World War Research Articles

The long-term implications of destruction during the Second World War on private wealth in Germany

The long-term implications of destruction during the Second World War on private wealth in Germany

The Cold War in pharmacology: a bibliometric analysis of Berlin's contributions to Naunyn‑Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology (1947-1974).

After World War II, Berlin was divided into the West, controlled by The United States, the UK, and France, and the East, controlled by the Soviet Union, resulting in a Cold War for decades. This bibliometric study analyzes the influence of the Cold War on pharmacological research in Berlin by evaluating publication patterns in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology from 1947 to 1974 (n = 383). The publications highlight the political disparities in scientific output, exacerbated by the founding of the Free University of Berlin (FUB) as a countermeasure to Soviet repression, promoting academic freedom in West-Berlin. Researchers in West-Berlin published many more papers in Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology than researchers in East-Berlin and received much more citations. West-Berlin adopted English as a scientific language much more rapidly than East-Berlin. West-Berlin and East-Berlin focused on totally different research topics. This paper demonstrates how political freedom, financial support, and internationalization boosted research productivity in West-Berlin. In contrast, political suppression, financial scarcity, and restricted international ties hindered scientific development in East-Berlin.

Working Backwards, Moving Forwards: Ephemera and Diversity in Australian Stories of Indigenous Second World War Service

Working Backwards, Moving Forwards: Ephemera and Diversity in Australian Stories of Indigenous Second World War Service

Putin’s retelling of the Great Patriotic War myth and the construction of Russian national identity

Political elites often use the nation’s past to construct the nation’s present identity. In his speeches about the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin frequently uses the Russian national myth of the Great Patriotic War to construct Russia’s present duties, values, and identity. Charges of neo-Nazism and fascism against Ukraine are made to construct the Russian national identity as one that fights proactively against Nazism. However, by using a myth set in the Soviet period, the status of Ukraine as either part of the Russian Self or constituting the foreign Other is highly ambiguous. Although cynical and deeply offensive, Putin’s use of Nazi imagery therefore has a purpose deeper than causing shock and offence.

Robert Millikan, Japanese internment, and eugenics

Robert A. Millikan (1868–1953) was the second American to win the Nobel Prize in physics. At the peak of his influence, no scientist save Einstein was more admired by the American public. Millikan, the head of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) during its first 24 years, oversaw its rapid growth into one of the leading scientific institutions of the world. However, in response to demands for social justice following the murder of George Floyd, Caltech launched an investigation into Millikan. Caltech reached a decision to strip Millikan of honors (such as the library named after him), following accusations from various sources that he was a sexist, racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, pro-eugenic Nazi sympathizer. In short, Caltech threw the book at him. This article analyzes two accusations against Millikan. The first of these accusations was published in Nature: that he collaborated to deprive Japanese Americans of their rights during their forced relocation to internment camps during the Second World War. An examination of original historical sources will show that this accusation is false. On the contrary, Millikan actively campaigned during the war to promote the rights of Japanese Americans. This article traces the stages of misrepresentation that led to current false beliefs about Millikan. In view of Millikan’s extraordinary position in American science, this misrepresentation is a cautionary tale. The article also treats Caltech’s central accusation against Millikan: he lent his name to “a morally reprehensible eugenics movement” that had been scientifically discredited in his time. The article considers the statements purporting to show that eugenics movement had been denounced by the scientific community by 1938. In a reversal of Caltech’s claims, all three of Caltech’s scientific witnesses against eugenics—including two Nobel laureates—were actually pro-eugenic to varying degrees. This article concludes that Millikan’s beliefs fell within acceptable scientific norms of his day.

Reporting the Second World War: The Press and the People 1939-1945. By Tim Luckhurst

Reporting the Second World War: The Press and the People 1939-1945. By Tim Luckhurst

Reflections of female and male patriotism in photographs: Analysis of First World War photographs of a Jewish family from Rome

Reflections of female and male patriotism in photographs: Analysis of First World War photographs of a Jewish family from Rome

Gustav Oppenheim (1882-1937) and the Discovery of Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy.

The discovery of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) is frequently attributed to Dr. Gustav Oppenheim-a man who has been largely passed over in history. Oppenheim's clinical and neuropathologic research covered a variety of disorders, but his name is best known for his work on senile dementia and CAA. Although Oppenheim was in fact not the first to discover CAA, his neuropathologic observations and inferences on neurodegenerative disease proved to be remarkably faithful to our modern understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. As a neurologist, he served in the First World War and was later subjected to religious persecutions in the leadup to the Holocaust but was not fortunate enough to emigrate before his death. The life, social impact, and previously overlooked contributions to science and medicine by Oppenheim are detailed.

Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?

Abstract Although identity politics dates back to the 1960 s, it has acquired a new urgency since the ascendance of Black Lives Matter in the late 2010 s. And while identity politics, as a critical framework, was developed in the United States, its rhetoric has since been taken up in much of the rest of the world. This article argues that the terminology of US-style identity politics is especially ill-suited to Germany, a country in which race does not exist as a legal category, and discrimination and inequality do not revolve around a Black/white axis. It points out, moreover, that the German appropriation of certain words and concepts – such as diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, intersectionality, and others – clashes both with their usage and meaning in the US and with the demographic changes that have transformed post-Second World War German culture. In order to illustrate this clash, this article compares Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019) with Yael Ronen’s Slippery Slope (2021), a critically acclaimed musical performed in English at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. It critiques Slippery Slope’s appropriation of the buzzwords of identity politics and notes with regret that German theatres are ill-equipped to perform the plays of the most important playwrights working in the US today, a new generation of African American writers, including Jackson, whose work is steeped in the performance traditions of Black American cultures.

Fall of a New Soviet-Jewish Person: The Unmasking of Anti-Antisemite Aleksandr Litinskii, aka American Spy Big Boss

The paper examines the unmaking of an exemplary individual in Stalin's Soviet Union, a New Soviet Person, caught in the anti-Jewish campaign of Stalin's last years, often remembered for the notorious Doctors’ Plot. Aleksandr Litinskii was a Soviet true believer, a veteran of the Second World War, and a Jew whose father died in the Holocaust. When confronted with the anti-Jewish campaign, he was not disillusioned but decided to save the Soviet project through an elaborate attempt at reverse psychology. He posed in letters as an American spy bent on undermining the Soviet Union through antisemitism. Evidence from this bizarre case, collected from police archives that Ukraine declassified after the Maidan Revolution and from Litinskii's memoir, suggests new insights into Soviet Jewish experiences and into the legacy of persecution among Eastern Europeans who supported the regimes that repressed them.

Combined Deficit of the Four Lower Cranial Nerves also Known as the Syndrome of Collet-Sicard: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

AbstractCombined deficit of the four lower cranial nerves (CN IX, X, XI, and XII) was originally described by French physicians Collet (1915) and Sicard (1917) during World War I. To date though, this rare neurological clinical picture lacks systematic evidence regarding its epidemiology, clinical presentation, treatment strategies, and outcome. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis concerning Collet-Sicard syndrome (CSS) on Medline database in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. The research yielded 84 articles among which 73 individual case reports were eventually retained. Mean age was 53.7 (± 16) years old and the male-to-female ratio was 1.8/1. CSS was firstly caused by tumors (38.4%), following by vascular etiologies (28.8%), trauma (16.4%), and infection (6.8%), among others. Temporary enteral nutrition was required for 17 patients (23.3%). The four CN presented significant chances of complete or partial recovery: 52.1% for CN IX (p < 0.001), 46.6% for CN X and CN XII (p < 0.001), and 39.7% for CN XI (p = 0.002). Tumoral causes presented significantly lower chances of favorable CN recovery (7.1%) compared to infection (60%), vascular (52.4%), and trauma (41.7%) (p < 0.001). Older age (> 53 years old) was not associated with a dismal CN prognostic (p = 0.763). Most patients (71.2%) presented a favorable outcome (Glasgow Outcome Scale score ≥ 4). All the patients who died (6.8%) suffered from skull base tumors. CSS is a rare condition requiring prompt clinical and radiologic diagnostic and multidisciplinary management. Vascular or infectious-related CSS seem to present a rather good prognostic, closely followed by trauma, whereas tumoral-related CSS seem to suffer from a more dismal prognostic.

Goodbye Old Man?

In the Great War’s immediate aftermath, many images of the soldier and his horse that had been popular during the War endured because they were still able to provide comfort. However, by the 1930s, the war horse was increasingly becoming, not a fact of military life, but a relic of its past. The War’s culmination had already proved to be a turning point in how the British public saw itself in relation to the soldier’s horse. Portrayals that had once been countered by reality now also started to gain a life of their own. Increasingly, the “real” became the imagined and the imagined became evidence that the events depicted had been “real”. It was not that the events recounted in images made popular during the War, such as Fortunino Matania’s Goodbye Old Man had never happened, but rather that what remained was becoming increasingly detached from the War as it had actually been fought.

Developments of the Romanian State and Law in the Period of Communism

The establishment of the communist regime in Romania began in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with the seizure of power by the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) and the elimination of political opposition. The communist regime imposed a totalitarian ideology based on full state control over all aspects of social, economic and political life. During the communist period, the Romanian state was transformed into a totalitarian state with an authoritarian and centralized regime. Political power was concentrated in the hands of the Communist Party and the state became an instrument of its control. State institutions were subordinated to the party, and the separation of powers in the state was abolished in favour of an executive power dominated by Communist leaders. As far as the legal system is concerned, the communist period brought significant changes in legislation and judicial procedures. The law was used as a tool to control and suppress political opposition and all forms of dissent. Judicial proceedings were politicised and the independence of the judiciary was undermined in favour of the political interests of the communist regime.

Educational Inequality in the Context of China's Educational Expansion

Since the conclusion of World War II, the topic of educational growth has garnered global interest, including in China. While the education expansion program has given several benefits and advantages to China, there are still many faults in the strategy. This paper examines the issue of educational inequality within the framework of educational growth in China. The paper examines educational inequity in China within the framework of educational growth, focusing on four key areas: educational inequity stemming from socio-economic factors, urban-rural disparities, insufficient secondary education, and gender disparities. After examining the aforementioned factors, this study asserts that the issue of educational inequality persists and proves to be particularly challenging to eradicate in certain areas, such as socio-economic disparity. Based on this, this paper puts forward the following suggestions. First, the government needs to increase spending on education. Second, attention should be paid to improving the balance of educational distribution. Finally, there is a need to close the gender gap in higher education. These guidelines are the best alternative to achieving equality in education.

One index, two publishers and the global research economy

ABSTRACT The emergence of a global science system after the second world war was spurred by transformations in academic publishing and information science. Amidst Russian-American technological rivalries, funding for science expanded rapidly. Elsevier and Pergamon internationalised journal publishing, whilst tools such as the Science Citation Index changed the way research was measured and valued. This paper traces the connections between the post-war expansion of academic research, new commercial publishing models, the management of research information and Cold War geopolitics. Today, the analysis and use of research metadata continues to revolutionise science communication. The monetisation of citation data has led to the creation of rival publishing platforms and citation infrastructures. The value of this data is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. Corporate ownership and commercial competition reinforce geographical and resource inequalities in a global research economy, marginalising non-Anglophone knowledge ecosystems as well as long-established scholar-led serials and institutional journals. The immediate future for academic publishing will be shaped by a growing divide between commercial and ‘community-owned’ open science infrastructures.

“Our Orthodox Church has always shared the fate of the people”. The Most Holy Patriarch Sergius during the Great Patriotic War

“Our Orthodox Church has always shared the fate of the people”. The Most Holy Patriarch Sergius during the Great Patriotic War

Establishment and development of the legislation of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic

The article examines the historical and legal aspects of the formation and development of the legislation of the ZUNR, in particular, it is stated that the beginning of a new stage in the development of state-building processes in the western Ukrainian lands was their inclusion in the Austrian Empire at the end of the 18th century. It was found that during the First World War, political life in the western Ukrainian lands became more active in the context of imperial policy and the national movement aimed at the formation of a national state. It has been found that the intensification of legislative activity in the western Ukrainian lands is connected with the events of November 1, 1918, in particular with the declaration of an independent Ukrainian state in the western Ukrainian lands, with the center in Lviv. The Ukrainian National Council became the main political body responsible for the development of the national state in the western Ukrainian lands. On November 13, 1918, the UN Rada adopted the «Temporary Basic Law on the State Independence of the Ukrainian Lands of the Former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy», which completed the process of constitutionalization of the newly created state. Formation of legal norms that regulated the main spheres of social life. In addition, a number of legislative acts were developed and adopted, which were supposed to regulate a complex of issues related to economic relations, the financial sphere and property obligations, as well as certain aspects of civil and criminal law. It was established that the «Act of Detachment» between the Ukrainian People's Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic of Ukraine, adopted on January 22, 1919, was an important document, because it has significant legal, political and historical significance for the Ukrainian present, as it becomes a consolidating factor of public consciousness. The author of the article emphasizes that the characteristic features of national legislation in the Western Ukrainian People's Republic at the time were brevity and the introduction of a system of administrative responsibility for violations of legal norms, as well as the issuance of various by-laws in the form of orders.

A Republican of Faith: Adolf von Harnack’s Public and Intellectual Activity, 1914–1930

Abstract This paper focuses on the prominent German theologian Adolf von Harnack in his capacity as a public intellectual during the Weimar Republic. The few works of scholarship that address Harnack’s Weimar years at any length are in German, and the barely extant Anglophone literature, severely outdated, largely neglects to evaluate adequately the evolution and scope of Harnack’s pedagogical and theological positions as well as of the institutional power he commanded. Drawing principally from Harnack’s writings, both personal and published, before World War I until his death in 1930, this essay seeks to chart his intellectual development during the final years of his life and to survey how he translated his liberal theological principles into loyalty to the Weimar constitution. Public intellectuals such as Harnack were able to serve the public good in multifaceted, unquantifiable ways without attaching themselves to a particular party or to an explicitly partisan cause. By examining Harnack’s public and theological activity, I intend to provide a more holistic look at intellectual life in the Weimar Republic and to advocate for both a less restrictive definition of “public intellectual” and a broader conception of “political activism.”

Curating Community behind Barbed Wire: Canadian Prisoner of War Art from the Second World War

Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through bits of ephemera—including wartime log books and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones along with handwritten letters—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told. Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and accumulation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

‘The poor man’s overdraft’: a longer history of Australian retail credit

Most histories of Australian cultural life pin the start of consumer credit’s popularity to the 1950s and the heady days of the early long boom. This article reveals the longer history of consumer credit in Australia. Middle-class Australians have long made use of forms of credit provided by retailers such as monthly accounts to supplement their incomes, take advantage of special offers, deal with unexpected expenses, or indulge impulsive desires. Those with more limited and less regular incomes, working-class families unable to secure credit from banks or department stores, also became enmeshed in credit culture, but through a different route. An early form of retail credit – the cash-order system – played a crucial role in preparing working-class consumers for the postwar boom in credit culture. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cash-order system provided a bridge between older forms of working-class retail credit such as the tick and the slate, and modern forms such as the department store budget accounts that would become widely available after the Second World War.