From Chapter 4 of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands

Einsatzgruppen had been deployed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, but met little resistance in these countries and had no special mission to kill selected groups. It was in Poland that the Einsatzgruppen were to fulfill their mission as “ideological soldiers” by eliminating the educated classes of a defeated enemy. (They were in some sense killing their peers: fifteen of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando commanders had doctorates.)

Snyder is citing Browning's Origins of the Final Solution, which says:

As in Poland, Heydrich did not hesitate to draw from his stable of highly educated Nazis. Of the four Einsatzgruppen commanders, three held a total of four doctorates: Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch of EG C, Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker of EG A, and Dr. Otto Ohlendorf of EG D.

Of the seventeen sk, ek, and Vorkommando chiefs, a further seven held the doctorate: Dr. Martin Sandberger (sk 1a), Dr. Erich Ehrlinger (sk 1b), Dr. Walter Blume (sk 7a), Dr. Erhard Kroeger (ek 6), Dr. Otto Bradfisch (ek 8), Dr. Alfred Filbert (ek 9), and Prof. Dr. Franz Six (Vorkommando Moscow). Some were taken from the upper ranks of the rsha in Berlin: Nebe, Ohlendorf, Six, Sandberger, Filbert, Blume, and Erwin Schulz (ek 5). Rasch and Stahlecker commanded the Security Police headquarters in Königsberg and Prague. Many others were branch Office Security Police and Gestapo chiefs: Rudolf Batz (ek 2) from Hanover, Günther Hermann (sk 4b) from Brünn, Heinz Seetzen (sk 10a) from Hamburg, and Gustav Nosske (ek 12) from Aachen.

Whatever their immediate previous postings, most of these officers had risen through Heydrich’s SD. They virtually all shared the same ideological outlook concerning Jews, Bolsheviks, and Slavs and Germany’s imperial future in the east as well as attitudes and dispositions of ‘‘energetic ruthlessness,’’ initiative, and activism that were the common characteristics of the SS intellectual elite. If the top officers were handpicked, there is no indication that ideological reliability was ever seen as a necessary distinguishing criterion among the candidates under consideration

Browning is citing here:

Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, p. 148; Ogorreck, ‘‘Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei,’’ p. 152.

Which, well, I can't read.

I'm not sure if I'm misreading this, but Browning seems to state, contra Snyder, that it was actually 11/21 commanders/subcommanders that had doctorates (one had two!)

In any case, what on earth is going on here? Is this maybe some quirk of the German academic system, and these people actually had the equivalent of Juris Doctors, with lawyers overrepresented in the elite police circles Himmler was pulling from? How common was a doctorate among Nazi officers? What did these people tend to have their doctorates in? Were they "STEM", like how contemporary terrorists commonly have graduate education in engineering? Or humanities scholars radicalized in the academy? Why were they chosen for these jobs over mere ideological fanatics with a taste for blood, like you'd usually envision running a death squad? How and why did a bunch of trained academics end up getting charged with murdering all the Jews in eastern europe?

This is partially inspired by the hubbub about Wikipedia potentially editing the “mass killings in communist regimes” when they don’t even have any “mass killings in other economic systems” pages at all. And that made me wonder when exactly did “capitalism” start and what else would get credit for the mass deaths that happened on Hispaniola?

Like enforcing a quota policy where you have your hand chopped off if you don’t mine enough gold, and spending most of your time exploring specifically looking for gold to increase your personal wealth and political station seems exceedingly capitalistic. If they did make a Wikipedia page about “list of mass killings under capitalist regimes” page, should it include Columbus and everything that happened after?

I always thought that witch hunts victimized almost exclusively women. I just learned and was very surprised that a significant number of men were tried and executed as well. Now I'm wondering if we have any idea about the ratio of men and women who were tried, sentenced or executed (mainly in Europe) because of witch hunts.

This quote was relayed by Cumann na mBan member Brigid Lyons Thornton in the 1970s documentary Curious Journey about her time spent in prison immediately following the 1916 Easter Rising:

Early that morning then I heard a terrible volley of shooting and I asked the one who came to me, a Miss McInnerney, I said ‘What was all the shooting this morning?’ And she said, ‘They were shooting some of the men.’ Now I didn’t know who or what and I didn’t believe it. Later that day we were let out for about ten minutes’ exercise and we met a lot of other girls who had been at other centres during the week and I said to one of them. ‘I heard they were shooting the men.’ And she said, ‘Don’t you worry, they’re not going to shoot any of the men. They’d be too much afraid of America.’

Well the next morning the shooting was on again and again and again, every morning after that at about five o’clock. I could hear the men marching out down by my cell door, a heavy march and then out and then the volleys.

Why would the British government fear some kind of response from the United States for executing what, from the Downing Street perspective, were unlawful rebels? Would the British have feared a U.S. government diplomatic response specifically or more a negative response from the American (and Canadian?) public? And more importantly, was an American response even a consideration at all for the government? If so it didn't stop them from executing 16 men. So why would Irish republicans believe that the British government would care?

Thank you!

Ive been studying european history from ancient greece and egypt all the way to the byzantine empire. Im amazed because it seems like the byzantine dromon was the same as a mycenian greek bireme- even though a millenia seperated those empires . Were navies on the Mediterranean really bascially unchanged for 1500 years? Using a square sail, banks of oars, and a ram? Or even scandinavian longships, similarly set up but with no ram or deck

When did the rigged ships of the line finally change that, and where?

It seems that until the cannon was invented, naval combat was very primitive and not very innovative. With the exception of greek fire in the 8th century byzantine navy. Im having a lot of trouble even finding good models or examples of navies through the early middle ages

Thanks

The lord of Navarre / Bourbon convert to calvinism in XVI century, then Henry IV will be king of France ("Paris is worth a mass").
Now the profoundly catholics Bourbons who will reign in Southern Italy and Spain come from the same dynasty?
I've always thought that the French Bourbons were tiepidly catholics, since that Henry's conversion was political and not spiritual.

This is my doubt

Like Delivered From Evil was for WWII.

For example, are there Chinese, Sumerian, or even Incan texts describing their ancestors as living till the ages of 200, 300, 500, or more?

I have been reading Max Hasting's "All Hell Let Loose" lately, and in it, he talks a lot about how Germany's blitzkrieg tactic was so effective in France that French soldiers' morale had taken a hit and in some instances, they had accepted - much before it actually happened - that France would fall in a matter of days.

This might sound like a stupid question, but the more I read about Blitzkrieg and its effectiveness, the more I can't seem to understand why wasn't it used by Germany throughout the war to finally win WW2?

Wikipedia talks about it briefly with an unsourced sentence:

Evidence supports the idea that the Thule (and also the Dorset, but to a lesser degree) were in contact with the Vikings, who had reached the shores of Canada in the 11th century

So that got me curious as to what the evidence was, and what we know about this contract

A large number of enslaved Africans brought to the American South were Muslims from West Africa. How long did Islam persist among slaves in the United States and did unique practices develop as a result? Iirc, Muslim slaves even staged a revolt in Brazil though that doesn't seem to have occurred in the American South. Did Muslim slaves show greater resistance to Christian conversion compared to those who practiced indigenous religions? Did Islam have any impact on African American religion after formal conversion, much as Voodoo and other West African religious practices have persisted to this day.

And beyond that question, how was your PhD program in general?

The quote is from John Iliffe’s Africans, page 301.

Obviously Europe shouldn’t be the default, but East Asian, Latin American, and South Asian cases seem to also follow that model, at least in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It doesn’t seem like there were a lot of migrants that came directly from France or Spain during the great waves of migration in the 19th century, even though millions of people left Britain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scandinavia, and various nations in Southern and Eastern Europe at this time.

The Kingdom?

The Republic Era?

The Punic Wars?

He served In the 101st according to the badges in his BDU. He was purportedly a “ radio commander” at the “north cliffs of Normandy, second wave.” He also said that he helped liberate concentration camps after the war.

He was a deeply troubled man who never spoke about his experiences. The above are what we were able to put together. Any ideas how I might figure out where he served? Or what his time abroad looked like?

I know he was about 50 miles from Andersonville and attempted to rescue officers from a prison camp made for them, though he only made a feeble attempt to do so. But was he callous? As starved sick men wouldn’t be any use to him as soldiers and only slow him down?

This is in book 2, part 3, chapter 7:

This speech not only made a strong impression, but created excitement in the Lodge. The majority of the Brothers, seeing in it dangerous designs of Illuminism, met it with a coldness that surprised Pierre.

Why would they react this way?

I am from Northwestern New Jersey, and while I'm familiar with the English names of features of the landscape, animals, plants, etc, I have no idea what the native peoples of the area (I believe the Lenni Lenape) would have called them. Is there any real way I could find out, or has that knowledge essentially been lost?