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The chapter starts with a survey of fascist policies designed to give a fresh dynamism to a stagnant regime in the later part of the 1930s (these included the Racial Laws of 1938) and then passes to a survey of popular responses to an increasingly ‘totalitarian’ assertion of the regime's authority. It charts mounting hostility to the regime among large sections of the population, tired of fascist rhetoric, disgusted by the behaviour — particularly at the provincial level — of the ‘new caste’ of fascist leaders, and dismayed by the prospect of a generalised European war with fascist Italy fighting alongside Mussolini's ally, Nazi Germany.

After considering the significance of the appointment of Eugenio Pacelli as Secretary of State, this chapter focuses on Pius XI’s relations with the totalitarian dictatorships—Soviet Nazi and Fascist. It considers the pope’s response to the Great Depression and to Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, especially the signing of the Reichskonkordat of 1933. After examining the contradictions of Pius XI’s response to Mussolini’s aggression against Ethiopia and the Vatican’s complex policy during the Spanish Civil War, which reveal the first divergences between the pope and Pacelli, it examines the differing responses to religious persecution in Russia, Nazi Germany, and Mexico, which Pius elucidated in the three encyclicals of 1937. Pius XI’s response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, including Italy, during his illness-plagued months of 1938 and 1939, is discussed in the last section of this chapter, which concludes with an assessment of the significance of his pontificate.

This chapter studies the large and varied repertoire of songs created by Polish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Most common of these compositions are parodies of songs popular before the war. Drawing on well-known melodies and familiar styles such as the tango, waltz, or foxtrot, prisoners who listened to, created, and performed these songs could reclaim, if only for a moment, some part of their lost popular culture. Yet paradoxically, and as many survivors attest, these same songs, with their unsparing depictions of camp life, helped prisoners push aside thoughts of life before captivity and so preserve their mental balance during those difficult years. The chapter then looks at one parody song, ‘Heil, Sachsenhausen’, and also examines the song parodied, ‘Madagaskar’, itself a satirical consideration of the Jewish predicament in inter-war Poland. ‘Heil, Sachsenhausen’ served not only as a narrative of camp experience, but also as a darkly comic condemnation of Nazi ‘racial purity’ laws. Moreover, this parody song may have functioned as a zone of inquiry for the author's personal reflections on German-Polish and Polish-Jewish relations before and during the Second World War.

This chapter studies the attempts at legalizing relationships between German men and Polish women. One alternative that Reich German–Polish couples had to the kinds of prosecution described in the previous chapter was to legalize their relationships — however paradoxical this may seem at first glance. Regulating marriages was an important element of Nazi occupation policy as a whole. Numerous decrees had the aim of keeping the German, “neo-German”, and Polish populations apart. Accordingly, newly-recruited Germans should marry among themselves wherever possible, and certainly not marry Poles. This did not work well everywhere so the authorities sometimes changed tack and legitimized cohabitation. The racial planners also permitted such weddings in an attempt to hide the fact that it was not possible to entirely separate the populations in the occupied territories as they had intended. The chapter describes the process of marriage applications and the authorities involved, and introduces some examples of successful and denied marriage applications. It shows further that SS men were more likely to have longer relationships, but did rarely succeed in marrying Polish women.

In the fall of 1933, English physiologist A.V. Hill forcibly denounced the brutal Nazi racial policies, which the Nazi anti-Semite Johannes Stark then defended. Rutherford was drawn into the dispute in early 1934 and responded by first reviewing the long history of racial tolerance and academic freedom in England, and then by appealing for support for the Academic Assistance Council to help refugees. Among them were nuclear physicists Rudolf Peierls, Otto Robert Frisch, Maurice and Gertrude Goldhaber, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, and Walter Elsasser, who like many before him never forgot the first time he saw the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, knowing that he had been given the chance for a new start in life.

Hitler annexed Austria to Germany on March 15, 1938. Erwin Schrödinger, in Graz, soon regretted having applauded this and fled to Dublin. Stefan Meyer pre-emptively resigned his professorship in Vienna. Marietta Blau, discoverer of cosmic-ray disintegration “stars,” immigrated to Mexico. Polonium expert Elizabeth Rona immigrated to America. Renowned Lise Meitner escaped to Stockholm, where she received little scientific or personal support. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy adopted Nazi racial policies and enacted anti-Semitic laws in the fall of 1938. Bruno Rossi, dismissed from his professorship in Padua, immigrated with his wife to England and then to America. Emilio Segrè relinquished his professorship in Palermo and immigrated with his wife and young son to America. Enrico Fermi, his Jewish wife Laura, and their two children, went to Stockholm where he received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and then immigrated to America to begin what Laura Fermi called the process of Americanization.