War Germany Research Articles

The Process of Strengthening by Germany Its Military-Political Presence in the World: the Concept of Regional Circles

The article tries to conceptualize the process of creation by Germany its military-political presence in the world arena. The author explores this process based on the idea of “regional circles”. The key principle of it is the step-by-step spread of influence over the nearest regions and only after it over far ones. In this regard, the example of Germany is the most interesting. During the period of “first editions” of the Cold war Germany was led by senior partners in the military-political sphere. In the 1990s Germany had been going to the role of regional power, and from the beginning of the 21st century it has been going to the role of global actor. The statues of regional power was a result of playing a role of constructor of Post-Yugoslavian political landscape and parallel keeping of strong military-political positions in Eastern European countries in the circumstances when regional states was entering NATO and the EU. During the begging of the 21st century Germany tries to create strong military-political positions in the Central Asia (since the beginning of the 2000s), Middle East (since the middle of the decade) and Sahel regions (since beginning of the 2010s). The article also explores the question of exceptions from the concept of “regional circles” in German security policy and the reasons of them. The paper also investigates the problem of zigzag character of strengthening and the loss of German military-political positions on the regional levels first of all since the middle 2010s. The author concludes about the reasons of this dynamics.

Criminal Acts of the Nazi Germany Occupation Regime in the Territory of the Vyazma District of the Smolensk Region in 1941-1943

When numerous myths are circulating around the Great Patriotic War on the whole and around the Vyazma Pocket in particular, there is the necessity to study the specific disclosures concerning the tragic period of the occupation of the Smolensk Region by Nazi Germany that can be proved with documents. This determines the topicality of this paper. In our research, we rely on the documents kept in the Central Archives of the Russian Defense Ministry, the Governmental Archives of the Smolensk Region, as well as on the witness memoires. The purpose of this research is to study the Nazi Germany war crimes committed by the occupation regime in the territory of the Vyazma District of the Smolensk Region in 1941-1943. The results of the research demonstrate that in 1941-1943 in the territory of the nowadays Vyazma District of the Smolensk Region, Nazis and their accessories committed the full range of war crimes as defined in the four Geneva Conventions (1949): murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; humiliating and degrading treatment; public arbitrary executions; cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners of war, including the wounded and sick. For civilian persons, the whole system of horrification and oppression was created to break down their resistance; the punitive actions were taken regularly. Special cruelty and cynicism were inherent to numerous cases of burning villages together with their residents, who in the war time were mainly the old, women, and children.

Balance of Power or Balance of Threat: Revisiting Ottoman Alliance Politics before the Great War

Abstract The Ottoman alliance politics before the Great War has not been explored for theorizing alliance politics though it presents a unique example of alliance formation under external threat. Thus, in this article, a neo-realist balance of threat theory is utilized to examine the Ottoman decision to align with Germany in the Great War. Unlike a historical account as to why the Ottomans sided with the German-Austrian alliance, this article develops a theoretical approach that takes insights from ‘alliance theories’ to explain the Ottomans’ fateful alignment. Such an alliance theory approach underlines the dilemmas of the Ottoman decision makers and demonstrates ‘rational’ elements of their strategy of balancing the main source of the threat. By bringing alliance theories and Ottoman historiography together it is argued that the Ottomans, in their search for an alliance before the Great War, sought a “balance of threat” politics rather than a “balance of power” politics.

Vorstin op vredespad

Abstract Queen of Peace. Emperor Wilhelm II, Queen Wilhelmina, and the End of the First World War A hundred years ago, on 10 November 1918, Emperor Wilhelm II fled occupied Belgium, in the face of a revolution and impending civil war in Germany. The Dutch government has always claimed a complete lack of pre-knowledge, and surprise at the Emperor’s arrival in the Netherlands. On the basis of newly found documents this article argues that in the summer of 1918 Queen Wilhelmina and Emperor Wilhelm II had engaged in considerable correspondence, via their courts and diplomats, to explore the possibility of organizing a peace conference in The Hague and a lobby for a Verständigungsfrieden. When this option was blocked by the military, the Emperor came to the Netherlands as a last resort and in search of refuge. This article showcases the historical importance of studying the relations between belligerents and neutrals in key moments such as the end of a war, the many hidden layers of diplomacy, and the role befriended royals could still wield within the (constitutional) restraints of their office.

OldVolk:Aging in 1950s Germany, East and West

Previous articleNext article No AccessOld Volk: Aging in 1950s Germany, East and West*James ChappelJames ChappelDuke University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 90, Number 4December 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700298 Views: 1032Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Donna Harsch The Fight against Infant Mortality in Cold War Germany: East/West Convergence on Liberal Governmentality, The Journal of Modern History 93, no.22 (Jun 2021): 401–432.https://doi.org/10.1086/713997James Chappel “On the Border of Old Age”: An Entangled History of Eldercare in East Germany, Central European History 53, no.22 (May 2020): 353–371.https://doi.org/10.1017/S000893892000014X

Young-Sun Hong. Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime.

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Südwall, Marseille, 2017–2018

During the Second World War Germany established its southern front or Südwall, running from the Spanish to the Italian borders and following the Marseille coastline, as a defensive line against an Allied invasion. The defenses served the Wehrmacht, who occupied the area from 1943, and to this day remnants of the military bunkers and forts can be seen in Marseille, on the white rocky coast of the Calanques and on surrounding islands, such as the Îles du Frioul. Unlike the Atlantic bunkers in Brittany and Normandy, the history of the Südwall is not well known.My series of photographs seeks to unearth these fortifications, which, because they are built of concrete, are virtually integrated into the rocky landscape of the coast. Were it not for the colourful graffiti and images that adorn them, they would vanish into the landscape, like camouflaged soldiers. I am not interested in a study of anthropomorphic forms, but in the form of the landscape itself as an environment for the bunkers, which through their stonelike character have become the landscape.The Südwall has changed over the decades from a fortress to ruins and architectural relics. Nature and man-made construction have become woven together into a unified matrix. Some bunkers were later transformed into homes in which people now live. In one of my images there is a stone memorial that reminds us of the victims of war – three resistance fighters who died young and are now present only by name: Jean Odelin, seventreen years old, Serge Loiseau, nineteen years old and Jaques Baby, twenty-three years old.The Südwall is a memorial to the conflicted history of Germany and France and the catastrophe of two world wars. This former line of defence – part of Hitler’s Fortress Europe – reminds us that the Europe of today, a peaceful union of different countries, can not be taken for granted. It is fragile.

Book Review: Blockade: Cruiser Warfare and the Starvation of Germany in World War One

Book Review: Blockade: Cruiser Warfare and the Starvation of Germany in World War One

Versuche der Sprachreinigung im Deutschen Reich: „Der Allgemeine Deutsche Sprachverein“

In 1871, after the defeat of France in front of Germany in the Prussian War, Hermann Regel led a campaign against the use of Foreign words in German and called for refining the German dictionary from words that came from other languages, particularly French and English. Then, in 1885, with the help of some academicians and politicians, he founded a German-speaking association which objectives were set as follows: 1. To purify the German language of unnecessary foreign words 2. To maintain and renew the unique and true spirit of the German language, 3. To enhance public awareness of all Germans, not only in terms of language, but also with regard to being Germans in general. This paper focuses on what the German General Assembly achieved from 1885 until the beginning of World War I in 1914, in terms of success and failure, in particular the inclusion of foreign words through translation, the inevitability of the enormous problems in the transfer of general language principles to the language actually used outside Academic circles.

Nuevos rumbos legislativos al final de la Guerra Fría: Alemania, República Checa y Rusia

El presente estudio teórico tiene como objetivo describir y analizar el sistema parlamentario que se estableció al fin de la Guerra Fría en Alemania, República Checa y Rusia, después de la caída del Muro de Berlín. Se considera como punto de arranque el cambio del sistema político, que dio paso a una economía de mercado y a una democracia moderna. También, se analiza la disciplina parlamentaria como un insumo para la gobernabilidad dentro de un nuevo régimen político del poder legislativo. Se abordan conceptos como cohesión, disciplina y unidad para entender la actuación de dicho poder en función del régimen político del momento. Mediante la visualización de la dinámica operativa del sistema parlamentario, se evidencia la tendencia del congreso hacia un esquema democrático. La metodología utilizada es teórica, descriptiva y deductiva.

The Clash of Historical Analogies and Their Influence on Decision-Making: The Case of Iraqi Reconstruction Under George W. Bush

ABSTRACTContrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature on United States foreign policy, there was no consensus within the George W. Bush Administration on the parallel between the reconstruction of Iraq and that of post-Second World War Germany and Japan. Systematic analysis of available sources shows that the decision-makers drew a large number of different historical analogies—73 in all. This analysis takes a fresh look at the use of analogies regarding Iraqi reconstruction. We divide the period of April 2003 to June 2008 into four phases, in each of which a different analogy predominates—Afghanistan, Germany and Japan, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Analysis of the analogies embraced by five distinct groups within the Administration’s decision-making team—nationalist hawks, neoconservatives, administrators of Iraq, realist internationalists and the president—clarifies the affinities and tensions amongst them.

The interplay of the Dirty Hands of British area bombing and the wicked problem of defeating Nazi Germany in the Second World War – A lesson in leadership ethics

The British area bombing of Germany in the Second World War has provided for enduring ethical controversy. Eschewing conventional approaches, we present area bombing as a Dirty Hands leadership response to the Wicked Problem of Britain’s wartime strategic predicament. Using historical methodology, we establish two distinct phases in area bombing: 1942–1944, when this was ethically contentious but politically necessary; and 1944–1945, which lacks a Dirty Hands legitimation. The second phase follows upon a six-month lull in area bombing during Bomber Command’s assignment to Overlord (D-Day) duties. It is characterised by credible alternatives to area bombing, a waning sense of proportionality in Bomber Command activity, and intensifying death and destruction without justifiable purpose. We relate the breaching of the boundaries of Dirty Hands in Phase II to a precise date – September 1944. This coincides with the mutation of the strategic Wicked Problem into a Critical Problem, visible in the stalling of the Allied land campaign in France. Mistaking this for a Tame Problem, the C-in-C of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, exploits the political context to escalate his commitment. Following Watters’ alignment of Critical Problems with Virtue Ethics, we argue that Harris’ leadership in Phase II is not consistent with Virtue Ethics (of which recognition of the boundaries of Dirty Hands is a function). Harris is the archetype of the leader who gets away with exploiting a Wicked Problem because his superiors have let down their guard. In the final instance, his failure of ethical leadership becomes their own.

German propaganda in the Balkans during the First World War

Immediately after the outbreak of the First World War Germany mobilized hu?man resources from all fields and put up all the necessary funds to counter British and French propaganda. In a very short period of time, it was in a position to organize its own propaganda networks abroad, to a large extent, by using the respective commercial networks and the pre-war enterprises operating in various countries. It was the neutral countries around the world that were among the primary targets of German propaganda. In the Balkans particular effort was made to create a favourable climate for the Central Powers and prevail over the adverse British and French influence. With the assistance of commercial circles and the appropriation of large sums of money, newspapers, journalists and publishing groups were bought off, information offices set up, agents recruited, politi?cal parties and politicians bribed, and pro-German parties founded. The aim was to influ?ence public opinion, promote the German version of war developments, and manipulate political leaders to give up their stance of neutrality and make the decision for their coun?try to take part in the war on the side of Germany. However, even though Berlin focused its attention on the Balkans where the major propaganda networks were organized, the propaganda campaigns proved to be essentially ineffective. Following Bulgaria?s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers and the destruction of Serbia, first Romania and then Greece joined the Entente, finding themselves on the winning side at the war?s end.

Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime by Young-Sun Hong

Reviewed by: Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime by Young-Sun Hong Eric Allina Hong, Young-Sun – Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 427. Young-Sun Hong's book is a welcome contribution to global Cold War history, the sprawling field that explores the military, diplomatic, and development activities not only of the US and USSR, but of other states as well. Deeply researched and densely argued, the book examines Cold War Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, or West and East Germany) and its engagement with what was, at the time, known as the "Third World." In addition to central Europe, the action unfolds in Algeria, Cameroon, Congo, Egypt, Guinea, India, the Koreas, the Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam—parts of what David Engerman in Kritika (2011) so evocatively called the "second world's third world." Like much other work published since Odd Arne Westad's Global Cold War (2005), this book holds the conviction that the conflict cannot be understood as epiphenomenal to the Moscow-Washington rivalry. Rather, undertakings of the type Hong examines had an independent logic and momentum of their own, albeit one connected to the greater drama. She explores a wide range of German international activity that falls under the rubric of what she calls the "global humanitarian regime," encompassing medical aid, housing and infrastructure construction, public health, and medical education. These included East German efforts to help North Korea rebuild after the 1953 armistice, West German construction and operation of a South Korean hospital in postwar Pusan, and both Germany's medical missions to Algeria and Congo (among other destinations) in [End Page 432] the mid-1960s. The two countries pursued forward- and backward-looking goals, building relationships in the "global south" (as we now call it) to burnish an image tarnished by the legacy of National Socialism, simultaneously hoping to undercut the global standing of their fraternal rival. Hong's focus is on the 1950s and 1960s, when the Germanys were locked in combat for legitimacy in the international arena. Bonn refused to recognize East Germany (referring to it only as the Soviet Occupation Zone) and sought to impose a global isolation via what was known as the Halstein doctrine, under which West Germany threatened to sever diplomatic relations with any country that recognized East German sovereignty. The East Germans condemned the West as a redoubt for fascism and little more than an appendage of US imperial ambition. Closed in separate spheres—West Germany in the "empire of liberty," East Germany in the "empire of justice" (to use Westad's formulation)—both nonetheless had similar goals in reaching out to newly independent states emerging from colonial rule Hong makes clear how "notions of civilizational difference" (p. 13), ideas with genealogical roots in nineteenth-century imperialism, were rearticulated in what she calls "the three-world paradigm" (p. 15). This paradigm maintained the centrality of a "civilizational gradient" (p. 127), powered by the unequal distribution of financial and military capital, which ran downhill from north to south. One of the book's continuous threads is how what both German states presented as "racial or/civilizational difference" (p. 269) was little more than thinly disguised, and sometimes undisguised, racism. Held by both, it underlay a neocolonial project that envisioned some parts of the south "primarily as a source of labor power and raw materials needed to realize the creative visions of industrialized countries" (p. 307). Indeed, this meticulously documented argument is a major conceptual contribution to histories not only of Germany and the Cold War, but to development, international organizations, and of the postwar order at large. Yet if the Germanys' humanitarian efforts were far from disinterested, Hong also shows that the targets of German designs were more than objects of exploitation and pawns of Cold War rivalries. Both German states depended on their southern allies to achieve important policy and ideological goals, and their counterparts in Dar es Salaam, Hanoi, and Pyongyang knew it. They were aware of how the Germans depended on them—if in a fashion different to their own...

Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World ed. by Quinn Slobodian

Reviewed by: Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World ed. by Quinn Slobodian Heide Fehrenbach Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Edited by Quinn Slobodian. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Pp. 325. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1782387053. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-1785337376. Contemporary Europeans continue to grapple with notions of identity and belonging and to debate proper policies of inclusion and exclusion toward ethnic minorities, refugees, and immigrants within and beyond their national borders. Over the past two decades, scholars of Britain, France, and Germany have trained their eyes on historical developments since 1945, examining these topics against the backdrop of postwar reconstruction and democratization, the emergence of the Cold War and its competing cultures, decolonization and postcolonial adjustments, and the challenges of multiculturalism—including claims about how it has been tried and failed, or as Rita Chin has recently argued in The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe (2017), was hardly tried in the first place. The bulk of this work has focused on Western Europe: NATO nations that, in their former political lives, lorded over far-flung empires within Europe (in the case of Germany) or beyond (in the case of the UK, France, and the Netherlands). By contrast, this important and deftly edited volume casts its critical eye on East Germany between the late 1940s and 1989 with the goal of exploring GDR internationalism and its "encounters across the borders of nation and bloc" (1). In a lucid introduction, Quinn Slobodian describes the volume as a response to the historiography on Cold War Germany that has tended to privilege the narratives of former SED functionaries and has focused on bipolar relations, whether national (German-German) or global (US-USSR). The essays in this volume, instead, plumb the archives to recapture the texture of East Germans' engagement with the third world and its inhabitants, both at home in the GDR and abroad. The authors approach their investigations as a "multipolar, transnational field," in the words of Young-Sun Hong, and explore how socialist solidarity was variously perceived, imaged, negotiated, and lived by East Germans and their various partners and beneficiaries from the global South (44). The volume is divided into five sections. The first, "Race without Racism," features an essay by Slobodian, a second introduction of sorts, that sets the stage by exploring the persistence of racial thinking and processes of racialization even as the East German officials renounced racism in favor of a socialist vision of a "politically unified humanity" (24). The essay provides an astute analysis of East Germany's "iconography of internationalism," which declared a break with Nazi-era racism yet peddled stereotypical representations of people of color by white Germans (33). Slobodian terms this continued reliance on skin color and phenotypical difference for new internationalist purposes "socialist chromatism" (24). This essay, and some that follow, introduce new theoretical concepts to help us make sense of the ambivalences, [End Page 652] tensions, accommodations, and blind spots in East Germany's approach to racial and ethnic "difference" in its construction of cross-cultural socialist solidarity. The second section, "Aid anders," features richly detailed essays by Young-Sun Hong on East German development aid to North Korea to build the industrial city Hamhung and by Bernd Schaefer on the pattern and range of East German aid to North Vietnam, including the import of contract workers to the GDR and the GDR's role in the Vietnamese coffee export industry. Both essays emphasize successes and failures; Hong's is especially good at uncovering the personal experiences and social interactions on the ground in North Korea, as well as such cultural contact's impact on East German participants' subsequent personal and political development. An essay by Gregory Witkowski offers an interesting reading comparing the rhetoric, images, and motivations structuring the philanthropic appeals by Christian churches and socialist organizations in East Germany. Oddly, no illustrations are included. The third section, "Ambivalent Solidarities," focuses on the mutual appraisals and expectations of Black Africans and African Americans, on the one hand, and East Germans and SED officials on the other. Simon Stevens traces Black South African writer William "Bloke" Modisane's visit to East Germany...

Enemies to Allies: Cold War Germany and American Memory

Enemies to Allies: Cold War Germany and American Memory

УКРАЇНСЬКА ВІЙСЬКОВО-САНІТАРНА МІСІЯ ДЛЯ СПРАВ ПОЛОНЕНИХ У НІМЕЧЧИНІ (1918-1920)

The article deals with the activities of the Ukrainian Military Sanitary Mission on matters of prisoners of war in Germany in 1918-1920. In addition to the main task of repatriating Ukrainian prisoners of war to their homeland and providing them with medical and material assistance, the mission was engaged in the national education of the Ukrainian soldiers of the former tsarist Russian army.

Germany, South Africa and Rwanda: Three Manners for a Church to Confess its Guilt

The paper examines three historical situations where Christian churches confessed their guilt for their implication in episodes of extreme violence, whether by acts of omission or commission: post-Second World War Germany, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda. In Germany and in South Africa several churches confessed their guilt rapidly and fairly comprehensively. In Rwanda only the Presbyterian Church did so. The other churches either abstained from making any statement or only acknowledged the crimes committed by some of their members. This paper argues that, for a large part, the political and military context explains the difference. In Germany the war was irremediably lost and in South Africa the apartheid government had accepted the necessity of a regime change. In Rwanda, by contrast, the government which had orchestrated the genocide had withdrawn to a neighbouring country and vowed to continue the fight. A second factor is the quality of the church leadership, strong in the first two cases, weak and divided in Rwanda except for the Presbyterian Church.

Malte Zierenberg. Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950.

Malte Zierenberg’s Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950, the original German edition of which was published in 2008, is an important addition to the literature on Berlin and Germany in the Second World War and its aftermath. It also contributes to European urban history in the 1940s as well as to the history of economic practices and attitudes. Especially for these latter reasons, its translation into English is highly welcome. The significance of the black market in Berlin after 1945 is well known, albeit more from anecdotal accounts and iconic images than from scholarly analysis. Zierenberg not only fills this important gap, but also demonstrates persuasively that black markets were already a crucial feature of urban life during the war, when extensive rationing regulations had unintended consequences. They ran counter both to the Nazi ambition to create a Volksgemeinschaft based on racial solidarity and to the subsequent attempt by the Allied occupiers to establish a working economic system.

The French Constitutional Council: Another Work-in-Progresss

The French Constitutional Council (hereinafter the Council) is a creation of the 1958 Constitution of the Fifth Republic (hereinafter the Constitution). From inception, the Council was special. Established in a relative indifference, the institution originally fulfilled the role of watchdog of the executive by being entrusted with the task of preventing Parliament from encroaching on the prerogatives of the government which enjoyed a then new autonomous regulatory power. Such a circumscribed role meant that the Council was not set up as a proper constitutional court similar to those established after the Second World War in Germany or Italy, for example. Without rehashing, the reasons behind this choice lie in the particular context of the beginnings of the current Republic, including its approach to the separation of powers and the role the judiciary. Correlatively. This had also to do with the status of the loi (hereinafter law) as a norm which, from then on, could only be restrictively challenged within the confines of a limited form of review, namely the a priori review before its promulgation. The history of French constitutional law had resulted at this juncture in time into a double distrust: towards Parliament, on the one hand, and towards judges, on the other hand. Parliament could not be trusted to respect the prerogatives of the executive as attested by the failure of the previous Republics, which led under the Fifth Republic, to ‘rationalise’ the parliamentary system and which explains, to an extent, the way the ensuing Constitutional Council was established; as for judges, the centuries-old mistrust towards them dated back from before the Revolution when they would oppose the passing of important pieces of royal legislation – the upshot being an enduring aversion towards any form of judicial constitutional review.