I Am Not A Prisoner of War : Agency, Adaptability, and Fulfillment of Expectations Among American Prisoners of War Held in Nazi Germany

In war memory, the typical prisoner of war narrative is one of either passive survival or heroic resistance. However, captured service members did not necessarily lose their agency when they lost their freedom. This study of Americans held in Germany during the Second World War shows that prisoners generally grounded themselves in their personal and national identities, while compromising ideas of heroism, sometimes passing up opportunities for resistance in order to survive

Survival in a Nazi concentration camp: the Spanish prisoners of Mauthausen

Analysis of the extent to which higher social class (along with other demographic variables) was an advantage for Spanish prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp advances the study of the determinants of survival in contexts of indiscriminate violence. Use of Cox event-history models, based on detailed information collected by well-placed Spaniards at the camp, reveals that individuals from higher social classes who filled administrative positions at Mauthausen were prominent in support networks and had a good command of the German language were more likely to survive. The risk of death was highest among unskilled agricultural workers, followed by unskilled non-agricultural workers

Victims of Circumstance: the Execution of German Deserters by Surrendered German Troops Under Canadian Control in Amsterdam, May 1945

On the morning of 13 May 1945, five days after the formal capitulation of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, a German military court delivered death sentences on two German naval deserters, Bruno Dorfer and Rainer Beck. The trial occurred in an abandoned Ford assembly plant on the outskirts of Amsterdam, a site used by the Canadian army for the concentration of German naval personnel. Later that same day, a German firing squad, supplied with captured German rifles anda three-ton truck from the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and escorted by Canadian Captain Robert K. Swinton, executed the two German prisoners of war a short distance outside the enclosure. Dorfer and Beck were among the last victims of a military legal system distorted by the Nazi state. At the time no one, Canadian or German, questioned the justice of the event. This tragic incident demonstrated a disturbing degree of cooperation between Canadian military units and the defeated German military. Why did German deserters like Dorfer and Beck continue to die after the end of the war? The executions were a matter of convenience. The Canadian military allowed the German military structure to function after the capitulation. Under this questionable arrangement, the German armed forces in Holland disarmed, concentrated, and evacuated themselves. To accomplish the gigantic task in an orderly and disciplined way, Canadian military authorities mistakenly relied on the vanquished German military leadership. German commanders and military judges continued to apply an irregular military law against deserters; and Canadian restrictions on these actions remained limited and hesitant. In this situation, larger political and strategic considerations worked against deserters like Dorfer and Beck. Canadian reactions, during and twenty-one years after the execution, reflected a sad record of indifference and callousness for these unfortunate victims of latent Nazism

A Place Like This: An Environmental Justice History of the Owens Valley - Water in Indigenous, Colonial, and Manzanar Stories

This text provides an environmental justice analysis of the stories of the people who lived in the Owens Valley, who watered its land and cultivated its crops—pine trees, apple trees, and kabocha alike. Telling the personal stories of challenge and resistance that manifested alongside the oppressive forces of military and state domination provides the opportunity to align forcibly relocated, exploited and incarcerated people’s struggles throughout time. This text starts with The Nü’ma Peoples who were the first humans to live in the Owens Valley and continues with the struggle for empire between rival colonial empires of agriculture and distant urban cities. Its final chapters end with an in-depth and personal exploration of the unconstitutional incarceration of 117,000 people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during World War II. All the while it weaves in poetry, art and grassroots stories of resistance. It is a call to action for Environmental Studies and Ethnic Studies Departments to link the critical analysis within their disciplines to tell more accurate histories

Women in a Man\u27s War: The Employment of Female Agents in the Special Operations Executive, 1940-1946

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was established in 1940 under the directive of Winston Churchill to collaborate with resistance groups, divert enemy military advances and “set Europe ablaze!” As the world’s armies marched across the globe once more, dozens of women found themselves deployed by the SOE to act as agents and combatants behind enemy lines; effectively challenging traditional gender roles in war. While World War II has often been perceived as a man’s war, the direct and violent participation of women in various theaters of the war have been largely overlooked. Rather, women during WWII have been recalled as factory workers, nurses and mothers, all of which were crucial components in the war effort, but nonetheless conscribe to the traditional notions of the gendered war work hierarchy. In this hierarchy, superiority was defined as soldiering, but only for the men of a nation. As societal norms excluded women from this wartime role, nursing was the valued feminine position. Yet, female agents of the SOE were employed and valued for their claims to femininity as the organization co-opted stereotypes of womanhood to deceive enemy forces in occupied territory. This thesis explores the overarching question of what it means to be a woman in war, a perceived male-dominated sphere of influence. Even though research has expanded extensively on this important question, female SOE agents in France present a unique case study in which women were not only legitimized as combatants by a government, but were also recognized for the advantages of their femininity. Drawing from SOE documentation, personnel files, and personal accounts from agents, this thesis illustrates the elite combatant status of female SOE agents in France. By tracking their experience from recruitment, training, war work, and imprisonment, reveals how both their actions and legal terminology defined these women as combatants, although unlawful. The fascination revolving around female agents has persisted over the past seventy-nine years since the inception of the SOE. That said, the way in which these elite women have been recognized has shifted from combatants to spies, a subtle but important distinction in terms of wartime gender roles

Going for Broke: A Talk to Music Teachers

In 1963—a racially-charged time in the United States—James Baldwin delivered “A Talk to Teachers,” urging educators to engage youth in difficult conversations about current events. We concur with Giroux (2011, 2019) that political forces influence our educational spaces and that classrooms should not be viewed as apolitical, but instead seen as sites for engagement, where educators and artists alike can “go for broke.” Drawing upon A Tribe Called Quest’s 2017 Grammy performance of “We the People…” as an example of the role of the arts in troubled times, we consider ways to work alongside youth in schools to respond, consider, and process current events through music

‘Sometime the Hating Has to Stop’: Liberation and Reconciliation in The Railway Man (Teplitzky, 2013)

The Railway Man (Teplitzky, 2013) recreates Eric Lomax’ experience as a Far East Prisoner of War (FEPOW) who, despite being tortured, was later reconciled with his interrogator, Takashi Nagase, in 1993. Though this biopic foregrounds the suffering of FEPOWs it also represents a route towards their psychological ‘liberation’. Within a context characterized by continued debates regarding the absence of a formal Japanese apology for their treatment of FEPOWs, The Railway Man suggests recuperation from wartime trauma and Anglo-Japanese reconciliation is possible when figures from both nations engage in shared remembrance. Cinematic flashbacks recreate the horrors of internment from Lomax’ perspective and also construct Japanese remembrance of the Second World War: Nagase is provided with a subjective flashback which imagines a wider Japanese remembrance of their wartime past. Thus The Railway Man asserts that recognition of the Far Eastern conflict as a shared trauma provides a route to Anglo-Japanese reconciliation