Himmler's Auxiliaries

Himmler's Auxiliaries PDF Author: Valdis O. Lumans
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807820667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of relations between Nazi Germany and the Volksdeutsche--Germans, estimated at ten million in number, who comprised minority populations in other European countries. Lumans examines these relations within the context of Hitler's foreign policy and the racial policies of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Himmler's Auxiliaries

Himmler's Auxiliaries PDF Author: Valdis O. Lumans
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807820667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of relations between Nazi Germany and the Volksdeutsche--Germans, estimated at ten million in number, who comprised minority populations in other European countries. Lumans examines these relations within the context of Hitler's foreign policy and the racial policies of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Himmler Brothers

The Himmler Brothers PDF Author: Katrin Himmler
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330475991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Katrin Himmler’s cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story reveals – in all its dark complexity – the gulf between the ‘normality’ of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member. This riveting family memoir provides essential new information on the private life and background of one of the twentieth- century’s most notorious killers – not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family. It also offers a unique account of one women’s courageous attempt to deal with her chilling inheritance. ‘It is part of the creeping discomfort in reading her book to realise the incredibly ordinary middle-class background of these three sons of a rather pompous provincial headmaster and to see how, right until the end, he was almost able to convince himself it hadn't happened like it had' Sunday Times ‘You get a vivid sense of a particular kind of German conservatism - Roman Catholic, monarchist - and of how, weirdly, it found an outlet in the upstart, part-pagan thuggery of Nazism’ Independent ‘One can only admire her bravery . . . In a way, Katrin Himmler's book is not a story about the past, but one about the present. The most interesting details are the ones she gives of her own quest’ Daily Telegraph

Latvia in World War II

Latvia in World War II PDF Author: Valdis O. Lumans
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 9780823226276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
Valdis Lumans provides an authoritative, balanced, and comprehensive account of one of the most complex, and conflicted, arenas of the Second World War. Struggling against both Germany and the Soviet Union, Latvia emerged as an independent nation state after the First World War. In 1940, the Soviets occupied neutral Latvia, deporting or executing more than 30,000 Latvians before the Nazis invaded in 1941 and installed a puppet regime. The Red Army expelled the Germans in 1944 and reincorporated Latvia as a Soviet Republic. By the end of the war, an estimated 180,000 Latvians fled to the West. The Soviets would deport at least another 100,000. Drawing on a wide range of sources--many brought together here for the first time--Lumans synthesizes political, military, social, economic, diplomatic, and cultural history. He moves carefully through traditional sources, many of them partisan, to scholarship emerging since the end of the Cold War, to confront such issues as political loyalties, military collaboration, resistance, capitulation, the Soviet occupation, anti-Semitism, and the Latvian role in the Holocaust.

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler PDF Author: Peter Longerich
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199592322
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1053

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Book Description
A biography of Henrich Himmler, interweaving both his personal life and his political career as a Nazi dictator.

The Eastern Front

The Eastern Front PDF Author: Yan Mann
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040225942
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
The Second World War in Eastern Europe is far from a neglected topic, especially since social, cultural, and diplomatic historians have entered a field previously dominated by operational histories, and produced a cornucopia of new scholarship offering a more nuanced picture from both sides of the front. However, until now, the story has still been disjointed and specialized, whereby military, social, economic, and diplomatic histories continue to give their own separate accounts. This collection of essays attempts to bring these themes into a more cohesive whole that tells a complex, multifaceted story of war on the Eastern Front as it truly was. This is one of the few critical examinations that includes both perspectives and looks at the war as a multi‐front effort. It also reveals how myths are created around military conflicts and have direct relevance to current developments in Europe, linking them to a broader discussion of the Second World War, its impact and utility today. It gives a historical dimension to pressing issues and will be of interest and relevance to history students, policymakers, political scientists, diplomats, and foreign policy experts. The Eastern Front will be a useful reference source, since some chapters rely on extensive new archival research and materials, ego sources, as well as extensive findings of non‐Western scholars, thereby bringing their work to the attention of a broader audience.

Ideology and the Rationality of Domination

Ideology and the Rationality of Domination PDF Author: Gerhard Wolf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253048087
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This “well-researched, clear [and] convincing” historical study examines the ideology and politics of Germanization during the WWII occupation of Poland (Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War). Following the brutal invasion and occupation of Poland, the Nazis moved swiftly to realize one of their key ideological aims: the expansion of German living space. This involved deporting Jews, bringing in German settlers, and establishing an evaluation process that separated Poles from ethnic Germans. As simple as this might have seemed initially, the various parts of the German occupation machinery were soon embroiled in a bitter fight about the essence of Germanness and how to identify a German. In this illuminating study, Gerhard Wolf reveals an astonishing development in which a more inclusive understanding of Germanness based on the notion of Volk won out against an exclusive definition based on Rasse. As Wolf demonstrates, this decision paved the way for turning three million Poles into German citizens. Parallel to the mass deportation and murder of Christian Poles and the genocide of Jewish Poles, the Nazis paradoxically also presided over the largest (forced) assimilation program in German history. Students and scholars of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Nazism will find new analysis of German imperialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in this important book.

Himmler's SS

Himmler's SS PDF Author: Robin Lumsden
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752497227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The real story of the SS, unlike its popular mythology, is so complex as to almost defy belief: it is a tale of intrigue and nepotism, of archaeology and Teutonism, of art and symbolism. Himmler's SS is a story of street fighters and convicted criminals becoming Ministers of State and police commanders; the story of charitable works and mass extermination being administered from the same building; the story of boy generals directing vast heterogeneous armies on devastating campaigns of conquest. Here, indeed, fact is stranger than fiction. Himmler's SS looks at the wide-ranging effects that the SS had on the Police, racial policies, German history, education, the economy and public life, as well as the uniforms and regalia which were carefully designed to set Himmler's men apart as the new elite in Third Reich society. Fully illustrated, this book is an authoritative history of the SS and as such will appeal to all with an interest in Hitler's Third Reich.

The Horror of Himmler’s Death Squads

The Horror of Himmler’s Death Squads PDF Author: Norman Ridley
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1036106748
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
During the Second World War, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were occupied on three separate occasions – twice by the Soviet Union and once by Nazi Germany. The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 allowed the Soviets to dominate the Baltic states without fear of German reprisals, causing many in the German-Baltic populations to flee to Poland. Soviet rule of the Baltics was brutal with the purging of political elites and deportation of many tens of thousands in a bid to turn them into vassal states. Consequently, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, many Balts saw it as a liberation from Soviet cruelties. The reality was, however, that it turned out to be the beginning of something much worse. During their occupation of Poland prior to Barbarossa the Nazis had decimated the Polish political elites, and the Jews there had been herded into ghettos in preparation for deportation to the east where they would serve as slave labour in the Nazi economy after the conquest of the Soviet Union. Similar policies were to be adopted in the Baltics when Heinrich Himmler's murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen, were allowed to move into the newly-occupied territories. Operating behind the advancing German forces Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D – four special mobile killing units, each made up of about a thousand men from the security police and the German intelligence service – proved to be more than willing to carry out Himmler's orders. He had called for the removal of every vestige of opposition to Nazi rule, which primarily meant complete elimination of the ‘inferior’ races who were unfit for work and the ghettoization of others in preparation for their economic exploitation. On foreign soil, away from scrutiny and free of all constraint, the Einsatzgruppen discovered that through the mass shootings of communists, Jews and gypsies it was possible to accelerate the pace of the Holocaust, slaughtering men, women and children in their tens of thousands. The Einsatzgruppen were assisted by local ‘volunteers’ who helped to identify victims as well as kill them; in places whole Jewish communities were swiftly eliminated. Many of the killers and victims had known one another as neighbors and colleagues. This massive slaughter of civilians convinced Heydrich and Himmler that complete extermination of Jews was within their grasp and before very long, in the death camps, new industrial methods of killing would be devised.

Joining Hitler's Crusade

Joining Hitler's Crusade PDF Author: David Stahel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108247180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
The reasons behind Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union are well known, but what about those of the other Axis and non-Axis powers that joined Operation Barbarossa? Six other European armies fought with the Wehrmacht in 1941 and six more countries sent volunteers, as well as there being countless collaborators in the east of various nationalities who were willing to work with the Germans in 1941. The political, social and military context behind why so many nations and groups of volunteers opted to join Hitler's war in the east reflects the many diverse, and largely unknown, roads that led to Operation Barbarossa. With each chapter dealing with a new country and every author being a subject matter expert on that nation, proficient in the local language and historiography, this fascinating new study offers unparalleled insight into non-German participation on the Eastern Front in 1941.

The Third Reich and Yugoslavia

The Third Reich and Yugoslavia PDF Author: Perica Hadzi-Jovancic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135013807X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The Third Reich and Yugoslavia focuses on economic and political affairs between the Third Reich and Yugoslavia before Germany attacked in April 1941. It observes the relations between the two countries primarily from an economic perspective, with the political dimension forming a backdrop within which the economy operated. Perica Hadzi-Jovancic challenges the conventional scholarly wisdom which recognises economics as mainly being a tool of German foreign policy towards Yugoslavia. Instead, he successfully places economic dealings on both sides within the broader context of both the German economic and financial plans and policies of the 1930s, as well as the existing trading ties between the two countries as they had been developing since the 1920s. At the same time, through detailed analysis of unpublished archival material, Hadzi-Jovancic explores the shared political relations from a new perspective; one from which there is a much deeper understanding of Yugoslavia's motives and the resulting implications for the other great powers and the wider regional framework. The book concludes that, contrary to the traditional view in historiography and despite the dependency of Yugoslavia's foreign trade on the German market at the dawn of the Second World War, Yugoslavia maintained both its economic and political agency in the shadow of the Third Reich. It was only international political developments beyond Yugoslavia's control in the years ahead that lead to a more receptive stance towards German demands.