The sectarian tactics of the Comintern's Third Period prevented the Communist Party of Great Britain from articulating an effective response to the rise of fascism during 1933. The CPGB leadership saw the main threat of fascism in Britain coming from the National Government, whose measures were portrayed as leading to the gradual 'fascisation' of British society. This led to the Party leadership ignoring the BUF as politically irrelevant. However, sections of the CPGB rank and file felt differently, linking up with their Labour movement counterparts; organising activity on a mass scale to prevent BUF activity on the streets of Britain. In mid 1934, reflecting pressure from below and the change in Comintern anti-fascist strategy as advocated by Dimitrov, the CPGB leadership changed tack and sanctioned counter-demonstrations to BUF meetings. In October 1934 it offered a united front electoral pact to the Labour Party. In 1935 the CPGB embraced the popular front policy adopted by the Comintern at its Seventh World Congress. The popular front movement was designed to change the 'profascist' foreign policy of the National Government and replace it with a people's government favourable to a military pact with the USSR. This guiding principle lay behind the popular front activity of the CPGB during 1935- 39. By 1939 after six years of hard work the CPGB had little to show for its struggle against fascism. Despite a small increase in membership, and a slight growth in influence amongst the trade unions and intelligentsia, it had failed to bring about a change in British foreign policy favourable to an alliance with the Soviet Union or to emerge as a significant force within the British Labour movement. This failure can be largely ascribed to its pursuit of an antifascist strategy determined mainly by the requirements of Soviet foreign policy and not by the concerns of British workers.

Why do ordinary individuals participate in mass violence perpetrated against civilians? That is the question I will attempt to answer in the following paper. I consider these men ordinary to the extent that the majority was not socially deviant. Looking at the case of Nazi Germany, two groups stand out as good case studies: the SS Einsatzgruppen and the SS cadres in the Death camps. The following analysis will focus on the motivations of these men to commit mass murder. I argue for a causal sequence of action, beginning with the onset of Nazi ideology, further followed by the dehumanization of the victim and the brutalization of the perpetrator. I will demonstrate how the ideology present during German interwar society influenced these men into participation. Dehumanization and brutalization are complimentary factors that push these men into action.

Occupation operations are some of the most resource and planning intensive military undertakings in modern combat. The United States Army has a long tradition of conducting military government operations, stretching back to the Revolutionary War. Yet the emergence of military government operational doctrine was a relatively new development for the United States Army. During the World Wars, the Army reluctantly embraced civil administration responsibilities as a pragmatic reaction to the realities of total war. In the face of opposition from the Roosevelt administration, the United States Army established an enduring doctrine for military government in the crucible of the European Theater of Operations.

This study analyses a number of Hannah Arendt’s books and essays written over four decades and suggests that a common thread can be detected that links together the different stages of her thought. The need to do this follows from having to treat with caution Arendt’s own judgement that in the mid-1930s her thinking changed when she became political. In relation to writings she produced throughout her life, what can be seen is that she was actually preoccupied by one and the same question, namely, what it means to be with other people, she just looked for answers in different places and used different methods. The study shows how in her dissertation on Saint Augustine’s treatment of love and such early published pieces as ‘The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question’ and her commentary on Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Arendt was already challenging Heidegger’s ontology, in Being and Time, of ‘being-with-one-another’. Her thinking at this time was purely empirical though, dependent upon interpretations of history alone. Her later work, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, for instance, reveal that Arendt’s political conversion amounted to the realisation that ontology and history are as necessary to each other as Kant’s concepts and intuitions. Her defence of plurality therefore, represented both a reaction to the evils of totalitarianism on the grounds that it is an anti-political form of government, and a revised challenge to Heidegger’s assessment of das Man on his own terms. In addition though, Arendt’s depiction of public space and public discourse, suggested that choosing to be with others politically, is an antidote to the solitude of the individual engendered by mass society.

This dissertation explores Irish and English fiction before, during, and shortly after the Second World War, a period of complex change in the relations between England and Ireland as British imperial control in Ireland ended. Ireland's neutrality in response to England's declaration of war intensified the nations' apparent differences, yet as my study brings to light, the War also fostered new affinities between England and Ireland, despite each country's inclination to define itself against the other by contrast. Each country's tendency toward xenophobic self-definition gave rise to policies and perspectives that resemble thinking and life in a fascist state. The fiction that I discuss responds to those tendencies by revealing possibilities for collectives that are more dynamically constituted around forms of vision and engagement involving shared responsibility and individual freedom. Chapter 1 reads Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts (1941) as a working through of contrasting responses to dictators from a 1938 diary entry and her manifesto Three Guineas, published the same year. I argue that character interactions and self-reflection in response to a play performed in the novel allow characters to recognize fascist tendencies in their own thinking and discover collective visions contrary to the total allegiance prized in Nazi spectacle and English propaganda. Against the mostly ahistorical critical treatments of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (written 1939-1940, published 1966), Chapter 2 traces affinities between the narrator's deluded belief in his own superiority in a milieu of suppressed violence and the psychological environment Irish neutrality created. Focusing on Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Heat of the Day (1948) and wartime short fiction, Chapter 3 argues that her characters' behavior challenges stereotypes about English and Irish residents promoted by the other country. Rather than offering the escape from the War that some English visitors desire, Ireland provides a vantage point for seeing their London lives in new ways. Chapter 4 takes Nazi narratives of German history as reference points for interpreting Samuel Beckett's Watt (written 1942-1945, published 1953) and Molloy (1955), in particular the narrators' attempts to hide their control over the narratives they shape and the collectives that surround them.

No description available.

World War II was the most devastating war in human history in terms of loss of life. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, plunged the United States into war. Less than seven thousand military nurses were on active duty at the time of the attack. By the end of the war, there were over fifty-thousand active-duty nurses. The army nurses performed under fire in field and evacuation hospitals, on hospital trains and ships, and as flight nurses on medical evacuation transport aircraft. The skill and dedication of the Army Nurses Corps insured a 95% survival rate for the wounded soldiers who received medical care in a field or evacuation hospital. Two hundred and one nurses lost their lives during World War II and sixty-seven nurses were captured and held as prisoners of war. Sixteen hundred medals, citations and commendations attest to the nurses’ courage and dedication.

Dans l'historiographie de la Résistance, le territoire n'a pas été un véritable objet d'étude. Les aspects politiques ayant les faveurs des historiens, cet essai, qui a pour cadre le département de l'Isère, tente de combler ce vide en introduisant des problématiques liées à la géographie. Des territoires d'usage ont été déterminés, portés par des relations sociales nées avant-guerre. Les valeurs politiques, sportives, voire les antécédents familiaux, portent les germes de réactions à l'encontre de Vichy et/ou des Occupations. Après le temps long des valeurs, des ruptures ont été identifiées : la défaite et les privations humiliantes concourent à engager un processus de transgression diffus. Ainsi, cette étude a distingué deux groupes pour clarifier ce phénomène. Le groupe d'appartenance, qui a pour marqueur premier l'adhésion, se caractérise également par les dissensions variables entretenues avec le groupe de référence, qui pour des raisons particulières laissa les actes de transgression les plus tangibles entre les mains du premier groupe. Le groupe d'appartenance dispose d'un espace construit par des Mouvements qui proposent leurs alternatives. Un territoire de la transgression est donc créé, avec empirisme. Les caractéristiques topographiques du département de l'Isère oscillent distinctement entre plaines et haute montagne. Ainsi, ce territoire, qui accueille une centaine de hameaux et des villes importantes, dans l'ombre de Lyon, contribua à créer une Résistance spécifique qui se lova sur ce terrain. Des G.F. urbains aux camps de réfractaires peu armés, une vaste nébuleuse de transgressions a été ici inventoriée afin de clarifier le phénomène Résistant en Isère. / In the histography of the Resistance, territory was not a subject that was really studied. As the political aspects were the favourite topics of historians, this essay, set within the framework of the department of Isère, attempts to fill this void by introducing issues linked to geography. The space in which the Resistance tried to impose its own standards brings a new approach. The territories involved were determined, bom of complex social pre-war relationships. Politics, and even family antecedents, carried the seeds of the reaction against Vichy and/or the Occupations. After a long period where these values predominated, cracks were appearing : defeat, the humiliating deprivations, all combined to trigger a diffused transgression process. This analysis thus distinguishes between two groups to clarify a complex phenomenon. A membership group, whose main distinguishing feature is affiliation, is also characterised by variable differences of opinion with respect to the reference group, which for their own reasons left the most tangible acts of transgression in the bands of the first group. The membership group was built via Movements where organisations offered their alternatives. A transgression territory was therefore created, with empiricism. The topographical characteristics of the Department of Isère vary distinctly between plains and mountains. This territory, home to some 100 hamlets and towns, in the shadow of Lyon, contributed to creating a specific Resistance. From urban G.F. to lightly armed mobile squads, a vast sphere of transgressions is inventoried here to clarify the Resistance phenomenon.

abstract: Through the lens of a Jewish family in the early 20th century, histories of resilience, rescue, and resistance are shown. The Loewys were a Jewish family who migrated from Poland to Germany then France and ending up in the United States following World War II. In their travels they experienced many of which other Jewish experiences were, while also differentiating from the overall story. The family also experienced life as refugees and interns during the Holocaust. Arrested in Vichy following the Armistice between Germany and France, the Loewys were later granted their freedom which they used to help free others from the camp. One of the few stories of Jews rescuing Jews, the family began its life as resistors to the Vichy and German occupation. Participating in both passive and active resistance from 1940-1944, they witnessed the highs and lows of this new life. The end of the war saw the family make it to the United States beginning their next chapter as survivors of the Holocaust and the war. With the use of primary source material provided by the Loewys, along with scholarly work about the different periods, the story of the Loewys is one of resilience in the face of mounting adversity, rescuing of internes from camps, and resistance against an occupational force that furthers the research of the Jewish experience in the early 20th century. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis History 2020

Uppsatsens syfte var att genom en fallstudie undersöka hur Norgehjälpen arbetade i Värmland med bakgrund av vad den tidigare forskningen visade. Genom en kvalitativ texttolkning skulle undersökningen försöka visa på eventuella variationer i hjälparbetet, lokalt jämförelsevis centralt. Genom att applicera en retorisk metod över arkivmaterialet från de lokala organisationerna inom Norgehjälpen i Värmland och att vi använder oss av tidigare forsknings hypoteser om tankesättet för tiden i Sverige, hoppas vi samtidigt kunna ge en lättare förklaring till Norgehjälpens uppbyggnad och utveckling. Materialet som använts är korrespondens mellan de lokala och centrala organisationerna, samt upprop.  Värmlands närhet till Norge gjorde att de lokala organisationerna fick en speciell uppgift. Nära vänskaps- och släktband gick kors och tvärs över gränsen och det förstahandsmöte man fick i Värmland som man inte alltid fick på andra platser i Sverige, påverkade helt klart avdelningen i Charlottenberg. Med tanke på att tågen från Norge stannade i Charlottenberg fick man ett förstahandsmöte med flyktingar som kom över gränsen och förstahandsinformation från järnvägspersonalen om situationen i Norge. I Charlottenberg arbetade de likt övriga länet och Sverige, men deras bespisningsverksamhet sticker ut och gjorde ett iögonfallande arbete med norska järnvägstjänstemän. Under kriget, delade man ut 19 000 måltider till norsk tull- och järnvägspersonal. / The purpose of the thesis was to investigate through a case study how Norgehjälpen worked in Värmland on the basis of what the previous historical research showed. Through a qualitative text interpretation, the survey would try to show any variations in the relief work, locally comparatively centrally. By applying a rhetorical method over the archive material from the local organizations within Norgehjälpen in Värmland and that we use previous research hypotheses about the way of thinking for the time being in Sweden, at the same time, we hope to be able to provide an easier explanation for Norgehjälpens structure and development. The material used is correspondence between the local and central organizations, as well as appeals.  Värmland's closeness to Norway gave the local organizations a special task. Close friendships and family ties crossed the border and the first-hand meeting you got in Värmland that you did not always get in other places in Sweden, clearly affected the department in Charlottenberg. Considering that the trains from Norway stopped in Charlottenberg, they had a first-hand meeting with refugees who came across the border and first-hand information from the railway staff about the situation in Norway. In Charlottenberg, they worked like the rest of the county and Sweden, but their dining activities stands out and did an eye-catching job with Norwegian railway officials. During the war, 19,000 meals were distributed to Norwegian customs and railway staff.