World War In Europe Research Articles

Cruising Europe in World War II: Epistemological Challenges of German Vernacular Trophy Photography

The Nazi regime outfitted the Wehrmacht with the best photographic technology and its soldiers were far better equipped than their allies or nemeses. More than ten per cent of the eighteen million German combatants possessed a fast-shutter 35-mm camera. German soldier-photographers documented their wartime activities extensively, in turn leaving behind a gigantic, private and largely underexplored archive that poses multiple epistemological and ethical challenges. Military historians and Holocaust scholars approach soldierly photographs primarily as sources of information, including proof of crimes. This article shifts these lenses and argues that reading them as visual images, and not solely as historical sources and circulating artefacts, reveals a medium that equally affects its practitioners as well as the observers. Drawing upon public archives and private collections, I focus on highly performative images of victory and conquest over enemy countries and peoples and conceptualise them as ‘trophy photographs’. I examine recurrent motifs within this genre, in particular sexual encounters with enemy women and photographs of male bonding, which arguably constitute the most prevalent images snapped by soldier-photographers who ‘cruised’ Nazi-occupied Europe. Borrowing from Queer Studies, the concept of cruising allows me to probe soldiers’ mobility in semipublic spaces and also acknowledge the voyeuristic and visually alluring quality of their photographs. Seductive, exciting, these trophy photographs lure in their audience(s) with sexually charged, often (homo)erotic overtones. In turn, these images provoke diverse ways of seeing and interpreting their content: how can we best frame the soldier-photographer’s gaze and capture the polysemic quality of the images, especially when dealing with violence, racism, sexism and/or homoeroticism? What effect do trophy images of conquest potentially have on the historical actors who shot and circulated those photographs and what impact do they have on contemporary observers? Finally, acknowledging multidirectional and fractious lives of images, how do we understand the complex relationship between public history and the ethics of seeing? Because photographic images are historically contingent and open-ended, this article casts light on the complexity of mediation and competing visions between diverse publics of the past, present and future.

Claire Andrieu, When Men Fell from the Sky. Civilians and Downed Airmen in Second World War Europe. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare.) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2023

Claire Andrieu, When Men Fell from the Sky. Civilians and Downed Airmen in Second World War Europe. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare.) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2023

Götterdämmerung Averted: Winston Churchill, Flensburg and the Unthinkable

ABSTRACT This article explores the anti-Soviet undertakings of Winston Churchill and the Flensburg Reich government during the spring of 1945. It contends that British and German strategic goals closely aligned as the Second World War in Europe ended. These objectives were to halt Soviet expansion westwards and to prepare for a potential new military confrontation with the USSR. It links British contingency planning to attack the Soviet Union (Operation Unthinkable) directly to Churchill’s attempts to prolong the existence of the Flensburg government after V-E Day. The article argues that Churchill sought to use the remnants of the Nazi leadership as an anti-communist tool against the Soviet Union. It also presents the case that Reich President Karl Doenitz pursued a similar arrangement. Finally, the article asserts if Churchill had been able to secure American support, then an armed conflict between the western allies, backed by the Nazi government, and the Soviet Union was plausible.

Bringing Columbus home: Buffalo soldiers, representation, and transatlantic memory of the Italian campaign in WWII

Following victory in Europe in World War II, African American troops of the Ninety-Second Infantry Division took part in a symbolic but relatively unknown ceremony returning the ashes of Christopher Columbus to the Italian city of Genoa. This event encapsulates the complicated experiences of the ‘Buffalo’ soldiers in Italy and their legacies. While the role of this rare Black combat unit was camouflaged by the mainstream press, for African Americans the Division captivated the hopes of ‘racial uplift’ that could come via the ideals of the ‘Double Victory’ against Fascism at home and abroad. While the patriotic character of the ceremony obscured the achievements of Black combat troops, the article suggests that veterans were active in agents in shaping ‘Double V’ memories which held Black patriotism and achievement in tension with the struggles they faced as African Americans in a segregated military. Importantly, by examining the return visits to Genoa alongside oral histories, the article argues these memories had a clear transatlantic dimension, which were underpinned by ideas of ‘colorblind’ Italians. The memories worked to underline the American identity of Black soldiers while acting as long-term reminders of American racism in the War.

Revitalizing the Political Avant-garde of the “Absurd” in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Harold Pinter’s The Room

ABSTRACT This article considers the political possibilities of the avant-garde in the experimental “absurd” plays of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Harold Pinter’s The Room that endeavor to depict the senselessness of life, reducing plot and characters to a bare minimum. While the popular interpretation of the plays has been made against the ideological exhaustion of post–World War Europe and America and hence with the philosophy of existentialism, this article analyzes the two plays in terms of the tension with contemporary ideologies that continue to inform our present lives. One prominent mode of creating this tension is minimization of the communication between the actors, director, and the audience in order to create a misinterpretation of the purpose of communication. The article argues that the element of the avant-garde is revitalized in such studies dealing with existential angst, Marxist orientation of Ionesco or Pinter’s commentary on racism, and can be properly interpreted by an appreciation of the multiple modernities that the plays inhabit.

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War, by Paul Betts

This book provides an excellent example of how historical research can reflect the Zeitgeist while also explaining how we got to where we are now. This is by no means the first book to capture the detail and spirit of post-Second World War Europe, however; and several books on this subject, such as those by Mark Mazower and Tony Judt, represent scholarship at its very best. Yet no post-1945 study has managed to achieve what Paul Betts has achieved here. By bringing together cultural, social and political research with a conceptual modern history of European civilisation, and by adopting a truly transnational perspective, Betts has managed to produce a highly original piece of work that sheds new light on Europe after the Second World War. The book is distinctive in several ways. First, it adopts what might be described as a case-study approach. This is most visible in the early chapters. To give a flavour of themes covered, these chapters include sections on anti-communism, the war crimes trials, military occupation, the post-1945 family, peace movements, housing, etiquette, and the role of social and religious groups. Secondly, the author makes excellent use of cultural content, drawing on both photography and architecture to provide evidence of post-war renewal. These sections of the book are fascinating. Finally, and perhaps most distinctive of all, is Betts’s global take on European history. This is the preserve of the second half of the book, and is the more original part of the project. It steps back from the domestic European scene to view Europe from an international standpoint, with particular attention given to relations with Africa. For example, it shows how, in the period after 1945, European states engaged in what was ultimately an unsuccessful effort at re-colonisation (challenging the prevailing view that post-1945 Europe was all about peace). In an entirely original contribution, this part of the book also demonstrates how East European states sought to cultivate cultural and economic relationships with African leaders, while arguing that socialist engagement with Africa inhabited a moral high-ground far above that of the imperialist West. Betts also gives voice to African perspectives on Europe, in a nuanced way that reflects inter- and intra-state debates and disagreements as to how much European cultural and political influence post-independence African countries should retain.

Where the Second World War in Europe Broke Out: The Landscape History of Westerplatte, Gdańsk/Danzig

The article describes the landscape history of the Westerplatte Peninsula in Gdańsk (Poland) from the 17th to the 20th century presented as a complex process of the landscape’s environmental, urban and military transformations. Westerplatte is known as the symbolic place where the Second World War in Europe broke out, and for this reason the current discourse is mainly concentrated on that period. Nonetheless, the history of Westerplatte includes many other important events involving Polish, German, Russian and even French politics over the last three centuries. Thanks to its location at the entrance of one of the main harbours on the Baltic Sea, it is cartographically the best-documented part of the Vistula river estuary. A comprehensive archival survey conducted in the Polish and German archives and cartographical analysis of over 200 selected historical maps allowed the authors to reconstruct its spatial history over three centuries. This case study of Westerplatte can be regarded as an example of the research modus operandi of a historical landscape which has been transformed multiple times. It might form the basis for establishing a new policy for its preservation, allowing a balance to be kept between fluctuations of the current historical politics and more universal requirements for the protection of tangible and intangible heritage. The article also stresses the importance of a holistic and interdisciplinary approach in the analysis of a historical landscape and the necessity of proper selection and critical verification of sources.

Music and Internationalism in Nazi Germany: Provenance and Post-War Consequences

In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:

Intertextuality: Decolonising Imperial Narrative in Weep Not, Child

ABSTRACT Imperial narrative paved the way for the ‘superior white’ and ‘inferior black’ psychology for centuries. This article seeks to determine the impact of intertexts employed in Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child in resisting the imperial discourse. The article identifies intertexts in the form of allusions, quotations, and references to the two world wars in Europe. A textual analysis method is then applied to uncover how the intertexts are used to decolonise the invented ‘whiteness’, ‘blackness’, and ‘Europe’. The study relies on selected concepts of intertextuality by Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva. The article reveals that the intertexts are employed to disprove the invented discourse about black and white people. The article also discloses how the novel reciprocates the old binary opposition that considers ‘civilised’ Europe as the antithesis of ‘uncivilised’ Africa. Finally, the article suggests that the current world order is directly connected to the imperial narrative, which necessitates consistent counter-narrative to fight the fabricated discourse.

Forced Migration and Refugee Resettlement in the Long 1940s: An Introduction to Its Connected and Global History

AbstractWhen considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.

Separate aspects of the study of the anti-fascist movement in Carpathian Ukraine during the Second World War and the consequences of the influence of Russian fascism on Ukraine during 2014-2022

The article examines the features of the declaration of Independence on March 15, 1939 by the Ukrainian state on the territory of modern Transcarpathia and the formation of a new state on the map of Europe – Carpathian Ukraine. The features of the Hungarian-Ukrainian war of March 15-18, 1939 are characterized. An attempt was made to analyze the impact of Ukrainian state building in Carpathian Ukraine on Ukrainian state processes during the Russian-Ukrainian war during 2014-2022. The Russian-Ukrainian war, which began in 2014, and its conventional component, which began on February 24, 2022, sharply pose questions for the Ukrainian people to study the lessons of their own history in order to effectively build Ukrainian statehood. One of the most important lessons of the past, which has many parallels with the modern Russian-Ukrainian war, is the presence of a little-studied page of Ukrainian history of the last century – the proclamation of independence on March 15, 1939 by the Ukrainian state on the territory of the modern Transcarpathian region – Carpathian Ukraine – and its heroic defense against intervention . Fascist Hungary during March 15-18, 1939. Targets and goals. The main goal and task of scientific research is to prove that the existence of the HungarianUkrainian war in March 15-18, 1939 is a confirmation of the fact that Ukrainians were not and are not fascists. Methods. In the process of research, in particular, the following methods were used: analysis – to study the object and subject of research; abstract-logical (theoretical generalizations and formulation of conclusions on the analysis of state processes in Carpatho-Ukraine in 1939). Results. It has been established that the beginning of the conventional confrontation on the European continent in World War II is March 15, 1939 - on this day, the intervention of fascist Hungary against the newly Central European country - Carpathian Ukraine began, and the conventional confrontation between fascist Germany and Poland. Was not the beginning of hostilities in Europe in World War II, but the next stage (or continuation). The Ukrainian state on the territory of modern Ukrainian Transcarpathia – Carpathian Ukraine – was the first state in Europe to offer armed resistance to the fascists (in fact, not only to the Hungarian fascists, but also to their allies - the Germans) on the European continent from March 15 to 18, 1939. It has been established that in 1939, members of the OUN, as part of the detachments of the Carpathian Sich, opposed with weapons in their hands against the country with the dominant fascist ideology – Hungary under the leadership of the fascist dictator Horthy, and the socialist Soviet Union in alliance with National Socialist Germany – in 1939. It is proved that modern Russian fascism, in fact, the continuation of the socialist fascism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, continues and embodies the policy of the destruction of Ukrainians in all its manifestations. Conclusions. The study of the historical experience of the formation of the Ukrainian state of Carpathian Ukraine on the territory of the modern Transcarpathian region highlights the long-term anti-fascist nature of the national state processes that took place in the Ukrainian territories in the middle of the 20th century. and in the second and third decades of the XXI century.

Rethinking waste within business history: A transnational perspective on waste recycling in World War II

Waste and its reuse have constituted an important field of economic activity for most of human history, including modern times. While the collected articles of this special issue exemplify the significance that waste salvage had in mobilising resources in Europe, Asia, and North America in World War II, this introduction situates these cases in a long-term perspective. It explores the continuities and ruptures inside the structures, markets, and actors of the salvage business from late nineteenth century waste reclamation, including the sanitary era of municipal waste disposal, to the more recent era of ‘green’ recycling. It argues that we need to rethink waste’s role within business history by delineating four basic characteristics of the waste business: the moral economies that govern wasting and reusing; the informality of the trade and its operations; the trans-sectorality of the waste streams; and the reverse logistics of the waste salvage trade.

D-Day to December 1944: The odyssey of the third auxiliary surgical group in World War II.

As a Major in the US Army Medical Corps, Darrell A. Campbell, MD, led Team 13 of the Third Auxiliary Surgical Group in Europe in World War II. The team began work on June 7, 1944, in a clearing station tent near the beach at Normandy. Subsequently, over the next 7 months, it was assigned to mobile hospitals in 15 different locations in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. Major Campbell kept the log books used to record all of the operations done by his team during this time and brought them home where three were discovered more than 70 years later. These log books contain descriptions of more than 500 consecutive operations done by Team 13. They provide a unique insight into the activities of the surgeons who worked to save lives on the front lines of battle in the European Theater of Operations between June and December 1944 and form the basis for this historical perspective.This is an article on the history of surgery.

Books Across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945–1951

Books Across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945–1951

The Absence of Tragedy in Ifigenia (1950) by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s novella, Ifigenia (1950) has been read consistently as a critique of the consolidating Francoist state of the 1940s and an early example of his ‘demythologizing’ technique. This article seeks to open discussion on aspects of the text that have not attracted critical attention to date. It traces the unacknowledged legacies of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis in the text, most visible in both authors’ emphasis on the capacity of language for deceit. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, it argues that Torrente’s Ifigenia should be read not only in the context of post-Civil War Spain but also in the wider socio-political context of post-Second World War Europe. It argues that the consistent suppression of expression of emotion throughout the text produces an absence of tragedy in Torrente’s retelling of the myth, and outlines how this relates to the post-war contexts of Spain and Europe.

Why the 1955 Austrian State Treaty Bans U-Boats

ABSTRACT Why the 1955 Austrian State Treaty that restored Austria’s sovereignty to its landlocked 1938 borders also bans it from deploying submarines is a foreign policy puzzle submerged in a political joke. The idea that Austria would deploy U-boats in the Danube was as preposterous in 1955 as it is today. A political joke is successful when it elicits amusement at awareness of some unrecognized or unspoken truth about power by exposing the contradiction between narratives or interpretive scripts. That Article 13 of the penultimate peace treaty of the Second World War in Europe prohibits submarines along with a list of other more plausible weapons performs the work of a political joke because further investigation reveals important material about the post-war settlement during the early Cold War. Analysis of this penultimate peace treaty of the Second World War in Europe indicates that the submarine ban was likely the product of traumatic recent historical memory, overwrought historical and geopolitical anxiety, and a determination to burden Austria with an arms limits nearly identical to those in the 1947 peace treaties with Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, even though the burden was entirely symbolic. The 1947 peace treaty with Italy included no comparable submarine ban. The drafters of the 1955 treaty appear to have been trapped, seemingly compelled by irrational motives, to include a provision that offered no additional security to the victorious powers but instead required an empty sacrifice. The irony of the submarine ban symbolically burdening Austria is it that may have been aimed indirectly at (West) Germany, whose U-boats were iconic weapons in both world wars and which deployed and exported military submarines during the Cold War. Moreover, Germany was not subjected to a submarine ban in the 1990 Final Settlement with Respect to Germany or ‘Two Plus Four’ Treaty, the final peace treaty of the Second World War.

Assigning moral roles within the Second World War in Europe: National similarities, differences, and implications for group‐level moral representations

The moral roles assigned to nations that took part in the Second World War cast a shadow over contemporary international politics. To understand contemporary moral beliefs about the war, we took 11 mostly student samples from 9 nations that took part in the European theatre of war (total N = 1,427). We asked respondents, in free and scaled listings, to identify the war’s heroes, villains, victims, and recipients of help. Nations and individuals seen as heroes, victims, and villains could be readily identified by most samples and showed both continuity and difference across nations. Most nations preferentially assigned themselves hero and victim roles, and the two were correlated positively, showing ingroup favouritism linked to victimhood. These findings show the importance of morality to contemporary views of the war and suggest further directions for studying today’s political climate in Europe and elsewhere.

An Apprenticeship and Its Stocktakings: Leibowitz, Boulez, Messiaen, and the Discourse and Practice of New Music

AbstractThe textbook historical account of post-war New Music describes a logical and radical succession from Schoenberg to Webern to the Darmstadt School. Against this narrative of inevitability, I provide a more contingent account of the institutionalization of a particular discourse of New Music in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. What is contingent here is not so much why or how certain figures – chiefly Pierre Boulez and René Leibowitz – were important, but the shape and the logic by which this importance was established and maintained. Accordingly, this article first of all provides a summary of just what it meant for Leibowitz's understanding of New Music to be reproduced in an institutional capacity. From here, I undertake close critical reading of Boulez's break with Leibowitz in order to discover what, exactly, Boulez began to do differently to establish a new practice.

‘The originator of Eni’s ideas’. Marcello Boldrini at the top of Agip/Eni (1948–1967)

Italy was one of the most peculiar protagonists of the ‘great season’ of State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in post-Second World War Europe. Public managers, in turn, were among the major players in shaping the rise, performance and cultural patterns of the Italian mixed economy. Within this ruling group, a significant role was played by Marcello Boldrini, statistician of international renown ‘lent’ to the State oil industry thanks to his friendship with Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (Eni)’s founder, Enrico Mattei. The essay highlights Boldrini’s contribution to the elaboration of Eni’s cultural strategy, focused on the reflection concerning the role played by the SOE in the economic development process. Secondly, the international profile of his work as a public manager is analysed, particularly with respect to the relationships between Eni and the emerging oil producing countries, based on an innovative partnership system to whose elaboration and fulfilment Boldrini authoritatively contributed.

The legacies of 1945: The evolutions of European civic morality

ABSTRACT This article explores the widespread use of the ‘lessons’ of the era of the Second World War in Europe since 1945. This usage proved to be a resilient element of European cultural values, especially in Western Europe during the era of the Cold War. However, with the emergence of a more diverse and pluralist Europe since 1989, so this form of civic morality has been replaced by new narratives of the war years, and of the twentieth century as a whole. These indicate changes not only in historical perspectives but also in the structures of civic morality.