![Kosta Nikolić, Mit o partizanskom jugoslovenstvu [The Myth of Partisan Yugoslavism]. Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike, 2015, xvii+502 p.](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2015_22003.jpg)
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From the mid-eighteenth century to the Second World War the Opole Silesia was a part of the German state. As a consequence, female religious orders developed at that time were deeply rooted in German tradition. The defeat of the Third Reich in the Second World War resulted in the change of borders and the need to adapt to a situation in which German population became a national minority within the dominant Polish society. The aim of the article was to present the examples of behavior among nuns of nine orders, which operated for three years in the reality of the new state.
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Ukrainian nationalists tried to de-polonize the South-Eastern Borderlands by means of mass genocide and they achieved this goal to a great extent. That, however, puts them on a par with the criminal regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The author of this article describes the genocide of Polish inhabitants in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia committed by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiya Ukrayins’kykh Natsionalistiv, OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiya, UPA) between 1943 and 1944. These events in European history are not well-known.
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Propaganda article about the humanitarian attitude of the Romanians towards the Jewish population of our country in the years 1940-1944, The situation of the Jews in the period of the Second World War was very difficult everywhere
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Lieutenant-colonel Pondy was one of many pre-war army officers who joined the anti-Nazi resistance movement. The Germans announced the price on his head. To avoid the arrest, he preferred to flee across the border. He served in France, Great Britain, and the USSR. As a commander of the 3rd independent brigade he took part in fights in Slovakia and Moravia. After the war he became, among others, the commander of school for reserve officers. After communist coup d’etat in February 1948 he was dismissed from the army and degraded. Again, the arrest was imminent, so he emigrated to Great Britain. He was awarded dozens of Czechoslovak and foreign decorations and medals. In 2014 the Czech Minister of Defence presented him another high award, the State Defence Cross, in memoriam.
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This article is about the situation the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939 and the betting movement as a protest against the nazi occupation.
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Based on data quoted in German historiography / historiography of the Danube Swabians, as well as Yugoslav and Croatian historiography, historical publicist writing, press and archive materials, and especially based on individual name lists/victimologies, this paper presents numerical and nominal indicators of the casualties and victims, i.e. the killed, murdered, dead and missing German soldiers and civilians from Slavonski Brod and the surrounding Sava Valley in World War II and the postwar period. According to nominal indicators for Slavonski Brod and 21 settlements in the surrounding Sava Valley that have been ascertained so far, at least 106 Germans lost their lives during World War II and the postwar period. Primarily during World War II, but also during the postwar period, somewhat less than two thirds of the casualties (mainly men, but also women) perished (were killed and murdered, died, went missing) as members of military and/or paramilitary troops. The remaining persons specified (men, women and children) perished (were killed and murdered, died, went missing) as civilians during World War II and the postwar period. Approximately 15 civilians out of this number perished (died or were killed) during the postwar period, in 1945 and 1946 (mainly in camps). The paper is an attempt of an integral review of actual casualties among the Germans in Slavonski Brod and the surrounding Sava Valley in World War II and the postwar period, accompanied by a revision of data found in German and Croatian editions and papers which bring name lists of casualties in Slavonski Brod and the surrounding Sava Valley that are often incomplete and/or inconsistent.
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The study focuses on the eviction and persecution of Roman Catholic clergymen of German ethnicity in the Litoměřice diocese during the first wave of uncontrolled massive transfer following World War II. It is based on a list of missing, interned, evicted and otherwise persecuted Roman Catholic clergymen, compiled by the newly appointed Czech Vicar General Josef Kuška in the summer of 1945 based on the correspondence and various reports sent to Litoměřice. The list contains over 60 names of parsons, administrators, chaplains, religion teachers, catechists and other clergymen. The author cites examples of clergymen deployed on labour (mitigating war damage or harvesting crops in farms) who were held in detention for months. Most of them were later released without a court procedure because their detention was often groundless and there was no evidence for proper complaints to be lodged. The study focuses on the various forms of persecution of the clergymen and on the church’s attempts at preventing experienced German clergymen from leaving for Saxony, Bavaria, Rhineland and other regions of Germany and Austria. Some clergymen were evicted and transported across the border without being given the time to pack for the trip or hand their parishes and offices over to their successors or authorities. The exodus of Roman Catholic clergymen from the borderland part of the diocese caused many problems, personnel turnover and expansion of benefices, which made conducting masses and securing the vital statistics agenda more difficult. Parsons’ arrests were often followed by destruction and theft of both church and private property. Parish houses were often used as lodging for the army or confiscated for other purposes; some were even used for storing crops and farming production.
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Tension between the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior escalated from 1945 to 1948, stemming from the different social structures of their employees and different mechanisms of official practice. These conflicts on an official level grew into politics and formed the soil for an escalation of the disputes on a government level. Particularly strong aversion arose between the Extraordinary People’s Court (MLS) in Prague, the most influential retribution institution on a national scale, and the strongly political District State Security (StB) Office in Prague. The controversy stemmed from the fact that the Court investigated retribution cases independently of the police. Doing so, it found out that StB officers used illegal practices in certain cases. The Court also criticised the common practice of retaining persons in detention in excess of statutory periods. The controversy between the two authorities culminated in January 1947 with the decision of the Chair of the penal jury of the Extraordinary People’s Court Dr. Karel Černík to arrest two StB officers, Ladislav Čadek and Josef Volf. They were suspect of beating witnesses and tampering with case files. During the main hearing, the court publicly discussed police violence on the premises of the police section of the Regional Penal Court Prison in Prague in 1945. The employees of the District StB Office tried to cover up their colleagues’ deeds and sent a false witness, Jaroslava Ledererová to court. She was exposed and she confessed that her testimony was false. Still, media siding with the communist party accused the Court of trying to discredit the Ministry of the Interior and condemning the May 1945 uprising instead of Nazi collaborators.
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Soviet diplomacy interpreted Yugoslavia's position as a result of the process that happened from its origin and place and role in the new system of international relations guided by France and Great Britain. They thought - after the fall of France, Italy's entry into the war, and the growing German pressure on the Balkans - that Yugoslavia had found itself in a kind of foreign policy isolation and was forced to sign a series of unfavorable economic agreements with Germany. According to Soviet sources, the German influence was also manifested in the political sphere by the actions of prominently politically motivated politicians and journalists, as well as "numerous German agents." They viewed the policy carried out by the previous government as a "concession" policy, and its decision to join the Tripartite Pact as the result of German pressure and the inability to provide resolute resistance to German demands. The new government was seen as a conglomeration of representatives of various political ideas, still dominated by the supporters of the new course of Yugoslav foreign policy in relation to the members of the shadow government that found themselves in the new one. Soviet diplomacy worried about the position of Croatian politicians in the new government, since the leadership of the Croatian Peasant Party stood firmly in the position of joining Yugoslavia in the Tripartite Pact. The Soviets encouraged the measures taken by the Yugoslav Government to arrest politicians and journalists, remove pro-German officers from important command positions and mobilize the military. Regarding the further development of events, Soviet diplomacy estimated that the United Kingdom would strive to exploit the uprising in Belgrade in order to form a Balkan front, which would include Yugoslavia, Greece, and possibly Turkey with British support.
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Relations between townspeople and peasants in Serbia under German occupation in World War II were multifaceted, just as they had been during the interwar period. They were somewhat controversial during both periods. However, under the influence of war and the occupation, in addition to mutuality, dependence and cooperation, the controversy acquired a new form: animosity, bordering on outright “hostility”. War and the occupation partly changed the pre-war relations between towns and townspeople and farmers and peasants in the rural areas. Now it was the townsfolk and towns that felt that the farmers and the countryside had an advantage. This was partly true. For urban dwellers the countryside was not only a place of greater freedom of movement and a chance to escape the wartime hardships in towns, but a source of food as well. Unlike townspeople, the peasants did not have to buy their food, or at least not all of it. It was the availability food that gave them superiority over the people living in towns. There were many ways of showing this superiority: corruption, hiking prices, week-long absences from marketplaces, or the sale of only very perishable foodstuffs (fruits, some vegetables such as tomatoes or cabbage), and even preferring to put up with confiscation of foodstuffs by German or collaborationist authorities rather than selling them in towns at lower prices. As money transactions virtually lost their importance after 1943 due to high inflation, bartering farm products for clothes, footwear, or other industrial goods became the dominant form of trade. In order to tackle this situation, the authorities undertook various measures. The German authorities usually punished the offenders by fines, confiscation of food, or even imprisonment. The Serbian authorities tried to mitigate the increased resentment between towns and the countryside. They appealed to the peasants to show solidarity with the townsfolk during wartime. They also called on townsfolk, above all of civil servants, to go to the countryside systematically and acquaint themselves with the hardships of farm labor and help the peasants plough the soil and cultivate the land, even proposing longer summer vacations. They also tried to organize courses in popular education. At the same time, they punished dishonest peasants and published their names in the newspapers. However, the purchasing power of peasants was extremely low in 1943, reaching only 20% of the pre-war level. Except for food, they had to buy everything else (industrial goods - clothing, footwear, sugar, salt, gas etc., and also tools). The quantities and prices of what they could sell were below the prices of goods they had to buy on the gray market. Furthermore, working their small plots of land, Serbian peasants had to feed not only towns and townsfolk, but also supply the occupation forces, sell at fixed prices to the Serbian collaborationist authorities, contribute to the refugees (some 400,000), and pay taxes while feeding numerous resistance fighters at the same time. Under such conditions they could make some money only if they sold at high prices or bartered food for the products they needed. At the same time, the peasants showed solidarity too. There are numerous examples where they risked their lives to hide and feed people wanted by the government. This was especially the case with Jews. Sometimes whole villages took part in hiding them. There was a similar situation with members of the resistance movement. In any case, as in the other parts of Europe, between peasants and town-dwellers, between rural and urban areas during the war, there was, apart from relations of mutuality and inter-dependence, also ill-will with elements of “animosity”. But there was also cooperation with elements of solidarity – especially in cases when the people in towns were in physical danger.
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Aaron William Moore: Writing War. Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, London, 2013, 378 p.
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Bognár Zalán: Hadifogolytáborok és (hadi)fogolysors a Vörös Hadsereg által megszállt Magyarországon, 1944–1945. Kairosz Kiadó. Budapest, 2012.
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Czechoslovak citizens or expatriates served in almost all the allied armies during World War Two. However, it was hardly anywhere that they were allowed to have their own unit and use the national symbols. One of these exceptions was the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC), which provided security for the “settlement”, i.e. the area of the former British and American “concession” in the town centre under international administration. Although at first glance this might seem to be nothing more than an exotic episode, the existence of the Czechoslovak unit in China is an inseparable part of the history of our foreign resistance.
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This paper analyses the establishing of the Croatian Orthodox Church (HPC) and the campaign for its international recognition. The research is based on rarely used historical documents from collections of the Political Archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Berlin) and the Croatian State Archives (Zagreb). The main research subject is analyzed in the context of Nazi policies toward the Orthodox churches in the European South-East, and those have varied from case to case in accordance with Germany’s war goals and properties. The paper also sheds light on the efforts of the Serbian Orthodox Church to prevent the international recognition of the HPC as well as efforts to establish the Hungarian Orthodox Church (a process analogous to the HPC case in many details)
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The paper is an attempt to point to the “anatomy” of the Holocaust that occurred on the territory of German-occupied Serbia between 1941 and 1944 by analyzing: the dynamics of the Holocaust in Serbia, the location of the Jewish camp in Zemun and the Banjica Concentration camp, the motives that forced some members of the Jewish community to hide out and seek refuge on territories that were part of other occupation zones (Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian) where the attitude toward members of the Jewish people was somewhat more flexible.
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The paper brings new facts and analyses regarding the number and structure of political prisoners in Yugoslavia who were detained in labour camps and prisons as supporters of the Informbiro (“ibeovci”) from 1948 to 1956. Based on available documents from the archives of the secret police, today it is possible to determine the number as well as the ethnic, social and gender structure of the victims of the political persecution at Goli Otok and other camps. It is also possible to reconstruct very precisely the methodology of terror, the conditions of detention, and the role of the state institutions and parties in implementing persecution and conducting torture.
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World War II began upon Germany's incursion of Poland on 1 September 1939. When this war started, Turkey's basic concern was to successfully manage this difficult situation without any threat to its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Therefore during this tempestuous six-year war the Turkish government have made great efforts to follow the politics of balance that would exclude her out of this war and also took great care and attention to take the necessary precautions against any possible attack on his own land despite the intense pressure of the warring parties. The failure of the Nazi-Soviet bargain in November 1940 was one of the incidents that severely affected the pace of war. Turkey, likewise, being extremely concerned about both the German and Soviet intentions, took defensive measures against any invasive attempt to be directed at its territories under priority threat–Thrace and the eastern territories bordering the USSR: began procuring the needs of the army: and tried hard to avoid any agreement that would lure her directly into the waging war. To this end, she signed agreements and treaties of nonaggression and of security commitments depending on the developments between the blocks throughout the war, in order to secure its borders. When World War II ended upon conclusion of unconditional surrender agreements by Germany and Japan, Turkey saved herself from the destructive effects of the war by staying out of the war. However, as the balance of powers in Europe changed in favor of the USSR upon the defeat of Germany, Turkey faced an even greater danger evolving in a different manner. This article aims at redefining the intensive pressures the Axis and the Allied Powers exerted on Turkey for her entry into the war and the resistance Turkey displayed against these pressures, within the framework of Turkish foreign policy. Furthermore, the impacts of these policies on the course of war, and the consequences for Turkey will be assessed.
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The documents from the period between 1945-1949 of the Romanian gendarmerie are accessible to researchers at the Harghita/Hargita branch of the Romanian National Archives, containing various observations and reports on the population. These documents offer the possibility to gain insights into the way in which the gendarmerie saw Odorhei/ Udvarhely County in the post-war years. One of the most interesting collection of documents consists in the secret reports on the irredentism of the local Hungarian population, documenting every activity and manifestation that could be interpreted as a potential threat to the Romanian state.
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