Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin never met, but between 1939 and 1945 they had a strong relationship, briefly as allies and then as enemies. In his riveting Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War, Laurence Rees, historian, bestselling author and acclaimed BBC documentary producer, brings this six-year period vividly alive. Rees has devoted his professional life to World War II and Holocaust history. What sets his newest account apart is that he interviewed more people who had direct experience working for these two men than any other historian to date. Rees’ skillful incorporation of these eyewitness accounts, carefully checked for reliability, gives a “you are there” feeling to events.

The most important connection between Hitler and Stalin was that each believed he had uncovered the secret of existence, but those “secrets” were definitely distinct. Hitler’s starting point was race—that the Jewish people were responsible for all that was wrong in the world. Stalin, inspired by the work of Karl Marx, became a revolutionary. Each hated the other’s belief system, though Stalin was a keen reader of Mein Kampf.

Rees gives us detailed, nuanced portraits of these two men. Hitler was charismatic, but only to those who agreed with him. Stalin exercised power through his profound understanding of working through committees. Hitler expressed a vision but was not realistic about implementation, while Stalin was much more detail oriented. They both demonstrated contempt for weaker nations and ruthlessly pursued actions that showed their total disregard for the lives of their supporters as well as their enemies. During their leadership, they were responsible for the deaths of at least 27 million people, but because they were suspicious of others, they were emotionally isolated from the suffering they caused. Rees also notes that because of the infamy of Hitler and the Holocaust, less attention has been paid to Stalin’s horrendous crimes, which has allowed him to escape the level of censure that he deserves. 

There are other fine, very long biographies of these dictators. However, this excellent book for the general reader is shorter and gives an authoritative and very readable understanding of who Hitler and Stalin were and what they did.

Chances are, if asked about life in the Middle Ages, one might describe a landscape from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with mud-covered peasants throwing not-quite-dead relatives into plague carts. And if asked about medieval science, one might simply ask, “What’s that?” However, in The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, Cambridge historian and lecturer Seb Falk reveals how far from reality these perceptions are.

Instead of smothering science, Falk argues, the church actually nurtured it during the Middle Ages. Observance of daily devotions and holy days required accurate methods for measuring time, which required sophisticated mathematical skills and precise astronomical observation. Astrolabes and other beautiful scientific instruments originally developed to tell time were found to be useful in other fields as well, triggering advances in optics, navigation and medicine. Friars, monks and priests went to universities, where, in addition to theology, they learned about scientific and mathematical advances developed by Islamic scholars. The medieval scholar was a member of an international society devoted to the precise understanding of creation, not a benighted isolationist.

In The Light Ages, Falk uses the story of John Westwyk, a 14th-century monk-mathematician-astronomer-warrior, to explore the scientific explosion that occurred well before the Renaissance. Westwyk, an almost anonymous brother in the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans, serves as the reader’s guide to the intellectual world of medieval Europe. This ordinary monk shows up in the most extraordinary places: the University of Oxford, Chaucer’s London and even the middle of a doomed crusade. A talented mathematician and astronomer, Westwyk refined the measurements necessary to locate exactly where a planet was on any given day in its revolution around the earth. Ironically, this increased precision necessitated evermore elaborate and unlikely explanations for the glaring discrepancies between the geocentric theory of the universe and observed reality.

The work of these early scientists revealed that the universe couldn’t revolve around the earth. Without their work, Copernicus’ calculations would have been neither possible nor necessary. In this magisterial and informative book, Falk makes a convincing argument that The Light Ages gave birth to our own age.

When the western part of the former Third Reich transformed itself with lightning speed into a stable democratic republic and economic powerhouse, it was the ultimate post-World War II success story. The story is true enough, but it wasn't quite that simple. In fact, the defeated German people were shattered after the war. Countless thousands were refugees, prisoners of war and rape victims, collectively blamed for the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, these conditions caused widespread tension, illness, emotional breakdown and deep denial.

They also caused a now-forgotten witch panic. Historian Monica Black surfaces this deeply buried episode in her riveting A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghost of the Past in Post-WWII Germany, which explores the connection between Germany’s trauma and an upsurge in superstitious hysteria. Included in this wave were Germans who accused their neighbors of being witches, a charismatic faith healer named Bruno Gröning who attracted thousands of followers and others who reported sightings of the Virgin Mary.

From 1947 to 1956, there were 77 “witchcraft” trials in Germany. To be clear, these were not trials of witches; they were cases brought by people accused of witchcraft against their accusers. (The word “witch” was seldom used; the accusers called them “evil people.”) The most notorious trial involved Waldemar Eberling, a lay healer and exorcist who told clients they had been bewitched by neighbors. He was called Hexenbanner, "witch banisher," and both he and his nemesis, a retired teacher who crusaded for the accused, had been anti-Nazis.

Black focuses much of the book on Gröning, a former Nazi believed by his legion of followers to possess magic healing powers against illnesses caused by evil. He eventually went to trial in a tragic case involving a teenage girl with tuberculosis who stopped medical treatment because of her faith in him.

All these cases were studied by doctors at the time they occurred, but Black perceptively points out that none of them ever publicly faced up to the heart of the matter. The terrible societal conditions that led to this outbreak, the experts said, was the fault of the Allied occupation. Guilt and shame over Nazi crimes were never mentioned. Only Eberling’s teacher-enemy pointed out—privately—that a hunt for “witches” was not unlike blaming the Jews.

When World War II ended, Europe was devastated. There were over 40 million displaced people across the continent, including 8 million civilians in Germany alone, 10% of them Jewish. Malaria, tuberculosis and famine were serious threats in areas that lacked a stable society, moral authority and basic infrastructure. In his wide-ranging and consistently enlightening Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II, Paul Betts shows how efforts to “civilize” these devastated regions influenced much of our world today. His account combines political, cultural and intellectual history, while also touching on science, religion, photography, architecture and archaeology.

The first humanitarian efforts were waged by foreign volunteers from both secular and religious groups. Among the many agencies was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, made up of workers from 44 countries. They offered help to the “victims of German and Japanese barbarism,” and their legacy is mixed, but the organization “did forge a new language of civilization . . . for postwar Europe.”

Other types of aid had religious overtones. In 1946 Winston Churchill asserted that there “can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.” His message of forgiveness went as far as a personal contribution to the defense fund for German officers accused of war crimes. Likewise, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower shaped a good deal of U.S. foreign policy according to their Christian beliefs.

The first half of the book focuses on the European continent, and the second half concentrates on Europe’s changing role in the wider world with regard to empire and decolonization. In all, this splendid overview provides striking new insights about where the Western world has been and where we may be going.

Although it’s been 75 years since the end of World War II, accounts that reveal the resilience of ordinary individuals in the face of the Nazi regime continue to emerge into the historical record. In Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, Jeffrey H. Jackson, a Rhodes College professor specializing in European history, unearths the fascinating story of two women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, whose “resistance activity grew organically out of life-long patterns of fighting against the social norms of their day.”

After 20 years of immersion in the art scene of Paris, Lucy, a photographer and writer who published under the name Claude Cahun, and Suzanne, an illustrator whose professional pseudonym was Marcel Moore, found themselves under German occupation on Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. The two women had retreated there in 1937 out of concern for Lucy’s chronic health problems, posing as sisters to hide their true relationship.

Jackson links the women’s involvement in resistance work to their personal experiences as artists and lesbians whose lives constantly put them at odds with expectations placed on them as the daughters of wealthy families in France. These expectations included gender identity and expression, which they explored in both their personal lives and art as a fluid spectrum between masculinity, androgyny and femininity. Jackson’s previous works include Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris, and he is adept at bringing the vibrancy of 1920s and 1930s Paris to life, including the cafes, nightclubs and personalities that were part of the thriving gay and lesbian community to which Lucy and Suzanne belonged.

This carefully researched volume also includes fascinating photographs, artwork and excerpts from the women’s letters and articles. The author’s attention to detail and prodigious research skills are also on display as he recounts the saga of the German occupation of Jersey and the women’s growing determination to do something to resist.

They began small enough, ripping down German posters and announcements and making graffiti. They also created their own anti-Nazi artwork and slipped subversive messages (the eponymous “paper bullets”) onto the windshields of police cars or into the pages of German-language magazines on local newsstands. Their efforts at fomenting doubt among the occupying forces escalated, eventually leading to their arrest, imprisonment in solitary confinement and a dramatic trial in which they were sentenced to death in November of 1944. Their sentence was later commuted, but they remained confined until the war ended.

The final section of Paper Bullets details these women's postwar lives. Lucy died in 1954, Suzanne in 1972. In an epilogue entitled “Why Resist?” Jackson addresses some of the issues that led to the women’s commitment to the cause of freedom. Their story, he notes, “invites us to look at a history of the war from the bottom up, to think about the complexities of ground-level responses to conquest.” Impeccably researched and meticulously sourced, Paper Bullets is a welcome and timely portrait of courage and creativity.

Princess Diana and Meghan Markle have both struggled with the downsides of marrying into the British royal family, but at least no one ever arrested them on accusations of treasonous witchcraft. Astoundingly, that really happened to four royal women in a 70-year period some six centuries ago, in a burst of bizarre prosecutions.

The Wars of the Roses, the dramatic 15th-century struggle over the English crown, have attracted writers from Shakespeare on. More recently they’ve inspired both "Game of Thrones" and the White Queen saga. Now author Gemma Hollman provides a new lens on this period in Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England.

The four women—Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Elizabeth Woodville—were far from the witchy stereotype of solitary village women. They were all intelligent and cultivated, the wives or widows of powerful men: two kings and two kings' brothers. It was too dangerous for these men's enemies to attack them directly, so their adversaries undermined them by targeting the women.

Hollman expertly re-creates their courtly world—the lavish clothes, jewels and palaces that inspired so much envy. Their personalities necessarily remain elusive, but all four chose unusual paths to marriage, so their sense of agency is clear.

In the 15th century, belief in magic blended easily with nascent science; even serious scholars pursued alchemy. These women may indeed have turned to “love potions” or fortunetellers—but was it treasonous conspiracy against the king? The likes of Cardinal Beaufort and Richard III did their best to make that case.

The accused women were smart and lucky enough to escape the axe. But this was not a game: Eleanor’s supposed accomplices were tortured and executed. Eleanor herself, the beloved wife of popular Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, was forced to walk unhooded across London on three separate days in “penance,” her humiliating fall visible to all.

Even readers familiar with the basic history of the Wars of the Roses will see aristocratic skulduggery in a strikingly fresh way in Royal Witches, as we continue to grapple with the treatment of women who rise to important positions even in our own time.

When a body of historical literature is as vast as the one on Winston Churchill in World War II, it’s fair to ask whether the world needs yet another entry. But when the author is a master of popular history like Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz—the engrossing story of Churchill’s first year as prime minister—needs no additional justification.

Larson (Dead Wake) begins his account with Churchill’s assumption of power on May 10, 1940, on the eve of the British evacuation of Dunkirk, and continues for exactly one year. That highly consequential span saw, among other events, the fall of France, the London Blitz (Germany’s relentless aerial bombardment that killed nearly 45,000 Britons) and Churchill’s tactful but persistent courtship of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that culminated in the securing of material assistance vital to sustaining Britain’s war effort. It was also a year in which Churchill time and again displayed his unsurpassed gift for inspiring a beleaguered nation—through his oratory and through the sheer force of his personality—to persist through some of the darkest days of the war, when German bombs rained death nightly on Britain’s cities, and invasion seemed imminent.

But The Splendid and the Vile isn’t merely a story of war and diplomacy. Larson devotes considerable attention to daily life inside the Churchill household, including frequent weekend excursions at the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers, where social gatherings often stretched into the early morning hours amid intensive war planning. Larson also humanizes the prime minister through stories of his teenage daughter, Mary, struggling to make the awkward transition into adulthood in the midst of war’s chaos, and his son Randolph, whose marriage was crumbling under the weight of a gambling addiction.

While Britain didn’t defeat Hitler in Churchill’s momentous first year, it unquestionably stared down annihilation and survived. Enlivened by Larson’s effective use of primary sources and, above all, by his vibrant storytelling, The Splendid and the Vile brings a fresh eye to a familiar story of courage, determination and hope.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile.

When Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937, he faced a growing threat to Great Britain’s security from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. His strategy was to “appease”—which meant, at that time, “bring peace” or “calm someone who was angry”—those leaders, to gain their trust and engage in rational dialogue. That approach was considered ill-advised by Winston Churchill, who understood the situation more realistically and encouraged rearmament. How Chamberlain dealt with the threats from afar and from within is the subject of Adrian Phillips’ fascinating Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler, which shows how the decisions made by men who were determined to avoid war instead made it almost inevitable.

The focus here is on the substantial foreign policy role played by Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s closest advisor who was head of the country’s civil service but had no prior diplomatic experience. Wilson was a master of bureaucracy and instrumental in the ongoing and seriously damaging rift between the PM and the foreign office. Both men were careful not to offend the other countries’ dictators by government action or comments in the media, and they failed to appreciate that Hitler and Mussolini were not serious about England’s efforts at either public or back-channel diplomacy. Meanwhile, Wilson’s efforts at propaganda and rearming the Royal Air Force indicated that he was not expecting war.

Chamberlain was vain and saw everything he did as a triumph. He had a forbidding image and had no friends among politicians. By contrast, Wilson had people skills and made many friends among those with whom he worked. But both were definitely convinced that their foreign policy approach was right, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. And both were determined to use almost any means to weaken Churchill’s influence and keep him out of the government, which, of course, was a goal of the Nazi regime as well.

This very readable and detailed description of how policy was made and implemented gives us a unique way to look at fateful decisions that helped advance events leading to World War II.