Author: Sol Littman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Between 1950 and 1955, thousands of veterans from the notorious German-led, Ukrainian 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division emigrated to North America with the full consent of the governments despite immigration regulations in force at the time that forbade entry to all who served in any branch of the SS. The Jewish community fought a brief, but futile, battle to persuade those governments to deny them entry, denouncing them as a "sinister legion" of "bloodthirsty murderers"-war criminals who had engaged in the mass murder of thousands of innocent civilians. On the other hand, a well-organized body of Division supporters insisted there was nothing "sinister" or "murderous" about the young men who had volunteered to serve in its ranks. They declared them exceptional soldiers who obeyed the international rules of war, praised them for being dedicated soldiers who harbored no hatred for Jews, guarded no concentration camps, and committed no crimes against humanity. At issue then was the nature of the Division and its war record. Were they "pure soldiers" as many of their supporters contended, or were they, to use Daniel Goldhagen’s phrase, among Hitler’s willing executioners? Pure Soldiers or Bloodthirsty Murdererstraces the 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division’s fortunes from its formation in April 1943, to its surrender to the British in May 1946, from immigrant farm workers in Britain, Canada and the USA, to Cold War CIA assassins. Along the way, it attempts to shed some light on this acrimonious dispute that has continued to the present day. Sol Littmanis former Canadian Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, author ofWar Criminal on Trial, founding editor ofThe Canadian Jewish News, the First Director of B’nai Brith Canada’s "League for Human Rights," and also served with the Anti-Defamation League in the United States.
Author: Sol Littman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Between 1950 and 1955, thousands of veterans from the notorious German-led, Ukrainian 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division emigrated to North America with the full consent of the governments despite immigration regulations in force at the time that forbade entry to all who served in any branch of the SS. The Jewish community fought a brief, but futile, battle to persuade those governments to deny them entry, denouncing them as a "sinister legion" of "bloodthirsty murderers"-war criminals who had engaged in the mass murder of thousands of innocent civilians. On the other hand, a well-organized body of Division supporters insisted there was nothing "sinister" or "murderous" about the young men who had volunteered to serve in its ranks. They declared them exceptional soldiers who obeyed the international rules of war, praised them for being dedicated soldiers who harbored no hatred for Jews, guarded no concentration camps, and committed no crimes against humanity. At issue then was the nature of the Division and its war record. Were they "pure soldiers" as many of their supporters contended, or were they, to use Daniel Goldhagen’s phrase, among Hitler’s willing executioners? Pure Soldiers or Bloodthirsty Murdererstraces the 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division’s fortunes from its formation in April 1943, to its surrender to the British in May 1946, from immigrant farm workers in Britain, Canada and the USA, to Cold War CIA assassins. Along the way, it attempts to shed some light on this acrimonious dispute that has continued to the present day. Sol Littmanis former Canadian Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, author ofWar Criminal on Trial, founding editor ofThe Canadian Jewish News, the First Director of B’nai Brith Canada’s "League for Human Rights," and also served with the Anti-Defamation League in the United States.
Author: Jody Perrun
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887554628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
When the Second World War broke out, Winnipeg was Canada’s fourth-largest city, home to strong class and ethnic divisions, and marked by a vibrant tradition of political protest. Citizens demonstrated their support for the war effort through their wide commitment to initiatives such as Victory Loan campaigns or calls for voluntary community service. But given Winnipeg’s diversity, was the Second World War a unifying event for Winnipeg residents? In The Patriotic Consensus, Jody Perrun explores the wartime experience of ordinary Winnipeggers through their responses to recruiting, the treatment of minorities, and the adjustments made necessary by family separation.
Author: David McCormack
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
In this absorbing new history of the ‘Galicia’ Division, David McCormack debunks many of the myths that have resulted in enduring controversies amongst the public, the mainstream media, academics, and politicians. ‘The Galicia Division 1943-45 : Just Ordinary Soldiers?’ provides an objective appraisal of the Ukrainian volunteers and conscripts that have been described as both heroes and villains in equal measure. What were the circumstances that led thousands of Ukrainians to volunteer to fight in Hitler’s crusade against Bolshevism in 1943? Why did coercion replace incentivisation as a means of recruitment in 1944? Why was a decision made by the British authorities to ignore Stalin’s demands for the repatriation of the division in 1945? Did the long established German military doctrine of ‘absolute destruction’ provide the foundations for accusations of war crimes against the division? How can the recent fetishisation of the division by Ukrainian nationalists be explained?
Author: Jonathan Dimbleby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197765319
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 665
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Book Description
Endgame 1944 offers a gripping account of the Soviet victories in 1944 that enabled Stalin to dictate the terms of the post-war settlement, which laid the foundations for the Cold War.
Author: Myroslav Shkandrij
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228016541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 459
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Book Description
An estimated 25,000 Ukrainians served in the Fourteenth Waffen-SS “Galicia” Division. Conflicting accounts of their reasons for enlistment and continuing accusations of wartime criminality have fuelled controversial debate for decades. The first comprehensive study of the division to address both its wartime experience and its postwar fate, In the Maelstrom draws on archival research that includes interrogation records, interviews, memoirs, testimonies, and creative literature. The accounts of veterans often begin with being drafted into the force in their teenage years and continue into postwar life in Italian and British internment camps. These reminiscences are compared with wartime records and recent narratives. Myroslav Shkandrij discusses the commissions of inquiry into war crimes during the 1980s, recent debates over the issue of monuments and commemoration, and different ways in which veterans, the diaspora community, Western governments, and researchers have approached the division and its history. In the Maelstrom brings to light the underexplored Ukrainian experience in the “Galicia” Division during and after the war – an experience that resonates strongly today.
Author: Paweł Markiewicz
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612496814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Unlikely Allies offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland during World War II. Drawing on extensive archival material, the Ukrainian position is examined chiefly through the perspective of Ukrainian Central Committee head Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a prewar academic and ardent nationalist. The contact between Kubiiovych and Nazi administrators at various levels shows where their collaboration coincided and where it differed, providing a full understanding of the Ukrainian Committee’s ties with the occupation authorities and its relationship with other groups, like Poles and Jews, in occupied Poland. Ukrainian nationalists’ collaboration created an opportunity to neutralize prewar Polish influences in various strata of social life. Kubiiovych hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Ukrainian region within the borders of the General Government or an ethnographic state closely associated with the Third Reich. This led to his partnership with the Third Reich to create a new European order after the war. Through their occupational policy of divide to conquer, German concessions raised Ukrainians to the position of a full-fledged ethnic group, giving them the respect they sought throughout the interwar period. Yet collaboration also contributed to the eruption of a bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict. Kubiiovych’s wartime experiences with Nazi politicians and administrators—greatly overlooked and only partially referenced today—not only illustrate the history of German-Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian relations, but also supply a missing piece to the larger, more controversial puzzle of collaboration during World War II.
Author: Christopher Hale
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752463934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
In Hitler's Foreign Executioners, Heinrich Himmler's secret master plan for Europe is revealed: an SS empire that would have no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of 'Germanic' peoples from every corner of Europe, and even parts of Asia, to build an 'SS Europa'. This revised and fully updated book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe's dirty secret: nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich to fight a deadly crusade against a mythic foe, Jewish Bolshevism. Even today, some apologists claim that these foreign SS volunteers were merely soldiers 'like any other' and fought a decent war against Stalin's Red Army. Historian Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken. By taking part in Himmler's murderous master plan, these foreign executioners hoped to prove that they were worthy of joining his future 'SS Europa'. But as the Reich collapsed in 1944, Himmler's monstrous scheme led to bitter confrontations with Hitler – and to the downfall of the man once known as 'loyal Heinrich'.
Author: Michael James Melnyk
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 507
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Book Description
The second volume of the definitive history of the 14th Waffen-Grenadier Division der SS (Ukrainische Nr 1). The lavishly illustrated concluding volume of the division's history features chapters on its reformation, deployment against Communist-backed partisans in Slovakia, the forced march to Slovenia, anti-partisan action against Tito's partisans in Slovenia and its committal for the final time on the Eastern Front against the Red Army in Austria. It concludes with an investigation into the Division's escape from repatriation a subject which has long been the subject of contention amongst historians. This volume also deals with internment and ends with its unique post war fate including new information about the secret role of MI6 in training former members of the Division for secret espionage activities behind the Iron Curtain. Drawing on an unsurpassed collection of material accumulated over decades of research, the author offers unique photographic sections on all aspects of the Divisions history including uniform details together with much hitherto unseen material featuring recent document discoveries, new veteran testimonies and detailed information on every aspect of the Division.
Author: Ben Shephard
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 030759548X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 682
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Book Description
At the end of World War II, long before an Allied victory was assured and before the scope of the atrocities orchestrated by Hitler would come into focus or even assume the name of the Holocaust, Allied forces had begun to prepare for its aftermath. Taking cues from the end of the First World War, planners had begun the futile task of preparing themselves for a civilian health crisis that, due in large part to advances in medical science, would never come. The problem that emerged was not widespread disease among Europe’s population, as anticipated, but massive displacement among those who had been uprooted from home and country during the war. Displaced Persons, as the refugees would come to be known, were not comprised entirely of Jews. Millions of Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Yugoslavs, in addition to several hundred thousand Germans, were situated in a limbo long overlooked by historians. While many were speedily repatriated, millions of refugees refused to return to countries that were forever changed by the war—a crisis that would take years to resolve and would become the defining legacy of World War II. Indeed many of the postwar questions that haunted the Allied planners still confront us today: How can humanitarian aid be made to work? What levels of immigration can our societies absorb? How can an occupying power restore prosperity to a defeated enemy? Including new documentation in the form of journals, oral histories, and essays by actual DPs unearthed during his research for this illuminating and radical reassessment of history, Ben Shephard brings to light the extraordinary stories and myriad versions of the war experienced by the refugees and the new United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that would undertake the responsibility of binding the wounds of an entire continent. Groundbreaking and remarkably relevant to conflicts that continue to plague peacekeeping efforts, The Long Road Home tells the epic story of how millions redefined the notion of home amid painstaking recovery.
