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Even though the situation was bad in the summer of 1945, the leaders of Japan were not willing to consider giving up their traditions, their beliefs, or their way of life. Until August 9. What could have happened that caused them to so suddenly and decisively change their minds? What made them sit down to seriously discuss surrender for the first time after 14 years of war?

It could not have been Nagasaki

Hiroshima isn't a very good candidate either. It came 74 hours -- more than three days -- earlier. What kind of crisis takes three days to unfold? The hallmark of a crisis is a sense of impending disaster and the overwhelming desire to take action now. How could Japan's leaders have felt that Hiroshima touched off a crisis and yet not meet to talk about the problem for three days?

As they moved through the isolated villages in this region in 1943, systematically killing men in a reprisal for an attack on a small outpost, German soldiers dragged Giannis Syngelakis’s father from his home here and shot him in the head. Within two days, more than 400 men were dead and the women left behind struggled with the monstrous task of burying so many corpses.

Mr. Syngelakis, who was 7 then, still wants payback. And in pursuing a demand for reparations from Germany, he reflects a growing movement here, fueled not just by historical grievances but also by deep resentment among his countrymen over Germany’s current power to dictate budget austerity to the fiscally crippled Greek government.

Estimates of how much money is at stake vary wildly. The government report does not cite a total. The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt.

As I and other scholars have tried to show, Hirohito, from the start of his rule in 1926, was a dynamic, activist and conflicted monarch who operated within a complex system of irresponsibility inherited from his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, who oversaw the start of Japan’s epochal modernization.

Hirohito (known in Japan as Showa, the name of his reign) represented an ideology and an institution — a system constructed to allow the emperor to interject his will into the decision-making process, before prime ministers brought cabinet decisions to him for his approval. Because he operated behind the scenes, the system allowed his advisers to later insist that he had acted only in accordance with their advice.

In fact, Hirohito was never a puppet. He failed to prevent his army from invading Manchuria in 1931, which caused Japan to withdraw from the League of Nations, but he sanctioned the full-scale invasion of China in 1937, which moved Japan into a state of total war. He exercised close control over the use of chemical weapons in China and sanctioned the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even after the war, when a new, American-modeled Constitution deprived him of sovereignty, he continued to meddle in politics.

Of course, I wish my homeland victory. But what would constitute a victory for my country? Each one of Hitler’s victories was a defeat for the German people. And the final rout of Nazi Germany was a victory for the Germans themselves, who demonstrated how a nation can rise up and live like human beings without the delirium of war in their heads.

Today, though, Victory Day has nothing to do with the people’s victory or my father’s victory. It is not a day of peace and remembrance for the victims. It is a day for rattling swords, a day of zinc coffins, a day of aggression, a day of great hypocrisy and great baseness.

hanks to the “zombie box,” the population now has a make-believe idea of the world: The West wants to destroy us, so we are compelled, like our fathers and grandfathers, to wage holy war against fascism and we must be prepared to sacrifice everything for victory.

When I grew up, I realized that in 1944 and 1945, my father was sinking ships that were evacuating German civilians and troops from Riga, in Latvia, and Tallinn, in Estonia. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people met their deaths in the waters of the Baltic — for which my father received his medals. It’s been a long time since I was proud of him, but I don’t judge him. It was war.

My father fought the evil of fascism, but he was taken advantage of by another evil. He and millions of Soviet soldiers, sailors and airmen, virtual slaves, brought the world not liberation but another slavery. The people sacrificed everything for victory, but the fruits of this victory were less freedom and more poverty.

So my father went off to defend his homeland. He was still a boy when he went to sea, in constant terror of drowning in that steel coffin. He ended up protecting the regime that killed his father.

Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931. A wider invasion began in 1937, and by the time Japan surrendered in 1945, between 13 and 20 million Chinese people died. Refugees trying to flee the fighting numbered 100 million.

Was it not the Kuomintang, the nationalists, who largely engaged the Japanese? The Communists, who defeated the Kuomintang in 1949, were in disarray in 1937. Didn't Mao Zedong tell Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in Beijing in 1972, when diplomatic relations were restored between China and Japan, that if it wasn’t for the Japanese the Communists would never have taken power as the invasion gave them time to regroup under an umbrella of resistance to Japan.

China accuses the West of generally ignoring its role in the war. In this they are right; the Chinese theatre is only now beginning to be appreciated as a factor in tying down Japanese troops. But also the Communists were none too keen on discussing the war in case it gave credence to the Kuomintang. That has changed. A more assertive Beijing feels it can bolster its reputation by establishing direct lines between resistance to Japan, its legitimacy and its stance against Japan in maritime disputes.

He believed that Goering and his cohorts were commonplace people and that their personalities “could be duplicated in any country of the world today.” In the years before and during World War II, the opportunity to obtain power led them to embrace a chilling political philosophy. In other words, the Holocaust and the war’s other heinous crimes were the products of healthy minds.

The story of the denazification of Germany after 1945 comes in two versions. The one we know best allows us to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We turned the most powerful and frightening dictatorship in Europe into a stable, peaceable and functioning democracy for the first time in its history. This is the story we grew up with during the cold war, one that justified the partition and occupation of the country over many decades.

there is also a much less self-­congratulatory version of denazification. It dwells on the darker side by exposing once taboo subjects like the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe and the apparently countless rapes carried out by the Red Army.

there were then — and remain to this day — two mysteries in the conduct of the German people at the war’s end, mysteries that go to the heart of Taylor’s book. One was the question of why they continued to fight so resolutely, for so long, against obviously overwhelming odds, even after it must have been clear that the war was lost. Taylor stresses two completely counterproductive messages sent by the Allies: the policy of unconditional surrender, and especially the draconian Morgenthau Plan advanced by the American Treasury secretary, which called for the destruction of Germany’s industrial base and the pastoralization of the country. He also highlights the Germans’ sheer terror at the approaching Red Army, a terror that had been fanned, as he notes, by Goebbels’s publicizing of an early Soviet atrocity in an East Prussian village. Finally, there was straightforward Nazi coercion as the regime rounded on its own people, killing more and more of them.

Apparently, there was something in the popular state of mind by the winter of 1944-45, some sense of being alone in the world, some intuitive understanding of what their own country had done, that led the Germans to fulfill the regime’s ultimate goal — producing a society capable of withstanding the shock of war far more effectively than the one that had collapsed so ignominiously in 1918. This was a country that would fight to the bitter end.

Which leads directly to the second mystery. Why was the end, when it came, so definitive, without any underground resistance to speak of?

a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.

The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.

“Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916,

“Eichmann in Jerusalem” in many ways mirrored Eichmann’s own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, nonideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt’s insights — that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder — remain pertinent.

as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist.

Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the “little man” portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”

Tabloids brand him a traitor for disseminating “Korean lies” that they say were part of a smear campaign aimed at settling old scores with Japan. Threats of violence, Mr. Uemura says, have cost him one university teaching job and could soon rob him of a second. Ultranationalists have even gone after his children, posting Internet messages urging people to drive his teenage daughter to suicide.

The revisionists, however, have seized on the lack of evidence of abductions to deny that any women were held captive in sexual slavery and to argue that the comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes out to make good money.

“The War on The Asahi,” as commentators have called it, began in August when the newspaper bowed to public criticism and retracted at least a dozen articles published in the 1980s and early ’90s. Those articles cited a former soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have helped abduct Korean women for the military brothels. Mr. Yoshida was discredited two decades ago, but the Japanese right pounced on The Asahi’s gesture and called for a boycott to drive the 135-year-old newspaper out of business.

But I can't understand why you would support someone as hateful, sexist, racist and ignorant as Donald Trump.

It's not okay to marginalize an entire race of people, saying things like all the Mexicans are lazy, that they are all stealing our jobs and bringing drugs into our country.

We're all human. Some humans are really bad people. Some are really good. And it doesn't matter what color they are, it makes no difference whatsoever

Talking to South Koreans about Japan today, you might think they are still fighting an occupying force. Starting in elementary school, children learn to dislike Japan. Many South Koreans of a certain age use pejorative language when they refer to the Japanese. Books like the best seller “Japan’s Got Nothing,” published in 1993, and “The Lie That Japan Is an Advanced Nation,” translated from Japanese in 2008, have pandered to the crowd. A 2015 survey showed that more than 72 percent of South Koreans had unfavorable impressions of Japan.

The anti-Japanese sentiment serves the left particularly well in discrediting the right. Many wartime collaborators morphed into pro-American, pro-business, anti-Communist figures in the post-independence era and became active in conservative politics. It’s easy to make the charge — perhaps fairly — that today’s conservatives and business elites are the biological and ideological offspring of collaborators.

Tales From Ukraine’s Surreal Front Lines

On a second level, the book is a work of analysis and history, as Judah delves into the post-WWII past of Western Ukraine, the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism, as well as that of Donetsk, the key rebel stronghold, which has always had closer ties to Russia.

allows Judah to understand the arguably fundamental issue at stake in the Ukraine conflict: the deep cognitive dissonance present within the country that allowed the violence to take root

Beevor’s account ­forces one to reassess the merits of some familiar names. Perhaps no one comes off worse than Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, who had failed to foresee the possibility of a German attack, who was out of touch with events for much of the battle and who seems to have spent a great deal of his time raging at Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

Montgomery himself, however, receives little sympathy: His ambition to drive into Germany earlier that fall led him to neglect the clearing of the approaches to Antwerp. That great port, liberated on Sept. 4, was unusable as such for nearly three months because the Germans had been allowed to dig in along the Scheldt estuary. Instead, Montgomery launched Market Garden, a wildly ambitious effort

Beevor speculates that Montgomery had something like Asperger’s syndrome, and although one shies away from amateur diagnosis, one suspects that he is right. Oblivious almost to the end of the impact of his arrogance, smugness and condescension on others, he nearly brought about his own dismissal on the verge of final victory over Germany.