The Second World War was filled with many terrible crimes, such as genocide, forced migration and labour, human-made famine, forced sterilizations, and dispossession, that occurred on an ...unprecedented scale. Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War examines victim groups constructed in the twentieth century in the aftermath of these experiences. The collection explores the concept of authenticity through an examination of victims’ histories and the construction of victimhood in Europe and East Asia. Chapters consider how notions of historical authenticity influence the self-identification and public recognition of a given social group, the tensions arising from individual and group experiences of victimhood, and the resulting, sometimes divergent, interpretation of historical events.
Drawing from case studies on topics including the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, American air raids on Japan, and forced migrations from Eastern Europe, Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War demonstrates the trend towards a victim-centred collective memory as well as the interplay of memory politics and public commemorative culture.
NBC Goes to War Cassidy, James; Sweeney, Michael
03/2022
eBook
The diary of radio correspondent James Cassidy presents
a unique view of World War II as this reporter followed the Allied
armies into Nazi Germany. James Joseph Cassidy was one of
362 American ...journalists accredited to cover the European Theater
of Operations between June 7, 1944, and the war's end. Radio was
relatively new, and World War II was its first war. Among the
difficulties facing historians examining radio reporters during
that period is that many potential primary documents-their live
broadcasts-were not recorded. In NBC Goes to War ,
Cassidy's censored scripts alongside his personal diary capture a
front-line view during some of the nastiest fighting in World War
II as told by a seasoned NBC reporter. James Cassidy was ambitious
and young, and his coverage of World War II for the NBC radio
network notched some notable firsts, including being the first to
broadcast live from German soil and arranging the broadcast of a
live Jewish religious service from inside Nazi Germany while
incoming mortar and artillery shells fell 200 yards away. His diary
describes how he gathered news, how it was censored, and how it was
sent from the battle zone to the United States. As radio had no
pictures, reporters quickly developed a descriptive visual style to
augment dry facts. All of Cassidy's stories, from the panic he felt
while being targeted by German planes to his shock at the deaths of
colleagues, he told with grace and a reporter's lean and engaging
prose. Providing valuable eyewitness material not previously
available to historians, NBC Goes to War tells a
"bottom-up" narrative that provides insight into war as fought and
chronicled by ordinary men and women. Cassidy skillfully placed
listeners alongside him in the ruins of Aachen, on icy back roads
crawling with spies, and in a Belgian bar where a little girl
wailed "Les Américains partent!" when Allied troops retreated to
safety, leaving the town open to German re-occupation. With a
journalistic eye for detail, NBC Goes to War unforgettably
portrays life in the press corps. This newly uncovered perspective
also helps balance the CBS-heavy radio scholarship about the war,
which has always focused heavily on Edward R. Murrow and his
"Murrow's Boys."
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book raises new questions and provides different perspectives on the roles, responsibilities, ethics and protection of interpreters in war while ...investigating the substance and agents of Japanese war crimes and legal aspects of interpreters’ taking part in war crimes. Informed by studies on interpreter ethics in conflict, historical studies of Japanese war crimes and legal discussion on individual liability in war crimes, Takeda provides a detailed description and analysis of the 39 interpreter defendants and interpreters as witnesses of war crimes at British military trials against the Japanese in the aftermath of the Pacific War, and tackles ethical and legal issues of various risks faced by interpreters in violent conflict.The book first discusses the backgrounds, recruitment and wartime activities of the accused interpreters at British military trials in addition to the charges they faced, the defence arguments and the verdicts they received at the trials, with attention to why so many of the accused were Taiwanese and foreign-born Japanese. Takeda provides a contextualized discussion, focusing on the Japanese military’s specific linguistic needs in its occupied areas in Southeast Asia and the attributes of interpreters who could meet such needs. In the theoretical examination of the issues that emerge, the focus is placed on interpreters’ proximity to danger, visibility and perceived authorship of speech, legal responsibility in war crimes and ethical issues in testifying as eyewitnesses of criminal acts in violent hostilities. Takeda critically examines prior literature on the roles of interpreters in conflict and ethical concerns such as interpreter neutrality and confidentiality, drawing on legal discussion of the ineffectiveness of the superior orders defence and modes of individual liability in war crimes. The book seeks to promote intersectoral discussion on how interpreters can be protected from exposure to manifestly unlawful acts such as torture.
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.
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.
World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and this new book--the first in the Legacies of War series--explores one of the most significant changes it fostered: a dramatic increase in ...ethnic and religious tolerance. A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War helped to dissolve long-standing differences among white soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds. Never before or since have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time: more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to 1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers' shared experiences--enduring basic training, living far from home, engaging in combat--transformed their views of other ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how specific military policies and practices worked to counteract old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder what it meant to be white in America. Using the presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias. Smith's defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy's victory some three decades later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar decades. Extensively documented, A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.
The order of terror Sofsky, Wolfgang
1997., 20130617, 2013, 1996, 1997-01-01
eBook
During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration ...camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation, "terror labor," and the business-like extermination of human beings.
This eye-opening anthology documents, for the first time, the effects of World War II on Latina/o personal and political beliefs across a broad spectrum of ethnicities and races within the Latina/o ...identity.
A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay ...between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This "territorial revisionism" came to include all manner of politics and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the War itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period 1933-1945 and East European nation-states' histories.
Trauma and Guilt Vees-Gulani, Susanne
2008, 2003, 2003-01-01
eBook
This book analyzes postwar literary works on large area bombings of German cities both in the context of trauma theory and questions of guilt and shame about Germany's Nazi past, embedding the recent ...debate surrounding the air war of World War II and its influence on German culture in a broader historical, societal, and psychological context.
