„I dette sataniske Evangelium“

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-318
Author(s):  
Daniel Nagelstutz

Abstract During the Second World War, a few well-educated Greenlanders from the Danish colonies of Godthåb and Holsteinsborg expressed their sympathy for Nazi Germany. However, the background of the political turmoil within the Greenlandic elite remains largely unknown. This article presents the state of research and previously unknown sources on the Nazi riots in Greenland. In a subsequent step, potential motives for the movement will be discussed. So far, researchers have ruled out that Greenlanders were aware of the true nature of National Socialism. Instead, the scattered pro-German activities along Greenland’s West coast have been played down as spontaneous acts of provocation and mere political calculus. In fact, the Nazis’ ideology and war crimes were well known to the Greenlanders. In addition, German polar researchers made friends with Greenlandic journalists, teachers and catechists after the Nazi seizure of power. Last not least, the article will examine how Danish discrimination against Greenlanders contributed to the Greenlandic chauvinism displayed by a few members of the Inuit elite.

2019 ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Magdalena Winkler

This paper examines the controversy triggered by the „Wehrmachtsausstellung“, an exhibition on the war crimes of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, displayed from 1995 to 1999. By analysing the debates surrounding the controversy, it shall be investigated to what extent generationally different approaches of remembrance of National Socialism and the Holocaust emerged in the course of the discussions. As will be shown, the controversy partially emerged due to the generational shift concerning history and memory.


Author(s):  
Philipp Glahé

Abstract After the Second World War, the Allies began a program of legal prosecution of war criminals who were to be sentenced in fair and public processes. However, these processes soon evoked vivid criticism, and by no means simply from former National Socialists. The Heidelberg Circle of Jurists (‘Heidelberger Juristenkreis’) is an example of a heterogeneous lobby group including victims of National Socialism as well as supporters of this ideology demanding amnesty for German war criminals between 1949 and 1955. Numbering forty high-ranking judges, lawyers, politicians, professors and church representatives, the Circle had access to a vast network and had a considerable impact on Allied and German war-crimes policy. On the basis of new source material, this article examines the Circle’s evolution, its apparently contradictory composition, its argumentation and its aims, by focusing on three of its members, the former minister of justice of the Weimar Republic and legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch, the internationalist Erich Kaufmann and the Nuremberg lawyer Hellmut Becker.


2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN KRAMER

The Nuremberg tribunal following the Second World War is universally considered as the foundation stone of international law with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It may come as a surprise, however, to learn that the first international attempts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity came at the end of the First World War, with trials held at Allied prompting in Turkey and Germany.


Author(s):  
Dean Aszkielowicz

Long before the Second World War ended, the Allies were planning to prosecute Axis war criminals, including both those in positions of leadership and the perpetrators of individual crimes. There was no standing war crimes court at the end of the Second World War, however, and the post-war trials were a watershed in international law. For the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo, Allied planners drew on the development of international humanitarian law and international agreements signed by the combatants over the decades preceding the war. The vast majority of war criminals who were prosecuted did not face the court at Nuremberg or Tokyo: they appeared before national military tribunals which were conducted according to each prosecuting country’s war crimes law. The Australian War Crimes Act passed through the parliament in October 1945, shortly before trials began.


Author(s):  
David Engels

This chapter discusses the life and work of Oswald Spengler, whose fame is based on his The Decline of the West, a monumental historical study that endeavored to show that all human civilizations live through similar phases of evolution. Spengler also dabbled with politics and attempted, in a series of essays, to promote the idea of a conservative renaissance in Germany. The rise of National Socialism put Spengler in a situation of ideological opposition and, after he criticized the regime because of its racial theory and its populism, made him a persona non grata until his death in 1937. After the Second World War, Spengler’s elitism and expectation of a German-dominated Europe dominated the reception of his work. This somewhat masked the complexity of his thought, which prefigures such modern debates as the criticism of technology, ecological issues, interreligious questions, the rise of Asia, and prehistoric human evolution.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942091108
Author(s):  
Benjamin M. Schneider

During the Second World War, the US Army was faced with the problem of turning average civilians into soldiers capable of destroying the German army. To ease their adjustment to their new duties and overcome what US officers saw as the unsuitability of Americans for soldiering, the Army Ground Forces adopted a training regimen designed to produce an ‘induced urge to hate the enemy’. This training would make soldiers into enthusiastic killers by portraying the enemy as brutal and ruthless and warfare as a fundamentally lawless activity. As the war went on, hate training increasingly emphasized German atrocities, breaking down the distinctions between soldier and civilian and painting all Germans as potential threats. This antinomian approach achieved only marginal effectiveness in getting US troops to kill, but had dire results for military justice. Blurring the lines between lawful killing and murder, the army’s hate training program crippled its ability to police its soldiers. As violence against German civilians and POWs mounted, many officers felt these war crimes were the natural and inevitable result of the army’s training regimen. Unwilling to hold soldiers responsible, confessed war criminals were only lightly punished, explicitly because the Army believed they had only acted on their training.


2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire P. Kaiser

The immediate aftermath of the Second World War saw a transnational effort to identify and prosecute those individuals who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in such fora as the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. However, parallel national processes were carried out across Europe to punish those citizens who, by a range of definitions, allegedly collaborated with enemy occupiers and committed treason. In the Soviet Union, suspected collaborators were tried as counterrevolutionaries in both the areas where crimes were committed and also those distant from regions of German or Romanian occupation. By examining tribunals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in this article, I argue for the importance of identifying and prosecuting alleged collaborators to the Soviet postwar project – a project which was far from limited to areas in the western parts of the country and which remained intimately linked to prewar, Stalinist understandings of justice and revolution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 858-879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

From the early 1930s, admiration for Hitler and Nazi Germany became characteristic of Spanish fascists. They were fascinated by the image of National Socialism and its example of ‘national resurgence’. During the war, the influence of Nazi Germany among Spanish fascists, traditionalists and supporters of the emerging Franco regime increased. On their return, Spanish travellers to Nazi Germany portrayed an enthusiastic image of a new society, marked by strong national pride, economic resurgence, social solidarity and material welfare. Until the end of the Second World War, several thousand Spanish Fascists and supporters of the Franco Regime visited Nazi Germany as soldiers on their way to and from the Eastern front, as civil workers or as students. A study of the experiences of such individuals may broaden our perspective on how Nazi Germany influenced foreign visitors. What image of Nazi Germany did those visitors paint in their letters, diaries and memoirs? What was left from this experience in post-1945 Spanish memories?


2020 ◽  
pp. 175069802095980
Author(s):  
Barak Ben-Aroia ◽  
Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

In recent decades, the experience of non-governmental politically motivated violence became a central element of global memory culture. Motivated by several shocking attacks at the beginning of the new millennium, this commemorative culture evolved in a memory ecology, which was significantly shaped by the prosperity of global Holocaust memory. Therefore, public commemoration of politically motivated violence intersects different discursive elements, leading to multidirectional forms of memory. Based on interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this article examines public memorials commemorating two notable cases of neo-Nazi xenophobic attacks in Germany as discursive spheres referring to the confrontation with the country’s unique past and its impact on Germany’s contemporary self-image challenged by right-wing extremism. We argue that various commemorative actors in the field adopted and appropriated Second World War and Holocaust-related iconography and terminology to shape these memory sites as instruments linking current Germany to the period of National Socialism.


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