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This article argues that rethinking historical agency to include nonhuman agents is one way to integrate better animals into historical narratives. Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), and forming part of a growing interest in nonhuman, particularly animal, agency, it aims to clear some theoretical and historiographical ground to provide a basis for claims that nature has agency. It then argues that environmental and animal historians have too readily equated nonhuman agency with ‘resistance’, a concept that does not easily map onto animal behaviour and one which also fails to capture the diversity of nonhuman agencies. Using case studies of Police rescue dogs in early twentieth-century France and animals on the Western Front, it argues that exploring the diverse types of nonhuman agencies and their deep and multiple entanglements with human agents will extend studies of nonhumans beyond the resistance model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses historiography of the Second World War. Specifically it argues that the critical battles of the war against Germany were fought on the European eastern front as opposed to the Western front beginning with the Normandy landings. Among other topics addressed are the relative amount of German casualties on the various fronts, political aspects of historiography, and the war between Germany and Russia as personified by the respective dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

During the western campaign of 1940, the Wehrmacht murdered several thousand black African POWs from the French army. German officers ordering or tolerating the killings felt authorized by the traditional stigmatization of black men in arms in German public discourse and by a massive propaganda offensive against France's black soldiers unleashed by Joseph Goebbels after consultation with Hitler. This "authorization through propaganda" produced great inconsistency, however, and must have led the Wehrmacht High Command and the SS to conclude that specific orders for the killing of "undesirable" prisoners were necessary, as issued later for the campaign against the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]