Bogdan Musial – författare

After over half a century of secrecy, a Swiss bank safe was opened, it contained the long-lost research notes of Josef Mengele, as well as those of his chief assistant in Auschwitz. They had been deposited there by the assistant who himself had been a Jewish doctor. Sent to Auschwitz, he was forced to participate in Josef Mengele’s gruesome human experiments. Following the war, he completely disappeared, assuming a new identity and shrouding himself in silence. He did write his story down, but ordered the documents to be sealed away until decades after his death. With the release date drawing closer, his granddaughter, a well-connected Vatican doctor, wanted to have the documents examined by a professional historian.Thus, a great investigation was launched to track him down and pin down his place in the medical system in Auschwitz and the horrendous medical experiments conducted there. However, after some time, doubts regarding the authenticity of the documents began to emerge. Thus, what promised to be a sensational historical breakthrough, soon turned into a criminal investigation into one of the greatest historical fraud attempts in recent decades.At the end of the second investigation, the person behind the forged documents was brought to trial and sentenced on 22 counts of fraud. This book thoroughly examines the way the fraud evolved over the span of three decades and how it succeeded in convincing so many people, while also comparing it to other historic hoaxes, particularly those concerning the Holocaust.

While the myth of Soviet benevolence has now largely been discredited, the idea that Stalin's Soviet Union was a peaceful power that sought to prevent the war through all kinds of means - including an ill-fated non-aggression treaty with Hitler - remains popular to this day. Indeed, this narrative is not only promoted by Putin`s propaganda but also by a host of Western intellectuals and even historians who take public declarations at face value.Drawing on a host of internal Soviet Politburo discussions, memoranda and speeches, this book shows that the Soviet Union was a heavily militarized state that incessantly planned to unleash a great, ideologically motivated war against the rest of the world. In fact, its entire political life revolved around the question of war, especially following the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, which convinced Soviet leaders of the imminent collapse of the capitalist system abroad. Thus, both the collectivization as well as the terror that followed in its wake were done with the coming war in mind - even though there was no tangible danger of war. Slowed down by countless devastating setbacks, Stalin was nevertheless able to amass a gigantic army by the late 1930s. When Hitler approached Stalin in 1939 asking for Soviet neutrality in his planned invasion of Poland, Stalin sensed a golden opportunity: by supporting Hitler, he could turn the European powers against each another, allowing him to intervene once they were sufficiently weakened. However, Stalin miscalculated: Hitler beat both Poland and France in less than a year and then turned against Moscow in 1941, long before Stalin was ready for his own attack.

A revelatory new history from one of Europe’s leading scholars, uncovering how Stalin’s systematic plunder of Germany after World War II fueled the Soviet Union’s rise to superpower status. When the Red Army advanced into Central Europe in 1944–45, its battlefield victory marked only the beginning of a vast Soviet project of domination and extraction. Behind the language of “reparations,” Stalin and his planners initiated one of the most sweeping programs of industrial plunder in modern history. Entire factories, whole industries, research institutes, rail networks, and cultural infrastructure were dismantled and transported eastward, along with tens of thousands of German engineers and specialists, as well as millions of German prisoners turned workers, all constituting the material and human basis for the USSR’s subsequent transformation from a ravaged wartime power into an industrial and military superstate. In Stalin’s Great Raid, distinguished Polish-German historian Bogdan Musial, drawing on never before seen declassified Soviet and Polish archives, offers the first comprehensive reconstruction of this vast transfer of wealth and technology. He situates the looting of Germany within the grim historical cycle that began with Germany’s sponsorship of Lenin’s revolution and continued through the industrial cooperation that had armed the very Soviet power which would ultimately devour its creator. A major work of archival history, Stalin’s Great Raid reframes the entangled destinies of Moscow and Berlin, transforming our understanding of how the Second World War ended, and how the Soviet Union rose from the ruins.