Approximately 9 million soldiers fell into enemy hands from 1914 to 1918, but historians have only recently begun to recognize the prisoner of war's significance to the history of the Great War. ...Examining the experiences of the approximately 130, 000 German prisoners held in the United Kingdom during World War I, historian Brian K. Feltman brings wartime captivity back into focus. Many German men of the Great War defined themselves and their manhood through their defense of the homeland. They often looked down on captured soldiers as potential deserters or cowards--and when they themselves fell into enemy hands, they were forced to cope with the stigma of surrender. This book examines the legacies of surrender and shows that the desire to repair their image as honorable men led many former prisoners toward an alliance with Hitler and Nazism after 1933. By drawing attention to the shame of captivity, this book does more than merely deepen our understanding of German soldiers' time in British hands. It illustrates the ways that popular notions of manhood affected soldiers' experience of captivity, and it sheds new light on perceptions of what it means to be a man at war.
The Killing Season Robinson, Geoffrey B
2018, 2018., 20180213, 2018-02-13, Letnik:
29
eBook
"Explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century--the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965-66, ...leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention. An expert in modern Indonesian history, genocide, and human rights, Geoffrey Robinson sets out to account for this violence and to end the troubling silence surrounding it. In doing so, he sheds new light on broad and enduring historical questions. How do we account for instances of systematic mass killing and detention? Why are some of these crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten? What are the social and political ramifications of such acts and such silence? Challenging conventional narratives of the mass violence of 1965-66 as arising spontaneously from religious and social conflicts, Robinson argues convincingly that it was instead the product of a deliberate campaign, led by the Indonesian Army. He also details the critical role played by the United States, Britain, and other major powers in facilitating mass murder and incarceration. Robinson concludes by probing the disturbing long-term consequences of the violence for millions of survivors and Indonesian society as a whole"
Containing analyses of everything from prisoner poetry to album covers, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag moves beyond the simplistic good/evil paradigm that often accompanies ...Gulag scholarship. While acknowledging the normative power of Stalinism—an ethos so hegemonic it wanted to harness the very mechanisms of inspiration—the volume also recognizes the various loopholes offered by artistic expression. Perhaps the most infamous project of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, the Belomor construction was riddled by paradox, above all the fact that it created a major waterway that was too shallow for large crafts. Even more significant, and sinister, is that the project won the backing of famous creative luminaries who enthusiastically professed the doctrine of self-fashioning. Belomor complicates our understanding of the Gulag by looking at both prisoner motivation and official response from multiple angles, thereby offering a more expansive vision of the labor camp.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, an estimated 30,000 German civilians in African and Asian colonies were violently uprooted and imprisoned. Britain's First World War internment of German settlers ...seriously challenged the structures that underpinned nineteenth-century imperialism. Through its analysis of this internment, this book highlights the impact that the First World War had on the notion of a common European 'civilising mission' and the image of empire in the early twentieth century. Mahon Murphy examines the effect of the war on a collective European colonial identity, perceptions of internment in the extra-European theatres of war, and empires in transition during war. Policymakers were forced to address difficult questions about the future rule of Germany's colonies and the nature of empire in general. Far from a conflict restricted to European powers, the First World War triggered a worldwide remaking of ideas, institutions and geopolitics.
Whenever police officers come into contact with citizens there is a chance that the encounter will digress to one in which force is used on a suspect. Fortunately, most police activities do not ...involve the use of force. But those that do reflect important patterns of interaction between the officer and the citizen. This book examines those patterns. It begins with a brief survey of prior research, and then goes on to present data and findings. Among the data are the force factor applied - that is, the level of force used relative to suspect resistance - and data on the sequential order of incidents of force. The authors also examine police use of force from the suspect's perspective. In analyzing this data they put forward a conceptual framework, the Authority Maintenance Theory, for examining and assessing police use of force.
As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and ...cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world--overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis.Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California's penal systems. Each element of prison life--from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence--demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.
This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did ...not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.
Soon after the close of military operations in the American Civil War, another war began over how it would be remembered by future generations. The prisoner-of-war issue has figured prominently in ...Northern and Southern writing about the conflict. Northerners used tales of Andersonville to demonize the Confederacy, while Southerners vilified Northern prison policies to show the depths to which Yankees had sunk to attain victory. Over the years the postwar Northern portrayal of Andersonville as fiendishly designed to kill prisoners in mass quantities has largely been dismissed. The Lost Cause characterization of Union prison policies as criminally negligent and inhumane, however, has shown remarkable durability. Northern officials have been portrayed as turning their military prisons into concentration camps where Southern prisoners were poorly fed, clothed, and sheltered, resulting in inexcusably high numbers of deaths. Andersonvilles of the North, by James M. Gillispie, represents the first broad study to argue that the image of Union prison officials as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. This study is not an attempt to “whitewash” Union prison policies or make light of Confederate prisoner mortality. But once the careful reader disregards unreliable postwar polemics, and focuses exclusively on the more reliable wartime records and documents from both Northern and Southern sources, then a much different, less negative, picture of Northern prison life emerges. While life in Northern prisons was difficult and potentially deadly, no evidence exists of a conspiracy to neglect or mistreat Southern captives. Confederate prisoners’ suffering and death were due to a number of factors, but it would seem that Yankee apathy and malice were rarely among them. In fact, likely the most significant single factor in Confederate (and all) prisoner mortality during the Civil War was the halting of the prisoner exchange cartel in the late spring of 1863. Though Northern officials have long been condemned for coldly calculating that doing so aided their war effort, the evidence convincingly suggests that the South’s staunch refusal to exchange black Union prisoners was actually the key sticking point in negotiations to resume exchanges from mid-1863 to 1865. Ultimately Gillispie concludes that Northern prisoner-of-war policies were far more humane and reasonable than generally depicted. His careful analysis will be welcomed by historians of the Civil War, the South, and of American history.
