Physical anthropology and ethnogenesis in Bulgaria, 1878-1944

Focaal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (58) ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Christian Promitzer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Physical Anthropology ◽  
World War ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
New Generation

This article engages with the commonly encountered claim that Bulgarian physical anthropology "features a long, fruitful, and honorable existence," by discussing Bulgarian anthropology's contribution to the controversial issue of ethnogenesis. With the Russian influence waning from the mid-1880s on, the pioneers of Bulgarian anthropology were largely influenced by the German example. But the first generation of Bulgarian anthropologists' tradition of "racial liberalism" (Benoit Massin) was lost after World War I. On the eve of World War II a debate on racism raged among Bulgarian intellectuals. By the time blood group analysis had joined anthropometrics, adherents of a closer collaboration with the Third Reich used it to argue for the Bulgarian nation's non-Slavic origins. In 1938 they even disrupted a lecture given by the biologist Metodiy Popov when he wanted to stress the Bulgarians' ethnic relationship with the other Slavic nations, and to repudiate the idea of a hierarchy of races. During the Socialist period a new generation of anthropologists went on to investigate the Bulgarian ethnogenesis using the term "race", although this clearly contravened the 1950 UNESCO statement on the race question.

TECHNICAL SOURCES OF OBTAINING INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION

2011 ◽  
Vol 162 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
Adam NOGAJ
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
World War ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Information Communications Technology ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Electronic Intelligence ◽  
Technical Measures

The author presents the development of technologies used to obtain intelligence information – obviously in a considerable simplification and in brief – from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. The author emphasises the timeless importance of the scientific and technological revolution, which enables the introduction of new, previously unknown tools. The purpose of these tools along with the traditional spying methods, which have functioned for centuries and millennia, is to obtain information. The author claims that the technical measures of obtaining information were not the invention of World War II. Most technologies for obtaining intelligence information used during World War II had already been known and widely used during World War I. During this war fighting armies paid considerable attention to radio reconnaissance, especially one of its forms: crypto-analysis, i.e. decoding. In that period air reconnaissance, including air photography, was also widely used. Moreover, tools to eavesdrop the enemy’s telephone networks situated from 10 to 20 and even tens of kilometres away were also known. With the example of the Third Reich, the author presents a horrifying picture of the development of the technical sources of obtaining intelligence information for the structures of military intelligence, civilian intelligence and secret police typical of a totalitarian state attempting to control everyone and everything. Another example is the Soviet Army, which at the end of World War II had very well-developed technical structures for obtaining intelligence information and made plenty of effort to obtain it. The most considerable attention was devoted to technical reconnaissance measures possessed by Russian fronts.The final part of the article presents an outline of the most significant information related to the contemporary systems of obtaining intelligence information on the basis of the following intelligence: air, satellite, electronic, radio, radiolocation and information communications technology. The author proves that human sources of information have ceased to play a key role in the past decades. Moreover, he proves that for many decades major intelligence expenditure has been incurred on electronic intelligence by world powers. The secret ring is no longer the most important and has definitely ceased to be the only source of obtaining information on a potential foe.

Weimar Germany and its Histories

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric D. Weitz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Times

Years later, after the catastrophes of the Third Reich and World War II, Arnold Zweig remembered how he had returned home from another disaster, World War I. “With what hopes had we come back from the war!” he wrote. Zweig recalled not just the catastrophe of total war, but also the élan of revolution. Like a demon, he threw himself into politics, then into his writing. “I have big works, wild works, great well-formed, monumental works in my head!,” he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl in April 1919. “I want to write! Everything that I have done up until now is just a preamble.” And it was not to be “normal” writing. The times were of galloping stallions and wide-open furrows, and talent was everywhere. War and revolution had drawn people out of the confining security of bourgeois life. “The times have once again placed adventure in the center of daily life, making possible once more the great novel and the great story.”

A war hero or a Hitler soldier?

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Committee ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third Reich

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.

Comrades Betrayed

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Nazi Persecution ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Great War

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, persecution under Hitler. They upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, this book challenges the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, the book exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, the book forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.

In Search of a Father

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus J. Arnold ◽  
Eve M. Duffy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
General Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Adolf Hitler ◽  
The Third ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Third Reich

In this introductory chapter, the author narrates how he searched for his missing father, Konrad Jarausch, who had died in the USSR in January 1942. After providing a background on Jarausch's nationalism and involvement in Protestant pedagogy, the chapter discusses his experiences during World War II. It then explains how Jarausch grew increasingly critical of the Nazis after witnessing the mass deaths of Russian prisoners of war. It also considers how the author, and his family, tried to keep the memory of his father alive. The author concludes by reflecting on his father's troubled legacy and how his search for his father poses the general question of complicity with Nazism and the Third Reich on a more personal level, asking why a decent and educated Protestant would follow Adolf Hitler and support the war until he himself, his family, and the country were swallowed up by it.

Ostmark

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Helen Roche
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Terrorist Activity ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Security Services ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

Following Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, the NPEA authorities were eager to pursue every opportunity to found new Napolas in the freshly acquired territories of the ‘Ostmark’. In the first instance, the Inspectorate took over the existing state boarding schools (Bundeserziehungsanstalten/Staatserziehungsanstalten) at Wien-Breitensee, Wien-Boerhavegasse, Traiskirchen, and the Theresianum. Secondly, beyond Vienna, numerous Napolas were also founded in the buildings of monastic foundations which had been requisitioned and expropriated by the Nazi security services. These included the abbey complexes at Göttweig, Lambach, Seckau, Vorau, and St. Paul (Spanheim), as well as the Catholic seminary at St. Veit (present-day Ljubljana-Šentvid, Slovenia). This chapter begins by charting the chequered history of the former imperial and royal (k.u.k.) cadet schools in Vienna, which were refashioned into civilian Bundeserziehungsanstalten by the Austrian socialist educational reformer Otto Glöckel immediately after World War I. During the reign of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist state, the schools were threatened from within by the terrorist activity of illegal Hitler Youth cells, and the Anschluss was ultimately welcomed by many pupils, staff, and administrators. August Heißmeyer and Otto Calliebe’s subsequent efforts to reform the schools into Napolas led to their being incorporated into the NPEA system on 13 March 1939. The chapter then treats the Inspectorate’s foundation of further Napolas in expropriated religious buildings, focusing on NPEA St. Veit as a case study. In conclusion, it outlines the ways in which both of these forms of Napolisation conformed to broader patterns of Nazification policy in Austria after the Anschluss.

Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Elliot Neaman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.

The two lives of neurologist Helmut J. Bauer (1914–2008)

Neurology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 109-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Schmidt ◽  
Jens Westemeier ◽  
Dominik Gross
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
University Professor ◽  
Medical Career ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Second World

In 2008, the internationally renowned neurologist and university professor Helmut Johannes Bauer died at the age of 93 years. In the numerous obituaries and tributes to him, the years between 1933 and 1945 are either omitted or simplified; the Nazi past of Helmut Bauer has hardly been explored. Based on original documents dating from the Third Reich and the early Federal Republic of Germany as well as relevant secondary writings, Bauer's life before 1945 was traced to gain knowledge of his exact activities and tasks during the Second World War. Bauer was actively involved in Nazi crimes. He was a member of the so-called Künsberg special command of the SS and also worked in a prominent position at the Institute for Microbiology as well as for the Foreign Department of the Reich Physicians' Chamber. After World War II, Bauer underwent denazification and, like many others, was able to pursue his further medical career undisturbed, building on the contacts he had already made during the Nazi period.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Heins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Private Life ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Third Reich

This concluding chapter reflects on the development of German melodrama in the aftermath of World War II. It traces a sense of disillusionment with the Nazi “deployment of sexuality” in films and how it had prepared the ground for the renewed postwar cultivation of domesticity and feminine nurturance in West Germany. The return to private life and to puritanical mores in the postwar era was partly a response to the attack on “bourgeois” sexual morality that had been carried out by the mass culture of the Third Reich. Turning against nudity and licentiousness in the early 1950s could be represented and understood as a turn against Nazism. Thus, this “reprivatization” and newly conservative culture left its mark on West German melodramas of the 1950s.

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