The German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War was central to Nazi plans for territorial expansion and genocidal demographic revolution. To create 'living space', Nazi Germany ...pursued two policies. The first was the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other groups that the Nazis found undesirable on racial, religious, ethnic, ideological, hereditary, or behavioral grounds. It also pursued a parallel, albeit smaller, program to mobilize supposedly Germanic residents of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - so-called Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans - as the vanguard of German expansion. This study recovers the intersection of these two projects in Transnistria, a portion of southern Ukraine that, because of its numerous Volksdeutsche communities, became an epicenter of both Nazi Volksdeutsche policy and the Holocaust in conquered Soviet territory, ultimately asking why local residents, whom German authorities identified as Volksdeutsche, participated in the Holocaust with apparent enthusiasm.
Satellite Empire is an in-depth investigation of the political and social history of the area in southwestern Ukraine under Romanian occupation during World War II. Transnistria was the only occupied ...Soviet territory administered by a power other than Nazi Germany, a reward for Romanian participation in Operation Barbarossa. Vladimir Solonari's invaluable contribution to World War II history focuses on three main aspects of Romanian rule of Transnistria: with fascinating insights from recently opened archives, Solonari examines the conquest and delimitation of the region, the Romanian administration of the new territory, and how locals responded to the occupation. What did Romania want from the conquest? The first section of the book analyzes Romanian policy aims and its participation in the invasion of the USSR. Solonari then traces how Romanian administrators attempted, in contradictory and inconsistent ways, to make Transnistria "Romanian" and "civilized" while simultaneously using it as a dumping ground for 150, 000 Jews and 20, 000 Roma deported from a racially cleansed Romania. The author shows that the imperatives of total war eventually prioritized economic exploitation of the region over any other aims the Romanians may have had. In the final section, he uncovers local responses in terms of collaboration and resistance, in particular exploring relationships with the local Christian population, which initially welcomed the occupiers as liberators from Soviet oppression but eventually became hostile to them. Ever increasing hostility towards the occupying regime buoyed the numbers and efficacy of pro-Soviet resistance groups.
The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic ...Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state's myths, and they often found their own uses for the state's monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union's chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.
During the 1940s Greece was torn apart twice, first by World War II and second by Civil War.Beginning in 1941, the occupation of Greece by Germany was intensely brutal. Children starved on the ...streets of Athens. The Jewish population was decimated in the Holocaust. Heroic acts of resistance - performed in concert with the SOE - were met with vicious reprisals. When Greece was finally freed from Nazi rule in 1944, the fractured and embittered nation became engulfed in civil war, as conflict flared between the British and American-sponsored government and communist-led rebels. Acclaimed historian of Greece David Brewer here investigates this tumultuous decade in Greece’s modern history, providing a compelling military and political history.
Based largely on formerly top-secret Soviet archival documents (including 66 reproduced documents and 70 illustrations), this book portrays the inner workings of the communist party and secret police ...during Germany's horrific 1941-44 siege of Leningrad, during which close to one million citizens perished. It shows how the city's inhabitants responded to the extraordinary demands placed upon them, encompassing both the activities of the political, security, and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders.
The Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police) was the political police of the German Army during World War Two. Its members were drawn from both the regular German police, including detectives, as ...well as personnel from various Nazi security organizations. The mission of the GFP was numerous: protecting important political and military leaders, investigating black market activities, as well as acts of sabotage and espionage; tracking down deserters, examining anti-German activists, and hunting down partisans and partisan suspects. An additional role of the GFP was to act as liaison between the German Army and the Nazi SS. While performing some of these duties, members of the GFP eventually involved themselves directly in criminal activities. The GFP committed numerous crimes to both the Jewish community and the general population of Greece. Its leadership cadre was composed of dedicated Nazis and in one instance, included a former concentration camp commander! As the war progressed, their crimes in Greece increased in intensity and volume. The behavior of the GFP in Greece was a combination of the manner in which they operated in the West and East.
Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Winner of the AATSEEL Book Prize Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize Honorable Mention, Reginald Zelnik Book Prize "Stand aside, ...Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri's account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured." —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator "Fascinating and perceptive." —Antony Beevor, New York Review of Books "Powerful and illuminating…A fascinating, insightful, and nuanced work." —Anna Reid, Times Literary Supplement "A sensitive, at times almost poetic examination." —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs In September 1941, two and a half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million civilian lives. It was one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured it. Drawing on unpublished diaries written by men and women from all walks of life, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how young and old struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested many of Leningrad's wartime leaders. Some were executed. Diaries—now dangerous to their authors—were concealed in homes, shelved in archives, and forgotten. The War Within recovers these lost accounts, shedding light on one of World War II's darkest episodes while paying tribute the resilience of the human spirit.
InThe Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, Tarik Cyril Amar reveals the local and transnational forces behind the twentieth-century transformation of one of East Central Europe's most important multiethnic ...borderland cities into a Soviet and Ukrainian urban center. Today, Lviv is the modern metropole of the western part of independent Ukraine and a center and symbol of Ukrainian national identity as well as nationalism. Over the last three centuries it has also been part of the Habsburg Empire, interwar Poland, a World War I Russian occupation regime, the Nazi Generalgouvernement, and, until 1991, the Soviet Union.
Lviv's twentieth-century history was marked by great violence, massive population changes, and fundamental transformation. Under Habsburg and Polish rule up to World War II, Lviv was a predominantly Polish city as well as one of the major centers of European Jewish life. Immediately after World War II, Lviv underwent rapid Soviet modernization, bringing further extensive change. Over the postwar period, the city became preponderantly Ukrainian-ethnically, linguistically, and in terms of its residents' self-perception. Against this background, Amar explains a striking paradox: Soviet rule, which came to Lviv in its most ruthless Stalinist shape and lasted for half a century, left behind the most Ukrainian version of the city in history. In reconstructing this dramatic and profound change, Amar also illuminates the historical background to present-day identities and tensions within Ukraine.
InThe Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, Tarik Cyril Amar reveals the local and transnational forces behind the twentieth-century transformation of one of East Central Europe's most important multiethnic borderland cities into a Soviet and Ukrainian urban center. Today, Lviv is the modern metropole of the western part of independent Ukraine and a center and symbol of Ukrainian national identity as well as nationalism. Over the last three centuries it has also been part of the Habsburg Empire, interwar Poland, a World War I Russian occupation regime, the Nazi Generalgouvernement, and, until 1991, the Soviet Union.Lviv's twentieth-century history was marked by great violence, massive population changes, and fundamental transformation. Under Habsburg and Polish rule up to World War II, Lviv was a predominantly Polish city as well as one of the major centers of European Jewish life. Immediately after World War II, Lviv underwent rapid Soviet modernization, bringing further extensive change. Over the postwar period, the city became preponderantly Ukrainian-ethnically, linguistically, and in terms of its residents' self-perception. Against this background, Amar explains a striking paradox: Soviet rule, which came to Lviv in its most ruthless Stalinist shape and lasted for half a century, left behind the most Ukrainian version of the city in history. In reconstructing this dramatic and profound change, Amar also illuminates the historical background to present-day identities and tensions within Ukraine.
The kings and the pawns Rein, Leonid
2011., 20110315, 2011, 2011-03-15, 2013-09-15, 20110101, Letnik:
15
eBook
For many years, the history of Byelorussia under Nazi occupation was written primarily from the perspective of the resistance movement. This movement, a reaction to the brutal occupation policies, ...was very strong indeed. Still, as the author shows, there existed in Byelorussia a whole web of local institutions and organizations which, some willingly, others with reservations, participated in the implementation of various aspects of occupation policies. The very sensitivity of the topic of collaboration has prevented researchers from approaching it for many years, not least because in the former Soviet territories ideological considerations have played an important role in preserving the topic's "untouchable" status. Focusing on the attitude of German authorities toward the Byelorussians, marked by their anti-Slavic and particularly anti-Byelorussian prejudices on the one hand and the motives of Byelorussian collaborators on the other, the author clearly shows that notwithstanding the postwar trend to marginalize the phenomenon of collaboration or to silence it altogether, the local collaboration in Byelorussia was clearly visible and pervaded all spheres of life under the occupation.
During the 872 days of the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1944), the city's inhabitants were surrounded by the military forces of Nazi Germany. They suffered famine, cold, and ...darkness, and a million people lost their lives, making the siege one of the most destructive in history. Confinement in the besieged city was a traumatic experience. Unlike the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp, for example, who were brought from afar and robbed of their cultural roots, the victims of the Siege of Leningrad were trapped in the city as it underwent a slow, horrific transformation. They lost everything except their physical location, which was layered with historical, cultural, and personal memory. In Besieged Leningrad, Polina Barskova examines how the city's inhabitants adjusted to their new urban reality, focusing on the emergence of new spatial perceptions that fostered the production of diverse textual and visual representations. The myriad texts that emerged during the siege were varied and exciting, engendered by sometimes sharply conflicting ideological urges and aesthetic sensibilities. In this first study of the cultural and literary representations of spatiality in besieged Leningrad, Barskova examines a wide range of authors with competing views of their difficult relationship with the city, filling a gap in Western knowledge of the culture of the siege. It will appeal to Russian studies specialists as well as those interested in war testimonies and the representation of trauma.
