Abstracts

Kristina Milz/Benedikt Sepp, “Hard Times for the Good Guys”. Kurt Huber and Mirok Li – Reception of Resistance in the Federal Republic of Germany and South Korea

Until his execution in 1943 as a member of the White Rose resistance group, Kurt Huber cultivated a close friendship with the Korean scholar Mirok Li. Li had fled from Korea due to his resistance to the Japanese colonial occupation and had been living in Munich since 1925, where he made a name for himself as a writer. In 1946 he became famous for his novel “The Yalu Flows” and in 1947 published an account of his memories of his executed friend. In Korea, the relationship between the two men is now portrayed in films and comics as a reflection of the parallels between Japanese imperialism and National Socialism. Li and Huber appear as figures sharing the same spirit of resistance; in this sense Germany and Korea can be interpreted as being fatefully connected by an analogous historical path.

Tobias Wals, Artur Boss. The Rise of a Ukrainian Volksdeutscher in the German Occupation Apparatus

During the Second World War, Artur Boss had a remarkable career in German-occupied Ukraine. Despite limitations due to his status as a Volksdeutscher or local ethnic German, he succeeded in gaining the trust of a high-ranking SS officer and played a key role in the city administration of Kyiv. His story confirms the thesis that Volksdeutsche could prove their loyalty to Nazi Germany through opportunism and their willingness to use violence. Additionally, the example of Artur Boss shows that the local civilian population was able to make use of their advantage over the occupiers regarding local information as a means of improving their own situation. Tobias Wals thoroughly investigates Boss’ biography, including his persecution by the Soviet intelligence service during the 1930s and his involvement in the trials for Nazi crimes that were conducted in West Germany beginning in the late 1950s.

Sebastian De Pretto, Submersed by Progress. Reservoir Construction and Resettlement in the Alps after 1945

The construction of reservoir lakes after 1945 permanently left its mark on the Alps, impacting ecological systems and pushing out entire village communities. Sebastian De Pretto analyses the socio-economic consequences of this transformational process in France, Italy and Switzerland through the case studies of Tignes, Marmorera, Reschen and Vernagt. He shows that technocratic planning experts and energy companies resettled villages and uprooted the population by increasingly withholding resources, all in the name of progress. Resistance often proved futile as the asymmetries of power between the representatives of the central state and the local communities defined the negotiations. In this manner, the often overlooked but impactful social costs of hydroelectric expansion in the Alpine energy landscape become tangible.

Paweł Machcewicz, The Stereotype of Judeo-Bolshevism in Poland. From Anti-Communist Myth to National Communist Instrument

During the interwar period, the Polish right was convinced that Communism was an invention of the Jews that only served their own interests. The Communist Party of Poland initially opposed all forms of anti-Semitism and explicitly supported full equal rights for the Jewish minority. This situation changed radically during the 1960s, with a nationalist-minded group centered on the Minister of the Interior, Mieczysław Moczar, increasingly gaining influence at the time. It succeeded in using anti-Semitism as a political weapon as a means of securing broad social support. Part of its message was the assertion that communists of Jewish origin were solely responsible for the crimes of Stalinism. Moczar and his followers propagated a national form of communism in which Jews had no place.

Christian Fleck/Andreas Kranebitter, Austria Counts. Remarks on the Debate Regarding the Proportion of Austrian National Socialist Perpetrators

In his article “Were Austrians Overrepresented among National Socialist Perpetrators? An Attempt at Synthesis” in the October 2024 issue of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Kurt Bauer claimed that those he identified as Austrians were not overrepresented among the National Socialist perpetrators. He thus asserted that the “perpetrator thesis” is to be rejected, which, after decades of the predominance of the “victim thesis”, i.e. the myth of Austria as the first victim of National Socialism, had gained dominance. Christian Fleck and Andreas Kranebitter refute Bauer’s arguments and methods. They demonstrate the methodological deficiencies of Bauer’s account and emphasise that his findings did not provide any new insights into the National Socialist regime in Austria.