The Second World War: plans for a new order

Author(s):  
Anthony Harrison
2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 322-352
Author(s):  
Romain Vanlandschoot

In Van "de soldaat Johan" tot "Herman den SS-soldaat" peilt Romain Vanlandschoot naar de verhouding én de verstrengeling tussen literatuur, Vlaamse beweging en collaboratie tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. De auteur stelt daarbij het vizier scherp in op het politieke en culturele Nieuwe-Ordekader (VNV en De Vlag) waarin het literair-artistieke eenheidstijdschrift Westland ontstond. De  populaire romancier én gezaghebbende Vlaamsgezinde militant Filip De Pillecyn (1891-1962) werd de centrale figuur in de langdurige aanloop-periode van het tijdschrift. De Pillecyn dankte die rol aan zijn belangrijke inbreng in de nieuwe, "völkische" oriëntering van het culturele leven in Vlaanderen én aan zijn nauwe banden met zowel het VNV als het concurrerende De Vlag. Daarenboven genoot hij grote achting en waardering in Duitse intellectuele en artistieke kringen. Het hoofdredacteurschap van De Pillecyn was echter kort als gevolg van een al te opdringerige De Vlag- en SS-invloed. Dat heeft hem wellicht behoed voor een totale wegdeemstering na de Tweede Wereldoorlog: hij beleefde toen integendeel een onbetwistbare rehabilitering als kunstenaar.________From "soldier Johan" to "Herman the SS-soldier"In From " soldier Johan" to "Herman the SS-soldier" Romain Vanlandschoot investigates the relation and the linkage between literature, the Flemish movement and collaboration during the Second World War. The author focuses in this study on the political and cultural New Order framework (VNV [Flemish National Union] and De Vlag [German Flemish Working Community]) within which the literary-artistic unity magazine Westland had its origins. The  popular novelist  and authoritative pro-Flemish militant Filip De Pillecyn (1891-1962) became the central character during  the protracted start-up phase of the magazine. De Pillecyn obtained this role because of his important input in the new "völkische" orientation of the cultural life in Flanders as well as his close links both with the VNV and the competing De Vlag. Moreover he was also much esteemed and valued in German intellectual and artistic circles. However, De Pillecyn held the job of general editor only briefly, because of the too aggressive influence of De Vlag and the SS. This may well have protected him from a total disappearance after the Second World War: on the contrary he then experienced an undeniable rehabilitation as an artist.


The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.


Author(s):  
David Brydan

This chapter explores the relationship between Spain and the Axis powers during the Second World War. Spanish experts were involved in intensive exchange with Nazi Germany during the war. This formed part of a wider pattern of cooperation between Axis, Axis-aligned, and neutral states under the auspices of the Nazi ‘New Order’. This chapter argues that the scientific networks, conferences, and organizations promoted by Nazi Germany represented a form of ‘Axis internationalism’, which appropriated the language and practices of pre-war internationalism to promote the idea of collaborative continental order under Nazi leadership. Spanish experts, like many of their European counterparts, were willing to embrace Axis internationalism as a new, and in many ways improved, form of international cooperation. Their work highlights how internationalist structures and ideas, particularly within the ‘technical’ and humanitarian fields of health and medicine, could be appropriated by political projects from across the ideological spectrum.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 834-857
Author(s):  
Toni Morant i Ariño

Spanish fascist women played a very active role in the Falange’s cross-border relations with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. From the very beginning, fascist women took a preeminent place in these contacts and exchanges in order to see with their own eyes how both fascist models were at a practical level. These relationships between fascist women’s organizations were born out of deep ideological affinity and were especially fluid, firstly on a bilateral level and after 1940 on the ‘New Order’ Europe-wide multilateral, transnational collaboration. However, they lacked neither of political calculation nor could abstract from the wider frame of international politics in such an eminently war period. As this article will show, Falangist women used these fluid but less studied relationships to consolidate their own political position at home and explore other ways of political participation in a Nazi-Fascist New Europe, while at the same time trying to secure there a pre-eminent place for non-belligerent Spain. In the end, concerns about the own survival of the Franco dictatorship as the fate of war clearly changed in 1943, let ideological affinity succumb to the diplomatic conveniences they had once meant to overcome.


Bastina ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 363-376
Author(s):  
Bajram Haliti

World War II is considered to be the largest and longest bloody conflict in recent history. It began with the German attack on Poland on September 1, 1939. The war lasted six years and ended with the capitulation of Japan on September 2, 1945. The consequences of the war are still present in many countries today. "German, Italian and Japanese fascists waged a war of conquest with the aim of dividing the world and creating a New Order in which it would have economic, political and military domination, establish a rule of terror and violence and destroy all forms of human freedom, dignity and humanism. Only a few thousand Roma in Germany survived the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps. Trying to rebuild their lives, after losing so many family members and relatives, and after their property was destroyed or confiscated, they faced enormous difficulties. The health of many was destroyed. Although they have been trying to get compensation for that for years, such requests have been constantly denied Based on established facts, eyewitnesses, witnesses, historical and legal documents, during the Second World War, the crime of genocide against Orthodox Serbs, Jews and Roma of all faiths except Islam was committed. The attempt to exterminate the Roma during the Second World War must not be forgotten. There was no justice for the survivors of the post-Hitler era. It is important to note that the trial in Nuremberg did not mention the genocide of the Roma at all. The Nuremberg trial is basically the punishment of the losers by the winners. This is visible even today because these forces rule the world. Innocent victims, primarily Roma, have not received justice, satisfaction or recognition from the world community. The Roma were further humiliated because they were not given a chance to speak about the few surviving witnesses about the victims and the horrors they survived. The Roma for the Nuremberg International Military Court and the Nuremberg judges simply did not exist, which called into question the legal aspect of the process, which has not been corrected to date. The Roma national community is committed to revising history, to reviewing the work of the Nuremberg tribunal.


Author(s):  
Fabrizio Amore Bianco

During the Great Depression, projects for exporting corporativism and its institutions abroad as a universal way to economic recovery and social justice were not only propaganda tools of Mussolini’s regime. They were debated as real options within some fascist circles up until the Ethiopian war and the planning for an Italian ‘Imperial Autarchy’. After Italy’ intervention into the Second World War, the possibility of exporting corporativism and its institutions was reconsidered with renewed attention in the perspective of the ‘New Order’. This essay aims to analyse the main developments and outcomes of such a debate, concentrating on some projects for international corporations since the thirties up until the Second World War.


Author(s):  
H. James Burgwyn

This article examines the essence of Mussolini's foreign policy and Italy in the Second World War. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were dreamers who indulged in a mysticism of empire and race. According to the gifted historian MacGregor Knox, there are major similarities between the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini. Each regime is found to be genuinely revolutionary, their evil and violent leaders committed to subverting the international system of sovereign states in favour of an Axis New Order where racial and ethnic inferiors would be either annihilated or reduced to helots serving barbaric masters. Meanwhile, according to a dominant nationalist school of thought of Italy led by Renzo De Felice, Mussolini, in seeking ‘equidistance’ between the chief European states, aimed to utilize Nazi Germany as leverage to extract colonial concessions from the Western Powers.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This chapter studies the situation of the Jews from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the communist system. The Second World War left the world of east European Jewry devastated. Although the Nazis had been defeated, they had succeeded in murdering a large proportion of the Jews of eastern Europe. The end of the wartime Grand Alliance and the increasingly repressive character of the regimes in the Soviet Union and in Poland form the background against which attempts were made to rebuild the war-torn societies of eastern Europe and to recreate Jewish life. The Nazi occupation left a landscape laid waste by the effort to impose a racially structured New Order and the violent and often fratricidal resistance that it elicited. The departure of the Germans did not lead to the end of hostilities, and guerrilla war against the communist authorities continued in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania.


2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-173
Author(s):  
Luc Boeva

Kunstschilder Prosper De Troyer (1880-1961) behoorde tot de Vlaamse potentiële avant-garde, die zich bewoog in de rand van het activisme. Tijdens de twintiger jaren evolueerde hij  in figuratieve, expressionistische zin, waarbij hij steeds sterker tendeerde naar een beeldentaal die kon gelden als de Identitätsnachweis van het Vlaamse volk. Dat beeld was overigens in overeenstemming met  de smaak (en de doelstellingen) van de Nieuwe Orde; De Troyer ging uiteindelijk de weg van de culturele collaboratie en kwam na de Tweede Wereldoorlog in aanraking met de repressie en de epuratie. In deze bronnenpublicatie stelt Luc Boeva een pleitnota voor van zijn advocaat, Frans van der Elst, die daarin de relatie tussen kunst en politiek centraal stelt. De tekst vormt daardoor een bron voor het vergelijkend kwalitatiief onderzoek van de culturele collaboratie c.q. de repressie.________Cultural collaboration and the "Art sector". A document dealing with the repression and purgation of Prosper De TroyerThe painter Prosper De Troyer (1880-1961) belonged to the Flemish potential avant-garde, which operated in the margins of activism. During the nineteen twenties he evolved in a figurative, expressionistic sense, and he tended to increasingly use an evocative language which could refer to the Identitätsnachweis of the Flemish nation. At any rate, that image agreed with the taste (and the objectives) of the New Order; De Troyer ultimately followed the path of cultural collaboration and after the Second World War he experienced repression and purgation. In this source publication Luc Boeva presents the memoranda of oral pleadings of De Troyer's solicitor, Frans Van der Elst, in which he focuses on the relationship between art and politics. For that reason the text constitutes a source for comparative qualitative research of cultural collaboration and/or the repression.


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