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Memorializing the GDR
Since unification, eastern Germany has witnessed a rapidly changing memorial landscape, as the fate of former socialist monuments has been hotly debated and new commemorative projects have met with fierce controversy. Memorializing the GDR provides the first in-depth study of this contested arena of public memory, investigating the individuals and groups devoted to the creation or destruction of memorials as well as their broader aesthetic, political, and historical contexts. Emphasizing the interrelationship of built environment, memory and identity, it brings to light the conflicting memories of recent German history, as well as the nuances of national and regional constructions of identity.
eBook
The Imperfect Union
In the mid-summer of 1989 the German Democratic Republic-- known as the GDR or East Germany--was an autocratic state led by an entrenched Communist Party. A loyal member of the Warsaw Pact, it was a counterpart of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), which it confronted with a mixture of hostility and grudging accommodation across the divide created by the Cold War. Over the following year and a half, dramatic changes occurred in the political system of East Germany and culminated in the GDR's \"accession\" to the Federal Republic itself. Yet the end of Germany's division evoked its own new and very bitter constitutional problems.The Imperfect Uniondiscusses these issues and shows that they are at the core of a great event of political, economic, and social history.
Part I analyzes the constitutional history of eastern Germany from 1945 through the constitutional changes of 1989-1990 and beyond to the constitutions of the re-created east German states. Part II analyzes the Unification Treaty and the numerous problems arising from it: the fate of expropriated property on unification; the unification of the disparate eastern and western abortion regimes; the transformation of East German institutions, such as the civil service, the universities, and the judiciary; prosecution of former GDR leaders and officials; the \"rehabilitation\" and compensation of GDR victims; and the issues raised by the fateful legacy of the files of the East German secret police. Part III examines the external aspects of unification.
eBook
Burying the Alliance: Interment, Repatriation and the Politics of the Sacred in Occupied Germany
In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the dead of the four occupying forces were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? The case of occupied Germany highlights different approaches to commemoration. Soviet officials commemorated the war dead as symbols of the collective sacrifice of the USSR in Eastern Europe, while the western allies desired to identify and rebury fallen soldiers to meet the expectations of their domestic audiences. Despite these differences, the politics of the sacred surrounding the dead necessitated that the allies engage one another. As the occupation regimes of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America embarked on their mission to retrieve their dead from the Soviet zone, USSR officials reacted with skepticism and hostility. But rather than rejecting what they viewed as attempts at espionage, Soviet officers traded the western dead for their own sacred mission – the chance to return living Soviet repatriates from the western zones of occupation. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain.
Journal Article
Making Sense of War
InMaking Sense of War,Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies.
The book explores the creation of the myth of the war against the historiography of modern schemes for social engineering, the Holocaust, ethnic deportations, collaboration, and postwar settlements. For communist true believers, World War II was the purgatory of the revolution, the final cleansing of Soviet society of the remaining elusive \"human weeds\" who intruded upon socialist harmony, and it brought the polity to the brink of communism. Those ridden with doubts turned to the war as a redemption for past wrongs of the regime, while others hoped it would be the death blow to an evil enterprise. For all, it was the Armageddon of the Bolshevik Revolution. The result of Weiner's inquiry is a bold, compelling new picture of a Soviet Union both reinforced and enfeebled by the experience of total war.
eBook
Crimes without Punishment
This chapter explores the rationale behind John McCloy’s final clemency decisions in January 1951 and the public backlash that quickly followed. In granting mass reprieves to the Landsberg prisoners, McCloy implicitly and explicitly called into question the validity of the Nuremberg trials, providing rhetorical victories for the unrepentant Nazis who decried the tribunals as illegitimate exercises in “victor’s justice” and denounced the postwar American commitment to international law as a sham. McCloy’s decisions were met with a firestorm of critical commentary in media outlets around the world. American, French, and British critics decried what they interpreted as McCloy’s bending to the will of the loudest and most reactionary voices in West German politics. Jewish groups and the state of Israel were horrified at the apparent trivialization of the broader Nazi project of genocide, and the continued marginalization of surviving victims. All expressed both regret for the consequences that the clemency decisions would have on the reluctantly forged consensus on the prevention of war crimes and genocide in international law, as well as dismay at the apparent propaganda victory McCloy had handed to Stalin by setting so many war criminals free.
Book Chapter
American Justice
This chapter presents an institutional and intellectual history of the aftermath of the Nuremberg tribunals from the perspective of new High Commissioner of Occupied Germany John J. McCloy. It explores the emergent consensus within HICOG that the Landsberg prisoners were entitled to a full review of their sentences. Far from the scholarly consensus that this shift in American policy from punishment to clemency was due to the pressures of the Cold War and West German political agitation, this chapter reveals that American officials were instead guided by the conviction that there were injustices done at Nuremberg that required revision—that some prisoners were either wrongly convicted or treated unduly harshly by the tribunal. The relationship between the Cold War and the drift toward clemency was at best, indirect, factoring into McCloy’s secondary consideration to provide a shining example of “American justice” and forbearance toward former enemies by allowing them to appeal their sentences, in contrast to the ubiquitous show trials of the Soviet Union and its satellites. As a result of this consensus, McCloy established an Advisory Board on Clemency for German War Criminals to review all eighty-nine cases under his jurisdiction and recommend appropriate revisions.
Book Chapter
Between Clemency and Parole
This chapter considers how and why, even after the mass clemency of 1951, McCloy and his successors continued tinkering with the Nuremberg sentences from 1951 to 1953 in an accelerating spiral of American, British, and French revision. Given that the Landsberg prisoners were already beneficiaries of good conduct release, medical parole, and clemency-based sentence reductions, the construction of a rehabilitative parole system on the American model seemed the next logical step. HICOG’s turn to parole to address the war criminals issue was the product of both an American desire for a smooth end to the West German occupation and adherence to the sense of American justice that guided all decisions on clemency after Nuremberg.This evolving story of institutional capture, as the fate of the Nuremberg war criminals was increasingly bound to both the broader population of army incarcerees and their compatriots in French and British custody, served to accelerate the release process for all prisoners still in American, British, and French custody. The justifications for continuing to incarcerate the few eroded with every act of mercy bestowed upon the many.
Book Chapter
A Short Walk to Freedom
In considering the final phase of the United States’ incarceration of German war criminals from 1953 to 1958, this chapter contemplates what it meant to “rehabilitate” a war criminal. From October 1953, when the Interim Mixed Board heard its first petition, until May 1958, when the last Nuremberg war criminals passed through Landsberg’s gates as free men, American policymakers in Bonn and Washington increasingly decided that the war criminals were not so different from every other prisoner in the United States. Prisoners in the United States were entitled to parole hearings and a system of supervised release, so the Interim Mixed Board and Mixed Board must fulfill this function as well. Leaving prison decades ahead of schedule, the Nuremberg war criminals received monetary compensation from the state, social support from sympathetic friends, relatives, and parole supervisors, and near unceasing encouragement from their American warders to ensure that their swift reentry into West German society proceeded smoothly. To a man, they continued to deny the legitimacy of their criminal convictions or their previous incarceration.
Book Chapter
We All Lost the Cold War
Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with Soviet and American policy-makers, among them several important figures speaking for public record for the first time, Ned Lebow and Janice Stein cast new light on the effect of nuclear threats in two of the tensest moments of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the confrontations arising out of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. They conclude that the strategy of deterrence prolonged rather than ended the conflict between the superpowers.
eBook