The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
Norman DaviesRead
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
Interpretation
The quote highlights Poland as a significant location for the implementation of Nazi racial ideologies and practices.
In this quote, Norman Davies refers to Poland's tragic role during the Nazi regime as a 'racial laboratory' where horrific theories about race were tested and executed. This dark period in history not only reflects the extreme ideologies held by the Nazis but also underscores the profound human suffering that occurred as a result of these experiments on Polish Jews and other target groups, marking a crucial point in understanding the Holocaust and its implications.
In practice
This quote can be used in a historical presentation about World War II.
The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.
Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.
Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.
Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.
History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.
It is true that not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims
The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.
During the twentieth century, men fought on behalf of nationalism. Yet the wars they fought were also engendered by dislocations in world markets and by social revolution stimulated by the coming of the industrial age.
The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.
The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle. Some branded our young cattle so they could claim them.
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