Mass Murderers Discover Mass Murder: the Germans and Katyn, 1943

After the German army in 1943 discovered the graves of murdered Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, Joseph Goebbels embarked upon a cynical publicity campaign to spread before the world the perils of Bolshevik success. But the Nazi discovery of Soviet crimes against leaders of Polish state and society elided the reality that from the very beginning of the German invasion of Poland, the SS had carried out identical mass murders of Polish intellectuals and other social leaders. Goebbels\u27s campaign amounted to mass murderers ““uncovering” mass murders on the part of their adversaries and seeking cynically to use that “shocking” discovery to the advantage of the Third Reich. This essay situates the Nazi campaign to mobilize the Katyn discovery to German advantage in three steps. First, it sketches the events leading up to the Katyn massacre in April 1940 and the Nazi discovery of the victims in late March 1943. Second, it examines the course and substance, as well as the immediate consequences of Nazi propaganda exploitation of the Katyn massacre to promote Goebbels\u27s ends. And third, it adverts to the impact of that propaganda campaign on the Allied war effort, on the Polish government in exile in London, and thus on the course of wartime and post-war Cold War history. To conclude, it situates Katyn in the bloody twentieth-century history of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine as the cockpit of genocide that Timothy Snyder has called the ““Bloodlands.

Mass Murderers Discover Mass Murder: the Germans and Katyn, 1943

After the German army in 1943 discovered the graves of murdered Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, Joseph Goebbels embarked upon a cynical publicity campaign to spread before the world the perils of Bolshevik success. But the Nazi discovery of Soviet crimes against leaders of Polish state and society elided the reality that from the very beginning of the German invasion of Poland, the SS had carried out identical mass murders of Polish intellectuals and other social leaders. Goebbels\u27s campaign amounted to mass murderers ““uncovering” mass murders on the part of their adversaries and seeking cynically to use that “shocking” discovery to the advantage of the Third Reich. This essay situates the Nazi campaign to mobilize the Katyn discovery to German advantage in three steps. First, it sketches the events leading up to the Katyn massacre in April 1940 and the Nazi discovery of the victims in late March 1943. Second, it examines the course and substance, as well as the immediate consequences of Nazi propaganda exploitation of the Katyn massacre to promote Goebbels\u27s ends. And third, it adverts to the impact of that propaganda campaign on the Allied war effort, on the Polish government in exile in London, and thus on the course of wartime and post-war Cold War history. To conclude, it situates Katyn in the bloody twentieth-century history of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine as the cockpit of genocide that Timothy Snyder has called the ““Bloodlands.

From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers 1878-1933

The is a book about German lawyers in priate practice, but it is also an effort to address larger qustiosn about the social and political history of Germany between the middle of the ninetenth century and the National Socialist sezure of power in 1933