Binding: Hardcover
Description: When Adolf Hitler seized Vienna in the Anschluss of 1938, he called the city "a pearl to which he would give a proper setting." But the setting he left behind seven years later was one of ruin and destruction - - a physical spiritual and intellectual wasteland. Here is a grippingly narrated and heartbreaking account of the debasement of one of Europe's great cities. Thomas Weyr shows how Hitler turned Vienna from a vibrant metropolis that was the cradle of modernism into a drab provincial town. In this riveting narrative we meet Austrian traitors like Arthur Seyss - Inquart and mass murderers like Odilo Globocnik; proconsuls like Joseph Buerckel who hacked Austria into seven pieces and Baldur von Schirach who dreamed of making Vienna into a Nazi capital on the Danube - - and failed miserably. More painfully Weyr chronicles the swift destruction of a rich Jewish culture and the removal of the city's 200,000 Jews through murder exile and deportation. Vienna never regained the global role the city had once played. Today Weyr concludes only the monuments remain - - beautiful but lifeless. This is not only the story of Nazi leaders but of how the Viennese themselves lived and died: those who embraced Hitler those who resisted and the many who merely in the local phrase "ran after the rabbit." The author draws on his own experiences as a child in Vienna under Nazi rule in 1938, and those of his parents and friends plus extensive documentary research to craft a vivid historical narrative that chillingly captures how a once - great city lost its soul under Hitler.
Title: The Setting Of The Pearl Vienna Under Hitler
Author(s): Weyr Thomas
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Barcode: 9780195146790
Pages: 384 Pages, 16pp Halftone Plates, 1 Map
Publication Date: 3/1/2005
Category: Second World War