Himmler S Auxiliaries

Lumans studies the relations between Nazi Germany and the German minority populations of other European countries, examining these ties within the context of Hitler's foreign policy and the racial policies of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. He shows how the Reich's racial and political interests in these German minorities between 1933 and 1945 helped determine its behavior toward neighboring states. Originally published in 1993. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Valdis Lumans provides an authoritative, balanced, and comprehensive account of one of the most complex, and conflicted, arenas of the Second World War. Struggling against both Germany and the Soviet Union, Latvia emerged as an independent nation state after the First World War. In 1940, the Soviets occupied neutral Latvia, deporting or executing more than 30,000 Latvians before the Nazis invaded in 1941 and installed a puppet regime. The Red Army expelled the Germans in 1944 and reincorporated Latvia as a Soviet Republic. By the end of the war, an estimated 180,000 Latvians fled to the West. The Soviets would deport at least another 100,000. Drawing on a wide range of sources--many brought together here for the first time--Lumans synthesizes political, military, social, economic, diplomatic, and cultural history. He moves carefully through traditional sources, many of them partisan, to scholarship emerging since the end of the Cold War, to confront such issues as political loyalties, military collaboration, resistance, capitulation, the Soviet occupation, anti-Semitism, and the Latvian role in the Holocaust.

Katrin Himmler’s cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story reveals – in all its dark complexity – the gulf between the ‘normality’ of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member. This riveting family memoir provides essential new information on the private life and background of one of the twentieth- century’s most notorious killers – not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family. It also offers a unique account of one women’s courageous attempt to deal with her chilling inheritance. ‘It is part of the creeping discomfort in reading her book to realise the incredibly ordinary middle-class background of these three sons of a rather pompous provincial headmaster and to see how, right until the end, he was almost able to convince himself it hadn't happened like it had' Sunday Times ‘You get a vivid sense of a particular kind of German conservatism - Roman Catholic, monarchist - and of how, weirdly, it found an outlet in the upstart, part-pagan thuggery of Nazism’ Independent ‘One can only admire her bravery . . . In a way, Katrin Himmler's book is not a story about the past, but one about the present. The most interesting details are the ones she gives of her own quest’ Daily Telegraph

Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and events on the Eastern Front that same year were pivotal to the history of World War II. It was during this year that the radicalization of Nazi policy -- through both an all-encompassing approach to warfare and the application of genocidal practices -- became most obvious. Germany's military aggression and overtly ideological conduct, culminating in genocide against Soviet Jewry and the decimation of the Soviet population through planned starvation and brutal antipartisan policies, distinguished Operation Barbarossa-the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union-from all previous military campaigns in modern European history. This collection of essays, written by young scholars of seven different nationalities, provides readers with the most current interpretations of Germany's military, economic, racial, and diplomatic policies in 1941. With its breadth and its thematic focus on total war, genocide, and radicalization, this volume fills a considerable gap in English-language literature on Germany's war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and the radicalization of World War II during this critical year. Alex J. Kay is the author of Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941 and is an independent contractor for the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences. Jeff Rutherford is assistant professor of history at Wheeling Jesuit University, where he teaches modern European history. David Stahel is the author of Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East and Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East.

One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. This book delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish population of Ukraine under German occupation in 1941–44. The extent of OUN and UPA’s culpability in the Holocaust has been a controversial issue in Ukraine and within the Ukrainian diaspora as well as in Jewish communities and Israel. Occasionally, the controversy has broken into the press of North America, the EU, and Israel. Triangulating sources from Jewish survivors, Soviet investigations, German documentation, documents produced by OUN itself, and memoirs of OUN activists, it has been possible to establish that: OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans' mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.

Follows the Nazis' attempts at a large-scale deportation system after its invasion of Poland in 1939 as it sought to reclaim territory and repatriate that space with an ever-expanding population of ethnic Germans. Standing in the way, however, were millions of ethnic Poles. Rutherford recounts the strenuous efforts and unexpected obstacles to the deportations, which in many ways were a dress rehearsal for the Final Solution.

The story of Hitler’s Wehrmachtsgefolge (armed forces auxiliaries) is less well known than that of Germany’s other armed forces in World War II, such as the panzer divisions, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. The Organization Todt (construction company), Reichsarbeitsdienst (labor service), Nationalsozialistische Kraftfahrer Korps (driver’s corp) and Volkssturm (people’s militia) were given the status of armed forces auxiliaries to protect their members under the Geneva Conventions should they be taken prisoner. By 1944, the Wehrmachtsgefolge comprised 40 percent of the German armed forces, and their contribution to the war effort was far from negligible. This illustrated history documents the development, structure and organization, uniforms, regalia and technical data of these units and discusses their role in the war and during the prewar period.

Once upon a time the Himmlers were just a normal German family, middle-class, hard-working, well-educated. There were three brothers, Gebhart, Heinrich, and Ernst. Heinrich grew up to become the head of Hitler’s SS, mastermind of the concentration camp system, and chief perpetrator of the Holocaust. When Katrin Himmler, Heinrich’s great-niece, was 15, one of her schoolmates asked during a history lesson if she was related to the Himmler. "Yes," she stammered, at which there was a deathly hush in the classroom and the teacher, embarrassed and unsure, quickly moved the lesson on. As she grew older, Katrin gave her family history a wide berth, but married to an Israeli whose family was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto and with a young, half-Jewish son, she realizes that she cannot evade the past so easily. Katrin Himmler’s cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story reveals—in all its dark complexity—the gulf between the "normality" of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member and a more nuanced portrait of Heinrich himself emerges—not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family.