BA, Oberlin College, 2020, History

This thesis relies primarily on German soldiers' diaries, letters, and post-war memoirs in order to present an detailed narrative from those soldiers. The selected soldiers all came from West Germany and Austria. Through scrutiny of their voices as case studies, this thesis argues that in their writings in different time periods during and after the war, German soldiers struggled not just to physically survive the war, but also to morally justify their roles in the war. Participating in arguably the world's most destructive war in history, German soldiers of World War Two encountered an irreconcilable delima since they were on one hand both psychologically and physically unprepared for the magnitude of violence laying ahead. On the other hand, despite such unpreparedness, most German soldiers chose not waive the bloody business imposed by the regime even if knowing that sometimes rejection would not caused any serious punishment. To reconcile their personal abhorrence with war and their active participation during the war, German soldiers, during the heydays of slaughtering, found their relieves mainly by getting drunk, and seeking temporary refuges by exchanging letters with family members. While such methods enabled German soldiers to better cope with embattled frontline life, it also paved the ground for them to better fulfill the orders given by the Nazi authority, which included burning down villages and murdering enemy civilians. However, in soldiers' post-war memoirs, they tended to emphasize the wounded and embattled sides of themselves and avoided discussing their own participations in war atrocities. Practices like denial, selective remembrance, and self-victimization enabled German veterans to not just integrated into the post-war democratic society, but also reinvented the historiography of the war and Europe. Appealing Cold-War political discourses, German soldiers' historical narratives actually occupied the mainstream historiography in West Germany (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Leonard V. Smith (Advisor) Subjects: History

MA, Kent State University, 2011, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

This study investigates the experience of American workingwomen struggling to balance their identity as women and workers. Gender was culturally constructed to create roles for men and women that fit societal needs, as these needs fluctuated, roles changed. This thesis examines the appropriate gender roles for women according to government policy, capitalist initiatives, and media representations, while exploring the everyday conflict workingwomen expressed in oral histories when prioritizing responsibilities to their families and society. Over the years, images of ideal women varied and sent contradictory messages about the proper place of women in society, amplifying tension for workingwomen during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Post-War Years. During the Great Depression, women were encouraged by the government and pressured by society to stay home, vacating jobs for unemployed men. Despite hostility, more and more women entered the workforce, performing a masculine objective to pay bills and feed themselves and loved ones. At the beginning of World War II, when the United States experienced a labor shortage which decreased production and hindered the nation's ability to wage war, women were called upon to obtain industrial jobs. Empowering images of beautiful young women with their sleeves rolled up and ready to work for victory, flooded magazines and factory walls, inspiring women to obtain masculine jobs in order to bring their men home sooner. Women were conflicted, placing their new duty to society before the needs of their families, by prioritizing work over their traditional responsibilities as mothers and homemakers. Regardless of the attempt to feminize industrial jobs, female industrial workers experienced a new masculine identity which challenged their relationships with the men they worked with and other female war workers in feminine jobs. At the war's end, female industrial workers, left or were pushed out of their jobs and returned to (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kevin Adams PhD (Advisor); Kenneth Bindas PhD (Committee Member); E. Sue Wamsley PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Studies; Gender Studies; History; Modern History; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2012, History

Wilsonian liberal internationalism has provided a consistent, sustaining ideological basis for U.S. foreign policy since America's entry into the First World War. Since Woodrow Wilson's day, however, the credo he originated has undergone several substantial reformulations in response to changing circumstances—reformulations that necessarily involved successive reinterpretations of those precepts that comprise the credo: the imminent threat to international order; democratic self-determination, collective security, an integrated world economic system, and American exceptionalism. Through an historical study of liberal internationalists from the American peace movement, the organizations they created, and the political leaders they sought to influence, the origins, divergent evolution, and demise of alternative Wilsonian systems can be understood. Between 1917 and 1968, internationalists in the American peace movement significantly shaped an ongoing process of formulating and reformulating Wilsonian ideals, variously cooperating with dominant policy-making elites or promoting alternative Wilsonian foreign policy prescriptions as they did so. The overall picture, then, is one of contending internationalist elites that can trace their intellectual roots back to Wilson, even as they clashed over the ultimate meaning of his legacy. Liberal internationalism originated as a response to World War I. In conjunction with internationalists from the peace movement, Wilson formulated and promoted the first iteration of Wilsonianism—and, in a number of ways, planted the seeds of future conflict over its interpretation. That conflict would arise only in the second half of the twentieth century, however, with the emergence of two subsequent reformulations of Wilson's ideals. The first of these was a progressive Rooseveltian interpretation that emerged in the years just before and during World War II. The second, a more conservative interpretation, came together in the late nineteen (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Hammack PhD (Committee Chair); Alan Rocke PhD (Committee Member); Kenneth Ledford PhD (Committee Member); Pete Moore PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History; International Law; International Relations; Peace Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2006, German/History (dual)

With the suicide of Adolf Hitler at the end of April 1945, leadership of the Third Reich was passed, as per Hitler's Testament, to Karl Donitz. Donitz had, up to that point, served as head of the U-boat or submarine fleet, and then as Grand Admiral of the entire German Navy, or Kriegsmarine. Very little analysis has been offered in current literature regarding the impact of the Donitz government. Indeed, history texts rarely mention it. This thesis set out to do just that, using both historically oriented works and insights as provided by German literature of the period such as Heimkehrerliteratur and Trummerliteratur. By investigating the works of Donitz himself and those of various other personalities associated with his government, primary documents of the period, and secondary works on the period as well as the aforementioned literature genres, several conclusions were reached. The activities of the Donitz government can be broken up into pre-surrender and post-surrender activities. Pre-surrender activities included the negotiations of surrender itself, which insofar as it was conducted in several stages, was not unconditional, as is often claimed. The other major pre-surrender activity was the decision to continue the war in the East while seeking peace with the West to allow evacuation of Germans from East Prussia. Post-surrender activities involved mainly the preliminary investigations that would be needed to begin a government, had the Allies not arrested Donitz. The Donitz government was therefore key in the transition from war to peace. This impact has also been seen in German literature of the period, which functions as a collective analysis of the psychological impact made by the war. Particularly useful were Wolfgang Borchert's Draußen vor der Tur and Uwe Timm's Die Entdeckung der Currywurst. These works show the reader how the period is remembered and/or memorialized. It was therefore concluded that far from being without impact, the Donitz government (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Beth Griech-Polelle (Advisor); Theodore Rippey (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2010, History

Government and commercial campaigns waged during World War II to encourage women to pursue occupations once reserved solely for men altered the public's ideas regarding women's capacity to serve their nation, and not only in ways directly related to industrial production. Once imagined as a threat to decency and the moral fiber of the nation, women's sexuality became harnessed to the winning of the war and the morale of the troops through public relations campaigns that explicitly charged women with objectifying themselves for the good of the nation. One of the most prevalent visual icons of femininity serving that purpose during this period was the pin-up girl—a figure of fantasy gracing magazine gatefolds, playing cards, packaging, calendars, and advertisements of all kinds. The pin-up comprised a set of visual conventions that not only guided illustrators' and photographers' production of the female image; it also shaped women's changing sense of their physical selves. The prescriptive dimension of the pin-up was best literalized in girdle marketing campaigns which urged women to reshape their bodies to align with new wartime ideals. World War Two-era girdle advertisements reveal the extent to which the pin-up as an image of femininity permeated ideas of women's capacities as not only sexual partners but also as citizens and members of the nation.

Committee: Tracey Jean Boisseau Dr. (Advisor); Shelley Baranowski Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: History

BA, Oberlin College, 2016, History

In 1960, during a resurgence of anti-Semitism, the Munich government initiated a program to invite Jewish former residents of Munich (who left during the 1930s and early 1940s due to the Nazis) back to their hometown for two-week visits. This program offered the participants a chance to reminisce about their childhoods, reconnect with their heritage, and visit their former communities. For the government, this program provided a crucial connection between the old prewar Munich and the new Munich of the 1960s, between Munich as the birthplace of National Socialism and Munich as a newly rebuilt city, ready to move forward from the Holocaust. This thesis relies primarily on correspondence between program participants and the Munich government from the Munich City Archive, oral interviews with individuals involved with the program, and secondary sources about postwar Munich and historical memory.

Committee: Annemarie Sammartino (Advisor) Subjects: European History; European Studies; Foreign Language; Germanic Literature; History; Holocaust Studies; Judaic Studies; Language; Modern History; Modern Language; Religion; Religious History

MFA, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The proposed thesis, entitled Grabbing the Beast by the Throat, is a collection of original poems that explores the theme of resistance while also delving into the ways in which threats against loved ones, family members, homeland, and lifestyle can transform individuals in negative as well as positive ways. Most of the poems are written in the voice of an invented Czech poet who is a partisan during World War II; however, the collection also includes poems from other perspectives as well as poems set in the American Midwest in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The collection, which incorporates real and imagined events, is divided into four sections of primarily free verse poems and a smaller number of prose poems. The structure of the free verse poems creates a sense of unrestrained independence and spontaneity; however, the poetic content suggests the heavily controlled atmosphere in which the invented poet writes. The persona poems are often narrative, allowing the collection to move through historical events while inviting the reader to fully engage with the idea of resistance and its connection to contemporary issues.

Committee: Maggie Anderson (Committee Chair); Mary Biddinger Dr. (Committee Member); Steven Reese (Committee Member) Subjects: European Studies; Holocaust Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2009, German

The purpose of this study was to examine the portrayal of the World War Two “Nazi” figure and the World War Two “German” figure as portrayed in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Capra's The Nazis Strike, and Hitchcock's Lifeboat. Research of each figure's portrayal in media through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century revealed that “Germans” possess strength, are portrayed as the non-enemy, are focused, and are able to solve problems. In contrast the “Nazi” is barbaric, militaristic, villainous, the enemy, and uses vile brutality to fulfill the mission of the war.By examining the three films I determined that although each film is of a different genre and year, each director similarly portrays the “German” characteristics and “Nazi” characteristics through different aspects of propaganda including the polarization of the enemy, a call for action and the American victory. In addition to the portrayal of the “German” and “Nazi” figures through propaganda techniques, I illustrated how each director uses interactions of other figures with these characters to show the differences between the “German” and “Nazi.” Finally I offered suggestions for additional research on images of the enemy that would further extend the concepts analyzed in this thesis.

Committee: Geoffrey Howes (Advisor); Kristie Foell (Committee Chair) Subjects: Motion Pictures