"Between 1941 and 1945, some 6,500 Berlin Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the capital of Nazi Germany. The ...experience was brutally difficult, and most did not survive. Yet the experiences of 1,700 who did demonstrate a remarkable and hitherto unconsidered level of agency among the survivors. This book sheds light on the daily life of those who hid and on the city that was both the source of their persecution and the site of their survival. "
Racing the Enemy Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi
2005, 2005., 2006-09-30, 20060101, 20050101
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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.
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.
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 Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to fixed locations of persecution such as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.
The early twentieth-century advent of aerial bombing made successful evacuations essential to any war effort, but ordinary people resented them deeply. Based on extensive archival research in Germany ...and France, this is the first broad, comparative study of civilian evacuations in Germany and France during World War II. The evidence uncovered exposes the complexities of an assumed monolithic and all-powerful Nazi state by showing that citizens' objections to evacuations, which were rooted in family concerns, forced changes in policy. Drawing attention to the interaction between the Germans and French throughout World War II, this book shows how policies in each country were shaped by events in the other. A truly cross-national comparison in a field dominated by accounts of one country or the other, this book provides a unique historical context for addressing current concerns about the impact of air raids and military occupations on civilians.
The Munich crisis is everywhere acknowledged as the prelude to World War II. If Hitler had been stopped at Munich then World War II as we know it could not have happened. The subject has been ...thoroughly studied in British, French and German documents and consequently we know that the weakness in the Western position at Munich consisted in the Anglo-French opinion that the Soviet commitment to its allies - France and Czechoslovakia - was utterly unreliable. What has never been seriously studied in the Western literature is the whole spectrum of East European documentation. This book targets precisely this dimension of the problem. The Romanians were at one time prepared to admit the transfer of the Red Army across their territory. The Red Army, mobilised on a massive scale, was informed that its destination was Czechoslovakia. The Polish consul in Lodavia reported the entrance of the Red Army into the country. In the meantime, Moscow focused especially on the Polish rail network. All of these findings are new, and they contribute to a considerable shift in the conventional wisdom on the subject.
In just four weeks in the summer of 1941 the German Wehrmacht wrought unprecedented destruction on four Soviet armies, conquering central Ukraine and killing or capturing three quarters of a million ...men. This was the Battle of Kiev - one of the largest and most decisive battles of World War II and, for Hitler and Stalin, a battle of crucial importance. In this book, David Stahel charts the battle's dramatic course and aftermath, uncovering the irreplaceable losses suffered by Germany's 'panzer groups' despite their battlefield gains, and the implications of these losses for the German war effort. He illuminates the inner workings of the German army as well as the experiences of ordinary soldiers, showing that with the Russian winter looming and Soviet resistance still unbroken, victory came at huge cost and confirmed the turning point in Germany's war in the East.
The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern European Cultures is a collection of essays by literary scholars from Germany, the US, and Central Eastern Europe offering insight into the specific ...ways of representing the Shoah and its aftereffects as well as its entanglement with other catastrophic events in the region. Introducing the conceptual frame of postcatastrophe, the collected essays explore the discursive and artistic space the Shoah occupies in the countries between Moscow and Berlin. Postcatastrophe is informed by the knowledge of other concepts of "post" and shares their insight into forms of transmission and latency; in contrast to them, explores the after-effects of extreme events on a collective, aesthetic, and political rather than a personal level. The articles use the concept of postcatastrophe as a key to understanding the entangled and conflicted cultures of remembrance in postsocialist literatures and the arts dealing with events, phenomena, and developments that refuse to remain in the past and still continue to shape perceptions of today’s societies in Eastern Europe. As a contribution to memory studies as well as to literary criticism with a special focus on Shoah remembrance after socialism, this book is of great interest to students and scholars of European history, and those interested in historical memory more broadly.
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