Download or read book World War Two written by Jim Downs and published by Jim Downs. This book was released on 2002 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Maria Gulovich OSS Heroine of World War II written by Sonya N. Jason and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of Slovak underground member Maria Gulovich's unlikely heroism, focusing on the former elementary schoolteacher's courageous actions in saving American OSS agents. It describes how, while trapped with the agents behind enemy lines, she forayed into enemy occupied villages to find scarce food for the starving men, spied out enemy troop strength, and occasionally obtained shelter from blizzards with terrified but kind citizens. For her heroism, the U.S. government presented her with a Bronze Star. The work includes an extensive bibliography, a map of the area held by insurrectionists, and several photographs offering a glimpse of World War II seldom seen.

Download or read book Axis Slovakia written by Mark Axworthy and published by Europa Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2002 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After extensive source study, Mark W. A. Axworthy has produced what many consider the definitive study on the history of the puppet Slovak state which was created, supported, and sustained by the Third Reich from 1938 until 1945. Mr. Axworthy has carefully compiled the military history of the Slovak State- complete with the political, economic, social, and personal reasons why things occurred as they did. Through hundreds of period photographs, tables, charts, line drawings and color uniform plates, this military study is carefully woven into a seamless and perfect tapestry- accurately depicting a little known aspect of the Second World War - Slovakia's participation on the side of the Axis forces. A partnership with Nazi Germany which was intended to cause a "Slavic wedge" between the Allies and the Slavic countries of Europe.

Download or read book After Hitler Before Stalin written by James Ramon Felak and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2009-07-16 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Hitler, Before Stalin examines the crucial postwar period in Slovakia, following Nazi occupation and ending with the Communist coup of February1948. Centering his work around the major political role of the Catholic Church and its leaders, James Ramon Felak offers a fascinating study of the interrelationship of Slovak Catholics, Democrats, and Communists. He provides an in-depth examination of Communist policies toward Catholics and their strategies to court Catholic voters, and he chronicles the variety of political stances Catholics maintained during Slovakia's political turmoil. Felak opens by providing a background on pre-war and wartime Slovak politics, notably the rise of Slovak Catholic nationalism and Slovakia's alignment with Nazi Germany during World War II. He then describes the union formed in the famed "April Agreement" of 1946 between the Democratic Party and Catholics that guaranteed a landslide victory for the Democrats and insured a position for Catholics in the new regime. Felak views other major political events of the period, including: the 1947 Czechoslovak war crimes trial of Father Jozef Tiso; education policy; the treatment of the Hungarian minority; the trumped-up "anti-state conspiracy" movement led by police in the Fall of 1947; and the subsequent Communist putsch. Through extensive research in Slovak national archives, including those of the Democratic and Communist parties, After Hitler, Before Stalin assembles a comprehensive study of the predominant political forces and events of this tumultuous period and the complex motivations behind them.

Download or read book Vanished History written by Tomas Sniegon and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitler’s Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however, remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps. About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.

Download or read book Slovakia in History written by Mikuláš Teich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Slovakia's identity seemed inextricably linked with that of the former state. This book explores the key moments and themes in the history of Slovakia from the Duchy of Nitra's ninth-century origins to the establishment of independent Slovakia at midnight 1992–3. Leading scholars chart the gradual ethnic awakening of the Slovaks during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and examine how Slovak national identity took shape with the codification of standard literary Slovak in 1843 and the subsequent development of the Slovak national movement. They show how, after a thousand years of Magyar-Slovak coexistence, Slovakia became part of the new Czechoslovak state from 1918–39, and shed new light on its role as a Nazi client state as well as on the postwar developments leading up to full statehood in the aftermath of the collapse of communism in 1989. There is no comparable book in English on the subject.

Download or read book Priest Politician Collaborator written by James Mace Ward and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Priest, Politician, Collaborator, James Mace Ward offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language biography of the Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso (1887–1947). The first president of an independent Slovakia, established as a satellite of Nazi Germany, Tiso was ultimately hanged for treason and (in effect) crimes against humanity by a postwar reunified Czechoslovakia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ward portrays Tiso as a devoutly religious man who came to privilege the maintenance of a Slovak state over all other concerns, helping thus to condemn Slovak Jewry to destruction. Ward, however, refuses to reduce Tiso to a mere opportunist, portraying him also as a man of principle and a victim of international circumstances. This potent mix, combined with an almost epic ability to deny the consequences of his own actions, ultimately led to Tiso’s undoing. Tiso began his career as a fervent priest seeking to defend the church and pursue social justice within the Kingdom of Hungary. With the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the creation of a Czechoslovak Republic, these missions then fused with a parochial Slovak nationalist agenda, a complex process that is the core narrative of the book. Ward presents the strongest case yet for Tiso’s heavy responsibility in the Holocaust, crimes that he investigates as an outcome of the interplay between Tiso’s lifelong pattern of collaboration and the murderous international politics of Hitler’s Europe. To this day memories of Tiso divide opinion within Slovakia, burdening the country’s efforts to come to terms with its own history. As portrayed in this masterful biography, Tiso’s life not only illuminates the history of a small state but also supplies a missing piece of the larger puzzle that was interwar and wartime Europe.

Download or read book Czecho Slovakia written by Eric Stein and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2000-01-26 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDescribes the peaceful breakup of the Czechoslovak Federation /div

Download or read book Germany s First Ally written by Charles K. Kliment and published by Schiffer Military History. This book was released on 1997 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slovakia split from Czechoslovakia and formed its own state on March 14, 1939. The Slovak State was born under the auspices of Hitler's Third Reich and became its first ally on September 1, 1939, when it took part in the invasion of Poland. The Slovak army inherited its weapons, equipment, training manuals and its doctrine from the defunct Czechoslovak Army. Though hampered by a shortage of specialists in its air force, armored units and artillery, it managed to field several division-sized units and sustain them during the initial three years of combat on the Eastern front. Its Mobile division fought its way all the way from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus. In the last years of the war, the Slovak people became more and more disillusioned with the war and with their own semi-fascist government. These feelings led to mounting desertions in the fighting units, and culminated in the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944. Though the uprising was liquidated after two months of bitter fighting, it gave the Slovak nation the right to join the victorious allies and be accepted back into the restored Czechoslovakia. Though the Slovak army was by far the smallest of the armies of Germany's allies on the Eastern front, it was part of this grandiose "clash of titans" and deserves thus a place in the history of the Second World War. This book describes in detail the composition, dislocation and equipment of all branches of the Slovak army (infantry, artillery, armored and air force) and its operational history through the war years.

Download or read book Operation Barbarossa and Germany s Defeat in the East written by David Stahel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an important reassessment of the failure of Germany's 1941 campaign against the Soviet Union.

Download or read book Savage Continent written by Keith Lowe and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years... The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.

Download or read book Zero Point Ukraine written by Olena Stiazhkina and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her Four Essays on World War II, Olena Stiazhkina inscribes the Ukrainian history of World War II into a wider European and world context. Among other aspects, she analyzes the mobilization measures on the eve of the war, and reconsiders Soviet narratives on them. Scrutinizing social and political processes initiated by the Bolshevik leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, she outlines how mobilization and militarization became integral parts of Soviet politics. Today, the Kremlin uses Soviet and post-Soviet Russian narratives of World War II to justify its aggressive policies towards a number of democratic countries. Russia is engaged in falsification of the past to underpin claims of a so-called “Russian World” and its ongoing war against Ukraine. Against this background, Stiazhkina offers a new understanding of what happened in Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.

Download or read book The Czech and Slovak Republics written by M. Mark Stolarik and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in the book compare the Czech Republic and Slovakia since the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993. The papers deal with the causes of the divorce and discuss the political, economic and social developments in the new countries. This is the only English-language volume that presents the synoptic findings of leading Czech, Slovak, and North American scholars in the field. The authors include two former Prime Ministers of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, eight leading scholars (four Czechs and four Slovaks), and eight knowledgeable commentators from North America. The most significant new insight is that in spite of predictions by various pundits in the Western World that Czechia would flourish after the breakup and Slovakia would languish, the opposite has happened. While the Czech Republic did well in its early years, it is now languishing while Slovakia, which had a rough start, is now doing very well. Anyone interested in the history of the Czech and Slovak Republics over the last twenty years will find gratification in reading this book.

Download or read book In Her Father s Eyes written by Béla Weichherz and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Her Father's Eyes sheds light on a fascinating but underexamined corner of Central Europe, where anti-Jewish measures often exceeded Nazi Germany's in their harshness. By bridging prewar and wartime periods, the diary also provides a rich context for understanding the history from which the Holocaust emerged. And all the while, it remains a moving story of a father's profound love for his only child."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Hungary in World War II written by Deborah S. Cornelius and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Hungary's participation in World War II is part of a much larger narrative—one that has never before been fully recounted for a non-Hungarian readership. As told by Deborah Cornelius, it is a fascinating tale of rise and fall, of hopes dashed and dreams in tatters. Using previously untapped sources and interviews she conducted for this book, Cornelius provides a clear account of Hungary’s attempt to regain the glory of the Hungarian Kingdom by joining forces with Nazi Germany—a decision that today seems doomed to fail from the start. For scholars and history buff s alike, Hungary in World War II is a riveting read. Cornelius begins her study with the Treaty of Trianon, which in 1920 spelled out the terms of defeat for the former kingdom. The new country of Hungary lost more than 70 percent of the kingdom’s territory, saw its population reduced by nearly the same percentage, and was stripped of five of its ten most populous cities. As Cornelius makes vividly clear, nearly all of the actions of Hungarian leaders during the succeeding decades can be traced back to this incalculable defeat. In the early years of World War II, Hungary enjoyed boom times—and the dream of restoring the Hungarian Kingdom began to rise again. Caught in the middle as the war engulfed Europe, Hungary was drawn into an alliance with Nazi Germany. When the Germans appeared to give Hungary much of its pre–World War I territory, Hungarians began to delude themselves into believing they had won their long-sought objective. Instead, the final year of the world war brought widespread destruction and a genocidal war against Hungarian Jews. Caught between two warring behemoths, the country became a battleground for German and Soviet forces. In the wake of the war, Hungary suffered further devastation under Soviet occupation and forty-five years of communist rule. The author first became interested in Hungary in 1957 and has visited the country numerous times, beginning in the 1970s. Over the years she has talked with many Hungarians, both scholars and everyday people. Hungary in World War II draws skillfully on these personal tales to narrate events before, during, and after World War II. It provides a comprehensive and highly readable history of Hungarian participation in the war, along with an explanation of Hungarian motivation: the attempt of a defeated nation to relive its former triumphs.

Download or read book The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination 1938 89 written by Hana Kubátová and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination,1938-89 is the first critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices in both main parts of former Czechoslovakia. The authors identify anti-Jewish prejudices over almost fifty years of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the post-Munich period and the Second World War (1938–45), the post-war reconstruction (1945–48), as well as the Communist rule with both its thaws and returns to hardline rule (1948–89). It is a provocative examination of the construction of the image of ‘the Jew’ in the Czech and Slovak majority societies, the assigning of character and other traits – real or imaginary – to individuals or groups. The book analyses the impact of these constructed images on the attitudes of the majority societies towards the Jews, and on Holocaust memory in the country. "This meticulously researched study covers the late 1930s to the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, then when Slovakia became a separate country under Nazi domination during WW II and much of the Czech Republic was a German 'protectorate.'...Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, professionals." - R.M. Seltzer, emeritus, Hunter College, CUNY, in: CHOICE 55.12 (2018)

Download or read book The Dead Man in the Bunker written by Martin Pollack and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1947, a man is found shot to death in an old military bunker near the Brenner Pass that links Italy to Austria. His papers claim him to be a farm labourer; the scars on his face could only have come from duelling, the mark of a man who was once a member of a German student fraternity. He is Dr. Gerhard Bast, lawyer, athlete, former head of the Gestapo in the Austrian city of Linz and a wanted war criminal. A few years before, his affair with a married woman led to the birth of a son, Martin Pollack, who in his maturity sets out to discover the truth about his father." "Martin Pollack reveals that his loving grandparents, with whom he spent long and happy holidays as a child, were ardent and unrepentant Nazis who never ceased to hate and resent Jews and Slavs, and never acknowledged what their son had really done. And what he did is the heart of this book, as Pollack quietly, relentlessly reconstructs the family history, moving from present-day Slovenia - where his grandparents were involved in vicious sectarian strife with their Slav neighbours - through Austria between the wars, where the family were enthusiastic members of the illegal Nazi party. Once war begins in 1939, Pollack tracks his father from Austria to Poland and on into Russia, where he was the head of an Einsatzgruppe, a killing squad, and back into Poland during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The closing months of the war find him rounding up Jews and partisans in Slovakia. In every place that Pollack's father has been, the evidence of mass murder mounts higher and higher, the undeniable evidence impossible to resist."--BOOK JACKET.