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1st September 1939 German troops invaded Poland. „Modlin” Army commanded by General Emil Przedrzymirski-Krukowicz started fighting in the Mława region. Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade fought the first fight near Narzym. But the most important struggles took place at the end of the September Campaign. 12th September Major-General Juliusz Rómmel created the Group of Cavalry under the command of General Władysław Anders, consisting of Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade, Volhynian Cavalry Brigade and the remnants of Borderland Cavalry Brigade. That same day Operational Group commanded by General Anders was ordered to attack Mińsk Mazowiecki and Kałuszyn. 12th September the Polish-French military alliance was broken as well. Operational Group commanded by General Anders joined to the Group of Army under the command of Major-General Stefan Dąb-Biernacki on 15th September. 17th September the Red Army invaded Poland. 19th September Operational Group commanded by General Anders went to the area of Maciejów–Kraśniczyn to support (from the North) Operational Group under the command of General Kraszewski. Then Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade fought in Suchowola, Krasnobród and Tomaszów Lubelski. It defeated the 28th German Infantry Division near Broszki and fought at Morańce on 26th September. Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade was the only one that has received permission to march further to South (on the basis of the agreement with Germany) and on 27th September took Chlipie village after struggles with the 99th Division of the Red Army. The last fight with the Soviets was held by the soldiers of General Anders in the Rajtarowice region. Most of the soldiers were killed by the Ukrainians, or murdered by the Soviets at Katyń, Starobielsk and Kharkov. General Anders was imprisoned by the Soviets. He was released in June 1941 as a result of German attack on the Soviet Union. Operational Group of Cavalry commanded by General Władysław Anders fulfi lled its duty to the Motherland and honourable fought for freedom.
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The problem of prosecuting war criminals falls within the sphere of interest of both lawyers and historians. Proposed interdisciplinary research aims to compare both points of view, presented in two aspects. The first aspect concerns dilemmas of the Nuremberg trials and the legal basis for the conviction of war criminals from legal-philosophical and historical perspectives. The second aspect refers to the analysis of the formula created by Gustav Radbruch adapted in the doctrine, along with juxtaposing it with its counterpart proposed by Hans Kelsen, which refers to the interpretation of the lex retro non agit principle. The crucial element of the article is the analysis of those aforementioned approaches in social and legal contexts. The comparison of the commonly known Radbruch’s formula with the less popular concept of Hans Kelsen paves the way for discussion between lawyers, philosophers, and historians.
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This study focuses on the process of the prosecution of Nazis and collaborators in the Jeseník region of the Czech Republic from 1945 to 1948. It focuses on the approach of the security and judicial apparatus to individual categories of the accused and on the comparison of this approach with other regions, especially in the adjacent areas of Western Silesia and Northern Moravia. In particular, the course and outcome of the trials of participants in Henlein’s Uprising of September 1938, exponents of the Nazi security apparatus, and party and public officials are followed. The research is based on court and police records and the contemporary press.
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Review of: Oto Luthar, Marta Verginella in Urška Strle, Užaljeno maščevanje: spomin na italijanska fašistična taborišča. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2022, 378 str.
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This contribution focuses on the cultural life in Celje and its protagonists during World War II. In the attempt to Germanise Slovenia and its inhabitants, the German occupiers started implementing measures for the eradication of the local ethnicity and culture immediately after their arrival, and their primary target was the Slovenian culture. Consequently, from the institutional point of view, the latter was utterly destroyed and its personnel eliminated. Only the cultural monuments created by German artists – or those allegedly proving that the occupied territories, among them Lower Styria, actually constituted the German cultural area – were preserved. Therefore, the occupiers’ cultural policy as an integral and crucial part of the broader propaganda apparatus in the service of Germanisation was largely based on the German tradition or its restoration.
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In the summer and autumn of 1944, the leadership of the resistance movement in Slovenia held two competitions among its political bodies and military units. Based on primary sources, the article analyses the idea, implementation, and results of these competitions, which, in terms of their content, represented a synergy between the resistance movement’s motivational and propaganda approaches and its needs for additional material resources and the expansion of its personnel. The competitions in gathering the material and political support for the resistance organisation spurred the further activation of its political bodies at all levels and encouraged a better definition of their political tasks. Obtaining additional material and human resources directly from the population was vital for the functioning and survival of the resistance organisation under the conditions of significant deficit. However, such actions could only be carried out in the areas where the resistance was sufficiently organised and which were not entirely controlled by the occupying forces and their collaborators.
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The article is based on the book The Order Has Already Been Carried Out – Rome, the Ardeatine Caves, Memory by Alessandro Portelli, whose translation by Nevenka Troha will be published by the ZRC SAZU. In this article, the author analyses specific topics discussed by contemporary Italian historiography and Portelli’s book. These include the following: the outlook on the wars waged by Fascist Italy between 1935 and 1943; the capitulation of Italy in September 1944; the German occupation of Rome and the local resistance; attacks by members of the resistance movement on German occupation forces with a particular focus on the attack against a convoy of German policemen in Rome on 23 March 1943, during which 33 policemen were killed; the repression of the German occupation forces, especially the massacre of 335 people in the Ardeatine Caves in Rome the day after this attack (on the principle of ten Italians for one German);; the events following the massacre, including the reactions to it; the question of guilt, especially the response of those who shifted the blame from the Nazis to the partisans; the structure of the victims; the problem of the victims’ burial and the mourning of those left behind; the commemorations; the legal epilogues and the attitude towards the representatives of the resistance movement in post-war Italy.
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The article focuses on the events in the Prekmurje region during World War II. From 1941 to 1944, this part of the Slovenian territory was almost completely cut off from the rest. The local Partisan movement was largely self-reliant and therefore weak. It received a new impetus in the autumn of 1944, when the first Partisan combat unit, consisting of 36 men, arrived in the Prekmurje region on the orders of the National Liberation Struggle High Command. However, it was soon pushed back across the river Mura. Due to betrayal, the Partisan movement in Prekmurje was once again weakened. At the end of January 1945, the Prekmurska četa company was established in the village of Strehovci but got involved in a fierce battle with the occupying forces and split into several groups. When the Red Army arrived in the Prekmurje region, only a small group of Partisans was in the area.
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Adorno carried out a socio-psychological analysis of Martin Luther Thomas, an agitator who preached in church and radio in the USA in the 1930s. In this study, the discourses of Victory Party Chairman Umit Ozdag between August 26, 2021 and June 6, 2023 are analyzed in the context of the concept of neo-fascism with the socio-psychological methodology proposed by Adorno. Ozdag’s tweets, live broadcast speeches, short films, and constituent texts related to his party were included in the study. The study aims to show the psychological techniques with which Ozdag constructs his rhetoric and to discuss them in an ideological context. Adorno, who identified more than thirty psychologically-based techniques, divided agitational speech, which functions with various strategies in line with the framework of analysis he developed, into four main themes: “The personal element, Thomas’s method, the religious medium and ideological bait”. In this study, Ozdag’s specific political rhetoric is analyzed under Adorno’s first two headings and in the context of his 10 techniques: “Lone wolf, emotional release, persecuted innocence, indefatigability, a great little man, if only you knew, dirty linen, tingling back-bone, last hour and exactitude of error”. As a result of the study, it was concluded that Ozdag tends to adopt a style of politics that utilises irrational elements by emphasising certain personality traits such as sincerity, courage, and enthusiasm, and to determine the method itself as the goal rather than the content. In the context of neo-fascism, it has been revealed that the discourses related to ethno-pluralism and the right to difference approaches have been put forward as the main defense of its policy towards asylum seekers.
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Gáspár Miklós Tamás has been one of the best-known Hungarian intellec-tuals and critics of the policies of the Victor Orban government in recent years. His anal-ysis of the phenomenon of the migration crisis was reflected in his concept of “post-fas-cism”. It is difficult to understand it without reference to his other works and a systematic reconstruction. The article problematises this notion in the perspective of the Hungarian philosopher’s broad historisophical narrative, in which nationalism, ethnicism, fascism and post-fascism are shown to be successive stages in the contradictory development of post-Enlightenment capitalist liberal democracy. His political thought in this context is a call for the restoration of a class perspective in the analysis of social relations.
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The story of local Belarusians who collaborated with Nazi Germany is often a forgotten page of history. Yet, their brutal tactics and participation in the extermination of Jews and other populations are a sad reminder of life under occupation, as was the case of the Barysau police offcers.
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Review of: Aurelia Wyleżyńska, Kroniki wojenne 1939–1944 (t. I: 1939–1942, t. II: 1943–1944), Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 2021– 2022, 1200 s.
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Review of: Niemiecki ksiądz u progu Auschwitz. Z ks.Mafredem Deselaersem rozmawia Piotr Żyłka, Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków 2022, 336 s.
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Wśród rodzinnych opowieści przekazanych mi w domu znajduje się i taka: jest marzec roku 1945. Moja babcia postanawia sprawdzić, jak wygląda Warszawa. Wygnana z córką i synem w czasie powstania, uciekła z obozu w Pruszkowie i znalazła schronienie w Puszczy Bolimowskiej u dalekiej krewnej. Wie – choć desperacko nie wierzy – że jej mąż zginął w Auschwitz. Wtedy, w sierpniu, jej druga córka była akurat na letnisku w okolicach Otwocka. Kiedy front przeszedł, udało się szczęśliwie ją odnaleźć i sprowadzić pod Bolimów. W tej sytuacji pora sprawdzić, w jakim stanie jest mieszkanie w zrujnowanej stolicy, zwłaszcza że w domu krewnej, wśród wielu innych uciekinierów z miasta, nie można przecież żyć w nieskończoność.
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The aim of the article is to present the criminal conviction of Gebhard Heyder, a catholic priest, who said during a mass in 1944 that “War is God’s criminal court for the nations”, and “Germany must return to Christ again”. During the trial, he added that: „The faith of the German people in National Socialism is the most erroneous path that the German people have ever followed”. Sentenced to death, he miraculously survived, and after the war he unsuccessfully applied to the prosecutor’s office and the court to establish the criminal liability of his perpetrators. The judiciary of the Federal Republic found that the prosecutor and the judge who collaborated in the priest’s conviction had not committed a crime because they were applying the law in force at the time and were not aware that they were illegal. In the Third Reich and in the territories occupied during World War II, over 4,000 Catholic priests were murdered. Most of the victims were murdered without trial in executions and concentration camps. In the Old Reich, Catholic priests were sentenced to death by the National Tribunal (Volksgerichtshof).
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The text describes fragmentary education gained by children deported from the territory of Poland occupied by the Soviet Union to the forced labour camps and kolkhozes. They were subsequently evacuated from the USSR to Iran and other countries controlled by Great Britain. The release of such a large group of people from Gulag camps and places of isolation was an unprecedented situation in the Soviet system, and the presence of such a large number of civilians along the regular military units being formed at the time was unexampled in history. The authors illustrate education methods and conditions of Polish youth released with their families from Gulag camps and locations of compulsory labour together under the so-called amnesty. They provide details regarding the young refugees’ health issues, numerous cases of starvation to death or symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTSD ‒ post-traumatic stress disorder). They present the problems with the evacuation itself and confront the standards of living and expulsion from Soviet Russia with a highly positive reception of refugees on the Persian land. They indicate their further fate, including the creation of orphanages and schools, as children in the USSR were deprived of the opportunity to learn. It was important to depict extremely difficult, frequently provisional attempts at schooling Polish youngsters against the background of historic events.
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Review of Filip Gańczak: Jan Sehn und die Ahndung der Verbrechen von Auschwitz. Eine Biografie. (Studien zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust, Bd. 7.) Wallstein Verlag. Göttingen 2022. 238 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-8353-5321-3. (€ 25,–.)
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