The thirst for post-World War II justice transcended the Cold War and mobilized diverse social groups. This is a story of their multilayered and at times conflictual interactions.

Über die NS-Prozesse in Osteuropa in den 1960er Jahren und den Stellenwert des Holocaust darin. Etwa 15 Jahre nach Kriegsende kam es in vielen Staaten des Ostblocks zu einer zweiten Welle von Gerichtsverfahren gegen NS-Verbrecher, die anderen Logiken folgte als die Prozesse unmittelbar nach Kriegsende. Auf dem Höhepunkt des Kalten Krieges in den 1960er Jahren verpflichteten die Prozesse einerseits zu einer Zusammenarbeit zwischen Ost und West, andererseits waren sie bestimmt durch die Abwehrhaltung gegenüber dem jeweiligen Gegner im Systemkonflikt. Innerhalb des Ostblocks sollte durch ein abgestimmtes Vorgehen auf der internationalen Bühne Einigkeit demonstriert werden, gleichzeitig führten nationale Interessen zu je eigenen Wegen in der Strafverfolgung. Die in diesem Band zusammengetragenen Aufsätze widmen sich der Geschichte der Strafprozesse zu nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen in Ungarn, der DDR, Polen, der Tschechoslowakei und der Sowjetunion nach der "Tauwetterphase" und fragen nach den Voraussetzungen und Eigenheiten dieser Verfahren. Welche Regeln galten für die Prozesse? Welche Ziele verfolgten sie? Und nicht zuletzt: Welchen Stellenwert hatte der Holocaust bei der Aufklärung der Verbrechen? Der Band erscheint vollständig in englischer Sprache. __________ On the Nazi trials in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and the place of the Holocaust in them. About 15 years after the end of the war, a second wave of trials against Nazi criminals occurred in many Eastern Bloc states, which followed a different logic than the ones immediately after the war. At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the trials on the one hand obliged cooperation between East and West, on the other hand they were determined by the defensive attitude towards the respective opponent in the system conflict. Within the Eastern bloc, unity was to be demonstrated through a coordinated approach on the international stage, while at the same time national interests led to their own paths in criminal prosecution. The essays collected in this volume are devoted to the history of criminal trials on National Socialist crimes in Hungary, the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the "thaw" and ask about the preconditions and peculiarities of these proceedings. What rules applied to the trials? What goals did they pursue? And last but not least: What significance did the Holocaust have in the clarification of the crimes?

This volume aims to offer a fresh perspective towards the evaluation of Soviet war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators, their representation through various means of media, and their reception in the context of the Cold War. By examining the 1964 Klaipėda war crimes trial in Soviet Lithuania through a microhistorical perspective, the book explores the history of the “second wave” of Soviet justice in the 1960s. It attempts to offer insight not only into how this Soviet war crimes trial was initiated and investigated, but also into how it was presented in the courtroom and channeled through the media for publicity. The book argues that the war crimes trials conducted by the Soviet Lithuanian judiciary can be on one hand perceived as an intrinsic element of Soviet ideological propaganda and, on the other, viewed as an alternative space for disclosing memories of the mass murder of Jews, offering an opposing perspective to the official Soviet politics of memory. Intended for both an academic audience and the general public, this volume unveils an intertwined compilation of Soviet legal history, politics of retribution, memory, and media during the Thaw period.

"Based on detailed notes taken during a doctor's incarceration in the concentration camps and ghettos of Romanian-ruled Transnistria during the Holocaust, this memoir tells a gripping story of calculated murder, resistance, and survival. In the aftermath of the Romanian Holocaust, Transnistria, a little-known region north of Odessa, between the Dniester and Bug rivers, came to be known as "the forgotten cemetery." Between 1941 and 1944, an estimated 300,000 Jews were killed or died there from starvation and disease. This memoir by Dr. Arthur Kessler, based on daily notes he kept as a physician during his two-year imprisonment in Transnistria's Vapniarka concentration camp and Olgopol ghetto, provides a unique perspective of a Jewish medical doctor who witnessed murderous death as well as brave acts of resistance and survival. Introduced and annotated by historian Leo Spitzer and translated from German by the late Margaret Robinson, Dr. Kessler's memoir provides an engrossing account of his infamous discovery that Vapniarka's Romanian authorities routinely, and it seems knowingly, fed camp inmates a daily soup containing toxic chickling peas (Lathyrus sativus) that induced paralysis, kidney failure, and oftentimes death. It reveals the daring by which he, together with fellow inmate medical associates, saved hundreds of lives by organizing a hunger strike that resulted in the camp's dissolution and the prisoners' relocation to ghettos throughout Transnistria. Kessler's narrative continues with an account of privileges attainable by deportees with useful skills and provides illuminating details about informal systems and practices that enabled many to survive and to provide care to fellow victims of genocidal persecution. The memoir is illustrated with moving drawings produced by prisoners in the Vapniarka concentration camp and presented to Dr. Kessler in recognition of his brave work of healing"--

The Second World War in Eastern Europe is far from a neglected topic, especially since social, cultural, and diplomatic historians have entered a field previously dominated by operational histories, and produced a cornucopia of new scholarship offering a more nuanced picture from both sides of the front. However, until now, the story has still been disjointed and specialized, whereby military, social, economic, and diplomatic histories continue to give their own separate accounts. This collection of essays attempts to bring these themes into a more cohesive whole that tells a complex, multifaceted story of war on the Eastern Front as it truly was. This is one of the few critical examinations that includes both perspectives and looks at the war as a multi‐front effort. It also reveals how myths are created around military conflicts and have direct relevance to current developments in Europe, linking them to a broader discussion of the Second World War, its impact and utility today. It gives a historical dimension to pressing issues and will be of interest and relevance to history students, policymakers, political scientists, diplomats, and foreign policy experts. The Eastern Front will be a useful reference source, since some chapters rely on extensive new archival research and materials, ego sources, as well as extensive findings of non‐Western scholars, thereby bringing their work to the attention of a broader audience.

During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its Jewish community. Until recently, this image of the country as an heroic exception has prevailed—despite the murder of almost all Jews living in Bulgarian-occupied territories. Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting archival investigation of the origins and perpetuation of Bulgaria's heroic narrative, restoring Jewish voices to the story. Translated from the original French edition. On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Analysis of how to prevent war and reinforce UN systems by imposing accountability on individuals and states for the unlawful use of force.

A critical examination of the category of "Polishness" - that is, the formation, redefinition, and performance of various kinds of Polish identities - from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Inspired by new research in the humanities and social sciences as well as recent scholarship on national identities, this volume offers a rigorous examination of the idea of Polishness. Offering a diversity of case studies and methodological-theoretical approaches, it demonstrates a profound connection between national and transnational processes and places the Polish case in a broader context. This broader context stretches from a larger Eastern European one, a usual frame of comparison, to the overseas immigrant communities. The authors, renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, thus demonstrate that an understanding of modern Polish identity means crossing not only historical but also geographical boundaries. Consequently, the narrative on Polish identity that unfolds in the volume is a personalized and multivocal one that presents the perspectives of a wide range of subjects: peasants, workers, migrants, ethnic and sexual minorities-that is, all those actors who have been absent in grand national narratives. As such, the examination of Polishness sheds light on the identity question more broadly, emphasizing the interplay of pluralizing and homogenizing tendencies, and fostering a reflection on national identity as encompassing both sameness and difference.

"This book investigates the long-term preconditions of lasting and successful democratization. It counters conventional wisdom that they are a matter of proper institutional design, or that the political culture of democracy is a by-product of modernizing economic change. Instead, it argues that achieving lasting democracy is difficult without a prior breakthrough to individualism: a system of beliefs centered on the belief in one's inner worth and in one's inner capacity for judgment. The rise of an individualist belief system that is widely proliferated in society requires social conditions that are in turn hard to meet, including a widespread breakdown of traditional culture, a frontier experience, and a process of civic nation building. The book's empirical focus, Poland, demonstrates the logic of the individuation process in a condensed form. Poland's road to individualism (and with it, to democracy) consisted of a catastrophic uprooting of broad segments of society in the aftermath of World War II, the rise of a frontier environment in the Western Territories acquired from Germany, and an unlikely emergence of the Catholic Church as a civic nation-builder in these Territories in the 1960s and the 1970s. However, the Polish case is not unique, and the book offers an analytical approach that could successfully be brought to bear on other cases of democratization, both past and present"--