The article delves into the concealed origins of Heinrich Gerlach's 1957 Stalingrad novel. A German veteran and former Soviet POW, Gerlach claimed to have recovered the memory of his wartime experience through hypnosis, after the original script, which he wrote in captivity, was confiscated by Soviet authorities. The author discovered this manuscript, believed lost, in Russian archives. It reveals how Soviet political re-education efforts prompted Gerlach to compose a memoir revolving around questions of personal complicity and guilt in German wartime crimes. Gerlach removed these soul-searching passages, as well as any reference to the Soviet origins of his memoir, from the published novel, which he presented as a self-generated inquiry into the tragedy of German soldiers abandoned by Hitler.

This article investigates the contested boundaries of the political within the working-class movements in Leipzig and Lyon at the end of the Weimar Republic and during the Popular Front. What the appropriate issues and places of politics should be was a question that was highly contested among the organisations of the local working-class movements in both cities. The article argues that an over-politicisation of the left-proletarian milieu in Leipzig contributed to the working-class movement's failure successfully to mobilise against the Nazis, while the dynamics of politicisation in Lyon helped the formation of the Popular Front in Lyon, but then contributed to its rapid collapse.

The Sezione Operaie e Lavoranti a Domicilio dei Fasci Femminili (Section of the Fascist Women's Groups for Female Workers and Outworkers) is the only one of the three Italian Fascist Party organisations for adult women that has never been studied. Founded in 1937 and recruiting factory workers, outworkers and domestic servants, it achieved a membership of almost a million by the fall of the regime in 1943. A top-down organisation, run by the largely middle-class Fasci Femminili, it offered its membership a mix of social, educational and professional opportunities. This article explores its activities, its organisational structure, the messages it attempted to convey to its membership and the reasons why such large numbers of women joined.

The idea of fascism spread quickly and transnationally in the inter-war era. Fascist groups identified themselves as sharing fundamental characteristics and ideas. At the same time, they distorted fascism for their own purposes, adapting it to their specific contexts. As a border region, Alsace provides a number of examples of fascist groups claiming solidarity with fascism, yet distinguishing themselves from each other. Looking at fascism as a transnational phenomenon provides insight into the evolution of fascist ideology and will help explain why it is so difficult to define.

This article examines the coverage by Radio Free Europe (RFE) of the show trial of Rudolf Slánský in 1952 and contrasts this coverage with documents on the response to the trial within Czechoslovakia. RFE aggressively portrayed the trial as a pack of lies and condemned its anti-Semitism as not authentically Czechoslovak. The response within Czechoslovakia was more much nuanced. Most publicly accepted the trial as valid and acted in ways that underscored that acceptance. Within this acceptance, however, they varied from the trial script and brought their own meanings to the story. Those meanings were not always ones that either RFE or Czechoslovak leaders would have recognised as true.