Download or read book The Jews of Bielorussia During World War II written by Shalom Cholawsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1998. This study fills a gap in the history of the fate of the Jews in Bielorussia during the Holocaust. The ghettos of Bielorussia were populated by a vibrant Jewish community, with its own particular traditions, its own unique characteristics justifying our detailed examination of its fate. In general, it may be said that every region, both in Eastern Europe and in other parts of the continent, differed from its neighbors.

Download or read book Marching into Darkness written by Waitman Wade Beorn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis. Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexual violence, and grave robbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. Improvised extermination progressively became methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." The Wehrmacht also used the pretense of Jewish anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans. Through military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of an army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.

Download or read book Jewish Belarusian History written by Source Wikipedia and published by University-Press.org. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 30. Chapters: Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany, History of the Jews in Belarus, Military history of Belarus during World War II, Pinsk massacre, Pale of Settlement, Belarusian Central Rada, Lakhva, Zhetel Ghetto, achwa Ghetto, Volozhin yeshiva, Naliboki massacre, Sluzk Affair, General Jewish Labour Bund in Belarus, Mir yeshiva. Excerpt: The occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany occurred as part of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) and ended in August 1944 with the Soviet Operation Bagration. The Soviet and Belarussian historiographies study this subject in context of Belarus, regarded as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR, a constituent republic of the Soviet Union or USSR) in the 1941 borders as a whole. Polish historiography, or possibly part of it, insists on special, even separate treatment for the East Lands of the Poland in the 1921 borders (alias "Kresy Wschodnie" alias West Belarus), which were incorporated into the BSSR after the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. More than 100,000 people in West Belarus were imprisoned, executed or transported to the eastern USSR by Soviet authorities before the German invasion. The NKVD (Soviet secret police) probably killed more than 1,000 prisoners in June/July 1941, for example, in Chervyen, Hlybokaye, Hrodna and Vileyka. These crimes stoked anti-Communist feelings in the Belarusian population and were used by Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. After twenty months of Soviet rule in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, Nazi Germany and its Axis allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Eastern Belarus suffered particularly heavily during the fighting and German occupation. Following bloody encirclement battles, all of the present-day Belarus territory was occupied by the Germans by the end of...

Download or read book Jewish Life in Belarus written by Leonid Smilovitsky and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-20 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish life in Belarus in the years after World War II was long an enigma. Officially it was held to be as being non-existent, and in the ideological atmosphere of the time research on the matter was impossible. Jewish community life had been wiped out by the Nazis, and information on its revival was suppressed by the communists. For more than half a century the truth about Jewish life during this period was sealed in inaccessible archives. The Jews of Belarus preferred to keep silent rather than expose themselves to the animosity of the authorities. Although the fate of Belarusian Jews before and during the war has now been amply studied, this book is one of the first attempts to study Jewish life in Belarus during the last decade of Stalin's rule. In addition to archival materials, the present research is based on a questionnaire submitted to former residents of Belarus in Israel, as well as information from periodicals, collections of documents, statistical reports and monographs.

Download or read book Soviet Jews in World War II written by Harriet Murav and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history.

Download or read book Polish Jews in the Soviet Union 1939 1959 written by Katharina Friedla and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Download or read book The Jews of Pinsk 1881 to 1941 written by Azriel Shohet and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing the reality of life in this important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905 Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this dynamic center of Jewish life were intertwined. Pinsk's role in the bloody aftermath of World War One is still the subject of scholarly debates: the murder of 35 Jewish men from Pinsk, many from its educated elite, provoked the American and British leaders to send emissaries to Pinsk. Shohet argues that the executions were a deliberate ploy by the Polish military and government to intimidate the Jewish population of the new Poland. Despite an increasingly hostile Polish state, Pinsk's Jews managed to maintain their community through the 1920s and 30s—until World War Two brought a grim Soviet interregnum succeeded by the entry of the Nazis on July 4th, 1941. For the first volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 at www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1442.

Download or read book Nazi War Crimes in Belarus written by Source Wikipedia and published by University-Press.org. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 49. Chapters: The Holocaust in Belarus, Einsatzgruppen, Reichskommissariat Ostland, Generalplan Ost, Heinz Jost, Blue Police, Arthur Nebe, Krupki, Latvian Auxiliary Police, Zhetel Ghetto, Maly Trostenets extermination camp, Erich Ehrlinger, Sonderaktion 1005, Waldemar Klingelhofer, Schutzmannschaft-Brigade Siegling, Wilhelm Kube, Rudolf Joachim Seck, Grodno Ghetto, Minsk Ghetto, Pripyat swamps, achwa Ghetto, Eduard Strauch, Walter Schimana, Karl Jager, Dzyatlava massacre, Sluzk Affair, Antopal, Operation Cottbus, Belarusian Auxiliary Police, Bia ystok Ghetto, Jager Report, The destruction of the German garrison in Lenin, Polizei-Bataillon 33, Brest Ghetto, Mikhail Gorshkow, Vitebsk Ghetto. Excerpt: Einsatzgruppen (German: "task forces"; singular Einsatzgruppe; official full name Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories. The Einsatzgruppen operated throughout the territory occupied by the German armed forces following the German invasions of Poland, in September, 1939, and later, of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Einsatzgruppen carried out operations ranging from the murder of a few people to operations which lasted over two or more days, such as the massacres at Babi Yar (33,771 killed in two days) and Rumbula (25,000 killed in two days). The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murders of over 1,000,000 people, and they were the first Nazi organizations to commence mass killing of Jews as an organized policy. The Einsatzgruppen were formed under the direction of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich (deputy to Heinrich Himmler) and operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS) before and during World War II. From...

Download or read book The Belarus Secret written by John Loftus and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1982 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, with the outbreak of the Cold War, numerous Belorussian Nazi collaborators were admitted to the U.S. and received citizenship. The U.S. intelligence agencies gave them sanctuary due to their opposition to communism, in order to make use of their knowledge of Eastern Europe. The U.S. took this action despite strong evidence that these people were guilty of war crimes. Shows that all high ranking Belorussian Nazi collaborators (Radaslaw Astrowsky, Frants Kushal, Stanislaw Stankevich, Emanuel Jasiuk, etc.) took part, in some form, in the genocide of the Jews, in particular in the mass murders in Borisov and Kletsk in 1941.

Download or read book Defiance written by Nechama Tec and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-26 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis. Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.

Download or read book Jews Without Yellow Stars written by Hersh Smolar and published by Yiddish Rediscoveries. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They were soldiers by circumstance, not by choice. Heroes by necessity, with nothing left to lose, Jewish resistance fighters fought back against the Nazis from strongholds deep in the primevals forests of World War II Belorussia. Among the most ferocious fighters were Jewish female partisans who had lost their children at the hands of the Germans. Hersh Smolar - a Polish Jew, prolific writer, and ardent activist - was front and center in the Jewish resistance. His short vignettes of partisan life in the Nali-boki forest chronicle the quiet, relentless pursuit of the enemy and the ongoing efforts to liberate Jews from the Minsk ghetto. Ruth Murphy's translation of Smolar's Yiddish work gives us an intimate view of ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances; people who embarked on unimaginable missions to avenge the brutal murders of their friends, family, and way of life. These are battle reports delivered at a personal level, fraught with anger, heartache, and determination. "A careful translation from the original Yiddish of Hersh Smolar's Yidn on gele lates, a collection of stories about Jewish resistance to the German invaders in what was then Belorussia (now Belarus) during World War II. Smolar, a Polish Jew and writer, trapped in German-occupied Minsk during the war, became a leader of the Minsk Jewish resistance. Smolar's vignettes, written soon after the war was over, vividly describe the suffering of Jews in Belorussian ghettos, the dangers that they encountered living in partisan units in the forest, and their passionate hatred of the German Army for its slaughter of their families and their people. Belorussia, unlike European countries to its west, was covered with dense primeval forests, which became the main terrain of the battles between partisans and German soldiers. Unlike in Poland and other West European countries, Jewish and Soviet partisans frequently joined together in fighting the Germans. As elsewhere in Europe, Jewish female partisans, whose children in many cases had been murdered by the Germans, fought the Germans with particular ferocity. Smolar's own participation in these events, and his skill as a writer, give his account of the Jewish resistance in and near Minsk a rare immediacy." -Barbara Epstein, author of The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism

Download or read book Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans written by Jack Kagan and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Two cousins relate their experiences in war-torn Russia during the Second World War. Natives of Novogrodek, part of present-day Belarus, they describe Jewish life in Novogrodec before the Holocaust and furnish a most moving account of how a thriving and prosperous Jewish Centre was decimated by the Nazis and local collaborators. Initial joy when their hometown was taken over by the Soviet Union disappeared when the Germans ran the Russians out of town and started implementing policies to eradicate all Jews and anything Jewish. The authors provide a unique view, not only of actual incidents, but of how two different people react to events and experiences. This is their story: a tale of tragedy, courage, defeat, and triumph.” --

Download or read book Ghosts of War written by Franziska Exeler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war? Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.

Download or read book The Jewish Enemy written by Jeffrey Herf and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds. According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.

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 The Portrayal of Jews in Modern Bie arusian Literature written by Zina J. Gimpelevich and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cold Rush Martin Breum travels through and describes the new quest for the Arctic and the tortuous ongoing diplomatic endeavours to maintain peace, while the governments involved all develop still stronger security presences.

Download or read book The Minsk Ghetto 1941 1943 written by Barbara Epstein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-07-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.