Mass violence and its immediate aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War, 1939–47

Author(s):  
Alexander Korb ◽  
Dieter Pohl
2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 924-935
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper Controversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were “frozen” during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memorialization of communism in the countries of the region. Although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of Eastern Europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 1015-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN E. GUMZ

During the Second World War, the Independent State of Croatia was the scene of intense guerrilla warfare as well as a programme of ethnic cleansing undertaken primarily, though not exclusively, by the Croatian state under the control of the Ustaša fascist party. This article investigates the Wehrmacht’s contrasting perceptions of its own violence in the anti-partisan war and its views of the Ustaša’s assault on Croatia’s Serb minority. The author argues that these different views emanated from the Wehrmacht’s conviction that its strategic concepts offered the only correct strategy for the prosecution of modern warfare. As the key to victory, Wehrmacht staff officers emphasized the maximization of force on the operational level. By contrast, the Ustaša state pursued a strategy of nationalizing war that moved away from Wehrmacht strategic concepts and infuriated Wehrmacht staff officers. Moreover, the Wehrmacht employed a starkly different vocabulary in describing its own violence and Ustaša violence. These descriptions more deeply entrenched the Wehrmacht’s sense of difference regarding the two types of violence. By examining the Wehrmacht’s views of violence, this article suggests that factors other than anti-Slavic racism more strongly determined the way in which the Wehrmacht both perceived and acted out violence in Eastern Europe.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-525
Author(s):  
KERSTIN VON LINGEN

This article addresses the normative framework of the concept of “crimes against humanity” from the perspective of intellectual history, by scrutinizing legal debates of marginalized (and exiled) academic–juridical actors within the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Decisive for its successful implementation were two factors: the growing scale of mass violence against civilians during the Second World War, and the strong support and advocacy of “peripheral actors,” jurists forced into exile in London by the war. These jurists included representatives of smaller Allied countries from around the world, who used the commission's work to push for a codification of international law, which finally materialized during the London Conference of August 1945. This article studies the process of mediation and the emergence of legal concepts. It thereby introduces the concept of “legal flows” to highlight the different strands and older traditions of humanitarian law involved in coining new law. The experience of exile is shown to have had a significant constitutive function in the globalization of a concept (that of “crimes against humanity”).


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This chapter explores how the outbreak of the Second World War initiated a new and tragic period in the history of the Jews of north-eastern Europe. The Polish defeat by Nazi Germany in the unequal campaign that began in September of 1939 led to a new partition of the country by Germany and the Soviet Union. Though Hitler had been relatively slow to put the more extreme aspects of Nazi antisemitism into practice, by the time the war broke out, the Nazi regime was set in its deep-seated hatred of the Jews. Following the brutal violence of Kristallnacht on November 9–10, 1938, when up to a hundred Jews were murdered in Germany and Austria and over 400 synagogues burnt down, Hitler, disconcerted by the domestic and foreign unease which this provoked, decided to entrust policy on the Jews to the ideologues of the SS. They were determined at this stage to enforce a ‘total separation’ between Jews and Germans, but wanted to do so in an ‘orderly and disciplined’ manner, perhaps by compelling most Jews to emigrate. The Nazis did not act immediately on the genocidal threat of ‘the annihilation of the Jews as a race in Europe’, but during the first months of the war, a dual process took place: the barbarization of Nazi policy generally and a hardening of policy towards Jews.


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