The Official Site of Jim Snowden

Why Did They Fill Out Death Certificates At Auschwitz?

By jim_snowden August 2, 2013History

The wife of Talking Points Memos' Josh Marshall discovered recently that her maternal great-grandfather didn't die at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen when they swept through his town. Instead, according…

We Would Be Honored If You Would Join Us

By jim_snowden August 2, 2013Books

Hi, All. As I may have mentioned once or twice, Summer of Long Knives, my new thriller set in pre-war Nazi Germany, is due to come out in mid-September. Not…

Oh, The People I Meet

By jim_snowden August 1, 2013Comedy

One of the advantages of being on social media is occasionally interacting with people who've amazed you from afar. A few weeks ago on Twitter, I was able to hip…

Philipp Bouhler, Hitler’s Mailman

By jim_snowden July 30, 2013History

In the news yesterday was a story about a bell still in active use in Austria that was dedicated to Adolf Hitler. A rare find today, such things were common…

Best of the Year So Far

By jim_snowden July 29, 2013Books, Criticism, Movies, Music, Television

Best Movie Seen In Theaters: None. I hadn't realized until just now that I haven't been in a movie theater since I caught Skyfall with my mom and Venice last December. I…

The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls

By jim_snowden July 23, 2013History1 Comment

In the 1920s, one of the most popular youth groups in Germany was the Wandervogel. Founded in the 1890s, the Wandervogel was a male-only youth organization dedicated to nature, German…

A Tale of Two Dance Sequences

By jim_snowden July 22, 2013Movies

Every part of a story contains the DNA of the whole. An example of this can be found in two John Travolta dance sequences: one from Saturday Night Fever and the…

Influences: To Know Kommissar Rolf Wundt, Check Out Tibbs, Burakov, and Rockford

By jim_snowden July 22, 2013Books, Movies, Television

The protagonist of Summer of Long Knives doesn't have a historical counterpart. He's a product of imagination inspired by three different detectives from film and television. The first is Virgil Tibbs from In…

Gays and Lesbians In the Third Reich

By jim_snowden July 19, 2013History

Though old German laws against homosexuality--most notoriously Paragraph 175 of the German penal code--persisted through the Weimar republic, the 1920s were a time when German homosexuals not only successfully pressed…