The Reichsschulen and the Napolas’ Germanizing Mission in Eastern and Western Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 288-311
Author(s):  
Helen Roche

Heinrich Himmler, August Heißmeyer, and the NPEA Inspectorate were eager to create a transnational empire of Napolas and ‘Reichsschulen’ in all of the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II. These schools both mirrored and contributed to broader National Socialist occupation and Germanization policies throughout Eastern and Western Europe. They were intended to create a cadre of ‘Germanic’ or ‘Germanizable’ leaders, loyal above all to the SS. The chapter begins by exploring the genesis of the Reichsschulen in the occupied Netherlands—Valkenburg and Heythuysen—which were adopted as a ‘Germanic’ prestige project by the Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyß-Inquart. The chapter then turns eastwards to consider the role of the Napolas which were established in the conquered Czech and Polish lands, focusing on NPEA Sudetenland in Ploschkowitz (Ploskowice), NPEA Wartheland in Reisen (Rydzyna), and NPEA Loben (Lubliniec). All in all, the Napola selection process in the occupied Eastern territories can be seen as the peak of all the ‘racial sieving’ processes which the Nazi state forced ‘ethnic Germans’ (Volksdeutsche), Czechs, and Poles to undergo, inextricably bound up with the Third Reich’s wider race, resettlement, and extermination policies. The ultimate aim of all of these schools was to mingle Reich German and ‘ethnic German’ or ‘Germanic’ pupils, educating the two groups alongside each other, in order to create a unified cohort of leaders for the future Nazi empire, and to reclaim valuable ‘Germanic blood’ for the Reich.

2018 ◽  
pp. 131-142
Author(s):  
Adam Cathcart ◽  
Robert Winstanley-Chesters

This article analyses scholarship and memoir writing by German geographer Gustav Fochler-Hauke with respect to Korean settlement in Manchuria, and along the Tumen and Yalu/Amnok rivers in the 1930s and early 40s. The research note demonstrates that while Focher-Hauke’s work has its value—not least due to the access he received thanks to the Japanese military government—his concepts of geopolitics and the influence of his mentor and collaborator, Karl Haushofer, renders the work flawed; its value as a historical source for scholars today is therefore limited. The research note begins with Fochler-Hauke’s rising profile within German geopolitical studies and turns toward that field’s documentation of Koreans in Manchuria, the role of borders between Korea and Manchuria, the blind eye turned toward Korean resistance to Japan, and the rehabilitation of some of these scholars and works after World War II.


1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-261
Author(s):  
Sidney Heitman

Since the end of World War II more than one million citizens of the USSR have emigrated to the West in a unique and unprecedented movement today called the “Third Soviet Emigration.” In contrast to two earlier flights of refugees from the Revolution and from World War II, the Third Emigration is a voluntary, legally-sanctioned process involving mainly three nationalities—Jews, ethnic Germans, and Armenians. The origin of the exodus goes back to the early postwar years, but the vast majority of the emigrants have left since 1971, when the Soviet government relaxed its historic antipathy to free movement by its citizens.


Mundo Eslavo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariia Shymchyshyn

The article deals with the English translations of Lesia Ukrainka’s works. The author considers the new approaches to translation that emerged after the Cultural turn in the last part of the 20th century. In particular, the attention has been paid to the issues of migration and translation, negation of the Eurocentric ideas about translation, and translation as a constituent part for the formation of migrant’s community. Considering the chronology of the translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s works into English, it is argued that as a rule they were done by the Ukrainian diaspora and published in the periodicals, financed by the Ukrainian communities in Great Britain, the USA, and Canada. The most intensive phase of the popularization of poetess’s works in English happened to be during the middle of the last century. This could be explained by the nature of the third wave of migration, which occurred after World War II. This wave brought the highly politicized people, who tried to oppose the Soviet regime. They used literature to oppose the Soviet appropriation of the Ukrainian cultural heritage. Besides the Ukrainian diaspora have utilized the native fictional discourse to maintain the boundaries and consciousness of their collectivity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Wójcik

Der Artikel soll einen kurzen Überblick über die Entstehung und Verbreitung der Propagandatexte im Distrikt Lublin geben. Das Textkorpus besteht aus den Texten über den Distrikt Lublin mit der damals größten Anzahl der verlegten Exemplare. Die damals von deutschen Journalisten, Archivaren, Historikern und Volkskundlern verfassten Texte waren vor allem als Propagandamittel für den Gebrauch der im Distrikt Lublin eingesetzten Deutschen, die über den ganzen Distrikt verstreut waren, gedacht. Zahlreiche Autoren haben sowohl gegenwärtige als auch geschichtliche Themenbereiche ins Auge gefasst. Mit Rücksicht auf den geplanten Weitergang des sog. Nationalsozialistischen Aufbaus wurden verschiedene Themenbereiche aufgeworfen. Das Ziel, der von den NS-Forschern „produzierten“ Texte über den Distrikt Lublin war vor allem die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums auf den besetzten Gebieten.National Socialist propaganda texts in relation to the Lublin district 1939–1944Propaganda texts published in the period of World War II by German journalists, historians and cultural analysts first of all consist of propaganda materials dedicated to Germans and Volksdeutsche scattered around the entire district. The corpus consists of texts about the Lublin district with the largest number of copies published at the time. The propaganda texts created in those times also aroused interest in the problems of Germans and Volksdeutsche from the General Governorate in the Third Reich. In relation to the National Socialist plan of “Aufbauarbeit” the texts addressed numerous topics which required scientific research of the district’s area and a statistical analysis. The aim of these texts “produced” by National Socialist researchers concerning the Lublin district was primarily to strengthen Germanness in the occupied areas.


Author(s):  
Charles B. Roger

This chapter explains how informal organizations are conceptualized in the book. It also maps temporal and geographic trends. It starts by explaining the idea of a formal international organization and uses this idea as a model to illustrate the contrasting features of informal organizations. The chapter then reviews what are called the distinct “functional properties” and “domestic implications” of formal and informal organizations, which are central for understanding the different theories that have been offered. The final part of the chapter explains how the concept of an informal organization has been operationalized and used to generate a database of informal institutions. Descriptive statistics are presented that help scholars to visualize the institutional terrain any theory of informality must explain. These reveal the extraordinary growth of informal organizations since the end of World War II, as well as the central role of states in North America and Western Europe in that growth.


2020 ◽  
pp. 248-308
Author(s):  
Caroline Mezger

Chapter 6 examines the extracurricular mobilization of ethnic German children and youth in the Hungarian-occupied Batschka/Bácska/Bačka during World War II. It shows how unlike in the German-occupied Banat, the Deutsche Jugend in the Batschka competed with the Hungarian Levente (a mandatory paramilitary youth organization) and various religious youth groups. Kinderlandverschickung (child evacuation, KLV) groups from the Reich further mingled with the region’s ethnic Germans to convey images of Germany and the “Reichsdeutsche” that remained unavailable to the Banat’s children and youth. Young Batschka Donauschwaben thus continuously formulated and defended diverse definitions of “Germanness,” despite the Axis occupation and overwhelming pro-Nazi mobilization of their communities. However, with Germany’s occupation of Hungary in March 1944, these dynamics, too, would shift: any youth who had not yet voluntarily joined formations like the Waffen-SS were coerced into service, making them complicit in some of the Third Reich’s most heinous crimes.


Author(s):  
Caroline Mezger

Forging Germans explores the nationalization and eventual National Socialist mobilization of ethnic German children and youth in interwar and World War II Yugoslavia, particularly in two of its multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderlands: the Western Banat and the Batschka. Drawing upon original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and historical press sources, the book uncovers the multifarious ways in which political, ecclesiastical, cultural, and military agents from Germany colluded with local nationalist activists to inculcate Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans with divergent notions of “Germanness.” As the book shows, even in the midst of Yugoslavia’s violent and shifting Axis occupation, children and youth not only remained the subjects, but became agents of nationalist activism, as they embraced, negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the “Germanness” ascribed to them. Forging Germans is conceptualized as a contribution to the study of National Socialism from a transnational and comparative perspective, to the mid-twentieth-century history of Southeastern Europe and its relation to Germany, to studies of borderland nationalism and experiences of World War II occupation, and to the history of childhood and youth.


Author(s):  
Luca Voges ◽  
Andreas Kupsch

AbstractHallervorden–Spatz disease (HSD) has been recently renamed to pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration (PKAN) and neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation (NBIA), mainly due to the unethical behavior of Julius Hallervorden in the National Socialist (NS) euthanasia program of the Nazi Third Reich. The role of the second name giver in the NS euthanasia program is less clear. Hugo Spatz was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch during World War II (WWII), renamed to Max Planck Institute after 1945. After the war, he headed the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main. The present study investigates the potential involvement of Hugo Spatz in the NS euthanasia program. In the present study, we compared a list of euthanasia victims from the German Federal Archive Berlin (30.146 cases published after the reunification of Germany, BArch R179) with the files of the collection of specimens from 1940 until 1945 of Hugo Spatz as listed in the Archive of the Max Planck Society Berlin-Dahlem (n = 305). Furthermore, the old term HSD and the new terms PKAN and NBIA were systematically searched in PubMed from 1946, through January 2019 to evaluate the renaming process from HSD to PKAN/NBIA. Following Hugo Spatz’s death in 1969 growing evidence indicated that he may have taken part in the NS euthanasia program. This study identifies 4 euthanized victims in the patient files of Hugo Spatz from 1940 to 1945, suggesting involvement of Hugo Spatz in the NS euthanasia program. This further strengthens the argument that the former HSD should be exclusively referred to as PKAN or NBIA.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 244-270
Author(s):  
Gabriele Linke

In modernity studies, there has been an ongoing debate about different forms and phases of modernity. Eastern and Western Europe present special cases in this debate because modernity developed unevenly, and differences became particularly obvious after World War II. While the ‘Eastern bloc’ strove for socialist modernity, Western Europe continued its route of classic capitalist modernity, soon entering the state of late, or liquid modernity, of which fluid and fragmented identities were a defining feature. These conceptions of modernity have been reflected upon in the life narratives of people who experienced different modernities, of which Vesna Goldsworthy’s memoir Chernobyl Strawberries is a compelling example. She grew up in Yugoslavia’s socialist modernity but, at the age of twenty-five, left for Britain, where she became a journalist and literary scholar. A close reading of her memoir reveals that she emphasizes the similarity of Western classic and Yugoslav socialist modernities but also constructs herself as a cosmopolitan subject with the flexible identity typical of liquid modernity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Henrietta Bannerman

John Cranko's dramatic and theatrically powerful Antigone (1959) disappeared from the ballet repertory in 1966 and this essay calls for a reappraisal and restaging of the work for 21st century audiences. Created in a post-World War II environment, and in the wake of appearances in London by the Martha Graham Company and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets USA, I point to American influences in Cranko's choreography. However, the discussion of the Greek-themed Antigone involves detailed consideration of the relationship between the ballet and the ancient dramas which inspired it, especially as the programme notes accompanying performances emphasised its Sophoclean source but failed to recognise that Cranko mainly based his ballet on an early play by Jean Racine. As Antigone derives from tragic drama, the essay investigates catharsis, one of the many principles that Aristotle delineated in the Poetics. This well-known effect is produced by Greek tragedies but the critics of the era complained about its lack in Cranko's ballet – views which I challenge. There is also an investigation of the role of Antigone, both in the play and in the ballet, and since Cranko created the role for Svetlana Beriosova, I reflect on memories of Beriosova's interpretation supported by more recent viewings of Edmée Wood's 1959 film.


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