Suchergebnisse

From 1941, faced with a shortage of men, the Waffen-SS admitted or recruited by force hundreds of thousands of non-Germans to their ranks. This volume, from a team of international contributors, shows who these foreign recruits were, where they came from, what their wartime experiences were, and what happened to them after 1945.

This article investigates the struggle for control over the violence that the Second Polish Republic and the First Czechoslovak Republic fought during their early independence in 1918. As violence had spread throughout the European continent during World War I, it became a crucial post-war question to control its expansion throughout the societies, as different paramilitary groups started to take the law into their own hands, either to protect their co-citizen's interests, or to enforce their own political or economic ambitions, and very often both at the same time. Thus, the use and limitation of violence were ambivalent: the newcomer states often relied on paramilitary units as policing forces and instruments to expand their state power into contested, ethnically mixed border areas. On the other hand, these emerging states faced difficulties to control paramilitary groups, which challenged the state's authority and followed their own – often criminal – agenda. This article aspires to comparatively examine the use of violence and its attempted regulation in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the first years of their existence. Furthermore, presenting the Polish-Czech conflict over Cieszyn Silesia, it aims to show how, immediately after the Great War, ethnopolitical tugs-of-war, fought between regular soldiers and paramilitaries of neighbouring states over borderlands created civil war-like scenarios and put the ethnically mixed population in these regions between a proverbial rock and a hard place.

Frontmatter -- Hugh Gibson -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- List of Images -- Introduction -- Source Editions -- February 1918 -- March 1918 -- April 1918 -- May 1918 -- June 1918 -- July 1918 -- August 1918 -- September 1918 -- October 1918 -- November 1918 -- December 1918 -- January 1919 -- February 1919 -- March 1919 -- April 1919 -- Biographical Index -- Place Index

Collaboration and Resistance in Wartime Poland (1939-1945) - A Case for Differentiated Occupation Studies This article aims to diffenenciate the often simplistic depiction of war and occupation in Europe between 1939 and 1945 as a fight of good against evil. Such a description can be found not only in popular culture, but also, though less blatantly, in historical literature. Without questioning the overall responsibility of the Axis powers for the horrendous crimes committed during the war, this article argues for a more nuanced approach that takes into account the often complex nature of interaction between the occupiers and the occupied. Instead of invoking moral judgment, the authors aim to prioritize the historical analysis of the reality of Poland's occupation by the Nazis, recognizing that the parties involved had their own agency and often conflicting agendas. The authors apply this approach to two major phenomena: collaboration with, and resistance against the occupying forces. It thereby becomes clear that violence was exchanged not only between the occupants and the occupied, but also between different political and ethnic groups of the Polish society.

Whether victorious or not, Central European states faced fundamental challenges after the First World War as they struggled to contain ongoing violence and forge peaceful societies. This collection explores the various forms of violence these nations confronted during this period, which effectively transformed the region into a laboratory for state-building. Employing a bottom-up approach to understanding everyday life, these studies trace the contours of individual and mass violence in the interwar era while illuminating their effects upon politics, intellectual developments, and the arts

The First World War began in the Balkans, and subsequently, fighting in the East radically transformed the political and social European order. The specifics of the Eastern war such as mass deportations, ethnic cleansing, and the radicalization of military, paramilitary and revolutionary violence have only recently become the focus of historical research.

The First World War began in the Balkans, and subsequently, fighting in the East radically transformed the political and social European order. The specifics of the Eastern war such as mass deportations, ethnic cleansing, and the radicalization of military, paramilitary and revolutionary violence have only recently become the focus of historical research