I often joke, darkly, that I write “history” books that get filed instead under “current events.” Over the last year, as I’ve worked on my new oral history of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings, there was one section in the book that always felt particularly chilling: The memories of the mostly Jewish refugee physicists who fled Hitler’s Europe to come to the United States ahead of the advancing cloak of fascism. The book, THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY, comes out next week — you can preorder a signed copy, support independent bookstores, and get a special gift of notepaper made from recycled Hiroshima peace cranes, all here — and given the spring and summer headlines about the backsliding of democracy here in the United States, I wanted to share what to me is one of the most urgent portions of the book, a chapter that takes place actually well before the work on the atomic bomb starts itself. Logically, inevitably, the fire produced the immense Nazi electoral victory of March 5, the savageries of the subsequent Brown Terror, the persecution of the Jews, the offensive against Austria, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland, and the enormous process of Gleichschaltung, or forcible assimilation, which steamrollered over Germany.
Author: Garrett M. Graff
Published at: 2025-08-02 19:14:43
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