Overview

World War II reached into the homes and lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Civilian men, women, and children made up the vast majority of those killed by the war, and the conflict displaced millions more. On Europe's home fronts, the war brought the German blitzkrieg, followed by long occupations and the racial genocide of the Holocaust. In An Iron Wind , historian Peter Fritzsche draws on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe struggled to understand this terrifying chaos. As the Third Reich targeted Europe's Jews for deportation and death, confusion and mistrust reigned. What were Hitler's aims? Did Germany's rapid early victories mark the start of an enduring new era? Was collaboration or resistance the wisest response to occupation? How far should solidarity and empathy extend? And where was God? People tried desperately to answer such questions and make sense of the horrors around them, but the stories they told themselves often justified a selfish indifference to their neighbours' fates.Piecing together the broken words of World War II's witnesses and victims,probing what they saw and what they failed to see,Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in modern history.

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Saul Friedlander, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA and author of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews Peter Fritzsche's An Iron Wind is a long overdue historical tapestry of the voices of prejudice, hatred, despair or illusion that express the mostly yet undocumented mindsets at all levels of society (or beyond its fringes) in Europe under Hitler. This searing book is a must. Ronald C. Rosbottom, author of When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation Moving deftly, and with a trenchant narrative force, Peter Fritzsche details the varieties of German occupation of other European countries during World War II. Ranging among the equivocations of frightened, neutral states such as Switzerland, the brutal disintegration of Poland, and the state collaboration of France, Fritzsche argues that no two occupations were the same. An Iron Wind illustrates, through an astute, objective and coherent use of eyewitness accounts, how military occupation, the longer it lasts, becomes the Achilles heel of any conquest. Reading it compels that, if we are to understand Europe and its divisions today, we must know which collective memories still resonate with the continent's inhabitants. He subtly reminds us how the dark presence of 'the iron wind' continues to whisper seductively. Modris Eksteins, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Toronto and author of Rites of Spring Peter Fritzsche has attempted the impossible: to capture, in a brief and readable volume, the mood of both the agents and victims of German occupation during World War II. How does one judge and articulate, let alone quantify, anguish, dread, hatred, and horror? Fritzsche is deeply aware of the difficulties, and that modesty is one of the many merits of this remarkable book.

Author Information

Peter Fritzsche is the W. D. & Sarah E. Trowbridge Professor of History at the University of Illinois. The author of nine books, including the award-winning Life and Death in the Third Reich, he lives in Urbana, Illinois.

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