hitlerite Germany, trying to facilitate and hasten the Jewish exodus, then all over Europe. During World War II he went to Baghdad to aid the endangered Jewish community there and later in the war, Sereni felt compelled to return to Italy to contact and help in the rescue of that country's remaining Jews. Translated from the Hebrew and slightly abridged.

265 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, good condition.

The big house on Cavour Street had been intended as a family estate, a fortress of the Sereni dynasty for generations. When the five-story residence was built in the nineties of the past century, Rome was in the first stages of its growth as the capital of the united Italian kingdom, and the Jews of Rome still felt keenly the sweet taste of the new freedom and equality which the soldiers of Victor Emmanuel II bestowed upon them when they conquered the city from the pope.

The author, Christabel Bielenberg, a niece of Lord Northcliffe, married a German lawyer in 1934. She lived through the war in Germany, as a German citizen, under the horrors of Nazi rule and Allied bombings. Closely associated with resistance circles, her husband was arrested after the failure of the plot against Hitler's life, and she herself was interrogated by the Gestapo. This book brings her story as well as of dozens of everyday Germans..

At four o'clock in the afternoon of September 29th, 1934, I became a German citizen, when, in a basement office of the German Embassy in London, I exchanged my British passport with its jovial lion and its unicorn and its requirement in the name of his Britannic Majesty that I be afforded every protection of which I might stand in need, for its German equivalent - a nondescript brown booklet with a disdainful looking eaglw stamped in black on its drab cardboard cover; the eagle clutched the Swastika emblem in a pair of skinny claws.

The story of the Third Reich, from the rise of the Nazi military machine in the 1930s, through the years of the Second World War on land, air and sea to the final reckoning in a shattered Berlin in 1945.

On 30 January 1933,Adolf Hitler,leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party — the "Nazis" — was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Ironically, he was considered a compromise candidate. In the national elections of the previous November the Nazis had actually seen their share of the popular vote decline to around one-third. The party was desperately short of funds and losing members fast. Yet Hitler was the only political figure with a coherent programme which could command support from a majority in the Reichstag parliament. Politicians of the right, centre and left all believed they could control this power-hungry demagogue. But no sooner was he installed in his chancellery than the Fuhrer began ruthlessly transforming the fragile democratic republic, founded only 15 years earlier, into a brutal, perverted yet undeniably dynamic dictatorship — a new German empire, one which he claimed would last for a thousand years. In fact, it ended a little over 12 years-later in May 1945, with total military defeat, economic and political collapse, and Hitler's suicide.

Excerpts of diaries written by Hashomer Hatzait youth in Poland during World War Two. Note that the book was published in 1941.

117 pages, hardcover, no dust jacket, good condition.

...The roar of cannon subsided. The news burst upon us: `They are coming!` Panic spread over the city—mortal fear mixed with constrained curiosity: `What will tomorrow bring?` The details of the horrible massacre on the Brzeziny Road were already widely known. Thousands of those killed during the last raid were still sprawled over the streets, while many more thousands of wounded were still lying helpless in the surrounding countryside. As though adding insult to injury, the white posters of the City Militia appealed to the public to `welcome the invading army peacefully!`.

As I entered the house in the evening without my brothers, I noticed tears welling in my father's eyes. Seeing me, he hastily hid his face with the palm of his hand. I was heart- stricken, for never before had I seen my father cry. Never had he revealed his plight to anyone. Now this calm, independent man was crying.... Mother was a little comforted when I assured her that the rest of the children were safe with our friends in Latrikow, but father simply refused to be convinced...