Summary of Gershom Gorenberg's War of Shadows

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 On September 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain delivered a radio speech that announced Britain was at war with Germany. The children of London and the rest of Britain’s cities were lined up on the platforms of railway stations and boarding trains for the countryside, where they would live with strangers.

#2 On the evening of September 3, the train carrying Adolf Hitler’s headquarters left Berlin. It was the mobile headquarters of Hitler, with a special security battalion traveling with him. Hitler was extremely taken with the forty-seven-year-old officer.

#3 The United States remained resolutely unready for war. The country’s best-known isolationist, aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave a national radio broadcast to rally opposition to the repeal of the Neutrality Act.

#4 The meeting was held the next week with Heydrich, and the week after. Hitler had approved more detailed plans. In the short term, Jews would be consigned to ghettos until they could be expelled. There would be three categories of Poles in the annexed territories: political leaders, to be put in concentration camps; mid-level Poles, to be deported immediately; and all the rest, who would first be exploited as laborers, then pushed eastward.