scholarly journals Place Renaming and German Policy-Making in Temporarily Occupied Soviet Territories

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Marina V. Datsishina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Western Border ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The Third Reich

The article discusses the transfer of territory-remapping strategies by Nazi Germany from Europe to the occupied territories of the USSR, with a particular focus on place renaming. Measures concerning toponymy and onomastics were generally well-rooted in the policy of the Third Reich. In the year of 1942, as the German occupation zone in the Soviet Union reached its peak for the whole period of the war, specific guidelines for renaming were issued to secure the acclaimed territories. On the functional side, the guidelines were to eliminate confusion in the correspondence between administrative bodies of the occupied lands and their Berlin leadership. The author shows that each renaming decision could be due to several factors, but ultimately these were meant to contribute to further legal and cultural appropriation of the occupied territories and their subsequent Germanization. Renaming of places in the German way took different forms. Most commonly, it went through the integration of the Nazi ideology into the context of European and world history. The national socialists declared themselves heirs to Germany’s great past, the successors of its best traditions. The “Germanization” of place names in different occupation zones had different dynamics. Logically, the farther the occupied territories were from the Western border of the USSR, the fewer German names they featured. The article showcases how the “derussification” policy was used to disrupt the links with the Soviet past, to foster separatist tendencies, and ultimately to verbalize the expectations of a “blitzkrieg” victory. Renaming of toponymic objects also aimed to reduce the population’s resistance to occupation, as well as increase the loyalty to the occupiers. The paper builds on archival documents, the occupation press, eyewitness accounts.

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.

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.

Alexander B. Rossino. Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003. xv, 343 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-383
Author(s):  
David Engel
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
University Of Kansas ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
German Army ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Third Reich

Historians of the Third Reich have long noted that Nazi Germany's actions on the battlefield and occupation policies were governed both by conventional military and radical ideological considerations. Much attention has been devoted to the problem of separating the two strands analytically, to determining which actions and policies should be labeled as primarily one or the other and which elements within the regime thought and behaved mainly according to conventional versus ideological notions. In recent years it has become common to place German military operations before June 1941 under the “conventional” rubric and to date the “ideological” war from the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in that month. On the other hand, whereas the German army was once widely thought to have constituted a bastion of conventional thinking even after the ideological war had been launched, scholars have increasingly implicated it in the perpetration of ideologically rooted crimes (particularly the murder of Jews on the eastern front).

scholarly journals Hitler’s Downfall and the Collapse of the Thousand Years Reich: Multi Fronts and Incapable Allies

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-23
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ali Baig
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Almost All

AbstractThe downfall of Adolf Hitler was a significant development in the history of the world. His armies conquered almost all of Europe in a dramatic span of time by the employment of Blitzkrieg tactics. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler assisted General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Later, while still fighting on the Western front, Hitler ordered the Afrika Korps to assist Italians in Northern Africa and in the Balkans region and finally launched Operation Barbarossa by invading the Soviet Union. The Anti-Comintern Pact, Pact of Steel and Tripartite Pact brought the Third Reich, the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Italy onto one page. This paper attempts to probe the multiple fronts and the efficacy of Hitler’s allies including Japan, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Croatia and to try and find the causes behind the downfall of one of the strongest men the world has ever seen from a theoretical perspective. This research did not intend to glorify Hitler or Nazism, but focuses on how the maximization of power and the states’ actions with hegemonic aspirations triggered a balancing coalition and ultimately resulted in punishment from the system itself.

scholarly journals Rząd Polski na Wychodźstwie wobec zbrodni niemieckich w Polsce, 1939–1943. Uwagi do problemu

2015 ◽  
pp. 104-123
Author(s):  
Wanda Jarząbek
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Criminal Policy ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government

The policy of the Polish government in exile during World War II has been the subject of numerous studies, but it still seems reasonable to trace their relation to crimes committed on Polish soil. The aim of this article is not to present the whole problem, but just outline the attitude towards German crimes. It must be remembered that the Polish government was also confronted with the occupation policy of the Soviet Union and the crimes committed in Volhynia and Galicia by Ukrainian nationalists. The final caesura of the article is the President’s decree of on punishment for war crimes released on March 30, 1943.The Polish government was of the opinion that the crimes should be punished primarily on the level of individuals who committed them, but the consequence of the criminal policy of the Third Reich should be the adoption of such a post-war policy against Germany that would guarantee compensation for victim countries, including compensation for material damage, and lead to a change in the German mentality, which was blamed partly responsible for the policy of the Third Reich. Such an attitude was shared by the anti-Hitler coalition countries.On the practical level, the Polish government’s policy had several stages. Initially, they collected information, tried to make it public and sough the cooperation of other countries. Despite numerous doubts were reported, they decided to amend the Polish criminal law to allow punishing war criminals more proportionally, as they thought, to the committed acts. The government’s activity probably influenced the attitude of the Allies, although it is difficult to accurately recognize and describe this issue. As a result of the situation after World War II, the new Polish authorities pursued a policy of punishing the guilty. Due to the international situation, i.e. the growing conflict between the coalition partners, many criminals escaped  punishment.

scholarly journals The activity of police formations in the village during the Nazi occupation of Dnipropetrovsk (1941-1943).

2019 ◽  
pp. 207-216
Author(s):  
І. А. Шахрайчук ◽  
М. С. Шманатов
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
Local Police ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Civil Authority ◽  
The City

With the capture of the partial territory of the Soviet Union by the troops of the Third Reich, and with the movement of the front line to the East, management in the new territories passed into the hands of civil authorities. Since 01. 09. 1941, in accordance with the order of A. Hitler «On the introduction of civil administration in the occupied Eastern territories», a territorial-administrative area Reichscommissariat «Ukraine» was created. Local authorities were inferior ingredients in the administration of that zone. After the occupation of the city of Dnepropetrovsk in August 1941, the local police appeared in the city. It was created by the actions of nationalist forces, marching groups of the OUN. But when the Nazi civil authority was established in the city in the fall, the police structure was incorporated into the occupying structure and reformed it. After that, were created local police schools, units, new police districts. Local police were created throughout Ukraine, including in the Dnipropetrovsk district. It existed in the countryside. The district was divided into districts, in each of which there were local police units led by Nazi organs. The structure of the local police included several components, so the tasks of the policemen were not the same. Depending on the region, location and composition of units, they could perform different tasks and have different powers. Often, the Nazi leadership adapted to local conditions, with consequences for the local population and the Nazi employees. The article analyses the creation of police structure of Dnipropetrovsk region in rural area and also its functions and the nature of the activity during the Nazi occupation (1941-1943). The article examines the reasons for, conditions and results of attraction of Ukrainians to formation of German police in Reichskommissariat Ukraine, their institutional forms, material basis and everyday conditions of work. The author analyses efficiency of the system of additional police, its role in occupation regime functioning, the organization and composition of the local police, examples of assistance to the police in the crimes of the Nazis. The motivation and reasons for the cooperation of the local population with the Nazis are also considered.

Human Rights in Africa: Toward the Definition of the Problem of a Double Standard

1980 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 66-76
Author(s):  
Laurie S. Wiseberg
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
To Come ◽  
Definition Of

In August 1936, 4,069 athletes from forty-nine countries participated in the Olympic Games in Berlin, hosted by the Nazi Fuehrer. It is true that the full bestiality of the Third Reich was not yet manifest in 1936; the gas ovens, the slave labor camps, and the rape of Europe were yet to come. However, by that year, Nazi ideology had already been articulated: blacks, Jews and gypsies had been declared sub-human; Hitler had issed his Nuremburg Laws depriving Jews of their citizenship and civil rights; German rearmament was well underway; and the National Socialists had brutally consolidated a racist despotism.

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.

The Dark Side of Transnational Mobility: Croatian Travel Writers in Hitler’s New Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542098343
Author(s):  
Rory Yeomans
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Life Consumption ◽  
Near Abroad ◽  
Magazine Articles

This article analyses the use of Europeanizing discourses in the travel writing of Croat visitors to the Third Reich. Situating these visits in the context of transnational exchanges in Hitler’s new Europe and the war against the Soviet Union, it considers a number of specific case studies of travel between Croatia and Nazi Germany. It argues that the European discourse of writers, journalists, and youth activists in the Ustasha-led Independent State of Croatia served a number of specific purposes. First, they created a space of normality in an extremely violent state, providing an illusion of stability. By bringing the sights, sounds, and pleasures of travel to the near abroad back to Croatia in the form of books, magazine articles, and mobile film reels, they also gave citizens a glimpse of the good life, consumption, and materiality. As such, these travelogues and accounts of journeys overseas also aimed to persuade intellectuals and members of the cultural elite who did not support the Ustasha regime of the various material and professional “club goods” that might accrue to them by becoming active supporters of the regime. Furthermore, they served to create an impression of mobility in a surveillance state in which even internal travel was extremely restricted. Finally, in depicting Nazi-led war in the East and the struggle against the “East within”—in the form of the campaign of genocide against Serbs, Jews, Roma and so-called “asocials”—to building European brotherhood, modernization, and becoming an essential member of the new Europe, they became a source of regime legitimation, thereby telling us important things about the subjectivity of both the state and ideological tourists in a time of terror, war, and occupation.

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