WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES

DOWNLOAD EBOOK : WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES PDF

Click link bellow and free register to download ebook: WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES DOWNLOAD FROM OUR ONLINE LIBRARY

WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES PDF

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees. The industrialized innovation, nowadays sustain every little thing the human requirements. It consists of the daily activities, tasks, office, entertainment, as well as much more. One of them is the terrific website connection and computer system. This problem will certainly alleviate you to assist among your leisure activities, reviewing practice. So, do you have eager to review this e-book World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees now?

Review “Rees is vastly well informed about the second world war. His judgments can seldom be faulted. . . . There are many surprises here, and much good detail. . . . The relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill makes an ugly story, and Rees tells it extraordinarily well.” —Sir Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (London) “A powerful and moving reminder that behind the generalizations of historians lie the fates of real human beings. . . . Amply worth reading.” —David Stafford, History Today “A thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction to many of the shadier deals of the Second World War. . . . The real virtue of this book lies in its ability to blend the experience of ordinary people into the narrative of public events. . . . Memorable in the extreme.” —Richard Overy, Literary Review “The important question which the book raises—and leaves open—is whether even the most just war can ever be fought with clean hands. . . . Rees’s finest book to date.” —Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris “Readers of this book . . . are in for a shock. . . . [Rees] illuminates many shady corners of Britain’s and America’s dealings with Stalin and each other. The famous trust between Churchill and Roosevelt is shown to be far from perfect.” —Peter Lewis, Daily Mail "Rees commendably keeps his reader-viewers in touch with a history inexorably receding from living memory.” —Booklist About the Author Laurence Rees is the writer and producer of the BBC/PBS television series World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. His previous work includes the acclaimed television

series and books The Nazis: A Warning from History, War of the Century, Horror in the East, and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the "Final Solution," for which he received the British Book Award for History Book of the Year. His other awards include a George Foster Peabody award and an Emmy. He lives in England. Visit the author's website at www.laurencerees.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION When do you think the Second World War ended? In August 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese? Well, it depends how you look at it. If you believe that the end of the war was supposed to have brought ‘freedom’ to the countries that had suffered under Nazi occupation, then for millions of people the war did not really end until the fall of Communism less than twenty years ago. In the summer of 1945 the people of Poland, of the Baltic states and a number of other countries in eastern Europe simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for that of another. It was in order to demonstrate this unpleasant reality that the presidents of both Estonia and Lithuania refused to visit Moscow in 2005 to participate in ‘celebrations’ marking the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘end of the war’ in Europe. How did this injustice happen? That is one of the crucial questions this book attempts to answer. And it is a history that it has only been possible to tell since the fall of Communism. Not just because the hundred or so eye witnesses I met in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe would never have been able to speak frankly under Communist rule, but also because key archival material that successive Soviet governments did all they could to hide has been made available only recently. The existence of these documents has allowed a true ‘behind-the-scenes’ history of the West’s dealings with Stalin to be attempted. All of which means, I hope, that this book contains much that is new. I have been lucky that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc has permitted this work. It was certainly something I could never have predicted would happen when I was taught the history of the Second World War at school back in the early 1970s. Then my history teacher got round the moral and political complexities of the Soviet Union’s1 participation in the war by the simple expedient of largely ignoring it. At the time, in the depths of the Cold War, that was how most people dealt with the awkward legacy of the West’s relationship with Stalin. The focus was on the heroism of the Western Allies – on Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day. None of which, of course, must be forgotten. But it is not the whole story. Before the fall of Communism the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War was, to a large extent, denied a proper place in our culture because it was easier than facing up to a variety of unpalatable truths. Did we, for example, really contribute to the terrible fate that in 1945 befell Poland, the very country we went to war to protect? Especially when we were taught that this was a war about confronting tyranny? And if, as we should, we do start asking ourselves these difficult questions, then we also have to pose some of the most uncomfortable of all. Was anyone in the West to blame in any way for what happened at the end of the war? What about the great heroes of British and American history, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt?

Paradoxically, the best way to attempt an answer to all this is by focusing on someone else entirely – Joseph Stalin. Whilst this is a book that is fundamentally about relationships, it is Stalin who dominates the work. And a real insight into the Soviet leader’s attitude to the war is gained by examining his behaviour immediately before his alliance with the West. This period, of the Nazi–Soviet pact between 1939 and 1941, has been largely ignored in the popular consciousness. It was certainly ignored in the post-war Soviet Union. I remember asking one Russian after the fall of the Berlin Wall: ‘How was the Nazi–Soviet pact taught when you were in school during the Soviet era? Wasn’t it a tricky piece of history to explain away?’ He smiled in response. ‘Oh, no’, he said, ‘not tricky at all. You see, I didn’t learn there had ever been a Nazi– Soviet pact until after 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union’. Stalin’s relationship with the Nazis is a vital insight into the kind of person he was; because, at least in the early days of the relationship, he got on perfectly well with them. The Soviet Communists and the German Nazis had a lot in common – not ideologically, of course, but in practical terms. Each of them respected the importance of raw power. And each of them despised the values that a man like Franklin Roosevelt held most dear, such as freedom of speech and the rule of law. As a consequence, we see Stalin at his most relaxed in one of the first encounters in the book, carving up Europe with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. The Soviet leader was never to attain such a moment of mutual interest and understanding at any point in his relationship with Churchill and Roosevelt. It is also important to understand the way in which the Soviets ran their occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941. That is because many of the injustices that were to occur in parts of occupied eastern Europe at the end of the war were broadly similar to those the Soviets had previously committed in eastern Poland – the torture, the arbitrary arrests, the deportations, the sham elections and the murders. What the earlier Soviet occupation of eastern Poland demonstrates is that the fundamental nature of Stalinism was obvious from the start. So it isn’t that Churchill and Roosevelt were unaware in the beginning of the kind of regime they were dealing with. Neither of them was initially enthusiastic about the forced alliance with Stalin following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Churchill considered it akin to a pact with ‘the Devil’, and Roosevelt, even though the United States was still officially neutral in the summer of 1941, was careful in his first statement after the Nazi invasion to condemn the Soviets for their previous abuses. How the British and Americans moved from that moment of justified scepticism about Stalin to the point immediately after the Yalta Conference in February 1945 when they stated, with apparent sincerity, that Stalin ‘meant well to the world’ and was ‘reasonable and sensible’, is the meat of this book. And the answer to why Churchill and Roosevelt publicly altered their position about Stalin and the Soviet Union doesn’t lie just in understanding the massive geo-political issues that were at stake in the war – and crucially the effect on the West of the successful Soviet fight-back against the Nazis – but also takes us into the realm of personal emotions. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had gigantic egos and both of them liked to dominate the room. And both of them liked the sound of their own voices. Stalin wasn’t like that at all. He was a watcher – an aggressive listener. It was no accident that it took two highly intelligent functionaries on the British side – Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, and Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff – to spot Stalin’s gifts most accurately. They saw him not as a politician playing to the crowd and awash with his own rhetoric, but more like a bureaucrat – a practical man

who got things done. As Cadogan confided in his diary at Yalta: ‘I must say I think Uncle Joe [Stalin] much the most impressive of the three men. He is very quiet and restrained…. The President flapped about and the PM boomed, but Joe just sat taking it all in and being rather amused. When he did chip in, he never used a superfluous word and spoke very much to the point’. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke ‘formed a very high idea of his [Stalin’s] ability, force of character and shrewdness’.3In particular, Alanbrooke was impressed that Stalin ‘displayed an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. No one would ever accuse Churchill or Roosevelt – those biggest of ‘big picture’ men – of having ‘an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. And it was Alanbrooke who spotted early on what was to be the crux of the final problem between Stalin and Churchill: ‘Stalin is a realist if ever there was one’, he wrote in his diary, ‘facts only count with him…[Churchill] appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there’. As one historian has put it, the Western leaders at the end of the war ‘were not dealing with a normal, everyday, run-of-themill, statesmanlike head of government. They confronted instead a psychologically disturbed but fully functional and highly intelligent dictator who had projected his own personality not only onto those around him but onto an entire nation and had thereby with catastrophic results, remade it in his image’. One of the problems was that Stalin in person was very different from the image of Stalin the tyrant. Anthony Eden, one of the first Western politicians to spend time with Stalin in Moscow during the war, remarked on his return that he had tried hard to imagine the Soviet leader ‘dripping with the blood of his opponents and rivals, but somehow the picture wouldn’t fit’. But Roosevelt and Churchill were sophisticated politicians and it is wrong to suppose that they were simply duped by Stalin. No, something altogether more interesting – and more complicated – takes place in this history. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to win the war at the least possible cost to their own respective countries – in both human and financial terms. Keeping Stalin ‘on side’, particularly during the years before D-Day when the Soviets believed they were fighting the war almost on their own, was a difficult business and required, as Roosevelt would have put it, ‘careful handling’. As a result, behind closed doors the Western leaders felt it necessary to make hard political compromises. One of them was to promote propaganda that painted a rosy picture of the Soviet leader; another was deliberately to suppress material that told the truth about both Stalin and the nature of the Soviet regime. In the process the Western leaders might easily, for the sake of convenience, have felt they had to ‘distort the normal and healthy operation’ of their ‘intellectual and moral judgements’ as one senior British diplomat was memorably to put it during the war.8 However, this isn’t just a ‘top-down’ history, examining the mentality and beliefs of the elite. I felt from the first that it was also important to show in human terms the impact of the decisions taken by Stalin and the Western Allies behind closed doors. And so in the course of writing this book I travelled across the former Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and asked people who had lived through this testing time to tell their stories. Uncovering this history was a strange and sometimes emotional experience. And – at least to me – it all seemed surprisingly fresh and relevant. I felt this most strongly standing in the leafy square by the opera house in Lviv. This elegant city had started the twentieth century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, become part of Poland after the First World War, then part of the Soviet Union between

1939 and 1941, then part of the Nazi Empire until 1944, then part of the Soviet Union again, until finally in 1991 it became part of an independent Ukraine. At various times in the last hundred years the city has been called Lemberg, Lvov, Lwów and Lviv. There was not one group of citizens I met there who had not at one time or another suffered because of who they were. Catholic or Jew, Ukrainian, Russian or Pole, they had all faced persecution in the end. It was the Nazis, of course, who operated the most infamous and murderous policy of persecution against the Jews of the city, but we are apt to forget that such was the change and turmoil in this part of central Europe that ultimately few non-Jews escaped suffering of one kind or another either. I was fortunate to have a chance to meet these witnesses to history – all the more so since in the near future there will be no one left alive who personally experienced the war. And after having spent so much time with these veterans from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc I am left with an overwhelming sense of the importance of recovering their history as part of our own. Our nations were all in the war together. And we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to face up to the consequences of that truth.

Laurence Rees London, May 2008

From the Hardcover edition.

WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES PDF

Download: WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES PDF

Spend your time also for only few minutes to read a publication World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees Reviewing a publication will never ever reduce and also lose your time to be useless. Checking out, for some folks become a requirement that is to do each day such as hanging out for eating. Now, just what about you? Do you prefer to read a book? Now, we will certainly reveal you a new publication qualified World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees that can be a new way to explore the understanding. When reviewing this publication, you could obtain something to consistently remember in every reading time, even detailed. Checking out behavior will certainly always lead people not to completely satisfied reading World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees, an e-book, ten publication, hundreds books, and also more. One that will certainly make them feel satisfied is completing reviewing this e-book World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees and also obtaining the notification of guides, then locating the various other next book to read. It proceeds a growing number of. The time to finish reading a publication World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees will certainly be constantly different relying on spar time to spend; one example is this World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees Now, just how do you recognize where to buy this publication World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees Never ever mind, now you could not go to the e-book establishment under the brilliant sun or night to browse the publication World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees We below consistently assist you to discover hundreds type of book. Among them is this book entitled World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees You might visit the link web page offered in this set then go with downloading and install. It will not take even more times. Just link to your net accessibility as well as you could access guide World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees on the internet. Naturally, after downloading and install World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees, you could not print it.

WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES PDF

In this revelatory chronicle of World War II, Laurence Rees documents the dramatic and secret deals that helped make the war possible and prompted some of the most crucial decisions made during the conflict. Drawing on material available only since the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as amazing new testimony from nearly a hundred separate witnesses from the period—Rees reexamines the key choices made by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the war, and presents, in a compelling and fresh way, the reasons why the people of Poland, the Baltic states, and other European countries simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for another. Surprising, incisive, and endlessly intriguing, World War II Behind Closed Doors will change the way we think about the Second World War. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Sales Rank: #1187968 in Books Published on: 2010-05-04 Released on: 2010-05-04 Original language: English Number of items: 1 Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.10" l, .94 pounds Binding: Paperback 464 pages

Review “Rees is vastly well informed about the second world war. His judgments can seldom be faulted. . . . There are many surprises here, and much good detail. . . . The relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill makes an ugly story, and Rees tells it extraordinarily well.” —Sir Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (London) “A powerful and moving reminder that behind the generalizations of historians lie the fates of real human beings. . . . Amply worth reading.” —David Stafford, History Today “A thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction to many of the shadier deals of the Second World War. . . . The real virtue of this book lies in its ability to blend the experience of ordinary people into the narrative of public events. . . . Memorable in the extreme.” —Richard Overy, Literary Review “The important question which the book raises—and leaves open—is whether even the most just war can ever be fought with clean hands. . . . Rees’s finest book to date.” —Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

“Readers of this book . . . are in for a shock. . . . [Rees] illuminates many shady corners of Britain’s and America’s dealings with Stalin and each other. The famous trust between Churchill and Roosevelt is shown to be far from perfect.” —Peter Lewis, Daily Mail "Rees commendably keeps his reader-viewers in touch with a history inexorably receding from living memory.” —Booklist About the Author Laurence Rees is the writer and producer of the BBC/PBS television series World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. His previous work includes the acclaimed television series and books The Nazis: A Warning from History, War of the Century, Horror in the East, and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the "Final Solution," for which he received the British Book Award for History Book of the Year. His other awards include a George Foster Peabody award and an Emmy. He lives in England. Visit the author's website at www.laurencerees.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION When do you think the Second World War ended? In August 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese? Well, it depends how you look at it. If you believe that the end of the war was supposed to have brought ‘freedom’ to the countries that had suffered under Nazi occupation, then for millions of people the war did not really end until the fall of Communism less than twenty years ago. In the summer of 1945 the people of Poland, of the Baltic states and a number of other countries in eastern Europe simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for that of another. It was in order to demonstrate this unpleasant reality that the presidents of both Estonia and Lithuania refused to visit Moscow in 2005 to participate in ‘celebrations’ marking the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘end of the war’ in Europe. How did this injustice happen? That is one of the crucial questions this book attempts to answer. And it is a history that it has only been possible to tell since the fall of Communism. Not just because the hundred or so eye witnesses I met in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe would never have been able to speak frankly under Communist rule, but also because key archival material that successive Soviet governments did all they could to hide has been made available only recently. The existence of these documents has allowed a true ‘behind-the-scenes’ history of the West’s dealings with Stalin to be attempted. All of which means, I hope, that this book contains much that is new. I have been lucky that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc has permitted this work. It was certainly something I could never have predicted would happen when I was taught the history of the Second World War at school back in the early 1970s. Then my history teacher got round the moral and political complexities of the Soviet Union’s1 participation in the war by the simple expedient of largely ignoring it. At the time, in the depths of the Cold War, that was how most people dealt with the awkward legacy of the West’s relationship with Stalin. The focus was on the heroism of the Western Allies – on Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day. None of which, of course, must be

forgotten. But it is not the whole story. Before the fall of Communism the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War was, to a large extent, denied a proper place in our culture because it was easier than facing up to a variety of unpalatable truths. Did we, for example, really contribute to the terrible fate that in 1945 befell Poland, the very country we went to war to protect? Especially when we were taught that this was a war about confronting tyranny? And if, as we should, we do start asking ourselves these difficult questions, then we also have to pose some of the most uncomfortable of all. Was anyone in the West to blame in any way for what happened at the end of the war? What about the great heroes of British and American history, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt? Paradoxically, the best way to attempt an answer to all this is by focusing on someone else entirely – Joseph Stalin. Whilst this is a book that is fundamentally about relationships, it is Stalin who dominates the work. And a real insight into the Soviet leader’s attitude to the war is gained by examining his behaviour immediately before his alliance with the West. This period, of the Nazi–Soviet pact between 1939 and 1941, has been largely ignored in the popular consciousness. It was certainly ignored in the post-war Soviet Union. I remember asking one Russian after the fall of the Berlin Wall: ‘How was the Nazi–Soviet pact taught when you were in school during the Soviet era? Wasn’t it a tricky piece of history to explain away?’ He smiled in response. ‘Oh, no’, he said, ‘not tricky at all. You see, I didn’t learn there had ever been a Nazi– Soviet pact until after 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union’. Stalin’s relationship with the Nazis is a vital insight into the kind of person he was; because, at least in the early days of the relationship, he got on perfectly well with them. The Soviet Communists and the German Nazis had a lot in common – not ideologically, of course, but in practical terms. Each of them respected the importance of raw power. And each of them despised the values that a man like Franklin Roosevelt held most dear, such as freedom of speech and the rule of law. As a consequence, we see Stalin at his most relaxed in one of the first encounters in the book, carving up Europe with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. The Soviet leader was never to attain such a moment of mutual interest and understanding at any point in his relationship with Churchill and Roosevelt. It is also important to understand the way in which the Soviets ran their occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941. That is because many of the injustices that were to occur in parts of occupied eastern Europe at the end of the war were broadly similar to those the Soviets had previously committed in eastern Poland – the torture, the arbitrary arrests, the deportations, the sham elections and the murders. What the earlier Soviet occupation of eastern Poland demonstrates is that the fundamental nature of Stalinism was obvious from the start. So it isn’t that Churchill and Roosevelt were unaware in the beginning of the kind of regime they were dealing with. Neither of them was initially enthusiastic about the forced alliance with Stalin following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Churchill considered it akin to a pact with ‘the Devil’, and Roosevelt, even though the United States was still officially neutral in the summer of 1941, was careful in his first statement after the Nazi invasion to condemn the Soviets for their previous abuses. How the British and Americans moved from that moment of justified scepticism about Stalin to the point immediately after the Yalta Conference in February 1945 when they stated, with apparent sincerity, that Stalin ‘meant well to the world’ and was ‘reasonable and sensible’, is the meat of this

book. And the answer to why Churchill and Roosevelt publicly altered their position about Stalin and the Soviet Union doesn’t lie just in understanding the massive geo-political issues that were at stake in the war – and crucially the effect on the West of the successful Soviet fight-back against the Nazis – but also takes us into the realm of personal emotions. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had gigantic egos and both of them liked to dominate the room. And both of them liked the sound of their own voices. Stalin wasn’t like that at all. He was a watcher – an aggressive listener. It was no accident that it took two highly intelligent functionaries on the British side – Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, and Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff – to spot Stalin’s gifts most accurately. They saw him not as a politician playing to the crowd and awash with his own rhetoric, but more like a bureaucrat – a practical man who got things done. As Cadogan confided in his diary at Yalta: ‘I must say I think Uncle Joe [Stalin] much the most impressive of the three men. He is very quiet and restrained…. The President flapped about and the PM boomed, but Joe just sat taking it all in and being rather amused. When he did chip in, he never used a superfluous word and spoke very much to the point’. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke ‘formed a very high idea of his [Stalin’s] ability, force of character and shrewdness’.3In particular, Alanbrooke was impressed that Stalin ‘displayed an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. No one would ever accuse Churchill or Roosevelt – those biggest of ‘big picture’ men – of having ‘an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. And it was Alanbrooke who spotted early on what was to be the crux of the final problem between Stalin and Churchill: ‘Stalin is a realist if ever there was one’, he wrote in his diary, ‘facts only count with him…[Churchill] appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there’. As one historian has put it, the Western leaders at the end of the war ‘were not dealing with a normal, everyday, run-of-themill, statesmanlike head of government. They confronted instead a psychologically disturbed but fully functional and highly intelligent dictator who had projected his own personality not only onto those around him but onto an entire nation and had thereby with catastrophic results, remade it in his image’. One of the problems was that Stalin in person was very different from the image of Stalin the tyrant. Anthony Eden, one of the first Western politicians to spend time with Stalin in Moscow during the war, remarked on his return that he had tried hard to imagine the Soviet leader ‘dripping with the blood of his opponents and rivals, but somehow the picture wouldn’t fit’. But Roosevelt and Churchill were sophisticated politicians and it is wrong to suppose that they were simply duped by Stalin. No, something altogether more interesting – and more complicated – takes place in this history. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to win the war at the least possible cost to their own respective countries – in both human and financial terms. Keeping Stalin ‘on side’, particularly during the years before D-Day when the Soviets believed they were fighting the war almost on their own, was a difficult business and required, as Roosevelt would have put it, ‘careful handling’. As a result, behind closed doors the Western leaders felt it necessary to make hard political compromises. One of them was to promote propaganda that painted a rosy picture of the Soviet leader; another was deliberately to suppress material that told the truth about both Stalin and the nature of the Soviet regime. In the process the Western leaders might easily, for the sake of convenience, have felt they had to ‘distort the normal and healthy operation’ of their ‘intellectual and moral judgements’ as one senior British diplomat was memorably to put it during the war.8

However, this isn’t just a ‘top-down’ history, examining the mentality and beliefs of the elite. I felt from the first that it was also important to show in human terms the impact of the decisions taken by Stalin and the Western Allies behind closed doors. And so in the course of writing this book I travelled across the former Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and asked people who had lived through this testing time to tell their stories. Uncovering this history was a strange and sometimes emotional experience. And – at least to me – it all seemed surprisingly fresh and relevant. I felt this most strongly standing in the leafy square by the opera house in Lviv. This elegant city had started the twentieth century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, become part of Poland after the First World War, then part of the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941, then part of the Nazi Empire until 1944, then part of the Soviet Union again, until finally in 1991 it became part of an independent Ukraine. At various times in the last hundred years the city has been called Lemberg, Lvov, Lwów and Lviv. There was not one group of citizens I met there who had not at one time or another suffered because of who they were. Catholic or Jew, Ukrainian, Russian or Pole, they had all faced persecution in the end. It was the Nazis, of course, who operated the most infamous and murderous policy of persecution against the Jews of the city, but we are apt to forget that such was the change and turmoil in this part of central Europe that ultimately few non-Jews escaped suffering of one kind or another either. I was fortunate to have a chance to meet these witnesses to history – all the more so since in the near future there will be no one left alive who personally experienced the war. And after having spent so much time with these veterans from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc I am left with an overwhelming sense of the importance of recovering their history as part of our own. Our nations were all in the war together. And we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to face up to the consequences of that truth.

Laurence Rees London, May 2008

From the Hardcover edition. Most helpful customer reviews 29 of 32 people found the following review helpful. Acceptance of 'evil' through necessity By Mannie Liscum World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West by Laurence Reis is a decent attempt to better illuminate the complex relationships and political-social results of the strange alliance between the Western democracies and the communist Soviet Union in WWII. It is easy for most 21st Century readers (especially Western) to now see how `strange' indeed this alliance was, how it could have resulted so easily in fracture, and how less than desirable outcomes resulted from it. However, at the time this alliance was needed to defeat Hitler's legions these piece of hindsight weren't even clear foresight, and even in cases when the foresight proved apt the common Nazi foe was deemed sufficiently menacing to justify the predicted social and political fallout. What Reis attempts to do in World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West is to highlight the interaction, how they arose and were maintained, and what resulted from them. He also attempts make sense of the sacrifices the Western allies made in dealing with the Soviet `devil' that was Stalin and his regime.

Separated into eight basic elements (an Introduction, six main chapters and a Postscript), World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West is by-and-large a well organized read that is likely to provide a decent primmer to the Western-Soviet alliance to those less versed in this crucial aspect of the Second World War. Yet, at times Reis loses focus in ways that obscure his points. This is too bad since in general Reis does a decent job presenting this complex story. It is also worth noting that Reis seems not entirely without Nationalistic pride and thus his `reading' of the major players in this drama is not absent of some level of subjective interpretation: First, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) is largely presented as a self-serving, oft petty, manipulator who is without much long term strategic sense (Reis does however give FDR credit for the establishment of the UN), more interested in his own political livelihood than the fact of European nations and European civilians. While some of Reis' criticisms of FDR are not without considerable merit, his overall handling of the President is somewhat callus and probably much too harsh and one-dimensional. In contrast, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is largely given a by for his mishandlings of issues. Reis is much more complementary of Churchill than FDR, and while he stops short (fairly this reviewer might positively add) of giving Churchill the great foresight that has oft been lavished upon him by other `historians' for his post-war denunciation of the Soviet state and the "Iron Curtain" that was largely a result of hindsight NOT foresight, Churchill is given much more latitude in terms of responsibility than FDR for the fallout of Western-Soviet `agreements' during and after the war. While it is clear that Churchill was much less able to wield power over the alliance later in the war when American and Soviet numbers (men and material) so outdid those of the British Empire, Churchill was not a statesman without political prowess and ability. It is hard to accept that Churchill was as `powerless' as Reis often makes him out to be, while assigning the vast number of poor political moves on part of the Western powers to FDR. This is not to say that Reis has attempted (conscienciously or not) to re-write history per se, but rather that his presentation puts a decidedly `British' spin on history. Again this is not done in the common - `...but Churchill recognized from the get-go the future of Europe when the Western allies made their pact with Stalin...' - but rather more subtly by painting Churchill largely as a brilliant leader rendered ineffectual due to circumstance who's ideas and ideals were overshadowed by the bumbling statesmanship of the self-important FDR. Where Reis seems to make his best cases are in his handlings of Stalin. Reis does not simply paint Stalin as an evil Red murderer (though he was this too) as has so often happened since the rise of the `Iron Curtain'; nor does Reis give a more apologetic appraisal of the Soviet regime and its leader that has become so popular since the fall of Soviet communism and warming relations between West and East. Rather, Reis, seems to provide a balanced, if frequently contradictory, assessment of Stalin and his leadership before, during and immediately after the war. It is the `duality' of Stalin's political and apparently personal nature that in fact makes him an interesting, if despicable, figure. He was in many ways a political genius and master strategist, while at the same time a hopeless military tactician and utterly ruthless and paranoid psychopath that distributed death as if it were candy to children. Reis does an admirable job capturing this duality of nature and how it played into the relationship between West and East, and in many ways lured the West into some complacency, that together with necessity, resulted in the post-war subjugation of eastern Europe. In this context it is worth noting that Reis handles the `necessity' of the alliance of clashing political ideologies quite well and provides considerable evidence (if largely anecdotal) that this necessity in large part resulted in the apparent `blindness' of the Western leaders to the now obvious evils of the Soviet regime. From an academic standpoint World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West is

a bit of a disappointment. The dominant portion of Reis' research appears, based on his Notes provided (pp. 415-428), to have come from previously published works and various documentaries. Little by way of new information and original research of primary documents is apparent. This is as surprising as it is disappointing given the wealth of information that has become available to Western researchers/historians over the past decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others, such as David Glanz, have utilized extensively these resources to provide new and enlightening insights into WWII when related to Soviet actions. Why Reis chose not to, or wasn't able to, utilize these treasure troves of information is unclear. What is clear is that World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West could have achieved much more, especially in terms of historical credibility, from further research. Without such research much of what Reis presents, however seemingly insightful and potentially correct, is largely conjecture. In the final analysis World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West is a fun and straightforward read that will provide a decent primmer for the uninitiated, but will leave more seasoned students of history wanting more bang for their buck. 4 stars for readability, 3 stars for content, 2 stars for originality of research - 3 stars overall. 11 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Incisive look at the individual machinations of the Grand Alliance By Dave Schranck Mr Rees has written a critical book of the events and relations of the three leaders that made up the Grand Alliance This narrative is highly focused on the machinations of the three leaders in order to propagate their agenda at the expense of the other two. Once you read this you'll definitely come away thinking that this alliance was one of perceived necessity and not convenience or friendship. Mr Churchill knew Britain couldn't defeat Germany alone as well as keep the empire together so he courted the two major powers to come to his aid. President Roosevelt, the ultimate politician would try to supply Russia in order to keep her going and in so doing reduce the number of American casualties in order to win in 1944. For both of these leaders they would forgo their moral values and the Atlantic Charter agreement of August 1941 to appease Stalin. Stalin who outplayed the others in this world class poker game needed huge quantities of supplies and even more urgently a second front. While never forgetting the differences in heritage as well as ideology between Stalin and the other two, the Soviet dictator was able to manipulate them to overlook his brutal deeds, break their moral codes and fulfill most of his wishes. (Hitler and Nazism are not part of this book and the cover is a puzzle.) Mr Rees has done his homework including using recently available material from Russia to write a fairly comprehensive history of these leaders. The book starts soon after Churchill becomes Prime Minister who has to decide whether to follow Halifax's advice to sue for peace with Hitler or to carry on the cause of defiance and try to hold on until America came into the war. The story will revolve around all the key political and some of the military events and include the Teheran and Yalta Conferences, the Katyn affair, the decision on how to carve up Europe after the war, keeping Poland independent, allowing Stalin to keep his spoils and getting Stalin's agreement to attack the Japanese in Manchuria in 1945. Early in the book background information of each leader is given in order to allow the reader to understand the motivations of each person. All the key events are then discussed as well as how each of the leaders reacted in solving those issues while trying to influence and outmaneuver the other two in the triumvirate. The author is compelled to levy moral condemnation and criticism to each person where deserved but the problem is that condemnation is unevenly applied. While

criticizing both Churchill and FDR on many of their actions, the criticism is modest for Churchill and severe on Roosevelt. Since the author is British the favoritism is understandable but still disappointing, detracting from the book. While the deceptive issues of Roosevelt are valid the extent of that criticism borders on President bashing and was a turnoff. It was compounded by the mild criticism of Churchill along with creating the image of the fearless Prime Minister the poor victim of that deception and betrayal as Roosevelt chooses to align himself with Stalin and not Churchill. The author did however do an excellent job in showing Churchill's spiral into irrelevancy as Roosevelt's and Stalin's star rises. It has been suggested in a previous review that some of the author's comments are conjecture for lack of research from the latest documentation coming out of Russia. I believe that position may be in error for several reasons. By studying the Endnotes, many of the author's sources come from the principals and their intimates. Brooks, Eden, Halifax for Churchill. Davies, Hopkins, Harriman, Elliot Roosevelt for the American President. There is usually confirming evidence from several sources and that primary information is difficult to ignore. More to the point, the author also uses documentation and support from BBC research which should be reliable and up to date. (The latest documentary of the war was 2008) Also, comparing the events of this book on the Grand Alliance with the coverage of other recent reputable books makes me confident of its creditability. The author's criticism of the principals may be open to argument but it seemed from my perspective relevant though sometimes harsh. The author describes in good detail the background history of each leader then moves on to explain the objectives and modus operandi of each leader in trying to achieve their own objectives and usually at the expense of the other two. It was quite a deceptive, manipulative history for all three participants and by the end of the war the Grand Alliance was faltering badly. Roosevelt had basically abandoned Churchill to throw his support to Stalin. While the favoritism displayed for Churchill at the expense of FDR was a negative, overall the book was creditable, providing noteworthy events and issues during the war of the three leaders as well as their motivations and failings in responding to those events. In "Postscript" the author sums up the performance of each leader and the world status at war's end. Both western leaders are to blame for post war results. Churchill knew Stalin better than FDR and what he was capable of and yet Churchill resisted with all his might the early invasion of France. Comparing the scale that would be Overlord even in late 1943 with the catastrophe of Dieppe or Dunkirk is irrational. With the recent major German defeats in North Africa, Stalingrad and Kursk, it would be reasonabe to believe the western Allies could have successfully taken Normandy and moved through Germany before the Russians. The author suggests two alternative histories in preventing Stalin from taking over eastern Europe: Join forces with the Germans in 1945 but quickly discounts this route as being impractical. The other measure which Churchill favored was the invasion of southern Europe through the Balkans by eliminating Operation Dragoon. That plan would be costly and had the potential to incite a war with Russia since by 1944 the Red Army was in the neighborhood and it seems reasonable to believe that if the western Allies were making progress that would shut the Russians out of Eastern Europe Stalin would react violently to the loss of his expected spoils of war. If the Balkan assault occurred in 1943 when the Red Army was near the Donets River and too far to interfere then this plan may have worked. However, FDR would have never sanctioned it for several reasons despite the positives it presented. Mr Rees has written a number of noteworthy books on WWII and has won awards for his

documentaries on the war. He has been associated with the BBC for years and has the benefit of their expertise and resources in gathering information and its unfair to suggest that his book is laced with conjecture and should be discounted. While his opinions may be arguable, the actual events described are solid and conform with other recent reputable books published. The author goes into good detail on - Katyn Affair, post war Poland and Yalta Conference etc- certain key topics that would suggest that recently unlocked information is being used and that the author is not using just old material. This book was fairly comprehensive on the personal dealings of the big three and is worth reading. I liked it a lot but gave it four stars for the uneven criticism levied on Churchill and FDR; the author was too easy on Churchill on deeds committed or neglected. 10 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Excellent in every respect By Henry Cohen I loved this book, which is a page-turner from which I learned much. It is about the horrors that Stalin perpetrated during the war, such as the Katyn massacre and the relocation of the Crimean Tatars, and Churchill and Roosevelt's willingness to not notice them. Rees portrays Churchill and Roosevelt, after their meetings with Stalin, as being genuinely impressed with Stalin as a person, and as not even thinking about the fact that they have just been conversing with history's greatest mass murderer. (After all, after Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin became THEIR mass murderer.) Stalin comes across as cleverer than Churchill or Roosevelt in his ability to dupe them. Rees' overall point is to condemn Churchill and Roosevelt for allowing Stalin to take over Eastern Europe after the war. By the way, the word "Nazis" in the subtitle is misleading, because the book has little about them. See all 19 customer reviews...

WORLD WAR II BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: STALIN, THE NAZIS AND THE WEST BY LAURENCE REES PDF

You can conserve the soft file of this publication World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees It will certainly rely on your leisure and also tasks to open up and review this e-book World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees soft documents. So, you could not be afraid to bring this e-book World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees anywhere you go. Simply include this sot data to your kitchen appliance or computer system disk to let you read every time and also anywhere you have time. Review “Rees is vastly well informed about the second world war. His judgments can seldom be faulted. . . . There are many surprises here, and much good detail. . . . The relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill makes an ugly story, and Rees tells it extraordinarily well.” —Sir Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (London) “A powerful and moving reminder that behind the generalizations of historians lie the fates of real human beings. . . . Amply worth reading.” —David Stafford, History Today “A thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction to many of the shadier deals of the Second World War. . . . The real virtue of this book lies in its ability to blend the experience of ordinary people into the narrative of public events. . . . Memorable in the extreme.” —Richard Overy, Literary Review “The important question which the book raises—and leaves open—is whether even the most just war can ever be fought with clean hands. . . . Rees’s finest book to date.” —Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris “Readers of this book . . . are in for a shock. . . . [Rees] illuminates many shady corners of Britain’s and America’s dealings with Stalin and each other. The famous trust between Churchill and Roosevelt is shown to be far from perfect.” —Peter Lewis, Daily Mail "Rees commendably keeps his reader-viewers in touch with a history inexorably receding from living memory.” —Booklist About the Author Laurence Rees is the writer and producer of the BBC/PBS television series World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. His previous work includes the acclaimed television series and books The Nazis: A Warning from History, War of the Century, Horror in the East, and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the "Final Solution," for which he received the British Book Award for History Book of the Year. His other awards include a George Foster Peabody award and an

Emmy. He lives in England. Visit the author's website at www.laurencerees.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION When do you think the Second World War ended? In August 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese? Well, it depends how you look at it. If you believe that the end of the war was supposed to have brought ‘freedom’ to the countries that had suffered under Nazi occupation, then for millions of people the war did not really end until the fall of Communism less than twenty years ago. In the summer of 1945 the people of Poland, of the Baltic states and a number of other countries in eastern Europe simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for that of another. It was in order to demonstrate this unpleasant reality that the presidents of both Estonia and Lithuania refused to visit Moscow in 2005 to participate in ‘celebrations’ marking the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘end of the war’ in Europe. How did this injustice happen? That is one of the crucial questions this book attempts to answer. And it is a history that it has only been possible to tell since the fall of Communism. Not just because the hundred or so eye witnesses I met in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe would never have been able to speak frankly under Communist rule, but also because key archival material that successive Soviet governments did all they could to hide has been made available only recently. The existence of these documents has allowed a true ‘behind-the-scenes’ history of the West’s dealings with Stalin to be attempted. All of which means, I hope, that this book contains much that is new. I have been lucky that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc has permitted this work. It was certainly something I could never have predicted would happen when I was taught the history of the Second World War at school back in the early 1970s. Then my history teacher got round the moral and political complexities of the Soviet Union’s1 participation in the war by the simple expedient of largely ignoring it. At the time, in the depths of the Cold War, that was how most people dealt with the awkward legacy of the West’s relationship with Stalin. The focus was on the heroism of the Western Allies – on Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day. None of which, of course, must be forgotten. But it is not the whole story. Before the fall of Communism the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War was, to a large extent, denied a proper place in our culture because it was easier than facing up to a variety of unpalatable truths. Did we, for example, really contribute to the terrible fate that in 1945 befell Poland, the very country we went to war to protect? Especially when we were taught that this was a war about confronting tyranny? And if, as we should, we do start asking ourselves these difficult questions, then we also have to pose some of the most uncomfortable of all. Was anyone in the West to blame in any way for what happened at the end of the war? What about the great heroes of British and American history, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt? Paradoxically, the best way to attempt an answer to all this is by focusing on someone else entirely – Joseph Stalin. Whilst this is a book that is fundamentally about relationships, it is Stalin who dominates the work. And a real insight into the Soviet leader’s attitude to the war is gained by

examining his behaviour immediately before his alliance with the West. This period, of the Nazi–Soviet pact between 1939 and 1941, has been largely ignored in the popular consciousness. It was certainly ignored in the post-war Soviet Union. I remember asking one Russian after the fall of the Berlin Wall: ‘How was the Nazi–Soviet pact taught when you were in school during the Soviet era? Wasn’t it a tricky piece of history to explain away?’ He smiled in response. ‘Oh, no’, he said, ‘not tricky at all. You see, I didn’t learn there had ever been a Nazi– Soviet pact until after 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union’. Stalin’s relationship with the Nazis is a vital insight into the kind of person he was; because, at least in the early days of the relationship, he got on perfectly well with them. The Soviet Communists and the German Nazis had a lot in common – not ideologically, of course, but in practical terms. Each of them respected the importance of raw power. And each of them despised the values that a man like Franklin Roosevelt held most dear, such as freedom of speech and the rule of law. As a consequence, we see Stalin at his most relaxed in one of the first encounters in the book, carving up Europe with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. The Soviet leader was never to attain such a moment of mutual interest and understanding at any point in his relationship with Churchill and Roosevelt. It is also important to understand the way in which the Soviets ran their occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941. That is because many of the injustices that were to occur in parts of occupied eastern Europe at the end of the war were broadly similar to those the Soviets had previously committed in eastern Poland – the torture, the arbitrary arrests, the deportations, the sham elections and the murders. What the earlier Soviet occupation of eastern Poland demonstrates is that the fundamental nature of Stalinism was obvious from the start. So it isn’t that Churchill and Roosevelt were unaware in the beginning of the kind of regime they were dealing with. Neither of them was initially enthusiastic about the forced alliance with Stalin following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Churchill considered it akin to a pact with ‘the Devil’, and Roosevelt, even though the United States was still officially neutral in the summer of 1941, was careful in his first statement after the Nazi invasion to condemn the Soviets for their previous abuses. How the British and Americans moved from that moment of justified scepticism about Stalin to the point immediately after the Yalta Conference in February 1945 when they stated, with apparent sincerity, that Stalin ‘meant well to the world’ and was ‘reasonable and sensible’, is the meat of this book. And the answer to why Churchill and Roosevelt publicly altered their position about Stalin and the Soviet Union doesn’t lie just in understanding the massive geo-political issues that were at stake in the war – and crucially the effect on the West of the successful Soviet fight-back against the Nazis – but also takes us into the realm of personal emotions. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had gigantic egos and both of them liked to dominate the room. And both of them liked the sound of their own voices. Stalin wasn’t like that at all. He was a watcher – an aggressive listener. It was no accident that it took two highly intelligent functionaries on the British side – Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, and Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff – to spot Stalin’s gifts most accurately. They saw him not as a politician playing to the crowd and awash with his own rhetoric, but more like a bureaucrat – a practical man who got things done. As Cadogan confided in his diary at Yalta: ‘I must say I think Uncle Joe [Stalin] much the most impressive of the three men. He is very quiet and restrained…. The President flapped about and the PM boomed, but Joe just sat taking it all in and being rather

amused. When he did chip in, he never used a superfluous word and spoke very much to the point’. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke ‘formed a very high idea of his [Stalin’s] ability, force of character and shrewdness’.3In particular, Alanbrooke was impressed that Stalin ‘displayed an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. No one would ever accuse Churchill or Roosevelt – those biggest of ‘big picture’ men – of having ‘an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. And it was Alanbrooke who spotted early on what was to be the crux of the final problem between Stalin and Churchill: ‘Stalin is a realist if ever there was one’, he wrote in his diary, ‘facts only count with him…[Churchill] appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there’. As one historian has put it, the Western leaders at the end of the war ‘were not dealing with a normal, everyday, run-of-themill, statesmanlike head of government. They confronted instead a psychologically disturbed but fully functional and highly intelligent dictator who had projected his own personality not only onto those around him but onto an entire nation and had thereby with catastrophic results, remade it in his image’. One of the problems was that Stalin in person was very different from the image of Stalin the tyrant. Anthony Eden, one of the first Western politicians to spend time with Stalin in Moscow during the war, remarked on his return that he had tried hard to imagine the Soviet leader ‘dripping with the blood of his opponents and rivals, but somehow the picture wouldn’t fit’. But Roosevelt and Churchill were sophisticated politicians and it is wrong to suppose that they were simply duped by Stalin. No, something altogether more interesting – and more complicated – takes place in this history. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to win the war at the least possible cost to their own respective countries – in both human and financial terms. Keeping Stalin ‘on side’, particularly during the years before D-Day when the Soviets believed they were fighting the war almost on their own, was a difficult business and required, as Roosevelt would have put it, ‘careful handling’. As a result, behind closed doors the Western leaders felt it necessary to make hard political compromises. One of them was to promote propaganda that painted a rosy picture of the Soviet leader; another was deliberately to suppress material that told the truth about both Stalin and the nature of the Soviet regime. In the process the Western leaders might easily, for the sake of convenience, have felt they had to ‘distort the normal and healthy operation’ of their ‘intellectual and moral judgements’ as one senior British diplomat was memorably to put it during the war.8 However, this isn’t just a ‘top-down’ history, examining the mentality and beliefs of the elite. I felt from the first that it was also important to show in human terms the impact of the decisions taken by Stalin and the Western Allies behind closed doors. And so in the course of writing this book I travelled across the former Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and asked people who had lived through this testing time to tell their stories. Uncovering this history was a strange and sometimes emotional experience. And – at least to me – it all seemed surprisingly fresh and relevant. I felt this most strongly standing in the leafy square by the opera house in Lviv. This elegant city had started the twentieth century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, become part of Poland after the First World War, then part of the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941, then part of the Nazi Empire until 1944, then part of the Soviet Union again, until finally in 1991 it became part of an independent Ukraine. At various times in the last hundred years the city has been called Lemberg, Lvov, Lwów and Lviv. There was not one group of citizens I met

there who had not at one time or another suffered because of who they were. Catholic or Jew, Ukrainian, Russian or Pole, they had all faced persecution in the end. It was the Nazis, of course, who operated the most infamous and murderous policy of persecution against the Jews of the city, but we are apt to forget that such was the change and turmoil in this part of central Europe that ultimately few non-Jews escaped suffering of one kind or another either. I was fortunate to have a chance to meet these witnesses to history – all the more so since in the near future there will be no one left alive who personally experienced the war. And after having spent so much time with these veterans from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc I am left with an overwhelming sense of the importance of recovering their history as part of our own. Our nations were all in the war together. And we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to face up to the consequences of that truth.

Laurence Rees London, May 2008

From the Hardcover edition.

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees. The industrialized innovation, nowadays sustain every little thing the human requirements. It consists of the daily activities, tasks, office, entertainment, as well as much more. One of them is the terrific website connection and computer system. This problem will certainly alleviate you to assist among your leisure activities, reviewing practice. So, do you have eager to review this e-book World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis And The West By Laurence Rees now?