Transitional Justice and the Holocaust in Poland

The Communist seizure of power is generally regarded as the key context of the transitional justice that characterized the prosecution of Nazi criminals and collaborators in postwar Poland, which naturally affected trials related to the Holocaust. Some of the guiding questions of this scholarship have asked the following: Should postwar trials be understood as “real” trials as opposed to staged political trials? To what extent did they allow for an expression of the distinctiveness of the Holocaust? Did the trials help or inhibit the creation of a space for Jewish voices and agency? The current state of research points to two emerging stories of Polish judicial reckoning with the Holocaust “behind the Iron Curtain.” On the one hand, scholars increasingly agree that the trials were not politically orchestrated but were generally conducted in the spirit of the rule of law, comparable to those held in Western European courts. Further, the Polish contribution to the prosecution of Nazi perpetrators is regarded as exceptional and successful in delivering some measure of justice. On the other hand, research into trials of Polish grassroots perpetrators of anti-Jewish crimes points to a failure in reaching a meaningful judicial and societal reckoning

Village Society and the Holocaust in the General Government: The Case of Kreis Debica

This dissertation is a microhistory of a phase of the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland characterized by widespread police manhunts for fugitive Jews (Judenjagd) from mid-1942 to late 1944, which followed the violent deportation Aktions directed at ghetto populations. It is a case study of one rural county, or Kreis, of Debica, located in the eastern half of District Kraków of the General Government. The study identifies 1,257 Jews who evaded the mass killing operations and took shelter on the territory of Kreis Debica, 75% of whom were subsequently killed and 25% survived. It provides a fine-grained reconstruction of the social dynamics and processes that informed the participation of locals in the persecution of Jews for a period of almost three years. The data is drawn primarily from postwar legal proceedings against individuals accused of collaboration on the basis of the Decree of August 31, 1944. The dissertation integrates the Judenjagd with parallel processes aimed at other groups by means of a thick description. It places the findings within two theoretical frames of reference. First, it treats the nexus of local structures co-opted by the occupation authorities as a critical meso level of the process of genocide in the General Government. Those with institutional ties to the system of indirect German rule over the Polish countryside became bound by a self-regulating dynamic of mutually reinforcing fears among its members, which did not necessitate the presence of the uniformed police. Second, it views local dynamics as a response to ongoing security dilemmas. The aftershock of German state violence against locals for the shelter of Jews provided a combustible social atmosphere, in which Polish fear of Jewish exposure upon capture set off a chain reaction of pre-emptive violence against Jews in hiding. The study situates the question of Polish agency within these structures and dynamics. It finds that the occupation authorities had essentially unleashed a sociology of state collapse upon Poland’s multiethnic society. These conditions lowered the threshold for participation in persecution and violence against targeted groups. This account stands in contrast to interpretations that explain Polish participation in genocide as stemming primarily from ideology and personal convictions.Ph.D

The Polish Criminal Police, the German Special Court in Lemberg, and the Prosecution of Poles for Giving Refuge to Jews, September 1943 to June 1944

This source publication contains three categories of documents related to the Nazi German occupation of Poland, specifically the city of Lwów (Lemberg) in District Galicia of the General Government, which have been translated from German to English. The documents were selected for their relevance to ongoing debates and research questions evoked by the “third phase” of the Holocaust characterized by both widespread police searches for Jews and help offered by non-Jews to the fugitives, here set in the multi-ethnic context of Eastern Galicia between September 1943 and June 1944. Documents 1 to 4 are the German laws that formed the legal basis of decrees limiting Jewish residence and sanctioning punishment for their violation. Documents 5 to 7 are verdicts handed down by the Special Court in Lemberg (Sondergericht im Lemberg) on the basis of these decrees, in which the judges imposed the death penalty on the accused for giving refuge to Jews. Documents 8 to 11 are final reports regarding the arrests of Poles and Ukrainians, and the Jews whom they were sheltering, written by members of the Third Commissariat of the Lemberg Polish Criminal Police (PPK), which were sent to their supervisors in the German Criminal Police (Kripo)

Panel 2: Rescue and Escape from the Holocaust

Panel 2: Rescue and Escape from the Holocaust Nina Paulovicova, University of Alberta, Canada: “The Silenced Phenomenon of Cross-National Rescue: \u27Leaking Border\u27 and Paid Smugglers” Download Paper (login required) Tomasz Frydel, University of Toronto: Rescue or Denunciation of Jews? A Case Study of Southeastern Poland during German Occupation Download Paper (login required) Tanja von Fransecky, Technical University, Berlin, Germany: Escape and Attempted Escape of Jewish Deportees from Deportation Trains in France, Belgium and the Netherlands” Download Paper (login required) Chair: Adara Goldberg and Elizabeth Anthony, Clark UniversityComment: Deborah Dwork, Clark Universit

The optical properties and quantum chemical calculations of thienyl and furyl derivatives of pyrene.

A detailed electrochemical, photophysical and theoretical study is presented for various new thienyl and furyl derivatives of pyrene. Their optical properties are described based on UV-VIS absorption and both steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy. DFT and TDDFT calculations are also presented to support experimental data. The calculations results show that HOMO-LUMO orbitals are delocalized uniformly between aromatic core and aryl substituents. Good electrochemical stability of thienyl and furyl hybrids of pyrene confirm their potential application for light emitting electrochemical cells or spintronics mainly due to their beneficial optical and charge transport properties in electrochromic devices. In order to demonstrate this potential, an OLED device is presented. Synthesized compounds included in this OLED device both facilitate electron transport and act as a light emitting layer

Time domain para hydrogen induced polarization

Abstract Para hydrogen induced polarization (PHIP) is a powerful hyperpolarization technique, which increases the NMR sensitivity by several orders of magnitude. However the hyperpolarized signal is created as an anti-phase signal, which necessitates high magnetic field homogeneity and spectral resolution in the conventional PHIP schemes. This hampers the application of PHIP enhancement in many fields, as for example in food science, materials science or MRI, where low B0-fields or low B0-homogeneity do decrease spectral resolution, leading to potential extinction if in-phase and anti-phase hyperpolarization signals cannot be resolved. Herein, we demonstrate that the echo sequence (45°-τ-180°-τ) enables the acquisition of low resolution PHIP enhanced liquid state NMR signals of phenylpropiolic acid derivatives and phenylacetylene at a low cost low-resolution 0.54 T spectrometer. As low field TD-spectrometers are commonly used in industry or biomedicine for the relaxometry of oil–water mixtures, food, nano-particles, or other systems, we compare two variants of para-hydrogen induced polarization with data-evaluation in the time domain (TD-PHIP). In both TD-ALTADENA and the TD-PASADENA strong spin echoes could be detected under conditions when usually no anti-phase signals can be measured due to the lack of resolution. The results suggest that the time-domain detection of PHIP-enhanced signals opens up new application areas for low-field PHIP-hyperpolarization, such as non-invasive compound detection or new contrast agents and biomarkers in low-field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Finally, solid-state NMR calculations are presented, which show that the solid echo (90y-τ-90x-τ) version of the TD-ALTADENA experiment is able to convert up to 10% of the PHIP signal into visible magnetization.status: publishe