This book focuses on the systems used by the Axis powers for the governance of the countries that they occupied during the Second World War. It would be easy to assume that the administration of each country was carried out on a somewhat ad hoc basis, but streams of detailed orders and decrees were enacted to cover all aspects of everyday life … from finance to crime.

Dr Raphael Lemkin was a Polish émigré and the person who coined the term ‘genocide’ during his study of international law concerning crimes against humanity which he began in 1933 — the year that the Nazis assumed power in Germany. Dr Lemkin’s much-acclaimed work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was published in 1944 and extracts from it now form the framework on which we have built this ‘then and now’ coverage of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Memel, Albania, Danzig, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,Belgium, France, Monaco, the Channel Islands, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Balticstates, the Soviet Union, Romania, Italy and Hungary.