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The Partisan movement in Bosnia-Hercegovina was the product both of long-term socio-economic developments at home and of the short-term ‘accident’ of foreign invasion and occupation; it involved the merger of a traditional Serb-peasant uprising and a modern urban-revolutionary movement; and it represented both a characteristic chapter and a turning-point in modern Bosnian history. The Axis powers of Germany and Italy, by destroying the Yugoslav kingdom, changed the course of Bosnian history. Their installation in power of the Ustasha regime, and the latter's genocide of the Serb population of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, unleashed a resistance movement that would take shape as the Partisans. Yet the Partisans were not simply an armed response to the new order, but a revolutionary movement of a specifically Bosnian kind.

In 1943, with the war demonstrably turning against Italy, her political and military leaders faced three unpalatable alternatives: a bloody and destructive military defeat, the spectre of bolshevism, or subordination to Germany and enslavement. In an attempt to avoid all three scenarios, conservative soldiers and politicians sought to change sides and enter into a collaborative partnership with the Allies. In seeking a way out of the cul-de-sac into which they had followed Mussolini, their cardinal motive was one of domestic politics :to preserve the crown and the system of parliamentary monarchy created in 1861, and to avoid a democratic constitutional referendumat all costs. Mussolini fell on 25 July 1943 and for the next forty-three days a self-serving administration led by Marshal Badoglio tried to negotiate secretly while preserving the fiction that Italy was still loyal to the Axis. Cynical and secretive, Badoglio kept his manoeuvres hidden even from senior military officials. When his hand was forced by Eisenhower's announcement of the armistice terms, he and the king fled Rome, leaving the population and Italian forces in Greece and the Balkans at the mercy of the Germans.John Gooch shows thepowergames in the Italian leadership as an example of how a state tried to get out of a catastrophic defeat.

On February 15, 1954 the US Northwestern Victory sailed into the ancient Spanish port of Cartegena. It carried the first consignment of United States aid to the Spain of General Francisco Franco, a man widely regarded in the Western democracies as the pariah of Europe for his leadership of the fascist-style government dominated by the Falange party, and for overt support of the Axis powers in World War II. The occasion demonstrated the depth of division between the United States and Britain, as well as the ultimate independence of United States foreign policy from that of its closest ally. Spain offers a unique area for examination of Anglo-United States relations, and of the domestic and external contexts which helped form them within a new world order increasingly divided between the internationalism embodied in the embryonic United Nations, and the unilateralism demonstrated by the emergent bipolarity of the United States and the Soviet Union.

This chapter examines the discourse on the alliance between Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and wartime. More specifically, it considers the historical nature of Italy and Germany and their place in world history and, by extension, their relationship to Japan. It discusses Japan's move from early 1920s internationalism to war time support of fascist blocs and how its diplomatic rapprochement with Italy and Germany, exemplified in the Anti-Comintern (1937) and Tripartite (1940) pacts, sparked a debate on the nature of the alliance and the principles that would underpin a new world order after the victory of the Axis. It considers how the Axis Powers became intertwined with Japanese visions of a new order at home and in Asia. It shows that the long-standing Japanese association with fascism became an inconvenient truth for the Allies after the war, when Americans decided to rehabilitate Japan as their best friend in Asia in the fight against communism.

Winston Churchill's references to Spain in May 1944 intensified fears in the Soviet Union of the formation of a Western bloc, a long held axiom of Russian foreign policy. So far as the United States was concerned, no bloc was yet envisaged and certainly not one which would include Francisco Franco. If Churchill's speech had been a miscalculation, difficulties increased a month later, when, during the United States Senate debate on foreign policy, questions were asked as to whether Churchill had extracted promises of aid from Franklin D. Roosevelt before 1941. By the end of 1944, disquiet in the United States and Britain on the Spanish question was rising. There were also reservations as evidence continued of Franco's support for the Axis powers. It was during September that the British realized that their own position in Spain in contrast to that of the United States was rapidly slipping.

This chapter discusses the United States film industry during the Second World War. The film industry and its personnel were recruited for the war effort. Directors such as Frank Capra and John Ford were conscripted into the armed forces where they made a series of documentaries that supported US involvement. Hollywood was also enlisted in other ways. The Office of War Information (OWI) worked with the film industry to mobilise support for the war and maintain morale during it. In the process, a whole host of films sought to illustrate the dangers of the menace posed by the Axis powers. The chapter also includes the study, ‘What to Show the World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942–1945’ by Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, which examines the OWI and its control over the content of motion-pictures during the Second World War.

This chapter traces the Vatican’s response to the spread of the Second World War to the USSR, the Atlantic, Africa, and Asia after the launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. After examining Pius XII’s changing relationships with the Grand Alliance and Axis powers, it focuses upon his response to the Holocaust and other fascist genocides, revisiting the controversy over his alleged silences and examining the role played by the Church in the rescue of European Jews. The spotlight is then turned on Pius XII’s increasingly difficult relationship with Italy, particularly after Mussolini’s overthrow in July 1943, and, subsequently, the even more dangerous relationships with the German occupation forces and the Resistance in Rome. Consequently, the Vatican’s response to various Nazi atrocities in Rome is scrutinized. The chapter ends with an appraisal of Pius XII’s relations with the Western Allies, including De Gaulle, at the end of the war.

In July 1943, newspapers in the United States reported that the National Committee for a Free Germany had been founded by German exiles and German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership appeared to be using the committee as, among other things, a political tool to attempt to bring about an early end to World War II, even at the cost of a compromise peace with the German government. A steering committee for the formation of a “Free Germany Movement” was founded in New York in September and October 1943 in order to produce an American alternative to the National Committee for a Free Germany. This chapter looks at the political factions among the exiles with respect to the rise of fascism in Germany, the war against the Axis powers, and the reconstruction of postwar Europe. Thomas Mann introduced a dialectical concept of one Germany, both good and evil. The dialectical conception of Mann's formula provided a more productive approach for dealing with Germany's past and future than that of Robert Gilbert Lord Vansittart.

This chapter looks at how the concept of population transfer was imported into central Europe by the Axis powers in the late 1930s. While the focus here is principally on negotiations between Italy and Germany over the South Tyrol in the period 1938-9, the wider context of Nazi aims in the East and Germany’s relations with the Soviet Union in the period up to June 1941 are also examined in relation to the Heim ins Reich transfers. The chapter discusses how these transfers were grounded in a shared reading of the European minorities problem and drew upon the ‘Lausanne model’ of interstate agreement on resettlement. Discussion of Romanian transfer proposals in 1940–1 also shows that emulators of the Nazi New Order were also inspired by the earlier Balkan population exchanges mediated by liberal democracies as well as by actions of the Rome-Berlin Axis.

This chapter looks at how, in the former Axis powers of Japan and Germany, the United States occupation authorities initially pursued policies that treated democratization and demilitarization as virtually synonymous. They believed a democracy could not flourish in either Japan or the Federal Republic of Germany until the military traditions had been purged from their national character and consciousness. The former aggressors faced total disarmament. Initial plans—embodied most drastically by the Morgenthau Plan to turn Germany into a pastoral country—were severe and uncompromising. However, once the Soviet Union had successfully acquired the atomic bomb, the United States concluded that measured rearmament in both countries was essential for the defense of democracy and the free world.

This chapter shows that despite the gains made by the NAPE for black postal workers since 1940 in breaking down barriers to employment and promotion, James B. Cobb, president of the Washington, D.C. branch, saw that discrimination in the post office and its unions was still the norm. Meanwhile, the Durham, North Carolina native, former tobacco factory worker, and Howard University graduate had won election as president of the Alliance's largest branch in 1941—the year the United States entered World War II on the side of the Allies that had begun fighting back against the invading fascist Axis powers in 1939. Cobb had won on the ambitious platform of “Complete integration throughout the Post Office.”

During the Second World War Swiss Re took precautionary measures to relocate business to several locations in the west of Switzerland in case the Nazis should invade. The UK and US subsidiaries were given carte blanche to continue functioning in the event of Swiss Re in Switzerland being seized by the Nazis. Germany, however, remained an immensely important market for Swiss Re, as did Italy, and the company maintained its relationships with the Axis powers. In the case of Germany this meant negotiating with the Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Berlin in order to secure clearing agreements. Swiss Re's managers did, however, defend their political views and the Germans remained dubious of Swiss Re's political allegiance. America, meanwhile, was suspicious of Swiss Re's proximity to Germany.

This chapter is devoted to Allied hypocrisy and the devastating consequences that flow from the attempt to conceal Allied wartime atrocities. It provides a summary of some of the principal Allied wartime atrocities that have been downplayed, white-washed, or otherwise outright suppressed, and for which justice has been denied to the victims, either because the perpetrators have never been criminally prosecuted or because the victims have been precluded from obtaining any relief. These include the area bombing of German and Japanese cities, the Katyń Forest massacre, ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe, and Allied death camps.