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In this paper, marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the authors have for the first time processed information about 455 Axis power soldiers, who had – between April 1941 and March 1947 – been buried in the Varaždin city cemetery. Given that the main historiographic source of this topic is the Graveyard book 1940–1949, it enables an extensive analysis. The paper deals with the following data (presented in graphs): the number and ratio of Axis powers soldiers buried by year; their marital status; age at death; military units they served in; state of origin; reasons of death and where they died. As a contribution to the work, the authors added two tables: a list of units to which buried Axis powers soldiers belonged; and a transcript of Axis powers soldiers in the Varaždin cemetery.
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Review of: Emily Greble, Saraybosna, 1941-1945: Hitler Avrupası’nda Müslümanlar, Hıristiyanlar ve Yahudiler, Çeviren: Ebru Sürmeli, Tarihçi Kitabevi, İstanbul 2016, 512 s., ISBN: 978-605-4534-88-3.
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Dans l’état dirigé d’une manière strictement centralisée qu’était l’État indépendant de Croatie (par la suite : NDH pour Nezavisna država Hrvatska), le Poglavnik (le Dirigeant) Ante Pavelić – en tant que personnage central de la totalité étatique – était l’homme phare d’une succession de résultats imposants de cette politique culturelle et éducative. Selon lui, les Croates appartenaient à « la communauté des dirigeants du monde » et avaient face à eux « de plus grandes responsabilités et devoirs que la plupart des autres peuples à travers le monde ».
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It is the intention of this article to objectively present the motifs and the out standing socio-cultural climate during the first years of the World War II, which determined the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, Aristides Sousa Mendes, a Righteous Among the Nations, to disobey the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs regulations by issuing thousands of visas, free of charge, to mainly Jewish war refugees in order to facilitate their flight from Nazi occupied Europe, using Lisbon as their departure harbor.
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The anti-Polish purges carried out by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN-B) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which are known in Polish history as the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, claimed the lives of about 100,000 people. These purges were among the bloodiest episodes in Poland’s twentieth-century history and among the major mass killings of civilians during World War II. Moreover, they were committed by an irregular partisan formation. In terms of scale, the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia can be compared to the mass pacification of Belarusian villages by German police formations and the massacres of Serbs by Croatian nationalists.Historical research indicates that, regardless of whether the objective of the OUN and the UPA was to exterminate or ‘only’ to expel the Poles, implementation of their plan must have assumed the killing of the Polish population, or at least part of it, in the disputed areas. Therefore, further research conducted in Poland confirmed the conviction about the genocidal nature of the UPA’s activities. Jędrzej Giertych was probably the first Pole to use the term ‘genocide’ in this context. He used it in the London-based literary weekly ‘Wiadomości’ [News] in 1951. In the second half of the 1990s, this opinion became dominant among scholars dealing with the issues in question. Similar conclusions were reached by prosecutors of the Institute of National Remembrance. It seems that their evaluation could not be different in the light of the definition of genocide specified in Article 118 of the Polish Criminal Code.Polish scholars argue, however, whether the term ‘genocide’ should be used in reference to all of the activities conducted by the OUN and UPA in the years 1939–1947, or only those conducted in the period from 9 February 1943 to 18 May 1945, known as the anti-Polish action (mass murders). They also argue whether the UPA’s actions were typical genocide, or should be considered as a specific example of cruel genocide (genocidum atrox) due to their ferocity. Some scholars are inclined to recognize the UPA’s ‘anti-Polish campaign’ as ethnic cleansing rather than genocide, but the scale of the crimes against the Polish population seems to undermine this opinion.The author suggests that the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia should be recognized as ‘genocidal ethnic cleansing’, or ‘ethnic cleansing that meets the definition of genocide’, as the terms indicate that from the very beginning perpetrators committed ethnic cleansing in the regions with intent to conduct mass murder of civilians.
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Due to the very limited use of the term ‘genocide’ in scientific discourse, researchers did not carry out broad methodological considerations on the legitimacy of its use in relation to the occupation policy of the Third Reich against the Poles during World War II. Historians often conducted their research based on other theoretical models (often those that were popular at that time). For example, they studied the policy of the Third Reich in terms of the racial theory, social engineering, ethnic cleansing, total war or in a classical way, i.e. they examined various aspects of the Nazi occupation without referring to models and theories. Interestingly, many authors presented the problem in a manner similar to that resulting from Lemkin’s definition of genocide. In other words, they described the phenomenon, but without using the term ‘genocide’. They used it, however, in reference to the Holocaust. Perhaps, they did not apply it in reference to other nations due to the fact that almost the entire Jewish population was annihilated in the areas occupied by the German Third Reich. The term ‘genocide’ appeared with regard to the German policy against the Poles mainly in the colloquial sense, thereby reducing its conceptual content to mass murder. The discussions on genocide have entered a new phase in Poland. The aim of this article is to reflect on the possibility of using the term ‘genocide’ to describe the German policy against the Poles in the context of the definition created by Raphael Lemkin and the UN Convention of 1948.
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The objective of this paper is to show how the filmmaker’s genre of choiceshapes the main discourse of the film. The author compares Helke Sander’sdocumentary Liberators Take Liberties (1991-1992) and Max Farberbock’snarrative feature A Woman in Berlin (2008) both dealing with the dramaticeffect of the end of WWII, in particular with the instances of Germanwomen having been raped by the Allied troops, a theme first publicized inthe anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin (1953). There is a clear connectionbetween the book and the two films, but if Sander focuses on the rape itself andon the extraordinary female experience of war, Farberbock is more concernedwith cross-national revenge. The author looks closer at the genre elements,particularly at the genres of the diary, the (feminist) documentary, and thenarrative film. Then, the author draws some parallels between the HelkeSander film and the diary A Woman of Berlin and discusses the documentarieswithin the feminist framework inspired by Sander’s accomplishments.
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This article analyzes the imagery shared by interwar Bessarabian peasants about their Jewish neighbors and traces the role that this imagery played in determining gentiles’ attitudes or behavior during the summer of 1941. It is built on a vast array of sources, including, over three hundred testimonies of Jewish survivors, and archival materials studied at the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. During the start of the war, civilians had brief interregnum allowing them to act on their own, unrestrained by local authorities. At this time, robberies in Jewish towns and villages occurred on an unprecedented scale across the region, with open involvement of numerous groups of civilians; sometimes these robberies were accompanied by assaults and murders. This paper argues that the plunder of Bessarabian Jewry was something more complex than war banditry. For these peasants, the robbery of Jewish goods represented a ‘natural’ way to balance what they perceived to be an unjust economic and social situation that had lasted too long and which could finally be resolved. During the summer of 1941 the peasants of Bessarabia undertook, on their own initiative and for their own benefit, a mass plunder which had the effect of expropriating property from their Jewish neighbors. Men, women, and even children took part in this “mass operation.” The plunder recast the economic topography of Bessarabian society, anticipating the actions of the Romanian state, which joined this process by legally nationalizing all property and assets owned by Jews in Bessarabia on September 4, 1941.
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The objective of the article is to recall the enormity of human suffering related to the forcible relocation of population at the close of and after World War II in Central Europe. The tragedy of World War II did not end with the signing of peace treaties. On the contrary, for many people it was the beginning of flight, exile,and, finally, forcible relocation. The victors were dealing without mercy not only with the defeated but also with the allies and own citizens, violating the regulations of international treaties. Today we should remember about those horrible events, which only recently have started to be discussed loudly so that the same mistakes leading to the suffering and death of many human beings are not made in the future.
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In several last years there have been many publications concerning the knowledge and attitudes of Germans in relation to the Holocaust. The author deals with the issue what the civilian population and the military troops stationed at that time in Warsaw knew about the Holocaust. The occupants quickly learned about the massacres of Jews. Precise information spread at a rapid pace, and consequently each of the occupants was well informed of the Holocaust. Very few Germans stationing in Warsaw condemned crimes committed against the Jews. There was consensus on the need of extermination of Jews, some reservations aroused only form in which the genocide was carrying on. Open violence intertwined with its general acceptance, which led to a progressive callousness.
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This texts talks about three single, uneducated Polish women living alone (a dressmaker, servant, and kitchen worker), who during the war sheltered Jews in their apartments in Warsaw and Drohobych. All three of them helped the Jews for money, but – as far as we know – none of them resorted to financial blackmail or any other major abuse of a financial character. Nevertheless, the war circumstances became an opportunity for them to fulfill their emotional needs, otherwise impossible to satisfy. They derived pleasure from having power and control over another person and their actions towards the Jews they sheltered also bore traces of a class revenge. The authors analyze the relations between the helpers and helps mostly on the basis of Jerzy Feliks Urman’s diary and memoirs of Karol Rotgeber and Calek Perechodnik. Aside from the sociological theory of exchange systems, another useful tool facilitating comprehension of the Polish women’s behavior and their interactions with the Jews in hiding, which are described in those texts, is Erich Fromm’s concept of human cruelty as a highly complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to openly violent actions.
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The author deconstructs Mirosław Tryczyk’s monograph entitled Miasta śmierci. Sąsiedzkie pogromy Żydów [Towns of death. Pogroms of Jews organized by their neighbors]. This book on the anti-Jewish violence inflicted by Poles in the Białystok region in 1941 was received as revealing and innovative. It gained prominence in the media and a favorable reception in the intellectual milieus, and eminent scholars opined it as excellent. Eventually, however, it proved a cognitively reproductive work lacking professional research methodology and formulating theses unable to withstand scholarly criticism. Using the case of Tryczyk’s book’s popularity, Persak inquires about the condition of scholarly criticism and the quality of the public debate in Poland.
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This article talks about Eleazar Grünbaum, a son of Izaak Grünbaum – an MP, journalist, and famous Zionist activist. In 1929 Eleazar was arrested as a young communist, but thanks to his father’s connections he received a lenient prison sentence and he was released in 1931. He then went on to study in France. During the Spanish Civil War, he fought on the Republic’s side. After the outbreak of the war he joined General Sikorski’s Polish army and then became a communist underground activist. In 1941 he was arrested and then deported to Auschwitz. He became a kapo in the camp and after the war was tried for torturing his fellow inmates. Thanks to his father’s endeavors he managed to avoid punishment and immigrated to Palestine. He died in combat against the Arabs in 1948. There is still controversy in Israel as to whether he was a cruel camp tormentor or whether he simply tried to survive. According to the author, the years Grünbaum spent in camps can be regarded as a masterpiece of survival.
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