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EN
In December 1943, upon his return from a visit to Moscow, which he regarded as the greatest success of his foreign policy, Edvard Benes became even more involved in appearing on the international scene in the role of an agent of Soviet impact. He was of the opinion that a constant demonstration of a pro-Soviet stand would strengthen the position of the Czechoslovak authorities abroad also vis a vis the Anglo-American powers. True, initially his conduct met with the approval of the British Prime Minster. Winston Churchill counted on using Benes for forcing the Polish government-in-exile to capitulate in the face of Soviet territorial claims. The Czechoslovak President also tried to suggest that the Polish side should accept Soviet demands to relegate from the Polish state leadership certain politicians, in other words, agree to a decomposition of its own centre of power. By doing so, he acted clearly in the Soviet interest, while at the same time making the reservation that he was not acting the part of an intermediary and did not wish to interfere in questions relating to others. The realisation of Churchill's intention, benefiting from Benes' support, failed, and in January 1944 the President was taken by surprise by a brutal anti-Polish Soviet propaganda campaign which, on the one hand, rendered the conflict public, something which Benes never expected, and, on the other hand, declared that Stalin never aimed at an agreement with the legal Polish government. Nonetheless, Benes did not intend to resign from the pro-Soviet line of his foreign policy. The proposals made by the Czechoslovak authorities started to lose importance among the British government circles, which began to treat Benes and his team - in accordance with the actual state of things - as an outpost of Soviet influence in Europe. The Czechoslovak President attempted to prevent this development, and at the end of March 1944 tried to convince the British side that a large loan, made as quickly as possible for setting into motion the economic potential of Czechoslovakia, and thus for balancing Soviet impact, lay in its own interest. Benes and his entourage remained under the constant pressure of the Soviet authorities, which demanded the organisation of an active Resistance movement in Czechoslovakia. When at the beginning of February 1944 the President called for the inauguration of a Resistance, he appeared to doubt the effectiveness of such an appeal. At any rate, more than a month later, this was the attitude recorded in his diaries by Eduard Táborský, the President's secretary. The Czechoslovak authorities were well aware that the situation might become further complicated, since in their talks with the Czechoslovak generals the Soviet military did not conceal the fact that Slovakia was to become a region of partisan armed operations containing the German forces. Benes enjoyed a rather partial success - the signing on 8 May 1944 of a Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement concerning the administration of Czechoslovak territory after the entry of the Red Army. The fact that he was incapable of attaining similar pacts with the United Kingdom and the United States was to a great extent the outcome of the constantly demonstrated pro-Soviet stand of the Czechoslovak authorities-in-exile. Having found themselves, of their volition, within the orbit of Soviet influence, they gradually became increasingly dependent upon the Kremlin.
EN
The article analyzes rumours and contemporary legends of the Second World War on the territory of the Czech lands. Similar social functions as rumours and legends presented jokes and anecdotes; some of them even used identical motives. The most typical and the most interesting war-time rumours were dealing with urban phantoms. The most important of these urban phantoms was legendary Spring Man ('Perak'). It was the Czech paralle of the Victorian urban phantom Spring-heeled Jack from the 19th century in England. Some actualised anecdotes and character of Spring Man, which have been deeply rooted in Czech popular culture, have remained to these days.
EN
The article deals with Polish-German relations in Pomerania preceding the outbreak of the Second World War and gives an account of the sequence of battles fought in 1939. The author discusses German preparations to the invasion of Poland, focusing mainly on the region of Gdansk Pomerania. Attention is drawn to the disproportion of forces engaged in combat on the Polish and German sides. The course of the September Campaign in Pomerania is assessed taking into account the actual strategic-operational capacities of the units of the 'Pomorze' Army. The article also highlights some of the documents which provide significant evidence of the real intentions of the generalship of the Third Reich's armed forces.
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Úvahy nad biografiemi Emila Háchy

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EN
The authors consider the historical role of Emil Hacha (1872-1945), the President of the Second Republic of Czechoslovakia (which lasted for the six months from the Munich Agreement of late September 1938 to the German Occupation of mid-March 1939) and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945). They compare and assess the four biographies of Hacha published since the collapse of Communism: Dusan Tomasek and Robert Kvacek's 'Causa Emil Hacha' (Prague, 1995), Tomas Pasak's 'JUDr. Emil Hacha' (Prague, 1997), Vit Machalek's 'Prezident v zajeti: Zivot, ciny a kriz Emila Hachy' (Prague, 1998), and a new, expanded edition of Pasak's work, with the title 'Emil Hacha (1938-1945)'. Gebhart and Kuklik note that all four authors use similar basic sources and, logically, concentrate mainly on Hacha as President. They differ, however, in their emphasis on various events and in their interpretations. They argue that the most critical are Kvacek and Tomasek, whereas Pasak is positivist and neutral. Machalek, on the other hand, is, according to them, almost an apologist, having selected his sources to suit the image of Hacha he wishes to portray; compared to the other three writers, he devotes the most attention to Hacha's childhood and youth and also to the posthumous dispute often called the 'Hacha case' (causa Emil Hacha). A weakness shared by all these works, according to Gebhart and Kuklik, is their failure to use records related to the development of the attitude of the resistance at home and abroad towards Hacha. Gebhart and Kuklik discuss important points in Hacha's career - from his becoming president (elected by the parliament in 1938) to his death in prison after the war, and they consider the trial that was being prepared for him. Without doubting the sincerity of his patriotism, they argue that Hacha's career was as a downward development from a state representative endeavouring to preserve his country's legal continuity with the pre-war period to a passive object of manipulation by the German occupying forces and the people around him. In conclusion they state that this tragic political fate will surely continue to attract the attention of historians, as was demonstrated, for instance, by 'The Case of Emil Hacha,' a seminar held by the Institute of Contemporary History and the Masaryk Institute, Prague, in June 2005.
EN
Southern Dobrudzha, situated in north-eastern Bulgaria next to the frontier with Romania, and recognised as the perpetual land of the Bulgarians and the cradle of Bulgarian statehood, comprised one of the very important territories lost by the Bulgarians after the First World War. In contrast to the Western Borderlands (encompassing the districts of Caribrod and Bosilegrad) and the region of Strumica (Pirin Macedonia) as well as Western Thrace, which had been permanently cut off from the Bulgarian state and incorporated into Yugoslavia and Greece, respectively, the Bulgarians managed to regain Southern Dobrudzha thanks to a conducive international situation as well as the determination and skills of their diplomats. This indubitable success of Sofia's foreign policy deserves a more in-depth analysis since it constitutes a sui generis extraordinary event in international relations in Europe during the initial stage of the Second World War. The reason for its exceptional nature lies in the fact that in 1940 Bulgarian-Romanian negotiations made it possible to attain one of the chief targets of Bulgarian revisionism in conditions when the European Continent was in the throes of a war and the West was submitting to demands made by the Third Reich.
EN
In the period 1945-1948 the Communist Party sought to use cultural institutions to promote its policies. Some cultural branches, such as theatre and film, were nationalized. Slovak museums did not awake state´s interest. The collection funds had not been assorted, classified and scientifically evaluated. It was not possible to prepare good-quality exhibitions. Association in this period focused on the nationalization of two major museums, Slovak Museum in Bratislava and Slovak National Museum in Turčiansky Svätý Martin. This objective was achieved in December 1948. The Association participated in the preparation of the legal incorporation of museums into a museum law. This action pursued to ensure museums financially, materially and personally.
EN
In the course of World War II, the three great powers, i.e. the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, had a clear picture about the new world arrangement in both general and particular terms. The American conception was based on three aspects: forming a vital alliance of this space based on federation or confederation principles, minimisation of nationalistic antagonism by means of synchronising language and political barriers, or replacing the population and substituting dictator and authoritative interwar regimes by democratic systems. The future of Transylvania was regarded the most complicated issue, exceeding the significance of the entire region. Unlike the American and British post-war Central and South-East European concepts, the Soviet standpoint posed expansive strategic plans of a power, which considered this space a subject of its immediate strategic and security interest. Concerning the Hungarian border, the Soviet leaders struggled to restore the Trianon border, which was justified by Hungary's participation in the war.
EN
This review article deals with the latest German historiographical research into the German military atrocities of World War II in Eastern Europe. The main focus of this research is laid on the mass murder of civilians and of Soviet and Polish prisoners of war, the question of mass rapes, the extermination of whole districts and the devastation of the occupied territories 'in the East'. The latest works can be considered a step forward towards a new understanding of this problem not only in terms of providing us with new analytic studies or new sources, but also by formulating new, innovative questions about the Nazi regime itself and its concept of 'total war' as well as its diverse relationship to the nations of Central and Eastern Europe.
EN
The memoir literature can be used as a basic historical source besides the archival documents. Even combats of the final phase of the World War II in southwester Slovakia can use some of such books. There are several groups of Soviet authors: Generals (Matvei V. Zakharov, Issa A. Pliev) were largely responsible for leading Soviet military operations in this area. They offer their point of view, seen from their commanding positions, focusing on operational problems, sometimes denying their failures, sometimes overestimating their own contributions. The other group of authors (Dmitri F. Loza, E.-N. Leonid S. Loginov, Gagni B. Uladjiev) consist of non-commanding officers and common soldiers. They report of their experiences much more common way, recording their everyday problems, fears, opinions. Sometimes they reveal many operational details that enable us to see several tactical features of combats that had taken place more than seventy years ago.
EN
Every record, even historical one, becomes a narrative, and every narrative must make a use of a trope, tone or way of presenting the story. Video game does not recreate history by presenting images of the past, but through the use of a characteristic trope or path. one of the central tropes of contemporary video games is the main character with which one plays. The character brings to mind characteristics of a hero taken straight from the oral tradition. He is brave, manly and ready to sacrifice himself. Such a person can deal with a tragic situation. This, during playing the game, is accompanied by a sense of immersion and the sense of being-in-the-world. Thanks to such telling of history, ethics and the connection between action and responsibility are brought forth. In such a way one can obtain a full and complete historiographic discourse. The author discusses those issues using the game Velvet Assassin as an example. The game deals with resistance movement during World War II in the Nazi occupied territories.
EN
This paper discusses how the events of World War II affected people's sense of identity and how the war changed their outlook on life. The war decided the fates of multitudes, forcing many to become refugees. Although Masuji Ono, a character created by the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, and Edmunds Valdemars Bunkse come from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, they are united by a common quest: to find peace of mind and their lost homes. Analysis of Ishiguro's novel and Bunkse's autobiography reveals the feelings of both characters as they face difficulties in finding and understanding their own identity.
Vojenská história
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2017
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vol. 21
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issue 1
147 - 160
EN
The study deals with the liberation of the city of Trnava by Red Army and the mission of Voluntary Fire and Rescue Force in Trnava during this process. The Voluntary Fire and Rescue Force in Trnava was one of the leading fire-fighting units in Slovakia. Its purpose was to protect the life, health and property of the citizens of Trnava and its surrounding from the fire thread and other natural disasters. This voluntary organization, based on the community principle, whose members voluntarily entered the Communities on the bases of the personal conviction and enthusiasm for the objectives set, played an important role during the Second World War. The variety of its activities was represented among other things rescue operations in the harsh times of the military operations and social changes at the end of the Second World War. At this time were maintaining the fire-fighting communities as the compact units, which united people according to the principles of humanity and decency without any kind of religious, political and social distinctions and barriers.
EN
This study is devoted to the German conservative intellectual Joachim Fest, an influential journalist and cultural publicist of the post-war period. Above all, he was best known internationally as the exceptionally successful author of popular books and films on Nazism and its protagonists, Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer. A Czech edition of his Memoirs, highly stylized and specifically manipulative of the past, provides the impetus for this critical contemplation of his life and work. The Memoirs are then analysed in the second part of this review, with an emphasis on making the retro-active self-stylization of the German nationalist and conservative elites clear to understand.
Studia Historica Nitriensia
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2017
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vol. 21
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issue 2
450 – 458
EN
A. D. Ponomaryov, member of the 40th cavalry guards regiment volunteered for a reconaissance mission on 28th March 1945 on the outskirts of village Úľany nad Žitavou in southwestern Slovakia. He failed to complete his task since German defenders of the 357th infantry division captured him. They had probably tried to interrogate him, but after a short time they poured petrol on him and burnt him. On the next day, when Soviet division occupied the village, Cossacks found his body presuming he was dead. But soon after that, when burial platoon started to collect bodies, they had found out, he was still alive. Ponomaryov thus got to the hospital and in spite of his burns, he survived. His regimental commander, not knowing about that, made a proposal to award Ponomaryov a Hero of the Soviet Union in memoriam, which was accepted and executed on the 15th May 1946! Even the supreme commander of cavalry-mechanized group, general Pliev, did know nothing about Ponomaryov’s survival and wrote about his presumed deathe in his memoirs in 1971.
EN
Already before the interruption of diplomatic contacts between the Soviet Union and the Polish Exile Government in April 1943 foundations of a future Polish pro-Soviet government were laid. In May 1943, the Polish Tadeusz Kosciuszko Division was formed under the Soviet patronage, and also a Union of Polish Patriots was established in the Soviet Union to represent the pro-Soviet Poles, which in fact was a tool in the Communist hands. Logically, the Czechoslovak representatives in Moscow came more and more frequently into contact with representatives of the Polish Communists and pro-Soviet oriented Poles. In addition, it became soon clear that the Polish Exile Government was getting in increasing isolation and that a new partner of Czechoslovakia would be the Polish government created under the Soviet patronage. Polish Communists, however, had to reckon with a resistance of the Polish population, which was mostly reluctant to accept the Communist ideas. Therefore, they adopted a program aimed at creating a Poland embracing in its territory all the Polish population. That is also why the new Polish government wanted to get back the Tesin area with mostly Polish population, and refused to unequivocally recognize the prewar borders of Czechoslovakia in that area. This, however, was a condition required by the Czechoslovak government to establish diplomatic contacts with the Polish Provisional Government in Warsaw. Based on many domestic and foreign sources unknown up to now the contacts between the Czechoslovak exile government and the Polish National Liberation Committee are analyzed by the author and a number of new facts are shown in relation to the diplomatic background of the recognition of the Polish Provisional Government by Czechoslovakia. The roots of the territorial conflict that broke out between Poland and Czechoslovakia soon after the end of World War II are explained.
Vojenská história
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2023
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vol. 27
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issue 4
7 - 33
EN
The image of the Slovak Army in 1939-1945 is usually associated with insufficient motorisation. However, not enough attention has been paid to this issue so far. The Army Headquarters and its activities in 1944 is a convenient subject for a probe into the motorisation of the Slovak Army. That year, both the material struggles and the modernization efforts of the Army, deepened by the formation of field units of the Army Headquarters for defending the borders against the advancing front, were fully manifested. Another level in the processing of this issue is the fact that the Army Headquarters units were envisaged in both conceptions of armed conduct against Nazi Germany.
Vojenská história
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2017
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vol. 21
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issue 1
61 - 84
EN
In his study, the author analysed the as yet scarcely processed topic of the post-war renewal of one of the military intelligence units. The recovery conditions were complicated due to the specific historic reality following the end of the World War 2 and the consolidation of the spheres of influence of the victorious powers. The focus of the topic is incorporated into the gradually escalating fight for the political power in CSR. This has been negatively reflected in the process of building the military intelligence under the new conditions. The 2nd Department of the Headquarters (military intelligence) had the biggest problems. On the selected contemporary examples, the study is highlighting the broad range of issues in the recovery of the military intelligence and its functioning during early stages of the post-war CSR. A substantial part of the study is dedicated to the 2nd Department of the Headquarters, the focus of which in the period in question should have been similar as in the pre-Munich Republic. This means that it was focusing on obtaining, collecting and evaluating (analysing) the information important for state defence, unlike the military counterintelligence, which disposed of not only the intelligence service powers but also the powers of security authorities.
Vojenská história
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2022
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vol. 26
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issue 1
101 - 121
EN
The operational deployment of the Slovak Air Force in the territory of the occupied USSR in 1941-1943 belongs to the most sought-after chapters in the military history of Slovakia. The quality of the outputs after November 1989, when the subject matter began to be realistically investigated and its results publicly published, was helped not only by written archival documents and other forms of records of permanent documentary value created by the activities of the central military authorities, military commands and military units, institutions and facilities of the Slovak Army in 1939-1945 professionally managed in specialized Slovak and Czech archives, direct testimonies of the participants of the operational deployment of the Slovak Air Force in the territory of the occupied USSR and their surviving contemporary documents, as well as the content of documents of German military provenance located in the Federal Archive - Military Archive in Freiburg (Federal Republic of Germany), containing valuable information about the Slovak Air Force in the years of the World War 2. One of the valuable sources, which sheds light on the operational deployment of the Slovak Air Force on the Eastern Front in the first half of 1943, is also a hitherto unpublished report of the head of the German Air Mission in Slovakia, Lt. Gen. Ludwig Keipre presenting the course and results of his mission to the headquarters of the German Air Fleet 4 and to the Slovak air units deployed on the Eastern Front, carried out between 28 May 1943 and 7 June 1943. The report was addressed to the Minister of National Defence, 1st Class General Ferdinand Čatloš, and offers a contemporary German account of the participation of the Slovak Air Force on the Eastern Front, as well as a plan to increase the number of air force and anti-aircraft artillery units. The document is published according to the established rules for the publication of sources on more recent history. It is published in full in German and in its original translation in Slovak.
World Literature Studies
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2020
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vol. 12
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issue 2
14 – 25
EN
The contribution deals with the crime novel „Hunkeler und der Fall Livius“ (2007) by the Swiss author Hansjȍrg Schneider. Its goal is to analyse the aesthetically effective incorporation of the historically authentic events of the World War II into the novel ś fictional world, in which the author applied the oral history method (interviewing contemporary witnesses) and partially relied on written sources.
Vojenská história
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2016
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vol. 20
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issue 3
48 - 73
EN
In the study, the author deals with the issue of origins, from which the Slovaks – members of the Czechoslovak army in the Soviet Union in 1942 – 1944 came from. Majority of the sources in processing the topic comprised the archival documents from the funds of the Military Central Archive in Prague, Military Historical Archive in Bratislava and Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) in Moscow. Based on the analysis thereof, the author declares that the most significant area, from which Slovaks as volunteers were arriving to this Army in the reporting period were the prisoners of the Slovak and Hungarian Army deployed on the Eastern frontline.
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