Jewish Child Soldiers in the Bloodlands of Europe
Jewish Child Soldiers in the Bloodlands of Europe

Author: David M. Rosen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-03

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1000552136

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This book is about the experiences of Jewish children who were members of armed partisan groups in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. It describes and analyze the role of children as activists, agents, and decision makers in a situation of extraordinary danger and stress. The children in this book were hunted like prey and ran for their lives. They survived by fleeing into the forest and swamps of Eastern Europe and joining anti-German partisan groups. The vast majority of these children were teenagers between ages 11 and 18, although some were younger. They were, by any definition, child soldiers, and that is the reason they lived to tell their tales. The book will be of interest to general and academic audiences. There is also great interest in children and childhood across disciplines of history and the social sciences. It is likely to spark considerable debate and interest, since its argument runs counter to the generally accepted wisdom that child soldiers must first and foremost be seen as victims of their recruiters. The argument of this book is that time, place, and context play a key role in our understanding of children’s involvement in war and that in some contexts children under arms must be seen as exercising an inherent right of self-defense.

Bloodlands
Bloodlands

Author: Timothy Snyder

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0465032974

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From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Jewish Art in Nazi Germany
Jewish Art in Nazi Germany

Author: Dana Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-27

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1000568083

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This book provides a social and cultural history of Jewish art in Nazi Germany, with a focus on the Jewish artists, art critics, and audiences in Nazi Bavaria. From the time of its conceptualization in the autumn of 1933 until its final curtain call in November 1938, the Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria sustained three departments: music, visual arts, and adult education. The Bavarian example steps outside the highly professional cultural milieu of Jewish Berlin, and instead looks at relatively unknown efforts of Bavarian Jewish artists as they used art to define what it now meant, to them, to be Jewish under Nazism. Insightful and engaging, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in social and cultural histories of Jews in Germany.

Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries
Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries

Author: Amy Simon

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-16

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1000895017

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This book uses an empathic reading of Yiddish diarists’ feelings, evaluations, and assessments about persecutors in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos to present an emotional history of persecution in the Nazi ghettos. It re-centers the daily experiences of psychological and physical violence that made up ghetto life and that ultimately led victims to use their diaries as a place of agency to question and attempt to maintain their own beliefs in pre-war Jewish and Enlightenment ethics and morality. Holocaust scholars and students, as well as people interested in personal narratives, interpersonal relations, and the problem of dehumanization during the Holocaust will find this study particularly thought-provoking. Essentially, this book highlights the benefits of reading with empathy and paying attention to emotions for understanding the experiences of people in the past, especially those facing tragedy and trauma.

Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945
Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945

Author: Matthew Evangelista

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-22

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1000833933

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Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to induce Italy’s surrender. Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro. The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Hitler’s Allies
Hitler’s Allies

Author: John P. Miglietta

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-09

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0429647379

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This book examines the significance of alliances in the international system, focusing on the dynamics between great and regional powers, and on the alliances Nazi Germany made during World War II, and their implications for Germany. It examines a variety of case studies and looks at how each of the respective states contributed to or weakened Nazi Germany’s warfighting capabilities. The cases cover the principal Axis members Italy and Japan, secondary Axis allies Hungary and Romania, as well as neutral states that had economic and military significance for Germany, namely Bulgaria, Iran, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Vichy France. Additional case studies include topics such as the German attempts to cultivate Arab nationalism, focusing on German involvement in the coup in Iraq against the pro-British government, and the wartime state of Croatia, whose creation was made possible by Germany, with the rivalry between Germany and Italy for control being a major focus. The book also includes a case study exploring the unique position of Finland among German allies as a democracy and how the country was essentially fighting a very different war from Nazi Germany. This will be of interest to students and academics with an interest in power dynamics in World War II, economic, political, strategic, and alliance theory, and scholarly debate on Nazism and Europe.

National Perspectives on the Global Second World War
National Perspectives on the Global Second World War

Author: Ashley Jackson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-04

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1000875210

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This collection of essays, written by authors of different nationalities, explores the experiences of the countries that were not numbered among the Second World War’s major belligerents, including colonies, 'lesser' powers, and neutral nation states. The story of the war is often dominated by the experiences, actions, and historical narratives of the major belligerent powers. By focusing on the war history of ten diverse countries, this analysis of the conflict’s global manifestations facilitates greater empathy with the experience of polities and societies dragged into regional and international conflicts. The volume offers valuable insights on the war’s place in national culture and collective memory. National Perspectives on the Global Second World War is an essential contribution to the study of the Second World War and will be of particular interest to scholars of imperial and colonial history, military history, and global history.

Politics of Death
Politics of Death

Author: Jesús Casquete

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-05

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1000881539

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To disentangle the National Socialists’ path to power in Germany, one must attend to the discursive strategies and liturgical practices employed by its emocrats, or manipulators of emotions. The apotheosis of martyrdom in the National Socialist propaganda template is far from being a marginal element in the movement’s history. Owing to its mobilising and unifying potential in constructing a community of memory, the glorification of Nazi martyrdom constituted a fundamental pillar of the movement’s communicative and propaganda strategy, stressed to the point of paroxysm. The propaganda and lies that ground the construction of the martyr as a prefiguration of the "new man" are the core ideas that form the backbone of this book. The Nazis’ politics of death was a carefully managed element of National Socialism from its very inception. The martyrs, and their blood sacrificed on the altar of the fatherland, were an invaluable propaganda weapon. There were three pillars of the Nazi martyrdom frame: sublimation of death, posthumous sugar-coating and "tamed" death. Once the Nazi movement had taken control of German state apparatus, the mechanisms for disseminating the exemplary martyr in society may have changed, but not the specifics of the propaganda strategy itself.

The Last Million
The Last Million

Author: David Nasaw

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 0143110993

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From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May 1945, after German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, millions of concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators were left behind in Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers attempted to repatriate the refugees, but more than a million displaced persons remained in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. Most would eventually be resettled in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages, but no nation, including the United States, was willing to accept more than a handful of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. When in June, 1948, the United States Congress passed legislation permitting the immigration of displaced persons, visas were granted to sizable numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, but denied to 90% of the Jewish displaced persons. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable future, carrying with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and shows us how it is our history as well.

Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination
Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination

Author: David M Rosen

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-10-12

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0813572894

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When we hear the term “child soldiers,” most Americans imagine innocent victims roped into bloody conflicts in distant war-torn lands like Sudan and Sierra Leone. Yet our own history is filled with examples of children involved in warfare—from adolescent prisoner of war Andrew Jackson to Civil War drummer boys—who were once viewed as symbols of national pride rather than signs of human degradation. In this daring new study, anthropologist David M. Rosen investigates why our cultural perception of the child soldier has changed so radically over the past two centuries. Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination reveals how Western conceptions of childhood as a uniquely vulnerable and innocent state are a relatively recent invention. Furthermore, Rosen offers an illuminating history of how human rights organizations drew upon these sentiments to create the very term “child soldier,” which they presented as the embodiment of war’s human cost. Filled with shocking historical accounts and facts—and revealing the reasons why one cannot spell “infantry” without “infant”—Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination seeks to shake us out of our pervasive historical amnesia. It challenges us to stop looking at child soldiers through a biased set of idealized assumptions about childhood, so that we can better address the realities of adolescents and pre-adolescents in combat. Presenting informative facts while examining fictional representations of the child soldier in popular culture, this book is both eye-opening and thought-provoking.