Double or Nothing

2019 ◽  
pp. 231-252
Author(s):  
Anand Toprani
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Third ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Technical Details ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Strategic Context

This chapter places oil at the center of the Third Reich’s plans for the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union. It begins by reviewing Germany’s preoccupation with the Caucasian oilfields during World War I. The chapter then considers the strategic context behind Germany’s decision to launch Operation Barbarossa in 1941. It moves on to review technical details of seizing and rehabilitating the Soviet oilfields. Time was running out for the Germans, however—their supply position was already tenuous by the spring of 1941, and by the autumn Germany had burned through its entire operational reserve even as the German war plan against the Soviet Union began to stall. The failure of Operation Barbarossa ultimately doomed the German war effort, since the Third Reich lacked the means to destroy the Soviet Union before the entry of the United States into the war tipped the scales irrevocably against Germany.

From Crisis to Opportunity

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-230
Author(s):  
Anand Toprani
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Oil Resources ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter offers a reassessment of Germany’s oil strategy during World War II. Fuel consumption during Germany’s early campaigns (1939–40) was lower than expected, but the swift victory over France left the Third Reich in a quandary. Before the war, Europe had imported two-thirds of its petroleum consumption. Germany’s prewar efforts had only aimed to make it self-sufficient—the Third Reich could not hope, however, to replace the supplies other European nations had imported from overseas. German planners concluded that unless Germany took control of the oil resources of either the Soviet Union or the Middle East, fuel shortages would soon derail the entire war effort. This looming energy crisis in Europe strengthened Hitler’s ideological and strategic conviction that Germany should risk a two-front war in 1941 by attacking the Soviet Union before the United States could intervene.

Oil and the Great Powers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anand Toprani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Energy Needs ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Alternative Sources

During the first half of the twentieth century, a lack of oil constrained Britain and Germany from exerting their economic and military power independently. Having fought World War I with oil imported from the United States, Britain was determined to avoid relying upon another great power for its energy needs ever again. Even before the war had ended, Whitehall began implementing a strategy of developing alternative sources of oil under British control. Britain’s key supplier would be the Middle East—already a region of vital importance to the British Empire, but one whose oil potential was still unproven. There turned out to be plenty of oil in the Middle East, but Italian hostility after 1935 threatened British transit through the Mediterranean. As war loomed in 1939, Britain’s quest for independence from the United States was a failure. Germany was in an even worse position than Britain. The Third Reich went to war dependent on petroleum synthesized from coal, meager domestic crude oil production, and overland imports—primarily from Romania. German leaders were confident, however, that they had sufficient oil to fight a series of short, localized campaigns that would deliver to them the mastery of Europe. Their plan derailed following Germany’s swift victory over France, when Britain refused to make peace. This left Germany responsible for satisfying Europe’s oil requirements while cut off from world markets. A looming energy crisis in Axis Europe, an absence of strategic alternatives, and ideological imperatives all compelled Germany to invade the Soviet Union in 1941—a decision that ultimately sealed its fate.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

scholarly journals INFORMATION CONFRONTATION OF NAZI GERMANY AND THE USSR IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

2018 ◽  
pp. 52-62
Author(s):  
Oksana Salata
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The United States ◽  
Information Policy ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Second World

The second world and its constituent German-Soviet wars became the key events of the 20th century. Currently, the study of domestic and foreign historiography in the context of the disclosure of the information policy of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the information confrontation of the Nazi and Soviet systems of information and psychological infl uence on the enemy population is relevant. Thanks to the work of domestic and foreign scholars, the attraction of new archival materials and documents, the world saw scientifi c works devoted to various aspects of the propaganda activities of Nazi Germany, including in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Among them are the works of Ukrainian historians: A. Podolsky, Y. Nikolaytsya, P. Rekotov, O. Lysenko, V. Shaikan, M. Mikhailyuk, V. Grinevich; Russian historians M. I. Semiaryagi, E. Makarevich, V. I. Tsymbal and G. F. Voronenkova. An analysis of scientifi c literature published in Germany, England and the United States showed that the eff ectiveness and negative eff ects of German information policy are revealed in the works of German historians and publicists O. Hadamovsky, N. Muller, P. Longerich, R. Coel, et al. Along with the works devoted to armed confrontation, one can single out a study in which the authors try to show the information technologies and methods of psychological action that were used by the governments of both countries to infl uence the consciousness and the moral and psychological state of their own population and the enemy’s population, on the results of the Second World War. Most active in the study of Nazi propaganda and information policy of the Third Reich, in general, were the German historians, in particular E. Hadamovskie , G. Fjorsterch and G. Schnitter, and others. The value of their work is to highlight the process of the creation in 1933–1945 of the National Socialist Party in Germany of an unprecedented system of mass manipulation in the world’s history, fully controlled by the Nazi leadership of the information space. Thus, an analysis of the works of domestic and foreign scholars shows that the information confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was extremely powerful, since both warring parties possessed the most up-to-date information and ideological weapon. Unfortunately, today there is no comprehensive study of this problem that could reveal all aspects of the information confrontation in the modern information world.

Conservative Catholicism and American Philanthropy

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Udi Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Effective Path

This chapter focuses on political theorist Waldemar Gurian, one of the first Catholic émigrés to return from exile to visit Germany in 1948. During the occupation period and the early 1950s, Gurian utilized U.S. wealth to fund a stream of publications, lectures, and educational programs intended to establish a union between the United States and Europe's Catholics. His writings depicted the United States as the guardian of Catholic ideals, autonomy, and communities and insisted that an alliance with the United States presented the only effective path toward defeating Catholicism's ultimate enemy, the Soviet Union. With the massive support of the American diplomatic and cultural apparatus, Gurian and other émigrés worked to popularize these ideas among German Catholics. By the mid-1950s, their efforts helped forge an alliance between Catholics, West Germany, and the United States, a bond that became the backbone of the Cold War effort in Europe.

Trophies of War

2019 ◽  
pp. 212-242
Author(s):  
Brandon M. Schechter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Clear Objective ◽  
Better Than

This chapter focuses on all manner of trophies, from German prisoners of war to objects looted from houses in the Third Reich. Between 1941 and 1945, soldiers of the Red Army were confronted with an enemy who was often better dressed, wealthier, and initially much more effective. First on Soviet territory and then abroad, Red Army soldiers confronted an alien culture. For average citizens, this trip abroad was a unique chance to go beyond Soviet borders, one that came at great personal risk and with a clear objective—to destroy Fascism and the Third Reich. What soldiers saw along the way was puzzling. They not only reckoned with material objects and institutions that the Soviet Union had purged but were also left to wonder why people who lived materially so much better than they did had waged a genocidal war against them, marked by systematic rape, pillaging, and wanton destruction. The chapter then shows how a Soviet understanding of jurisprudence and a particular perception of the bourgeois world combined with a desire for vengeance to both justify looting and frame Soviet understandings of the Third Reich.

Response to “France and the German Question, 1945–1955,” by Michael Creswell and Marc Trachtenberg

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-36
Author(s):  
William I. Hitchcock
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question

Three scholars offer separate responses to the article by Michael Creswell and Marc Trachtenberg. The responses include some common points, but they diverge sharply in other respects. The first two respondents generally agree with the conclusions reached by Creswell and Trachtenberg, but one of them believes that the article goes too far (in its contention that France's anxiety about the Soviet Union eclipsed its concerns about Germany), whereas the other argues that the article does not go far enough in showing how the United States adapted its policy to accommodate French leaders. The second respondent also questions whether Creswell and Trachtenberg have added anything new to the latest “revisionist” works on French-German relations in the first decade of Cold War. The third respondent, unlike the first two, rejects the main thrust of the article by Creswell and Trachtenberg and seeks to defend the traditional view that France was very reluctant to go along with U.S. and British policies on the German question. This respondent also questions whether Creswell and Trachtenberg have focused on the most appropriate sources of evidence.

Winning the Third World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregg A. Brazinsky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Broad Array ◽  
The Third World

Winning the Third World examines afresh the intense and enduring rivalry between the United States and China during the Cold War. Gregg A. Brazinsky shows how both nations fought vigorously to establish their influence in newly independent African and Asian countries. By playing a leadership role in Asia and Africa, China hoped to regain its status in world affairs, but Americans feared that China's history as a nonwhite, anticolonial nation would make it an even more dangerous threat in the postcolonial world than the Soviet Union. Drawing on a broad array of new archival materials from China and the United States, Brazinsky demonstrates that disrupting China's efforts to elevate its stature became an important motive behind Washington's use of both hard and soft power in the "Global South."

The Soviet Union and the Antarctic Regime

1984 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 834-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boleslaw A. Boczek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Social Science Literature ◽  
Antarctic Treaty ◽  
The Antarctic

Ever since the Antarctic regime began the third, crucial decade of its existence following the entry into effect of the Antarctic Treaty in 1961, interest in the frozen continent has escalated. This interest has spawned an immense social science literature, which analyzes the diverse legal, political and economic aspects of Antarctica and the surrounding oceans. The Antarctic regime has been universally and deservedly hailed both in the West and, especially, in the East as an unprecedented example of peaceful cooperation among states professing conflicting ideologies and, one might add, belonging to adversary alliances—as witnessed especially by the participation in the regime of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet much of the pertinent scholarly writing devotes primary or exclusive attention to the position of the United States within this regime; except for incidental references in some works, not one study has appeared anywhere that deals with the position of the Soviet Union on major substantive issues arising within the context of the Antarctic regime. This study will attempt to fill this gap by comprehensively examining the topic of Soviet participation in the affairs of the southern continent.

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