Related Papers
Biographical notes of selected victims, [in:] Guidebook. Piaśnica. A scene of German crimes in Pomerania in 1939, ed. J. Józefczyk, M. Odyniecki, The Stutthof Museum in Sztutowo for the Branch Office The Piaśnica Museum in Wejherowo, Wejherowo 2017, p. 57-61.
2017 •
Mateusz Ihnatowicz
Selected biographies of German crimes in Pomerania in 1939.
Szymon Datner's "Little-Known Category of Hitlerite Crime" – 50 Years On (2018)
2018 •
Tomasz Frydel
Studia z Dziejów Rosji i Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej/Studies into the History of Russia and Central-Eastern Europe
The Waffen-SS: A European History, ed. Jochen Böhler, Robert Gerwarth, Oxford University Press, 2017. xviii + 372 pp. ISBN 978- 0-19-879055-6.
2019 •
Hubert Kuberski
The collection of articles delivered on 28–30 May 2014 at the conference “Himmler’s Supranational Militia. Indigenous Participation in SS- and Police Units during the Second World War” organised at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, became the monograph The Waffen-SS. A European History, edited by Jochen Böhler and Robert Gerwarth.
H-Net Reviews
Review: Gabriel N. Finder, Alexander V. Prusin. Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland. German and European Studies Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018.
2019 •
Łukasz Jasiński
Polish-Jewish Studies
T. Domański, The Trial of the Polnische Polizei Functionaries from Wodzisław Accused of Crimes Against Jews (Held According to the Regulations of the 31 August 1944 Decree)
2020 •
Tomasz Domański
After the Polish defeat in 1939, the German occupiers established a new police force within the General Governorate, formed of pre-war officers of the Polish State Police. They named it Polnische Polizei (Polish Police). The new police gained the name of the ‘Navy Blue Police’ because of the colour of the uniforms, and has become engraved under this name in social awareness and historical research. The officers of the Polnische Polizei were to implement the orders imposed by their German superiors. Among these tasks, anti-Jewish operations played an important role. The paper discusses the participation of Polnische Polizei policemen in the deportation of Jews from Wodzisław in the Jędrzejów district in 1942; it also attempts to verify the charges raised during the post-war trial of two functionaries. The analysis unambiguously proves that during the Jewish deportation period at least two policemen, including Józef Machowski, were involved in the murders of Jews. In addition, the same policeman, together with Józef Klepka from the Wodzisław police station, participated in the murder of the Rajzman family; Machowski was the one who shot them. For these crimes, Machowski was sentenced to capital punishment, and the sentence was carried out.
EAC Occasional Paper
Baales et al. 2024 – Massacres in the Arnsberg Forest. Interdisciplinary research on the end-of-war crimes against forced labourers in the last days of the Second World War in Westphalia (western Germany) – EAC 19
2024 •
Aussenstelle Olpe LWL-Archaeologie fuer Westfalen, Manuel Zeiler
Michael Baales, Marcus Weidner & Manuel Zeiler (2024): Massacres in the Arnsberg Forest. Interdisciplinary research on the end-of-war crimes against forced labourers in the last days of the Second World War in Westphalia (western Germany). In: Alex Hale & Thomas Kersting: New Challenges. Archaeological Heritage Management and the Archaeology of the 18th to 20th centuries. EAC Occasional Paper 19. Namur, 97-104. In recent years, a historical reappraisal has been carried out of one of the worst crimes – outside of prisons and concentration camps – committed in Germany by the SS and Wehrmacht in the fi nal months of the Second World War: the massacre of 208 forced labourers in the Arnsberg Forest near Warstein and Meschede (Westphalia, western Germany) by SS-General Kammler’s “Division for Vengeance” in March 1945. The use of archaeological research methods allowed us to (1) pinpoint both the scenes of the crimes and the events, (2) recover and classify fi nds attributed to both the victims and the perpetrators, and (3) uncover and record concrete fi nds and features from when the atrocity occurred in their historical context, the period of the initial burial of the victims by US troops in May 1945 and their exhumation in 1964, with the aim of preserving them for future presentations. In den letzten Jahren wurde eines der schlimmsten Verbrechen – außerhalb von Gefängnissen und Konzentrationslagern –, das SS und Wehrmacht in den letzten Monaten des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Deutschland verübten, historisch aufgearbeitet: das Massaker an 208 Zwangsarbeiter:innen im Arnsberger Wald bei Warstein und Meschede (Süd-Westfalen) durch die "Division zur Vergeltung" unter SS-General Kammler im März 1945. Die Anwendung archäologischer Forschungsmethoden ermöglichte es uns zudem, (1) die Tatorte und Ereignisse genau zu lokalisieren, (2) Funde zu bergen und zu klassifizieren, die sowohl den Opfern als auch den Tätern zugeschrieben werden können, und (3) konkrete Funde und Befunde aus der Zeit der Gräueltaten in ihrem historischen Kontext, der Zeit der Beisetzung der Opfer (veranlasst durch US-Truppen im Mai 1945) und ihrer Exhumierung im Jahr 1964, freizulegen und zu erfassen, um sie für zukünftige Präsentationen zu bewahren.
German History
Review: Die Gestapo nach 1945--Konflikte, Karrieren, Konstruktionen
2010 •
Stephan Glienke
Political and Transitional Justice in Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s
In Search of Political Justice, 1939-2000: From the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland to the Institute of National Remembrance
2019 •
Władysław Bułhak
The volume was edited by Magnus Brechtken, Władysław Bułhak and Jürgen Zarusky contains studies by Yan Rachinsky, Yuri Shapoval, Iryna Ramanava, Ingo Müller, Ingo Loose, Maximilian Becker, Jarosław Rabiński, Andrzej Paczkowski, Władysław Bułhak, Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel, Joanna Lubecka, Adam Dziurok, Hubert Seliger, Łukasz Jasiński and Marek Kornat. All of them depart from or are related to the concept of political justice as proposed by Otto Kirchheimer. In his text, Władysław Bułhak, describes the origins and perhaps somewhat ambiguous history of the institution he currently works for, in the context of the enforcement of “political justice”. So far, historiography has failed to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject. Bułhak begins with the documentation of German war crimes by the Polish government-in-exile in London and Poland’s contribution to the broader efforts of the United Nations in this regard. He then sketches IPN’s successive evolutionary stages, initially called the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, as an organ of a state governed by Soviet-sponsored communists. He highlights the use of the Main Commission to legitimise the authorities in the early years of communist rule and the subsequent role played by the same Commission under a slightly new name and entirely new leadership in the 1960s, not only in prosecuting Nazi war criminals but also in the Moscow-orchestrated propaganda campaign against the ruling elites of West Germany. The overview also contains a brief description of the little-known period of the Commission’s activities in the years 1984-1998, by which time its name was changed to the Institute of National Remembrance. Finally, Bułhak discusses the origins and first years of the IPN as we know it today.
Unwelcome Facts: Forgotten Events At the End of the Third Reich and In the Early Post-War Period
Herbert Ammon
Böhler, Jochen; Gerwarth, Robert (eds.) (2017): The Waffen-SS. A European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Jochen Boehler, Robert Gerwarth
This is the first systematic pan-European study of the hundreds of thousands of non-Germans who fought - either voluntarily or under different kinds of pressures - for the Waffen-SS (or auxiliary police formations operating in the occupied East). Building on the findings of regional studies by other scholars - many of them included in this volume - The Waffen-SS aims to arrive at a fuller picture of those non-German citizens (from Eastern as well as Western Europe) who served under the SS flag. Where did the non-Germans in the SS come from (socially, geographically, and culturally)? What motivated them? What do we know about the practicalities of international collaboration in war and genocide, in terms of everyday life, language, and ideological training? Did a common transnational identity emerge as a result of shared ideological convictions or experiences of extreme violence? In order to address these questions (and others), The Waffen-SS adopts an approach that does justice to the complexity of the subject, adding a more nuanced, empirically sound understanding of collaboration in Europe during World War II, while also seeking to push the methodological boundaries of the historiographical genre of perpetrator studies by adopting a transnational approach.
