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This paper reviews the signature characteristics of extant Second World War German army munitions storage landscapes in forested areas of north-west Europe with particular reference to sites in north-west France and the Netherlands. Archaeological survey, aerial photographs and documentary archives show the geography of munitions sites exhibit a regulated pattern of bunker disposition and spacing that is adapted to local road configurations and terrain. Non-hardened bunkers form the predominant feature in munitions depots and conform to a five-/six-fold typology defined by non-invasive survey and excavated examples from the Netherlands. The typology reflects an evolution of storage protocols towards all-round protection from the effects of weather and blast, but also reveals variation in size, structural characteristics and function that poses questions for further study. It is anticipated that these results will be of diagnostic value in future Second World War conflict archaeological survey of German military support structures in formerly occupied territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes Nazi crimes against the mentally ill during World War II. The main focus is the T4 action, the first extermination campaign in national socialist Germany, which is widely considered a precursor to the Holocaust. The first part of the paper presents historical facts regarding the T4 Action: its ideological background, its characteristic organization, and secret structures; the parallels between this inner war and the war that was being waged against other nations; the rigorous methodology—from the filling out of ‘special forms‘ (meldebogen) to death in the gas chamber at one of six extermination centers. The second part of the paper is based on our own research on the victims' medical files, now available in the Federal Archives of Germany. The history of how the current archival material was discovered is touched on briefly. The T4 selection criteria are analyzed. As an example, events at the Uchtspringe asylum are described in detail. We attempt to distinguish among potential motives for the killings—those inspired by concepts of racial hygiene and those with a more pragmatic or utilitarian purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how policy-makers during the Second World War attempted to “learn the lessons” of history from the reparations settlement imposed after the First World War. It shows how these lessons were developed and articulated in the formulation of, in particular, American foreign policy, and also their consequences for foreign policy during and after the Second World War. The paper demonstrates the important role of European advisors in shaping American policy, thereby illustrating that not all American lessons of history were born in the USA. It also draws out how many of these lessons have found an echo in the historiography of German reparations that has emerged over the past fifty years. In both periods the issues of enforcement and compliance, the issues that concern us generally in this volume, dominated the debate between advisors and policy-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The currently accepted narrative regarding WWII in China suggests that Nationalist China and the Third Reich had no diplomatic connections after their official break of diplomatic relations in July 1941. Based on archival material from Germany, China and Taiwan, this article challenges this narrative. As I hope to demonstrate, communications between Germany and China continued well after July 1941 through back channels. From Switzerland, Chinese agents maintained connections with the German party intelligence service (RSHA), and Germany acted as a mediator between China and Japan. It is the role that intelligence personnel played in maintaining this communication channel and their role in clandestine Sino-German relations, which form the foundation of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a first attempt to examine systematically the politics of waste and recycling in the Third Reich, one of the first modern states to articulate ‘zero waste’ as a political goal. It presupposes that waste, both in its material realities and its everyday representations, offers a powerful guide to any society's implicit order. With respect to Nazi Germany, the suggestion that such presumably neutral materials as trash, waste and garbage order social relations has particularly sinister implications. Focusing on scrap collectors and salvaging practices inside Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe, this article argues that waste management and recycling were integral to the Nazi racial order and crystallized as central strategies to administer the chaos of war. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers in party, industry and society performed their loyalty and re-imposed order by collecting paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rags and bones with the explicit goal of closing the energy cycle, extending the Reich's resource base and increasing the regime's war-making capabilities. In pursuit of these goals, the Nazi state attempted not only to conquer its many enemies but also to erase the evidence of its own proliferating military setbacks. These efforts notwithstanding, the reclamation of waste did not have the power to reverse the fortunes of war. The Nazi politics of zero waste recycled chaos instead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seeking to critically engage with German post-war politics of memory through a study of material culture, this paper examines the political implications of absence for archaeological work. More specifically, it confronts the problem of the lacuna of the archive of the Holocaust and explores how we can productively engage the archival absences that animate the present. Introducing first results from archaeological excavations at a former forced labour camp at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin, Germany, I discuss how archaeology, by investigating what remains after the Holocaust, may allow us to manifest absence, loss and historical silence. Analysing the role of objects of memory in storytelling and history writing, I also lay out how tender a task an archaeological study of the Nazi past is, pointing out where our work may risk to misappropriate history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “Blitz spirit” is a popular story about the British public during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance and resilience to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. Previous work has revised this wartime story as a propagandistic construction of national identity and popular memory. Therefore, this paper reviews the Blitz spirit as a myth. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) then examines how this myth was retold in British newspapers after the July 7th bombings in London. I examine how this myth was constructed and the ideological role it played after the attacks. Similar to previous revisions of the Blitz myth from 1940, I argue that social and political complexities after July 7th were often suppressed by messages that sought to evoke a sense of “Britishness” defined by a previous generation. Whilst the July 7th bombings were not a case of traditional warfare or attacks carried out by a foreign force, I argue that wartime analogies often supported military responses in the war on terror and evoked a foreign threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the 1944 Hürtgenwald battlefield on the German-Belgian border as a case study to reflect upon two issues: what contributions to an understanding of post-battle transformations are made by an analysis of Second World War battlefields; and how an archaeological approach can help understand the Hürtgenwald battlefield. The analysis presented here discusses what actually happens with a modern battlefield after the killing is over and how such post-battle processes alter the way such a site is interpreted. In this respect, a battlefield from World War II reveals the transformations to which battlefields are subjected and provides a well-documented model case to study the effect of post-battle processes on conflict landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper lists Enigma-related Kriegsmarine documents captured by the British during the Second World War and describes the formation and functions of Naval Section VI, which dealt with captured documents in the British Government Code and Cypher School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the end of the Second World War, American companies with a highly efficient industrial management system prepared the way for globalisation. To understand how 'global players' evolved, this paper investigates the influence of US companies on the internationalisation of German firms between 1945 and the early 1970s and the consequences on German corporate management and competitive strategies. To withstand the so-called 'American challenge', to recapture those markets which had been lost during the war and to enter new geographic markets, German companies resorted to new management strategies. In this context, the adoption of American know-how led to a process of catching up, which finally contributed to globalised corporate growth in German companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Anglo-German relations since 1945 have by and large been friendly at the level of the political elite, on a wider scale British perceptions of Germany and the Germans are for the most part negative and still dominated by images of the Third Reich and the Second World War. It has even been suggested that 'kraut-bashing' is the only form of racism in Britain which is still considered socially acceptable. Going beyond the simplistic but commonly expressed view which dismisses these negative British perceptions of Germany as envy of Germany's post-war economic revival, this paper will argue that there is a range of other reasons which help to account for the negative perceptions British people hold of Germany and the Germans such as the legacy of the Second World War and post-war challenges to British national identity, the nature of the Holocaust and the way history and languages are taught in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the following questions: how and with the aid of which resources was the memory of forced labour during World War II constructed and recreated in the public space of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine? How has the perception of the place of forced labourers in the general pantheon of war participants changed? And what kinds of transformations took place in the meaningful emphases and symbolic accretion of images associated with this group of people? The initial focus is on the Soviet version of this memory because some correction must be made to the theory that was formulated in the early 1990s and which gradually acquired normative significance in post-Soviet (including Ukrainian) journalism and scholarly literature: namely, that the history, creativity, and memory of this population group were "forgotten" in the official Soviet version of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]