Chapter 4, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A People Set Apart,” considers how Polish elites grappled with Jewish victimhood in their midst and differentiates between Nazi targeting of Polish elites and the better known targeting and murder of Polish Jews. It traces initial Nazi persecution of Warsaw’s Jewish community, ghettoization in 1940, persecution within the ghetto, and its liquidation to the death camp at Treblinka in 1942, and the outbreak of violent resistance in 1943. This is contextualized against Polish antisemitism before and during the war and particular Polish elite reactions to the developing Holocaust. A handful of intelligentsia figures who reacted strongly to antisemitic persecution in various ways demonstrate the complexity of Polish response to the Nazi Holocaust and how prewar and wartime antisemitism widened gulfs between ethnic Poles and the Polish-Jewish community. It argues that, because of a combination of targeted Nazi violence and native antisemitism, Polish elite response to Jewish persecution arose very late, typically only in 1943 with the outbreak of the ghetto uprisings, which captured the attention of resistance-minded Poles.

To Nelson Algren, the alleys, backstreets, and pool halls of Chicago constituted a frontier in their own right, with the Polish triangle of Wabanasia, Milwaukee, and Division forming the bulwark of a neighborhood peopled by those whose pulses could only be read in terms of the class, race, and ethnicity which defined their very existence. These were the multitude of Americans who are not recognized, who are largely excluded from American society, and Algren assumed the task of ensuring their visibility. Yet Algren’s insistence that the excluded were worth our attention, that their lives were important, came at a time when American criticism was moving away from the social realism of his work. By the 1950s, the propagation of monolithic values rooted in the premise of classless consumption formed a consensus that shifted the reality of class to a point where those who continued to address it were regarded at best as curiosities. Like the subject of his fiction, then, Algren’s work was excluded, moved to the periphery, as this important author fell victim to the myths of Cold War homogeneity.

When most students first approachfeedback control, they are still coming to grips with its foundation inlinear system theory. This unsteadiness with thefoundationmakes understanding feedback dramatically moredifficult. Experienced professionals canhavesimilar problems, painfully compounded by the fog of imperfect memory of the linear system theorystudied years before. It is thusvery common for all types of students to sit down to study feedback, glimpse the breadth and depth of knowledge required as a prerequisite, and simply give up. The purpose of this chapter is to strengthen the reader in linear systemfundamentals. It will fill in the gaps for those who need gaps filled,deepen the understanding of thosefluent in the mechanics of solving problems but who were nevershown the overarching conceptual logic, and serve as a handy reference for those who are truly comfortable.

This chapter tracks how the measures on enemy aliens consolidated, evolved and transformed and how the number of enemy aliens grew and changed between 1915 and the beginning of 1917. In this period, policies against enemy aliens became more detailed and regulated new aspects of the enemy aliens’ lives. The chapter follows the processes of convergence and divergence among countries at war. It also deals with the policies adopted and implemented by countries such as Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Portugal and its colonies that entered the war at a later stage. It also pays attention to the process that transformed enemy aliens into friendly aliens and vice versa. As the war ground on, while anti-alien feelings among the belligerent populations assumed an anti-Semitic and racial character, the warring governments put in place a two-way process that turned some enemy aliens into friendly aliens and citizens and subjects who belonged to specific national or religious minorities into aliens. This double process mainly concerned, directly and indirectly, the multi-ethnic empires at different stages of the war, and varied greatly from government to government.

This chapter examines birth customs and bodily experiences and practices as an important but rarely considered dimension of private life under Nazism, setting them in the context of the complex racial and ethnic hierarchies created by Nazi occupation policy in Poland. It outlines the power relations and practices associated with women giving birth in the Nazi-annexed Polish territory of the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, and focuses in particular on the relationship between ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) women giving birth and the German and Polish midwives they sought out to assist them. Efforts by Reich German midwives to control events in the birth room sometimes faced fierce opposition on the part of the women giving birth, who asserted their right to privacy and to choose persons they trusted to be present at the birth. While the Nazi regime sought to exclude Polish midwives from attending German women giving birth, the supply of German midwives was inadequate. Polish midwives therefore continued to practise, though their precarious status made them vulnerable to harassment by the occupation authorities and accusations by Volksdeutsche of malpractice.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.