Michael Dobbs, Class of 2010

The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between is a book written by Michael Dobbs, who was a short-term scholar with the Kennan Institute and the History and Public Policy Program in 2010. 

The book focuses on several Jewish families from a village in south-west Germany called Kippenheim who had applied for U.S. immigration visas. It examines the reasons why some succeeded in reaching America, while others ended up in Nazi death camps.  The story of what happened to these refugees is a German story, obviously, but it is also an American story with resonance today.  In the words of the journalist Dorothy Thompson, writing in 1938, "a piece of paper with a stamp on it" was "often the difference between life and death." It will be published next April by Knopf in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

Michael Dobbs has spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent, mainly for the Washington Post for which he covered the collapse of communism. His other books include Down with Big Brother: The Fall of The Soviet Empire (1997), and his study of the Cuban missile crisis, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (2009). Six Months in 1945 (2012) completes his cold war trilogy and provides thought for the future as well as reflections on the Cold War era.

More information on his forthcoming book can be found here.