V nucené vojenské službě třetí říše
Forced into military service of the Third Reich

Summary/Abstract: Stroh, Frédéric and Peter M. Quadflieg (eds.): L’incorporation de force dans les territoires annexés par le IIIe Reich 1939–1945 / Die Zwangsrekrutierung in den vom Dritten Reich annektierten Gebieten. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2016, 228 pp., ISBN 978-2-86820-536-0. The bilingual French-German collection is a product of international cooperation of historians studying the topic of forced service in German armed forces in territories occupied (or annexed) by the Third Reich during WW2. After a brief introduction of the topic, the reviewer points at the fact that the service of members of one’s own nation in the German occupation army was, regardless of its context and circumstances, in contradiction with heroic myths about the nationwide resistance against the occupying forces, which emerged in various liberated countries after the war. This was also the reason why such memories recollections were being forced from the collective memory of national communities; the interest of historians in the topic was marginal, and for a long time limited only to their own national communities. The reviewed publication demonstrates possibilities offered by international cooperation or a transnational perspective. The authors succeeded in comparing the situation in various occupied territories (France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovenia), and in showing that, however the forced service in German armed forces was common for different territories, its circumstances and manifestations were far from identical; they have thus managed to elevate the perception of the topic to a transnational level.

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