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Political crimes constitute a specific “set” of prohibited acts undertaken by the perpetrator in specific historical and political conditionalities. In the Criminal Penal Code of 19 April 1969 and in the Penal Code of 6 June 1997, the legislator distinguished the factual states circumstances of acts directed against the State that bear the features of punishable acts of a political nature. After 1944/1945, the concept of “counter-revolutionary crime” was developed in the doctrine of communist criminal law. However, after the breakthrough of 1989, in the new social and political reality, it was necessary for the legislator to respond to the acts committed in the previous system, consistent with the legal norms of that time, but classified under new legal and political circumstances as crimes committed on behalf of state authorities or as state crimes. Thus, individual acts, in different circumstances, had a certain political potential and should be treated as political crimes.
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The article is dedicated to the reception of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s academic achievements in German science and journalism during the first third of the 20th century, in the years of World War I and the interwar period. The authors emphasize that German scientists were generally honest about the achievements and activity of the Ukrainian historian. Despite their scepticism towards M. Hrushevsky’s Anti-Normanism ideology, they followed closely the emergence of his major scientific works. In the reception of the Ukrainian historian’s work, the academic motivation definitely dominated over the political one, although the latter indirectly appeared in many statements devoted to him. The authors prove the vivid presence of Hrushevsky’s thought in the German Slavic discourse of the period.
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The article presents the history of the Catholic weekly “Ład” and the Christian Democrat circles gathered around it in 1988–1993. It presents the main ideological disputes of the Christian Democrats at the time of the political transformation, organizational transformations and their attitude to events on the political scene. The aim of the article is also to indicate the reasons for the defeat of the traditional Christian Democratic parties, which were unable to maintain their position on the political scene, as did the weekly “Ład”. The text argues that this was due both to objective reasons, which made it impossible for the parties referring to the interwar traditions to gain a strong position, and to the fragmentation of the Christian Democratic movement and the Polish right in general, as well as to the negative public perception of the Solidarity governments. “Ład” and the Christian Democrats proposed interesting political and economic solutions, but they were unable to take a clear position in the political conflict. Many of their ideas did not arouse public interest, while those that had the potential to become famous were “intercepted” by other parties. Therefore, the magazine and its milieu remained an interesting element of the history of Polish political thought, but due to the fact that the Polish political scene was determined by other issues they did not manage to break through with their moderate program.
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The Roman Catholic parish in Nawarzyce (the Świętokrzyskie Province, the Kielce Diocese) has a medieval origins (first mentioned in 1345). There is situated a brick church of St. Andrew the Apostle and St. Anna, built in the mid-seventeenth century as the foundation of the abbot of Jędrzejów, Bernard Łaszewski. The decoration of the temple is mostly from around 1780 and is in the Baroque and Rococo style. The interior hides several unique monuments, such as a stone bowl-shaped baptismal font, supported on the backs of lions, and a wooden boatshaped pulpit supported by four naked mermaids. The document being the basis for below edition is stored in the Diocesan Archives in Kielce. This manuscript has not yet been published and exploited to a greater extent by historians. It is valuable because it contains many interesting, hitherto unknown facts about the church in Lubcza, destroyed by Calvinists during the Reformation, as well as the parish itself – incorporated into the Nawarzyce parish in 1690.
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Source records concerning the history of Kutno in the period prior to the end of the eighteenth century are scarce. Moreover, only a few of them mention information about the manor located there, and if they do so, they usually only confirm its existence. Exceptions include three records from 1503 (or 1502) and 1695, but in their case too the amount of information provided differs.The first of the three records tells us that the Voivode of Rawa, Andrzej of Kutno, upon deciding about the future division of his goods and possessions between his sons, appointed the central seat of one of the holdings to be half of the town of Kutno with the entire manor house or fortalice (curia seu fortalicio), that is, a residential-defensive building.The second source (1695) gives us a lengthy description of the manor and grange complex located on the banks of the river Ochnia, made a few years after it was taken over by the Zamoyskis from the Kucienskis family. The third record (also 1695) complements this with information related to the renovation and building works conducted here at the end of the seventeenth century.The Kutno manor and grange complex at the time consisted of a number of old buildings, most of them in need of renovation or under reconstruction, only rarely new ones, almost all of them wooden; they were partly surrounded by a fence and a palisade made of poles and beams. Within this area stood the old, partly rebuilt, one-storey manor with corner extensions. Its rectangular corpus housed five or six chambers laid out in three (at least partly) two-bay lanes. At its corners were four extensions, one of which had a second storey. The porch located at the main entrance was also raised. As a result, the entirety of the structure recalled forms known from, among others, the projects of Battista Gisleni and Tylman van Gameren. The other residential building possibly served the needs of the leaseholders of the goods. It housed five chambers laid out in three, partly two-bay lanes. Next to them, within the grange yard were two residential-farm buildings (budowanie kuchenne and budowanie folwarczne), one industrial farm building (a brewery with ozdownia, where malt was dried) and a few others serving as strictly farming-related buildings. The latter included a granary; a vaguely described building housing a stable; a cowshed that could have a single large building housing an oxshed and seven pigpens or a complex of separate buildings grouped around a small, internal yard; and such a complex of a threshing floor with a shed and two barns.The only brick building within the grange perimeter, described as zamek stary na kopcu murowany pusty, w oknach niektórych kraty są żelazne (an old castle on a mound, made of bricks and empty, with iron bars in some windows), differed markedly from all these buildings. This building, unused then, was arguably a brick defensive manor raised in the sixteenth century, situated on a mound that may have been a relic of the old fortalicium.A few other buildings that belonged to the manor were located beyond the main yard of the complex. Four of them were industrial farm buildings (second brewery, horse mill, brickworks, watermill), the fifth one was a service building (inn). The first three were adjacent to the grange, whereas the fourth one was situated west of the city, at some distance from the grange, near a pond on the river Ochnia, and the last one was in the centre (?) of the town.We do not know what happened to this complex later, but there are no grounds to establish an exact date for its dismantling. It is possible that the latter was related to the construction of a new manor house, surviving to this day (though extensively rebuilt), in the nearby Gierałty in the second half of the 18th or early 19th century, and to the construction of new grange buildings north of town.
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The article presents the history of creation and development of hand grenades as infantry weapons. The most interesting designs of Polish grenades from the interwar period and the German occupation are described. Both prototype designs from the time of occupation, which were the basis for mass production and on a nearly industrial scale, as well as self-made designs that did not meet the conditions for mass production and whose features, due to a very small number of surviving copies, are poorly known, are described.
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In this paper, we will try to point out that the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War served as a perfect pretext for the re-establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. The Holocaust, as the biggest Nazi war crime, served as a “trigger event” for the Jews to finally rebuild their country in the Middle East. International circumstances and increasing knowledge about the suffering of the Jews were constantly being used by the founders of the modern Jewish state. We will see that Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was more than willing to seek financial reparations from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) for Nazi crimes to consolidate his country’s economy and military strength. We will also prove that even though decades have passed since independence, the Holocaust was widely being used as propaganda to create and justify the Israeli policy towards “hostile” Arab states.
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