Download or read book The Gulag in East Germany written by Ulrich Merten and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gulag in East Germany: Soviet Special Camps, 1945-1950 is the real story of what happened to thousands upon thousands of German victims of Stalinism who were incarcerated in special camps called Spezlager in the Soviet zone of occupation and abroad. The Spetzlager were under the direct control of the Soviet central camp administration in the eastern occupation zone of Germany. The Red Army's hold over most of Eastern Europe in 1944-1945 permitted Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the Soviet secret security services to project their political power beyond the USSR's traditional borders to construct a socialist society that mirrored their own. In addition to building new camps, the Soviets used former Nazi concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen for the detainment of political prisoners where ultimately tens of thousands perished. This book draws upon a vast trove of English- and German-language research to document, in precise and excruciating detail, the Soviet Union's violation of human rights in it administration of these camps. The book is also remarkable in its careful examination of Western Allied internship camps; the practices, goals, and policies of American, French, and British camps are compared with astonishing insights. Published close to the one hundredth anniversary of the tragic and violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, this book represents a critical contribution to the study of the Spezlager and indeed the postwar history of Germany.

Download or read book The Gulag Study written by Michael E. Allen and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Voices from the Gulag written by Ulrich Merten and published by . This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Voices from the Gulag" draws on a wealth of available sources to tell the story of the German settlements in Russia, from their beginning during the reign of Empress Catherine the Great, to their accomplishments and, finally, their destruction under Stalin. It relates the harsh living conditions of the survivors in Siberia and Central Asia under subsequent communist governments and, finally, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, their return to their ancient homeland. Their personal stories tell of their suffering, as well as their ability to overcome the hardships of the Soviet Union. Author Ulrich Merten was born in Berlin, Germany, and came to the United States as a small child before the Second World War. His family were political refugees because his father was a lawyer in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, active in prosecuting the Nazi Party. He was fired immediately when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and sent to Oranienburg Concentration Camp, charged with high treason. Mr. Merten grew up in New York City and after the war, returned to Europe, studying at the University of ZUrich, Switzerland and the University of Zaragoza in Spain. He subsequently earned his BA degree at Columbia College, Columbia University and M.A. at the Graduate Faculties, Columbia University. In his professional life he was an international banker, a senior executive of the Bank of America, working almost exclusively in Latin America and the Caribbean, over a period of 38 years. His book, "Forgotten Voices; The Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II " was published in 2012. There have been eight editions of the book, including soft cover and e-book editions. The author lives in Miami with his wife.

Download or read book Gulag written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. “A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Download or read book Suppressed Terror written by Bettina Greiner and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of World War II, the Soviet secret police installed ten special camps in the Soviet occupation zone, later to become the German Democratic Republik. Between 1945 and 1950, roughly 154,000 Germans were held incommunicado in these camps. Whether those accused of being Nazis, spies, or terrorists were indeed guilty as charged, they were indiscriminately imprisoned as security threats and denied due process of the law. One third of the captives did not survive. To this day, most Germans have no knowledge of this postwar Stalinist persecution, even though it exemplifies in a unique way the entangled history of Germans as perpetrators and victims. How can one write the history of victims in a “society of perpetrators?” This is only one of the questions Displaced Terror: History and Perception of Soviet Special Camps in Germany raises in exploring issues in memory culture in contemporary Germany. The study begins with a detailed description of the camp system against the backdrop of Stalinist security policies in a territory undergoing a transition from war zone to occupation zone to Cold War hot spot. The interpretation of the camps as an instrument of pacification rather than of denacification does not ignore the fact that, while actual perpetrators were a minority, the majority of the special camp inmates had at least been supporters of Nazi rule and were now imprisoned under life-threatening conditions together with victims and opponents of the defeated regime. Based on their detention memoirs, the second part of the book offers a closer look at life and death in the camps, focusing on the prisoners' self-organization and the frictions within these coerced communities. The memoirs also play an important role in the third and last part of the study. Read as attempts to establish public acknowledgment of violence suffered by Germans, they mirror German memory culture since the end of World War II.

Download or read book Allied Internment Camps in Occupied Germany written by Andrew H. Beattie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how all four Allied powers interned alleged Nazis without trial in camps only recently liberated from Nazi control.

Download or read book Voices from the Gulag written by Tzvetan Todorov and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We also hear from guards, commandants, and bureaucrats whose lives were bound together with the inmates in an absurd drama. Regardless of their grade and duties, all agree that those responsible for these "excesses" were above or below them, yet never they themselves. Accountability is thereby diffused through the many strata of the state apparatus, providing legal defenses and "clear" consciences. Yet, as the concluding section of interviews - with the children and wives of the victims - reminds us, accountability is a moral and historical imperative."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Soviet Gulag written by Michael David-Fox and published by Russian and East European Stud. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent archival revolution, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous "literary investigation" The Gulag Archipelago was the most authoritative overview of the Stalinist system of camps. This volume develops a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of the Gulag. It brings a greater awareness of the wide variety of camps, the forced labor system, and the Gulag as viewed in a global historical context, among many other topics. It also offers fascinating new interpretations of the interrelationship and importance of the Gulag to the larger Soviet political and economic system, and how they were in fact, parts of the same entity"--

Download or read book We Germans written by Alexander Starritt and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE A letter from a German soldier to his grandson recounts the terrors of war on the Eastern Front, and a postwar ordinary life in search of atonement, in this “raw, visceral, and propulsive” novel (New York Times Book Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice In the throes of the Second World War, young Meissner, a college student with dreams of becoming a scientist, is drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front. But soon his regiment collapses in the face of the onslaught of the Red Army, hell-bent on revenge in its race to Berlin. Many decades later, now an old man reckoning with his past, Meissner pens a letter to his grandson explaining his actions, his guilt as a Nazi participator, and the difficulty of life after war. Found among his effects after his death, the letter is at once a thrilling story of adventure and a questing rumination on the moral ambiguity of war. In his years spent fighting the Russians and attempting afterward to survive the Gulag, Meissner recounts a life lived in perseverance and atonement. Wracked with shame—both for himself and for Germany—the grandfather explains his dark rationale, exults in the courage of others, and blurs the boundaries of right and wrong. We Germans complicates our most steadfast beliefs and seeks to account for the complicity of an entire country in the perpetration of heinous acts. In this breathless and page-turning story, Alexander Starritt also presents us with a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one's own life at the cost of the lives of others and asks whether we can ever truly atone.

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 Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Download or read book Gulag Voices written by Anne Applebaum and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-11 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects the writings of a diverse group of people who survived imprisonment in the Gulag, recounting their experiences and relationships, and offering insight into the psychological aspects of life in the camps.

Download or read book Weimar written by Michael H. Kater and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany’s most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar’s creative lights, transforming the onetime artists’ utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. Kater’s richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond.

Download or read book Forgotten Voices written by Ulrich Merten and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The news agency Reuters reported in 2009 that a mass grave containing 1,800 bodies was found in Malbork, Poland. Polish authorities suspected that they were German civilians that were killed by advancing Soviet forces. A Polish archeologist supervising the exhumation, said, "We are dealing with a mass grave of civilians, probably of German origin. The presence of children . . . suggests they were civilians." During World War II, the German Nazi regime committed great crimes against innocent civilian victims: Jews, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and other people of Central and Eastern Europe. At war’s end, however, innocent German civilians in turn became victims of crimes against humanity. Forgotten Voices lets these victims of ethnic cleansing tell their story in their own words, so that they and what they endured are not forgotten. This volume is an important supplement to the voices of victims of totalitarianism and has been written in order to keep the historical record clear. The root cause of this tragedy was ultimately the Nazi German regime. As a leading German historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler has noted, "Germany should avoid creating a cult of victimization, and thus forgetting Auschwitz and the mass killing of Russians." Ulrich Merten argues that applying collective punishment to an entire people is a crime against humanity. He concludes that this should also be recognized as a European catastrophe, not only a German one, because of its magnitude and the broad violation of human rights that occurred on European soil. Supplementary maps and pictures are available online at http://www.forgottenvoices.net

Download or read book Stalin s Italian Prisoners of War written by Maria Teresa Giusti and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.

Download or read book KL written by Nikolaus Wachsmann and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise in the spring of 1945.