Moral combat

Pre-eminent WWII historian Michael Burleigh delivers a brilliant new examination of the day-to-day moral crises underpinning the momentous conflicts of the Second World War. A magisterial counterpart to his award-winning and internationally bestselling The Third Reich, winner of the Samuel Johnson prize, Moral Combat offers a unique and riveting look at, in the words of The Times (London), "not just the war planners faced with the prospect of bombing Dresden or the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also the individuals working at the coalface of war, killing or murdering, resisting or collaborating."

"Magnificent. . . . Seldom has a study of the past combined such erudition with such exuberance." — The Guardian. "No-one with an interest in the Second World War should be without this book; and indeed nor should anyone who cares about how our world has come about." —The Daily Telegraph

ISBN-13 : 9780060580971
Author : Michael Burleigh
Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date : 03/22/2011

Editorial Reviews - Publishers Weekly

A moral history of WWII would be brief, said one wit, but respected British historian Burleigh (Blood Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism) delivers a long, riveting account of awful events and the perverted reasoning behind them. Communist, Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese systems claimed to be regimes of public virtue carrying out inexorable historical processes. Proclaiming that the only evil was obstructing this march to utopia, all discarded the rule of law and alternative moral authority (religion, ethics).

The Holocaust and other familiar WWII atrocities top off an exhaustive litany of mass murder, brutality, and squalid cruelty perpetrated by governments, military leaders, local officials, and ordinary individuals who, acting without moral values, became monsters. Burleigh does not ignore Hiroshima and Allied mass bombing campaigns, but deplores the current fashion for balancing the moral books. All nations acted shamefully, he concludes, but denies that Eleanor Roosevelt's youthful anti-Semitism made America complicit with Hitler, as one recent revisionist implied. 16 pages of color photos. (Apr.)

Meet the Author

Michael Burleigh is the author of Earthly Powers, Sacred Causes, and The Third Reich: A New History, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. He is married and lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

It seems like a throwback to a bygone epoch to talk about good and evil in history….Michael Burleigh succeeds in avoiding easy, snap judgments. Instead, he has written an insightful, often moving account of the war's players, great and small, and the principles that guided them. Burleigh succeeds in finding new insights into almost every major event of the war, on both sides, as often by sharp counter-questioning as by logistical and political analysis. Burleigh examines many of the most ethically complicated parts of the conflict to unravel the values and visions they embody. The result is extremely satisfying.