World War II

With our World War II collection, you can explore the vast history of the Second World War across the European continent, from Germany and the Soviet Union to beyond. Curzio Malaparte’s novel Kaputt is a disturbing insider look at Axis Europe—including dinner parties with Nazi leaders—by a man with his own ties to Italian fascism. In Inhuman Land, the Polish painter, writer, and reserve officer Józef Czapski investigates the massacre of thousands of his fellow Polish officers by the Soviet secret police.

First published in 1942, Anna Seghers’s tense and powerful thriller The Seventh Cross follows seven concentration camp escapees in their desperate journeys toward the border. All for Nothing, by the postwar German writer Walter Kempowski, is a searing epic of wartime Germany centered around an aristocratic East Prussian family, whose home becomes an unlikely refuge during the last days of the Reich.

Inspired by his service in the London Auxiliary Fire Service, Henry Green’s novel Caught is both a “harrowing war story of London during the Blitz and a sharply observed comedy about social class” (The New York Times Book Review). Vasily Grossman, a witness to the front lines, vividly describes the Battle of Stalingrad and life as it was lived then in his monumental epic Life and Fate. The book, which was long suppressed by the Soviet government, has been hailed as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.