This thesis is a political history of the trials of wartime collaborators in Norway after 1945. It offers a first scholarly investigation into the central actors behind these trials, looking at the ways in which Norwegian authorities planned, implemented and interpreted the 'reckoning' with wartime collaborators between 1941 and 1964. In doing so, it evaluates the broader political purposes the trials served, how these changed over time, and the mechanisms that brought about these changes. The analysis distinguishes between 'internal' and 'external' influences on the trials. 'Internal' influences are understood to be both the inherent doctrinal and institutional limitations of the law, as well as the personal and political convictions found within the authorities that governed the trials. 'External' influences meanwhile constitute the broader public attitudes and debates surrounding the trials in politics, the media and civil society. This thesis therefore seeks to deepen our understanding of the trials in two ways. Firstly, it goes beyond existing scholarship by focusing not on questions of 'morality' and 'justice', but instead on competing institutional dynamics and political representations of legitimacy and authority. Secondly, unlike most previous scholarship, it provides an encompassing account of the policy decisions underlying the trials by looking at the full timespan of the Norwegian authorities' administrative engagement with them, from their initial conceptualisation to the handling of their legacy. Thereby, individual decisions and events can be seen in relation to one another, allowing us to understand what purposes the trials served at different stages of their implementation, and how legal and administrative measures related to their political purposes. In response to previous scholarship on the trials, this thesis argues that the driving agent of the trials was not the static agenda of any one institution or group, but that their final shape was the result of the complex interaction of demands for legal consistency with a rapidly changing political and social context, both at the national and the international level.

This study examines the City of Edinburgh Police and establishes that organisational and operational aspects during the Second Word War were characterised by both continuity and change. These aspects were influenced by both the centralised direction of the war effort on the home front and by a specific combination of strategic police decisions and broader political, social, economic, and religious factors. These included the failure to implement a system for warning juvenile offenders; the desire to control vagrancy; the desire to control public disorder attendant to anti-Catholic sentiment; the extension of the spatial extent of the city; and financial constraints imposed by the town council. In this latter regard, the concept of ‘reactive underestimation’ is created and explored. That is the policy of imposing harsh conditions on the workforce until its stability was threatened. Utilising extensive and previously unseen primary sources, including reports by Special Branch, minutes of the Scottish Police Federation, and police officers’ Service Records together with Rhodes’ theory of ‘power-dependence’ the study examines the interplay between aspects of the police organisation as well as local policing within a macro-structural context. In doing so the study contributes to the ‘relational’ historiography of the ‘new’ police, the social history of police officers, and revisionist accounts of the home front. The study establishes that, despite the introduction of the Defence Regulations giving the central state more control over local policing, the police authority was not marginalised in the governance of the police. Furthermore, as a consequence of the legacy of its creation, the Police Federation remained an ineffective mechanism of representation for rank-and-file officers. Given the context of the war there was even less of an imperative for central government to create an effective means of collective bargaining. The study also demonstrates that, whilst operational policing and consequently the profile of personnel had evolved since the late nineteenth century, both aspects changed dramatically in response to the war. The additional demands associated with policing the home front and the consequent recruitment of auxiliaries together with the release of younger regular officers to the armed services and industry and the retention of those who would otherwise have been superannuated, however, created a problem of capacity. As a consequence, the use of discretion at a strategic and tactical level was a significant feature, whilst aspects of core policing and the regulation of traffic were less effectively discharged.

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No description available.

This thesis investigates fascist Jewish policy in Italian-occupied southeastern France between November 1942 and August 1943. The fascist government repeatedly refused to hand over to its Nazi ally or to its French enemy foreign Jewish refugees in the Italian occupation zone. This decision, which was tantamount to a refusal to collaborate in the extermination of the Jews, was partially overturned in mid-July 1943. This thesis seeks to explain the rationale for the fascist government’s decisions concerning the fates of foreign Jewish refugees in southeastern France. Current scholarship justifies the fascist government’s decisions as a manifestation either of humanitarianism or political expediency. This thesis argues instead that the Italian refusal to partake in the extermination of the Jews was ideological. As the fascist and Nazi leaderships attributed different relevance to the ‘Jewish question’, they consequently prescribed different methods to ‘solve’ it, in the context of their common military effort to win the war. Through the in-depth reconstruction of fascist Jewish policy in southern France, this thesis argues that although the fascist rulers acknowledged the existence of a ‘Jewish problem’, they never considered its solution as vital to their effort to win the war. Unlike the Nazis who considered their war against the Jew as the pivotal issue, thus rendering the physical eradication of all Jews as a conceivable action in the context of a total war, the Italians considered Jews as a secondary threat compared to communists or enemy aliens residing in their occupation zone. In turn, by analysing fascist Jewish policy in the broader geopolitical, diplomatic and military context of the occupation of southeastern France, this thesis demonstrates how, and to what extent, other ethical and practical considerations interacted with the larger ideology in operation. The overall result was a policy in which the murder of Jews was considered politically inexpedient and morally unacceptable, but which was, nevertheless, still persecutory (the Italian authorities interned foreign Jewish refugees in southern France and took measures to prevent their arrival in the Italian occupation zone). At the same time, this thesis reveals that, although the Jewish policy was consistent with the regime’s declared goal to ‘discriminate, but not persecute’ the Jews, it was not a necessary consequence of that goal. Instead, this policy could be negotiated and adjusted should the political need arise, as proved by the decision (ultimately without consequences) to surrender German Jews in mid-July 1943.

Following Britain’s entry into the First World War, the foreign spy became a particularly poignant image in popular culture as well as broader political discourse. Although espionage had featured regularly across British society during the preceding decade, with the outbreak of war the depiction of the spy took on a new significance. This thesis analyses British fears of German espionage between August 1914 and December 1915, in order to assess how popular spy phobias shaped wartime experiences. This recrudescence of spy fever, as these fears are commonly known, was facilitated by national policies and encouraged by local authorities. Pre-war strategic planning had determined that agents of the Kaiser were likely to target vulnerable infrastructure essential to Britain’s mobilisation. With this in mind, authorities responded to the declaration of war by conducting an erratic search for potential spies within their respective communities. These ostensibly official measures combined with scaremongering in the press to establish the danger of foreign espionage. Early rhetoric defined the appropriate response; popular suspicion and enhanced vigilance became essential to the national war effort. Defence panics had been an intermittent feature of Victorian and Edwardian discourse, and spy scares reflected a continuation of this tradition. Fears of espionage were far more prolific as collective anxieties rather than individual qualms. While some elements of society were caught up in this spy fever, others appeared unaffected by such concerns. As this thesis will show, emotional responses to spies appeared most pervasive in staunchly conservative communities that believed liberalism was ill-equipped to deal with national security and imperial defence. As a result, liberal ideals created a conflicting set of emotions that opposed radicalism and the feelings that it promoted. Spy fever was thus not a ubiquitous panic, nor was it particularly irrational, despite the fallacy of the espionage threat. Although anti-alienism has often been identified as the cause of such trepidation, spy phobias were multifaceted, and individuals who developed such fears did so for a variety of reasons.

The First World War was a key factor in the development of Scottish art and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet historians concentrating on Scotland have been slow to recognise its potential as an area of research. This thesis aims to provide a broad-ranging perspective by exploring the responses to the war of seven of Scotland's leading cultural personalities, including the poet Christopher Murray Grieve, the dramatists, James Matthew Barrie and Osborne Henry Mavor, the painters Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson and William McCance, the architect Robert Stodart Lorimer and the aristocrat, the 8th Duke of Atholl. In addition to consideration of their personal experiences of the war, however, attention will be given to the varied and many cultural productions created by these men both during and in the aftermath of the First World War to assess the nature of the war's impact on Scottish culture. The Scottish Renaissance movement of the 1920s will be discussed in light of the fury and disillusionment felt by Grieve as a result of his active service in Salonika; the pervading influence of the war in the plays of Mavor and Barrie will be shown to owe much to their subjective impressions of the war, and the curtailment and containment of the careers of Robertson and McCance viewed in the context of their conscientious objection to military service. Finally, the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle will be attributed to the determination and passion imbued by the war in Lorimer and Atholl. In achieving these aims this thesis will demonstrate that the First World War should be held up as a central component in the history of Scottish art and society, and by dOing so hopes to widen the horizon of Scottish cultural studies beyond the current fixation with typicality within the United Kingdom in order to emphasise the range of Scottish cultures.

This thesis charts the military education of junior Edwardian army officers, moving chronologically through key aspects of the process. It examines the detail of curricula at Sandhurst and Woolwich, the prevalence of entry via auxiliary forces and the military knowledge of men who gained commissions by that route, the training and study officers undertook after commissioning, and the education available at Camberley and Quetta. It thus offers a holistic examination of officer education. It concludes that there was a strong and growing professionalism among the junior commissioned officers, founded on their acquisition of skilled expertise and their expectations of advancing in their careers on the basis of professional merit. This thesis contributes to broader debates in three ways. Firstly, by going beyond existing studies which focus heavily on the upper echelons of the officer corps, it allows a more complete examination of the competence and military capacity of the Edwardian army. Secondly, it contributes to discussions on professionalism and processes of professionalization at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thirdly, it considers the nature of the training and education that the Edwardian Army undertook and seeks to locate this within discussions on the proper form and objectives of officer education.

David DuBois has chronicled the opening days of World War II in the Pacific and the demise of the U.S. Navy's Asiatic Fleet, relying extensively on primary sources such as combat narratives, after action reports, ship's logs, and testimony from congressional hearings. His extensive analysis and historically-substantiated revision of the standard narrative surrounding the initial weeks and months of the Pacific war is a must-read for every World War II historian or enthusiast. - Dr. Stephen G. Fritz, Professor of History, East Tennessee State University / https://dc.etsu.edu/alumni_books/1027/thumbnail.jpg