Concentration camps are essentially penal camps and were first created to confine selected groups of people, usually for political reasons. Concentration camps differ from prisons because men, women and children are confined without normal judicial trials; the period of confinement is usually indefi...
Yehuda Bauer defines Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe as "any group action consciously taken in opposition to known or surmised laws, actions, or intentions directed against the Jews by the Germans and their supporters." However, many argue that passive resistance, even when done by a singl...
Each soldier carried his own four-day ration, but unfortunally, these rations were all consumed during the first day due to lack of discipline; therefore, out of the 500,000 troops that Napoleon brought, only 20,000 of these man managed and straggled to save their lives. ...
Fascism was forged in the crucible of post-World War I nationalism in Europe. The national aspirations of many European peoples nations without states, peoples arbitrarily assigned to political entities with little regard for custom or culture had been crushed after World War I. The humiliation impo...
What exactly is fascism? Where did it come from? What on earth is it good for? Nowadays, fascism is most popularly associated with Mussolini's Italy between the years 1922 to 1943, and Hitler's Nazi Germany between the years 1933 to 1945. However, making Nazism synonymous with fascism would be a...
"Fascism" When and why? Italy had suffered badly during the war - 460,000 soldiers were killed and the country was heavily in debt. the Italian army had been heavily defeated and had only won its first major victory at Vittorio Veneto in October 1918. Italy had been promised extra land by B...
Gleischaltung was in essence: "the elimination of those institution and structures of the Weimar Republic that no longer served a useful purpose in a National Socialist Germany and the disciplining and co-ordination of those that were indispensable." - Gordon A. ...
The gates swing open and inside lay mounds of emaciated corpses, haggard and diseased victims and remnants of skeletons within ovens so vast that they defy belief. At the close of World War II, the Allied Powers (The United States of America, England, France, and The Soviet Union) were faced with the dilemma of how to deal with the vanquished Axis military and political regime which had committed horrific crimes in its pursuit of world dominance. The United States, taking the dominant role, set forth in the Moscow Declaration of 1943 methods to deal with the punishment of Germany. Thus the N...
The term 'totalitarianism' was first coined in Italy in May 1923 as a term of abuse against Mussolini's Fascist government. In England in 1929 the term was used to describe both Fascist (Italy and later Germany) and Communist (Soviet Union) states. Indeed, these countries were ruled by a single mas...
Introduction The field of transitional justice was practically nonexistent prior to the end of the Second World War. Mass atrocities had taken place on the world stage with almost no consequences being brought upon the perpetrators, and more importantly the orchestrators or those "most responsible" for these crimes. This would all change after the crimes of the Nazis being brought to light during/after WWII. There was a paradigm shift in the international community in regards to justice being brought upon those who commit these crimes and the common thought or feeling that this coul...
