Famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, crop failure, population imbalance, or government policies. This phenomenon is accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation and increased mortality; every inhabited continent in the world has experienced a period of famine throughout history. In the 19th and 20th century, it was Southeast and South Asia, as well as Eastern and Central Europe that suffered the most deaths from famine; the numbers dying from famine began to fall from the 2000s. Some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, continue to have extreme cases of famine. Since 2010, Africa has been the most affected continent in the world; as of 2017, the United Nations has warned some 20 million are at risk in South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. The distribution of food has been affected by conflict. Most programmes now direct their aid towards Africa. According to the United Nations humanitarian criteria if there are food shortages with large numbers of people lacking nutrition, a famine is declared only when certain measures of mortality and hunger are met.
The criteria are: At least 20% of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope The prevalence of acute malnutrition in children exceeds 30% The death rate exceeds two people per 10,000 people per dayThe declaration of a famine carries no binding obligations on the UN or member states, but serves to focus global attention on the problem. The cyclical occurrence of famine has been a mainstay of societies engaged in subsistence agriculture since the dawn of agriculture itself; the frequency and intensity of famine has fluctuated throughout history, depending on changes in food demand, such as population growth, supply-side shifts caused by changing climatic conditions. Famine was first eliminated in Holland and England during the 17th century, due to the commercialization of agriculture and the implementation of improved techniques to increase crop yields. In the 16th and 17th century, the feudal system began to break down, more prosperous farmers began to enclose their own land and improve their yields to sell the surplus crops for a profit.
These capitalist landowners paid their labourers with money, thereby increasing the commercialization of rural society. In the emerging competitive labour market, better techniques for the improvement of labour productivity were valued and rewarded, it was in the farmer's interest to produce as much as possible on their land in order to sell it to areas that demanded that product. They produced guaranteed surpluses of their crop every year. Subsistence peasants were increasingly forced to commercialize their activities because of increasing taxes. Taxes that had to be paid to central governments in money forced the peasants to produce crops to sell. Sometimes they produced industrial crops, but they would find ways to increase their production in order to meet both their subsistence requirements as well as their tax obligations. Peasants used the new money to purchase manufactured goods; the agricultural and social developments encouraging increased food production were taking place throughout the 16th century, but took off in the early 17th century.
By the 1590s, these trends were sufficiently developed in the rich and commercialized province of Holland to allow its population to withstand a general outbreak of famine in Western Europe at that time. By that time, the Netherlands had one of the most commercialized agricultural systems in Europe, they grew many industrial crops such as flax and hops. Agriculture became specialized and efficient; the efficiency of Dutch agriculture allowed for much more rapid urbanization in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than anywhere else in Europe. As a result and wealth increased, allowing the Netherlands to maintain a steady food supply. By 1650, English agriculture had become commercialized on a much wider scale; the last peacetime famine in England was in 1623–24. There were still periods of hunger, as in the Netherlands, but no more famines occurred. Common areas for pasture were enclosed for private use and large scale, efficient farms were consolidated. Other technical developments included the draining of marshes, more efficient field use patterns, the wider introduction of industrial crops.
These agricultural developments led to wider prosperity in increasing urbanization. By the end of the 17th century, English agriculture was the most productive in Europe. In both England and the Netherlands, the population stabilized between 1650 and 1750, the same time period in which the sweeping changes to agriculture occurred. Famine still occurred in other parts of Europe, however. In East Europe, famines occurred as late as the twentieth century; because of the severity of famine, it was a chief concern for other authorities. In pre-industrial Europe, preventing famine, ensuring timely food supplies, was one of the chief concerns of many governments, although they were limited in their options due to limited levels of external trade and an infrastructure and bureaucracy too rudimentary to effect real relief. Most governments were concerned by famine because it could lead to revolt and other forms of social disruption. By the mid-19th century and the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it became possible for governments to alleviate the effects of famine through price controls, large scale importation of food products from foreign markets, rationing, regulation of production and charity.
The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland was one of the first famines to feature such intervention, although the government respon
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany based on a specific racist doctrine asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen, which culminated in the Holocaust. Nazi policies labeled centuries-long residents in German territory who were not ethnic Germans such as Jews, along with the vast majority of Slavs, most non-Europeans as inferior non-Aryan subhumans in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk of the Volksgemeinschaft at the top; the Aryan Master Race conceived by the Nazis graded humans on a scale of pure Aryans to non-Aryans. At the top of the scale of pure Aryans were Germans and other Germanic peoples, including the Dutch and the English. Latins were tolerated; the feeling that Germans were the Aryan Herrenvolk was spread among the German public through Nazi propaganda and among Nazi officials throughout the ranks, in particular when Reichskommissariat Ukraine Erich Koch said: We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.
The Nazis considered the Slavs as Non-Aryan Untermenschen who were to be enslaved and exterminated by Germans. Slavic nations such as the Ukrainians, Slovaks and Croats who collaborated with Nazi Germany were still being perceived as not racially "pure" enough to reach the status of Germanic peoples, yet they were considered ethnically better than the rest of the Slavs due to pseudoscientific theories about these nations having a considerable admixture of Germanic blood. In countries where these people lived, there were according to Nazis small groups of non-Slavic German descendants; these people underwent a "racial selection" process to determine whether or not they were "racially valuable", if the individual passed they would be re-Germanised and forcefully taken from their families in order to be raised as Germans. This secret plan Generalplan Ost aimed at expulsion and extermination of most Slavic people. Nazi policy towards them changed during World War II as a pragmatic means to resolve military manpower shortages: they were allowed, with certain restrictions, to serve in the Waffen-SS, in spite of being considered subhumans.
Nazi propaganda portrayed people in Eastern Europe with an Asiatic appearance to be the result of intermingling between the native Slavic populations and Asiatic or Mongolian races as sub-humans dominated by the Jews with the help of Bolshevism. At the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans were Jews, ethnic Poles, ethnic Serbs and other Slavic people and black people; the Nazis sought to rid the German state of Jews and Romani by means of deportation, while blacks were to be segregated and eliminated through compulsory sterilization. Volkisch theorists believed that Germany's Teutonic ancestors had spread out from Germany throughout Europe. Of the Germanic tribes that spread through Europe, the theorists identified that the Burgundians and Western Goths joined with the Gauls to make France. Nazi racial beliefs of the superiority of an Aryan master race arose from earlier proponents of a supremacist conception of race such as the French novelist and diplomat Arthur de Gobineau, who published a four-volume work titled An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.
Gobineau proposed that the Aryan race was superior, urged the preservation of its cultural and racial purity. Gobineau came to use and reserve the term Aryan only for the "German race" and described the Aryans as'la race germanique'. By doing so he presented a racist theory in which Aryans–that is Germans–were all, positive. Houston Stewart Chamberlain's work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, one of the first to combine Social Darwinism with antisemitism, describes history as a struggle for survival between the Germanic peoples and the Jews, whom he characterized as an inferior and dangerous group; the two-volume book Foundations of Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene by Eugen Fischer, Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz, used pseudoscientific studies to conclude that the Germans were superior to the Jews intellectually and physically, recommended eugenics as a solution. Madison Grant's work The Passing of the Great Race advocated Nordicism and proposed using a eugenic program to preserve the Nordic race.
After reading the book, Hitler called it "my Bible". Racist author and Nordic supremacist Hans F. K. Günther who influenced Nazi ideology, wrote in his "Race Lore of German People" about the danger of "Slavic blood of Eastern race" mixing with the German and combined virulent nationalism with anti-semitism. Günther became an epitome of corrupt and politicized pseudo-science in post-war Germany Among the topics of his research
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process; the official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire; the Nazi regime ended. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, on 30 January 1933; the NSDAP began to eliminate all political opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the offices and powers of the Chancellery and Presidency. A national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany.
All power was centralised in Hitler's person and his word became the highest law. The government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitler's favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen; the return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity. Racism antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime; the Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and persecution against Jews and Romani people began in earnest after the seizure of power; the first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, liberals and communists were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed, many leaders imprisoned.
Education focused on racial biology, population policy, fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion; the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. The Nazi regime dominated neighbours through military threats in the years leading up to war. Nazi Germany made aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if these were not met, it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe. By early 1941, Germany controlled much of Europe. Reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas and a German administration was established in the remainder of Poland.
Germany exploited labour of both its occupied territories and its allies. In the Holocaust, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, or shot. While the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was successful, the Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant the Wehrmacht lost the initiative on the Eastern Front in 1943 and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the pre-1939 border. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated in 1944 and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe. After the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, capitulated in May 1945. Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war; the victorious Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945, while common English terms are "Nazi Germany" and "Third Reich". The latter, adopted by Nazi propaganda as Drittes Reich, was first used in Das Dritte Reich, a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; the book counted the Holy Roman Empire as the German Empire as the second. Germany was known as the Weimar Republic during the years 1919 to 1933, it was a republic with a semi-presidential system. The Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, contentious relationships with the Allied victors of World War I, a series of failed attempts at coalition government by divided political parties. Severe setbacks to the German economy began after World War I ended because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; the government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt, but the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices for consumer goods, economic chaos, food riots.
When the government defaulted on their reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr and widespread civil unrest followed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party (National
Reich Main Security Office
The Reich Main Security Office was an organization subordinate to Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacities as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS, the head of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel. The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" inside and outside the borders of Nazi Germany; the RSHA was created by Himmler on 27 September 1939. Himmler's assumption of total control over all security and police forces in Germany was the "crucial precondition" for the establishment and growth of the SS state, he combined the Nazi Party's Sicherheitsdienst with the Sicherheitspolizei, nominally under the Interior Ministry. The SiPo was composed of the Geheime Staatspolizei and the Kriminalpolizei; the RSHA was abbreviated to RSi-H in correspondence to avoid confusion with the SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt. The creation of the RSHA represented the formalization, at the top level, of the relationship under which the SD served as the intelligence agency for the security police.
A similar coordination existed in the local offices. Within Germany and areas which were incorporated within the Reich for the purpose of civil administration, local offices of the Gestapo, criminal police, SD were formally separate, they were subject to coordination by inspectors of the security police and SD on the staffs of the local higher SS and police leaders and one of the principal functions of the local SD units was to serve as the intelligence agency for the local Gestapo units. In the occupied territories, the formal relationship between local units of the Gestapo, criminal police, SD was closer. Throughout the course of wartime expansion, the RSHA continued to grow at an enormous rate and was "repeatedly reorganized". Routine reorganization did not change the tendency for centralization within the Third Reich nor did it change the general trend for organizations like the RSHA to develop direct relationships to Hitler, adhering to a familiar National Socialist pattern of the leader-follower construct.
For the RSHA, its centrality within Nazi Germany was pronounced since departments like the Gestapo were controlled by Himmler and his immediate subordinate SS-Obergruppenführer and General of Police Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich remained the RSHA chief until he was assassinated in 1942. In January 1943, Himmler delegated the office to SS-Obergruppenführer and General of Police Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who headed the RSHA until the end of World War II in Europe; the head of the RSHA was known as the CSSD or Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD. According to British author Gerald Reitlinger, the RSHA "became a typical overblown bureaucracy... The complexity of RSHA was unequalled... with at least a hundred... sub-sub-sections, a modest camouflage of the fact that it handled the progressive extermination which Hitler planned for the ten million Jews of Europe". The organization at its simplest was divided into seven offices: Amt I, "Administration and Legal" headed by SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Werner Best.
In 1940, he was succeeded by SS-Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach. In April 1944, Erich Ehrlinger took over as department chief. Amt II, "Ideological Investigation", headed by SS-Brigadeführer Professor Franz Six. Amt III, "Spheres of German Life" or the Inland-SD, headed by SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, was the SS information gathering service for inside Germany, it dealt with ethnic Germans outside of Germany's prewar borders, matters of culture. Amt IV, "Suppression of Opposition", formed from Abteilung II and III of the Gestapa, headed by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller. SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, was head of the Amt IV sub-department called Referat IV B4. Amt V, "Suppression of Crime" Kriminalpolizei led by SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe and by SS-Oberführer Friedrich Panzinger; this was the Criminal Police, which dealt with non-political serious crimes, such as rape and arson. Amt V was known as the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt. Amt VI, "Foreign Intelligence Service" or Ausland-SD led by SS-Brigadeführer Heinz Jost and by SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg.
Amt VII, "Ideological Research and Evaluation" was a reconstitution of Amt II overseen by SS-Brigadeführer Professor Dr. Franz Six, it was headed by SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul Dittel. It was responsible for "ideological" tasks; these included the creation of anti-semitic, anti-masonic propaganda, the sounding of public opinion and monitoring of Nazi indoctrination by the public. The RSHA controlled the security services of the Nazi Party, its activities included intelligence-gathering, criminal investigation, overseeing foreigners, monitoring public opinion, Nazi indoctrination. The RSHA was "the central office for the extra-judicial NS measures of terror and repression from the beginning of the war until 1945"; the list of "enemies" included Jews, Freemasons and Christian activists. In addition to dealing with identified enemies, the RSHA advocated expansionist policies for the Reich and the Germanization of additional territory through settlement. Generalplan Ost, the secret Nazi plan to colonize Central and Eastern Europe exclus
Generalplan Ost
The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated as GPO, was the Nazi German government's plan for the genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. It was to be undertaken in territories occupied by Germany during World War II; the plan was realized during the war, resulting directly and indirectly in the deaths of 9.4 to 11.4 million ethnic Slavs by starvation, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, or extermination through labor, including 4.5 million Soviet citizens, 2.8 to 3.3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 to 3 million Slavic Poles, 300 to 600 thousand Serbs and 20 to 25 thousand Slovenes. Its full implementation, was not considered practicable during the major military operations, was prevented by Germany's defeat; the plan entailed the enslavement, forced displacement, mass murder of most Slavic peoples in Europe along with planned destruction of their nations, whom the'Aryan' Nazis viewed as racially inferior. The program operational guidelines were based on the policy of Lebensraum designed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten ideology of German expansionism.
As such, it was intended to be a part of the New Order in Europe. The master plan was a work in progress. There are four known versions of it, developed. After the invasion of Poland, the original blueprint for Generalplan Ost was discussed by the RKFDV in mid-1940 during the Nazi–Soviet population transfers; the second known version of GPO was procured by the RSHA from Erhard Wetzel in April 1942. The third version was dated June 1942; the final settlement master plan for the East came in from the RKFDV on October 29, 1942. However, after the German defeat at Stalingrad planning of the colonization in the East was suspended, the program was abandoned; the body responsible for the Generalplan Ost was the SS's Reich Main Security Office under Heinrich Himmler, which commissioned the work. The document was revised several times between June 1941 and spring 1942 as the war in the east progressed successfully, it was a confidential proposal whose content was known only to those at the top level of the Nazi hierarchy.
According to testimony of SS-Standartenführer Dr. Hans Ehlich, the original version of the plan was drafted in 1940; as a high official in the RSHA, Ehlich was the man responsible for the drafting of Generalplan Ost along with Dr. Konrad Meyer, Chief of the Planning Office of Himmler's Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom, it had been preceded by the Ostforschung, a number of studies and research projects carried out over several years by various academic centres to provide the necessary facts and figures. The preliminary versions were discussed by Heinrich Himmler and his most trusted colleagues before the outbreak of war; this was mentioned by SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski during his evidence as a prosecution witness in the trial of officials of the Race and Settlement Main Office. According to Bach-Zelewski, Himmler stated openly: "It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply."
A fundamental change in the plan was introduced on June 24, 1941 – two days after the start of Operation Barbarossa – when the'solution' to the Jewish question ceased to be part of that particular framework gaining a lethal, autonomous priority. Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945, the full proposal has never been found, though several documents refer to it or supplement it. Nonetheless, most of the plan's essential elements have been reconstructed from related memos and other documents. A major document which enabled historians to reconstruct the Generalplan Ost was a memorandum released on April 27, 1942, by Erhard Wetzel, director of the NSDAP Office of Racial Policy, entitled "Opinion and thoughts on the master plan for the East of the Reichsführer SS". Wetzel's memorandum was a broad elaboration of the Generalplan Ost proposal, it came to light only in 1957. Adolf Hitler, in his attempt to reassure sceptics, mentioned the world's indifference towards the earlier Armenian Genocide as an argument that possible negative consequences for Germany would be minimal in this case.
In subsequent years, his declaration from Berghof has been referred to as Hitler's Armenian quote. Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in the European territories occupied by Germany during World War II, it would have included the extermination of most Slavic people in Europe. The plan, prepared in the years 1939-1942, was part of Adolf Hitler's and the Nazi movement's Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten ideology of German expansion to the east, both of them part of the larger plan to establish the New Order; the final version of the Generalplan Ost proposal was divided into two parts.
Zamość uprising
The Zamość uprising comprised World War II partisan operations, 1942–1944, by the Polish resistance against Germany's Generalplan-Ost forced expulsion of Poles from the Zamość region and the region's colonization by German settlers. The Polish defense of the Zamość region was one of Poland's largest resistance operations of World War II. In 1942, as part of Generalplan Ost, the Zamość region, with its fertile black soil, in the General Government, was chosen for further German colonisation. In fact the Zamość region expulsions and colonization can be considered the beginning of the large-scale implementation of the Generalplan Ost; the city itself was to be renamed "Himmlerstadt" changed to Pflugstadt, to symbolise the German "plow", to "plow the East". The German occupiers had planned the relocation of at least 60,000 ethnic Germans to the area before the end of 1943. An initial "test trial" expulsion was performed in November 1941, the whole operation ended in anti-partisan pacification operations combined with expulsions in June–July 1943 which were codenamed Wehrwolf Action I and II.
Over 110,000 Polish people from 300 villages were expelled to make room for German settlers as part of Nazi plans for establishment of German colonies in the conquered territories. In the Warsaw or Lublin area some villagers were resettled, but about 50,000 of those expelled were sent as forced labour to Germany while others were sent to the Nazi concentration camps never to return; some villages were razed and the inhabitants murdered. 5,000 Polish children were kidnapped by German authorities from their parents for potential Germanisation. Only 800 of them were found and sent back to Poland after World War II. Local people resisted the action with great determination. Units of Polish resistance as well as elements of Soviet partisans and the pro-Soviet Gwardia Ludowa helped to evacuate Polish civilians and assaulted German colonists and forces in the region. In December 1942 one of the first large partisan battles of World War II occurred in the region; the resistance forces numbered several thousand forest fighters.
The first phase of the resistance took place from December 1942 to February 1943. After several battles between the partisans and the German units, the Germans had to halt the action and in the end few German settlers were brought to the area; until the middle of 1943, the Germans managed to settle 9,000 colonists, an additional 4,000 until the end of 1943. The increasing harassment from the partisans meant that the Germans began to lose the control of the region in the spring of 1943. In the first half of 1944, Polish civilians and the Polish resistance were attacked by Ukrainian units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Nonetheless, by the summer of 1944 the Polish partisans, based in the large forests of the region, had taken control of most of the countryside, limiting German control to the major towns. In the summer of 1944 Germans again initiated major anti-partisan operations which resulted in the battle of Osuchy, with the insurgents sustaining heavy casualties; however soon afterwards, in July, the remaining Polish units took part in the nationwide Operation Tempest and managed to liberate several towns and villages in the Zamość region.
The Germans, pressured by the advancing Red Army, were forced to abandon the region. Several monuments and cemeteries have been raised in the area over time. In the People's Republic of Poland the actions of the communist Armia Ludowa were emphasized at the expense of those of the non-communist resistance. A recent Polish documentary dedicated to the uprising has been recognized in the New York Festivals of 2008 with a bronze medal. Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany Ethnic cleansing of Zamojszczyzna by Nazi Germany Operation Tannenberg Joseph Poprzeczny. Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's Man in the East. McFarland. ISBN 0786481463. Joseph Poprzeczny, German order, dated 22 November 1943, for the ethnic cleansing of the Zamosc Lands issued by Odilo Globocnik, in Hitler's Man. Andrzej Jerzy Krukowski, Powstanie Zamojskie 1942–1943 at ZSP4Zamosc.edu.pl "Bitwa o Zamojszczyznę" Zygmunt Puźniak, POWSTANIE ZAMOJSKIE CZY JÓZEFOWSKIE?, Tygodnik Zamojski, 27 luty 2008. Powstanie Zamojskie, TVP 3 Lublin, 31 October 2006.
Janusz Gmitruk, Powstanie Zamojskie, Muzeum Historii Polskiego Ruchu Ludowego, 2003, ISBN 83-87838-69-1 Jan Grygiel, Związek Walki Zbrojnej i Armia Krajowa w Obwodzie Zamojskim 1939–1944, Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe 1985 Walki oddziałów ZWZ-AK i BCh Inspektoratu Zamojskiego w latach wojny 1939–1944, Związek Żołnierzy Armii Krajowej Okręg Zamość 1990
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial and/or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration, intimidation, as well as genocide and genocidal rape. Ethnic cleansing is accompanied with efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers and infrastructure, by the desecration of monuments and places of worship. Used by the perpetrators during the Yugoslav Wars and cited in this context as a euphemism akin to that of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution", by the 1990s, the term gained widespread acceptance due to journalism and the media's heightened use of the term in its generic meaning. An antecedent to the term is the Greek word andrapodismos, used in ancient texts to describe atrocities that accompanied Alexander the Great's conquest of Thebes in 335 BC.
In the early 1900s, regional variants of the term could be found among the Czechs, the Poles, the French and the Germans. A 1913 Carnegie Endowment report condemning the actions of all participants in the Balkan Wars contained various new terms to describe brutalities committed toward ethnic groups. During World War II, the euphemism čišćenje terena was used by the Croatian Ustaše to describe military actions in which non-Croats were purposely killed or otherwise uprooted from their homes. Viktor Gutić, a senior Ustaše leader, was one of the first Croatian nationalists on record to use the term as a euphemism for committing atrocities against Serbs; the term was used in the internal memorandums of Serbian Chetniks in reference to a number of retaliatory massacres they committed against Bosniaks and Croats between 1941 and 1945. The Russian phrase очистка границ was used in Soviet documents of the early 1930s to refer to the forced resettlement of Polish people from the 22-kilometre border zone in the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs.
This process was repeated on an larger scale in 1939–41, involving many other groups suspected of disloyalty towards the Soviet Union. During The Holocaust, Nazi Germany pursued a policy of ensuring that Europe was "cleansed of Jews". In its complete form, the term appeared for the first time in the Romanian language in an address by Vice Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu to cabinet members in July 1941. After the beginning of the invasion of the USSR, he concluded: “I do not know when the Romanians will have such chance for ethnic cleansing." In the 1980s, the Soviets used the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe the inter-ethnic violence in Nagorno-Karabakh. At around the same time, the Yugoslav media used it to describe what they alleged was an Albanian nationalist plot to force all Serbs to leave Kosovo, it was popularized by the Western media during the Bosnian War. The first recorded mention of its use in the Western media can be traced back to an article in The New York Times dated 15 April 1992, in a quote by an anonymous Western diplomat.
Synonyms include ethnic purification. The Final Report of the Commission of Experts established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 defined ethnic cleansing as "a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas". In its previous, first interim report it noted, "ased on the many reports describing the policy and practices conducted in the former Yugoslavia,'ethnic cleansing' has been carried out by means of murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-judicial executions and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, wanton destruction of property; those practices can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention."The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group".
As a category, ethnic cleansing encompasses a spectrum of policies. In the words of Andrew Bell-Fialkoff:thnic cleansing defies easy definition. At one end it is indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of a population from a given territory. Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as "the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory" and as "occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end". In reviewing the International Court of Justice Bosnian Genocide Case in the judgement of Jorgic v. Germany on July 12, 2007 the European Court of Human Rights quoted from the ICJ ruling on the Bosnian Genocide Case to draw a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide: The term'ethnic cleansing' has been employed to refer to the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are the subject of this case...
General Assembly resolution 47/121 referred in its Preamble to'the abhorrent polic
