Historical events are reflected in asset prices. Based on a unique data-set, we analyse government bond prices of Germany and Austria traded on the Swiss bourse during the Second World War. Some war ...events generally considered crucial are clearly reflected in government bond prices; this holds, in particular, for the official outbreak of the war and the loss and gain of national sovereignty. Other events to which historians attach great importance are not reflected in bond prices, most prominently Germany's capitulation in 1945. The analysis of financial markets provides a fruitful method for evaluating the importance contemporaries attached to historical events.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Argument Two medical delegations, one from Palestine and one from the United States, were sent to detainment camps in Cyprus in the summer of 1947. The British Mandatory government had set up these ...camps in the summer of 1946 to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants into Palestine after World War II. The purpose of the medical delegations was to screen the camps' inhabitants and to propose a mental-health program for their life in Palestine. We examine the activities of these two delegations within the context of their scientific interest in the psycho-pathology of displaced persons after World War II and as part of a broader project of mental hygiene. According to the delegations, the detainees would be a potential source of strength for building a new society if they adapted to life in Palestine. However, they would become a burden if they failed to be absorbed. At the same time, the medical delegations also saw the detainee camps as a potential “living laboratory” for scientific exploration. The case of the two medical delegations in Cyprus is also a story about constructing and transgressing medical borders. Apart from the obvious fact that this case study deals with movement of people, refugees as well as health-care workers, it is also about the transmission of knowledge and professions across the ocean.
Illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine prior to the founding of the State of Israel forms one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Zionism and modern Jewish history. Bringing Jews from ...Europe to Palestine by land and by sea in defiance of restrictive British immigration policies was partly an undertaking of national rescue and partly a calculated strategy of political brinkmanship. Ofer focuses on this important phase in the history of the Holocaust.
