The “Statement on Atrocities” of the Moscow Tripartite Conference

Author(s):  
Otto Kircheimer

This chapter focuses on the “Statement on Atrocities,” which contains a joint declaration concerning war crimes and war criminals. Issued by the Tripartite Conference over the signatures of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, the report details that the declaration constitutes the first common announcement of intentions on the part of all three major powers. The chapter considers parallel statements issued on October 25, 1941, by Roosevelt and Churchill, which drew the attention of the world to the shooting of hostages during World War II and announced that retribution would be exacted from the guilty. It also addresses the question of the effect of the Moscow Declaration on Germany and the use which can be made of it in psychological warfare operations.

Author(s):  
Michele K. Troy

This chapter examines how the Allied bombings of Germany affected the lives of people in the Albatross-Tauchnitz fold, particularly Max Christian Wegner and Walter Gey. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's reign, the Nazi elite gathered with thousands of party loyalists on January 30, 1943 for an evening of rousing speeches at the Berlin Sportpalast. The Allies commemorated Hitler's tenth anniversary by sending Royal Air Force Mosquito light bombers on a daylight air raid on the German capital. For Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this attack marked the beginning of the “strategic bombing” campaign they had agreed upon at the Casablanca Conference days earlier. This chapter considers Wegner's arrest and imprisonment at the height of World War II as well as Gey's efforts to make the best of the Albatross Press's ever-shrinking terrain.


Author(s):  
Alexandra Gerena Cubbon

Winston Churchill was British Prime Minister twice during his eventful political career. Churchill initially served the British Empire as a soldier in the Caribbean, India, and Africa during the imperial wars of the 1890s. His political service began in Parliament in May 1904 when he joined the Liberal Party and became undersecretary at the Colonial Office (1905). Prime Minister Herbert Asquith promoted Churchill to the Home Office and, in 1911, appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. After briefly resigning from politics, Churchill returned in 1917 as an ardent anti-communist, joining the Conservatives in 1924, the year he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty following the outbreak of World War II and became Prime Minister for the first time in May 1940. As Prime Minister during the war, Churchill relied on vigorous nationalist rhetoric to rouse his compatriots against Germany. Although defeated in the general election of 1945, he continued to speak and publish, delivering his famous "iron curtain" speech at Fulton College in Missouri on March 5, 1946. A lifelong anti-communist, he used this particular speech to emphasize the ideological gulf between the democratic, liberty-embracing West and the Soviet Union. Churchill again served as Prime Minister from 1951 until 1955.


Author(s):  
Gerard L. Weinberg

The ‘Conclusion’ shows how the world was changed forever by World War II, during which around sixty million people had been killed, the majority of them civilians. There were huge losses in the Soviet Union and China, but the country most damaged was Poland. Massive destruction and economic dislocation characterized much of Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and portions of North Africa. The war and its ending also brought about enormous population movements. Countries faced massive reconstruction, the defeated had reparations to pay, and war criminals had to be dealt with. The war also provided new developments in technology and medicine, which transformed post-war life.


Author(s):  
Daria Mikhailovna Pokrovskaia

The subject of this research is the practice of liberal internationalistic approach to foreign affairs, which form many decades is a defining factors in studying Canada’s foreign policy. The Canadian liberal internationalism emerged after the World War II, and the concept of its ideology received its development in the 1950’s being inextricably linked to the name of Lester Pearson. The object of this research is the views, ideas and main approaches of Lester Pearson, who held a post of Undersecretary of State and later Prime Minister of Canada, towards the formation of foreign policy of the country. Methodology contains the analysis of personal sources of Lester Pearson and his colleagues, public speeches, official documents of Canadian Department of Foreign Policy, as well as writings of the leading Russian and foreign scholars. The author highlights the key principles of the liberal internationalistic approach towards conducting Canada’s foreign policy, among which is the institutional approach, participation of Canada in world politics as a “medium superpower”, mediation in settlement of international disputes, peacekeeping activity and adherence to the ideas of collective security, etc. A detailed analysis is carried out on the personal views and techniques of conducting diplomacy of Lester Pearson that influences the development of the Canadian liberal internationalism.


1979 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-374
Author(s):  
Sydney H. Zebel

Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister who was Resident Minister and political adviser at Algiers during 1943, devotes a chapter in his autobiographical volume dealing with World War II to the reactivation of the French naval squadron known as “Force X.” Although brief, impressionistic and lacking balance (students would be better advised to consult Sir Llewellyn Woodward's scholarly treatment), his account makes it evident that he had serious differences with Winston Churchill. The explanation he offers is that the Prime Minister resented his warning against the use of “bullying tactics.” Churchill, in his great war history, devotes only a brief paragraph to this curious episode and omits any reference to the important part Macmillan played. But a recent investigation of unpublished correspondence in the Prime Minister's Operational Papers, and of other pertinent materials, casts considerable light on the nature of their disagreement. These sources also provide valuable insights into the Force X problem generally, notably with respect to its linkage by Macmillan with the larger and much more important issue of French political unity. Actually minor in global war perspective, the Force X problem became a symbol of British difficulties in dealing with a defeated and divided France.Force X was the French eastern Mediterranean squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral René Godfroy, which was blocked in the port of Alexandria by a more powerful British fleet at the time of the Franco-German armistice in June, 1940. It consisted of one battleship, four cruisers, three destroyers, a half-dozen torpedo boats, and one submarine. The Force X commander, although claiming to be an Anglophile, believed that the French government had no option at that critical juncture but to abandon its ally and to accept Hitler's cease-fire terms.


1981 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa

Of the many fascinating episodes that punctuate the diplomatic history of World War II, few have intrigued scholars more than the secret Balkan spheres-of-action agreement worked out by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Josef Stalin at the Anglo-Soviet conference (British code-named TOLSTOY) held in Moscow in the autumn of 1944. It was late in the evening of 9 October. In his first encounter with Stalin since the meeting of the Big Three at Teheran in 1943, Churchill, believing “the moment … apt for business,” appealed to the Soviet dictator to “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans.” Specifically, he went on, “We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways.


Author(s):  
Maynard Mack

I am reminded by Professor [Georges] May’s generous introduction of a story about Winston Churchill. After World War II and his stint as prime minister, he was invited back to his old school, Harrow, to give the commencement address and decided he ought probably to oblige. So he went, weathered an introduction almost as laudatory as the one you’ve just listened to (except in his case deserved) then got to his feet and said to the graduating class, “Nevah give up!” and sat down. I think you will agree that this is the most memorable commencement address you have ever heard as well as perhaps the wisest possible comment on the life that all of us here are engaged in fostering, and that I, alas, on grounds that will be no more apparent to you than they are to me, have been singled out (“fingered” is, I believe, the underworld term) to address: the life of learning. . . . Although I stand here before my betters, I do not stand here before very many of my elders. I have already drawn down from that mysterious fund with which we all begin three and a half years beyond my Biblical allowance, with the result that on any reasonably quiet afternoon I can hear my brain cells dying so fast they sound like popcorn. And that, I came to realize, is precisely what ACLS had in mind: they wanted to exhibit me, the way the Egyptians used to exhibit a skeleton at the beginning of their feasts. “Nothing like a mouldy old professor,” I could hear the Executive Board whispering, “to energize an audience of other professors into taking thought—before they get to be like him.” So do take thought, ladies and gentlemen, golden lads and girls; and as an old gravestone in Exeter churchyard says, “The faults you saw in me, Pray strive to shun; And look at home: There’s something to be done.” My instructions for this talk urged me to be somewhat personal, even to reminisce.


Author(s):  
Richard Shannon

Robert Norman William Blake (1916–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, had published admired revisionist studies of the soldier Lord Haig (1952) and the politician Andrew Bonar Law (1955), but unquestionably it was the brilliant success of his biography of Benjamin Disraeli in 1966 that stimulated support for his election to the Academy. He was born in the Manor House, Brundall, on the Yare, Norfolk, a little outside Norwich, on December 23, 1916 to William Joseph Blake and Norah Lindley. In 1935, Blake went to Magdalen College, Oxford, with a view to preparing for a legal career. He read ‘Modern Greats’, philosophy, politics, and economics. Blake was eloquent on the depressing peculiarities of World War II. He related in a manuscript fragment, ‘Memories of Christ Church’, that his two closest friends in the Senior Common Room were Hugh Trevor-Roper and Charles Stuart. In his biography of Disraeli, Blake made the British prime minister much less convincing as a heroic legend, but made him much more interesting as a man.


Author(s):  
Katharine Dow

At the start of the twentieth century, the golf resort was the most important industry in Spey Bay alongside the salmon fishing at Tugnet. The golf links and hotel were originally built in 1907 and this was by all accounts a popular leisure destination, with the Lossiemouth-born former British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald a regular player in the 1920s, so there has in fact been over a century of tourism in the village. However, this declined during World War II, when the hotel was requisitioned for RAF troops based at Nether Dallachy, one mile southeast of Spey Bay. The hotel was largely destroyed in a fire in 1965 and later rebuilt with little of its former grandeur....


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Florian Wegscheider

Abstract The historical kiss of peace between Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Krzyżowa/Kreisau in 1989 serves as an example for how existential experiences can profoundly impact and even alter liturgy. However, liturgy can also be an obstacle for the further reflection and processing of such experiences, if they are not taken up in the liturgical setting. The political situation of a divided Europe as well as the Cold War following World War II indicate a unique situation in recent history that concernes believers all over the world. The question that results from taking this immediate past seriously is what kind of experiences liturgy can and should address (and in what form) and if there might be experiences or forms of handling such experiences that threaten the power of the ritual.


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