Birds of Prey Blood, Philip W
2021, 20210921, 2021-09-21
eBook
‘This is the smoking gun of all your research.’
Professor Richard E. Holmes (18 February 2001).
Birds of Prey is a microhistory of the Nazi occupation of Białowieźa Forest, Poland’s national park. ...The narrative stretches from Göring’s palatial lifestyle to the common soldier on the ground killing Jews, partisans, and civilians. Based entirely on previously unpublished sources, the book is the synthesis of six areas of research: Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the hunt and environmental history, military geography, Colonialism and Nazi Lebensraum, the Holocaust, and the war in the East. By weaving together a narrative about Hermann Göring, his inner circle, and ordinary soldiers, the book reveals the Nazi ambition to draw together East Prussia, the Bialystok region, and Ukraine into a common eastern frontier of the Greater German state, revealing how the Luftwaffe, the German hunt, and the state forestry were institutional perpetrators of Lebensraum and genocide. Up until now the Luftwaffe had not been identified in specific acts of genocide or placed at large scale killings of Jews, civilians, and partisans. This gap in the historical record had been facilitated by the destruction of the Luftwaffe’s records in 1945. Through a forensic and painstaking process of piecing together scraps of evidence over two decades, and utilizing Geographical Information System software, Philip W. Blood managed to decipher previously obscure reports and expose patterns of Nazi atrocities.
The article presents the last years of the life of Aleksander Prusiewicz (1878-1941), an ethnographer, sightseer, collector, curator of the Volyn Museum in Lutsk, organiser and manager of the Lviv ...Ethnographic Museum. From 1 September 1939, he kept a diary, describing, among many other things, the siege of Lviv, the first days of Soviet occupation as well as the worsening living conditions in the city. He devoted most of his attention to the arrest of the former Prime Minister of Poland, professor of archeology, Leon Kozłowski, which he provoked on 26 September 1939. In the next months, Prusiewicz limited keeping his diary to laconic notes. In the spring of 1940, he made efforts to obtain PhD at the Ivan Franko State University of Lviv, which ended in failure. He returned to systematic diary-keeping after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, bringing his notes until 13 August 1941. Three weeks later, on 6 September 1941, he committed suicide. He was buried in the Łyczakowski cemetery.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it aimed to
destroy Polish national consciousness. As a symbol of Polish
national identity and the religious faith of approximately
two-thirds of Poland's ...population, the Roman Catholic Church was an
obvious target of the Nazi regime's policies of ethnic, racial, and
cultural Germanization.
Jonathan Huener reveals in The Polish Catholic Church under
German Occupation that the persecution of the church was most
severe in the Reichsgau Wartheland, a region of Poland annexed to
Nazi Germany. Here Catholics witnessed the execution of priests,
the incarceration of hundreds of clergymen and nuns in prisons and
concentration camps, the closure of churches, the destruction and
confiscation of church property, and countless restrictions on
public expression of the Catholic faith. Huener also illustrates
how some among the Nazi elite viewed this area as a testing ground
for anti-church policies to be launched in the Reich after the
successful completion of the war. Based on largely untapped sources
from state and church archives, punctuated by vivid archival
photographs, and marked by nuance and balance, The Polish
Catholic Church under German Occupation exposes both the
brutalities and the limitations of Nazi church policy.
The first English-language investigation of German policy toward
the Catholic Church in occupied Poland, this compelling story also
offers insight into the varied ways in which Catholics-from Pope
Pius XII, to members of the Polish episcopate, to the Polish laity
at the parish level-responded to the Nazi regime's repressive
measures.
The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands investigates the Soviet response to nationalist insurgencies that occurred between 1944 and 1953 in the regions the Soviet Union annexed after ...the Nazi-Soviet pact: Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Based on new archival data, Alexander Statiev presents the first comprehensive study of Soviet counterinsurgency that ties together the security tools and populist policies intended to attract the local populations. The book traces the origins of the Soviet pacification doctrine and then presents a comparative analysis of the rural societies in Eastern Poland and the Baltic States on the eve of the Soviet invasion. This analysis is followed by a description of the anti-communist resistance movements. Subsequently, the author shows how ideology affected the Soviet pacification doctrine and examines the major means to enforce the doctrine: agrarian reforms, deportations, amnesties, informant networks, covert operations, and local militias.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, executed a staggering number of political prisoners in Western Ukraine-somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000-in the ...space of eight days, in one of the greatest atrocities perpetrated by the Soviet state. Yet the Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 is largely unknown. This sourcebook aims to change that, offering detailed scholarly analysis, eyewitness testimonies and profiles of known victims, and a selection of fiction, memoirs, and poetry that testifies to the lasting impact of the massacre in the collective memory of Ukrainians.
The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945 examines one of the central problems in the history of Polish-Jewish relations: the attitude and the behavior of the Polish Underground - the resistance ...organization loyal to the Polish government-in-exile - toward the Jews during World War II. Using a variety of archival documents, testimonies, and memoirs, Zimmerman offers a careful, dispassionate narrative, arguing that the reaction of the Polish Underground to the catastrophe that befell European Jewry was immensely varied, ranging from aggressive aid to acts of murder. By analyzing the military, civilian, and political wings of the Polish Underground and offering portraits of the organization's main leaders, this book is the first full-length scholarly monograph in any language to provide a thorough examination of the Polish Underground's attitude and behavior towards the Jews during the entire period of World War II.
This work is a re-examination of the decisions regarding the 1944 Warsaw Uprising made by the leadership of the underground Polish Army (AK), as well as the questionable attitudes of senior Polish ...commanders in exile in London. McGilvray's work is supplemented with Polish sources as well as interviews with five women who had been involved in the Warsaw Uprising as young women and girls in 1944.
