Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies) Review

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(More customer reviews)Sanford presents a wealth of information on the events leading up to and including the Katyn massacre and the decades-long coverup (in both Communist and western nations) of Soviet responsibility. Ironically, many past Soviet dissidents had acknowledged Soviet guilt for this crime (p. 213). Interestingly, evidence from Luftwaffe photos has recently become public that adds to the proof that the burials, and hence the massacre, must have predated the German invasion of the USSR (pp. 145-146).
Some 98.1% of the victims were ethnic Poles (p. 54). However, the "Poles" may include around 900 heavily-Polonized or secularized individuals of Jewish origin. Physical evidence recovered in the 1990s exhumations confirms the fact that a significant fraction of Polish victims fought back against their murderers (p. 108). Katyn was no emotional spur-of-the-moment murder. Instead, it resembled the acts of the Nazis: "The Soviet 1940 massacre, though, shares one fundamental feature with the trainloads of Jewish and Roma victims brought to be exterminated in Auschwitz and other death camps on industrial lines in batches according to a carefully thought out and scientifically organized method. The element of planned, impersonal and unemotional control predominated even though the chosen Soviet method of execution was about as direct and personal a relationship between executioner and victim as one could get." (p. 95). Sanford doesn't mention the fact that nearly 2 million of the 5-6 million murdered Jews also died through the "personal" means of being shot (by Einsatzgruppen, other German units, and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators).

Sanford quotes Neil Ascherson, who called Katyn "an act of selective genocide against a part of Poland's national elite, closely parallel to Hitler's order to exterminate the Polish intellectual class". (p. 83). Sanford himself concludes that: "It also suggests that the massacre was not aimed primarily to eliminate Poland's officer corps, so much as to weaken its general leadership elite." (p. 52). Finally, Louis FitzGibbon called Katyn: "The worst single unpunished crime in history." (p. vii).
Consider the progressive betrayal of Poland by the British and Americans, culminating at Teheran and Yalta. Unlike those who rationalize this event, Sanford acknowledges the fact that there was no danger of a Soviet-Nazi separate peace (p. 163), and that the Soviet puppet state was not a foregone conclusion given Red Army successes: "On the other hand, Western failure to tie Stalin down over the political future of Eastern Europe during his period of military weakness meant that Roosevelt had no cards left to play at the end-of-war conferences apart from a simple-minded banking on Stalin's goodwill." (p. 168)


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The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and in other camps in 1940 was one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War. The truth about the massacres was long suppressed, both by the Soviet Union, and also by the United States and Britain who wished to hold together their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. This informativebook examines the details of this often overlooked event, shedding light on what took place especially in relation to the massacres at locations other than Katyn itself. It discusses how the truth about the killings was hidden, how it gradually came to light and why the memory of the massacres has long affected Polish-Russian relations.

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Destroy Warsaw: Hitler's Punishment, Stalin's Revenge Review

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(More customer reviews)One especially valuable aspect of this book is its detailed introduction to the beginnings of the Polish Underground. Concrete strategy was planned even before the German guns of 1939 had fallen silent.
During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, even Polish firemen tried to help the doomed Jews: "The flames leaped high above the twelve-foot wall covered with broken glass, and firemen in gleaming helmets were called to the scene. But when they aimed their hoses at the burning buildings across the wall, an SS officer waving a pistol shouted at them to stop wasting water. They were there not to extinguish the burning Jewish part of the city but to prevent the flames from spreading to the `Aryan' side of Warsaw. Nearby factories produced uniforms and spare parts for German army vehicles. The firemen stood there, useless and helpless, together with a crowd of silent Polish onlookers, numb with horror and fear. Several women wept. Then Lithuanian police in black uniforms arrived and told the crowd to move on." (p. 55). Borowiec's testimony, an eyewitness one (p. 66), adds refutation to the oft-repeated Polonophobic innuendo of Poles cheering the burning of the Jews.
Borowiec was 14 years old at the time of the Warsaw Uprising. He writes much about the first days of the Uprising and the premature shootouts that occurred prior to 5 PM, August 1. This made it virtually impossible to coordinate the first planned actions of the Uprising, and it ruined whatever chances the Poles had of taking the Germans by surprise at their strongly-defended positions (bridges, etc.). The Poles' arms had been depleted by the actions of "Operation Tempest" further east. German armored units played a major role in stifling the Uprising in certain parts of Warsaw in its first days (p. 94)
As if writing a rebuke to those who labeled the Uprising a folly, Borowiec quotes from an Underground newspaper: "There are no regrets and no fear. And we are determined to die in the Polish Thermopylae, in the ruins of our city, rather than abandon the independent life and the values gained in the general enthusiasm." (p. 181)
Some 40,000 Varsovians were taken to concentration camps (p. 177), in violation of the capitulation agreement. The Germans removed 33,000 railway wagons of loot before burning Warsaw's remaining buildings (p. 178). The AK continued to fight the Germans after the Uprising before being disbanded on January 19, 1945 (p. 181).


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Written by a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, this book examines the background of the ill-fated 63-day uprising that pitted poorly armed Polish civilians and volunteers against Hitler's well-armed and veteran forces.

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Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War Review

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(More customer reviews)Since there are as yet no reviews on this book, I will post the review by Paul Saydak, who at the time was a doctoral student in history at Yale University.
The Cold War remains one of the most debated topics between scholars of American, Russian, West European and Central European history. Who was to blame for the start of the Cold War? Was it an aggressive Russian policy or American actions which set off the struggle? Likewise, was it the West's fault for having pushed Stalin into the arms of Hitler and set up a paradigm through which Moscow would continue to mistrust the Western powers even after the war? Given the lack of access to the Soviet archives, the academic community has produced a colorful array of interpretations explaining the initiation of the Cold War.
With the help of the newly available sources from Eastern Europe as well as a few from the former Soviet Union, R.C. Raack has undertaken to contribute to the field of Cold War interpretation in his latest work. Responding to recent historiography claiming that Stalin, after the West failed to give Moscow a firm alliance offer, had little choice but to sign the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939, Raack makes a case that Stalin in fact allied himself with Hitler for other reasons. Raack's major contribution to the field of interpretation of the origins of the Cold War lies in the fact that he dates Stalin's planned offensive intentions further back than most: back to 1938.
Raack dates Stalin's planned offensive intentions to 1938. They led the Soviet leader to advocate the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in the late summer of 1939. The earlier Soviet attempt to move westward was stopped by the Poles.
Citing the evidence of Molotov's private boastings of expansionism in the summer of 1940, Raack demonstrates Stalin's desire to expand into the west of Europe. This desire, according to Raack, led the Soviet leader to advocate the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in the late summer of 1939. The author writes that if Stalin's international motives are closely examined, we can infer that in 1938 and in 1939, Stalin wanted a general war in the West, though without his participation, with the British, French, and Germans bogged down in a mutually debilitating conflict over Czechoslovakia. It was this kind of war that his quick agreement with Hitler, manufactured in the summer of 1939, was designed to encourage. (p. 20) In fact, the Soviets did gain valuable time in the almost two years after the Nazi-Soviet Agreement with which to consolidate its new officer ranks (previously handicapped and reeling from massive purges). Additionally, Raack's contention about Soviet desires for westward expansion as early as 1938 is supported by the often ignored attempts by Moscow to do the same less than two decades earlier in the summer of 1920. That Soviet attempt to move westward was eventually stopped at the gates of Warsaw and pushed back by Józef Pisudski's Polish armies.
Raack's work offers other compelling contributions to Cold War scholarship. Probably the most interesting is Raack's contention that Stalin did not view the future of Nazism and Socialism as forever divergent. Introducing a possible affinity between Stalin and Hitler, Raack uses the recently available Soviet documentation to show that Stalin, in November 1939, testified to having believed that someday Communism and National Socialism would converge. Stalin told several trusted colleagues that he believed that the German political system would increasingly take on socialist characteristics leading to the eventual convergence.
The remainder of Raack's study documents further the increasing aggression of the Soviet army throughout the war. First, after two and a half weeks of fighting the Germans, the Poles found themselves attacked from behind by Soviet armies which, in cooperation with Hitler, partitioned Poland for the fourth time. The Finns were attacked soon afterwards in November 1939. By August 1940, the Balts were annexed to the Soviet Union. On June 22, 1941, the Nazi attack on its former Soviet ally drew Stalin into the eventually victorious Allied coalition with the West.
What is refreshing about Raack's approach is his familiarity with East European sources which Western writers continue to ignore. For instance, he cites standard works in Polish on the period by such scholars as Piotr ¸ossowski, Krystyna Kersten, Jan Karski and Anna Cienciala. These studies enable him to portray with incomparably higher accuracy the East European experience in the context of Russian diplomacy with the West.
The immediate postwar period is illuminated by one of the most creative moments of Raack's book. Through his brilliant use of Soviet cinematic footage, the author captures Moscow's intentions at the end of the war. In May 1945, Stalin demanded that the Allies stage a repeat for cameras of the German surrender which had already occurred at Reims. On May 8, Soviet cameras and props were prepared for the affair in the Soviet-controlled German city of Karlshorst. Raack points out that the Soviet films which captured the event made sure to keep Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov in center screen throughout 'to emphasize the Red Army's major importance, this point likewise reiterated by the narrator.' (p. 115) An overnight feud among Allied powers about placement of representatives before the episode did not stop a favorable seating arrangement for the Soviets. Raack writes:
The squabble and the lack of Western preparation for the Soviets' pettifoggery here anticipated the conflicts to come and recalled such past inter-Allied wartime diplomatic exchange. It was an almost too obvious display of the East-West dichotomy that Stalin already had in mind. On the one side were the victorious Soviet armies; on the other, seated together as one scarcely significant group, were the Western Allies. This split is particularly emphasized in the Moscow-edited film, most certainly the official Soviet version, that was released in June [1945]. Already the Soviets were scorning that wartime parlance about 'allies'.... (p.116)
Raack shows the cynicism of Stalin's approach to the West at war's end. However, Stalin's intentions would not become fully apparent to Washington until 1946. Unfortunately for the Central and Eastern Europeans, the Red Army's presence upon their territory, until then unchallenged by the Americans, began what would become the loss of independence for Central and Eastern Europe for the next forty-four years.
The origins of Eastern Europe's occupation by Soviet troops, as presented by R.C. Raack's book, deserve more than a casual read. For those interested in his argument about Stalin's early aggressive strategies towards the West, and for those tired of historians making ignorant generalizations about Central and Eastern Europe, or for those who simply want a good solid account of the origins of the Cold War, Raack's book is a rare find.


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Exploiting new findings from former East Bloc archives and from long-ignored Western sources, this book presents a wholly new picture of the coming of World War II, Allied wartime diplomacy, and the origins of the Cold War. The author reveals that the widely believed story that Stalin’s purposes in European diplomacy from 1938 on were mainly defensive is a fantasy.

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The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks) Review

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(More customer reviews)Gellately's research radically alters our understanding of how the secret police operated in Nazi Germany, as well as in the German Democratic Republic and elsewhere. Essentially, Gellately is challenging the notion that the Gestapo was omnipotent, i.e. there was an agent on every corner who provided the regime with all the information it needed. By looking at remaining files in the area of Wurzburg, Gellately found that only a small number of total agents were available to cover a relatively large area. He concludes that even if those agents worked all day and all night, they still would not be able to accumulate the type and amount of information that they did. So, if there was not a Gestapo agent on every corner, how was the regime able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance and how could they enforce their racial policies? Gellately suggests that the key factor was the willingness of Germans to provide the authorities with information about alleged criminal activities. In fact, most cases began with denunciations or self-policing. In other words, the Gestapo was reactive, not proactive. Gellately suggests that without this cooperation, the Gestapo would have been far less efficient and successful. So just why did the Germans denounce each other? Gellately found that motives were usually quite petty. One had to worry about being denounced by former lovers, business competitors, jealous neighbours, and so on. In fact, Nazi officials tried to put the brakes on the denunciations. In a nutshell, Gellately is suggesting that the secret to the success of the Gestapo was not that it had an agent on every corner, but that the population was so willing to denounce each other for personal gain. The result was an environment of self-policing. There was a Gestapo agent on every police corner, but just in the minds of the German people. But according to Bentham's theory about pan-optic society, that was enough. Germans behaved because they thought they were being watched, whether they were or not was neither here nor there. Gellately's work suggests that there are a lot of problems with the notion of a totalitarian regime. Total control is not only impossible, but not necessary in even the most notorious regimes. Far from being a regime which depended completely on terror and compulsion, the Nazis appear to have been successful largely because of public participation. The only shortcoming is that Gellately's evidence is drawn from one set of files from one part of Germany. We have to assume that the results here would be similar if not identical to other areas, even though we have no evidence from those other areas. Gellately is aware of this and it is beyond his control since most Gestapo files were completely destroyed. This book is a must read for German and Holocaust historians.

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How was the Gestapo able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance with Nazi doctrines--especially "crimes" pertaining to the private spheres of social, family, and sexual life?How could the police enforce policies such as those designed to isolate Jews, or the foreign workers brought to Germany after 1939, with such apparent ease? Addressing these questions, Gellately argues that the key factor in the successful enforcement of Nazi racial policy was the willingness of German citizens to provide authorities with information about suspected "criminality." He demonstrates that without some degree of popular participation in the operation of institutions such as the Gestapo, the regime would have been seriously hampered in the "realization of the unthinkable," not only inside Germany but also in many of the occupied countries.Offering an intriguing examination of the everyday operations of the Gestapo and the product of extensive archival research, this incisive study surveys the experiences of areas across Germany, drawing out national, local, and regional implications.

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Did the Children Cry: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945 Review

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This book is known less for its content than for the controversy that has surrounded it. Nominated for the Janusz Korczak Literary Award, it was subsequently beset with a flurry of Jewish protests. After a spate of bad publicity, and the threat of legal action, the award was belatedly presented--but without any ceremony.
One reason give for challenging the Janusz Korczak Literary Award is the transparently bogus charge that this book "sanitizes" Polish behavior. Even a cursory reading of it reveals just the opposite. Lukas criticizes Polish conduct many times. For example, he discusses Polish-German collaboration (e. g., pp. 141-142), even citing an Israeli study that estimates that there were 7,000 Polish collaborators in all (p. 152; which, incidentally, means that about 1 in every 4,000 Poles had been a collaborator). Another reason given for challenging the Janusz Korczak Literary Award is the claim that this book is "borderline anti-Semitic". Indeed it is--if one understands anti-Semitism to be any criticism of Jewish conduct under any circumstances. Lukas, for example, points out that Jews were commonly prejudiced against Poles just as Poles were commonly prejudiced against Jews (p. 152). He also gives examples of Jewish selfishness against fellow needy Jews at the same time that he gives examples of Polish selfishness against fellow needy Poles (p. 28). Lukas also cites a Jewish historian who faults the method that Jewish organizations used to recover Jewish children after the war (p. 220). Is all this anti-Semitism? Let the reader decide.
And, far from overstating the extent of Polish assistance to Jews, Lukas quotes a wide range of estimates (both Polish and Jewish) of how many Poles were involved in such aid (pp. 155-157). Lukas also provides figures for the deaths in some of the extermination camps. The collective death toll at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka ranges from 1.65 million to 2.54 million (p. 230).

The genocide against Jews is well known, but Lukas makes it clear that Poles were also victims of genocide. The genocide of Poles does not spark the imagination as much as the industrial-scale gassing and cremation of Jews by the millions, but it was no less real. Heinrich Himmler stated (p. 17) that all Poles will disappear from the world and that all Poles will be destroyed. Martin Bormann (p. 21) asserted that Slavs should be kept alive only as long as they are needed as forced laborers. 2-3 million Polish gentiles, including roughly half of the Polish intelligentsia, were already murdered. Of course, since the Polish population was much larger than the Jewish one, the genocide of Poles had to be a long-term German project, with greater emphasis placed on passive genocide, at least until Germany won the war. Hitler spoke of reducing the Slavs' fertility and, by 1942, the Polish birth rate had fallen by 80% relative to its prewar level (p. 87). SS General Odilo Globocnik noted that the mass killings of Poles and their replacement with German colonists meant that Poles would be gradually crushed "economically and biologically"(p. 107). Heinrich Himmler wanted the General Government (German-occupied central Poland) to be completely Germanized within twenty years (p. 107).
Throughout this book, Lukas consistently relates the experiences of Polish and Jewish children to each other. Both, for instance, experienced the horror of the German conquest of Poland. Both experienced a breakdown of morality caused by the privations of the German occupation. Both learned how to lie and steal to survive. Both quickly learned not to trust anybody. Both were in German concentration camps. Both were used in sadistic experiments conducted by Dr. Mengele. Both experienced sexual assaults (including homosexual assaults) by German guards and officials (pp. 95-96, 202). Both were sent to secret schools in their respective communities. Both took part in clandestine cultural activities. Both enjoyed the childrens' books written by Polish Jew Janusz Korczak. Both held odd jobs to help their parents. Both were forced to work in Germany as forced laborers under appalling conditions. Both were involved in the rescue of their compatriots. Both served in their respective guerilla movements. Both had to watch their parents die, and both experienced death at the hands of the Germans in large numbers. Both were commonly left orphaned. Both experienced difficulties in locating still-surviving relatives (with postwar Germans commonly resisting attempts to identify kidnapped Polish children: pp. 211-214). Finally, both experienced adjustment problems after the war. For example, both Polish and Jewish children commonly internalized the German hatred directed against their respective nationalities, scorning their respective heritages, and sometimes actually believing that their nationalities had deserved their sufferings.
Let us return to the contrived fuss surrounding the Janusz Korczak Literary Award. The reader can clearly see that this book does not fit with the template of modern thinking--where the genocide of Jews is given disproportionate attention, is accorded a special term (Holocaust), and any attempt to compare it with any other genocidal event is called "relativizing the Holocaust." In contrast to all of this, Lukas consistently juxtaposes the experiences of Polish and Jewish children. Perhaps that is what motivated the outburst of hostility to this book. So long as Jewish sufferings are thought to be higher than those of others, or at least more worthy of public attention than those of others, specifically the Poles, any such juxtaposition will be unbearable, especially for a book that is to receive any special recognition.



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Based on eye-witness accounts, interviews, and prodigious research by the author, who is an expert in the field, this is a unique contribution to the literature of World War II, and a most compelling account of German inhumanity towards children in occupied Poland.

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The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale Review

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(More customer reviews)The title of this review consists of words I don't use too often. But this is a masterpiece that deserved its Pulitzer Prize and then some. What makes Spiegelman's work so moving is the juxtaposition of a supposedly lighthearted form, the comic strip, with the greatest evil and suffering in human history, the Holocaust. Spiegelman's parents miraculously survived the concentration camps, being among very few survivors, getting by on luck and (in the case of Spiegelman's father) a lot of resourcefulness. This is their story, from the point of view of the father, who lost nearly all of his relatives. With the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, this work pulls no punches in describing the true horrors of the Holocaust, and Spiegelman's minimalist artwork makes the images all the more disturbing. You don't get this kind of emotion, terror, and brutal honesty in standard written accounts of the period. But underneath the direct suffering of the Holocaust, the true theme of this book is the lasting effects on the Spiegelman family, including the father's lasting agony and the mental illness shared by both Spiegelman's mother and himself, who hadn't even been born yet. The strained relationship between father and son are the true heart of this tremendous work. I haven't been this blown away by a work of literature in a very long time, if ever.

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A son struggles to come to terms with the horrific story of his parents and their experiences during the Holocaust and in postwar America, in an omnibus edition of Spiegelman's two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller. 25,000 first printing.

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When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland Review

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(More customer reviews)"When Nationalism Began to Hate" is an excellent book. The title is a bit sensationalistic and a bit misleading.
WNBtH is a history of eighteenth century Polish nationalism. It is an attempt to answer the question: Why is it that decent Poles, and certainly decent Polish Catholics, in the 1880s, could not and did not publicly support an anti-Semitic brand of nationalism, and yet by the 1930s, this had changed -- Polish Nationalism and Polish Catholicism were both often openly anti-Semitic?
What happened?
Porter takes the reader on a journey through the tragedies of Polish history, and the uprisings that Poles mounted to resist German and Russian colonizers' attempts to eliminate Polish identity, and the theorizing that went on behind these uprisings.
Philo-Semitism was a marked feature of Polish Romantic nationalism, and Jews did participate in the struggle for Polish freedom. Many Poles saw Jews as an integral part of Poland. Mickiewicz created Jankiel, a Polish Jewish hero of the national epic, "Pan Tadeusz." Patriotic Jewish Poles were not just a feature of fiction; Jews like Michal Landy gave their lives in the nationalist struggle.
A feature of Mickiewicz's Romantic Nationalism was the concept of Poland as the "Christ of Nations," that would struggle for the uplift of all humanity. This wasn't just rhetoric -- Poles fought internationally. Poles like Haym Solomon, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Casimir Pulaski contributed to the American Revolution in this multi-national, Christian-inspired spirit.
Poland's many uprisings against Russian and German colonizers ended tragically, with the deaths and deportation of many, and even harsher attempts to stamp out Polish language and culture.
These tragedies changed Polish nationalists' views of time -- could time really result in progress? -- and what constituted a Pole. Could Lithuanians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews ever be part of a successful Polish nation state?
Peasants presented a particular problem. A popular argument stated that Polish uprisings failed because the peasants did not support them, and, in fact, had no reason to. Did it matter to them if they slaved for Poles, Austrians, or Russians? What did peasants care about Poland's literary heritage? They couldn't read. Some regarded peasants as inherently lesser creatures, perhaps inferior because of reincarnation.
Similar questions were asked about Jews and other ethnic minorities.
The answers that Poles, struggling with a highly multi-cultural, multi-faith population, came up with are fascinating, and speak to the mult-cultural, multi-faith world many of us live in today. One can hear echoes on nightly news discussions of how to address Spanish speaking, or Muslim, immigrants to the US.
Porter emphasizes that there is nothing inherently Polish, or Catholic, or Polish-Catholic, about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was a development of one train of nationalist thought, a train of thought inspired by Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism.
Roman Dmowski, the proponent of this train of thought, wrote with brutality about forcing nationalism on peasants, whether they liked it or not, and forcing deportation on Poland's Jews. Dmowski stated, "Every Pole should be the enemy of every German he meets."
Dmowski had suffered under colonization, and he was a trained biologist. He was influenced by Social Darwinism, and saw life as a struggle for the survival of the fittest. He wanted Poles, as he understood Poles, to survive.
Dmowski rejected Poland's Romantic Nationalism, as embodied by Mickiewicz, and Mickiewicz's multicultural, philo-Semitic view of Poland. That approach -- the Romantic approach -- was worthlessly "spiritual" in Dmowski's view, and doomed to failure. Poles and Poland needed to enter the Darwinian struggle for life, and renounce any touchy-feely notions of solidarity with others who were not ethnic Poles.
Again, though this is a scholarly book, it is a fasciating read. Porter writes well. The questions the book engages are questions we are all contemplating in our increasingly globalized world.
I wish I could place "When Nationalism Began to Hate" on the required reading list of all of those who read a book that made a very big splash recently, Jan Tomasz Gross' "Neighbors."
Though I'm sure Gross did not intend this, "Neighbors," and the flood of media that accompanied its release, encouraged the stereotype of Poles as mindless, inherently anti-Semitic, brutes.
As WNBtH shows, multi-cultural societies present a series of challenges, and that is especially true when multi-cultural societies face the added stress of foreign occupation, colonization, and attempts at the elmination of the culture being colonized.
Polish thinkers developed varied ways of dealing with their oppression, and of responding to multi-culturalism. Their words, written a century ago, have resonance for us today.

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In When Nationalism Began to Hate, Brian Porter offers a challenging new explanation for the emergence of xenophobic, authoritarian nationalism in Europe. He begins by examining the common assumption that nationalist movements by nature draw lines of inclusion and exclusion around social groups, establishing authority and hierarchy among "one's own" and antagonism towards "others." Porter argues instead that the penetration of communal hatred and social discipline into the rhetoric of nationalism must be explained, not merely assumed.Porter focuses on nineteenth-century Poland, tracing the transformation of revolutionary patriotism into a violent anti-Semitic ideology. Instead of deterministically attributing this change to the "forces of modernization," Porter demonstrates that the language of hatred and discipline was central to the way "modernity" itself was perceived by fin-de-siecle intellectuals.The book is based on a wide variety of sources, including political speeches and posters, newspaper articles and editorials, underground brochures, published and unpublished memoirs, personal letters, and nineteenth-century books on history, sociology, and politics. It embeds nationalism within a much broader framework, showing how the concept of "the nation" played a role in liberal, conservative, socialist, and populist thought.When Nationalism Began to Hate is not only a detailed history of Polish nationalism but also an ambitious study of how the term "nation" functioned within the political imagination of "modernity." It will prove an important text for a wide range of students and researchers of European history and politics.

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Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford Studies in Modern European History) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an excellent study of Arthur Greiser who was the Nazi leader of the area of Poland around Gdansk- an area where he came to be really hated. 15000 people attended his hanging. Greiser spent his life trying to become a model Nazi. The author believes that this was partly because he was trying to make up for what the Nazis viewed as past errors- such as the fact that he had been a Free-Mason and was late to join the party. He became particularly zealous to overcome these 'deficiencies'. He proposed bizarre intiatives like killing people with Tuberculosis but Hitler refused to countenance this. Epstein stresses the prominent role he took in the Final Solution. This excellent and well-researched study is backed up by some interesting private correspondence which makes an already compelling story even more engaging as we see that in his letters home he could seem like a loving family man whilst at the same time acting as a total monster in the area of Poland he controlled. I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone interested in the Second World War.
I really hope this book wins a prize- it deserves it.

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Model Nazi tells the story of Arthur Greiser, the man who initiated the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, Greiser was the territorial leader of the Warthegau, an area of western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. In an effort to make the Warthegau "German," Greiser introduced numerous cruel policies. He spearheaded an influx of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans. He segregated Germans from Poles, and introduced wide-ranging discriminatory measures against the Polish population. He refashioned the urban and natural landscape to make it "German." And even more chillingly, the first and longest standing ghetto, the largest forced labour program, and the first mass gassings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were all initiated under Greiser's jurisdiction.Who was the man behind these dreadful policies? Catherine Epstein gives us a compelling biographical portrait of Greiser the man: his birth in the German-Polish borderlands, his rise to Nazi prominence in Danzig, his actions as party leader in the Warthegau, and his trial and execution in postwar Poland. Drawing on a remarkable array of German and Polish sources, she shows how nationalist obsessions, political jealousies, and personal insecurities shaped the policies of a man who held remarkable power in his Nazi fiefdom. Throughout, Epstein confronts a burning question of our age: why do individuals imagine genocide and ethnic cleansing to be solutions to political problems?

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Blitzkrieg Unleashed: The German Invasion of Poland, 1939 (The Stackpole Military History Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)While there is much to like about Mr. Hargreaves account of the Polish Campaign which is taken primarily from the German point of view there are several deficiencies with this book that make it difficult for me to recommend it. The maps do not complement the text very well particularly as one tries to understand the movements of the opposing sides. The book fails to include an order of battle or any information about the Red Army's invasion of eastern Poland. Hargreaves writes well and draws upon a number of primary sources to illustrate his text which follows in a logical pattern but it left much out such as the Luftwaffe's or Kreigsmarine's respective roles in the campaign.

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At dawn on Friday 1 September 1939 the Germans launched their land, sea and air assault on Poland.The World became aware of the awesome power of Hitler's Third Reich and the limitless and ruthless nature of his ambition.

The Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) attack, spearheaded by Panzers, took the German forces to the gates of Warsaw in a week.The vital port of Danzig fell, crushed by naval and air bombardment and land assaults.The Polish Air Force, out-numbered and out-gunned, were driven from the skies.In a month Warsaw fell amid great bloodshed and in six weeks the Poles were defeated.

The speed of the German conquest was matched by its brutality.Lives and property meant little to the invaders and civilians and POWs were summarily executed.Jews received particular attention and these atrocities were not just perpetrated by the SS but soldiers of the Wehrmacht.

Blitzkrieg Unleashed is told in the words of those who conquered Poland, thanks to the author's research into letters, diaries, unpublished accounts, official documents and histories and newspapers.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation 1939-1944 Review

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(More customer reviews)This second edition of the book contains new chapters. One of them contains a list of Polish gentiles, murdered by the German occupants, while attempting to assist Jews (Poland was one of the only countries where the death penalty was handed out by the Nazis to anyone who gave the slightest assistance to the Jews). Of course, this list is but a drop in the bucket: The actual number of Polish gentiles strongly assisting Polish Jews, but caught and slain by the Germans for helping Jews, is estimated to be as high as 50,000.
The second new chapter is a discussion of Zegota: A clandestine Polish underground organization for assisting Jews. At its height, it consisted of tens of thousands of Polish gentiles in German-occupied Warsaw alone--all working under the threat of death if caught.
Lukas also discusses Polish collaboration with the Nazis, but shows that, contrary to much popular Holocaust material, this level of collaboration was much smaller than those of most other German-occupied European nations, and was also dwarfed by the number of Poles who assisted the Jews.
Earlier, Lukas documents how 3 million Polish gentiles were murdered by the Germans during World War II. This is very rarely mentioned in most Holocaust materials. Also included is discussion of the cultural genocide of Poland: the systematic, barbaric German practice of systematically destroying visible traces of Polish culture (monuments, libraries, museums, etc.). If you are one raised on the belief that only Jews suffered in the hands of the Nazis, you are in for a shock when you read this excellent book.

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