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Hitlerův "Mein Kampf" 2016

Author(s): Milan Hauner / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2016

Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermeyer, Othmar Plöckinger, and Roman Töppel (eds.). Hitler, Mein Kampf: Eine kritische Edition. Munich and Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 2016, vols 1–2, 947 + 1019 pp., ISBN 978-3-9814052-3-1. With Edith Raim, Pascal Trees, Angelika Reizle, and Martina Seewald-Mooser. Includes illustrations, maps, a list of all known translations of Mein Kampf before 1945, a list of abbreviations, a detailed bibliography in three parts (before 1932, 1933–45, after 1945), and four indexes (a biographical index and indexes of persons, places, and subjects). In the form of an essay, the author comments here on the 2016 critical edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925–26), edited by a team of historians from the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, with additional assistance from others. He contemplates the nature and importance of this book and discusses its author and his meaning in the history of twentieth-century central Europe. He then discusses some of the ideas of Mein Kampf, and clarifies the historical context of the work, returning to the circumstances that led to its being written and published. He also discusses some of Hitler’s fellow travellers in the Nazi movement, who were of importance for this key work. The author brings up episodes in Hitler’s life, and pays particular attention to his still unclear transformation from an apolitical soldier into a zealous antisemite and political agitator of exceptional rhetorical skill, who was able to bewitch the German people and become their Führer. The author also discusses the difficulties that the editors of this critical edition had to struggle with, and he praises their work as utterly solid and astonishingly thorough, particularly the commentaries in the huge critical apparatus. The author concludes by discussing reactions both to the first edition of Mein Kampf and to this critical edition, and he discusses various attempts to publish a Czech edition.

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Rodina kolonizovaná státem?

Author(s): Květa Jechová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2016

Jakub Rákosník and Radka Šustrová. Rodina v zájmu státu: Populační růst a instituce manželství v českých zemích 1918–1989. (Knižnice Dějin a současnosti, vol. 60.) Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2016, 283 pp., ISBN 978-80-7422-378-5. According to the reviewer, the two authors of the book under review (whose title translates as The Family in the Interest of the State: Population Growth and the Institute of Marriage in Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia, 1918–89) convincingly demonstrate the massive growth in state intervention in the private sphere in Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia in the seventy years from the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic to the collapse of the Communist regime in late 1989. She does, however, have some doubts about their periodization, which ignores great political dividing lines in favour of continuities, and she is also disappointed in the authors’ intentionally refusing to pass judgement on the topics they discuss. The reviewer would have liked to have read an assessment of interwar Czechoslovakia, which had sought to be a democratic and socially just state, and she would have welcomed discussion of the Nazis’ intentions to eradicate the Czechs during the German occupation from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945. The reviewer remarks on some aspects of family policy in socialist Czechoslovakia, and concludes that the book under review is useful for the general public as a call for discussion about the social values and traditions and the purpose and operation of the State.

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Spor o malínský masakr

Author(s): Jared McBride / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2017

The study was initially published in June 2016 as No. 2405 “Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies”, published by the Center for Russian & East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh. The text is available online at hhtps:// www.carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/203. On the morning of July 13, 1943, a German anti-partisan formation surrounded the small village of Malyn and its Czech and Ukrainian inhabitants. The soldiers gathered the entire village population in the town square and, after a document check, proceeded to lock them inside the town church, school and their homes. The soldiers then set fire to these buildings and shot those trying to escape with machine guns. By the end of the day, Malyn ceased to exist. On the surface, the Malyn Massacre appears as just another ghastly crime committed by a brutal occupying force. Yet, a closer look at archival sources, popular discourse, and scholarly literature on Malyn reveals a much different picture – and a murkier one. The author states there are over fifteen different versions of what happened in Malyn that day. The ethnic identities of the units that accompanied the Germans vary from account to account, as do the details of the crime, the justification for the reprisal, and even the ethnicity of the victims. The study attempts to clarify disparate and mutually contradicting accounts of the events in Malyn by analyzing materials from over ten archives in six countries and four historiographical-linguistic narratives, in addition to field research in Ukraine and the Czech Republic. The author specifies four discursive landscapes about Malyn (Soviet, Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech) and details how and why each of these has come to construct their own version(s) of Malyn in relation to larger grand narratives about the war in the East. This microhistory also underscores how the trauma and legacy of wartime inter-ethnic violence casts a long shadow over the current understanding of the war and highlights the daunting task scholars face writing the history of this region and time period.

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Očista průmyslových závodů od kolaborantů a „asociálních živlů“ v roce 1945

Author(s): Jakub Šlouf / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2017

Using results of extensive research in central and company archives, the author studies the cleansing of industrial plants from collaborationists and so-called anti-social elements in Czechoslovakia in 1945. He describes it as a standard-setting process during which the form of a new revolutionary value system and guilt criteria in relation to the occupation past arising there from were negotiated and established in practice in factories and plants. Both escalated nationalism and social egalitarianism, sometimes developing into class antagonism, found their use in it. In addition to acts prosecuted under official legislation, the cleansing process incorporated various minor conflicts of employees during the occupation, in particular disputes between subordinates and superiors. For this reason, mainly top-ranking whitecollars, human resource officers, rate setters, and shop foremen were removed from their positions. The articulation of guilt of the above group also worked as an absolution of others, particularly rank-and-file workers and white collars, at the symbolic and psychological level. The selected guilt criteria were subsequently becoming a part of the legitimization pattern of the ongoing revolution. The study illustrates how company councils, acting through investigation commissions which, nevertheless, had to create their own legal rules as they had no position or status defined in official legislation, were trying, since mid-May 1945, to regulate, formalize, and unify initial spontaneous actions of employees. However,the legal uncertainty in factories led to a decline of respect to superiors, deterioration of working morale, and devaluation of expertise. In mid-July 1945, organs of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement intervened into the cleansing process,as they were interested in improving the performance of the nationalized industry. Appeal chambers were established at regional trade union councils as second instance bodies deciding disputes submitted by industrial plants. In doing so, they were demanding a higher quality of submitted legal documents and supporting as signing the individuals affected by the cleansing to adequate working positionsin the production process. In October 1945, results of the company cleansing process were incorporated, under the pressure of trade unions, into official legislation under the so-called Small Retribution Decree. The resulting legal framework was thus an apparent compromise between pre-war legal conventions and moral criteria established during the May 1945 revolution.

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Gestapo mýtů zbavené?

Author(s): Karel Černý / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2017

McDONOUGH, Frank. Gestapo: Mýtus a realita Hitlerovy tajné policie. Translated from English by Jindřich Manďák. Prague: Vyšehrad 2016, 292 pp., ISBN978-80-7429-742-7. The publication is a translation of the original title "The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police" (London: Hodder & Stoughton 2015). According to the reviewer, the British historian attempts to present a new, revisionist interpretation of the role of the political police in a totalitarian society. He claims that the Nazi Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei – Gestapo) was not the omnipotent, fearsome, and brutal apparatus it is purported to have been, but rather an undermanned, overworked, and underfinanced police organization staffed mostly by former detectives,reacting mainly to denunciations submitted by citizens, using lengthy and not very effective investigation methods, and sticking to legal procedures. According to the reviewer who provides a fairly detailed account of the author’s interpretations, the above picture is sometimes relatively credible (in relation to churches), but not very convincing in other places (in particular in relation to Jews). Moreover, the author depicts only the situation in the Third Reich, and his generalizing conclusions are thus unfounded.

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Policie v Marseille a vichistický režim

Author(s): Dalibor Vácha / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2017

KITSON, Simon. Police and Politics in Marseille, 1936–1945. Leiden: Brill 2014,326 pp., ISBN 978-90-04-24835-9. The reviewer provides an account of interpretations of the British historian; he sees their main contribution in rich facts based on a thorough study of French archival documents and a novel angle of view unburdened by extensive and often heated discussions over phenomena of resistance and collaboration in the French historiography and society. In the reviewer’s opinion, the book´s strengths also include an interdisciplinary approach combining social history, everyday history and police history with the so-called great political history. The author drafts a much more diverse and disparate picture of reality than that suggested by established myths about the police force extensively and voluntarily collaborating both with Germans and the Vichy regime, about the cowardice of police officers and their permanent links to the world of crime.

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Jozef Tiso: můj nepřítel – tvůj hrdina?

Author(s): Jan Rychlík / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3+4/2018

The author first summarizes the career of Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), a politician and a Roman Catholic priest. His entire political life was linked to Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party; he was always a representative of its moderate faction, and even represented it as a minister of the Czechoslovak government. In 1939, he became its chairman. In the First Czechoslovak Republic, he was a dyed-in-the-wool federalist; since the proclamation of the Slovak State in March 1939 until the end of his life, an advocate of Slovakia’s independence. As the president of the Slovak Republic between 1939 and 1945, he was responsible for Slovakia’s political regime, alliance with the Nazi Germany until the end of the war, and deportations of Slovak Jews. After the war, he was tried by the National Court of Justice, sentenced to death, and executed in 1947. The author analyzes in detail the accusations brought against Tito during the trial and Tiso’s defence, as the arguments presented by both parties were later used by Tiso’s adversaries and sympathizers. Czech politicians and general public after the war were united in their condemnation of Tiso; in their eyes, Tiso’s biggest crime was his share in the destruction of the common state. On the other hand, the Slovaks’ view on Tiso depended on their attitude toward the previous political regime in Slovakia. Furthermore, the author monitors how Tiso’s cult was formed in the separatist segment of the Slovak exile since the end of the war. It was spreading mainly in the United States, Canada, and Argentina, but the efforts aimed at Tiso’s moral purification were unsuccessful. The article also pays special attention to Tiso’s reflections in the Czech and Slovak dissent in the 1970s and 1980s. In the end, the author describes disputes over Tiso which broke up after 1989 in Slovakia and which were a part of the “return of history” to the public space. They were related to attempts for Tiso’s commemoration and historical rehabilitation, and found their way to the media, politics, and historiography. The essay is concluded by a statement that the Czech society is not interested in Tiso as a historical figure, but that Tiso still divides the Slovak one: a minority of the Slovak society sees Tiso as a hero and a martyr, while most Slovaks perceive him as an unsuccessful and discredited politician.

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Jak se Hitler stal nacistou

Author(s): Milan Hauner / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3+4/2018

Weber, Thomas: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi. New York: Basic Books, 2017, 423 pp., 2 maps, 32 photographs, ISBN 9780465032686; Plöckinger, Othmar: Unter Soldaten und Agitatoren: Hitlers prägende Jahre im deutschen Militär 1918–1920. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013, 377 pp., 26 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-506-77570-2. In the reviewer’s opinion, the question how Adolf Hitler had become a Nazi, i.e.a full-fledged follower and ideologist of the nationalistic and racial doctrine, which declared Jews and Bolsheviks enemies of the German nation, remained open for a long time. Hitler’s own version to the effect that the transformation had occurred as early as during his apprenticeship years in Vienna, is utterly implausible. It must have happened after the Great War, in the chaos shortly after the defeat of the Bavarian Council Republic in May 1919. The reviewer describes the events taking place at that time, Hitler’s situation and circumstances of his conversion to Nazism, and compares both publications dealing with that period. He admires Weber’s style, vivid in comparison with Plöckinger’s heavy-handed language; on the other hand, Plöckinger precisely documents all his arguments, while Weber does not hesitate to use dubious and obscure sources to confirm his conclusions.

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V nucené vojenské službě třetí říše

Author(s): Zdenko Maršálek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3+4/2018

Stroh, Frédéric and Peter M. Quadflieg (eds.): L’incorporation de force dans les territoires annexés par le IIIe Reich 1939–1945 / Die Zwangsrekrutierung in den vom Dritten Reich annektierten Gebieten. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2016, 228 pp., ISBN 978-2-86820-536-0. The bilingual French-German collection is a product of international cooperation of historians studying the topic of forced service in German armed forces in territories occupied (or annexed) by the Third Reich during WW2. After a brief introduction of the topic, the reviewer points at the fact that the service of members of one’s own nation in the German occupation army was, regardless of its context and circumstances, in contradiction with heroic myths about the nationwide resistance against the occupying forces, which emerged in various liberated countries after the war. This was also the reason why such memories recollections were being forced from the collective memory of national communities; the interest of historians in the topic was marginal, and for a long time limited only to their own national communities. The reviewed publication demonstrates possibilities offered by international cooperation or a transnational perspective. The authors succeeded in comparing the situation in various occupied territories (France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovenia), and in showing that, however the forced service in German armed forces was common for different territories, its circumstances and manifestations were far from identical; they have thus managed to elevate the perception of the topic to a transnational level.

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Počátky československé a jugoslávské exilové vlády v Londýně za druhé světové války

Author(s): Milan Sovilj / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2019

In his partly comparative study, the author focuses on a specific chapter in Czechoslovak-Yugoslav relations in the 20th century, namely contacts of the exile governments of both countries after their occupation by the German army in March 1939 (remnants of Czechoslovakia) and April 1941 (Yugoslavia). Supported by document from Prague’s and Belgrade’s archives, he recalls circumstances of the German occupation of Yugoslavia and compares the formation of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav political representations in exile, the different ways they took to London, the problems they encountered during early years in exile, and their positions in London’s exile community. The study shows how the restoration of mutual relations between the two representations was burdened by historical animosities, although Belgrade and Prague had been allies since 1919, both being members of the Little Entente; President Edvard Beneš (1884 – 1948), in particular, was long reproaching Yugoslav politicians for abandoning Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich crisis in the autumn of 1938. However, some Yugoslav representatives, on the other hand, disliked the fact that the Czechoslovak government had not supported them in the conflict with Italy in 1926 and during the establishment of the king’s dictatorship three years later. Mutual relations of leading Czechoslovak and Yugoslav politicians in exile were also reflecting their respective opinions on further war developments and on relations of restored Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia toallied powers. Both exile governments were striving for help and support of Great Britain; however, they assumed, for a variety of reasons, different attitudes to cooperation with the Soviet Union. Although the relations were gradually improving, especially since 1943, when the Yugoslav government declared that it did not acknowledge the Munich Agreement, their courses drifted apart while both were still in exile, and only Czechoslovak exile representatives returned home as winners, while their Yugoslav counterparts in London had to “beat a retreat”, yielding to Tito’s Communists, and most of them stayed in exile.

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Kliometrie a národní příběh

Author(s): Zdenko Maršálek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2020

Using Czechoslovak units-in-exile during WW2 as an example, the study presents possibilities of using quantitative approaches in historiography; first and foremost, it suggests that numerical methods have a potential to examine even deeper contexts or such “soft” terms as prejudiced perception of “others” or processes of the formation ofimages of various historical phenomena in the historical memory. The author states that Czechoslovak units formed in the West between 1939 and 1945 were joined by almost 3,000 Czechoslovaks who had previously served for some time in the German Wehrmacht. They accounted for almost thirty percent of the numbers which these units had reached by the end of the war. Thus, in May 1945, almost every third Czechoslovak soldier had previously served in the German uniform. However, this fact did not dovetail too well with the ideological formation of a new national identity, based mainly on a notion of a “nationwide struggle” for freedom and a story of the age-long conflict with the Germanhood. The synergy of targeted and natural marginalization “from above” and “from below” subsequently resulted in an almost total suppression of this phenomenon in the collective memory of the entire Czech society. Czechoslovakia’s resistance abroad was depicted along strictly national lines and soldiers of Czechoslovak foreign units presented as typical representatives of the Czech and Slovak nations. Ex-Wehrmacht POWs do not receive the attention matching their numbers and importance even in published memoirs and recollections of resistance veterans. The author uses quantitative methods to establish whether the above phenomenon was due only to intentional marginalization or whether the “displacement” might be caused by other reasons as well. He provides a detailed mapping of the extent and chronology of the induction of these men into different units and shows that most of them started joining the Czechoslovak units only since the summer of 1944, and many of them were not sent to the frontline before the end of the war. This fact was undoubtedly reflected in their perception by veterans, who practically need not have met them and did not have a clue as to the importance of former Wehrmacht POWs as a source of manpower.

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"Temné jeho oči doslova fascinují"

Author(s): Jiří Křesťan / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3+4/2020

Between 1939 and 1943, trips to Nazi Germany and to territories occupied by Germany (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, a large part of the Soviet Union) ranked among important tools influencing the public opinion in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The study deals with a trip of a group of Czech intellectuals – artists, representatives of culture and journalists – to Germany and the Netherlands in September 1940. Under German guidance, the 35-strong delegation was composed to give a representative and diverse impression. Apart from newspapermen collaborating with Germans, such as Karel Lažnovský (1906–1941) or Vladimír Krychtálek (1903–1947), men active in different segments of culture were invited as well, including personalities as outstanding as the directors of the dramatic company and the opera ensemble of the National Theatre in Prague, Jan Bor (1886–1943) and Václav Talich (1883–1961), respectively, operatic singers Jan Konstantin (1894–1965) and Pavel Ludikar (1882–1970), violin virtuoso Váša Příhoda (1900–1960), publisher Bedřich Fučík (1900–1984), or architect Jan Sokol (1904–1987). The study focuses primarily on five writers who took part in the trip. Jaroslav Durych (1886–1962) and Václav Renč (1911–1973) ranked among Catholic-oriented authors, while Josef Knap (1900–1973) and Jan Čarek (1898–1966) represented so-called ruralists (writers of the country), and Josef Hora (1891–1945) was a leading poet, initially writing social poetry and later reflexive lyric poetry. Between the wars, all of them had been critical toward the reality of the First Republic in one way or another, the first four from conservative positions and Hora on the left (until 1929, he had been a member of the Communist Party). The trip’s programme had been put together very ingeniously. In addition to proofs of the Third Reich’s brutal strength (a visit of the bombed-out city of Rotterdam, a sightseeing tour of the Krupp arms factory in Essen), the travelers were served a menu of diverse cultural experiences (visits of theatrical performances, exhibitions and museums, outstanding architectural creations etc.). In Berlin, they were received by Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, who emphasized, while addressing them, that the survival of the Czech nation and its culture depended on its submission to the German Reich. Upon their return home, all participants were forced to give public statements about the trip and their impressions, which had to conform to Nazi propaganda. Having described the above facts, the author analyzes defence strategies which the above mentioned authors were using while writing made-to-order articles or showing their supposed loyalty in order to avoid being dragged into the Nazi propaganda machine. They were bypassing some topics, resorting to allegories and ambiguities, and making use of concealed irony. In the end of the study, the author follows the fates of those who took part in the trip to Germany and the Netherlands, pondering, in a more general manner, fuzzy boundaries and dilemmas of guilt and collaboration in a totalitarian regime. Attached to the article are short biographies of all thirty-five participants in the trip.

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Poněkud neosobní portrét "věrného vůdcova paladina"

Author(s): Anna Blatecká / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2021

The reviewed book titled “'Domů do říše': Konrád Henlein a Říšská župa Sudety (1939–1945)" (Prague: Argo, 2018), written by German historian Ralf Gebel is a translation of the German original „,Heim ins Reich!' Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland 1938–1945" (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1999). The author closely links a biography of the German Sudeten politician and Nazi official Konrad Henlein (1898–1945) and the history of the region known as the Reichsgau Sudetenland, which existed from 1939 to 1945 in the territory of Czech borderlands ceded to the German Reich. In the reviewer’s opinion, the concept is good; she appreciates a relatively comprehensive presentation of the region’s history and links to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, something that is not all that common in Czech historiography. On the other hand, she regrets that Henlein’s portrait focuses solely on his public career and utterly ignores his private life, which fact makes the result less plastic than it could be. The author’s use of sources is very meticulous and he does not resort to unfounded statements; his work is, in terms of facts it contains, very reliable.

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Hitler proti Habsburkům

Author(s): Marek Šmíd / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2021

The reviewed publication titled "Hitler a Habsburkové: Proč chtěl nacistický vůdce zničit rakouskou královskou rodinu" (Prague: Slovart, 2020), written by US journalist James M. Longo is a translation of the original work "Hitler and the Habsburgs: Führer’s Vendetta against the Austrian Royals" (New York: Diversion Books, 2018). The first third of the book is a parallel biography of Franz Ferdinand d’Este (1863–1914), heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in Austria in the early 20th century. The other two parts describe the fates of children of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek, Princess of Hohenberg (1868–1914) – daughter Sophie (1901–1990) and sons Maximilian (1902–1962) and Ernst (1904–1954). As shown by the author and summarized by the reviewer, their lives were tragically affected by the assassination of their parents in Sarajevo and, in the case of both sons, also by persecution of the Nazi regime. In the reviewer’s opinion, the author is very well acquainted with sources, save for a few factual errors, his style is admirably vivid, and he provides inspiring evidence on how many noble families were actively resisting destructive totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century.

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Transformácia českého robotníctva od nacizmu k socializmu

Author(s): Adam Šumichrast / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2021

For some period after the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, the history of workers and the labour movement have been marginalized in the local historiography. The reviewer notes with gratitude that with the publishing of the extensive synthetic work of Dušan Janák, Stanislav Kokoška and a team of their collaborators entitled "Průmyslové dělnictvo v českých zemích v letech 1938–1948" [Industrial Workers in the Czech Lands in 1938–1948] (Prague, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) this situation changes considerably. The publication captures the transformation of Czech labour during the critical decade from the end of the First Republic to the establishment of the communist regime, which included six months of the authoritative Second Republic, six years of German occupation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and three years of a limited democracy in the Third Republic. The fairly comprehensive narration describes, among other things, the organization of industrial workers and the development of trade unions, their relationship with the changing political regimes and employers, the social policy towards the workers, the workers’ position in enterprises or the strike movement. The reviewer partly challenges the text’s division into two parts dealing separately with the periods of the Protectorate and the Third Republic, which does not encourage comparative thinking on the issue and tracing long-term continuities, and points to the conceptual inconsistency in their elaboration. However, the book summarizes the existing knowledge of the issue and provides a great deal of information from archival research.

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Zásadný posun vo výskume dejín slovenského štátu

Author(s): Michaela Lenčéšová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2021

The reviewer sets the monograph of the Slovak historian Miloslav Szabó, entitled "Klérofašisti: Slovenskí kňazi a pokušenie radikálnej politiky" [Clerical fascists: Slovak clergy and the temptation of radical policy (1935–1945)] (Bratislava, Slovart 2019), in the context of contemporary transnational research works and debates on the relation between Catholicism and fascism in the twentieth century. The author drews inspiration from the methodological tools of research into hybrid forms of fascism and from the concept of clerical fascism, which he applied to the environment of the Slovak Christians, mainly Catholic clerics, in the late period of the First Czechoslovak Republic and during the Slovak State (1939–1945). He traces their ideological and political radicalization, describes the dynamics of the development of their opinions, placing them in the context of the changes in the ideological and political climate. Using specific examples, he also outlines a typology of a clerical fascist activist, an extremist and a martyr. The reviewer sees the first type, characterized by a more or less tactical shift towards fascism and the Ludak regime and probably predominant among the Slovak clergy, as the most productive area for research. According to the reviewer, the author takes the research on the issue further thanks to his approach and knowledge. Finally, the reviewer raises the question of the applicability of the concept of clerical-fascism to the Czech Catholic environment of the first half of the twentieth century.

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Maciej Jan Mazurkiewicz, Ludobójstwo Niemiec na narodzie polskim (1939–1945). Studium historycznoprawne

Author(s): Hubert Mielnik / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2022

The monograph highlights the aspects of the international law qualification of the actions and omissions of Germany towards Poland and Poles during World War II. The study tries to prove that in the years 1939–1945 Germany was obliged to observe the norms of international law in its relations with Poland, and especially the non-treaty prohibitions not to initiate aggressive war or to commit the crime of genocide. The review describes the hypothesis and aims of the monograph and evaluates its substance, form, and argumentation.

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Denazyfikacja w Austrii w świetle raportów szefa polskiej misji politycznej w Wiedniu Feliksa Mantla

Author(s): Stanisław Jankowiak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 01/2022

The aim of the paper is to present the process of denazification carried out in post-war Austria until 1949, based on reports prepared by Feliks Mantel, chief of the Polish diplomatic outpost. He arrived in Vienna on May 13, 1946 and the diplomatic mission operated until 1958 when it was transformed into an embassy. The focus of the paper is the problem of bringing former fascists to justice for their past conduct. The scale of collaboration, manifested among others by the large number of people engaged in the NSDAP, military service, participation in war crimes, etc. resulted in a gradual mitigation of the rules of their court trials. The cases of former fascists dragged on and the punishments imposed were disproportionate to the guilt. The process of the resolution of the legacy of fascism was also hampered by great politics, including the division of the post-war world into two blocks and the rivalry between the superpowers. This inconsistent process of judgment of the past continued for many decades. The author puts forward the thesis that based on the analysis of the situation in Austria in the second half of the 1940s it can be concluded that a practical resolution of their shameful past by the Austrians was simply impossible. He also attempts to show the reasons which ultimately made this process largely ineffective. The problem of denazification was not fully resolved. The reports of Feliks Mantel on the process of denazification were used in the study.

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Against political compromises – coming to terms with the Austrofascist and National Socialist past in John Olden’s docudrama The Blue Danube (1965)

Author(s): Jakub Gortat / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2022

An der schönen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube), written by Hellmut Andics and Franz Hiesel and directed by John Olden in 1965, may be viewed as a groundbreaking television docudrama in Austria for two reasons. Firstly, it offered a new, hybrid form called ‘docudrama,’ which combined elements of a documentary film with the features of a fiction film. Secondly, in the context of the Austrian culture of remembrance, the film was astonishing in that its narrative boldly dealt with topics considered taboo at a time of an informal consensus between the two major political parties: the ÖVP and the SPÖ as well as their successors, the CSP and the SDAP. In line with this consensus, no mention of the antagonism between the conservatives and socialists during the authoritarian rule of Chancellors Dollfuß and Schuschnigg was made in the public discourse, instead, both parties claimed to have been victims of the Nazi terror (the so called “camp street” myth – Mythos der Lagerstraße). An der schönen blauen Donau significantly infringes this consensus, showing the persecution of socialist activists by the Austrofacist regime and the downplaying of the activity of the underground Nazis in Austria (the so called illegale Nazis). Embedded in the context of the Austrian post-war culture of remembrance, the paper analyses the teleplay’s narrative, paying special attention to selected characters representing three political movements in Austria: the socialists, the conservatives and the Nazis. Film narration analysis is the principal research method applied in the paper. Its last section also examines the reception of the docudrama and its problematic distribution.

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Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung und das Verbot rückwirkender Strafverschärfung

Author(s): Milan Kuhli / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2021

The principle “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege” is one of the core principles of German criminal law and constitutional law. However, the history of this principle is quite varied. This article will focus on an essential part of this history, namely on the version of this principle in the Weimar Constitution of 1919. It will be shown that the principle of legality of criminal law was indeed expressed in that constitution, but that the exact scope of application of this constitutional principle was quite unclear. In this regard, it was uncertain whether the Weimar Constitution also prohibited the retroactive application of criminal laws to those cases for which a more lenient penalty was provided at the time of the offense. This ambiguity of the Weimar Constitution finally became apparent in 1933 in the so-called Reichstagsbrandprozess (Reichstag fire trial). The issue in these criminal proceedings was whether the burning of the parliament building in Berlin (February 27, 1933) was punishable by death, although this sanction was not provided at the time the crime was committed. In this essay, it will be shown that the National Socialists had to go to considerable effort to be able to ignore prohibitions on retroactivity. This undermining of the principle “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege” forms an important example of the willingness of the legislature to negate essential protective principles of law in the Third Reich.

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