Showing titles in Genocide & War Crimes

Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging audiobook, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the 17th and 21st centuries.

In Bearing Witness, John Carpenter explores how across the world, those who experienced the war tried to make sense of it both during and in its immediate aftermath. The digestion of a cataclysmic event can take generations. But in this fascinating audiobook, Carpenter brings together all those who did their best to communicate what they saw in the moment so that it could never be lost.

August 21, 2013: A chemical weapons attack on the suburbs of Damascus reminds the world of the existence of the Syrian war. Hundreds of journalists from every corner of the world rush to the frontier only to leave disappointed when Obama decides not to bomb. They leave behind 200,000 estimated victims, and more than half of a population of 22 million people dispersed or refugeed in nearby countries: the worst humanitarian crisis since WWII according to the UN.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

Enno Lenze war auf dem Weg nach Butscha, als dieser Ort noch nicht als Synonym für russische Kriegsverbrechen galt. Er berichtet von der Front aus der Ukraine, vom Kampf gegen den IS in der Autonomen Region Kurdistan, von der Herrschaft der Taliban in Afghanistan, von Tränengasangriffen auf Studenten in Hongkong. Waffenmessen in Paris und Dubai sind ebenso sein Thema wie der versuchte Sturm des Bundestags durch Reichsbürger.

It has been eleven years since Diane Foley’s son, the American journalist James Foley, was kidnapped in northern Syria, and nearly ten since that day in August 2014 when she would learn that he had been murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A whole decade. Time rushes past. And yet, for Diane, that moment is unending. In American Mother, legendary author Colum McCann tells Diane’s story as she recalls the months of his captivity, the efforts made to bring him home and the days following his death.

On 17 October 2019, in Hamburg's imposing criminal justice building, a trial laden with extraordinary historical weight begins to unfold. Bruno Dey stands accused of being involved in a crime committed over seven decades ago: the murder of at least 5,230 inmates at Stutthof, the Nazi concentration camp in present-day Poland. Only seventeen at the time, Dey was a member of the SS unit responsible for administering the camp. Though he concedes to his role as a guard, he adamantly denies responsibility for the killings.

Willacy’s devastating award-winning Four Corners program, Killing Fields, captured on film for the first time a war crime perpetrated by an Australian: the killing of a terrified, unarmed Afghan man in a field by an SAS soldier. It caused shockwaves around the world and resulted in an Australian Federal Police war crimes investigation. For Willacy, it was just the beginning of a much bigger story. More SAS soldiers came forward with undeniable evidence and eyewitness testimony of other unlawful killings, and exposed a culture of brutality and impunity.

Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, uncounted thousands of civilians have died in the fighting and as a result of the destruction. In The Bodies in Person, Nick McDonell introduces us to some of the civilians who died, along with the rescue workers who tried to save them, US soldiers grappling with their deaths, and everyone in between. He shows us how decent Americans, inside and outside the government and military, looked away from the mounting death toll, even as they claimed to do everything in their power to prevent civilian casualties.

For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.

In this one-hour history audiobook, discover why 1944 was the year of no return. A year of triumph for the Allies and of despair for the Axis forces, as we uncover the main events of that year during World War II, the most lethal war of all times. The Axis powers that had previously shaken the world with their fascist aggression were now thoroughly shaken themselves. By 1944 their reign of terror was almost over, but they would still fight on, clinging to the fantastic hope that they would somehow pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

In the multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious Central African state called Cameroon, the country's largest ethnic group that paid the highest price in the struggle for its reunification and independence has effectively been cast as the national enemy by the system made up of those who did not opt for reunification and independence and their French overlords who put them in power. It has been a six-decade old campaign that has robbed the Cameroonian people of their history, divided them and created stereotypes that would take generations to undo.

Chaplains of the Militia is the extraordinary story of those priests accused of complicity in genocide. Chris McGreal takes us from Rwanda in 1994, where he stood among the bodies at one of the many massacres in churches, to modern day France in pursuit of a priest notorious during the genocide for wearing a gun and selecting victims for the machete-waving militia.

In February 1945, 350 American POWs captured earlier at the Battle of the Bulge or elsewhere in Europe were singled out by the Nazis because they were Jews or were thought to resemble Jews. They were transported in cattle cars to Berga, a concentration camp in eastern Germany, and put to work as slave laborers, mining tunnels for a planned underground synthetic-fuel factory. This was the only incident of its kind during World War II.

“WER NICHT FÜR DEN FRIEDEN ARBEITET, DER ARBEITET GEGEN IHN". Der unbekannte Soldat ist eine Hommage an Bertha von Suttner, die erste Botschafterin des Pazifismus, lange bevor er eine greifbare Theorie einer Welt ohne Waffen war und lange bevor diese Welt in Trümmer fiel.

In this radical new perspective on Hitler's so-called 'Final Solution', Martin Davidson shows that the terrible fate of Europe's Jews was not one Nazi policy amongst many, but the central preoccupation of the regime, the purpose towards which so many of its resources and energies were directed—the one which they were most determined to achieve and of which they were most chillingly proud. It is the exploration of the mindset from which it sprang that is the central concern of Mobilising Hate.

More than 170,000 British prisoners of war (POWs) were taken by German and Italian forces during the Second World War. Conditions were tough. Rations were meagre. The days dragged, and there was a constant battle against boredom. The men, but not officers, had to work, often at heavy labour. Guests of the Third Reich will provide an overview of what daily life was like for prisoners, from staging theatre productions to keep morale up to working allotments and planning audacious escape attempts.

No dia 31 de dezembro de 1999, um jovem Vladimir Putin apareceu desajeitado e constrangido nas telas da TV russa... como novo presidente. Duas décadas depois, Putin continua no poder, exalando confiança e muito à vontade no cenário mundial. Como um burocrata desconhecido da KGB conseguiu se tornar uma das figuras mais dominantes da política do século 21?

The Middle East today is characterized by an astonishingly bloody civil war in Syria, a highly racialized and militarized approach to the concept of a Jewish state in Israel and the Palestinian territories, an Iraqi state paralyzed by the emergence of class- and region-inflected sectarian identifications, a Lebanon teetering on the edge of collapse from the pressures of its huge numbers of refugees and its sect-bound political system, and the rise of a wide variety of Islamist paramilitary organizations seeking to operate outside all these states.

At the Australian war crimes trials that followed World War II, one prosecution witness stood out: Warrant Officer Bill Sticpewich. During his three years in the infamous Sandakan POW camp, Sticpewich had seen hundreds of fellow prisoners die of starvation, sickness and overwork. Of more than 2400 Allied prisoners at Sandakan at the start of 1945, only six survived. It was Sticpewich's meticulous evidence that sent Sandakan's commandant and his murderous henchmen to the gallows. But to his fellow prisoners Sticpewich was not a war hero.