Confessions of a Home Army Executioner

Confessions of a Home Army Executioner PDF Author: Roger Moorhouse
Publisher: Greenhill Books
ISBN: 1805000306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book

Book Description
“This book is moral dynamite. It reveals not only what men can do in war but also what war can do to men.” – Norman Davies, historian and academic Stefan D?mbski joined the Polish Home Army in 1942 when he was just 16 years old. The Home Army formed the military wing of the Polish Underground, the resistance movement established to fight the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War. During this occupation, the Home Army passed death sentences on hundreds of individuals – both Nazi enemies and colluding Polish compatriots. As one of the few Home Army members who volunteered to carry out these death sentences, the young D?mbski quickly became a seasoned executioner. In July 1945, D?mbski was transferred to the West and ended up in the United States where he remained until his death in 1993. In his final years, D?mbski recorded his story in fascinating, shocking detail. After his death, his memoirs came into the possession of his niece and nephew before eventually arriving at the KARTA Foundation in 2005. Initially published in the original Polish, Sobieralski’s translation of D?mbski’s records now gives English-language readers a hugely important insight into the mind of this seasoned executioner. Readers are made aware of the facts and actions of D?mbski’s life, but are witness to the lifelong moral struggle that accompanied these actions and led him to reflect on ideas of heroism, patriotism, guilt and on the very act of war itself.

Confessions of a Home Army Executioner

Confessions of a Home Army Executioner PDF Author: Roger Moorhouse
Publisher: Greenhill Books
ISBN: 1805000306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book

Book Description
“This book is moral dynamite. It reveals not only what men can do in war but also what war can do to men.” – Norman Davies, historian and academic Stefan D?mbski joined the Polish Home Army in 1942 when he was just 16 years old. The Home Army formed the military wing of the Polish Underground, the resistance movement established to fight the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War. During this occupation, the Home Army passed death sentences on hundreds of individuals – both Nazi enemies and colluding Polish compatriots. As one of the few Home Army members who volunteered to carry out these death sentences, the young D?mbski quickly became a seasoned executioner. In July 1945, D?mbski was transferred to the West and ended up in the United States where he remained until his death in 1993. In his final years, D?mbski recorded his story in fascinating, shocking detail. After his death, his memoirs came into the possession of his niece and nephew before eventually arriving at the KARTA Foundation in 2005. Initially published in the original Polish, Sobieralski’s translation of D?mbski’s records now gives English-language readers a hugely important insight into the mind of this seasoned executioner. Readers are made aware of the facts and actions of D?mbski’s life, but are witness to the lifelong moral struggle that accompanied these actions and led him to reflect on ideas of heroism, patriotism, guilt and on the very act of war itself.

Confessions of a Home Army Executioner

Confessions of a Home Army Executioner PDF Author: Roger Moorhouse
Publisher: Greenhill Books
ISBN: 9781805000280
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
"This book is moral dynamite. It reveals not only what men can do in war but also what war can do to men." - Norman Davies, historian and academic Stefan Dąmbski joined the Polish Home Army in 1942 when he was just 16 years old. The Home Army formed the military wing of the Polish Underground, the resistance movement established to fight the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War. During this occupation, the Home Army passed death sentences on hundreds of individuals - both Nazi enemies and colluding Polish compatriots. As one of the few Home Army members who volunteered to carry out these death sentences, the young Dąmbski quickly became a seasoned executioner. In July 1945, Dąmbski was transferred to the West and ended up in the United States where he remained until his death in 1993. In his final years, Dąmbski recorded his story in fascinating, shocking detail. After his death, his memoirs came into the possession of his niece and nephew before eventually arriving at the KARTA Foundation in 2005. Initially published in the original Polish, Sobieralski's translation of Dąmbski's records now gives English-language readers a hugely important insight into the mind of this seasoned executioner. Readers are made aware of the facts and actions of Dąmbski's life, but are witness to the lifelong moral struggle that accompanied these actions and led him to reflect on ideas of heroism, patriotism, guilt and on the very act of war itself.

Conversations with an Executioner

Conversations with an Executioner PDF Author: Kazimierz Moczarski
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
"Relying largely on Stroop's own words ... Moczarski recreates the chain of events which caused a nondescript German youth, the son of a provincial policeman, to rise to the top of the Nazi hierarchy; become part of the inner circle of Hitler, Himmler, and Göring; wield ... power in Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, and Greece; and mastermind Warsaw's "Final solution"--Jacket.

The Katyn Diaries

The Katyn Diaries PDF Author: Marek Sobieralski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Execution sites
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Get Book

Book Description
"Denied by the Soviets, and hushed up by Poland's allies. The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia that was carried out by the Soviet Union's secret police - the NKVD - in April and May 1940. Mass graves were discovered in 1942, and with the bodies there were numerous Polish artefacts such as letters, diaries, photographs and identification tags. There were packed into crates and evacuated westward in 1944. There was a small crate, into which were placed twenty-two diaries and personal notes. Four copies of these items were made soon afterwards in Krakow, and the Polish Home Army then delivered its transcripts to the Polish government in exile, in London. Presented for you here are English translations of twelve of those diaries, which open a window into the individual and personal tragedies of these very different individuals. They give us an insight into their everyday lives in captivity, and the very real and very human emotions and hardships they experienced during what was undoubtedly a difficult and testing time." --Page 4 of cover.

Confessions of a Mask

Confessions of a Mask PDF Author: Yukio Mishima
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811201186
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
The story of a man coming to terms with his homosexuality in traditional Japanese society has become a modern classic.

In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood PDF Author: Truman Capote
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0812994388
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book

Book Description
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.

Oil, Politics and Violence

Oil, Politics and Violence PDF Author: Max Siollun
Publisher: Algora Publishing
ISBN: 087586709X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book

Book Description
"An insider traces the details of hope and ambition gone wrong in the Giant of Africa, Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. When it gained independence from Britain in 1960, hopes were high that, with mineral wealth and over 140 million people, the most educated workforce in Africa, Nigeria would become Africa s first superpower and a stabilizing democratic influence in the region. However, these lofty hopes were soon dashed and the country lumbered from crisis to crisis, with the democratic government eventually being overthrown in a violent military coup in January 1966. From 1966 until 1999, the army held onto power almost uninterrupted under a succession of increasingly authoritarian military governments and army coups. Military coups and military rule (which began as an emergency aberration) became a seemingly permanent feature of Nigerian politics. The author names names, and explores how British influence aggravated indigenous rivalries. He shows how various factions in the military were able to hold onto power and resist civil and international pressure for democratic governance by exploiting the country's oil wealth and ethnic divisions to its advantage."--Publisher's description.

The Way of the Knife

The Way of the Knife PDF Author: Mark Mazzetti
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101617942
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
“The new American way of war is here, but the debate about it has only just begun. In The Way of the Knife, Mr Mazzetti has made a valuable contribution to it.” —The Economist A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s riveting account of the transformation of the CIA and America’s special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world’s dark spaces: the new American way of war The most momentous change in American warfare over the past decade has taken place away from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the corners of the world where large armies can’t go. The Way of the Knife is the untold story of that shadow war: a campaign that has blurred the lines between soldiers and spies and lowered the bar for waging war across the globe. America has pursued its enemies with killer drones and special operations troops; trained privateers for assassination missions and used them to set up clandestine spying networks; and relied on mercurial dictators, untrustworthy foreign intelligence services, and proxy armies. This new approach to war has been embraced by Washington as a lower risk, lower cost alternative to the messy wars of occupation and has been championed as a clean and surgical way of conflict. But the knife has created enemies just as it has killed them. It has fomented resentments among allies, fueled instability, and created new weapons unbound by the normal rules of accountability during wartime. Mark Mazzetti tracks an astonishing cast of characters on the ground in the shadow war, from a CIA officer dropped into the tribal areas to learn the hard way how the spy games in Pakistan are played to the chain-smoking Pentagon official running an off-the-books spy operation, from a Virginia socialite whom the Pentagon hired to gather intelligence about militants in Somalia to a CIA contractor imprisoned in Lahore after going off the leash. At the heart of the book is the story of two proud and rival entities, the CIA and the American military, elbowing each other for supremacy. Sometimes, as with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, their efforts have been perfectly coordinated. Other times, including the failed operations disclosed here for the first time, they have not. For better or worse, their struggles will define American national security in the years to come.

Stalin's Loyal Executioner

Stalin's Loyal Executioner PDF Author: Marc Jansen
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
ISBN: 0817929061
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book

Book Description
Stalin's Loyal Executioner, drawn from still-classified Soviet archives, chronicles the meteoric and bloody career of Nikolai Ezhov, NKVD leader and security chief, revealing the tragic scope of communist terrorism under Joseph Stalin.

The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945

The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945 PDF Author: Joshua D. Zimmerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107014263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Get Book

Book Description
Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.