This thesis focuses on the concept of cultural national identity during the Third Reich and how the Nazis attempted to shape an image of Germany to their liking. By specifically examining musical culture and restrictions, this thesis investigates the methods the Nazis used to define Germany through music by determining what aspects of Germany’s culture were not “traditionally” German—namely those of the Jewish minority in Germany. Therefore, this study follows the Nazi restrictions on the German population who participated in the creation and performance of music and is then contrasted with those imposed upon the corresponding Jewish population. The resulting conclusion is that the Nazis created a place for exclusion and oppression, but managed to, ironically, create a place of refuge for Jewish musicians in the Third Reich. Music was, in the end, an unstoppable force which the Nazis could not control or fully regulate.

This thesis explores the history of one German family during World War II, using the inspiration and background knowledge gained from historic scholarship and literature to create narrative closely following actual experiences and memories to help understand the peculiarities of war narrative and war memory. The sources are interviews with relatives, existing literature on the subject matter, and the writer’s imagination.

Focusing on Rachel Seiffert¡¦s The Dark Room, this thesis discusses three German protagonists¡¦ fictional representations in three different times and space, all coming from different family backgrounds and with different social understandings in relation to the Holocaust in the World War II. In my discussions on this trilogy, moreover, The Dark Room is believed to have demonstrated the notion of ¡§humanity¡¨ in the sense that vulnerability, perseverance, egoism, ignorance, guilt, sorrow, goodwill, evilness, light and darkness are all intertwined and coexisting as some kind of symbiosis, one blended into another. Meanwhile, The Dark Room offers a significant debate over guilt and punishment, especially with the incredibly heavy historical inheritance on those who are descendents of the perpetrators in World War II living in the contemporary times. What is at stake thus is an interpretation and reading of the Holocaust that allows more of a new and multi-dimensional perspective on this traumatic event in the 20th century. This call for fresh ideas and contemporary understandings of the Holocaust can be seen as answered in The Dark Room as this book has successfully provided a glimpse of an atypical account from the perpetrator side of the story. This fact validates The Dark Room as one of the important literary works in the contemporary times.

No description available.

During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 to 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shandong Province in North China achieved an unnoticed but historically significant success in financial affairs. From that time onward, the CCP in Shandong not only controlled economic affairs within its territory, but also obtained access to territories under enemy occupation through manipulation of currency exchange rates and by controlling the trade in staple grains, cotton, salt and peanut oil. As a result, trade with occupied China and with the Japanese invaders became the principal source of revenue of the CCP in Shandong as early as the second half of 1943. By the time of Japan’s defeat in August 1945, about 80% of the CCP’s revenue in Shandong came from trade beyond the areas under its control. Moreover, the CCP in Shandong deliberately carried out a policy of controlled inflation to increase its financial power. The key to this achievement was the CCP’s success in establishing exclusive zones for its banknotes in August 1943. The exclusive use of CCP currency developed in the course of many years of armed conflict among Japanese, CCP and Nationalist (GMD) forces in the province. The CCP’s ii banknotes were backed by Communist military power and military success. From their first days, the banknotes were intertwined with the military power of the CCP in Shandong and the supporting administrative institutions that Party authorities established in the province. The establishment of exclusive currency zones reflected the maturity of the CCP’s party-state. Because external trade was their principal source of revenue, CCP leaders in Shandong lacked the incentive to carry out social reform in Shandong. Moreover, justifications for the CCP’s program of agrarian revolution as carried out elsewhere were not found in Shandong. Rather than seeking social and economic transformation, the CCP built up power with a view to achieving a favourable position vis-à-vis the GMD before the end of the war against Japan. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2008-10-02

The strategic air offensive against Germany during World War II formed a major part of Britain�s wartime military effort and it has subsequently attracted the attention of historians. Despite the attention, historians have paid little attention to the impact of the strategic air offensive on Britain. This thesis attempts to redress this situation by providing an examination of the economic impact on Britain of the offensive. The work puts the economic cost of the offensive into its historical context by describing the strategic air offensive and its intellectual underpinnings. Following this preliminary step, the economic costs are described and quantified across a range of activities using accrual accounting methods. The areas of activity examined include the expansion of the aircraft industry, the cost of individual aircraft types, the cost of constructing airfields, the manufacture and delivery of armaments, petrol and oil, and the recruitment, training and maintenance of the necessary manpower. The findings are that the strategic air offensive cost Britain �2.78 billion, equating to an average cost of �2,911.00 for every operational sortie flown by Bomber Command or �5,914.00 for every Germany civilian killed by aerial bombing. The conclusion reached is the damage inflicted upon Germany by the strategic air offensive imposed a very heavy financial burden on Britain that she could not afford and this burden was a major contributor to Britain�s post-war impoverishment.

This thesis aims to make an original contribution to knowledge by looking at the phenomenon of resistance in the French region of Upper Normandy between 1940 and 1944 from a perspective of ‘history from below’, by looking principally at the testimonies of former resisters, and demonstrating a political history of resistance. The introduction defines what is meant by Upper Normandy and justifies its choice as a region for this study, before analysing both the historiography and the epistemology of resistance, both locally and nationally, and then giving a justification and an analysis of the methodology used. The main body of the thesis is then divided into four chapters. Chapter one looks at resistance that was designed to revolutionise society, by looking at Communist resisters and the idea of the grand soir, as well as the sociological origins of these resisters, and how this influenced their resistance action. Chapter two looks at more gradualist forms of resistance, which were conceived to slowly prepare for an eventual liberation and the struggle against Vichyite hegemony, arguing that these resisters formed a ‘resistance aristocracy’, aiming to slowly forge a post-Vichy vision of the polis. Chapter three analyses resistance purely from a patriotic angle, and identifies three different forms of patriotism, before arguing that resistance was part of a process to ‘remasculate’ France after the defeat of 1940, and that these resisters saw their engagement as primarily being one of serving France. Chapter four looks at auxiliary resistance, or resistance actions that were designed to help people, whether they were fleeing persecution or were active resisters, aiming to show that resistance went beyond just organisations and networks, and could be about facilitating other actions rather than direct confrontation. The conclusion then argues for a new understanding of resistance, not as une organisation or even un mouvement, but as a form of la cité, or polis, engaged in creating a new form of polity. It shows that the political history of resistance is a combination of institutional politics and expression politics, and that resistance, even if not necessarily politicised, was political by its very nature.

Women have been involved within the public sphere of the workforce for thousands of years. Within the United States during the 18th and 19th Centuries, it was often with socially mandated stipulations. Once a woman was married, she usually withdrew to tend to the home front. If she became widowed, it was deemed tolerable for her to once again leave the confines of the home to work in the public sphere. However, war often changed the perception of what was acceptable. During the Revolutionary War, women found a voice and while still criticized for articulating their opinions, it was somewhat acceptable. Women also found work among the camps of the Revolutionary Army by helping to nurse soldiers back to health. Work in the nursing field would follow women through almost all of the conflicts that the United States found themselves embroiled, including the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. With the issuance of the Army Reorganization Act of 1901, the Army officially recognized the work of women as nurses as part of the military structure. As such, the Army Nurse Corps was formed. With the outbreak of World War II, women who were in or who entered the Army Nurse Corps often found themselves in areas they were not previously allowed, most specifically, near battle zones. As such, the Army was initially ill prepared to send women into these areas but their skills as trained nurses were deemed necessary. Utilizing a qualitative and historical framework, this work examines the experiences of women through both a social construction and a feminist lens. Research tools included a pilot study of oral history interviews completed by the author, use of archival interviews housed by the Library of Congress Veteran's History Project, document analysis and an extensive literature review. These tools helped in understanding and explaining the experiences of the women included within the study within both a historical and qualitative context.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / This study will proceed on the assumption that there is a general recognition that the children who were separated from their fathers during World war II suffered more from the effects of the war than those children whose fathers remained at home. The fathers who were in the service brought about a disruption in family life which was abnormal and damaging to the wholesome growth of the children so that they did not have the best possible opportunities for their emotional development. The purpose of this study is to examine a group of cases in treatment at the Worcester Youth Guidance Center in which there was separation from the father involved to see what relationship the absence of the father has to the underlying problem. The group consists of thirty-five children who have been treated some time between January 1, 1949, am December 31, 1951. It is possible that many of these cases are still in treatment. The effect of the absence of the father on the mother and on the environment would also have some bearing on the problem of the child, so these factors will also be considered.

This study is a social history of communists in wartime Rome. It examines a decisive change in Italian communist politics, as the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) rose from a hounded fraternity of prisoners and exiles to a party of government. Joining with other Resistance forces in the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN), this ‘new party’ recast itself as a mass, patriotic force, committed to building a new democracy. This study explains how such a party came into being. It argues that a PCI machine could establish itself only by subduing other strands of communist thought and organistion that had emerged independently of exiled Party leaders. This was particularly true in Rome, where dissident communists created the largest single Resistance formation, the Movimento Comunista d’Italia (MCd’I). This movement was the product of the underground that survived across the Mussolini period, expressing a ‘subversive’ politics that took on a popular following through the disintegration of the Fascist regime. Standing outside the CLN alliance and the postwar democratic governments, it reflected the maximalism and eclecticism of a communist milieu that had persisted on the margins of Fascist society. In the Occupation period this dissident movement galvanised a social revolt in the borgate slums, which would also trouble the new authorities even after the Allies’ arrival. Studying the political writing of these dissidents, their autodidact Marxism and the social conditions in which it emerged, this study reconstructs a far-reaching battle to redefine communist politics. Highlighting the erasure of the dissidents’ history in mainstream narration of the Resistance, it argues that the repressed radicalism of this period represented a lasting danger to the postwar PCI and the new Republic.