ANDREW NAGORSKI
BIO
HITLERLAND
EVENTS
BOOKS
INTERVIEWS
Hitler's rise to power through the eyes of Americans who watched horrified and up close...
Back to Interviews
Andrew Nagorski has appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, Fox News and numerous foreign TV stations.
TV & VIDEO
RADIO & AUDIO
PRINT & PAGE
Andrew Nagorski, who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek, is now Vice President and Director of Public Policy for the EastWest Institute, an international affairs think tank with offices in New York, Brussels and Moscow. Nagorski is based in New York but continues to travel extensively, writing for numerous publications. His latest book, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power , will be published by Simon & Schuster in March, 2012.
From January 2000 to July 2008, Nagorski served as senior editor for Newsweek International, handling the editorial cooperation between the parent magazine and its expanding network of foreign language editions and other joint venture partners. The new magazines that were launched during his tenure were Newsweek Arabic in 2000; Newsweek Polska, which has become Polands leading newsmagazine since it was launched in 2001; Newsweek Russia in 2004; and Newsweek Argentina in 2006. Nagorski also continued to write reviews and commentaries for Newsweek International. He has been honored three times by the Overseas Press Club for his reporting.
As Berlin bureau chief from 1996 to 1999, Nagorski provided in-depth reporting about Germany's efforts to overcome the legacy of division, the immigration debate, and German-Jewish relations. From Berlin, Nagorski also covered Central Europe, taking advantage of his long experience in the region and his knowledge of Polish, Russian, and German.
From 1990 to 1994, he served as Newsweeks Warsaw bureau chief, and he has served two tours of duty as Newsweeks Moscow bureau chief, first in the early 1980s and then from 1995 to 1996. In 1982, he gained international notoriety when the Soviet government, angry about his enterprising reporting, expelled him from the country. After spending the next two and a half years as Rome bureau chief, he became Bonn bureau chief.
From 1978 to 1980, Nagorski was the Hong Kong-based Asian regional editor for Newsweek International and then as Hong Kong Bureau Chief. After joining Newsweek International in 1973 as an associate editor, he was its assistant managing editor from 1977 to 1978.
In 1988, Nagorski took a one-year leave of absence to serve as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. In recent years, he has also served as an adjunct professor at Bard Colleges Center for Globalization and International Affairs, teaching a course on international affairs writing. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, and serves on the board of directors of the Polish-American Freedom Foundation. In 2009, Polands Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski presented Nagorski with the newly created Bene Merito award for his reporting from Poland about the Solidarity movement during the 1980s. In 2011, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski awarded him the Cavalry Cross for the same reason.
Aside from Hitlerland, Nagorski is the author of the non-fiction books: Reluctant Farewell: An American Reporters Candid Look Inside the Soviet Union (New Republic/Henry Holt, 1985); The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe (Simon & Schuster, 1993); and The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II (Simon & Schuster, 2007). The New York Review of Books described The Greatest Battle as "a new and beautifully researched account of what had been a poorly understood part of the war." His first novel, Last Stop Vienna (Simon & Schuster, 2003) about a young German who joins the early Nazi movement and then is propelled into a confrontation with Hitler, was on the Washington Posts bestseller list. Film/TV rights to Hitlerland have been optioned by Lakeshore Entertainment.
Nagorski taught social studies at Wayland High School in Massachusetts before joining Newsweek. Born in Edinburgh of Polish parents (who shortly after his birth emigrated to the United States), he attended school overseas while his father was in the U.S. foreign service. He earned a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College in 1969 and studied at the University of Cracow.
Nagorski and his wife, Christina, have four children: Eva, Sonia, Adam and Alex.
Hitler's rise to power, Germanys march to the abyss, as seen by Americans-diplomats, military, expats, visiting authors, Olympic athletes who watched horrified and up close. Some of the Americans in Hitler's Germany were merely casual observers, others deliberately blind, a few were Nazi apologists. But most began slowly to understand what was unfolding, even when they found it difficult to grasp the breadth of the catastrophe.
Among the journalists, William Shirer understood what was happening. Edgar Mowrer, Dorothy Thompson, and Sigrid Schultz, reporters, were alarmed. Consul General George Messersmith distinguished. Truman Smith, the first American official to meet Hitler, was an astute political observer. Historian William Dodd, who FDR tapped as ambassador in Berlin, left disillusioned; his daughter Martha scandalized the embassy with her procession of lovers, Nazis she took up with; she ended as a Soviet spy.
On the scene were George Kennan, the architect of containment; Richard Helms, who rose to the top of the CIA. The writers Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Wolfe, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the great athlete Jesse Owens came through Germany; so did a younger generation of journalists Richard Hottelet, Hans V. Kaltenborn, Howard K. Smith, and Ed Murrow.
These Americans helped their reluctant countrymen begin to understand Nazi Germany as it ruthlessly eliminated political opponents, instilled hatred of Jews and anyone deemed a member of an inferior race, and readied its military and its people for a war for global domination. They helped prepare Americans for the years of struggle ahead.
Reviews
Praise
The Battle for Moscow was the deadliest battle of World War II--and the deadliest battle of all time. Between September 30, 1941 and April 20, 1942, seven million German and Soviet troops took part in the battle, and 2.5 million of them were killed, taken prisoner, missing or severely wounded. As German troops approached Moscow, half of the city's population fled, while others looted stores, staged strikes and attacked those who were escaping. In the end, the German drive fell short, but Stalin's regime was so embarrassed by how close they came, by the mistakes the Soviet dictator made that allowed them to do so, and the behavior of many of its own citizens, that the battle was given short shrift in their history books.
Both Hitler and Stalin (briefly allied and now newly at war) intruded themselves into the strategies for their armies. Hitler was so overconfident--even though his generals warned him--that the German army went into battle in the Russian fall with no winter clothes. Stalin was so in denial that the majority of Russian soldiers had no weapons. They had to wait for a comrade to fall in order to acquire a gun. Soviet soldiers following the front lines were under orders to shoot anyone who retreated. Meanwhile, the German soldiers, well equipped with armaments, and well trained but with no winter clothes, were freezing to death by the thousands.
Foreign Editions
Germany in the 1920s, in the early days of Hitler and the Nazi party, was a country plunging into darkness and violence. Andrew Nagorski has written the story of a doomed generation, of evil, hopelessness, sexual perversion and murder that set the stage for the ultimate destruction of a society. But in a stunning denouement, a young Nazi brownshirt, acting out of passion and revenge, changes the course of history.
Karl Naumann, a German teenager who has lost his father and brother in World War I, has tried to find a place in a defeated, demoralized and anarchic Berlin. Impressed by the returning veterans who refuse to lay down their arms and fight running battles with communist revolutionaries, and alone and adrift on the streets, he is recruited to their cause and camaraderie. He is sent to Munich, where he works his way up the ranks to become one of Adolf Hitler's bodyguards, a storm trooper.
The new movement is increasingly split between Hitler and rival leaders, including Karl's mentor, Otto Strasser, a real-life Nazi activist. As the schism within the party widens, the battles intensify and Hitler asserts his dominance, Karl must determine where his loyalty lies. He has fallen in love with a nurse, Sabine, whom he marries, but he is infatuated with Hitler's young niece, Geli Raubal, who is caught up in a deeply disturbing sexual relationship with her uncle.
Of the many books published recently on the fate of Eastern Europe, Andrew Nagorski’s deserves a special place. A trained journalist, he reported from the Soviet Union for several years before being expelled by the Brezhnev regime. He never believed in the myth of the Soviet Union’s total domination of its satellites, and he looked for stories that revealed how people coped with and sometimes defied political oppression. At the same time, he admits that he, like virtually everyone else, was caught by surprise at the rapid demise of the Soviet Empire and the go-for-broke efforts of countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary to rejoin Europe and to develop social democratic governments and capitalistic economies.
What makes Nagorski’s perspective especially valuable is that he is steeped in Eastern European culture. His grandfather served in the Polish government-in-exile during World War II, and his father fought as a tank battalion officer. His family spoke Polish at home. He spent time in Poland as an exchange student and married a Polish woman. This personal background informs both his reading of history and of current events. He is never less than objective, reporting conflicting points of view, but the people of this part of Europe are like family to him. He views them sympathetically and skeptically, knowing how shaky the independence of these countries has been and how prone they are to blame their troubles on powerful neighbors.
Nevertheless, Nagorski regards Eastern Europe as roughly equivalent to the American Wild West— its institutions barely established, its political structures tenuous and makeshift. Yet with its fund of ideas and enthusiasms, this part of the world bids to become the most exciting theater of human possibilities, where whole peoples are forging new identities.
Nagorski, who was Newsweek 's Moscow bureau chief from May 1981 until August 1982, joins a growing body of correspondents such as Michael Binyon ( Life in Russia , LJ 5/1/84) and Kevin Klose ( Russia and the Russians , LJ 3/1/84) who have chronicled their experiences within and their impressions of one of the most enigmatic societies. Nagorski differed from most of his colleagues in his ability to speak Russian, his eagerness to travel outside the major cities, and his willingness to meet all sorts of Soviet citizens: academics to dissidents to black marketeers. He also was the first American reporter expelled by the Kremlin since 1977. An extremely readable and personal account of one journalist's struggles with a markedly different tradition.
Back to Greatest Battle
Back to Last Stop Vienna
Back to Birth of Freedom
Back to Books
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union at 0400 hours on June 22, 1941. By June 23, the Wehrmacht had destroyed the entire Soviet air force. By June 26, the Soviet commander of the Western front had lost radio contact with Moscow. By June 28, German troops had entered Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus. And on the morning of June 29—just a week into the invasion—Stalin failed to appear in the Kremlin.
Until that moment Stalin, though stunned by the attack, had appeared to be more or less in control. He had not yet made a public statement—Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, was the one assigned to announce the invasion to the Soviet people—and Khrushchev later said he had looked, throughout that period, like “a different Stalin, a bag of bones in a grey tunic.” Still, he had been stable enough to order the rapid evacuation of the western regions of the country, once his generals convinced him that the invasion really was something more than a diabolical provocation.
But the fall of Minsk, less than a week after the start of the war, seems to have left him in despair. “Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up,” he told his entourage, before disappearing to his dacha. When he failed to show up in Moscow the next day, the Politburo members tried to call him. “Comrade Stalin’s not here and is unlikely to be here,” his secretary responded. He didn’t appear the day after that either.
Worried, the Politburo met in secret, and determined to approach Stalin themselves. Nervously, they made their way to his “Blizny” or “Nearby” dacha, in a wooded area outside of Moscow. Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin’s inner circle, later described the scene:
We found him in an armchair in the small dining room. He looked up and said, “What have you come here for?” He had the strangest look on his face, and the question itself was pretty strange too….
"Now we know. The Germans are not human. Now the word 'German' has become the most terrible swear word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill.... If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses."
When Ilya Ehrenburg, a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zveda, wrote those famous words, the battle for Moscow -- Sept. 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942 -- had recently ended. The atrocities that had been exacted on the Russian people by Hitler's invading army were eliciting a corresponding savagery from Stalin's troops as they drove German divisions back from the edge of the capital city.
In his enthralling history of the defense of the Soviet capital, "The Greatest Battle," Andrew Nagorski, a Newsweek International senior editor, writes that "the battle for Moscow was arguably the most important battle of World War II and inarguably the largest battle between two armies of all time." The statistics are astounding: Approximately seven million Russian and German soldiers were involved in the fighting; about 2.5 million were killed, taken prisoner, wounded or counted as missing. Soviet troops sustained the highest casualties.
And the stakes were high: Had the Germans' "Operation Barbarossa" succeeded, Hitler would have had the vast natural resources of the Soviet Union under his control, magnifying the strength of his forces and enabling the German military machine to return, mightier than ever, to the Western Front. As Mr. Nagorski shows, Moscow was a turning point: At long last the fearsome blitzkrieg had been forced to a standstill, shattering the myth of Nazi invincibility.
