The Russian Liberation Army (original) (raw)
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The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (review)
Kritika, 2007
This groundbreaking book examines the overlooked topic of the influence of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Russian exiles on Nazism. Whiteémigrés contributed politically, financially, militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This work refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon. National Socialism arose primarily from the cooperation between völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful Whiteémigrés. From 1920 to 1923, Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-Whiteémigré organization, Aufbau (Reconstruction). Aufbau allied with Nazis to overthrow the German government and Bolshevik rule through terrorism and military/paramilitary schemes. This organization's warnings of the monstrous "Jewish Bolshevik" peril helped to inspire Hitler to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union and to initiate the mass murder of European Jews. This book uses extensive archival materials from Germany and Russia, including recently declassified documents, and it will prove invaluable reading for anyone interested in the international roots of National Socialism. michael kellogg is an independent researcher and a past recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant.
In recent years there has been an increased interest in the legacy of the Fourteenth Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS, known as the Waffen-SS Galizien, a Ukrainian volunteer formation formed in 1943. In Ukrainian ultra-nationalist mythology the unit is depicted as freedom fighters who fought for an independent Ukraine, its collaboration with Nazi Germany dismissed as “Soviet propaganda.” There is a widening gulf between the myth and the picture that emerges from the archival materials. This article revisits the history of the unit, with a particular focus on aspects of its history which the myth makers omit or deny: its ideological foundations, its allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and the involvement of units associated with the division in atrocities against civilians in 1944.
Human Rights Review, 2012
Abstract This article examines the Stalin regime’s treatment of the ethnic Germans in the USSR during the 1940s as a case study in racial discrimination. After 1938,Soviet definitions of nationality became racialized. Systematic repression against certain nationalities in the USSR after this time clearly fit the definition of racial discrimination formulated by scholars in the post-war era. This article examines the separate and unequal institutions of the special settlement regime and labor army imposed upon the ethnic Germans in the USSR during World War II in the context of race as a category constructed along lines of primordial and essentialist views of culture. It also compares the construction of racialized groups and the practice of racial discrimination in the USSR with South Africa during the apartheid era.
Moscow 1941: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet People’s Militia (Narodnoe Opolchenie)
The Civilianization of War, 2018
This desperate statement from Latyshev, a member of the 3rd Company of the Kominternovksii district battalion of the Moscow Narodnoe Opolchenie (Soviet People's Militia or Levy), may surprise anyone who has studied the history of this volunteer force from the pages of its commemorative Soviet historiography. 1 Always stressing its voluntary character, several generations of Soviet historians have looked at the Narodnoe Opolchenie as a measure of the truly Soviet patriotism that swept the country at the war's outbreak. It has been seen as an early and genuine popular response to the German invasion of June 1941, which threatened the destruction of the Soviet state and the social and political order upon which it lay. This chapter examines the extent to which the rise of the People's Militia swept aside the civil-military divide. In doing so, it revises the Narodnoe Opolchenie's patriotic historiography, and with it the limits of the logic and ability of a modern regime, even in the most extreme circumstances, to make every civilian a soldier. Historians looking at the numerous Soviet paramilitary forces of the period have traced their origins to the popular response to the invasion, to provide a supplementary force to the Red Army. This alternative type of fighting force could be trained faster, could help prepare the defense of cities, and could participate in the combat to defend them. The Opolchenie was only one type of volunteer unit raised in the first months of the war. Others included workers', fighters', communist, and Komsomol battalions, anti-tank squads, and MPVO (Local Anti-Aircraft Defense). However, the Opolchenie was the largest of all these units and certainly more reliant on volunteers than communist-based battalions. The People's Militias of Moscow and Leningrad are better known because
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia Ukraїns’kykh Natsionalistiv, OUN) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukraїns’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, UPA) were the most violent 20th-century Ukrainian nationalist movement. Their violence became genocidal, and it substantially influenced the history of Ukraine, the history of Ukrainian and Polish Jews, the history of the Holocaust, Polish history, and the history of East Central Europe and the Soviet Union. Because the Ukrainian nationalists were anti-Soviet, resisting and being defeated by the Soviet Union, and because the German occupiers committed worse crimes in Ukraine than the Ukrainian nationalists, Cold War historians such as John Armstrong, Ukrainian and Polish dissidents, and German historians of Eastern Europe denied or marginalized the violence of this movement or portrayed them as an anti-Soviet “liberation movement.” The denial of the collaboration of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust was interrelated with the denial of the fascistization of Ukrainian nationalism and of the creative invention of a genuine form of Ukrainian fascism that fostered genocidal violence in Ukraine.
Hitler's Manifest Destiny: Nazi Genocide, Slavery, and Colonization in Slavic Eastern Europe
2019
This paper examines the role of Slavs in the bigger picture of racially-motivated genocide and crimes of the Third Reich. The orientation of Slavs as a racial group, labelled "Untermenschen" or subhumans, and the ideology of "Lebensraum" or "living space", traces back to Hitler's inspiration of colonialism in America and Africa. Mass killings, slave labour, and an attempted famine-genocide are the heights of this racism having been actualized. Additionally, the roles of Jews and the roles of Slavs are inseparable aspects of Nazism, and throughout their unfoldings in the Holocaust, co-determined the destiny of the other. Altogether, we see how the Slavs as a victim were in fact central to the forces of Nazism and the Second World War.