ABSTRACT
This book deals with the Second World War in Southeastern Europe from the perspective of conditions on the ground during the conflict. The focus is on the reshaping of ethnic and religious groups in wartime, on the "top-down" and "bottom-up" dynamics of mass violence, and on the local dimensions of the Holocaust. The approach breaks with the national narratives and "top-down" political and military histories that continue to be the predominant paradigms for the Second World War in this part of Europe.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|60 pages
Group-making as a process
chapter 1|23 pages
Heirs of the Roman Empire?
27Aromanians and the fascist occupation of Greece (1941–1943)
chapter 2|16 pages
“The Task of the century”
Local dimensions of the policy of forced conversion in the Independent State of Croatia (1941–1942)
chapter 3|19 pages
Forced identities
The use of the category “Yugoslav” to classify inmates in the Mauthausen, Buchenwald and Dachau Nazi concentration camps (1941–1945)
part II|74 pages
Local dynamics of violence
chapter 4|19 pages
Controlling space and people
87War, territoriality and population engineering in Greece during the 1940s
chapter 5|35 pages
Spatial and temporal logics of violence
The Independent State of Croatia in the districts of Glina and Vrginmost (April 1941–January 1942)
1
part III|76 pages
Local perspectives on the Holocaust
chapter 7|35 pages
The madding clocks of local persecution
161Anti-Jewish policies in Bitola under Bulgarian occupation (1941–1943)
chapter 8|18 pages
Resistance or collaboration?
The Greek Christian elites of Thessaloniki facing the Holocaust (1941–1943)
part IV|26 pages
Everyday life under occupation
chapter 10|24 pages
Escape into normality
236Entertainment and propaganda in Belgrade during the occupation (1941–1944)
part V|21 pages
Epilogue
chapter 11|19 pages
(Re-)Scaling the Second World War
263Regimes of historicity and the legacies of the Cold War in Europe
