Examining the largest prisoner-of-war handling operation in U.S. history, this book offers a meticulous account of the myriad problems—as well as the impressive successes—that ...came with housing 371,000 German POWs on American soil during World War II. Antonio Thompson draws on extensive archival research to probe the various ways in which the U.S. government strove to comply with the Geneva Convention’s mandate that enemy prisoners be moved from the war zone and given food, shelter, and clothing equal to that provided for American soldiers. While the prisoners became a ready source of manpower for the labor-starved American home front and received small wages in return, their stay in the United States generated more than a few difficulties, which included not only daunting logistics but also violence within the camps. Such violence was often blamed on Nazi influence and control; however, as Thompson points out, only a few of the prisoners were actually Nazis. Because the Germans had cobbled together military forces that included convicts, their own POWs, volunteers from neutral nations, and conscripts from occupied countries, the bonds that held these soldiers together amid the pressures of combat dissolved once they were placed behind barbed wire. When these “men in German uniform,” who were not always Germans, donned POW garb, their former social, racial, religious, and ethnic tensions quickly reemerged. To counter such troubles, American authorities organized various activities—including sports, arts, education, and religion—within the POW camps; some prisoners even participated in an illegal denazification program created by the U.S. government. Despite the problems, Thompson argues, the POW-housing program proved largely successful, as Americans maintained their reputation for fairness and humane treatment during a time of widespread turmoil.   Antonio Thompson is an assistant professor of history at Austin Peay State University and the author of <i>German Jackboots on Kentucky Bluegrass: Housing German Prisoners of War in Kentucky, 1942–1946</i>. He has also taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
In an innovative effort to situate Baltic testimonies to the Gulag in the broader international context of research on displacement and memory, scholars from the Baltic States, Western Europe, ...Canada, and the United States seek answers to the following questions: Do different groups of deportees experience deportation differently? How do the accounts of women, children and men differ in their representation? Do various ethnic groups remember the past differently: how do they use historical and cultural paradigms to structure their experience in unique ways? The scholars researched the archives, read testimonies, interviewed former deportees, and examined artifacts of memory produced since the late 1980s, applying crossdisciplinary approaches used at the study of the Holocaust testimonies; the testimonies of women have received a particular emphasis. The essays in the book also examine the issues of transmittance, commemoration and public uses of the memory of deportations in contemporary social, cultural and political contexts of Baltic societies, including the reflection of Gulag legacy in literature, the cinema and museums.
Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis' genocidal vision of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were ...transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the "Final Solution" Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe. This book explores the question by analyzing victims' experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to fixed locations of persecution such as ghettos and camps.
This book fills a gap in the existing literature on the Second World War by covering the range of challenges, threats, issues, dilemmas, and changes faced and dealt with by Sweden during the ...conflict. Interest in Sweden's wartime experiences has increased due to its post-war profile as a neutral that both allowed German troops to transit through its territory and also carried on trading with the Nazi regime during the holocaust years. Many misconceptions and false impressions have arisen and persisted as a result of deliberate misinformation and concealment by all sides during that time. Readers of this book will gain a fresh, broad view of the period, personalities and problems from a Swedish orientation.
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.
Secret reports on Nazi Germany Neumann, Franz; Marcuse, Herbert; Kirchheimer, Otto ...
2013., 20130714, 2013, 2013-07-14
eBook
During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic ...Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time.
These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war.
Secret Reports on Nazi Germanyfeatures a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.
'We request an immediate favour of you, to build a shelter for us women and small children, because we have absolutely no place to take refuge and we are terrified!' This French mother's petition ...sent to her mayor on the eve of Germany's 1940 invasion of France reveals civilians' security concerns unleashed by the Blitzkrieg fighting tactics of World War II. Unprepared for air warfare's assault on civilian psyches, French planners were among the first in history to respond to civilian security challenges posed by aerial bombardment. France under Fire offers a social, political and military examination of the origins of the French refugee crisis of 1940, a mass displacement of eight million civilians fleeing German combatants. Scattered throughout a divided France, refugees turned to German Occupation officials and Vichy administrators for relief and repatriation. Their solutions raised questions about occupying powers' obligations to civilians and elicited new definitions of refugees' rights.
Writing War Moore, Aaron William
2013, 2013-06-03, 2013-07-01
eBook
Writing War examines over two hundred diaries, and many more letters, postcards, and memoirs, written by Chinese, Japanese, and American servicemen in the Pacific from 1937 to 1945. As he describes ...conflicts that have often been overlooked by historians, Aaron William Moore reflects on diaries as tools in the construction of modern identity.
The legacy of the Second World War has been, like the war itself, an international phenomenon. In both Europe and Asia, common questions of criminality, guilt, and collaboration have intersected with ...history and politics on the local level to shape the way that wartime experience has been memorialized, reinterpreted, and used.
By directly comparing European and Asian legacies, Confronting Memories of World War II, provides unique insight into the way that World War II continues to influence contemporary attitudes and politics on a global scale. The collection brings together experts from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to explore the often overlooked commonalities between European and Asian handling of memories and reflections about guilt. These commonalities suggest new understandings of the war's legacy and the continuing impact of historical trauma.
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