The Slovak Polish Border 1918 1947

The first English-language monograph on the Slovak-Polish border in 1918-47 explores the interplay of politics, diplomacy, moral principles and self-determination. This book argues that the failure to reconcile strategic objectives with territorial claims could cost a higher price than the geographical size of the disputed region would indicate.

Baer's biography of the former Czechoslovak foreign minister Vladimír Clementis (1902–1952) is the first historical study on the Communist politician who was executed with Rudolf Slánský and other top Communist Party members after the show trial of 1952. Born in Tisovec, Central Slovakia, Clementis studied law at Charles University in Prague in the 1920s and had his own law firm in Bratislava in the 1930s. After the Munich Agreement of 1938, he went into exile to France and Great Britain, where he worked at the Czechoslovak broadcast at the BBC for the exile government of Edvard Beneš. After the Second World War, Clementis' political career at the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry blossomed. In 1945, he became Assistant Secretary of State under Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. After Masaryk's mysterious death in 1948, Clementis was appointed foreign minister. This biography offers an unprecedented insight into the mind of a Slovak leftist intellectual of the interwar generation who died at the command of the comrade he had admired since his youth: Generalissimus Stalin.

With the end of World War I, a new Republic of Poland emerged on the maps of Europe, made up of some of the territory from the first Polish Republic, including Wolyn and Wilno, and significant parts of Belarus, Upper Silesia, Eastern Galicia, and East Prussia. The resulting conglomeration of ethnic groups left many substantial minorities wanting independence. The approach of World War II provided the minorities' leaders a new opportunity in their nationalist movements, and many sided with one or the other of Poland's two enemies--the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany--in hopes of achieving their goals at the expense of Poland and its people. Based on primary and secondary sources in numerous languages (including Polish, German, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian and English), this work examines the roles of the ethnic minorities in the collapse of the Republic and in the atrocities that occurred under the occupying troops. The Polish government's response to mounting ethnic tensions in the prewar era and its conduct of the war effort are also examined.

Most of the works on the crises of the 1930s and especially the Munich Agreement in 1938 were written when it was virtually impossible to gain access to the relevant archive collections on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This text studies the Czechoslovak-German crisis and its impact from previously neglected perspectives and celebrates the post-Cold War openness by bringing in new evidence from hitherto inaccessible archives.

This volume analyses the image of ‘the Jew’ as it developed and transformed in both Czech and Slovak society under the nondemocratic regimes of the twentieth century. It is the first serious attempt to offer a comparative analysis of anti-Jewish prejudices in the Czech and Slovak mindset between 1938 and 1989.

Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

This book examines the ways Poland dealt with the territories and peoples it gained from Germany after the Second World War.