"Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold ...chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets. The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In exploring the fate of these Hungarian Jews and their local coreligionists, A Summer of Mass Murder transcends conventional history by introducing a multitude of layers of politics, culture, and, above all, psychology?for both the victims and the executioners. The narrative presents an uncharted territory in Holocaust scholarship with extensive archival research, interviews, and corresponding literature across countries and languages, incorporating many previously unexplored documents and testimonies. Eisen reflects upon the voices of the victims, the images of the perpetrators, whose motivation for murder remains inexplicable. In addition, the author incorporates the long-forgotten testimonies of bystander contemporaries, who unwittingly became part of the unfolding nightmare and recorded the horror in simple words. This book also serves as a personal journey of discovery. Among the twenty thousand people killed was the tale of two brothers, the author?s uncles. In retracing their final fate and how they were swept up in the looming genocide, A Summer of Mass Murder also gives voice to their story. "
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.
In the campaign against Japan in the Pacific during the Second World War, the armed forces of the United States, Australia, and the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea made use of indigenous ...peoples in new capacities. The United States had long used American Indians as soldiers and scouts in frontier conflicts and in wars with other nations. With the advent of the Navajo Code Talkers in the Pacific theater, Native servicemen were now being employed for contributions that were unique to their Native cultures. In contrast, Australia, Papua, and New Guinea had long attempted to keep indigenous peoples out of the armed forces altogether. With the threat of Japanese invasion, however, they began to bring indigenous peoples into the military as guerilla patrollers, coastwatchers, and regular soldiers.
Defending Whose Country?is a comparative study of the military participation of Papua New Guineans, Yolngu, and Navajos in the Pacific theater. In examining the decisions of state and military leaders to bring indigenous peoples into military service, as well as the decisions of indigenous individuals to serve in the armed forces, Noah Riseman reconsiders the impact of the largely forgotten contributions of indigenous soldiers in the Second World War.
Filming the End of the Holocaust considers how the US Government commissioned the US Signal Corps and other filmmakers to document the horrors of the concentration camps during the April-May 1945 ...liberation. The evidence of the Nazis' genocidal actions amassed in these films, some of them made by Hollywood luminaries such as John Ford and Billy Wilder, would go on to have a major impact at the Nuremberg Trials; they helped to indict Nazi officials as the judges witnessed scenes of torture, human experimentation and extermination of Jews and non-Jews in the gas chambers and crematoria. These films, some produced by the Soviets, were integral to the war crime trials that followed the Holocaust and the Second World War, and this book provides a thorough, close analysis of the footage in these films and their historical significance.
Racing the Enemy Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi
2005, 2005., 2006-09-30, 20060101, 20050101
eBook
Hasegawa rewrites the history of the end of World War II in the Pacific by integrating the key actors in the story--the US, the USSR, and Japan. From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese ...Neutrality Pact and Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, he reveals the real reasons Japan surrendered.
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.
Bartov provides a critical analysis of various recent ways to understand the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime and the reconstruction of German and Jewish identities in the wake of World War II.
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