Slovenia 1945
Slovenia 1945

Author: John Corsellis

Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Published: 2005-10-04

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781850438403

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"At the end of May 1945, 12,000 Slovene soldiers were put on board trains by the British Army in Austria. They thought they were on their way to freedom in Italy. Their true destination was Slovenia, and death." "One of the most moving and tragic diaspora stories of World War II, Slovenia 1945 follows the fate of a strongly Catholic and non-Communist community in Slovenia, including members of the anti-Communist Home Guard 'domobranci', caught up in the maelstrom of war and politics in the Balkans and the problems of the post-war settlement. Thousands of soldiers returned to face torture and death at the hands of their war-time enemies - Tito's Partisans - who had triumphed by the war's end. Six thousand more civilians narrowly escaped the same fate, after the intervention of Red Cross and Quaker aid workers. Yet the story of exile is also one of triumph as the surviving refugees built new lives in Argentina, the USA, Canada and Britain." "In this volume, the authors call on more than half a century of research and an unsurpassed knowledge of the Slovene migrant communities around the world to tell their stories. For the first time, the survivors tell their tales of wartime cruelty, of reviving their battered community in refugee camps, and of their emigration overseas, building successful new lives through courage, self-help and strong cultural identity."--BOOK JACKET.

Slovenia 1945
Slovenia 1945

Author: John Corsellis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2005-10-04

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0857716875

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At the end of May 1945, 12,000 Slovenian soldiers boarded trains in Austria. They thought they were on their way to freedom in Italy. Their true destination was Slovenia, and death. One of the most moving and tragic diaspora stories of World War II, Slovenia 1945 follows the fate of a strongly Catholic and non-Communist community in Slovenia - including members of the anti-Communist Home Guard 'domobranci' - caught up in the maelstrom of war and politics in the Balkans in World War II and the problems of post-war settlement. Thousands of soldiers returned to face death and exile at the hands of their war-time enemies - Tito's Partisans - who had triumphed by the war's end. Six thousand more civilians narrowly escaped the same fate, after the intervention of Red Cross and Quaker aid workers. Yet the story of exile is also one of triumph as the surviving refugees built new lives in Argentina, the USA, Canada and Britain. In this unique book, the authors call on more than half a century of research and an unsurpassed knowledge of the Slovene migrant communities around the world to tell their stories. For the first time, the survivors tell their vivid tales of wartime cruelty, of reviving their battered community in refugee camps, and of their emigration to Argentina, the US, Canada and Britain building successful new lives through courage, self-help and strong cultural identity. Slovenia 1945 is a vivid, personal and deeply moving story of an episode that marked all those involved indelibly.

To Walk with the Devil
To Walk with the Devil

Author: Gregor Joseph Kranjc

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1442613300

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Examining archival material and post-war scholarly and popular literature, Kranjc describes the often sharp divide between Communist-era interpretations of collaboration and those of their émigré anti-Communist opponents.

Postwar
Postwar

Author: Tony Judt

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-09-05

Total Pages: 1000

ISBN-13: 9780143037750

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Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.

Croatia and Slovenia at the End and After the Second World War (1944-1945)
Croatia and Slovenia at the End and After the Second World War (1944-1945)

Author: Blanka Matkovich

Publisher: BrownWalker Press

Published: 2017-10-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1627346910

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This book focuses on the events that took place in late 1944 and 1945 in Croatia and Slovenia when the intensity of violence was strongest. At that time, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), assisted by the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Army, the Department for the Protection of the People (OZNA) and the Corps of People’s Defence of Yugoslavia (KNOJ) conducted organized terror not only by intimidation, persecution, torture and imprisonment, but also by the execution of a large number of citizens perceived by the KPJ as disloyal, passive, ideological enemies or class enemies. However, investigating war and post-war crimes committed by communist regime was not possible until 1990, after the democratic changes in Yugoslavia. This book is based on documents kept in the archives of Croatia, Slovenia, the UK, and Serbia. Many of them, especially those in Croatia, recently became available to the public, which makes them extremely valuable source of data to the academics and students in this field and which shed new light on these historical events. The Communist Party in the former Yugoslavia was an organization which used all available means to seize and keep power, including terror and mass murder, especially between autumn 1944 and summer 1945 when mass killings occurred across the country. However, in the Soviet sphere of influence, investigating war and post-war crimes committed by communist regimes was not possible until 1990. This project not only covers new ground in the research into communist war crimes at the end of and after the Second World War, but also contributes to coming to terms with the past in the successor states of Yugoslavia by studying one of the most controversial episodes in the contemporary history of the Balkans. Since the October Revolution, when for the first time in history a Marxist party seized state power, communist regimes have influenced the lives of more than a billion people, caused millions of deaths and violated the human rights of countless people. However, in the Soviet sphere of influence and in Yugoslavia, investigating war and post-war crimes committed by communist regimes was not possible until 1990, after the democratic changes in Eastern Europe. Resolution 1481/2006 of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly strongly condemned human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes and the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism stated that these crimes were comparable with Nazi crimes but, very few people have been tried for committing such crimes. Nevertheless, 25 years later, in former Yugoslav republics this topic is still a matter of political and scientific debates.

The Tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring, 1945
The Tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring, 1945

Author: Florian Rulitz

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-03-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1609091779

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The atrocities and mass murders committed by Josip Broz Tito's Partisan units of the Yugoslav Army immediately after the Second World War had no place in the conscience of Socialist Yugoslavia. More than once, the annual Croatian commemoration of the Bleiburg victims was subject to attacks carried out by the socialist Yugoslav state. Abroad in the West, on Austrian soil, the Yugoslav secret service (UDBA) did not shy away from murdering the protagonist of the Croatian memory culture, Nicola Martinovic, as late as 1975. The official history was aligned with a firm interpretational paradigm that called for a glorification of the anti-fascist "people's liberation resistance." With the breakup of Yugoslavia and its socialist regime in 1991, the identity-establishing accounts of contemporary witnesses, which had mainly been cherished in exile circles abroad, increasingly reached public awareness in Croatia and Slovenia. In the 1990s Croatia witnessed the emergence of a memory that had been suppressed by the socialist-Yugoslav regime—namely the Bleiburg tragedy. The situation in Slovenia was similar in terms of identity and remembrance culture. Among the Slovenes, the communist crimes committed during the turmoil are known as the drama of Viktring or the Viktring tragedy, named after the largest refugee camp of the Slovenes. Reports on the communist postwar crimes and on the countless discoveries of mass gravesites have also begun circulating in the media of the German-speaking world in the last few years. Florian Rulitz's meticulously researched book, now available for the first time in English, provides a corrective to the historical memory that had been previously accepted as truth. Rulitz focuses on two essential questions. First, did the so-called "final encirclement battles" indeed occur in Carinthia in the Ferlach/Hollenburg/Viktring and Dravograd/Poljana/Bleiburg areas, resulting in military victories for the Yugoslav Army? Second, were the battles after the capitulation fought by the refugees with the aim of reaching the British-controlled areas in Carinthia? To answer these questions, Rulitz presents a detailed reconstruction of those days in May 1945. He furthermore considers the question of the murders on Austrian territory, which were hushed up in Partisan literature and presented as casualties of the final military operations. This groundbreaking study will interest scholars and students of modern European history.

The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945
The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945

Author: Olivier Wieviorka

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0231548648

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In just three months in 1940, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France fell to the Nazis. The German occupation of Western Europe had begun—but a brave few rose up in defiance. National resistance has long been celebrated in remembrances of World War II, depicted as making significant contributions to the defeat of Nazi Germany. However, the so-called army of shadows drew heavily on the support of London and Washington, a fact often forgotten in postwar Europe. The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945 is a sweeping analytical history of the underground anti-Nazi forces during World War II. Examining clandestine organizations in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy, Olivier Wieviorka sheds new light on the factors that shaped the resistance and its place in the grand scheme of Anglo-American military strategy. While national actors played a leading role in fomenting resistance, British and American intelligence services and propaganda as well as financial, material, and logistical support were crucial to its activities and growth. Wieviorka illuminates the policies of governments in exile and resistance actors regarding cooperation with the British and Americans, pointing to the persistence of national self-interest and long-standing historical tensions. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and bringing together the political, diplomatic, and military dimensions of the conflict, this book is the first account of the resistance on a continental scale and from a trans-European perspective.

A World Connecting
A World Connecting

Author: Emily S. Rosenberg

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 1168

ISBN-13: 0674047214

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Between 1870 and 1945, advances in communication and transportation simultaneously expanded and shrank the world. In five interpretive essays, A World Connecting goes beyond nations, empires, and world wars to capture the era’s defining feature: the profound and disruptive shift toward an ever more rapidly integrating world.

Socialist Cosmopolitanism
Socialist Cosmopolitanism

Author: Nicolai Volland

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-03-28

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0231544758

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Socialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literary works from the Mao era that reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. As Nicolai Volland demonstrates, after 1949 China engaged with the world beyond its borders in a variety of ways and on many levels—politically, economically, and culturally. Far from rejecting the worldliness of earlier eras, the young People's Republic developed its own cosmopolitanism. Rather than a radical break with the past, Chinese socialist literature should be seen as an integral and important chapter in China's long search to find a place within world literature. Socialist Cosmopolitanism revisits a range of genres, from poetry and land reform novels to science fiction and children's literature, and shows how Chinese writers and readers alike saw their own literary production as part of a much larger literary universe. This literary space, reaching from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Moscow to Hanoi, allowed authors and texts to travel, reinventing the meaning of world literature. Chinese socialist literature was not driven solely by politics but by an ambitious—but ultimately doomed—attempt to redraw the literary world map.