Download or read book A French Slave in Nazi Germany written by Elie Poulard and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Required Work Service Law, or Service du Travail Obligatoire, was passed in 1943 by the Vichy government of France under German occupation. Passage of the law confirmed the French government’s willing collaboration in providing the Nazi regime with French manpower to replace German workers sent to fight in the war. The result was the deportation of 600,000 young Frenchmen to Germany, where they worked under the harshest conditions. Elie Poulard was one of the Frenchmen forced into labor by the Vichy government. Translated by his brother Jean V. Poulard, Elie’s memoir vividly captures the lives of a largely unrecognized group of people who suffered under the Nazis. He describes in great detail his ordeal at different work sites in the Ruhr region, the horrors that he witnessed, and the few Germans who were good to him. Through this account of one eyewitness on the ground, we gain a vivid picture of Allied bombing in the western part of Germany and its contribution to the gradual collapse and capitulation of Germany at the end of the war. Throughout his ordeal, Elie's Catholic faith, good humor, and perseverance sustained him. Little has been published in French or English about the use of foreign workers by the Nazi regime and their fate. The Poulards’ book makes an important contribution to the historiography of World War II, with its firsthand account of what foreign workers endured when they were sent to Nazi Germany. The memoir concludes with an explanation of the ongoing controversy in France over the opposition to the title Déporté du Travail, which those who experienced this forced deportation, like Elie, gave themselves after the war.
Download or read book Hitler s Slaves written by Alexander von Plato and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War II at least 13.5 million people were employed as forced labourers in Germany and across the territories occupied by the German Reich. Most came from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, the Baltic countries, France, Poland and Italy. Among them were 8.4 million civilians working for private companies and public agencies in industry, administration and agriculture. In addition, there were 4.6 million prisoners of war and 1.7 million concentration camp prisoners who were either subjected to forced labour in concentration or similar camps or were ‘rented out’ or sold by the SS. While there are numerous publications on forced labour in National Socialist Germany during World War II, this publication combines a historical account of events with the biographies and memories of former forced labourers from twenty-seven countries, offering a comparative international perspective.
Download or read book Nazi Labour Camps in Paris written by Jean-Marc Dreyfus and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 18 July 1943, one-hundred and twenty Jews were transported from the concentration camp at Drancy to the Lévitan furniture store building in the middle of Paris. These were the first detainees of three satellite camps (Lévitan, Austerlitz, Bassano) in Paris. Between July 1943 and August 1944, nearly eight hundred prisoners spent a few weeks to a year in one of these buildings, previously been used to store furniture, and were subjected to forced labor. Although the history of the persecution and deportation of France’s Jews is well known, the three Parisian satellite camps have been subjected to the silence of both memory and history. This lack of attention by the most authoritative voices on the subject can perhaps be explained by the absence of a collective memory or by the marginal status of the Parisian detainees - the spouses of Aryans, wives of prisoners of war, half-Jews. Still, the Parisian camps did, and continue to this day, lack simple and straightforward descriptions. This book is a much needed study of these camps and is witness to how, sixty years after the events, expressing this memory remains a complex, sometimes painful process, and speaking about it a struggle.
Download or read book Working for the Enemy written by Reinhold Billstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book, historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today. Long before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and General Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford Werke and Opel became indispensable suppliers to the German armed forces, together providing most of the trucks that later motorized the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe. After the outbreak of war in 1939, Opel converted its largest factory to warplane parts production, and both companies set up extensive maintenance and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels. During the war, the Nazi Reich used millions of POWs, civilians from German-occupied countries, and concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in the German homefront economy. Starting in 1940, Ford Werke and Opel also made use of thousands of forced laborers. POWs and civilian detainees, deported to Germany by the Nazi authorities, were kept at private camps owned and managed by the companies. In the longest section of the book, ten people who were forced to work at Ford Werke recall their experiences in oral testimonies. For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor; in the most recent case, a $12 billion lawsuit was filed against the computer giant I.B.M. by a group of Gypsy organizations. In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts. The concluding chapter reviews the subsequent, immensely complex negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic, Israel and several other countries, as well as dozens of well-known German corporations.
Download or read book They Shall Not Have Me written by Jean Helion and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French painter Jean Hélion’s unique and deeply moving account of his experiences in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps prefigures the even darker stories that would emerge from the concentration camps. This serious adventure tale begins with Hélion’s infantry platoon fleeing from the German army and warplanes as they advanced through France in the early days of the war. The soldiers chant as they march and run, “They shall not have me!” but are quickly captured and sent to hard labor. Writing in English in 1943, after his risky escape to freedom in the United States, Hélion vividly depicts the sights, sounds, and smells of the camps, and shrewdly sizes up both captors and captured. In the deep humanity, humor, and unsentimental intelligence of his observations, we can recognize the artist whose long career included friendships with the likes of Mondrian, Giacometti, and Balthus, and an important role in shaping modern art movements. Hélion’s picture of almost two years without his art is a self-portrait of the artist as a man.
Download or read book Orderly and Humane written by R. M. Douglas and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.
Download or read book Hitler s Collaborators written by Philip Morgan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most controversial and uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Although a widespread phenomenon, this was long ignored in the years after the war, when peoples and governments understandably emphasized popular resistance to Nazi occupation as they sought to reconstruct their devastated economies and societies along anti-fascist and democratic lines. Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects, the Quislings who backed Nazi occupation because they were fascists, and focuses instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi uthorities and agencies, and who were ultimately responsible for gearing the economies of the occupied territories to the Nazi war effort. It was their choices which had the greatest impact on the lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen in the occupied territories, including the deportation of slave-workers to the Reich and hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the death camps in the East. In time, as the fortunes of war shifted so decisively against Germany between 1941 and 1944, these collaborators found themselves trapped by the logic of their initial cooperation with their Nazi overlords — caught up between the demands of an increasingly desperate and extremist occupying power, growing internal resistance to Nazi rule, and the relentlessly advancing Allied armies.
Download or read book Tuberculosis and War written by J.F. Murray and published by Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tuberculosis (TB) remains the largest cause of adult deaths from any single infectious disease, and ranks among the top 10 causes of death worldwide. When TB and war occur simultaneously, the inevitable consequences are disease, human misery, suffering, and heightened mortality. TB is, therefore, one of the most frequent and deadly diseases to complicate the special circumstances of warfare. Written by internationally acclaimed experts, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the status of TB before, during and after WWII in the 25 belligerent countries that were chiefly involved. It summarizes the history of TB up to the present day. A special chapter on “Nazi Medicine, Tuberculosis and Genocide” examines the horrendous, inhuman Nazi ideology, which during WWII used TB as a justification for murder, and targeted the disease by eradicating millions who were afflicted by it. The final chapter summarizes the lessons learned from WWII and more recent wars and recommends anti-TB measures for future conflicts. This publication is not only of interest to TB specialists and pulmonologists but also to those interested in public health, infectious diseases, war-related issues and the history of medicine. It should also appeal to nonmedical readers like journalists and politicians.
Download or read book A History of the Dora Camp written by Andre Sellier and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 2003-05-27 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In mid-1943 Nazi Germany entered a crisis from which it was to emerge vanquished. Faced with a shortage of manpower in armaments factories, the Third Reich sent concentration camp prisoners to work as slaves. While the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies continued at extermination camps, numerous outside "Kommandos" were set up in the vicinity of the large concentration camps. The Dora Camp, located in the center of Germany, was one of the most notorious. Originally a mere Kommando attached to Buchenwald, it became one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. There prisoners were put to work in a huge underground factory, building V-2 rockets, the secret weapon developed by German scientists in an attempt to reverse the course of the war, under the direction of Wernher von Braun. In this dispassionate but powerful account, André Sellier, himself a former prisoner at Dora, tells the dramatic story of the camp, the tunnel factory, and the underground work sites. He has utilized all available documents as well as unpublished testimony from several dozen fellow prisoners. He recounts the horrors of everyday life at Dora—prisoners dying by the hundreds and indescribable suffering—and the murderous "evacuation" of the camp by railroad convoys and death marches, which took place in early 1945 and led to the death of thousands of prisoners. Illustrated with 20 pages of photographs and drawings, and 24 maps.
Download or read book The Unfree French written by Richard Vinen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The swift and unexpected defeat of the French Army in 1940 shocked the nation. This compelling book investigates the impact of the occupation on the people of France and dispels any lingering notion that somehow, under the collaborating government of Marshal Petain, life was quite tolerable for most French citizens.
Download or read book Hitler s Foreign Workers written by Ulrich Herbert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-13 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the millions of foreign workers imported into Germany during the Second World War.
Download or read book The Men With the Pink Triangle written by Heinz Heger and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed “undesirable,” suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the crime of homosexuality, now with a new preface by Sarah Schulman, remains an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable and complex story of survival and identity.
Download or read book Imperfect Justice written by Stuart Eizenstat and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2009-08-05 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second half of the 1990s, Stuart Eizenstat was perhaps the most controversial U.S. foreign policy official in Europe. His mission had nothing to do with Russia, the Middle East, Yugoslavia, or any of the other hotspots of the day. Rather, Eizenstat's mission was to provide justice—albeit belated and imperfect justice—for the victims of World War II. Imperfect Justice is Eizenstat's account of how the Holocaust became a political and diplomatic battleground fifty years after the war's end, as the issues of dormant bank accounts, slave labor, confiscated property, looted art, and unpaid insurance policies convulsed Europe and America. He recounts the often heated negotiations with the Swiss, the Germans, the French, the Austrians, and various Jewish organizations, showing how these moral issues, shunted aside for so long, exposed wounds that had never healed and conflicts that had never been properly resolved. Though we will all continue to reckon with the crimes of World War II for a long time to come, Eizenstat's account shows that it is still possible to take positive steps in the service of justice.
Download or read book Eavesdropping on Hell written by Robert J. Hanyok and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This official government publication investigates the impact of the Holocaust on the Western powers' intelligence-gathering community. It explains the archival organization of wartime records accumulated by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service and Britain's Government Code and Cypher School. It also summarizes Holocaust-related information intercepted during the war years.
Download or read book Wine and War written by Donald Kladstrup and published by Crown. This book was released on 2002-06-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable untold story of France’s courageous, clever vinters who protected and rescued the country’s most treasured commodity from German plunder during World War II. "To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine." –Claude Terrail, owner, Restaurant La Tour d’Argent In 1940, France fell to the Nazis and almost immediately the German army began a campaign of pillaging one of the assets the French hold most dear: their wine. Like others in the French Resistance, winemakers mobilized to oppose their occupiers, but the tale of their extraordinary efforts has remained largely unknown–until now. This is the thrilling and harrowing story of the French wine producers who undertook ingenious, daring measures to save their cherished crops and bottles as the Germans closed in on them. Wine and War illuminates a compelling, little-known chapter of history, and stands as a tribute to extraordinary individuals who waged a battle that, in a very real way, saved the spirit of France.
Download or read book Love between Enemies written by Raffael Scheck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative study of empathy, sex, and love between prisoners of war and German women during World War II.
Download or read book OST written by MEMORIAL and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Jan Michalski Prize 2021 An Ostarbeiter was an 'Eastern Worker', rounded up by Nazi Germany from the captured territories in Central and Eastern Europe. By the end of the war, it is estimated that approximately 3 million to 5.5. million Ostarbeiter were forced to work in guarded work camps, many of them younger than 16 years old - at which age they would be conscripted for military service. Ostarbeiter worked 12 hours a day on starvation on rations; as ethnic Slavs, they were treated with extraordinary brutality by Nazi guards who considered them 'sub-human' by the standards of the Aryan master race. They were distinguished by the label 'OST' sewn onto their uniforms. OST is based on over two hundred personal accounts, hundreds of hours of interviews, and over 350,000 letters. This important publication will ensure that the voices of the brutalised and displaced Ostarbeiter will not be forgotten.
