World War II

The opening frames of Steve McQueen’s Blitz situate us in the midst of all the horror and chaos of Hitler’s lightning war – his blitzkrieg – on Britain in 1940-41. Bombs rain down on the densely populated streets of London’s East End, while firefighters and air raid patrol (ARP) wardens rush to counter the raging flames, dragging bodies, alive or dead, from the rubble. ... (read more)

As its title tells us, this book focuses on one month of World War II: November 1942. Swedish author and historian Peter Englund argues that this month was the turning point of the war. In North Africa, the Germans were on the retreat after the Allied victory at El Alamein. American forces began their land operations against the Axis powers by invading French Morocco and Algeria. In the Pacific war, the battle of Guadalcanal reached its decisive climax, while Australian troops recaptured Kokoda after pushing the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track. Most importantly, on the Eastern front, the Red Army launched an attack that surrounded the German 6th Army in Stalingrad. Two months later, the 91,000 German troops still alive in the ruins of the city surrendered. Almost all of them perished in captivity.

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After sixty years, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ has almost become a cliché. Yet, in films like Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest it is powerfully present in every mundane detail of the Auschwitz commandant’s family life. What of the banality and trauma of the lives of survivors or those murdered? There is a view that if the victims had been more aware of their fate, they would have escaped and survived. This claim is an insult, as most had no choice. The overwhelming majority of Jews, many of whom were alert to the risk of mass extermination, were unable to get exit visas, afford to flee, or obtain refuge in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Tess Scholfield-Peters’ grandfather, Hermann (Mutzi) Pollnow, was one of the lucky ones.

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The title and subtitle give it away. This edited collection considers two related subjects: the British practice of internment in World War II, and Britons’ experience of internment at the hands of enemy powers in that conflict. The editors define internment as ‘the state of civilian confinement caused by citizenship of a belligerent country’. Thus, the histories this book tells are those of civilian men, women, and children betrayed by nationality and circumstance, as opposed to those of military men captured in conflict. Each of the histories included here is worthy, and some are riveting. There is much in this volume that will be unfamiliar to students of internment and World War II generally.

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In Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest (2014), Auschwitz Commandant Paul Doll asserts that to meet the objectives of the Reich it is necessary to ‘shut down a certain zone of the mind. I must accept that we have mobilised the weapons, the wonder weapons, of darkness.’ Doll is not a man seeking to absolve himself. Rather, he attempts to explain his dilemma, lamenting not so much the moral nightmare into which he has been thrust, but the bureaucratic one: how to balance the Reich’s need to exploit the prisoners for their labour with the desire to eradicate them as quickly and efficiently possible? ‘The Christian system of right and wrong, of good and bad,’ he muses, ‘is 1 we categorically reject … There are only positive outcomes and negative outcomes.’

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Bomber Command operations cost about 3,500 Australian lives in World War II. This was more than five times the number of Australians who died in the Battle of Kokoda from July to November 1942. Yet the strategic bombing offensive over Germany has never held a comparable place in the national memory of war. 

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What happens when you mix some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century with the urgency of war? Wizards of Oz, a new book by lawyer and former politician Brett Mason, seeks to provide the answer. It is an account of a friendship between two Adelaide men and their extraordinary scientific achievements during World War II. 

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Why do publishers do this? The cover of this book screams that the Cowra breakout is an ‘untold’ story, and ‘the missing piece of Australia’s World War II history’. Neither claim is remotely true, as the author himself acknowledges. Once we get past the sensationalist cover and into the text, Mat McLachlan notes that the story of the Cowra breakout has been told several times before, and well: he even salutes Harry Gordon’s Die Like the Carp!, first published in 1978, as the ‘definitive’ account. So this is hardly the missing piece of an Australian military history jigsaw. Another stretch is the suggestion in the shoutline that the breakout was a conventional military ‘battle’.

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In the twentieth century, the Jewish experience has been dominated by two extraordinary (and related) events: the Nazi holocaust and the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel. It is natural that they should be reflected in Jewish historiography, and especially in the large number of books, articles, and theses concerned with the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish communities around the world. In Europe, especially, where almost every national Jewish community was destroyed, historians (many of them survivors of the events they describe) have been struggling to come to terms with the way these things happened.

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‘Freedom’ is a word that slips off the tongue easily. As the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre notes in his essay ‘Freedom and Revolution’: ‘No word has been more cheapened by misuse. No word has experienced more of the tortuous redefinitions of politicians.’ In the essay, MacIntyre turns to Karl Marx to recover the idea that human beings are essentially free. With the same source of inspiration, but through a poignant and often funny memoir of coming to age in state-socialist Albania, Lea Ypi’s Free attempts the same task.

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