The German Secret Field Police In Greece 1941 1944

 The Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police) was the political police force of the German Army during World War II. Its members were drawn from both the regular German police, including detectives, and various Nazi security organizations. The goals of the GFP were numerous and included protecting important political and military leaders; investigating black market activities as well as acts of sabotage and espionage; locating deserters; examining anti–German activists and hunting down partisans. While performing these duties, GFP members immersed themselves in criminal activities. This book focuses on the function of the GFP in Greece compared to that of the GFP elsewhere in Europe.

The Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police) was the political police force of the German Army during World War II. Its members were drawn from both the regular German police, including detectives, and various Nazi security organizations. The goals of the GFP were numerous and included protecting important political and military leaders; investigating black market activities as well as acts of sabotage and espionage; locating deserters; examining anti-German activists and hunting down partisans. While performing these duties, GFP members immersed themselves in criminal activities. This book focuses on the function of the GFP in Greece compared to that of the GFP elsewhere in Europe.

The first comparative, comprehensive history of Nazi mass killing – showing how genocidal policies were crucial to the regime’s strategy to win the war Nazi Germany killed approximately 13 million civilians and other non-combatants in deliberate policies of mass murder, mostly during the war years. Almost half the victims were Jewish, systematically destroyed in the Holocaust, the core of the Nazis’ pan-European racial purification programme. Alex Kay argues that the genocide of European Jewry can be examined in the wider context of Nazi mass killing. For the first time, Empire of Destruction considers Europe’s Jews alongside all the other major victim groups: captive Red Army soldiers, the Soviet urban population, unarmed civilian victims of preventive terror and reprisals, the mentally and physically disabled, the European Roma and the Polish intelligentsia. Kay shows how each of these groups was regarded by the Nazi regime as a potential threat to Germany’s ability to successfully wage a war for hegemony in Europe. Combining the full quantitative scale of the killings with the individual horror, this is a vital and groundbreaking work.

This book explores Greek collaboration with the Nazis during the Axis occupation of Greece in the Second World War, a topic that continues to be one of the biggest taboos in Greek society. It tells the mostly unknown story of the Greek quislings, an heterogeneous amalgam of fascists, germanophiles, anti-Semites, criminals and opportunists, but also of genuine patriots and ordinary citizens. It provides a clear picture on the Axis-held puppet governments in Athens and the court of radical Greek Nazi political organizations that supported them. It also examines specific aspects of collaboration, from the issuing of German-sponsored propaganda to the creation of paramilitary units to fight along the Wehrmacht, from the intrigues within the collaborationist government to the questionable economic profiteering of some locals. The book explains why so many Greeks chose to ally themselves with the enemy instead of choosing Resistance and reveals the most occult secrets of Greece.

When Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland in 1939, he was following a plan which he had outlined many years earlier in Mein Kampf. Hitler's dream of creating Lebensraum--living space--for the German people required the conquest of the East: Poland. In 1941, the Führer expanded that goal further with the invasion of the Soviet Union. By the fall of 1941, almost 85 million Soviet citizens--nearly half the population--were living under German occupation, while in Poland, the Germans ruled about 34 million Poles. The people who lived in these eastern regions of Europe were considered Untermensch, subhuman, by the Nazi racial theorists. The policies which the Third Reich imposed on these mostly Slavic peoples in the East therefore, were meant to terrorize and subjugate about 119 million human beings. The eventual goal was to exterminate the Jewish population, but also to wipe out a large portion of the larger population, either directly by killing them, or indirectly by starving and working them to death. In this way, the Nazis would create the available land for German colonization that Hitler decreed was necessary. This comprehensive study covers German rule in Poland, the Baltic States, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Russia, looking at the formations and locations of the German occupation forces, as well as describing the rise of resistance to that occupation. It includes a full analysis of the policies that the Nazis employed in their attempt at empire building in the East, and the causes for its failure.

Since unification, the Federal Republic of Germany has made vaunted efforts to make amends for the crimes of the Third Reich. Yet it remains the case that the demands for restitution by many countries that were occupied during the Second World War are unresolved, and recent demands from Greece and Poland have only reignited old debates. This book reconstructs the German occupation of Poland and Greece and gives a thorough accounting of these debates. Working from the perspective of international law, it deepens the scholarly discourse around the issue, clarifying the ‘never-ending story’ of German reparations policy and making a principled call for further action. A compilation of primary sources comprising 125 annotated key texts (512 pages) on the complexity of reparations discussions covering the period between 1941 and the end of 2017 is available for free on the Berghahn Books website, doi: 10.3167/9781800732575.dd.