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In the midst of the Second World War, the Allies acknowledged Germany's ongoing programme of extermination. In the Shadow of the Holocaust examines the struggle to attain post-war justice and prosecution. Focusing on Poland's engagement with the United Nations War Crimes Commission, it analyses the different ways that the Polish Government in Exile (based in London from 1940) agitated for an Allied response to German atrocities. Michael Fleming shows that jurists associated with the Government in Exile made significant contributions to legal debates on war crimes and, along with others, paid attention to German crimes against Jews. By exploring the relationship between the UNWCC and the Polish War Crimes Office under the authority of the Polish Government in Exile and later, from the summer of 1945, the Polish Government in Warsaw, Fleming provides a new lens through which to examine the early stages of the Cold War.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Invasion and occupation: (officially) informing the world; 2. Seeking a response: Polish diplomacy (sensu stricto); 3. Polish soft diplomacy: attempts to shape the discursive environment; 4. War crimes and the path towards the UNWCC; 5. The UNWCC, law and inter-allied politics; 6. The Polish Government in Exile's war crimes office; 7. Pursuing justice across the Iron Curtain; 8. Poland, the UNWCC and the Cold War; Conclusion.
About the author
Michael Fleming is a historian based in London. His publications include Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944-1950 (2010), Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (2014) and, as editor, Essays Commemorating Szmul Zygielbojm (2018). He is a recipient of the Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies, and the Aquila Polonica Prize.
Summary
In the Shadow of the Holocaust examines the struggle to ensure that war crimes committed during the Second World War were prosecuted. Focusing on Poland's engagement with the United Nations War Crimes Commission, it analyses the different ways that the Polish Government in Exile agitated for an Allied response to German atrocities.
