German Threat Research Articles

The Commission for Relief in Belgium and the Political Diplomatic History of the First World War

During the First World War, the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) supplied occupied Belgium with food, provoking discord between military and political leaders on both sides. The CRB's work undermined the Allies' economic blockade of the enemy, attracting military criticism. In Germany, politicians favoured sustaining the food supply to prevent unrest, whilst the Army wanted to exploit Belgium's resources. From 1916 onwards, the CRB became a bone of contention in Germany in the dispute between military and political leaders about unrestricted submarine warfare. It also loomed large in the political and military debate about the attitude to neutral countries: the Allies wanted them to brave the German threat and cooperate with the blockade policy—otherwise, food imports from Allied countries would be forbidden. Tonnage and food for the CRB were incorporated into the negotiations with neutral countries about their imports and the use of home-grown produce. The debates about the CRB thus exemplify the relationship between military events and the war's economic and social significance. This study of the CRB shows that political/diplomatic historiography can bridge the gap between the military and socioeconomic history of the First World War.

The twentieth anniversary of the German‐polish border treaty of 19901: International treaties and the imagining of Poland's post‐1945 western border2

The Potsdam Protocol provisionally recognized Poland's new western border subject to final confirmation at a future peace conference. This conference never took place. Poland (under the Kremlin's tutelage) emphasized the finality of its western border and castigated West Germany and the Western Allies as ‘revisionists’ for sticking to the letter of the Potsdam Protocol. The policy of détente brought Bonn's tentative acceptance of this border in the 1970 treaty, however, with the caveat that this act would not bind a future united Germany. The unexpected unification of Germany in 1990 made possible (and actually necessitated) the final confirmation of this border, as duly carried out in the 2+4 Treaty and the Polish‐German Border Treaty. This article analyzes the changing status of Poland's western border in the international treaties concluded between 1945 and 1990, and the two contentious interpretations of the border's status. One was espoused by West Germany and the Western Allies, the other by Poland and the Soviet Union. Only the post‐1990 unanimity of all the parties involved eventually buried this fault line, though to this day German and Polish ethnic nationalists continue to invoke it, the former to emphasize ‘Germany's primordial right to its eastern German territories,’ the latter to summon up the specter of the ‘German threat’ (niemieckie niebezpieczeństwo).

Do good fences make good neighbors?: what history teaches us about strategic barriers and international security

1. Introduction 2. Athens' Long Walls: Lifelines to the Sea 3. Hadrian's Wall: Rome's Foremost Frontier Fortification 4. The Ming Great Wall of China: A Dynasty's Unending Pursuit of Security 5. The Pre Carre: Fortifying France's Northeastern Frontier 6. The Maginot Line: France's Great Folly or Reasoned Response to the German Threat 7. The Bar-Lev Line: Citadels in the Sand 8. Conclusion: Lessons Learned about the Use and Abuse of Strategic Defense Selected BibliographyAbout the AuthorIndex

Austin Harrison and the English review

Political and literary journalist Austin Harrison became editor of the in 1910. While holding that chair, he expanded the publication's literary scope by publishing articles on such issues as woman suffrage, parliamentary reform, the German threat, and Irish home rule. But although he edited the Review far longer than its celebrated founder, Ford Madox Ford, history has long confined him to the shadows of not only his predecessor but also his father, the English Positivist Harrison.This first scholarly assessment of Harrison's tenure at the from 1910 to 1923 shows him courting controversy, establishing reputations, winning and losing authors, and pushing the limits of the publishable as he made his Adult the most consistently intelligent and challenging monthly of its day. Martha Vogeler offers a compelling personal and family narrative and a new perspective on British literary culture and political journalism in the years just before, during, and after the First World War.Vogeler provides a revealing account of Harrison the editor - his writings and opinions, his public life and relations - as she also traces the complex relationship between a son and his famous father. Balancing a scholar's attention to detail and a fine writer's eye for style, she relates Harrison's improbable friendships with the notorious Frank Harris and the outrageous Aleister Crowley. And she has mined Harrison's correspondence to lend insight into the careers of such writers as Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, John Masefield, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, and Marie Stopes. Other figures such as George Gissing, Bertrand Russell, Lord Northcliffe, and important Irish revolutionaries appear in new contexts.Ranging widely across literature, foreign relations, national politics, the women's movement, censorship, and sexuality, Vogeler captures the themes of Harrison's era. She describes his transformation from Germanophobe before and during World War I to an outspoken critic of the punitive measures against Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. She explores the ambiguities in his engagement with modernist aesthetics and in his attempt to escape the shadow of his father while benefiting from his family's wealth and connections. Vogeler's assessment of Harrison's books further sharpens our understanding of his ideas about Germany, women, education, and Victorian family life - notably his underappreciated tribute/rebuke to his father, Frederic Harrison: Thoughts and Memories. This account of Austin Harrison's career allows us to observe a journalist making his way in a highly competitive world and opens up a new window on Britain in the era of the Great War.

Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord und das polnischjüdische Verhältnis im Diskurs der polnischen Untergrundpresse (1942-1944) by Klaus-Peter Friedrich (review)

REVIEWS 155 Friedrich, Klaus-Peter. Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord und das polnisch jiidische Verhdltnisim Diskurs derpolnischenUntergrundpresse (ig42-ig44). Mit einem Vorwort von Karol Sauerland. Materialien und Studien zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 15. Herder-Institut, Marburg, 2006. ix + 246 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 33.00 (paperback). No subject ismore guaranteed to setpulses racing and voices raised in anger than the contentious one of Polish attitudes and actions towards theJews of Poland during theNazi occupation of that country in the Second World War. For those years, the lines of this difficult subject are easily drawn: towhat extent did endemic Polish antisemitism manifest itselfduring thewar, and if sowas this really a factor in themanner inwhich theNazi authorities killed nearly threemillion Polish Jews? Were the Poles able or willing to help the Nazi-oppressed Jews, and was what theydid sufficient? And ifnot, why not? Klaus-Peter Friedrich's meticulous studyof thePolish wartime underground press and itsresponses to theJewish question inPoland then isguaranteed to stoke the fires of controversy even further.This is because of the evidence he has uncovered of the extremes ? and some of it really is extreme ? of Polish anti-Jewish sentiment at a time when the Nazi authorities were methodically gassing Polish Jews in their extermination camps. Friedrich's study isbased on over 1,000 examples of thePolish underground press during the war, and represents the views of the whole gamut of Polish political and religious resistance to theGermans: The Home Army; the Government [in-Exile] Delegates; theLeft; theRight; the Sanacja Group, i.e. the Pilsudski clique; theNational Catholics; the Peasant Movement; and the Communists. Usefully, Friedrich begins with a survey of those groups and theirpublished views on theJews. The centre-piece of this study is the reaction of the Polish press to the elimination of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in the summer and autumn of 1942, and the January and April 1943 anti-German uprisings in the ghetto. Yet whatever the topic, the comments quoted always need to be contextualized within a number of consistent anti-Jewish themes that frame the overall subject: Polish Jews, like theGermans and Russians, are the perennial enemy of the Poles; Polish Jews collaborated with the Communist authorities in anti Polish policies in eastern Poland after itsannexation by Soviet Russia on 17 September 1939; after thewar therewill be no place forJews in Poland; the Poles need to think of themselves firstand foremost, especially since the fate of theJews under Nazism could foreshadow the same for the Poles. Yet as Friedrich underlines, since the Poles (correctly) regarded themselves as victims of Nazi terror ? at the Nuremberg trials itwas asserted that almost one-third of Poles died under Nazism ? they inevitably regarded the fate of Polish Jews under Nazism exclusively from thepoint of view of theirown forms ofmartyrdom. It should also be remembered that Poles laboured under the German threat of execution ifcaught assistingJews. Not that such attitudesmeant that feelings of empathy or sympathy for the Jewish fate under theNazis were altogether missing. Time and again reports on the clearing out of theWarsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942 and the transport of theJews to be gassed at Treblinka (from their very beginning, I56 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 reports were carried on the mass murder of Jews at named places such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka) prompted extensive comments on the 'bestiality' and cruelty of theGermans. A socialist publica tion,WRN, issued a call on 28 September 1942 that itwas 'the duty of every Pole to help the victims of German bestiality' (p. 93). However, a report in the 14October 1942 issue of Rzeczpospolita Polska (ThePolish Republic) of the Government-in-Exile Delegates summed up precisely the kinds of thinking to be found across the board of the underground press at all times and which are fully represented throughout this book. Admitting that that therewas not a party or person inPoland that did not consider theJews as the principal and most threatening enemy of thePoles, nevertheless, in the circumstances, Poles should react to theJews in the sense 'that they are humans' (p. 63). Interestingly, while there was much criticism of the 'passivity' of the Warsaw Jews in the summer of 1942when the ghetto was being...

Security Studies and the Use of History: Neville Chamberlain's Grand Strategy Revisited

In The Gathering Storm, Winston S. Churchill claimed that during the 1930s British leaders were willfully blind to the German threat and failed to meet it by rearming. Accepting the Churchillian narrative, leading IR scholars regard British grand strategy during the 1930s as glaring example of strategic adjustment failure. This article reappraises British grand strategy during the 1930s and rejects both the Churchillian narrative, and the scholarly claims that Britain did not adjust its strategy to the German threat. In the 1930s, Britain did balance against Germany and focused on countering what policy makers perceived as the key threat facing Britain: its vulnerability to German air attack. Britain's grand strategic options were limited by external conditions and by domestic economic constraints. Neville Chamberlain, therefore, was playing a weak hand, and did the best that he could with the cards he was dealt. Britain's 1930s grand strategy is one of the historical cases most frequently used by IR scholars for theory testing. For that reason alone, it is important to get the history right. This is not the only reason, however. The 1930s have provided many of the concepts, images, and metaphors that have dominated the discourse about American foreign policy since World War II. Because scholarship about the events of the 1930s shapes the discourse about real-world policy, getting the history right matters.

Flights of fancy: myth, monopoly and the making of Pan American Airways

PurposeBetween 1927 and 1941 Pan American Airways (PAA) operated international flights from the USA with virtually no competition from US carriers. How PAA established and maintained its monopolistic position – by instrumentally creating a myth of “German threat” – and the implications for organizational theorizing and historiography is the proposed focus of this paper.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on a cultural theory approach to “doing history” and Barthes' 1972 notion of myth, this paper uses a critical hermeneutical exploration of the extensive PAA archive collection (at the Otto Richter Library of the University of Miami) and numerous secondary sources (e.g. various written histories). Following Barthes, the paper views myths as monolithic and authoritative historical constructions which conceal their ideological roots and instrumental conditions of creation. Through critical hermeneutics, the paper deciphers the myth of “German threat” by (re)contextualizing it and thus pluralizing history by showing how a threatening image of “foreign” and specifically “German” aviation operation in South America was instrumentally created to privilege PAA's operations and its close relationship with the US State Department.FindingsImplications for the management theorist and historian as they pertain to a more fragile tone for “doing history” include the acknowledgement of history as multiple socially constructed interpretations of the past, an appreciation for histories that make their conditions of production transparent and the need for (re)writing histories that parade as authoritative monoliths.Originality/valueThe paper offers an empirical example of how an organization's instrumental use of myth facilitates manipulations of history in order to situate and secure the positioning and image of that organization.

A feeling for justice: French reactions to the ‘finnish cause’ between 1890 and 1917

At the turn of the century, Finnish networks in France managed to raise consciousness about Finland and the Finnish situation among certain groups within the French intellectual and political elite. If the French reactions to the ‘Finnish cause’ remained ambiguous, the Finns in Paris and their French interlocutors managed to paint a certain picture of Finland, its political and juridical situation with the Russian empire, and its national development. Until 1917 French leaders continued to emphasize the alliance with Russia against the German threat. Yet the image of Finland and the Finnish networks created in France before the First World War prepared France and the French leadership to see Finland in a certain way when the time came to decide whether or not to recognize Finnish independence.

Nuclear War and World Citizenship

_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 Reviews 187 NUCLEAR WAR AND WORLD CITIZENSHIP Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa stratoflampsacus@aol.com Robert Hinde and Joseph Rotblat. War No More: Eliminating Conflict in the Nuclear Age. London and Sterling, Va.: Pluto P., 2003. Pp. x, 228. £40.00; us$50.00; isbn 0745321925 (hb). £11.99; us$17.95 (pb). ast year marked the 50th anniversary of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, Lwhich sought to put the world on guard against the hydrogen bomb’s dangers . The last surviving signatory to the manifesto was Joseph Rotblat, who died on 31 August 2005. In 1995, Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. During World War ii, Joseph Rotblat participated in the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. An Encyclopaedia Britannica article on his Nobel prize explains that “Although he was uncomfortable about participating in the creation of an atomic bomb, Rotblat initially believed that the weapon would be used only to deter a German threat. After learning in 1944 that it would be used to contain the Soviet Union, a World War ii ally, he left the project….” Upon returning to England in 1945, Rotblat left defence work for medical research. He served as founding secretary-general and later as president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which began in 1957 and at which key scientists and others from different countries could confer about the peril of nuclear weapons facing the world. As a medical physicist at London University’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College (1950–76), Rotblat directed attention toward the biological hazards of nuclear radiation and the severity of fallout from atmospheric testing. He worked closely with Russell in the 1950s and early ’60s and still visited him in his last years. (See his “Personal Reminiscences”, Russell, 18 [1998]: 5–24.) The book’s co-author, Robert Hinde, is the author of numerous books and articles in psychology. The book addresses the planet’s current state in terms of weapons of mass destruction. It features many tables and charts on matters ranging from the varying levels of the super-powers’ nuclear warhead stockpiles to the principal nuclear arms control treaties to estimates of military deaths in individual wars during the last 60 years. Since this book is an earnest endeavour to address the issue of weapons of mass destruction, many of its most fundamental prescriptions sound basic, even _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 188 Reviews somewhat banal. To be sure, the authors acknowledge that “Any attempt to discuss ways of preventing war must address very basic issues, and in so doing lays itself open to accusations of mushy idealism” (pp. 214–15). In War No More the authors opt to err in the direction of moral truisms as a small price to pay if there is a chance of contributing to a discussion eventually compelling the world’s political leaders to heed such moral considerations. In the prevention of conflict, “Often the success of such efforts may be unknown to the wider world just because the criterion of success is simply that nothing happens” (p. 198). Hinde and Rotblat urge their readers to understand the absolute need to abolish war if humanity is to endure in this nuclear age. Their position is that “the very possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. Their enormous destructive power, inflicted on civilians even more than on the military, would make their use unforgiveable” (p. 139). The authors expressly credit Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein with having taken the initiative for international action on this front (p. 189). And as was the view of Russell and Einstein 50 years earlier, Hinde and Rotblat proclaim in their book that “The only solution is international agreement on the total abolition of nuclear weapons” (p. 139). Hinde and Rotblat concede the ease with which people can be pessimistic about the prospects of abolishing war. However, the formidable challenge posed by such a task is deemed “no excuse for inaction”. They cite historic instances in which humanity has...

The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940 (review)

Reviewed by: The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940 Mary E. Davis The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940. By Jane Fulcher. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xiv, 473 p. ISBN 0-19-517473-9. $74.] Index, bibliography. Since the day in 1792 when rebel troops entered the Tuilleries Gardens singing the Marseillaise, music has been linked to revolution in the French imagination. But what of the connection between music and politics when passions are cooler and the times less obviously explosive? In her two-volume study of music and politics in France during the Third Republic, Jane Fulcher aims to address this question and illuminate its importance to one of the most significant periods in French history. In the first installment, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) she traced the tensions between left-wing republicans and the right-wing nationalists who ultimately held sway over them, and she worked to reveal the ways in which this political dynamic played out in musical culture between 1894 and 1914. Now comes the sequel, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940, which proposes to follow the entwined trails of politics and music from the declaration of war in the summer of 1914 to the Nazi occupation a quarter of a century later. Aiming to "reintegrate two previously separated histories—that of official politics and culture ... with that of musical, stylistic development" (p. 17), Fulcher focuses on composers who qualify in her estimation as "intellectuals," with the dual goal of unveiling the ideological orientations implicated in their works and demonstrating the ways in which their compositions were appropriated for political purposes. Perhaps to an even greater extent than was the case in the two decades covered in Fulcher's first volume, the years considered here saw a complex and shifting series of political alignments in France, as well as wholesale changes in national political sentiment. The war itself sparked complicated and extremist political responses; in its wake the French government reeled and the French people struggled to achieve a consensus about the nation's future. The Versailles Treaty of 1919 left France not only devastated but impoverished and desperate for the payment of German reparations, and as those funds failed to materialize in the 1920s the deepening monetary crisis culminated in the steep devaluation of the franc. With economic concerns as a flashpoint, control of government was held alternately by iterations of the right-wing Bloc national (1919–24; 1926–32) and the more liberal Cartel des gauches (1924–26; 1932–34). These governments were fairly moderate, but more extremist politics took hold in 1936 with the ascent of Léon Blum's radical leftist Popular Front. Most importantly, the growing German threat colored politics during these years, right up to the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940 and the establishment of the government at Vichy that July. Layer into that history a discussion of musical developments during the period, and you have the makings of a groundbreaking study with the potential to alter perceptions about both music and politics in an era that arguably defined modern practice in both arenas. Fulcher's book goes a considerable distance toward this end. Rich in detail and [End Page 358] laden with references to sources that will unquestionably prove valuable to scholars who follow her lead, it lays out a number of the major themes and topics that brought politics and music into direct contact in France (read Paris) during the years under consideration. In four main chapters, Fulcher moves chronologically through the decades at issue, weaving through her discussions a broad interrogation of both the ways in which French music was implicated in "political-cultural initiatives of the state, and the responses of its opponents" and the degree to which "ideological orientations became demonstrably associated with aesthetic values" (p. 18). She thus outlines a history of what she perceives as related generations of French composers, all united by their intellectualizing and political tendencies. From Debussy and Ravel through Satie and Les Six, from Roussel and Koechlin...

A Succession of Crises: SOE in the Middle East, 1940–45

A detailed account of SOE in the Middle East is a prominent omission from the collection of studies on SOE during the Second World War. This is surprising given the importance of the region to Britain and the fact that some records were released, with a helpful guide, in 1994. Using these records, and the SOE War Diary (released in 1999), this article intends to show that SOE operations in the Middle East were characterized by a succession of crises. These fall into three periods: the early activities in 1940–41; the post-occupational planning phase of 1941–43, and the post-October 1943 period which saw reorganization, the recession of the German threat, the disbandment of the post-occupational schemes and the desire to re-tool SOE in the Middle East for peacetime/post-war problems.

A Prophet Scorned? Ralph Wigram, the Foreign Office and the German Threat, 1933-36

This article focuses on Wigram’s traditional image as a supporter of Winston Churchill’s anti-appeasement line from his position as Head of the Central Department in the Foreign Office. It questions the traditional portrayal of Wigram and argues that he was much more in the Foreign Office appeasement mainstream than is frequently suggested.

Revisiting the Transatlantic Triangle: The Decolonisation of the British Caribbean in Light of the Anglo-American Special Relationship

The international collapse in the price of sugar, together with increasing immigration restrictions in the late 1920s and 1930s, produced great pressure on wages and employment throughout the British Caribbean. The underlying tensions reached their boiling point in the years between 1935 and 1938. The chronology proved fateful and speaks for itself: a sugar strike in St. Kitts, 1935; a revolt against an increase of customs duties in St. Vincent, 1935; a coal strike in St. Lucia, 1935; labor disputes in the sugar plantations of British Guiana, 1935; oil strikes in Trinidad and Tobago, 1937; urban riots in Barbados, 1937; and acute disturbances in Jamaica, 1938. While these disturbances, together with the radicalization of the colonial discourse, facilitated the archipelago's constitutional decolonization, attributing all social, economic, and constitutional postwar reforms to the riots alone constitutes an immense leap of faith. A careful analysis of the chronology, let alone a detailed study of the archival records, suggests a robust correlation between the islands’ constitutional evolution and the geopolitical worries of the Anglo-American alliance. The German threat, on the one hand, led Britain to re-articulate its colonial project and, on the other, compelled the US to make sure the British did not walk away from their responsibilities. The strategic importance of “the slums of empire” came to light dramatically once the theater of war became apparent. The Caribbean now became “the show window” where British and American interests collided against each other.

France and the German Question, 1945–1955

This article challenges the traditional view that France was “obsessed” with the German threat in the decade after World War II and that French leaders only grudgingly accepted the policy that the United States and Britain had decided to pursue. The official rhetoric of the postwar period should not to be taken at face value. In reality, French leaders understood the logic of the “western strategy” for Germany and at a basic level endorsed it. Even on the question of West German rearmament—a critical issue in 1950—the French government was not nearly as opposed to moving ahead as many scholars have argued.

A Great Russia: Russia and the Triple Entente, 1905-1914

The Triple Entente of Great Britain, Russia, and France was the foreign policy prong of the Russian imperial government's reaction to the disastrous events of 1905, including the revolution and the near defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. This alignment with the two western, liberal powers was almost universally perceived within official Russian governing circles as a necessary, if ideologically distasteful, diplomatic relationship to offset the growing German threat on the continent. Maintaining the entente would help Russia retain its great power status. For the first time, Tomaszewski tells the official Russian side of the story, long inaccessible due to restrictions imposed by the relevant Russian archives during the Soviet era. In doing so, she sheds new light on the international scene as the crisis of World War One approached. The Triple Entente went hand in hand with two policies of Stolypin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers: draconian repression of the revolutionaries and sweeping domestic reforms. Acutely aware that serious failures in foreign policy would threaten the regime's existence, the imperial government designed both its foreign and its domestic policies to consolidate the autocracy for the twentieth century. Nicholas II gambled on the Triple Entente and its diplomatic alignment with the other two status-quo powers as the best means of preserving the peace in Europe and thereby preserving the imperial system as well.

Viorel Virgil Tilea and the Origins of the Second World War: An Essay in Closure

The 'Tilea Affair' of March 1939 is among the most contentious of the short-term events leading to the Second World War. V.V. Tilea, the Romanian minister in London, brought information to the British Foreign Office, about an alleged German threat to his country. The guarantee to Poland soon followed and, in turn, the outbreak of the war. This article examines the evidence offered by contemporary British witnesses, the ensuing historical controversy - bringing to bear a variety of new revelations, including materials derived from the author's acquaintance with Tilea - and the present state of historical knowledge. It concludes that closure can be applied to most aspects of the 'Tilea Affair'.

France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy Making, 1933-1939

France and the Nazi Menace examines the French response to the challenge posed by National Socialist Germany in the years 1933-1939. It focuses on the relationship between the intelligence on German intentions and capabilities and the evolution of French national policy from the rise of Hitler in 1933 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Based on extensive archival research, it considers the nature of the intelligence process and the place of intelligence within the French policy making establishment during the inter-war period. The central argument in the book is that the German threat was far from the only challenge facing French national leaders in an era of economic depression and profound ideological discord. Only after the national humiliation at the Munich Conference did the threat from Nazi Germany take precedence over France's internal problems in the making of policy.

Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On the Hiroshima Cenotaph are inscribed the words: “Please rest in peace, for the error will not be repeated”. Was the error the atomic bombing or Japanese militarism? On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul W. Tibbets, dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and gave the world “a peep into hell”. And on August 9, 1945, the town of Nagasaki was subjected to the same horrible fate. August as a month became synonymous with the Apoclypse of Hiroshima in 1945. Originally intended as a deterrent to the German threat, the atomic bomb became an offensive weapon to be used to coerce Japan to surrender and bring World War II to an end. This article discusses this major shift in policy and recalls the history of one of the most devastating events of our times.

Jak viděl český národ Alfred-Louis Méroux de Valois, první francouzský konzul v Praze v letech 1897–1903

On the basis of research in French archives, the author of the essay seeks to examine closely the personality and activities of the first French Consul in Prague, and also lo characterize the period and conditions under which this professional diplomat worked in Prague. The author also turns his attention to the Czech political scene and to the political situation in the Austrian monarchy, based on concrete examples (e.g. the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Victor Hugo, the reaction of the press to the Dreyfus affair, disputes between the so-called “Young Czechs” and “Old Czechs”, the Badeni reforms or conflicts between the Czech and the German population).The French consulate in Prague was opened at the very end of the 19th century. Its objective was to promote bilateral Czech-French economic relations. However, the Austrian authorities lived with the assumption right from the start that here an endeavour was becoming evident to attribute to Prague a significance going beyond that of the capital of a province. That is why they tried to deny permission for its opening so that legally the German consulate was set up earlier.The author uses in his essay quotations from documents of that time to illustrate the way Valois’ views concentrated on the Czech nation. But he is said to have discovered later that the Czechs under no circumstances deserved the sympathy they enjoyed in France. After initial favourable judgements of the Czechs, the first French Consul made a 180 degree about-turn in the course of only a few years, which in some cases meant a shift, if not to hatred, at least to condescending high-handedness. This occurred at a time when a new place was explored in the context of the era when two nationalisms – the French and the Czech – combined in their common opposition to the German threat and when the Dreyfus affair, with international repercussions that cannot be ignored, had whipped up emotions not only in France hut throughout Europe to the great detriment of the 3rd republic whose foundations were still unstable and whose prestige was seriously jeopardized in the eyes of the world.

A view from Berlin: Colonel Frederick trench and the development of British perceptions of German aggressive intent, 1906–1910

This essay traces the image of Germany that emerges from the reports of Colonel Frederick Trench (1857–1942), British military attache in Berlin from 1906 to 1910. At this time, the British Army possessed only the most limited intelligence‐gathering apparatus and had to rely heavily on the reports of military attaches for information about their continental rivals. Trench, who believed that Germany planned to wage war against Britain and said so categorically in his reports, was the main source of data on the German Army. From the limited surviving records of who read these reports and how they responded to them, this essay posits that Trench's views contributed to the growing British perception of a German threat, a perception that did much to influence British strategic planning in this period.