scholarly journals The Attitude of Soviet Security Organs to the Home Army (July 1944 – January 1945)

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 1303-1351
Author(s):  
Dariusz Rogut

The article deals with the problem of relations between the Soviet State Security Organs and the Home Army, an underground Polish military organization, in the final period of the Second World War. The author concludes that the main tools for establishing the Communist dictatorship and suppressing Polish society were the NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH. Repression was aimed at broad groups of Polish society (landlords, teachers, doctors, clergy, etc.) and at certain individuals who were considered by the Soviet leadership as dangerous, hostile, and threatening the new Communist authorities. According to some estimates, from January 1944 to the end of the 1940s, 80–100 thousand Poles were arrested in the territory of the Second Polish Republic, of whom several thousand were convicted (not counting Polish citizens of other nationalities). They were held in screening and filtration camps, camps for prisoners of war and internees, correctional labour camps and labour battalions of the NKVD-MVD. The arrests, internment, mass deportations and trials of this period contradicted the norms of international law and marked the beginning of the new, Soviet, period of occupation.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 1360-1376
Author(s):  
Boris N. Kovalev

The article analyzes the publication of the Polish historian Dariusz Rogut “The Attitude of Soviet Security Organs to the Home Army (July 1944 – January 1945).” The reasons for the problems in the relationship between the Soviet State Security Organs and the underground Polish military organization “Home Army” in the final period of the Second World War are seen in the complex relationship between the Soviet leadership in Moscow and the Polish government in London.


1983 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 221-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Greenwood

The rules of international law governing the legality of the use of force by states (ius ad bellum) and the rales by which international law regulates the actual conduct of hostilities once the use of force has begun (ius in bello) have seldom sat happily together. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, some international lawyers took the view that the development of the ius ad bellum by the Charter of the United Nations had rendered the ius in bello superfluous. This view has, not surprisingly, become somewhat less fashionable of late and the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the 1977 Protocols to those Conventions, and a number of other treaties bear witness to the continuing interest of the international community in regulating the conduct of warfare. Nevertheless, the suspicion remains that ius in bello should have been absorbed by ius ad bellum, that the two subjects are somehow in competition, so that discussion of the former distracts attention from the more fundamental requirements of the latter or implies a lack of confidence in it. Thus, one letter published in The Times at the height of the Falklands conflict castigated international lawyers for engaging in a debate about the law concerning the treatment of prisoners of war on the ground that they should have been devoting their attention to questioning the legality of the whole operation mounted by the United Kingdom.


Author(s):  
Mark Edele

How many Soviet soldiers defected to the Germans? Vague statements abound in the literature, but few scholars have tried to systematically investigate the available quantitative evidence. This chapter discusses the available numbers on defectors from both Soviet and German sources. It discusses the methodological problems involved in establishing the total number and the share of defectors among Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). It also compares these numbers with comparative cases in other fronts of the Second World War in Europe. It shows that despite methodological and source problems we can be confident that defection was much more prevalent at the German–Soviet front than elsewhere.


1986 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 896-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Lachs

To write of Philip Jessup means to survey the history of the teaching of international law in the United States throughout the last half century; to cover all important events concerning the birth of international organizations on the morrow of the Second World War; to visit the halls of the General Assembly and the Security Council; to attend meetings of the American Society of International Law and the Institute of International Law, where he so frequently took the floor to shed light on their debates; to attend sittings of the International Court of Justice in the years 1960-1969. I could hardly undertake this task; there are others much more qualified to do so. What I wish to do is to recall him as a great jurist I knew and a delightful human being; in short, a judge and a great friend whom I learned to admire.


1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (102) ◽  
pp. 491-491 ◽  

Mr. Raymond Courvoisier has since 1 August 1969 taken over the appointment of special assistant to the President of the International Committee, thus bringing it his wide experience in the field of international humanitarian law. It should, in fact, be recalled that from 1936 to 1945 he undertook a large number of missions in ICRC service as delegate in Spain, Turkey, in East European and Middle East countries. Furthermore, he was in charge of a section in the Central Prisoners of War Agency in Geneva during the Second World War.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110512
Author(s):  
Justyna Chodkowska-Miszczuk ◽  
Krzysztof Rogatka ◽  
Aleksandra Lewandowska

Dynamic and unrestrained socio-economic development is upsetting the balance of nature’s mechanisms, causing a climate stalemate, or even climate destabilisation. After the Second World War a new political system – real socialism – was enforced on Poland. It brought about changes of a social, cultural, economic and environmental nature. Its immanent feature was the application of top-down decisions that did not take into account environmental components. There was also little ecological awareness within Polish society at that time. The transformations of the 1990s resulted not only in the liberalisation of the Polish economy, but also in the permeation of new trends oriented towards pro-environmental activities. The aim of the article is to find an answer to the question: How is ecological awareness currently shaped in the context of Anthropocene in Poland during the transition from a socialist economy to a capitalist economic system?


2002 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gavron

Amnesties presuppose a breach of law and provide immunity or protection from punishment. Historically amnesties were invoked in relation to breaches of the laws of war and were reciprocally implemented by opposing sides in an international armed conflict. The impact of the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, however, had considerable implications not only for the use of amnesties, but also for their legality under international law. The scale of the First World War precipitated a new phase of unilateral amnesty for the victors and prosecutions of war criminals for the defeated aggressor states.1 This precedent was followed after the Second World War,2 with the establishment of the first ‘international’3 criminal court, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. However, the horrors perpetrated during the Second World War also prompted the development of a branch of international law aimed at recognising and protecting human rights in an attempt to prevent such atrocities being repeated.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document