In this compelling account of life and death in a Russian province under Nazi occupation, Johannes Due Enstad challenges received wisdom about Russian patriotism during World War II. With the benefit ...of hindsight, we know how hopelessly destructive Germany's war against the Soviet Union was. Yet ordinary Russians witnessing the advancing German forces saw things differently. For many of them, having lived through collectivization and Stalinist terror in the 1930s, the invasion created hopes of a better life without the Bolsheviks. German policies on land and church helped sustain those hopes for parts of the population. Drawing on Soviet and German archival sources as well as eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Enstad demonstrates the impact of Nazi rule on the mostly peasant population of northwest Russia and offers a reconsideration of the relationship between the Soviet regime and its core Russian population at this crucial moment in their history.
Based off of a wide range of archival materials, this article reveals a little-known chapter in the history of the Leningrad blockade-the processes involved with the manufacturing of food ration ...cards for the population of the besieged city. The authors describe the initial phase of the rationing system in Leningrad by showing the diversity of circulating ration cards and coupons which personified the system of rationed food supply. The authors also note that the Leningrad City Soviet Executive Committee's office for the management and allocation of food and industrial goods ration cards during 1941-42 was headed by Ivan G. Stozhilov. The latter office not only controlled the production of the cards, but was also--for the Party and Soviet bodies involved--one of the main sources in defining the size of the city's population. The authors' analysis of documents involved suggests the production of ration cards in Leningrad began hastily after the German attack on the Soviet Union. This work was entrusted to the Volodarskii printing factory located in the vicinity of the Leningrad paper mill which produced the special paper involved. Issues related to the number of cards printed for the city's populations--as well as the very process of manufacturing of these valuable products--were closely controlled by its Party and Soviet leadership. In 1942, because of the economic state of emergency which city lived under, ration cards began to be produced on plain paper instead of paper with water marks. This latter fact contributed to increasing the number of counterfeit cards. Often the specialists of printing factory themselves were involved in this crime. At the same time there were recorded cases of stealing cards from shops of the printing factories, where they were being manufactured.
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.
Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, ...Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.
Berichte Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau / Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau
2011
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Die hier zusammengeführten 46 Bände der sogenannten "Sterbebücher" gehören zu den wenigen erhalten gebliebenen Originaldokumenten aus Auschwitz. Zwischen 27. Juli 1941 und 31. Dezember 1943 sind in ...ihnen Todesdaten von Auschwitz- Häftlingen verzeichnet. Die fast 69.000 Sterbeeinträge betreffen allerdings nur den kleineren Teil der im Lagerkomplex Auschwitz gestorbenen Häftlinge. Die Dokumentation erscheint in drei Bänden. Im ersten Band, "Berichte", werden die Erfahrungen namhafter Auschwitz-Überlebender veröffentlicht. Ihre Darstellungen der verschiedenen Aspekte des Lagerlebens vermitteln eine tiefe Einsicht in die Mechanismen des SS-Verwaltungsapparats und sind unverzichtbar für die Interpretation der Quelleninhalte. Der erste Band erscheint in deutscher, englischer und polnischer Sprache und ist auch separat zu beziehen. Die Bände 2 und 3 enthalten das Namensverzeichnis der Sterbeeinträge. Aufgeführt sind Name, Geburtsdatum und -ort, Sterbedatum und Nummer des Sterbeeintrags mit Sterbejahr. Ein ergänzendes Register im Band 3 basiert auf zusätzlichen Quellen, u. a. den Zugangslisten der Juden. Diese wurden mit den Daten in den "Sterbebüchern" verglichen und belegen so die Zuverlässigkeit der hier enthaltenen Informationen. Die Mehrzahl dieser durch die SS-Verwaltung dokumentierten Namen von Häftlingen, die in Auschwitz umgekommen sind, ist bisher noch nicht veröffentlicht worden. Die Dokumentation der Sterbebücher von Auschwitz ist somit eine Quelle von einzigartiger Bedeutung.
When she was very young, Irene Kacandes knew things about her father that had no plot, no narrator, and no audience. To her childhood self these things resembled beings who resided with her family, ...like the ancestresses who'd thrown themselves off cliffs rather than be taken by the Turks, or the forefathers who'd fought the Trojans. For decades she thought of these cohabitants as Daddy's War Experiences and tried to stay away from them. When tragedy touched the adult life she had constructed for herself, however, she realized she had to confront her family's wartime past.
Kacandes begins with what shedidknow: that her immigrant grandmother returned to Greece with four young children-and without her husband-only to get trapped there by the Nazi occupation. Though still a child himself, her father, John, helped feed his younger siblings by taking up any task possible, including smuggling arms to the Resistance. Kacandes painstakingly uncovers a complex truth her father chose not to tell, a truth inextricably entwined with the Holocaust, discovering, too, a common but little-told story about how the telling of such memories is negotiated between survivors and their children.Daddy's Warbrings new understanding to how trauma, like the revenge of Greek gods, can visit each generation and offers a model for breaking the cycle.
Swastika over the Acropolis is a major reinterpretation of the conduct and significance of the Greek campaign of 1941, and its place in the history of World War II.
Allied Fighting Effectiveness is a collection of scholarly papers focusing on a variety of different aspects of the major campaigns of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, ranging from operation TORCH to ...the end of the war in Europe.
Through the poetry of Bouena Sarfatty (1916-1997), An Ode to Salonika sketches the life and demise of the Sephardi Jewish community that once flourished in this Greek crossroads city. A resident of ...Salonika who survived the Holocaust as a partisan and later settled in Canada, Sarfatty preserved the traditions and memories of this diverse and thriving Sephardi community in some 500 Ladino poems known as coplas. The coplas also describe the traumas the community faced under German occupation before the Nazis deported its Jewish residents to Auschwitz. The coplas in Ladino and in Renée Levine Melammed's English translation are framed by chapters that trace the history of the Sephardi community in Salonika and provide context for the poems. This unique and moving source provides a rare entrée into a once vibrant world now lost.
Germany's 1941 seizure of Yugoslavia led to a bloody insurgency, and the Wehrmacht waged a brutal campaign in response--massive reprisal shootings, destruction of entire villages, and huge mobile ...operations against civilians. Terror in the Balkans explores the reasons behind Germany's extreme security measures in southern and eastern Europe.
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