The Rebel was first published in 1951, just a few years after the end of World War II (1939-1945). World War II was a devastating conflict on a truly global scale, leading to the death, injury, or displacement of tens of millions of people, both soldiers and civilians. The conflict pitted the Allied forces (namely Great Britain, France, the United States, and—eventually—the Soviet Union) against the powers of the Axis (Nazi Germany and its allies, such as fascist Italy and imperial Japan). The conflict is also notable for one of the most notorious large-scale crimes in human history: the Holocaust, in which Hitler sought the total extermination of the Jewish people and other designated “undesirables” according to Nazi ideology. As a result of this systematic persecution, millions of victims died in concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The sheer scale of the war’s violence and the brutalities of Nazi ideology shocked the world and left Europe in a crisis of conscience. The Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946) placed surviving Nazis on trial and sought redress for their crimes; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was declared in 1948 as an attempt to safeguard human liberties and prevent the horrors of genocide from ever taking place again.