“The (final) solution of the Gypsy-question:” continuities in discourses about Roma in Hungary, 1940s–1950s

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-130
Author(s):  
Eszter Varsa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Regional Policy ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Hungarian Society ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
State Socialist ◽  
Radical Solution

Although the repression and elimination of Roma from Hungarian society in the 1940s did not reach the same extent as in the German and Austrian part of the Third Reich, their characterization as lazy and work-shy, used to justify their persecution, was similar. This paper establishes the presence of racial hygienic discourse related to Roma during the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s in Hungary, and traces its survival and influence on regional policy-making in the postwar period. It furthermore explores the transformation and adaptation of racism and eugenics to the socialist ideology of equality based on citizens' participation in productive work in the early state socialist period, including the first Party declaration on the situation of Roma in Hungary in 1961. Specific attention is paid to the role of medical experts who discussed the “radical solution of the Gypsy-question” in the early 1940s and the immediate years following World War II. Reflecting on wider transformations of racism in the postcolonial and post-World War II period in Europe and North America, the paper contributes to scholarship that complicates the evaluation of the state socialist past, including the connection between medicine and politics in Cold War Europe.

Domestic Constraints on West German Ostpolitik: The Role of the Expellee Organizations in the Adenauer Era

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 31-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pertti Ahonen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
Domestic Constraints ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
General Studies

TheOstpolitik of the early Federal Republic presents a puzzle: why did West Germany—a country that consistently denounced the brutal Eastern policies of the Third Reich and sought to present itself as a new, peace-loving entity—refuse to normalize its relations with most East European countries until the early 1970s? The existing literature has explained Bonn's behavior primarily with reference to foreign policy calculations, such as the need to isolate the GDR and its satellite allies and to avoid granting unilateral concessions to the Soviet bloc. Although such Staatsräson considerations were very significant for the Federal Republic's policymakers, they do not tell the whole story. Movement on Eastern policy was also significantly hindered by domestic factors, the most important of which was the influence of the Vertriebenenverbände—the pressure organizations purporting to represent the millions of Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The role of these organizations has typically received passing reference in general studies of Ostpolitik, but the specialized literature on the topic has remained weak.

A war hero or a Hitler soldier?

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Committee ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third Reich

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.

Il rumore delle onde

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-86
Author(s):  
Camilla Tenaglia
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Neutral Position ◽  
Holy See ◽  
Radio Broadcasting ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract This essay addresses the relations between Pius XII and Germany at the beginning of his pontificate through the role of Vatican Media, especially Vatican Radio. During the interwar period, the Vatican media system (media ensemble) underwent major transformations, including the creation of a radio broadcasting station in 1931. Pacelli was one of the main agents of these improvements: as Secretary of State supporting Guglielmo Marconi’s project, as Pope through his extensive use of the mass media at his disposal, from radio to cinema. At the end of the 30s the difficult diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Third Reich also had an impact on mass media, as shown by the election of Pacelli in March 1939. The role of Vatican Radio in Vatican diplomacy towards Nazi Germany was already clear during the events surrounding the Anschluss in 1938 and it became a tool for unofficial communication to convey more explicit stances on the regime during World War II. The same strategy was employed during the Option in Südtirol in 1939, when Catholics were able to deliver anti-Nazi propaganda thanks in part to radio in the attempt to avoid the voluntary resettlement of German-speaking Italian citizens from the area. The Holy See maintained a neutral position throughout the events, but at the same time Vatican Radio broadcast programmes in German about the condition of the Catholic Church under the Nazi regime. These broadcasts supported the efforts especially of the Archbishop of Trento Celestino Endrici and his clergy, who opposed the resettlement. Once again Vatican Radio proved a crucial tool for conveying unofficial communications while maintaining the neutral stance typical of the Holy See‘s foreign policy.

Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945-1953. By David Monod. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xiv+325. $45.00. ISBN 0-8078-2944-7.

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-352
Author(s):  
Pamela M. Potter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
American Military ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Research Interviews ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Military

The impetus among Germany's cultural elite to mark the end of World War II as a “zero hour” has been analyzed mainly as a German phenomenon, with considerably less attention to the role of the occupying forces in fostering that mentality. Settling Scores offers a long-awaited analysis of the American Military Government's precarious navigation in the music world, one of the most sensitive cultural areas for both the conquerors and the conquered. Most histories of twentieth-century German music and culture suffer from a basic misunderstanding of this tumultuous time and uncritically accept many of the prejudices it engendered. As this study demonstrates, the notion of a musical “zero hour” is one such misconception, for the imperfect projects of denazification and reeducation left the musical world of the post-war period largely indistinguishable from its pre-war existence. Based on thorough archival research, interviews with eyewitnesses, and a wide range of literature, this highly readable and engaging history reveals in detail the successes and failures of the Military Government's ambitious agenda to root out the musical “Führers” of the Third Reich and to transform music from a tool of nationalist aggression to one of democratic tolerance.

In Search of a Father

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus J. Arnold ◽  
Eve M. Duffy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
General Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Adolf Hitler ◽  
The Third ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Third Reich

In this introductory chapter, the author narrates how he searched for his missing father, Konrad Jarausch, who had died in the USSR in January 1942. After providing a background on Jarausch's nationalism and involvement in Protestant pedagogy, the chapter discusses his experiences during World War II. It then explains how Jarausch grew increasingly critical of the Nazis after witnessing the mass deaths of Russian prisoners of war. It also considers how the author, and his family, tried to keep the memory of his father alive. The author concludes by reflecting on his father's troubled legacy and how his search for his father poses the general question of complicity with Nazism and the Third Reich on a more personal level, asking why a decent and educated Protestant would follow Adolf Hitler and support the war until he himself, his family, and the country were swallowed up by it.

The two lives of neurologist Helmut J. Bauer (1914–2008)

Neurology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 109-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Schmidt ◽  
Jens Westemeier ◽  
Dominik Gross
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
University Professor ◽  
Medical Career ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Second World

In 2008, the internationally renowned neurologist and university professor Helmut Johannes Bauer died at the age of 93 years. In the numerous obituaries and tributes to him, the years between 1933 and 1945 are either omitted or simplified; the Nazi past of Helmut Bauer has hardly been explored. Based on original documents dating from the Third Reich and the early Federal Republic of Germany as well as relevant secondary writings, Bauer's life before 1945 was traced to gain knowledge of his exact activities and tasks during the Second World War. Bauer was actively involved in Nazi crimes. He was a member of the so-called Künsberg special command of the SS and also worked in a prominent position at the Institute for Microbiology as well as for the Foreign Department of the Reich Physicians' Chamber. After World War II, Bauer underwent denazification and, like many others, was able to pursue his further medical career undisturbed, building on the contacts he had already made during the Nazi period.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Heins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Private Life ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Third Reich

This concluding chapter reflects on the development of German melodrama in the aftermath of World War II. It traces a sense of disillusionment with the Nazi “deployment of sexuality” in films and how it had prepared the ground for the renewed postwar cultivation of domesticity and feminine nurturance in West Germany. The return to private life and to puritanical mores in the postwar era was partly a response to the attack on “bourgeois” sexual morality that had been carried out by the mass culture of the Third Reich. Turning against nudity and licentiousness in the early 1950s could be represented and understood as a turn against Nazism. Thus, this “reprivatization” and newly conservative culture left its mark on West German melodramas of the 1950s.

Communism and anti-Communism in early Cold War Italy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Mariuzzo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
World War ◽  
International Context ◽  
Western Government ◽  
First Time ◽  
And Diffusion

The struggle in projects, ideas and symbols between the strongest Communist Party in the West and an anti-Communist and pro-Western government coalition was the most peculiar founding element of the Italian democratic political system after World War II. Until now, most historians have focused their attention on political parties as the only players in the competition for the making of political orientations and civic identities in Italian public opinion. Others have considered Italian political struggle in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of the polarisation between Communism and organized Catholicism, due to the undoubted importance of the Church in Italian culture and social relations. This book enlarges the view, looking at new aspects and players of the anti-Communist ‘front’. It takes into account the role of cultural associations, newspapers and the popular press in the selection and diffusion of critical judgements and images of Communism, highlighting a dimension that explains the force of anti-communist opinions in Italy after 1989 and the crisis of traditional parties. The author also places the case of Italian Cold War anti-Communism in an international context for the first time.

Physical anthropology and ethnogenesis in Bulgaria, 1878-1944

Focaal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (58) ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Christian Promitzer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Physical Anthropology ◽  
World War ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
New Generation

This article engages with the commonly encountered claim that Bulgarian physical anthropology "features a long, fruitful, and honorable existence," by discussing Bulgarian anthropology's contribution to the controversial issue of ethnogenesis. With the Russian influence waning from the mid-1880s on, the pioneers of Bulgarian anthropology were largely influenced by the German example. But the first generation of Bulgarian anthropologists' tradition of "racial liberalism" (Benoit Massin) was lost after World War I. On the eve of World War II a debate on racism raged among Bulgarian intellectuals. By the time blood group analysis had joined anthropometrics, adherents of a closer collaboration with the Third Reich used it to argue for the Bulgarian nation's non-Slavic origins. In 1938 they even disrupted a lecture given by the biologist Metodiy Popov when he wanted to stress the Bulgarians' ethnic relationship with the other Slavic nations, and to repudiate the idea of a hierarchy of races. During the Socialist period a new generation of anthropologists went on to investigate the Bulgarian ethnogenesis using the term "race", although this clearly contravened the 1950 UNESCO statement on the race question.

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