Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War

Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War
Author: Marina Cattaruzza
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2012-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 085745739X

A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This “territorial revisionism” came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

Occupation in the East

Occupation in the East
Author: Stephan Lehnstaedt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785333240

Following their occupation by the Third Reich, Warsaw and Minsk became home to tens of thousands of Germans. In this exhaustive study, Stephan Lehnstaedt provides a nuanced, eye-opening portrait of the lives of these men and women, who constituted a surprisingly diverse population—including everyone from SS officers to civil servants, as well as ethnically German city residents—united in its self-conception as a “master race.” Even as they acclimated to the daily routines and tedium of life in the East, many Germans engaged in acts of shocking brutality against Poles, Belarusians, and Jews, while social conditions became increasingly conducive to systematic mass murder.

The 'Final Solution' in Riga

The 'Final Solution' in Riga
Author: Andrej Angrick
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857456016

"With its ... over thousand] detailed and expansive footnotes drawing on twenty-four different archive collections in eight countries and three continents and an enormous secondary literature, this is one of the best researched regional studies of the Holocaust ever to appear. It is helped by the fact that the authors are also always so cognizant of what was happening elsewhere in Europe at the same time and thus frequently draw out the relationship between seemingly haphazard local decisions and trends across Europe...Indeed, the way in which the book 'makes sense' of complex institutional behavior is at times breathtaking...The precision in the detail and the scope of the contextualization make this one of the more important works to appear on the Holocaust in recent years." - English Historical Review "This very readable and well documented study fills an important gap in the Holocaust literature: it offers insight into the microcosm reflecting the entire terrifying and murderous scenario of the SS State." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung " This] excellent study of the Riga ghetto, informed by Eastern European sources and available now in English translation, provides a precise and ghastly description of what the liquidation] meant for the local Jews. With laudable thoroughness, they describe the organized shooting of Jews, the first form of industrial-scale mass murder." - The New York Review of Books Ghetto, forced labor camp, concentration camp: All of the elements of the National Socialists' policies of annihilation were to be found in Riga. This first analysis of the Riga ghetto and the nearby camps of Salaspils and Jungfernhof addresses all aspects of German occupation policy during the Second World War. Drawing upon a broad array of sources that includes previously inaccessible Soviet archives, postwar criminal investigations, and trial records of alleged perpetrators, and the records of the Society of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto, the authors have produced an in-depth study of the Riga ghetto that never loses sight of the Latvian capital's place within the overall design of Nazi policy and the all-of-Europe dimension of the Holocaust. Andrej Angrick, a native of Berlin, is a historian, consultant, and researcher affiliated with the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. He has published numerous articles about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and co-edited Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (1999) and Die Gestapo nach 1945: Karrieren, Konflikte, Konstruktionen (with Klaus-Michael Mallmann, 2009), as well as Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der s dlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943 (2003). Peter Klein, a Berlin-based historian, consultant, and researcher affiliated with the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture, has published widely on the Holocaust and German occupation in various parts of central and eastern Europe during the Second World War. Klein was the editor of Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/1942 (1997) and a co-editor of Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (1999). He is the author of "Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt" (2009). Ray Brandon is a freelance translator, historian, and researcher based in Berlin. A former editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, English Edition, he is co-editor, with Wendy Lower, of The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization.

Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II

Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II
Author: Mirna Zakić
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2017-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 131677306X

This is an in-depth study of the ethnic German minority in the Serbian Banat (Southeast Europe) and its experiences under German occupation in World War II. Mirna Zakić argues that the Banat Germans exercised great agency within the constraints imposed on them by Nazi ideology, with its expectations that ethnic Germans would collaborate with the invading Nazis. The book examines the incentives that the Nazis offered to collaboration and social dynamics within the Banat German community - between their Nazified leadership and the rank and file - as well as the various and ever-more damning forms collaboration took. The Banat Germans provided administrative and economic aid to the Nazi war effort, and took part in Nazi military operations in Yugoslav lands, the Holocaust and Aryanization. They ruled the Banat on the Nazis' behalf between 1941 and 1944, yet their wartime choices led ultimately to their disenfranchisement and persecution following the Nazis' defeat.

Britain and Danubian Europe in the Era of World War II, 1933-1941

Britain and Danubian Europe in the Era of World War II, 1933-1941
Author: Andras Becker
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2021-03-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030675106

This book is a study of British official attitudes towards the Danubian countries (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia) from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to the year 1941, a period that marked serious but fruitless British political and economic efforts to unite this unruly part of Europe against Nazi ascendancy. Set against an international backdrop of regional revanchist, revisionist and irredentist tendencies, particularly in Hungary and Bulgaria, the book explores how these movements affected international relations in the region as they aimed to overturn the territorial order set down in Versailles following the Great War to restore the status quo of a more glorious national past. Offering fresh insights into the British-East Central and South East European relationship, the book charts the shifts in British official policy towards Danubian Europe, amidst competing regional nationalisms and the sudden and abrupt shifts in British global priorities during the early part of World War II.

The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 2, Politics and Ideology

The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 2, Politics and Ideology
Author: Richard Bosworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 718
Release: 2017-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781108406406

War is often described as an extension of politics by violent means. With contributions from twenty-eight eminent historians, Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War examines the relationship between ideology and politics in the war's origins, dynamics and consequences. Part I examines the ideologies of the combatants and shows how the war can be understood as a struggle of words, ideas and values with the rival powers expressing divergent claims to justice and controlling news from the front in order to sustain moral and influence international opinion. Part II looks at politics from the perspective of pre-war and wartime diplomacy as well as examining the way in which neutrals were treated and behaved. The volume concludes by assessing the impact of states, politics and ideology on the fate of individuals as occupied and liberated peoples, collaborators and resistors, and as British and French colonial subjects.

German History Unbound

German History Unbound
Author: Glenn Penny
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316510417

Offers a new, polycentric vision of modern German history, focusing on the great plurality of Germans across Europe and around the world.

Making Minorities History

Making Minorities History
Author: Matthew Frank
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2017-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 019101771X

Making Minorities History examines the various attempts made by European states over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, under the umbrella of international law and in the name of international peace and reconciliation, to rid the Continent of its ethnographic misfits and problem populations. It is principally a study of the concept of 'population transfer' - the idea that, in order to construct stable and homogeneous nation-states and a peaceful international order out of them, national minorities could be relocated en masse in an orderly way with minimal economic and political disruption as long as there was sufficient planning, bureaucratic oversight, and international support in place. Tracing the rise and fall of the concept from its emergence in the late 1890s through its 1940s zenith, and its geopolitical and historiographical afterlife during the Cold War, Making Minorities History explores the historical context and intellectual milieu in which population transfer developed from being initially regarded as a marginal idea propagated by a handful of political fantasists and extreme nationalists into an acceptable and a 'progressive' instrument of state policy, as amenable to bourgeois democracies and Nobel Peace Prize winners as it was to authoritarian regimes and fascist dictators. In addition to examining the planning and implementation of population transfers, and in particular the diplomatic negotiations surrounding them, Making Minorities History looks at a selection of different proposals for the resettlement of minorities that came from individuals, organizations, and states during this era of population transfer.

Map Men

Map Men
Author: Steven Seegel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2018-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 022643852X

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps. Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments. At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.

Stalin's War

Stalin's War
Author: Sean McMeekin
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 818
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1541672771

A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history. World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.