Iron Wind

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.

A profoundly significant exploration of how Europeans-both Germans and those under German occupation-struggled to make sense of the conflict by giving it some shape or meaning, or by simply accepting in the end that it made no sense... In a strikingly original chapter [Fritzsche] explores the question of where God stood in people's accounts of wartime excesses... It is difficult to do full justice to the richness and range of sources that Mr. Fritzsche has unearthed. The book is very much a history from below, providing glimpses of the reality, but it reflects the way that many ordinary people experience catastrophe then and now.