German Intelligence History during the Nazi time remains a neglected field in academic research while there are still actors of the German Resistance (Widerstand) against the Nazi regime about whom ...very little is known. Original documentary sources are scarce, and even more so for lesser-known Germans whose life straddled both Intelligence and Widerstand, while working within the heart of Nazi terror. Egon Lengeling (1905-1945) was a family man, an exemplary official at the Foreign Intelligence Office of the Reich Security Headquarters in Berlin, and he managed several acts of resistance using his position. However, the Gestapo arrested Lengeling in June 1944 and he was imprisoned until February 1945, when he disappeared. The framework of an ego network within an historical network analysis is applied through which it is possible to determine some of Lengeling's roles and motives. This ego network analysis serves as an example of how to illuminate the activities of other lesser-known actors of the Nazi Intelligence and participants with the Widerstand in cases where source material is scarce.
In 1945, the British arrested Horst Kopkow, a Gestapo Referent, or desk officer, tasked with countering British and Russian sabotage in Hitler's empire. Despite being co-responsible for the demise of ...hundreds of Allied parachute agents, the British Secret Intelligence Service faked Kopkow's death and gave him freedom in exchange for his unrivalled understanding of Soviet espionage in Western Europe, particularly the famed Red Orchestra. The value of Kopkow's information is still being debated, but it was sufficiently important for SIS to protect Kopkow from war crimes investigators. Western intelligence agencies have, since the 1980s, been censured for utilising ex-Nazis in the initial Cold War, precisely because their wartime roles were still unclear. With the partial release of MI5 records on Kopkow in 2000, some attempt to gauge the value and degree of his collaboration is possible.
Biographical documentation of a search for traces of German emigration after 1933 During the National Socialist era, thousands of emigrants were deprived of their German citizenship. This is the ...first time that this state injustice has been documented for a group of people. Sources and research on the history of the legal profession in the "Third Reich", the genesis of the expatriation law of 14 July 1933 and the practice of bureaucratic persecution are dealt with in an introductory section. In addition, the consequential punishment of academic expatriation is demonstrated for the universities with law faculties. Affected by the punitive expatriation were hundreds of lawyers, among them half a dozen female lawyers. 610 short biographies recall both luminaries and unknown representatives of the profession. The lawyers who were declared "deprived of German citizenship" were, with few exceptions, Jews, stigmatised and persecuted as Jewish lawyers. Only a few of the lawyers expelled from their profession and homeland returned from exile. Among them were the lawyers Fritz Löwenthal, Rudolf Katz and Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, who were expatriated after 1933. Appointed to the Parliamentary Council, they voted for the adoption of the Basic Law on 8 May 1949. While Löwenthal retired from politics, Katz served as Minister of Justice in Kiel until 1950. In 1951, he was elected by the Bundesrat as a judge of the newly founded Federal Constitutional Court. Wagner had been a member of the German Bundestag since 1949. In 1961, he moved from Bonn to Karlsruhe, and succeeded Katz as a judge of the Second Senate and Vice-President of the constitutional body.
"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. "
Torture and democracy Rejali, Darius
2007., 20090608, 2009, 2007, 2008-01-01
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world’s leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late ...nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world’s oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods.
Richard Krebs (1905-1951), alias Jan Valtin, a été un marin communiste et syndiqué allemand. Son récit, Sans patrie, ni frontières, qu’il présente comme une autobiographie, est paru aux États-Unis en ...janvier 1941. Différents éléments constituant la trame du livre ne concordent pas avec l’objectivité historique. Dans cette autobiographie romancée, Valtin s’octroie une vie d’exception qui le dégage de l’anonymat du simple militant. Quel fut le rôle politique réel de Richard Krebs ? À la lecture des sources et des analyses qui ont été faites sur cet ouvrage, on remarque que Krebs mêla à sa propre expérience au sein de l’Internationale des gens de la mer (ISH), syndicat dirigé par le Profintern, des colportages et récits trouvés dans les journaux de l’époque ou des histoires entendues. L’exagération, qui est présente tout au long du récit, est-elle une forme narrative ou la transformation du narrateur en héros ? L’ouvrage de Jan Valtin doit être compris comme celui d’un marin allemand pris dans la tourmente de l’Allemagne des années vingt et trente. Son ascension et ses responsabilités sont à mettre en parallèle avec la création, le 3 octobre 1930, de l’Internationale des marins et dockers (IMD en français), à Hambourg. De communiste convaincu, Richard Krebs devint un agent de la Gestapo tandis que sombrait, avec l’avènement du régime nazi, l’Allemagne comme centre opérationnel du mouvement communiste mondial.
Germany encroached in Spain's internal affairs that followed providing military support the Spanish Civil War in the interest of pursuing National Socialist objectives through the establishment of an ...extensive apparatus of National Socialist organisations in Spain, including the Gestapo. Cooperation was officially established between Spanish and German police on 25 November 1937, which was extended to the Spanish political police on 31 July 1938, when they entered into a secret agreement with the German Gestapo for mutual assistance. The Gestapo trained the Spanish ordinary police and political police to contribute to maintaining the Franco regime in control of Spain, just as the Gestapo in Germany was charged with investigating and suppressing all forms of anti-state tendencies, and exported its methods and proceedings to Spain under the guise of contributing to the struggle against the alleged danger of worldwide communism. In addition to cooperation with Spanish police on suppressing dissent against the Franco regime, other functions related to serving the interests of National Socialist Germany, which deployed the Gestapo for various purposes while Spain constituted an extension of National Socialist Germany's sphere of influence. This was ensured through the Gestapo maintaining a presence in Spain until 1945.
Spying in God’s House Skiles, William S.
Church history and religious culture,
01/2018, Letnik:
98, Številka:
3/4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article examines the reports of the Gestapo and SD regarding pastors’ criticisms of the Nazi state and its ideology from the authority of the pulpit. My research reveals a degree of public ...opposition to the regime within the walls of the German churches, especially in terms of Nazi racial ideology and the persecution of Jews. While pastors did not incite resistance to the Nazi regime or conspire to overthrow its leadership, they at times sought to undermine the legitimacy of Nazi claims to truth. The sermons reveal concern among pastors that National Socialism and Christianity are at odds, or even mutually exclusive believe systems. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that pastors were often drawn into the cross-hairs of the Nazi secret police by asserting that Christianity must be the standard and measure of Nazi racial truth claims.
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