Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence

Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence PDF Author: Elissa Mailänder
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628952318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Get Book Here

Book Description
How did “ordinary women,” like their male counterparts, become capable of brutal violence during the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailänder examines the daily work of twenty-eight women employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the concentration and death camp Majdanek/Lublin in Poland. Many female SS overseers in Majdanek perpetrated violence and terrorized prisoners not only when ordered to do so but also on their own initiative. The social order of the concentration camp, combined with individual propensities, shaped a microcosm in which violence became endemic to workaday life. The author’s analysis of Nazi records, court testimony, memoirs, and film interviews illuminates the guards’ social backgrounds, careers, and motives as well as their day-to-day behavior during free time and on the “job,” as they supervised prisoners on work detail and in the cell blocks, conducted roll calls, and “selected” girls and women for death in the gas chambers. Scrutinizing interactions and conflicts among female guards, relations with male colleagues and superiors, and internal hierarchies, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence shows how work routines, pressure to “resolve problems,” material gratification, and Nazi propaganda stressing guards’ roles in “creating a new order” heightened female overseers’ identification with Nazi policies and radicalized their behavior.

Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence

Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence PDF Author: Elissa Mailänder
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628952318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Get Book Here

Book Description
How did “ordinary women,” like their male counterparts, become capable of brutal violence during the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailänder examines the daily work of twenty-eight women employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the concentration and death camp Majdanek/Lublin in Poland. Many female SS overseers in Majdanek perpetrated violence and terrorized prisoners not only when ordered to do so but also on their own initiative. The social order of the concentration camp, combined with individual propensities, shaped a microcosm in which violence became endemic to workaday life. The author’s analysis of Nazi records, court testimony, memoirs, and film interviews illuminates the guards’ social backgrounds, careers, and motives as well as their day-to-day behavior during free time and on the “job,” as they supervised prisoners on work detail and in the cell blocks, conducted roll calls, and “selected” girls and women for death in the gas chambers. Scrutinizing interactions and conflicts among female guards, relations with male colleagues and superiors, and internal hierarchies, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence shows how work routines, pressure to “resolve problems,” material gratification, and Nazi propaganda stressing guards’ roles in “creating a new order” heightened female overseers’ identification with Nazi policies and radicalized their behavior.

Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence

Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence PDF Author: Elissa Mailander
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781628962314
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Macabresque

The Macabresque PDF Author: Edward Weisband
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190677880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Get Book Here

Book Description
Studies of genocide and mass atrocity most often focus on their causes and consequences, their aims and effects, and the number of people killed. But if the main goal is death, why is torture necessary? By understanding how and why mass violence occurs and the reasons for its variations, The Macabresque aims to explain why so many seemingly normal or "ordinary" people participate in mass atrocity across cultures and why such egregious violence occurs repeatedly through history.

A Companion to the Holocaust

A Companion to the Holocaust PDF Author: Simone Gigliotti
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118970527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 704

Get Book Here

Book Description
Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others – continue to make important contributions to its scholarship. A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust’s causes, unfolding and impact. Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section’s themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies: Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.

Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars

Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars PDF Author: Edward B. Westermann
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806157135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United States’s westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny. The peoples of Eastern Europe were, he said, his “redskins,” and for his colonial fantasy of a “German East” he claimed a historical precedent in the United States’s displacement and killing of the native population. Edward B. Westermann examines the validity, and value, of this claim in Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars. The book takes an empirical approach that highlights areas of similarity and continuity, but also explores key distinctions and differences between these two national projects. The westward march of American empire and the Nazi conquest of the East offer clear parallels, not least that both cases fused a sense of national purpose with racial stereotypes that aided in the exclusion, expropriation, and killing of peoples. Westermann evaluates the philosophies of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum that justified both conquests, the national and administrative policies that framed Nazi and U.S. governmental involvement in these efforts, the military strategies that supported each nation’s political goals, and the role of massacre and atrocity in both processes. Important differences emerge: a goal of annihilation versus one of assimilation and acculturation; a planned military campaign versus a confused strategy of pacification and punishment; large-scale atrocity as routine versus massacre as exception. Comparative history at its best, Westermann’s assessment of these two national projects provides crucial insights into not only their rhetoric and pronouncements but also the application of policy and ideology “on the ground.” His sophisticated and nuanced revelations of the similarities and dissimilarities between these two cases will inform further study of genocide, as well as our understanding of the Nazi conquest of the East and the American conquest of the West.

Hell Before Their Very Eyes

Hell Before Their Very Eyes PDF Author: John C. McManus
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
The life-altering experiences of the American soldiers who liberated three Nazi concentration camps. On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler’s Germany. These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of incinerated human remains; warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses; prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies; and—perhaps most disturbing of all—the half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes. Military historian John C. McManus sheds new light on this often-overlooked aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on a rich blend of archival sources and thousands of firsthand accounts—including unit journals, interviews, oral histories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and published recollections—Hell Before Their Very Eyes focuses on the experiences of the soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau and their determination to bear witness to this horrific history.

485 Days at Majdanek

485 Days at Majdanek PDF Author: Jerzy Kwiatkowski
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780817924171
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Ideology and Criminal Law

Ideology and Criminal Law PDF Author: Stephen Skinner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1509910832
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
With populist, nationalist and repressive governments on the rise around the world, questioning the impact of politics on the nature and role of law and the state is a pressing concern. If we are to understand the effects of extreme ideologies on the state's legal dimensions and powers – especially the power to punish and to determine the boundaries of permissible conduct through criminal law – it is essential to consider the lessons of history. This timely collection explores how political ideas and beliefs influenced the nature, content and application of criminal law and justice under Fascism, National Socialism, and other authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together expert legal historians from four continents, the collection's 16 chapters examine aspects of criminal law and related jurisprudential and criminological questions in the context of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Norway, apartheid South Africa, Francoist Spain, and the authoritarian regimes of Brazil, Romania and Japan. Based on original archival, doctrinal and theoretical research, the collection offers new critical perspectives on issues of systemic identity, self-perception and the foundational role of criminal law; processes of state repression and the activities of criminal courts and lawyers; and ideological aspects of, and tensions in, substantive criminal law.

Of Mind and Murder

Of Mind and Murder PDF Author: George R. Mastroianni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190638249
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Get Book Here

Book Description
How could the Holocaust have happened? How can people do such things to other people? Questions such as these have animated discussion of the Holocaust from our earliest awareness of what had happened. These questions have engaged the lay public as well as academics from many different fields. Psychologists have taken an active role in trying to understand and explain the motivation, thinking, and behavior of all those involved in and affected by the Holocaust. The present volume is, in part, an attempt to provide a kind of historical roadmap to the diverse psychological explanations and interpretations that have been developed by psychologists over the last several decades. While many psychological discussions of the Holocaust dismiss or diminish the significance of work that antedates the Milgram obedience experiments in the early 1960s, this book engages some of these earlier formulations in detail. It strives to be, in this sense, a more complete history of psychological thought on the Holocaust. As many psychologists now accept the idea that a comprehensive psychology of the Holocaust must include more than social influence, the book addresses the question, "What, then?" The answer can be found by looking both backward and forward in time. Gordon Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice remains one of the best psychological attempts to grapple with the Holocaust written, though that was not its primary purpose. In this volume, the reader will find both echoes of Allport and new ideas for ways psychologists can engage this profoundly important subject.

After the Deportation

After the Deportation PDF Author: Philip Nord
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108478905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 487

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the change in memory regime in postwar France, from one centered on the concentration camps to one centered on the Holocaust.