scholarly journals "Amnesty through the Back Door" for Nazi Criminal Otto Bradfsch

Lex Russica ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
A. P. Grakhotskiy
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
German Society ◽  
Criminal Prosecution ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Police Services ◽  
Local Justice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Medical Reports ◽  
Back Door ◽  
The 1960S

In the 1960s, the process of criminal prosecution of Nazi criminals became more active in Germany. Former members of the einsatzkommand, SS members, SD, and police services who took part in the mass extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe were brought to justice. However, these trials resulted in unreasonably lenient sentences to Nazi criminals handed down by the courts. Often, the convicts managed to avoid imprisonment altogether.By the example of two trials against the commander of the einsatzkommando 8, Lodz Otto Bradfisch the head of the Gestapo Department and the chief burgomaster the paper aims to show what legal assessment the crimes of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe the German justice of the 1960s received and how the Nazi criminals managed to evade serving their sentences.The Munich and Hanover jury found the convinced nazi O. Bradfish, who was guilty of killing 37 thousand Jews (according to the most minimal calculations), to be only an "accomplice", "blindly implementing the criminal will of the Fuhrer". Such court decisions fully fit into the general conceptual approach of West German justice to assessing the crimes of the Holocaust. This approach made it possible to remove responsibility for the genocide of Jews not only from the Nazi criminals who appeared before the courts in the 1960s, but also from the entire German society. Placing full responsibility on Hitler and his inner circle, the German society refused to take seriously even the smallest penalties that the so-called "accomplices"received. Bradfish was sentenced to 13 years in prison. However, under the pretext of "poor health", without declaring an amnesty, on the basis of questionable medical reports and decisions of local justice bodies, the convicted person was released early. The narrative of O. Bradfisch showed that the sentences of the West German courts turned into a mockery of the memory of millions of victims of Nazi crimes.

scholarly journals Necrocartography: Topographies and topologies of non-sites of memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 13-24
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Szczepan ◽  
Kinga Siewior
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Research Material ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
The 1960S

Based on the experience of spatial confusion and inadequacy common during visits to uncommemorated sites of violence, the authors propose expanding the topological reflection in the research on the spatialities of the Holocaust, as well as to introduce topology into the analysis of the everyday experiences of users of the postgenocidal space of Central and Eastern Europe. The research material is composed of hand-drawn maps by Holocaust eyewitnesses – documents created both in the 1960s and in recent years. The authors begin by summarizing the significance of topology for cultural studies, and provides a state-of-the-art reflection on cartography in the context of the Holocaust. They then proceed to interpret several of the maps as particular topological testimonies. The authors conclude by proposing a multi-faceted method of researching these maps, “necrocartography”, oriented by their testimonial, topological and performative aspects.

The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915–1945

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-296
Author(s):  
Peter Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Defense ◽  
German Society ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Fritz Haber

AbstractIn April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

scholarly journals On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Family Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

Tropical Russian Bears: Jews and Soviet Animation During The Cold War

Images ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-90
Author(s):  
Maya Balakirsky Katz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Mickey Mouse ◽  
Social Mapping ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

After Stalin consolidated the major animation studios and closed down smaller regional studios to create a single Moscow-based drawn and puppet animation studio in 1934–36, the animation studio Soyuzmultfilm became the largest animation studio in Eastern Europe. In the 1960s, Soviet Jewish animators focused on the theme of social geography and developed individual characters in relationship to social mapping. This essay analyses the enigmatic Cheburashka, the Soviet Mickey Mouse, whose popularity as a Communist ideal led to his starring role as Soyuzmultfilm’s most enduring logo. It is particularly concerned with the development of the ethnically-unidentifiable Cheburashka against the history of the Moscow Zoo and its inter-species exhibitions.

Ghiţa Ionescu and Comparative Communist Politics

1997 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-214
Author(s):  
Peter Ferdinand
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Soviet Empire ◽  
Break Up ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Main Ideas

GHIŢA IONESCU'S MAIN WORKS ON COMPARATIVE COMMUNIST POLITICS were The Politics of the European Communist States which appeared in 1967 and Comparatiue Communist Politics which appeared in 1972. They generalized upon the more historical and empirical studies which had appeared earlier in the 1960s: Communism in Romania, The Reluctant Ally: A Study of Communist Neo-Colonialism and The Break-up of the Soviet Empire. They established his reputation as one of the foremost scholars of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. This article will consider the main ideas of the two key works and relate them to broader trends in the evolution of his thinking. Chiefly, though, it will concentrate upon his 1967 work, since the 1972 one was much shorter and it also largely recapitulated the same ideas.

Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

‘Time is Over’: Postmodern Times

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-219
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Malcolm Lowry ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Martin Amis ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

After the Wall II: The Fall and Rise of an Educational System

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Rodden
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Maximum Speed ◽  
The West ◽  
System P ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Journey To The West ◽  
The 1960S

In the fall of 1990, a hit movie comedy opened to packed houses in eastern German theaters. Go, Trabi, Go!—the producers gave the film an English title—celebrated with rollicking Weltschmerz the misadventures of Georg, a hapless baby-blue Trabant 601—whose jinxed capers make him the undeniable screen successor to Herbie, the Disney VW Beetle of the 1960s. Georg stalls pitifully on the Autobahn, is shorn of his bumper in Munich traffic, is robbed of all four tires by pranksters during a camping stop, and even gets mistaken for scrap near an auto junkyard, an obvious metaphor for the DDR running out of gas—as it lurches toward unity. Go, Trabi, Go! begins with DDR German teacher Udo Struutz deciding to fulfill a long-deferred dream: his first journey to the West will be to travel from his hellhole hometown of industrial Bitterfield, the dirtiest city in all of Eastern Europe, to balmy Naples, thereby tracing the footsteps of his beloved Goethe, whose Italian Journey recorded his own (less quixotic) southern pilgrimage from Weimar in the 1780s. Herr Struutz packs his wife and daughter into little Georg, a family member for 20 years whom Herr Struutz lovingly wipes down with his own washcloth. “See Naples and Die!” scrawls Herr Struutz on Georg’s trunk, recalling Goethe’s clarion call to self-actualization: “Sterbe und werde!” (“die and become!”). The adventure turns out to be a story of Innocent Ossis Abroad and their psychological collision with the West. Numerous scenes in Go, Trabi, Go! allude to the region’s plight: putt-putting along on the Autobahn, little Georg strains to do his maximum speed of 60 mph as contemptuous Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches, and BMWs fly by; broken-down in Bavaria, Georg costs the Struutz family a steep (an outrageously inflated) price for repair, which the intrepid socialist entrepreneurs earn by charging curious Bavarians DM 5 for a “Trabi Peep Show” and a five-minute joy ride in Georg. Reassuringly, the Struutz family eventually does reach its destination, albeit with the accident-prone but indomitable Georg—now minus his top—as a breezy convertible.

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