scholarly journals Romania in the Second World War 1939–1945: unknown facts and new views on the problem

Author(s):  
Serhii Luchkanyn

The article is devoted to the analysis of different views in Romanian historiography on the participation of I. Antonescu, along with Germany, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Finland, in the war against the USSR, starting from June 22, 1941. It is known that the decision to join the anti-Soviet war was taken by I. Antonescu alone, without any consultation with any political group, or even with the king Mihai, who has learned from the BBC radio that Romania had entered the war with the USSR. First, the war was proclaimed as a “sacred war” against Bolshevism for the return of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, received full support from the king and from the leaders of the “historical parties”, as well as from a wide range of the population. However, in August 1941, at the request of Hitler, having already military rank of Marshal, Ion Antonescu decided to continue the war in the East, which has been completely unfounded (the territory to the East of the Dniester never belonged to Romania). The modern Romanian historiographers emphasize that the continuation of the anti-Soviet war on the other side of the Dniester, which led to large (and useless) human losses, has become one of Antonescu’s greatest mistakes. The article also raises the issue of the Holocaust in Romania during the Second World War (suppressed during the communist years), the decline in the scale of the tragedy in that period. It is noted that the arrest of I. Antonescu on August 23, 1944 was the merit of the young king, Mihai I, and his entourage, and not the Communist Party of Romania represented by Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu.

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Eriksen

Artiklen undersøger med udgangspunkt i landsdækkende aviser og fokus på fodbold, den danske sportspresses stereotyper af Tyskland, England og Spanien. Michael Eriksen: Nationale sportsstereotyper in Danish sport press 1980-2004Football is not just about who’s winning and who’s not. It much more important. In this article the various sporting stereotypes used by the danish sporting press to describe the english, spanish and german national footballteams against the danish national footballteam are identified. These national sporting stereotypes are identified by analyzing a wide range of danish newspapers covering the period 1980-2004. The english are, among other things, described as lions, the germans are frequently referred to by using words originating from the second world war, while the spanish are described as bulls. These stereotypes appear in the way they do as a result of many factors. On the one hand, these stereotypes are a result of football-internal events, and on the other hand footballing external reasons.


Author(s):  
Franklin Littell

This chapter assesses Nechama Tec's book, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, which introduces a new aspect to the history of the Holocaust period. The book details how several hundred men, women, and children in western Belorussia during the Second World War maintained a surviving and fighting community. These Jewish partisans were blessed with a gifted leader, Tuvia Bielski. Bielski emerged out of the chaos of war conditions and the assault on the Jewish people, an assault not only by the Germans but by some sectors of the peoples subject to their military occupation. Around him he gathered a triad of loyal and gifted aides: his brothers Asael and Zus, and his chief of staff Lazar Malbin. Their relationship with Russian partisan groups ranged from precarious to friendly, depending on the measure of overt antisemitism on the part of the other partisans. The Bielski group pursued a policy of harsh retribution towards villagers who collaborated with the Germans and helped to recapture Jews. The non-Jewish villagers came to respect the courage and efficiency of the Jewish partisans and there were fewer denunciations and safer roads as a result.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00007
Author(s):  
B Dewi Puspitaningrum ◽  
Airin Miranda

<p class="Keyword">Nazi Germany used Endlösung to persecute Jews during the Second World War, leading them to the Holocaust, known as “death”. During the German occupation in France, the status of the Jews was applied. Polonski reacted to the situation by establishing a Zionist resistance, Jewish Army, in January 1942. Their first visions were to create a state of Israel and save the Jews as much as they could. Although the members of the group are not numerous, they represented Israel and played an important role in the rescue of the Jews in France, also in Europe. Using descriptive methods and three aspects of historical research, this article shows that the Jewish Army has played an important role in safeguarding Jewish children, smuggling smugglers, physical education and the safeguarding of Jews in other countries. In order to realize their visions, collaborations with other Jewish resistances and the French army itself were often created. With the feeling of belonging to France, they finally extended their vision to the liberation of France in 1945 by joining the French Forces of the Interior and allied troops.</p>


This chapter reviews the book The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War (2014), by Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, translated by Jessica Setbon. The Story of an Underground is about the Jews of Kovno (Kaunas) who founded an underground movement during the Holocaust. The armed underground developed a plan to escape to the forests and join the partisans. The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. Many of the remaining Jews were sent to the Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps. The book highlights the dilemmas of Jewish armed resistance such as difficulties in obtaining weapons and training, some of the failures of the resistance, and some of the positive aspects of those who thought differently from members of the armed resistance.


Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Cinnamon

ABSTRACTThrough narratives of an anti-‘fetish’ movement that swept through north-eastern Gabon in the mid-1950s, the present article traces the contours of converging political and religious imaginations in that country in the years preceding independence. Fang speakers in the region make explicit connections between the arrival of post-Second World War electoral politics, the anti-fetish movements, and perceptions of political weakening and marginalization of their region on the eve of independence. Rival politicians and the colonial administration played key roles in the movement, which brought in a Congolese ritual expert, Emane Boncoeur, and his two powerful spirits, Mademoiselle and Mimbare. These spirits, later recuperated in a wide range of healing practices, continue to operate today throughout northern Gabon and Rio Muni. In local imaginaries, these spirits played central roles in the birth of both regional and national politics, paradoxically strengthening the colonial administration and Gabonese auxiliaries in an era of pre-independence liberalization. Thus, regional political events in the 1950s rehearsed later configurations of power, including presidential politics, on the national stage.


2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862199758
Author(s):  
Eloise Florence

This article investigates the possibilities for experiential encounters with ruins in Berlin to complicate the dominant articulations of the cultural memory of Allied bombing attacks on German cities during the Second World War. Building on works that seek to disrupt normative models of cultural memory of the bombings, and entangling them with existing literature that uses new materialism to engage the sensorial nature of memory site-encounters, I examine my own fieldwork visits the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof—a former train station—as an entanglement of both. Specifically, I investigate how encountering Anhalter through this entangled method allows the site to emerge as haunted. Encountering Anhalter as haunted might complicate the linear temporality that underpins enduring the narrative that the Allies’ actions during the war were completely ethical because they are largely framed as a response to— ergo following—the Holocaust.


Aschkenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-200
Author(s):  
Hans-Harald Müller

Abstract Arnold Zweig and Walter A. Berendsohn, who were in correspondence with each other between 1909 and 1968, continuously sought to convert the other to their beliefs. Around 1910 Zweig wanted to convert Berendsohn to Zionism as coined by Buber, while his views changed after his exile in Palestine, when he tried to win Berendsohn over to communism. Berendsohn, for his part, wanted to convince Zweig of social democracy around 1910, but after traveling Palestine in the 1950s tried to convince Zweig of Zionism. Viewed retrospectively, both appear as idealistic German intellectuals whose eagerness to reform society in 1910 led them in very different directions due to their individual experiences especially in and after the Second World War.


Author(s):  
Anna D. Bertova ◽  

Prominent Japanese economist, specialist in colonial politics, a professor of Im­perial Tokyo University, Yanaihara Tadao (1893‒1961) was one of a few people who dared to oppose the aggressive policy of Japanese government before and during the Second World War. He developed his own view of patriotism and na­tionalism, regarding as a true patriot a person who wished for the moral develop­ment of his or her country and fought the injustice. In the years leading up to the war he stated the necessity of pacifism, calling every war evil in the ultimate, divine sense, developing at the same time the concept of the «just war» (gisen­ron), which can be considered good seen from the point of view of this, imper­fect life. Yanaihara’s theory of pacifism is, on one hand, the continuation of the one proposed by his spiritual teacher, the founder of the Non-Church movement, Uchimura Kanzo (1861‒1930); one the other hand, being a person of different historical period, directly witnessing the boundless spread of Japanese militarism and enormous hardships brought by the war, Yanaihara introduced a number of corrections to the idealistic theory of his teacher and proposed quite a specific explanation of the international situation and the state of affairs in Japan. Yanai­hara’s philosophical concepts influenced greatly both his contemporaries and successors of the pacifist ideas in postwar Japan, and contributed to the dis­cussion about interrelations of pacifism and patriotism, and also patriotism and religion.


2017 ◽  
pp. 197-210
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kročanová

The article discusses several Slovak plays with the theme of the Holocaust; namely Ticho (Silence) by Juraj Váh, Holokaust (Holocaust) by Viliam Klimáček, and Rabínka (The Woman Rabbi) by Anna Grusková. It also briefly refers to Návrat do života (Return to Life) and Antigona a tí druhí (Antigone and Those Others) by Peter Karvaš, both mediating traumas from concentration camps. Two plays (Ticho and Návrat do života) were written and staged immediately after the Second World War. Karvaš’s Antigona is a rare occurrence of the theme in Slovak drama during the Communism (in the early 1960s), whereas Klimáček’s and Grusková’s plays are recent, both staged in 2012. The article focuses on several aspects of these five plays: on dramatic characters representing “victims”, “witnesses” and “culprits” (Panas, quoted in Gawliński 2007: 19); on references about and/or representation of the Holocaust in dramatic texts; and on the type of the conflict(s) in the plays. It also mentions specific approaches of respective authors when dealing with the theme of the Holocaust, as well as with the relevance of their reflection of the theme for Slovak society in respective periods.


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