Catherine Hokin looks at why ghettos were created in the cities of occupied Europe during the Second World War – places of segregation and also of suffering. My latest World War Two novel, The Secret Locket, tells a story that’s very much tied to its settings. Part of the book takes place in the Bavarian […]
The Secret Locket by Catherine Hokin
In Germany in 1941, when Pascal kisses Noemi and presses his mother’s silver locket into her hands, it is a moment she has been longing for her whole life. Growing up they were fearless, exploring the wild mountains in the Bavarian countryside together. But when war is declared, overnight their love becomes forbidden – Noemi […]
In search of a Holocaust survivor’s past
2025 marks 80 years since the liberation of the Third Reich’s camps. This significant anniversary will likely be the last in which survivors are still alive to tell their stories. When writer Kate Thompson went to visit 95-year-old Renee Salt in her London home she had no idea of the journey of discovery it would […]
Making room for the master race: the true scope of Himmler’s Lebensborn programme
Catherine Hokin writes about the Nazi Lebensborn programme, the background to her latest novel. What did it involve? And how did the Third Reich plan to make room for the ‘master race’ babies they envisaged being born? “The living space of the Nazis has become the dying space of Europe.” When Karl Frank – an […]
Language and the Nazi propaganda machine
Catherine Hokin examines how the Nazi propaganda machine twisted language to hide mass murder, including their Aktion T4 euthanasia programme. Language and how it is used is particularly important to a writer. That might sound very obvious but it is a truism I have come back to again and again while writing fiction based around […]
Hitler’s Aristocrats by Susan Ronald
This book exposes the shadowy world of the aristocrats and business leaders on both sides of the Atlantic who secretly aided Hitler and Nazi Germany. Hitler said: “I am convinced that propaganda is an essential means to achieve one’s aims.” Enlisting Europe’s aristocracy, international industrialists, and the political elite in Britain and America, Hitler spun […]
Britain’s Plot to Kill Hitler: The True Story of Operation Foxley and SOE by Eric Lee
Operation Foxley was the name of the secret plan supported by Winston Churchill to assassinate Hitler in 1944–45. More than 75 years after its conception, the assassination plan remains shrouded in mystery. Eric Lee’s new book is the product of painstaking research and sheds more light on this plan. This book asks what would have […]
Re-examining the history of Empire in fact and fiction
Tom Williams considers whether historical fiction could be the most effective way to engage people in re-examining the history of the British Empire. September brought the re-publication of my novel Cawnpore, set during the events of 1857 known variously as the Indian Mutiny, the First Indian War of Independence, and the Indian Rebellion. (That’s far […]