Andrew Nagorski is an author and journalist who served as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at Newsweek for over two decades. He is known for his books on World War II, the Cold War, and Eastern European history. He contributed reviews and essays to The Weekly Standard covering topics including Stalin, wartime espionage, and European history and politics.
In 1717, Frederick William, the king of Prussia, gave his 5-year-old son a full company of lead soldiers for Christmas. This was in keeping with the monarch’s insistence that the boy's education should be guided by the principle "that there is nothing in the world that bestows on a prince more fame…
Vladimir Putin has systematically worked to rehabilitate the image of Stalin, downplaying his record of mass murder while celebrating his role as the architect of victory in World War II. But Stalin almost lost that war before he won it. Disregarding multiple warnings from the West, and even his…
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin was both critically acclaimed and fiercely denounced. Its detractors accused the Yale historian of relativizing the Holocaust by placing it in the context of the other acts of wholesale violence in the region, particularly the terror…
In the final days of World War II, Kurt Weill wrote a letter to his wife, Lotte Lenya, who was in New York, from the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. The couple had fled Germany after Hitler had taken power, and Weill was eager for the final collapse of the Third Reich. “This is what we’ve been…
Here’s a generally accepted syllogism: The Weimar Republic saw an explosion in the arts, particularly of modern forms like expressionist painting and atonal music. When Hitler swept away the freedoms of the Weimar era and assumed dictatorial powers, he targeted “degenerate art”—the Nazis’…
Simon Sebag Montefiore is best known for his monumental biography Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003), which offered a mesmerizing, richly detailed portrait of the Soviet tyrant’s inner circle—and how he could alternately, even simultaneously, ooze charm and terror in his dealings with them.…
At the first of the Nuremberg trials, Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, delivered one of the most powerful opening statements in modern times. Speaking of the 22 top Nazi leaders brought before the International Military Tribunal (and Martin Bormann, who was tried in…
Late on a frozen, translucent night in Moscow in 1981, I took my collie out for a walk and let her off the leash on the snow-covered playground near our building in the foreigners’ compound where we lived. She was only a few months old and my half-hearted training techniques had done little to…
Otto and Elise Hampel were improbable German resisters. By all accounts, the working-class, middle-aged couple accepted Hitler’s New Order up until 1940. Then, during the invasion of France, Elise’s brother was killed—and something snapped in them. The pair began writing postcards denouncing the…
War Stories
The Summer the Archduke Died
Yeltsin
What Stalin Knew