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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocidedi Daniel Blatman
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Premi e riconoscimenti
From January 1945, in the last months of the Third Reich, about 250,000 inmates of concentration camps perished on death marches and in countless incidents of mass slaughter. They were murdered with merciless brutality by their SS guards, by army and police units, and often by gangs of civilians as they passed through German and Austrian towns and villages. Even in the bloody annals of the Nazi regime, this final death blow was unique in character and scope. In this first comprehensive attempt to answer the questions raised by this final murderous rampage, the author draws on the testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Hunting through archives throughout the world, Daniel Blatman sets out to explainto the extent that is possiblethe effort invested by mankinds most lethal regime in liquidating the remnants of the enemies of the Aryan race before it abandoned the stage of history. What were the characteristics of this last Nazi genocide? How was it linked to the earlier stages, the slaughter of millions in concentration camps? How did the prevailing chaos help to create the conditions that made the final murderous rampage possible? In its exploration of a topic nearly neglected in the current history of the Shoah, this book offers unusual insight into the workings, and the unraveling, of the Nazi regime. It combines micro-historical accounts of representative massacres with an overall analysis of the collapse of the Third Reich, helping us to understand a seemingly inexplicable chapter in history. - Publisher. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)940.53History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War IIClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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What further concerns the author is why the killings continued to the end, even when the war was sometimes literally hours from being over for the men (and occasionally women) who were charged with herding these prisoners somewhere to discharge their responsibility. The theory that Blatman offers is that this is a triumph of 12 years of Nazi enculturation where someone could always be found to pull the trigger when an expendable person had to be terminated. For Blatman the climactic example is the massacre at the small town of Gardelegen, where 1000-plus camp inmates from the "Dora" installation were driven into a barn for a mass killing at the insistence of district Nazi leader Gerhard Thiele; the killers being a motley gang of airborne recruits, militia, police, firemen, Hitler Youth and ad hoc volunteers who bought the argument that in the imminent chaos it was imperative that the potential threat the inmates represented had to be eliminated.
However, as important as this book is, I do have to mark it down a bit on the grounds of some sloppy writing when it comes to military topics. The 7th Waffen-SS Div. "Prinz Eugen" is referred to as "Prinz-Eugen's 7th Division." Messerschmitt is consistently misspelled as "Messerschmidt." There is a reference to the "ZV2 Rocket;" one presumes V2 is what was meant. There are other apparent gaffs, but my favorite is the reference to "electrocuted fences." Was it that hard to find a reader conversant with nuts-and-bolts military history when this book was being edited? ( )