German Blood, Slavic Soil

German Blood, Slavic Soil PDF Author: Nicole Eaton
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501767372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler's Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis' genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin's Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

German Blood, Slavic Soil

German Blood, Slavic Soil PDF Author: Nicole Eaton
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501767372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler's Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis' genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin's Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950

Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950 PDF Author: Devin O. Pendas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108915957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Post-war Germany has been seen as a model of 'transitional justice' in action, where the prosecution of Nazis, most prominently in the Nuremberg Trials, helped promote a transition to democracy. However, this view forgets that Nazis were also prosecuted in what became East Germany, and the story in West Germany is more complicated than has been assumed. Revising received understanding of how transitional justice works, Devin O. Pendas examines Nazi trials between 1945 and 1950 to challenge assumptions about the political outcomes of prosecuting mass atrocities. In East Germany, where there were more trials and stricter sentences, and where they grasped a broad German complicity in Nazi crimes, the trials also helped to consolidate the emerging Stalinist dictatorship by legitimating a new police state. Meanwhile, opponents of Nazi prosecutions in West Germany embraced the language of fairness and due process, which helped de-radicalise the West German judiciary and promote democracy.

War in the Wild East

War in the Wild East PDF Author: Ben Shepherd
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674043553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the "wild east," a savage region ripe for exploitation, its subhuman inhabitants destined for extermination or helotry. An especially brutal dimension of the German army's eastern war was its anti-partisan campaign. This conflict brought death and destruction to thousands of Soviet civilians, and has been held as a prime example of ordinary German soldiers participating in the Nazi regime's annihilation policies. Ben Shepherd enters the heated debate over the wartime behavior of the Wehrmacht in a detailed study of the motivation and conduct of its anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union. He investigates how anti-partisan warfare was conducted, not by the generals, but by the far more numerous, average Germans serving as officers in the field. What shaped their behavior was more complex than Nazi ideology alone. The influence of German society, as well as of party and army, together with officers' grueling yet diverse experience of their environment and enemy, made them perceive the anti-partisan war in varied ways. Reactions ranged from extreme brutality to relative restraint; some sought less to terrorize the native population than to try to win it over. The emerging picture does not dilute the suffering the Wehrmacht's eastern war inflicted. It shows, however, that properly judging ordinary Germans' role in that war is more complicated than is indicated by either wholesale condemnation or wholesale exoneration. This valuable study offers a nuanced discussion of the diversity of behaviors within the German army, as well as providing a compelling exploration of the war and counterinsurgency operations on the eastern front.

Nazis of Copley Square

Nazis of Copley Square PDF Author: Charles Gallagher
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674983718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The forgotten history of American terrorists who, in the name of God, conspired to overthrow the government and formed an alliance with Hitler. On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar HooverÕs charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a Òtemporary dictatorshipÓ in order to stamp out Jewish and communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the frontÕs ringleader was unbowed: ÒAll I can say isÑlong live Christ the King! Down with communism!Ó In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves as crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, under assault from godless communism, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. The front traced its origins to vibrant global Catholic theological movements of the early twentieth century, such as the Mystical Body of Christ and Catholic Action. The frontÕs anti-Semitism was inspired by Sunday sermons and by lay leaders openly espousing fascist and Nazi beliefs. Gallagher chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the mainstream political and religious leaders who shielded the frontÕs activities from scrutiny. Nazis of Copley Square offers a grim tale of faith perverted to violent ends, and its lessons provide a warning for those who hope to stop the spread of far-right violence today.

The Problems of Genocide

The Problems of Genocide PDF Author: A. Dirk Moses
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107103584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 611

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Book Description
Historically delineates the problems of genocide as a concept in relation to rival categories of mass violence.

Heinrich Von Kleist and Modernity (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture)

Heinrich Von Kleist and Modernity (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) PDF Author: Bernd Fischer
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571135065
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
New essays employing a multitude of approaches to the works of Kleist, in the process shedding light on our present modernity. Modernity, according to some views, poses the problem of homo politicus -- the problem of how to act in a moral universe without a "master narrative," without a final foundation. From this angle, the oeuvre of Heinrich vonKleist -- novellas, dramas, and essays -- addresses problems emerging from a new universe of Kantian provenance, in many ways the same universe we inhabit today. This volume of new essays investigates Kleist's position in ourever-changing conception of modernity, employing aesthetic, narrative, philosophical, biographical, political, economic, anthropological, psychological, and cultural approaches and wrestling with the difficulties of historicizingKleist's life and work. Central questions are: To what extent can the multitude of breaking points and turning points, endgames and pre-games, ruptures and departures that permeate Kleist's work and biography be conceptually bundled together and linked to the emerging paradigm of modernity? And to what extent does such an approach to Kleist not only advance understanding of this major German writer and his work, but also shed light on the nature of our present modernity? Contributors: Seán Allan, Peter Barton, Hilda Meldrum Brown, David Chisholm, Andreas Gailus, Bernhard Greiner, Jeffrey L. High, Anette Horn, Peter Horn, Wolf Kittler, Jonathan W. Marshall, Christian Moser, Dorothea von Mücke, Nancy Nobile, David Pan, Ricarda Schmidt, Helmut J. Schneider. Bernd Fischer is Professor of German at the Ohio State University. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German in the Department of Languagesand Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Stalingrad

Stalingrad PDF Author: Jochen Hellbeck
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610394976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
The turning point of World War II came at Stalingrad. Hitler's soldiers stormed the city in September 1942 in a bid to complete the conquest of Europe. Yet Stalingrad never fell. After months of bitter fighting, 100,000 surviving Germans, huddled in the ruined city, surrendered to Soviet troops. During the battle and shortly after its conclusion, scores of Red Army commanders and soldiers, party officials and workers spoke with a team of historians who visited from Moscow to record their conversations. The tapestry of their voices provides groundbreaking insights into the thoughts and feelings of Soviet citizens during wartime. Legendary sniper Vasily Zaytsev recounted the horrors he witnessed at Stalingrad: "You see young girls, children hanging from trees in the park.[ . . .] That has a tremendous impact." Nurse Vera Gurova attended hundreds of wounded soldiers in a makeshift hospital every day, but she couldn't forget one young amputee who begged her to avenge his suffering. "Every soldier and officer in Stalingrad was itching to kill as many Germans as possible," said Major Nikolai Aksyonov. These testimonials were so harrowing and candid that the Kremlin forbade their publication, and they were forgotten by modern history -- until now. Revealed here in English for the first time, they humanize the Soviet defenders and allow Jochen Hellbeck, in Stalingrad, to present a definitive new portrait of the most fateful battle of World War II.

Tropics of Vienna

Tropics of Vienna PDF Author: Ulrich E. Bach
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785331337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
The Austrian Empire was not a colonial power in the sense that fellow actors like 19th-century England and France were. It nevertheless oversaw a multinational federation where the capital of Vienna was unmistakably linked with its eastern periphery in a quasi-colonial arrangement that inevitably shaped the cultural and intellectual life of the Habsburg Empire. This was particularly evident in the era’s colonial utopian writing, and Tropics of Vienna blends literary criticism, cultural theory, and historical analysis to illuminate this curious genre. By analyzing the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, and other representative Austrian writers, it reveals a shared longing for alternative social and spatial configurations beyond the concept of the “nation-state” prevalent at the time.

Dragonslayer

Dragonslayer PDF Author: Jay Lockenour
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501754610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
In this fascinating biography of the infamous ideologue Erich Ludendorff, Jay Lockenour complicates the classic depiction of this German World War I hero. Erich Ludendorff created for himself a persona that secured his place as one of the most prominent (and despicable) Germans of the twentieth century. With boundless energy and an obsession with detail, Ludendorff ascended to power and solidified a stable, public position among Germany's most influential. Between 1914 and his death in 1937, he was a war hero, a dictator, a right-wing activist, a failed putschist, a presidential candidate, a publisher, and a would-be prophet. He guided Germany's effort in the Great War between 1916 and 1918 and, importantly, set the tone for a politics of victimhood and revenge in the postwar era. Dragonslayer explores Ludendorff's life after 1918, arguing that the strange or unhinged personal traits most historians attribute to mental collapse were, in fact, integral to Ludendorff's political strategy. Lockenour asserts that Ludendorff patterned himself, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, on the dragonslayer of Germanic mythology, Siegfried—hero of the epic poem The Niebelungenlied and much admired by German nationalists. The symbolic power of this myth allowed Ludendorff to embody many Germans' fantasies of revenge after their defeat in 1918, keeping him relevant to political discourse despite his failure to hold high office or cultivate a mass following after World War I. Lockenour reveals the influence that Ludendorff's postwar career had on Germany's political culture and radical right during this tumultuous era. Dragonslayer is a tale as fabulist as fiction.

Nazi Ideology and the Holocaust

Nazi Ideology and the Holocaust PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
A popularly written and illustrated history of the Holocaust. Deals with all of the victims of the Nazis' genocidal campaign: communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Poles and other Slavs, and Soviet POWs, as well as the "racial enemies" - Afro-Germans, the mentally and physically disabled, Gypsies, and Jews. Jews were regarded by the Nazis as the foremost "racial enemy". Pp. 110-156, "The Holocaust", deal specifically with the destruction of the Jews - from the first Nazi anti-Jewish measures in Germany, through the "Kristallnacht" pogrom and murders of Jews in Poland and the USSR, to the total mass murder in the death camps.