History 126B Final

U.S. Position Regarding war in Europe

• Anti-communism

• Many Americans believed Britain to be doomed and that the fate of Britain was not vital to American national interests.

Lend Lease Act, Passes by US Congress, March 11 1941

• Authorized the president to transfer munitions and supplies “to the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the U.S.”

• Allies would repay the United States not in money (but by returning the goods, or repaying in kind with details to be worked out later)

Atlantic Charter, August 1941

• Common declaration of dual aims and principles (not a treaty). Public statement about democratic solidarity. Vision of postwar world. System of general security.

• Free trade

• Disarmament

• Neither country to seek territorial aggrandizement

• No territorial changes that did not accord with the wishes of people concerned

• Rights of people to choose their own governments.

What does Weinberg argue is critical to understand the war in the Pacific

• This war was different because of the evolution of technology, the economy, medicine, etc.

• The Japanese advance through halted throughout the pacific theater delayed the American operations in the mediterranean

• The Japanese navy and industry was vulnerable and couldn’t be exploited until well into the war.

How does Bess intervene in traditional narratives of the Pearl Harbor attack

• Challenging the traditional telling of the war, he wanted to give more context of the war

• western people were forcing things on Japan

• The attack on pearl harbor was not part of the larger context but was an immediate reaction

• “Out of the blue” he challenged it by talking about the 10 years of aggression that was leading up to it; this is not out of the blue it goes back 250 years to when Japan was forcibly opened by the Americans; merely doing the same thing that Europe was doing to us (they used western strategy)

• The treaty of Japan was 1858 modeling after western strategy

What is the main factor that led to US victory in the Midway battle, according to Bess

• The interception of the Navy and their way

• The moral character, luck, courage.

What is the legacy of this battle

• The turning point that gave the Americans hope in the war

• The Japanese navy never really recovered from this battle

• This was the last point that the Japanese were on the attack, everything became defensive maneuvers.

What does this battle tell us about the nature of the war’s unfolding

Luck, self-sacrifce, miscalculations, personal courage, moral choices, intentions, preparations (preparing for 3 years)

Russian Fronts

The majority of the fighting of the war took place on the Eastern Front

Nazi Germany Invaded USSR

June 22 1941

Initial German successes, colossal Soviet defeats

Summer of 1941 (July 1941: beginning of genocide of Jews)

Germans halted outside Moscow

Fall 1941

Germans laid siege to Leningrade

Sept 1941 - Jan 1943

First Soviet Counter offensives

Dec 1941

Summer Campaign

1942

Battle of Stalingrad (Germans defeated at Stalingrad; enormous turning point)

August 1942 - Jan 1943

Nazi Plans for USSR

• Destruction of Soviet Union

• Elimination of Communist threat to Germany

• Seizure of Prime land

• Long-term settlement

• Larger Germany on the Future

Bialystock (Poland)

Soviet prisoners from the encirclement at Biastock

Effect in Belarus on civilian population of 9 million

• 2 million dead

• 1.5 million fled

• 2 million forcibly resettled

• 3 million left homeless

• 5,000 villages wasted and depopulated

Reasons for Soviet survival and revival December 1941

• The Soviet army held the front

• Territory not occupied by Germans still functioned

• The Soviets had developed industrial capacity beyond the Ural Mountains in the 1930s. Served as a base or continued production. They evacuated equipment and specialists to this area.

• The Japanese attacked south (Malaya, Dutch East Indies, U.S.) rather than North

• Material aid came from Britain

Why We Fight Film

• Purpose: to justify to U.S. involvement in the war

• Made to be shown to U.S. soldiers

• Films on Russia also shown to civilians in commercial theaters

• Films series directed by Hollywood director Frank Capra

Bloodlands (Timothy Snyder, 2012)

mass murders committed before an during WW2 in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Lend-Lease Act

• Proposed in late 1940

• Passed March 1941

• Permitted the American President to "sell, transfer title, exchange, lease, lend or otherwise dispense to any such government [whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States] any defense article

Mobilization of Soviet Home Front

Siege of Leningrad, Sept 1941 - Jan 1943 (seventeen month siege)

Soviet Counter Offensives

December 1941 - January 1942

Genocide

Origin: term coined after WW2 to describe Turkish slaughter of Armenians in 1911 and Nazi annihilation of the Jews during WW2

Definition: “The deliberate and systematic extermination…of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group..”

In the context of WW2: genocide means the murder carried out against the Jews by the Nazis.

Holocaust

Burnt Offering

Shoah

Catastrophe

Judeocide

Killing of the Jews

Defining characteristics of the Shoah

• Jews were the primary target. Their annihilation to be complete [not the case for other groups the Nazis attacked].

• use of biological criteria to define the enemy.

• carried out by a modern, bureaucratic state.

Alternatives of Annihilation

• Marginalization

• Sterilization

• Selective murder (also on a mass scale)

Phases of the Genocide

• Exclusion (Nuremberg Laws, 1935)

• Ghettoization (1939 - 1941)

• War of annihilation against Soviet Union, 22 June 1941 initiates “The Shoah by Bullets”. `941-1944

• January 1942. Decision to implement a “final solution” to the Jewish question. Wannsee Conference

• 1942-1943 peak killing years, Building of killing centers

Shoah by Bullets

• Mass shooting operations carried out from mid 1941 - early 1944. 40% of Jewish victims of the Holocaust killed in mass shootings.

• Carried our by Nazi SS, German police forces, german military units, locally-recruited collaborators.

• 2 million + Jews residing in the Soviet Union killed

• Priority placed on annihilating Soviet Jews but also included prominent Communists; anyone suspected of sabotage; Roma people; and asylum inmates murdered —but not as systematically.

Shoah by Bullets

• Of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, 40% were killed in mass shootings

• Mass shootings were carried out by Nazi SS, German police forces, German military units (including Waffen SS), locally-recruited collaborators

• Witnessed by local public and neighbors. Pressed into service as clerks, grave diggers, wagon drivers, cooks.

Wannsee Conference

January 1942

Evolution of Camp System

• 1933: first camp open for detention/internment

• 1938: Austrian and German Jews arrested

• After invasion of SU: Labor camps, POW camps built. They became concentration camps.

• 1942: Killing centers built

• 75% of Jews murdered in the Shoah killed 1942-1943

Names of Killing Centers Peak Killing Years: 1942 - 1943

• Chelmno (Near Lodz)

• Belzec

• Sobibor

• Treblinka

• Majdanek (Near Lublin)

• Auschwitz-Birkenau (Near Cracow)

Forms of occupation

• direct annexation (example: Austria 1938, northern Poland, Czech part of Czechoslovakia, Alsace and Lorraine in France)

• direct rule (southern Poland: General Gouvernement)

• Military Rule (Soviet Union, Belgium)

• Direct rule with intermediaries (here is where we begin to encounter collaboration)

• Nominally independent regimes (France).

Resistance/resistance

1. actions that take with the intention of thwarting Nazi Germany’s war goals

2. actions that carried the risk of punishment

3. note the uance between resistance (small r) and Resistance (capital R). R refers to a social movement that went beyond individual action for the sake of people in one’s own entourage.

Accommodation

• Adjusting to foreign occupiers without making a formal commitment to the occupier’s ideology or policies

• One measure of rates of accommodation: shifting popularity of learning foreign languages.

Examples of Resistance activity

• intelligence gathering

• defiance: final uprising in Warsaw ghetto, April 1943

• Rescue: example, hiding Jewish children. Village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (France).

The White Rose 1942

a non-violent resistance group formed by students and a professor at the University of Munich in Nazi Germany

French Resistance

External Resistance: Free French, led by Charles de Gaulle, based in London and in Africa

Internal Resistance: In metropolitan France (France on the European continent)

Maquis

Underground guerilla group in rural areas

Maquisards

member of a maquis group

Strategic Bombing

A strike at the enemy’s capacity and willingness to fight

The Plan

• Use long-range bombers to strike deep into enemy territory to bomb industrial facilities as well as urban areas.

• Area bombing

• Use “Concentrated incendiary method” i.e. firebombing

Bombed-out Cologne

1945

Firebombing of Tokyo

March 9-10, 1945

Red Army reached Majdanek and Lublin

Late July 1944

Massacre at Katyn Forest 1940

• Poland

• April-May 1940

• NKVD

Warsaw Uprising

1. Warsaw ghetto uprising April 1943

2. Warsaw uprising of the Polish Home Army August 1, 1944 - October 4, 1944

Sam Fuller Movie

“Falkenau, the Impossible” about the US army liberating the Flakenau death camp. The Czech locals denied they knew anything about a genocide.

Forms of Justice

• Juridical Trials (Nuremberg, 1945-1946)

• Summary Justice (example: Sam Fuller showed in the big red one, shows how the war itself can be summary justice)

• Vigilante Justice: punishing without legal authority

• Administrative Purges

• Instrumental purges: a purge serving political purposes other than the ones stated.

Nuremberg Laws

only those who were german could be considered citizens

Nuremberg Trials (1945-46)

• The architects of the Nuremberg trials consciously sought to break new legal ground. Aimed for these tirals to be a source and a test of international law.

• They created the International Military Tribunal to carry this out.

texts that embodied the laws of war

• Geneva Convention 1864

• Hague Convention 1899

• “Red Cross” Convention 1906

• Geneva Convention 1929

Charges

• Crimes against peace: planning, preparation, initiation of war of aggression

• war crimes: violation of customs of war

• crimes against humanity: a notion established for the postwar trials at Nuremberg

Crimes Against Humanity

• Murder, Extermination, Enslavement, Deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations….

Key Concepts

• Conspiracy

• Guilt of organizations

Innovations codified at Nuremberg

• Eliminated two central defenses to culpability: “act of state defense” and “due obedience” defense.

• Established the notion of an unjust war

• Crimes against humanity codified for the first time

Genocide

• Genocide defined as a crime that could be committed by a state against its own civilians

• Nuremberg made a state’s treatment of its own civilians an international matter.

• Term coined by Raphael Lemkin

Collective Memory

• Concept proposed by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s

• Basic idea: we always remember the past in a social context

• In short, we need others to remember

• Commemoration: remembering in public with others.