Books like The texture of memory by James Edward Young

During the final year of World War II, a daring group of American and British museum professionals—known as the Monuments Men—risked their lives behind enemy lines to salvage priceless European art from Nazi plunder and destruction.

THE MASTER PLAN is a groundbreaking history of a little known Nazi SS archeological research institute, the Ahnenerbe, and the key role it played in the Holocaust. The Ahnenerbe was the brainchild of Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer SS and architect of the Final Solution, who was intensely interested in Germany’s ancient past. His intent was not only to rewrite the history of what he and others termed the “Aryan Race,” but also to use that mythic past to shape a more glorious future for Germany. While attempting to prove that Aryans were responsible for all of civilization’s greatest achievements, he also hoped to use tall, blond-haired SS men as stock to breed future generations of Germans in a racially purer mold. In the tradition of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, THE MASTER PLAN is also an expose of the work of German scientists and scholars who allowed their research to be used to justify extermination, and who, in some cases, directly participated in the slaughter—many of whom resumed their academic positions at war’s end. Intensely compelling and exhaustively researched, THE MASTER PLAN is based on extensive personal interviews and previously ignored archival material.

"How should Germany commemorate the mass murder of Jews once committed in its name? In 1997, James E. Young was invited to join a German commission appointed to find an appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the European Jews killed in World War II. As the only foreigner and only Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique perspective on Germany's fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust. In this book, he tells for the first time the inside story of Germany's national Holocaust memorial and his own role in it." "In exploring Germany's memorial crisis, Young also asks the more general question of how a generation of contemporary artists can remember an event like the Holocaust, which it never knew directly."--BOOK JACKET.