The Art of Tetman Callis

“The overall quality of the Eastern Worker experience is not entirely clear. The few who worked for farmers were generally satisfied with their treatment and payment, and initially some even wanted to stay in Germany forever. On the whole, the Eastern Workers, who were mostly females, worked much harder than either western European or Balkan […]

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“I hopped off in the Podil [in Kiev] and walked down the Andriïvsky Uzviz, which was lined with beggars all the way. Some of them were whining and begging openly for money, others exposed their amputated limbs in silence. There were other, quiet, intelligent-looking elderly men and women, some with spectacles and pince-nez, standing there; […]

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“There are almost no eyewitness accounts of public interactions between German and local city dwellers who were not girlfriends of the Germans. A glimpse comes from Jacob Gerstenfeld-Maltiel, a man who escaped from the Lviv ghetto and reached Dnipropetrovsk early in 1943. Despite his experiences as a Jew in the General Government, the way the […]

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“Passersby could be forced to watch public hangings of ‘saboteurs’ or ‘Jews.’ German onlookers, meanwhile, often took pictures. The victims were left suspended from the balconies or lampposts—there were no public gallows in the cities—for days. In Kiev, the first public hangings, of two ‘arsonists,’ apparently took place in late September 1941. They are also […]

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“Food is given out in the evening. We stand in line, but instead of leading us into the kitchen in an organized fashion, they shout, ‘To the canteen!’ ‘Run!’ The hungry people rush to the kitchen, where there are several dirty barrels with a millet slop. Everybody knows that there is not enough food and […]

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“They were taken away in groups of ten, past the trees. There, the first ten men dug themselves a common grave (the required amount of shovels had been arranged), and a brief volley of automatics rang out. The next ten were ordered to cover the grave with earth and to dig a new one. Thus […]

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“Of the Ukrainians, the Baptists and Evangelical Christians seem to have helped Jews the most. In Volhynia alone, they apparently saved hundreds. These Protestants felt that their Christian faith allowed for nothing else. Also important was that they were a community in which mutual trust prevailed, so that they could quickly pass Jews from one […]

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“All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.” – Bishop Milton Wright (father of Orville and Wilbur)

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“Everybody is saying now that the Jews are being murdered. No, they have been murdered already. All of them, without exception—old people, women, and children. Those who went home on Monday have also been shot. People say it in a way that does not leave any doubt. No trains left Lukianivka at all. People saw […]

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“We still don’t know what they did to the Jews. There are terrifying rumors coming from the Lukianivka Cemetery. But they are still impossible to believe. They say that the Jews are being shot . . . Some people say that the Jews are being shot with machine guns, all of them. Others say that […]

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“The Jewish Holocaust in Dnieper Ukraine was rather different from the Holocaust in western and central Europe, where Jews were put into ghettoes and then, sooner or later, were shipped away to be gassed to death. In Dnieper Ukraine, most Jewish men, women, and children died at the edge of or inside their graves: anti-tank […]

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“After 1945 the world was totally different from what it had been in 1939; mid-century saw the balance of power shift westward across the Atlantic Ocean to a newly internationalist United States. Europe found itself divided along lines that were drawn up at wartime conferences in which most of the affected nations did not participate. […]

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“The war crimes trials in Germany and Japan have been criticized by some as having no legal, judicial basis. Many critics making this argument have stated that the Allies would have been better off simply executing the top German and Japanese leaders under military law instead of engaging in an elaborate legal charade. Those who […]

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“Before 1939, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy were the most influential nations in the world, but when the war ended, Germany, Italy, and France were in shambles, and Great Britain was nearly bankrupt and its colonies were pressing for independence.” – The World War II Desk Reference, Douglas Brinkley and Michael E. Haskew, eds.

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“No one, whether Nazi or not, should be led summarily before a firing squad without legal trial and consideration of the relevant facts and proofs. Rather would I here and now be led out into the garden and shot than that my honor and that of my country should be smirched by such baseness.” – […]

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“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” – Douglas Adams, “The Salmon of Doubt”

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“The Germans systematically persecuted, hunted, and exterminated the Jews of Europe during the Nazi era. Once the war had started, they rounded up Jews from virtually every nation on the continent and summarily executed them, murdered them in gas chambers, or worked them to death in slave labor camps.” – The World War II Desk […]

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“Ortiz frequently went into German-occupied towns wearing civilian clothes to gather information, quietly passing himself off as a local. On one occasion, however, he did things a little different. He strolled unnoticed into a cafe, wearing a long coat. Several German officers were present, drinking and cursing the troublesome Maquis. They saved their special venom […]

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“Between 1940 and 1945 the number of working women increased by 50 percent and the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce increased from 27.6 percent to nearly 37 percent. In the aviation industry, the increase was even more dramatic, from 1 percent to 65 percent by 1943. Time reported that in 1943: ‘Many a […]

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“American women achieved an unprecedented degree of independence during World War II. Many joined the military, and many others found themselves working outside the home for the first time in their lives. For those who entered the labor force and accepted employment in nontraditional jobs, the civilian day often began earlier and ended later. They […]

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“The home front in occupied Poland was a veritable Nazi reign of terror. Polish Jews were herded off to concentration and extermination camps, and the treatment of Poles in general was what might be expected from an occupier who thought of them, at best, as Untermenschen. Because Poland was one of the first nations that […]

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“The solidarity of the Norwegian people (population three million) against the Nazi occupation was epitomized by the nation’s schoolteachers, who walked out en masse rather than teach a ‘Nazified’ history of the world.” – The World War II Desk Reference, Douglas Brinkley and Michael E. Haskew, eds.

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“While the Dutch had little more than a ceremonial military presence (and the royal retinue), they did have Les Gueux (the Beggars), a secret society that had, since the 16th century, stealthily battled its country’s various oppressors. Les Gueux was responsible for poisoning Nazi soldiers in restaurants, drowning isolated Nazis in the canals, and other […]

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“It’s real simple. If you ain’t gonna eat it and it ain’t gonna eat YOU, put your goddamn gun away.” – Fawn Neun, Facebook, July 29, 2015 (emphasis in original)

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“The people of Leningrad and Stalingrad put up some of the most tenacious defenses in modern military history. Leningrad was under siege from September 1941 until January 1944, and as many as a third of its three million inhabitants died of starvation or disease. Electricity was cut off, potable water was nonexistent, and the only […]

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“By the time World War II broke out, Mussolini had been the Italian dictator for 17 years, and all political life revolved around this flamboyant, crude peasant from the Romagna hills in Northeast Italy. His Fascist movement was, like Hitler’s invocation of an earlier racially pure Reich, predicated on a return to the glory days […]

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“During the later stages of the war, German industry used slave labor procured from occupied France and Poland, Russian prisoners, and Jewish concentration camp inmates. The living conditions were almost unfathomably harsh: long unpaid hours of work, meager food rations, unheated and inappropriate quarters (for example, dog kennels, stables, bombed work camps), inadequate water, no […]

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“In February 1933, soon after being named Chancellor, Adolph Hitler convened a meeting with German business leaders. The three business leaders most vital to the war industry and rearmament of the Wehrmacht were present: Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, who made armaments; Karl Bosch and Georg von Schnitzler from I.G. Farben, the chemical maker; and […]

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“Nothing is easier than leading the people on a leash. I just hold up a dazzling campaign poster and they jump right through it.” – Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, The World War II Desk Reference, Douglas Brinkley and Michael E. Haskew, eds.

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“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” – Winston Churchill, The World War II Desk Reference, Douglas Brinkley and Michael E. Haskew, eds.

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