Slovenia 1945 is a well-crafted blend of personal memories, historiography,
and eyewitness accounts. The result is moving narrative that avoids the
turgidity and dryness historical studies may fall prey to, as well as the
indulgent emotionalism of some memoirs. The starting point for the volume
was the letters written by John Corsellis, a conscientious objector working
in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Austrian Carinthia from 1945 to 1947.
This material was fleshed out with several dozen interviews, a diary by
camp survivor France Perni?ek, and the journalist Marcus Ferrar. Although
Corsellis is a central participant in the story, his presence in the book is
subtle and unobtrusive.
Structurally, the book is attractive to both casual readers and
serious researchers. In addition to the main text, there are fifteen photos,
three maps, an outline of the chief characters, a four-page catalogue of other
persons, a tightly packed six-page bibliography, and a five-page index of
people, subjects, and places.
A striking feature of the book is its impartiality?a goal that the
authors explicitly state in the prologue (p. 2). Negative sides of all
participants are depicted: Germans (slave labor, attacks on civilians, book
burning), Italians (the Rab concentration camp, the myth of kind and
romantic soldiers), Partisans (theft, murder, rape), Catholics (the Black
Hand death squads), the western Allies (shooting at civilians, looting), and
the Village Guards (burning prisoners to death). However, the book is much
more than a catalogue of crimes; it also relates the human sides of all
involved: individual acts of kindness by combatants and civilians on all
sides. The narrative is replete with religious imagery?priests, ...
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...jana: Modrian.
Markovski, Venko. 1984. Goli Otok: The Island of Death. Boulder: Social
Science Monographs.
Mila?, Metod. 2002. Resistance, Imprisonment & Forced Labor. A Slovene
Student in World War II [= Studies in Modern European History
47]. New York: Peter Lang.
Reindl, Donald F. 2001. Mass Graves from the Communist Past Haunt
Slovenia?s Present, RFE/RL Newsline 5.225 (29 November),
available at http://www.rferl.org/ newsline/2001/11/5-not/not-
291101.asp
Sirc, Ljubo. 1989. Between Hitler and Tito: Nazi Occupation and
Communist Oppression. London: Andre Deutsch.
Tolstoy, Nikolai. 1986. The Minister and the Massacres. London: Century
Hutchinson.
John Corsellis & Marcus Ferrar. Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and
Survival after World War II. London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2005. xi
+ 276 pp., �24.50 ($47.97) (cloth). ISBN: 1-85043-840-0.
...g. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 12th ed. New York: Pearson, 2013. 549-51. Print.
The autobiography, Survival in Auschwitz was written by an Italian resistance member named Primo Levi. In the novel, Levi accounts on his incarceration in the Auschwitz Holocaust concentration camp from February 1944 to January 27, 1945. Levi was born in July 1919 in Turin, Italy. Sixty seven years later, he died in the same city, Turin in Italy. He was an intelligent and intellectual man with a passion for writing and chemistry. Primo’s most famous writing piece was actually the book, Survival in Auschwitz. Originally titled, If this Is a Man, Survival in Aushwitz was first officially published in 1947, two years after his release from Auschwitz.
In the story “Survival In Auschwitz” by Levi Primo. Moral thoughts during the holocaust were proven to be adaptable during extreme circumstances. In the camps the Jews were treated as if they were animals as a result animalistic behavior was adapted, being human did not exist behind the barbed wires of the camp. In order to survive in Auschwitz also viewed as hell one has to lose their self respect and human dignity.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
In the Holocaust, the Nazis persecuted and murdered over 6 million Jews during a four and a half year period. By the 1930s the Nazis rose in power and all the Jews became victims. One of the ways the Nazis persecuted the Jews, was putting them into tight confined places called ghettos were they suffered for many years.
Hitler believed that life was all about struggle; in order to live a full life you must struggle and overcoming this struggle is the true meaning of life. Hitler believes that only the strongest will survive, and the weak will succumb and cease to exist, which ultimately will better the country as a whole. Hitler carried out many projects to weed out the weak, and build his strong ‘perfect’ nation; this included Action T4, concentration and death camps. Auschwitz is Hitler’s creation; it is his constructed society to exterminate the Jewish population through immense struggle, by not only killing them, but he also attempts to strip them of every single shred of humanity until there is nothing left and they serve simply as economic investments. Those who survived did not allow their humanity to be confiscated.
It has not only been a trend, but almost a necessity, for novelists who depict wars to depict humanity. Wars are largely, if not totally, alienating; it alienates humans from who they are—or at least whom they think they are—to fighting machines programmed exclusively for mass destruction and ruthless killing. Romantic love and strong sentiment seem to be incompatible with the nature of wars and are rarely found in wars as well. However, in Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier shows us the reshaping of humanity and personality of the male protagonist Inman during the war; he conveys an idea of rebirth in the war—a process of gradually discovering and finally adopting a new, more introspective self-identity; and this journey to rebirth is led by love, courage, and the desire for freedom.
The Forgotten Soldier is not a book concerning the tactics and strategy of the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Nor does it analyze Nazi ideology and philosophy. Instead, it describes the life of a typical teenage German soldier on the Eastern Front. And through this examined life, the reader receives a first hand account of the atrocious nature of war. Sajer's book portrays the reality of combat in relation to the human physical, psychological, and physiological condition.
“Corruption” Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Community Television of Southern California (KCET). 2004-2005. Web. 24 March 2014
The Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp was the most brutal, heart-stopping camp in all of Poland. It is known for its high killing rates. If you were ever sent to this camp you were most likely going to die if you were weak,because they made you work until your bones can't move and with the climate it was hell. It was so terrifying that human bones were scattered everywhere along the dirt.
Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Bastards entails a Jewish revenge fantasy that is told through a counterfactual history of events in World War II. However, this story follows a completely different plot than what we are currently familiar with. Within these circumstances, audiences now question the very ideas and arguments that are often associated with World War II. We believe that Inglourious Basterds is a Jewish revenge fantasy that forces us to rethink our previous understandings by disrupting the viewers sense of content and nature in the history of World War II. Within this thesis, this paper will cover the Jewish lens vs. American lens, counter-plots with-in the film, ignored social undercurrents, and the idea that nobody wins in war. These ideas all correlate with how we view World War II history and how Inglourious Basterds muddles our previous thoughts on how these events occurred.
The concentration camp known as Belzic was a death camp that lasted between March 17,1942 to summer 1943. To operate this camp properly it had to be staffed by 20 SS men and 90 Ukrainians. This camp was not only for Jews, but also for gypsies that were considered unworthy. Jews were just told that they were going to relocate, but that wasn't the case. They believed they were going to be safe, but they ended up in the Belzec death camp.
The main focus of the post war testimony of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, Commandant at Auschwitz from May 1940 until December, 1943, is the mass extermination of Jews during World War II. His signed affidavit had a profound impact at the Post-War trials of Major War Criminals held at Nuremburg from November 14, 1945 to October 1, 1946. His testimony is a primary source that details and describes his personal account of the timeline, who ordered Auschwitz to become a death camp, and the means used to execute and exterminate millions of Jews. Obtained while tortured nearly to death under British custody, the authenticity and reliability of this document is questioned due to arguable inconsistencies that exist. However, the events sworn to in his testimony have been recounted and corroborated by witnesses and thousands of survivors.
Throughout their lives, people must deal with the horrific and violent side of humanity. The side of humanity is shown through the act of war. This is shown in Erich Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”. War is by far the most horrible thing that the human race has to go through. The participants in the war suffer irreversible damage by the atrocities they witness and the things they go through.
Anti-Semitism reached to extreme levels beginning in 1939, when Polish Jews were regularly rounded up and shot by members of the SS. Though some of these SS men saw the arbitrary killing of Jews as a sport, many had to be lubricated with large quantities of alcohol before committing these atrocious acts. Mental trauma was not uncommon amongst those men who were ordered to murder Jews. The establishment of extermination camps therefore became the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question”, as well as a way to alleviate the mental trauma that grappled the minds of Nazi soldiers. The following essay will examine various primary and secondary sources to better illuminate the creation, evolution, practices and perpetrators of the extermination camps wherein the horrors of the Holocaust were conducted.