Topic 8 Vocabulary

Appeasement - the policy of giving in to an aggressor’s demands in order to keep the peace

Stalingrad - now Volgograd, a city in SW Russia that was the site of a fierce battle during WWII

Pacifism - opposition to all war

D-Day - code name for June 6, 1944, the day that Allied forces invaded France during WWII

Neutrality Acts - a series of acts passed by the U.S. Congress from 1935 to 1939 that aimed to keep the U.S. from becoming involved in WWII

Yalta Conference - meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in February 1945 where the three leaders made agreements regarding the end of World War II

Axis powers - a group of countries led by Germany, Italy, and Japan that fought the Allies in World War II

V-E Day - Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, the day the Allies won WWII in Europe

Anschluss - the union of Austria and Germany

Bataan Death March - during World War II, the forced march of Filipino and American prisoners of war under brutal conditions by the Japanese military

Sudetenland - a region of western Czechoslovakia

Island-hopping - during World War II, Allied strategy of recapturing some Japanese-held islands while bypassing others

Nazi-Soviet Pact - an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 in which the two nations promised not to fight each other and to divide up land in Eastern Europe

Kamikaze - Japanese pilot who undertook a suicide mission

Blitzkrieg - lightning war

Manhattan Project - code name for the project to build the first atomic bomb during WWII

Luftwaffe - German air force

Hiroshima - the city in Japan where the first atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945

Dunkirk - port in France from which 300,000 Allied troops were evacuated when their retreat by land was cut off by the German advance in 1940

Nagasaki - Japanese city; on an island in its harbor, the Tokugawa shoguns in the 1600s permitted one or two Dutch ships to trade with Japan each year

Vichy - city in central France where a puppet state governed unoccupied France and the French colonies

Nuremberg Trials - a series of war crimes trials held in Germany after WWII

Lend-Lease Act - an act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1941 that allowed the president (FDR) to sell or lend war supplies to any country whose defense was considered vital to the United States

United Nations (UN) - an international organization formed in 1945 at the end of World War II. Since then, its global role has expanded to include economic and social development, human rights, humanitarian aid, and international law.

Atlantic Charter - agreement in which Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill set goals for the defeat of Nazi Germany and for the postwar world

Concentration camp - detention center for civilians considered enemies of the state

Holocaust - the systematic genocide of about six million European Jews by the Nazis in World War II

Crematorium - a place used to burn corpses

Auschwitz - a group of three German concentration camps and extermination camps in southern Poland, built and operated during the Third Reich

Internment - confinement during wartime

Rosie the Riveter - popular name for women who worked in war industries during WWII

Aircraft carrier - ship that accommodates the taking off and landing of airplanes, and transports aircraft