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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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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