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CLOSURE: Central Library will be closed Tuesday, July 21, through Saturday, July 25, while emergency repairs are made to the building’s cooling system. We expect to reopen Monday, July 27.

Notice of Public Meeting: Kalamazoo Public Library Board of Trustees | July 27 | 5:30 pm | Central Library/Van Deusen Room. The packet of information for the meeting can be found on the library’s website. 

Book

Moral combat : good and evil in World War II

Call Number

  • 940.54 B9613 (OSH)

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Edition

1st U.S. ed.

Publication Information

New York : HarperCollins, 2011.

Physical Description

xxi, 650 p. : col. ill. ; 24 cm.

Summary

British historian Burleigh (Blood Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism) delivers a long, riveting account of the awful atrocities of WWII and the perverted reasoning behind them. Burleigh explains that Communist, Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese systems claimed to be regimes of public virtue carrying out inexorable historical processes. Proclaiming that the only evil was obstructing this march to utopia, they discarded the rule of law and alternative moral authority (religion, ethics).

Notes

Originally published in Great Britain in 2010.

Contents

  • The predators
  • Appeasement
  • Brotherly enemies
  • The rape of Poland
  • Trampling the remains
  • Not losing: Churchill's Britain
  • Under the swastika: Nazi occupied Europe
  • Barbarossa
  • Global war
  • The resistance
  • Moral calculus
  • Beneath the mask of command
  • Antagonistic allies
  • 'We were savages': combat soldiers
  • Massacring the innocents
  • Journeys through night
  • Observing an avalanche
  • Tenuous altruism
  • 'The King's thunderbolts are righteous': RAF Bomber Command
  • Is that Britain?--No, it's Brittany
  • The predators at bay.

Subjects