General Philip M. Breedlove will discuss the rapidly evolving geopolitical climate in Europe. Additionally, he will highlight many of the current and future security challenges which the United States and NATO must be prepared for.

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Gen. Breedlove is Commander, Supreme Allied Command, Europe, SHAPE, Belgium and Headquarters, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany.   

The General was raised in Forest Park, Ga., and was commissioned in 1977 as a distinguished graduate of Georgia Tech's ROTC program. He has been assigned to numerous operational, command and staff positions, and has completed nine overseas tours, including two remote tours. He has commanded a fighter squadron, an operations group, three fighter wings, and a numbered air force. Additionally, he has served as Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C. Operations Officer in the Pacific Command Division on the Joint Staff; Executive Officer to the Commander of Headquarters Air Combat Command; the Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force; and Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff. 

Prior to assuming his current position, General Breedlove served as the Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Commander, U.S. Air Forces Africa; Commander, Air Component Command, Ramstein; and Director, Joint Air Power Competence Centre, Kalkar, Germany.  He was responsible for Air Forces activities, conducted through 3rd Air Force, in an area of operations covering more than 19 million square miles.  This area included 105 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.  As Vice Chief, he presided over the Air Staff and served as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Requirements Oversight Council and Deputy Advisory Working Group. He assisted the Chief of Staff with organizing, training, and equipping of 680,000 active-duty, Guard, Reserve and civilian forces serving in the United States and overseas. General Breedlove has flown combat missions in Operation Joint Forge/Joint Guardian. He is a command pilot with 3,500 flying hours, primarily in the F-16.

The fate of a soldier serving in the Russian army in the First World War largely depended on luck and circumstances. But even though his own means of influencing his fate were limited, there were available certain active choices – such as shirking and desertion – that could turn his life around in both positive and negative ways. For Russian civil and military authorities, of course, desertion was a nuisance that was fought against by all available means. Sometimes, such as with physical punishment, these means only succeeded in lowering the already low morale and increasing the number of deserters.

Dr. Mart Kuldkepp's presentation will focus on a small and somewhat exceptional group of deserters from the Russian army: the soldiers who served in the border guard regiments in Northern Finland and deserted alone or in small groups over the border to neutral Sweden. He will consider their motivation in doing so, and their subsequent fate, as much as it is known. At the same time, he will also look at how Sweden administratively handled this very unforeseen phenomenon and how the deserters were treated by Swedish authorities.

Mart Kuldkepp completed his PhD dissertation at University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2014 and joined University College London in 2015. Dr. Kuldkepp has been active as an academic in the field of Scandinavian Studies since 2007. Dr. Kuldkepp’s primary research focus is on 20th century Scandinavian political history, with a particular interest in contacts between the Scandinavian and the Baltic states, but also has interest in the history of secret services and espionage and Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. His teaching has mostly concerned the history of Scandinavian culture, society, and politics from the earliest times up to today. He has taught subjects related to Old Norse studies and overview courses in humanities.

Organized by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and Stanford University Libraries

Ernst Röhm (1887-1934) was an early member of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s closest friend.  As head of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung), Röhm was one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, at least until his execution during the “Night of Long Knives” in the summer of 1934.  Röhm was also openly homosexual.   This talk considers Röhm’s rise, the disclosure of his homosexuality in 1931 in two widely-publicized trials (for violation of the anti-sodomy statute), his role in the consolidation of Nazi control, and his downfall.  The talk also considers how Hans Blüher’s theory of the Männerbund (male association) might help analyze not only Röhm and the Nazis but also contribute more broadly to the historical sociology of nationalist revolution.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, The Europe Center and the Department of German Studies.

On March 29, 1945 the first Soviet troops crossed the Austrian border. On April 13, after fighting involving heavy losses, Vienna was liberated by the Red Army. The efforts of a resistance group within the Wehrmacht to avoid combat and surrender the city were betrayed and failed.

In building up the new, postwar Austria, the provisional Austrian government, installed by the Soviets, faced a dilemma: on the one hand the Moscow Declaration of November 1943 offered the opportunity to avoid the accusation of shared responsibility in Nazi crimes, even though Austria had been an integral part of the German Reich since the “Anschluss” in March 1938. The Moscow Declaration formula that, after the war, Austria would be dealt as the “first victim of Hitlerite aggression” offered a more than welcome way to avoid the threatened punishment. On the other hand, the obvious fact could not be denied that Austrians – as well as other Germans – had served in the Wehrmacht.

The Austrian Declaration of Independence, proclaimed on April 27, 1945, tried to explain this fact in claiming that the Austrians had been forced by Nazi suppression to fight in a war no Austrian had ever wanted, against peoples towards whom no Austrian felt any resentment.

In the immediate postwar period, this interpretation was underlined through several governmental projects, particularly the official Rot-Weiß-Rot-Buch (Red-White-Red-Book, 1946) that aimed to prove the significance of Austrian resistance to the Nazi regime – Wehrmacht soldiers were amongst those honored as patriotic resistance fighters, having been murdered for opposing the regime’s military orders.

But this narrative was to change within a short period in time. The Cold War and the re-integration of former members of the Nazi Party reframed the politics of history. This did not affect the official theory of Austria as the “first victim” but this argument was used mainly for official representations, especially to the “Ausland”. In Austrian internal discourse, clear indicators of a re-definition can be observed as early as 1948 as concerned attitudes to the Wehrmacht soldiers. In war memorials, commemoration ceremonies etc. the fallen soldiers – in 1945 defined as victims of infamous Nazi war policy - were now honored as heroes defending their homeland against the enemies from the “East”.

1945’s victim theory is of course the founding myth (more critically referred to as the foundational “historical lie”) of the Second Republic of Austria. But it is only one part of the specific Austrian postwar myth. Rather, Austrian memory is characterized by the tension between the official victim theory – Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany in 1938 – and a widespread, populist counter-narrative: Austrians as heroic defenders of Heimat and as military and civilian victims of the Allied war against Nazi Germany. In this populist or popular second victim theory, the darkest moment of Austrian history was not in 1938, but in 1945, when Austria was occupied by the Allies, above all by the “Russian barbarians”. Obviously “Liberation” was not a term appropriate to this perspective.

These contradictory narratives caused several public conflicts, mostly triggered by the erection of new war memorials and commemoration ceremonies for the fallen, especially in the decade after the State Treaty (1955) when it was no longer necessary to take the Allied Military Occupation Forces into consideration.

In the 1980s, with the break with the European postwar myths also came the unmasking of the official victim theory, triggered by the debate on President Kurt Waldheim’s role as a Wehrmacht officer in the Balkan theater of war (1986). The official standpoint, declared by Chancellor Franz Vranitzky in 1991, now acknowledged the “co-responsibility” of the Austrians for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.

But surprisingly, the culture of commemoration for the fallen soldiers of the Wehrmacht remained largely untouched, despite the intensity of the "memory wars" at the end of the 20th century. Only in 2012 was Austria at last confronted with its long overlooked blind spot in coming to terms with the Nazi past. Beyond all ethical or moral arguments and the historical fact that the Wehrmacht had participated in War Crimes and played a major role in the Holocaust, honoring Wehrmacht soldiers for defending the “homeland” against the Allied Military Forces, which liberated Austria from the Nazi terror regime, is anachronistic and inappropriate, not at least taking the commitment of the Austrian Bundesheer in European military co-operation into consideration. Ironically, the starting point for the break with this outdated postwar tradition was a hidden Nazi document discovered in 2012 at the very center of official commemoration: the sculpture of the Fallen Soldier in the Austrian national Heroes Monument on Vienna’s Heroes square.

But despite overcoming of the last und today yet hardly comprehensible remains of the postwar strategies of national, social and individual reconstruction, the question still remains: How should Austrian society commemorate its Wehrmacht soldiers – the fallen and the surviving, a generation which is now passing away? As victims? As perpetrators? This affects not only national representation but also family memory. Honoring the millions of soldiers of the Allied Forces who died for the liberation of Europe – and Austria – will be in the focus of this year‘s 70th anniversary of the end of WW II. But how to commemorate the ambivalent role of the Red Army in Austria (and other countries) – commemorating and honoring the death toll of Russian soldiers who died in the Eastern and Central European theaters of war, whilst also remembering the suffering of raped women?

In 2014, the centenary of WW I resulted in an harmonious scene in which a European family of nations had learned their lessons from history. Predictably in the commemoration year 2015, the picture will be far more complex and ambivalent – especially in view of the different experiences of democratic and communist EU countries after 1945, the conflicts with Russia in Ukraine and Crimea and, not least, the role of the Great Patriotic War in today’s Russian nationalist politics of history. The commemoration year 2015 seems to become an exciting event: one can observe how new world orders – and new tensions – will be negotiated in the field of cultural memory.

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Heidemarie Uhl is a Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor, a consulting professor at The Europe Center and visiting associate professor with the Department of History.  She is a Senior Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and teaches at the University of Vienna. Professor Uhl has held guest professorships at Hebrew University Jerusalem (Israel), University of Strasbourg (France) and Andrassy University Budapest (Hungary). She has published books and articles on the memory of the Holocaust in Austria and Europe and is currently co-directing a project on the persecution, expulsion and annihilation of Viennese Jews 1938-1945.

Professor Uhl's recent research interest focuses on the political, social, cultural and intellectual framework in which the Holocaust became the universal watershed event for a common memory of Western civilization at the end of the 20th century. What are the pre-conditions for this change in paradigm? Which transformations in narrative and in representation - from historiography to Memorial Museums and popular movie productions - were necessary for the acknowledgment of the Holocaust as the negative point of reference for the values and norms of western societies? And what are the new challenges Holocaust memory is confronted with in today’s multi-polar post-Cold War era?

Professor Uhl taught the history course "The Holocaust in Recent Memory: Conficts - Commemorations - Challenges" during the fall quarter, 2014.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History.

The presentation summarizes preliminary findings of my research project on Allied policy towards resistance groups during World War II and its impact on post-war political and ideological divisions.

The research is linked with a multiplicity of historical problems: the western Allies’ balance of political and military considerations during World War II; the Anglo-American cooperation and competition in the field of intelligence; the use of special operations as an instrument of foreign policy, especially in regard to countries where the development of resistance movements had a strong impact on post-war settlement (e.g. Yugoslavia, Greece and Poland); the politics of communist movements between war and revolution in Central and Eastern Europe; the relationship between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union and the Allies’ perception of the latter.

The particular contribution of the project is to bring together aspects which are usually addressed separately: the different national scenarios, whose connections and mutual influence will be investigated; the two Western intelligence agencies, which have been researched mostly in separate ways by scholars of the corresponding nationalities; the Soviet and Western allies’ policies.

Tommaso Piffer is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and at the University of Cambridge. Among his publications is a biography of Alfredo Pizzoni, the political chief of the Italian Resistance (Il Banchiere della Resistenza, 2005), an account of the relationship between the Allies and the Italian Resistance during World War II (Gli Alleati e la Resistenza Italiana, 2010) as well as several essays. He also edited a book in memory of Victor Zaslavsky on Totalitarian societies and democratic transition (Società totalitarie e transizione alla democrazia, 2011, with Vladislav Zubok) and the collection of essays on the political mass murder of Porzus (Porzus. Violenza e resistenza sul confine orientale, 2012). He is an affiliate at the Harvard Center for European Studies and a contributor to the cultural insert of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Open to Stanford affiliates

Sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center