After the Anschluss (annexation) in 1938, the Nazis forced Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg to resign and kept him imprisoned for seven years, until his rescue by the Allies in 1945. ...Schuschnigg’s privileged position within the concentration camp system allowed him to keep a diary and to write letters which were smuggled out to family members.
Drawing on these records, Prison Elite paints a picture of a little-known aspect of concentration camp history: the life of a VIP prisoner. Schuschnigg, who was a devout Catholic, presents his memoirs as a confession, expecting absolution for any political missteps and, more specifically, for his dictatorial regime in the 1930s. As Erika Rummel reveals in fascinating detail, his autobiographical writings are frequently unreliable.
Prison Elite describes the strategies Schuschnigg used to survive his captivity emotionally and intellectually. Religion, memory of better days, friendship, books and music, and maintaining a sense of humour allowed him to cope. A comparison with the memoirs of fellow captives reveals these tactics to be universal.
Studying Schuschnigg’s writing in the context of contemporary prison memoirs, Prison Elite provides unique insight into the life of a VIP prisoner.
Institutions that have collected video testimonies from the few remaining Holocaust survivors are grappling with how to continue their mission to educate and commemorate. Noah Shenker calls attention ...to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. Shenker argues that testimonies are shaped not only by the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, but also by technical practices and the testimony process. He analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.
In a landmark process that transformed global reparations after the Holocaust, Germany created the largest sustained redress program in history, amounting to more than $60 billion. When human rights ...violations are presented primarily in material terms, acknowledging an indemnity claim becomes one way for a victim to be recognized. At the same time, indemnifications provoke a number of difficult questions about how suffering and loss can be measured: How much is an individual life worth? How much or what kind of violence merits compensation? What is "financial pain," and what does it mean to monetize "concentration camp survivor syndrome"?Susan Slyomovics explores this and other compensation programs, both those past and those that might exist in the future, through the lens of anthropological and human rights discourse. How to account for variation in German reparations and French restitution directed solely at Algerian Jewry for Vichy-era losses? Do crimes of colonialism merit reparations? How might reparations models apply to the modern-day conflict in Israel and Palestine? The author points to the examples of her grandmother and mother, Czechoslovakian Jews who survived the Auschwitz, Plaszow, and Markkleeberg camps together but disagreed about applying for the post-World War IIWiedergutmachung("to make good again") reparation programs. Slyomovics maintains that we can use the legacies of German reparations to reconsider approaches to reparations in the future, and the result is an investigation of practical implications, complicated by the difficult legal, ethnographic, and personal questions that reparations inevitably prompt.
Du milieu des années 1930 à la fin des années 1940, dans tous les pays européens du pourtour méditerranéen, des femmes et des hommes ont combattu, selon des temporalités et des modalités différentes, ...dans des mouvements de résistance antifasciste, que ce soit contre le régime en place ou contre une armée d’occupation, au premier chef l’armée allemande. Dès le temps de la lutte et à la sortie de cette phase de longues et intenses convulsions, la question de la place et du rôle des femmes a été soulevée, souvent par les acteurs et les actrices eux-mêmes. Elle a plus encore retenu l’attention de la recherche scientifique à dater des années 1970, quand les revendications féministes ont fait irruption dans le monde intellectuel et sur l’avant-scène publique. En revanche, les questions liées à la catégorie de genre n’ont été prises en compte que tout récemment et de façon inégale en fonction de l’aire géographique. Ce champ d’investigation relève davantage encore actuellement d’un chantier en pleine ébullition que d’un jardin à la française. C’est sur ce chantier que les artisan.e.s de cet ouvrage ont réfléchi ensemble dans une perspective transnationale qui en modifie les caractéristiques et la perception. Venu.e.s d’Australie, d’Espagne, des États-Unis, d’Italie, de France, de Grèce, de l’ex-Yougoslavie, leurs contributions éclairent différemment une période qui défie volontiers l’analyse. Contributions de Jelena Batinic, Antonio Bechelloni, Julien Blanc, Tiphaine Catalan, Estelle Ceccarini, Laurent Douzou, Gina Herrmann, Catherine Lacour-Astol, Jose Marco, Margarite Poulos, Odette Varon-Vassard, Anne Verdet, Mercedes Yusta
How was Bletchley Park made as an organization? How was signals intelligence constructed as a field? What was Bletchley Park's culture and how was its work co-ordinated? Bletchley Park was not just ...the home of geniuses such as Alan Turing, it was also the workplace of thousands of other people, mostly women, and their organization was a key component in the cracking of Enigma. Challenging many popular perceptions, this book examines the hitherto unexamined complexities of how 10,000 people were brought together in complete secrecy during World War II to work on ciphers. Unlike most organizational studies, this book decodes, rather than encodes, the processes of organization and examines the structures, cultures and the work itself of Bletchley Park using archive and oral history sources. Organization theorists, intelligence historians and general readers alike will find in this book a challenge to their preconceptions of both Bletchley Park and organizational analysis.
Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.
On October 10, 1941, the entire Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was the work of footsoldiers in a regular German army unit, acting on its ...own initiative. Marching into Darkness paints a searing portrait of the Wehrmacht's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.
The powerful writings and art of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto
Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from ...the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices-young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists-and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as "a civilization responding to its own destruction," these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.
This volume retraces Carl Lutz's diplomatic wartime rescue efforts in Budapest, Hungary, through the lens of Jewish eyewitness testimonies. Together with his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, the ...director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zürcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement, Carl Lutz led an extensive rescue operation between March 1944 and February 1945. It is estimated that Lutz and his team of rescuers issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection ( Schutzbriefe ) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses—annexes of the Swiss Legation. Based on interviews with Holocaust survivors in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States, this volume shines a light on the extraordinary scope and scale of Carl Lutz's humanitarian response.
Jeffrey Herf, a leading scholar in the field, offers the most extensive examination to date of Nazi propaganda activities targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East during World War II and the ...Holocaust. He draws extensively on previously unused and little-known archival resources, including the shocking transcriptions of the "Axis Broadcasts in Arabic" radio programs, which convey a strongly anti-Semitic message.
Herf explores the intellectual, political, and cultural context in which German and European radical anti-Semitism was found to resonate with similar views rooted in a selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam. Pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin, including Haj el-Husseini and Rashid el-Kilani, collaborated with the Nazis in constructing their Middle East propaganda campaign. By integrating the political and military history of the war in the Middle East with the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the propagandistic diffusion of Nazi ideology, Herf offers the most thorough examination to date of this important chapter in the history of World War II. Importantly, he also shows how the anti-Semitism promoted by the Nazi propaganda effort contributed to the anti-Semitism exhibited by adherents of radical forms of Islam in the Middle East today.
