For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbos archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.
In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughter's memoir, which records the “all-too-human” qualities of those who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, shows that the Holocaust cannot be used to neatly segregate lives into the categories of before and after. Clement's discussions of differences in social status, along with the persistence of antisemitism and patriarchal structures, support this point strongly, demonstrating the tenacity of trauma—individual, familial, and collective—among Jews in twentieth-century Europe.
The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and in other camps in 1940 was one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War. The truth about the massacres was long suppressed, both by the Soviet Union and also by the United States and Britain who wished to hold together their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. This informative book examines the details of this often-overlooked event, shedding light on what took place especially in relation to the massacres at locations other than Katyn itself. It discusses how the truth about the killings was hidden, how it gradually came to light, and why the memory of the massacres has long affected Polish-Russian relations.
Kaia, Heroine of the 1944 Warsaw Rising tells the story of one woman, whose life encompasses a century of Polish history. Full of tragic and compelling experiences such as life in Siberia, Warsaw before World War II, the German occupation, the Warsaw Rising, and life in the Soviet Ostashkov prison, Kaia was deeply involved with the battle that decimated Warsaw in 1944 as a member of the resistance army and the rebuilding of the city as an architect years later. Kaia's father was expelled from Poland for conspiring against the Russian czar. She spent her early childhood near Altai Mountain and remembered Siberia as a “paradise”. In 1922, the family returned to free Poland, the train trip taking a year. Kaia entered the school system, studied architecture, and joined the Armia Krajowa in 1942. After the legendary partisan Hubal's death, a courier gave Kaia the famous leader's Virtuti Militari Award to protect. She carried the medal for 54 years. After the Warsaw Rising collapsed, she was captured by the Russian NKVD in Bialystok and imprisoned. In one of many interrogations, a Russian asked about Hubal's award. When Kaia replied that it was a religious relic from her father, she received only a puzzled look from the interrogator. Knowing that another interrogation could end differently, she hid the award in the heel of her shoe where it was never discovered. In 1946, Kaia, very ill and weighing only 84 pounds, returned to Poland, where she regained her health and later worked as an architect to rebuild the totally decimated Warsaw.
Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use soft power in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc.
The Second World War presents the backdrop for this riveting account of displacement, migration, and resettlement. Once the Soviet forces marched into Poland, thousands of Polish citizens were deported to slave-labor camps in the USSR. As news of their inhuman condition and ordeal spread, Jam Saheb Digvijaysinghji of Nawanagar, a Princely State in British India, opened the doors of his state and welcomed the orphaned Polish children. The Second Homeland chronicles the passage and sojourn of these young refugees. Readers will get an authentic account of their tribulations through the first-person narrative of a young Polish orphan′s hair-raising journey to India and his experiences during the stay. The book includes a historical perspective culled out from archival documents in India, the UK, and Poland.
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Alongside the open conflict of World War II there were other, hidden wars - the wars of communication, in which success depended on a flow of concealed and closely guarded information. Smuggled written messages, secretly transmitted wireless signals, or months of eavesdropping on radio traffic meant operatives could discover in advance what the enemy intended to do. This information was passed on to those who commanded the armies, the fleets, and the bomber formations, as well as to the other secret agents throughout the world who were desperately trying to infiltrate enemy lines. Vital information that turned the tide of battle in the North African desert and on the Pacific Ocean proved to have been obtained by the time-consuming and unglamorous work of cryptanalysts who deciphered the enemy's coded messages and coded those for the Allies. From the stuffy huts of Bletchley Park to the battles in the Mediterranean, the French and Dutch Resistance movements, and the unkempt radio operatives in Burma, the rarely-seen, outstanding stories collected here reveal the true extent of the secret war'. The ongoing need for secrecy for decades after the war meant that the outstanding achievements of wartime cryptanalysts could not be properly recognized. With vivid first-hand accounts and illuminating historical research, VOICES OF THE CODEBREAKERS reveals and finally celebrates the extraordinary accomplishments of these ordinary men and women.
Since the end of World War II, Germans have struggled with the legacy of the Wehrmacht -- the unified armed forces mobilized by Adolf Hitler in 1935 to ensure the domination of the Third Reich in perpetuity. Historians have vigorously debated whether the Wehrmacht's atrocities represented a break with the past or a continuation of Germany's military traditions. Now available for the first time in English, this meticulously researched yet accessible overview by eminent historian Rolf-Dieter Müller provides the most comprehensive analysis of the organization to date, illuminating its role in a complex, horrific era. Müller examines the Wehrmacht's leadership principles, organization, equipment, and training, as well as the front-line experiences of soldiers, airmen, Waffen SS, foreign legionnaires, and volunteers. He skillfully demonstrates how state-directed propaganda and terror influenced the extent to which the militarized Volksgemeinschaft (national community) was transformed under the pressure of total mobilization. Finally, he evaluates the army's conduct of the war, from blitzkrieg to the final surrender and charges of war crimes. Brief acts of resistance, such as an officers ''rebellion of conscience" in July 1944, embody the repressed, principled humanity of Germany's soldiers, but ultimately, Müller concludes, the Wehrmacht became the 'steel guarantor' of the criminal Nazi regime.
The year 2012 marks the centenary of Eva Braun's birth. This is the strange-but-true saga of her life, richly illustrated from her own personal photograph albums, as well as from other captured German archives. She married German dictator Adolf Hitler but 36 hours before their joint suicides in Berlin on April 30, 1945, in the last week of the Second World War in Europe. This exciting pictorial biography tells the full story of a Catholic convent-bred young woman - not only as of the secret mistress, as many historians have painted her since her voluntary death at age 33 - but also as Hitler's lawfully wedded wife, even though she is still largely referred to today by her maiden name. They met at a Munich photography shop in 1929 when she was but 17, and he was already 40. The true nature of their long relationship is fully explained in detail for the very first time: she was heterosexual and bisexual, but the author concludes Eva most likely remained a virgin until the day she died. Although many reports after the war claimed that he shot himself and that she took poison, the official Russian autopsy of their partially-burnt bodies asserted that both died by cyanide capsules, despite the postwar testimony of all Hitler's closest aides, lending even their deaths an air of mystery.
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This volume presents a comprehensive, multifaceted picture both of the destructive dynamic of the Nazi leadership and of the attitudes and behavior of ordinary Germans as the persecution of the Jews spiraled into total genocide.
Hitler claimed that his years as a soldier in the First World War were the most formative years of his life. However, for the six decades since his death in the ruins of Berlin, Hitler's time as a soldier on the Western Front has, remarkably, remained a blank spot. Until now, all that we knew about Hitler's life in these years and the regiment in which he served came from his own account in Mein Kampf and the equally mythical accounts of his comrades. Hitler's First War for the first time looks at what really happened to Private Hitler and the men of the Bavarian List Regiment of which he was a member. It is a radical revision of the period of Hitler's life that is said to have made him. Through the stories of the veterans of the regiment - an officer who became Hitler's personal adjutant in the 1930s but then offered himself to British intelligence, a soldier-turned-Concentration Camp Commander, Jewish veterans who fell victim to the Holocaust, or of veterans who simply returned to their lives in Bavaria - Thomas Weber presents a Private Hitler very different from the one portrayed in his own mythical account. Instead, we find a Hitler who was shunned by the frontline soldiers of his regiment as a rear area pig' and who was still unsure of his political ideology even at the end of the war in 1918. In looking at the post-war lives of Hitler's fellow veterans back in Bavaria, Thomas Weber also challenges the commonly accepted notion that the First World War was somehow a seminal catastrophic twentieth-century German history and even questions just how deep-seated Nazi ideology really was in its home state.
Available at JSCC Jackson Campus
Available at JSCC Jackson Campus
Steinacher not only reveals how Nazi war criminals escaped from justice at the end of the Second World War, fleeing through the Tyrolean Alps to Italian seaports, but he also highlights the key roles played by the Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Secret Services of the major powers.
Benito Mussolini was a brilliant Socialist journalist who in 1914 declared war, put himself at the head of the anti-Socialist movement in Italy, maneuvered himself into power by 1933, and ruled the country until overthrown in 1943. He was a dynamic but insecure personality, who appeared dictatorial but always had to share power with the military and bureaucratic establishment. Mussolini founded an Empire in Africa and tried to make Italians' in his own heroic, war-like image, but in fact, failed to even control his own family! In June 1940, when France fell, he could not resist joining in the Second World War on the German side, although Italy was not equipped for serious fighting. His rule ended in Military disaster and personal humiliation. This new biography focuses both on Mussolini's personality and on the way he exercised power and regards these two issues as closely linked. It sees him as a man with all the talents needed to attain power but few of those needed to exercise it well. This book primarily focuses on how Mussolini had absolutely the wrong personality for a successful political leader.
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The furies and Benito Mussolini, 1944-1945 -- First of his class? The Mussolini's and the young Benito, 1883-1902 -- Emigrant and socialist, 1902-1910 -- The class struggle, 1910-1914 -- War and revolution, 1914-1919 -- The first months of Fascism, 1919-1920 -- The Fascist rise to power, 1920-1922 -- Government, 1922-1924 -- The imposition of dictatorship, 1924-1925 -- The man of providence, 1926-1929 -- Mussolini in his pomp, 1929-1932 -- The challenge of Adolph Hitler, 1932-1934 -- Empire in Ethiopia, 1935-1936 -- Crisis in Europe, 1936-1938 -- The approach of a Second World War, 1938-1939 -- Germany's ignoble second, 1939-1941 -- The first and feeble resurrection, 1942-1943 -- The ghost of Benito Mussolini, 1945-2001
How successful was Mussolini in creating a force of loyal and committed policemen to defend his regime and assist in the creation of a new fascist civilization? How far was the Italian police transformed under Mussolini, and how did policemen experience the dictatorship? This book examines Italy's regular police in the context of fascism's efforts to modernize and establish ideological control over the state. Contrasting the regime's idealized representations with the more humdrum realities of everyday practice, the book considers the impact of the dictatorship on the Italian police and their personnel.
The cult of the Duce is the first book to explore systematically the personality cult of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. It examines the factors which informed the cult and look in detail at its many manifestations in the visual arts, architecture, political spectacle, and the media. The conviction that Mussolini was an exceptional individual first became dogma among Fascists and then was communicated to the people at large. Intellectuals and artists helped fashion the idea of him as a new Caesar while the modern media of press, photography, cinema, and radio aggrandized his every public act. The book considers the way in which Italians experienced the personality cult and analyses its controversial resonances in the postwar period. Academics and students with interests in Italian and European history and politics will find the volume indispensable to an understanding of Fascism, Italian society and culture, and modern political leadership. Among the contributions is an Afterword by Mussolini's leading biographer, R.J.B. Bosworth.
The dramatic story of Mussolini's fall from power in July 1943, illuminating both the causes and the consequences of this momentous event. Morgan shows how Italians of all classes coped with the extraordinary pressures of wartime living, both on the military and home fronts, and how their experience of the country at war eventually distanced them from the dictator and his fascist regime. Looking beyond Mussolini's initial fall from power, Morgan examines how the Italian people responded to the invasion, occupation, and division of their country by Nazi German and Anglo-American forces - and how crucial the experience of this period was in shaping Italy's post-war sense of nationhood and transition to democracy.
Mussolini's Italy is a compelling introduction to this infamous fascist dictator and his extraordinary rule. Though sometimes regarded as a farcical ruler, Mussolini's brutal friendship with Hitler and his tyrannical killing of over a million people cannot be ignored as crucial aspects of modern European history. David Evans' pacy and nuanced analysis of the rise and fall of this colorful yet dangerous dictator will keep you gripped from beginning to end.
In contrast to its brutal seizure of the Balkans, the Italian Army's 1940-1943 relatively mild occupation of the French Riviera and nearby alpine regions bred the myth of the Italian brava gente, or good fellow, an agreeable occupier who abstained from the savage wartime behaviors so common across Europe. Employing a multi-tiered approach, Emanuele Sica examines the simultaneously conflicting and symbiotic relationship between the French population and Italian soldiers. At the grassroots level, Sica asserts that the cultural proximity between the soldiers and the local population, one-quarter of which was Italian, smoothed the sharp angles of miscommunication and cultural faux-pas at a time of great uncertainty. At the same time, it encouraged a laxness in a discipline that manifested as fraternization and black marketeering.
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was the founder of Fascism and iron-fisted ruler of Italy for two decades. He was also an extremely able politician who won the esteem of many statesmen—including Winston Churchill and influential persons in the United States. This biography describes Mussolini's childhood; his education (including his suspension from school for attacking other boys with knives); his World War I experiences and severe wounding; his involvement in, and eventual expulsion from the revolutionary Italian Socialist Party; his numerous love affairs, his early career as a journalist and his rise to power and brutal rule.
The book is a thematic collection of essays that examine the extent to which social and cultural life in Germany was permeated by Nazi aims and ambitions. Each essay deals with a different theme of daily German life in the Nazi era, with topics including food, fashion, health, sport, art, tourism, and religion all covered in chapters based on original and expert scholarship.
Of all victims of Nazi persecution, German Jews had to suffer the Nazi yoke for the longest time. Throughout the Third Reich, they were exposed to anti-Jewish propaganda, discrimination, anti-Semitic laws, and increasingly to outrages and offenses by non-Jewish Germans. While the International Military Tribunal and the subsequent American Military Tribunals at Nuremberg dealt with a variety of Nazi crimes according to international law, these courts did not consider themselves cognizant in adjudicating wrongdoings against German citizens and those who lost German citizenship based on the so-called “Nuremberg laws,” such as Germany's Jews.
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Wachsmann offers an ... integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators, and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called 'the gray zone'"
Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism's ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft - a 'people's community' that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. Diaries and letters reveal Germans' fears, desires, and reservations while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life.
The book focuses on the manipulation of the German past, one of the primary means of state intervention to ensure the triumph of the racial idea in history. It shows how textbooks written by National Socialists equaled or exceeded the most imaginative fiction, with an itinerary that extended from Valhalla and the Germania of Tacitus to the Prussia of Frederick the Great, before mounting to the pinnacle represented by the Third Reich.
Despite the Holocaust's profound impact on the history of Eastern Europe, the communist regimes successfully repressed public discourse about and memory of this tragedy. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, however, this has changed. Not only has a wealth of archival sources become available, but there have also been oral history projects and interviews recording the testimonies of eyewitnesses who experienced the Holocaust as children and young adults. Recent political, social, and cultural developments have facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in representations of the Holocaust. People are beginning to realize the significant role that memory of the Holocaust plays in contemporary discussions of national identity in Eastern Europe.
During 1938 and 1939, Paul Neurath was a Jewish political prisoner in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He owed his survival to a temporary Nazi policy allowing the release of prisoners who were willing to go into exile and the help of friends on the outside who helped him obtain a visa. He fled to Sweden before coming to the United States in 1941. In 1943, he completed The Society of Terror, based on his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald. He embarked on a long career teaching sociology and statistics at universities in the United States and later in Vienna until his death in September 2001. After liberation, the horrific images of the extermination camps abounded from Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places. Neurath's chillingly factual discussion of his experience as an inmate and his astute observations of the conditions and the social structures in Dachau and Buchenwald captivate the reader, not only because of their authenticity but also because of the work's proximity to the events and the absence of influence of later interpretations. His account is unique also because of the exceptional links Neurath establishes between personal experience and theoretical reflection, the persistent oscillation between the distanced and sober view of the scientist and that of the prisoner.
Mussolini's Children uses the lens of state-mandated youth culture to analyze the evolution of official racism in Fascist Italy. Between 1922 and 1940, educational institutions designed to mold the minds and bodies of Italy's children between the ages of five and eleven undertook a mission to rejuvenate the Italian race and create a second Roman Empire.
Between 1926 and 1943, the Fascist regime arrested thousands of Italians and deported them to island internment colonies and small villages in southern Italy. Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy analyses this system of political confinement and, more broadly, its effects on Italian society, revealing the centrality of political violence to Fascist rule. In doing so, the book shatters the widely accepted view that the Mussolini regime ruled without a system of mass repression. The Fascist state ruled Italy violently, projecting its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination, and other quotidian forms of coercion.
Surviving Hitler and Mussolini examine how far everyday life was possible in a situation of total war and brutal occupation. Its theme is the social experience of occupation in German- and Italian-occupied Europe, and in particular the strategies ordinary people developed in order to survive. Survival included meeting the challenges of shortage and hunger, of having to work for the enemy, of women entering into intimate relations with soldiers, of the preservation of culture in a fascist universe, of whether and how to resist, and the reaction of local communities to measures of reprisal taken in response to resistance. What emerges is that ordinary people were fewer heroes, villains, or victims than inventive and resourceful individuals able to maintain courage and dignity despite the conditions they faced. The book adopts a comparative approach from Denmark and the Netherlands to Poland and Greece and offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War.
The East Surreys were in near-continuous action from November 1942, when they landed in North Africa (Operation TORCH) through to May 1945 Armistice. By that time they had cleared the Germans from Tunisia, taken part in Operation HUSKY, (the Sicily invasion TORCH), and fought up through Italy as far as River Po. Trained as mountain troops, the East Surreys saw bitter action in the Atlas Mountains, on the slopes of Mount Etna and Monte Cassino, and in the unforgiving hills and valleys of the Apennines.
In this lyrical memoir, noted Jewish historian, author, translator, and activist Augusto Segre not only recounts his rich life experiences but also evokes the changing world of Italian Jewry in the 20th century.
On 19 April 1940, Celso Costantini prophetically wrote in his diary that if Italy followed Hitler into war, it would be allying itself with the anti-Christ.' Within weeks, Mussolini's fascist regime plunged Italy into the destructive maelstrom of global military conflict. The ensuing years brought world war, the fall of fascism, occupation, liberation, and the emergence of a new political order. The Secrets of a Vatican Cardinal is an extraordinary and detailed behind-the-scenes account of crucial episodes in Europe's wartime history from a unique vantage point: the Vatican and the Eternal City. Costantini, a close advisor to Pope Pius XII, possessed a perspective few of his contemporaries could match. His diaries offer new insights into the great issues of the time - the Nazi occupation, the fall of Mussolini, the tumultuous end of the Italian monarchy, the birth of republican democracy in Italy, and the emergence of a new international order - while also recounting heartbreaking stories of the suffering, perseverance, and heroism of ordinary people.
Hide & Seek chronicles the intensely personal war between wartime Rome's Nazi SS Chief Herbert Kappler and the Vatican's Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, a fiercely fought rivalry that culminated in Kappler attempting to kidnap and murder his Irish opponent, who was determined to fight Rome's Nazi rulers. Called “Ireland's Oscar Schindler,” O'Flaherty masterminded a large-scale operation from inside the neutral Vatican, to hide and help Jews, downed airmen, and escaped Allied prisoners.
'Examines how the Francisco Franco regime achieved its goals of state survival and internal order following the divisive Spanish Civil War. Bowen argues that even the most pro-Axis elements within Spain were more concerned with domestic politics, the potential for civil unrest, and poverty than with wartime events in Europe
Wigg demonstrates that the tolerance shown toward Spain's wartime trading permitted the rebuilding of Spanish gold reserves which helped Franco survive his (and Spain's) international ostracism between 1945 and 1950.This important book will interest scholars with an interest in contemporary European political history as well as those with a general interest in Spanish history.
