Author: Anita Prazmowska
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521483858
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Poland was a problematic issue for the Big Powers throughout the Second World War. For Britain, Poland was a major stumbling block in British-Soviet relations as Polish-Soviet territorial disputes clashed with the needs of the British-Soviet-United States alliance. As the Polish government-in-exile attempted to obtain a guarantee of British support, and many thousands of Polish troops fought for the British cause, the perception grew that the Churchill government had a debt to pay. Ultimately, however, it was a debt which Britain could not discharge because of its dependence on Soviet participation in the war. In this book Anita Prazmowska looks at British policies from the point of view of wartime strategy, relating this to Polish government expectations and policies. She describes a tragic situation where Polish soldiers were trapped between the grandiose and unrealistic plans of their government and the harsh realities of a war which they fought with no prospect of a satisfactory outcome for them or their country.
Author: David G. Williamson
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 184884980X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
An in-depth history of the attack that began World War II, and one country’s courageous fight against two unstoppable forces. Hitler’s military offensive against Poland on September 1, 1939 was the brutal act that triggered the start of World War II, wreaking six years of death and bloodshed around the world. But the campaign is often overshadowed by the momentous struggle that followed across the rest of Europe. In this thought-provoking study, each stage of the battle is reconstructed in graphic detail. The author examines the precarious situation Poland was in, caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He also reconsiders the pre-war policies of the other European powers—particularly France and Britain—and assesses the evolving scenario in a vivid, fast-moving narrative. Included throughout are first-hand accounts of soldiers and civilians who were caught up in the war as well as the Polish capitulation and its tragic aftermath.
Author: Jan Grabowski
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025301087X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
A revealing account of Polish cooperation with Nazis in WWII—a “grim, compelling [and] significant scholarly study” (Kirkus Reviews). Between 1942 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped the fate of German death camps in Poland. As they sought refuge in the Polish countryside, the Nazi death machine organized what they called Judenjagd, meaning hunt for the Jews. As a result of the Judenjagd, few of those who escaped the death camps would survive to see liberation. As Jan Grabowski’s penetrating microhistory reveals, the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Hunt for the Jews tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa, Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland. Drawing on materials from Polish, Jewish, and German sources created during and after the war, Grabowski documents the involvement of the local Polish population in the process of detecting and killing the Jews who sought their aid. Through detailed reconstruction of events, “Grabowski offers incredible insight into how Poles in rural Poland reacted to and, not infrequently, were complicit with, the German practice of genocide. Grabowski also, implicitly, challenges us to confront our own myths and to rethink how we narrate British (and American) history of responding to the Holocaust” (European History Quarterly).
Author: George H. Nash
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817912363
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 816
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Book Description
Herbert Hoover's "magnum opus"—at last published nearly fifty years after its completion—offers a revisionist reexamination of World War II and its cold war aftermath and a sweeping indictment of the "lost statesmanship" of Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover offers his frank evaluation of Roosevelt's foreign policies before Pearl Harbor and policies during the war, as well as an examination of the war's consequences, including the expansion of the Soviet empire at war's end and the eruption of the cold war against the Communists.
Author: Alex J. Bellamy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550081
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
The suffering of Syrian civilians, caught between the government’s barrel bombs and chemical weapons and religious fanatics’ beheadings and mass killings, shocked the world. Yet despite international law and political commitments proclaiming a responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities, world actors stood aside as Syria burned. Again and again, neighboring states, global powers, and the United Nations opted for half-measures or made counterproductive choices that caused even more harm. Alex J. Bellamy provides a forensic account of the world’s failure to protect Syrian civilians from mass atrocities. Drawing on interviews with key players, documents from the United Nations and other international organizations, and sources from the Middle East and beyond, he traces the missteps of the international response to Syria’s civil war. Bellamy systematically examines the various peace processes and the reasons they failed, highlighting potential alternative paths. He details how and why key actors prioritized their own national interest, geopolitical standing, regional stability, local rivalries, counterterrorism goals, or domestic politics rather than the welfare of Syrians. Some governments settled on unrealistic strategies founded on misguided assumptions while others pursued naked ambition; the United Nations descended into irrelevance and even complicity. Shedding new light on the decisions that led to a vast calamity, Syria Betrayed also draws out lessons for more effective responses to future civil conflicts.
Author: Arthur Bliss Lane
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
"Except for the omission of illustrations and appendix, this edition is complete and unabridged. Rare Book copy: Cased with other titles issued by the same publisher. Unhappy landing -- Studying the background -- The incredible crime -- Between Tehran and Yalta -- Yalta--deathblow to Poland's hopes -- The Moscow commission -- Reluctant departure -- Potsdam interlude -- My work in Poland begins -- The dark road ahead -- Our initial difficulties -- Political freedom--Moscow style -- Our encounters with the police state -- American assistance -- Financial appeasement -- Referendum and pogrom -- The frontier question -- Consultation -- The elections -- Betrayal legalized -- To all free peoples
Author: Joshua D. Zimmerman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674275853
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 641
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Book Description
The story of the enigmatic Jozef Pilsudski, the founding father of modern Poland: a brilliant military leader and high-minded statesman who betrayed his own democratic vision by seizing power in a military coup. In the story of modern Poland, no one stands taller than Jozef Pilsudski. From the age of sixteen he devoted his life to reestablishing the Polish state that had ceased to exist in 1795. Ahead of World War I, he created a clandestine military corps to fight Russia, which held most Polish territory. After the war, his dream of an independent Poland realized, he took the helm of its newly democratic political order. When he died in 1935, he was buried alongside Polish kings. Yet Pilsudski was a complicated figure. Passionately devoted to the idea of democracy, he ceded power on constitutional terms, only to retake it a few years later in a coup when he believed his opponents aimed to dismantle the democratic system. Joshua Zimmerman’s authoritative biography examines a national hero in the thick of a changing Europe, and the legacy that still divides supporters and detractors. The Poland that Pilsudski envisioned was modern, democratic, and pluralistic. Domestically, he championed equality for Jews. Internationally, he positioned Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism. But in 1926 he seized power violently, then ruled as a strongman for nearly a decade, imprisoning opponents and eroding legislative power. In Zimmerman’s telling, Pilsudski’s faith in the young democracy was shattered after its first elected president was assassinated. Unnerved by Poles brutally turning on one another, the father of the nation came to doubt his fellow citizens’ democratic commitments and thereby betrayed his own. It is a legacy that dogs today’s Poland, caught on the tortured edge between self-government and authoritarianism.
Author: Halik Kochanski
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674068165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 783
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Book Description
World War II gripped Poland as it did no other country. Invaded by Germany and the USSR, it was occupied from the first day of war to the last, and then endured 44 years behind the Iron Curtain while its wartime partners celebrated their freedom. The Eagle Unbowed tells, for the first time, the story of Poland’s war in its entirety and complexity.
Author: Diana West
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312630786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
Conservative columnist West uncovers how and when America gave up its core ideals and began the march toward socialism. She digs into the modern political landscape, dominated by President Barack Obama, to ask how it is that America turned its back on its basic beliefs.
Author: Andrew Kornbluth
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674249135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past. When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten. Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in Polish-Jewish relations. The August Trials draws striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes, even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated: justice.
