Robert O. Paxton – författare

Fascism was the major political invention of the twentieth century and the source of much of its pain. How can we try to comprehend its allure and its horror? Is it a philosophy, a movement, an aesthetic experience? What makes states and nations become fascist?Acclaimed historian Robert O. Paxton shows that in order to understand fascism we must look at it in action - at what it did, as much as what it said it was about. He explores its falsehoods and common threads; the social and political base that allowed it to prosper; its leaders and internal struggles; how it manifested itself differently in each country - France, Britain, the low countries, Eastern Europe, even Latin America as well as Italy and Germany; how fascists viewed the Holocaust; and, finally, whether fascism is still possible in today's world.Offering a bold new interpretation of the fascist phenomenon, this groundbreaking book will overturn our understanding of twentieth-century history.

The center of the art world before the war, Paris fired the Nazis' greed. The discovery of more than 1,500 prized paintings and drawings in a private Munich residence, as well as a recent movie about Allied attempts to recover European works of art, have brought Nazi plundering back into the headlines, but the thievery was far from being limited to works of art. From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews—mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe—were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz. Brought from Paris in 1945, the photographs were cataloged by the staff of the Munich Central Collecting Point. Beyond bearing witness to the petty acts of larceny, these images provide crucial information on how the Germans saw their work. They enable us to grasp the "Nazi gaze" and to confront the issue of the relation between greed and mass destruction.

In June 1940 the French Army that Europe had known and feared since Louis XIV vanished in the most overwhelming defeat ever suffered by the military force of a modern nation. This is the story of what really happened to that army. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In June 1940 the French Army that Europe had known and feared since Louis XIV vanished in the most overwhelming defeat ever suffered by the military force of a modern nation. This is the story of what really happened to that army. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

When Vichy France and the Jews was first published in France in 1981, the reaction was explosive. Before the appearance of this groundbreaking book, the question of the Vichy regime's cooperation with the Third Reich had been suppressed. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton were the first to access closed archives that revealed the extent of Vichy's complicity in the Nazi effort to eliminate the Jews.Since the book's original publication, additional archives have been opened, and the role of the French state in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi death factories is now openly acknowledged. This new edition integrates over thirty years of subsequent scholarship, and incorporates research on French public opinion and the diversity of responses by French civilians to the campaign of persecution they witnessed around them. This classic account remains central to the historiography of France and the Holocaust, and in its revised edition, is more important than ever for understanding the Vichy government's role in the darkest atrocity of the twentieth century.