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Cross-border Talks
Cross-Border Talks is an independent medium ran by journalists from Poland, Bulgaria and Czechia.
SPD may have lost the German elections massively, but the new coalition, to be inaugurated within days, does not aim at erasing Olaf Scholz's legacy. Wojciech Albert Łobodziński analyzes the new German 'grand coalition' governance plans.
www.crossbordertalks.eu
Germany is entering a new political phase, not only due to the shift in parliamentary...
Operation Barbarossa was Nazi-Germany’s code-word for Hitler’s brutal war of racial annihilation on the Soviet Union starting in 1941.![]()
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Almost 85 years after that – in 2025 – Germany has finally translated one of the most vital books on the subject: Ales Adamowitsch, Janka Bryl and Uladsimir Kalesnik’s Feuerdörfer or Out Of The Fire.![]()
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This book tells the story of the crimes of Hitler’s army – the Wehrmacht. Unlike conventional armies, Hitler’s fascist army did not conduct a conventional war – army against army.![]()
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Instead, it was, in large parts, a war of one army – Nazi-Germany’s army set against defenceless civilians. Hitler’s Nazi army came to Eastern Europe as ferocious mass killers.![]()
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In this, the words Out Of The Fire or Feuerdörfer stand for the unbearable fact that well over 9,000 villages, hamlets, Jewish shtetels and rural settlements were destroyed by the Germans and with many of its people barbarously and callously massacred.![]()
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Unsurprisingly, it took the Germans a whopping fifty years to translate the book. One might argue that a cold-war Soviet book might not have been popular in Germany fifty years ago – even though it spoke – and still speaks – the truth of what Nazi-Germany did.![]()
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During the last fifty years, what was even less popular in Germany was outlining – to the Germans – what their brothers, uncles, fathers and grandfathers had done in their Nazi army – not so long ago.![]()
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After Nazism, Germany’s Nazis had managed to survive the Allied Forces’ De-Nazification (1946-1951) and enjoyed the ensuing Re-Nazification – the recycling of Nazis – during the subsequent years that filled Germany’s state and corporate apparatus with ex- (and not so) ex-Nazis.![]()
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In 2025, finally, Adamovich’s book has been translated. It even won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Perhaps very deservedly, some say that it is impossible to read this book in one go.![]()
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The book is more like a novel or a non-fiction book that you go to immerse yourself into. With this book, you will need several attempts and extended breaks in order to finish the book.![]()
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Again and again, you want to stop reading. It is hard to plunge yourself in the gruesome world of the German Wehrmacht invading the Soviet Union.![]()
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The atrocities are too overwhelming and the horror, the Germans unleashed, is too terrifying. For this reason, it is not intended to describe, in minute detail, how the people of Belarus were murdered by the criminal killer squads of the Wehrmacht and the SS while being burned to death in their houses and barns.![]()
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The fact that this book can now be published in German language for the first time – 50 years after it was published in Minsk despite initial reservations by the Soviet censorship authorities – is still somewhat of an event.![]()
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Its translator – Thomas Weiler – has accomplished an enormous feat and rightly received the Translator Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2025.![]()
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Fire villages - Cross-border Talks
www.crossbordertalks.eu
Book review of Ales Adamowitsch, Janka Bryl and Uladsimir Kalesnik’s Feuerdörfer or Out Of The Fire
Thomas Kilkauer on press freedom day about the German extreme right's attacks on press freedom and journalists![]()
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Germany’s far right attacks press freedom - Cross-border Talks
www.crossbordertalks.eu
Posted by Thomas Klikauer Perhaps even before a free press emerged during a period known...
A thoughtful article on Romanian elections by CbT's author Andrei Gudu![]()
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The Post-Politics Behind Romania’s Rising Far Right
jacobin.com
Ultranationalist Călin Georgescu was barred from Romania’s presidential election, but now another far-right candidate has taken over his poll lead. To defeat them requires real social policies, not...