scholarly journals The ‘Poitrot Report’, 1945: the first public document on Nazi euthanasia

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Müller ◽  
Bernd Reichelt

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the so-called ‘Poitrot Report’, submitted to the French Military Government in Baden-Baden, Germany, in December 1945 and published in a reduced German version in 1946. Its author was the French-Moroccan psychiatrist Robert Poitrot, who had been put in charge of the public mental asylums in Südwürttemberg after World War II. Poitrot took responsibility for restoring psychiatric care during the occupation, and was also eager to document Nazi ‘euthanasia’ and to start investigating the role of staff in mental hospitals during National Socialism. Focusing on the ‘Poitrot Report’, this paper also reflects on life in Württemberg mental hospitals and the interaction between French representatives such as Poitrot and regional German medical staff.

Author(s):  
Ann Sherif

The company history of a newspaper company raises new questions about the genre of company histories. Who reads them? What features should readers and researchers be aware of when using them as a source? This article examines the shashi of the Chûgoku Shinbun, the Hiroshima regional newspaper. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were significant because of their perceived role in bringing World War II to an end and in signaling the start of the nuclear age. Most research to date has emphasized the role of national newspapers and the international media in informing the public about the extent of the damage and generating a framework within which to understand. I compare the representation of three key events in the Chûgoku Shinbun company history (shashi) to those in two national newspapers (Asahi and Yomiuri), as well as the ways that the Hiroshima company’s 100th and 120th year self-presentations reveal important concerns of the region and the nation, and motivations in going public with its shashi. These comparisons will reveal some of the merits and limits of using shashi in research. This article is part of a larger study on the work of the influence of regional press and publishers on literature in twentieth-century Japan.   


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 03009
Author(s):  
Saassylana Sivtseva ◽  
Olga Parfenova

The historical and cultural heritage, expressed in monuments, architectural structures, dedicated to the Great Patriotic War, today is significant. The purpose of the article is to determine the role of society in perpetuating the memory of the Great Patriotic War. The authors conclude that the events of World War II find a lively response from the public. At the same time, new tendencies in commemorative practices are traced - tragic pages of history that until recently were “uncomfortable” (and in Soviet times banned for research), such as human losses, extremely high mortality of the civilian population from hunger, forcibly transferred to special settlements, - began to be reflected in the construction of monuments, memorable places. The location of these monuments is specific - they were erected at a certain distance from public places, at the territories of churches (victims of famine, victims of political repressions), which is associated with the predicted ambiguity of their perception.


1975 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-142
Author(s):  
Robert G. Craig ◽  
Harry P. Mapp

“There is more than enough evidence to show that the states and localities, far from being weak sisters, have actually been carrying the brunt of domestic governmental progress in the United States ever since the end of World War II … Moreover, they have been largely responsible for undertaking the truly revolutionary change in the role of government in the United States that has occurred over the past decade.”–Daniel J. Elazar, The Public Interest


1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Laffey

The completion in 1986 of the Documents diplomatiques français, 1932–1939 permits a review of French Far Eastern policy during that troubled time characterized by J.-B. Duroselle as ‘la décadence.’ This massive documentary collection, however, still dose not provide a full picture of the forces which shaped French East Asian policy in the years before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Understandably focused upon European developments, it begins and ends, from the Far Eastern perspective, in medias res; that is, after the outbreak of the Manchurian crisis and before the Japanese occupation of Indochina. Moreover, like other compilations of what statesmen and diplomats said to each other, this one slights economic factors and, though to a lesser extent, the role of public opinion. Even taken in their own terms, the documents perhaps reveal more about what others said and did to the French than about what they themselves accomplished. That points to a more fundamental problem, for one can question whether anything so gelatinous as the French responses or lack thereof to developments largely beyond their control can even be described as ‘policy.’ Still, although much more work in archives and private papers will be necessary before the entire story can be pieced together, these documents do shed light on what passed for French policy in East Asia during the years before the outbreak of World War II.


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.


2019 ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Sabah Atallah Khalifa Ali ◽  
Zaid Ibrahim Ismael

Like J. J. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and many other fantasies, Rowling’s Harry Potter is rich with allegorical implications that reflect the political anxiety of the era in which it was written. The critics and readers found connections between the events of the early parts of the novel and the historical havoc in world politics, like Hitler and World War II, a thing which Rowling attested in many of her interviews. Still, the texts are still open for other readings. It is possible to draw political parallels with contemporary issues. For instance, the American and British readers have been unable to resist identification with the events which mirror the international campaign on terrorism. This study is a political reading of Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It sheds light on the role of the Ministry of Magic in the novel and its relation to the governments’ policies to misguide the public about the terrorist threats to world powers, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary V Seeman

Objectives: To update Canadian psychiatrists on recent information from newly discovered Berlin archives about the actions of physicians, especially psychiatrists, during the era of National Socialism in Germany and to encourage introspection about the role of the medical profession, its relationship with government, and its vulnerability to manipulation by ideology and economic pressures. Method: This is a selective review of the literature on the collaboration of physicians, especially psychiatrists, in the sterilization, experimentation, and annihilation of patients with mental illness before and during World War II. Results: Directed to value the health of the nation over the care of individual patients and convinced that a hierarchy of worth distinguished one person from another, German psychiatrists were enlisted to commit atrocities during the Nazi period. Conclusions: The values of care and compassion can be eroded; this knowledge demands constant vigilance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Lauren Schwartz

How, in the aftermath of National Socialism and World War II, was the memory landscape of Munich and Bavaria denazified under the Office of the Military Government of the United States? Supplementing existing cultural approaches and scholarship on denazification in Bavaria, this article considers the execution of Allied Control Council Directive Number 30 by the American occupation government (omgus) in Bavaria, in conjunction with appropriated native Bavarian bureaucracies and bureaucrats, to inventory and assess the built environment in order to register militaristic or Nazi monuments and prioritize their removal or modification. The limitations of the project to renew or restore the monument landscape confront in turn the limitations on the “bureaucratic manufacture of memory” in the modification of individual memory.


2015 ◽  
pp. 49-87
Author(s):  
Sylwia Bykowska

This article attempts to analyse the trials held against the guards of the Stutthof concentration camp and the public execution of eleven criminals sentenced to death. The proceedings were held before the Special Criminal Court in Gdansk from 25 April to 31 May 1946. The sentence was carried out on a hill called Biskupia Górka (Stolzenberg) on 4 July of that year, in the presence of a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands of people. These events are shown as a ritual, which did not only punish Nazi perpetrators, but also fulfilled important social and political functions. Attention is also paid to the role of the city of Gdansk, which was undergoing another transformation in its history after the end of World War II, in the process of the settlement of the Nazi crimes.


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