• Dates: 1939-1945

• Causes: Treaty of Versailles, Rise of Fascism, Appeasement Policy

• Major Powers: Allies (US, UK, USSR, France) vs Axis (Germany, Japan, Italy)

• Major Events: Invasion of Poland, Battle of Stalingrad, D-Day, Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

• Consequences: 50-85 million deaths, Holocaust, Formation of United Nations, Cold War tensions.

Chapter 27: Dictatorships and the Second World War (1919-1945)

Introduction

• Communist and Fascist states undertook determined assaults on democratic government and individual rights across Europe

• On the eve of the Second World War, popularly elected governments survived only in Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Switzerland

• Totalitarian regimes in the Communist Soviet Union and Fascist Italy and Germany practiced ruthless dynamic tyranny

  • Promised to greatly improve the lives of ordinary citizens and intervened radically in those lives in pursuit of utopian schemes of social engineering

• Attempts to build a “radically pure” New Order in Europe by Hitler’s Nazi Germany led to the deaths of tens of millions

Authoritarian States

• Conservative Authoritarianism and Radical Totalitarian Dictatorships

Conservative Authoritarianism

• Conservative authoritarianism was the traditional form of antidemocratic government in European history

  • The leaders of such governments relied on obedient bureaucracies in the efforts to control society

• Conservative authoritarianism was limited in both power and objectives

  • Had neither the ability nor desire to control many aspects of their subjects’ lives; as long as people did not try to challenge the system, they were typically allowed considerable independence

• After WWI, authoritarianism revived, but new kinds of radical dictatorship became well established

  • Soviet Union

  • Germany

  • Italy

  • Communist and Fascist political parties established in all major European nations and mounted challenges to democratic rule

Totalitarianism

• totalitarianism: A radical dictatorship that exercises “total claims” over the beliefs and behavior of its citizens by taking control of the economic, social, intellectual, and cultural aspects of society

  • Emphasizes the characteristics that Fascist and Communist dictatorships had in common

  • One-party totalitarian states used violent political repression and intense propaganda to gain complete power; the state tried to dominate the economic, social, intellectual, and cultural aspects of people’s lives

Characteristics of Communist and Fascist Dictatorships

• Both Communist and Fascist Dictatorships rejected parliamentary government and liberal values

  • Liberals sought to limit the power of the state and protect the rights of the individual

  • Totalitarians believed that individualism undermined equality and unity, and rejected democracy in favor of one-party political systems

• A leader typically dominated the totalitarian state

  • Stalin - Soviet Union

  • Mussolini - Italy

  • Hitler - Germany

    • All three created political parties dedicated to promoting idealized versions of collective harmony

    • Used force and terror to intimidate and destroy political opponents and pursued policies of imperial expansion to exploit other lands

    • Censored the mass media and instituted propaganda campaigns to advance their goals

    • Engaged in massive projects of state-controlled social engineering dedicated to replace individualism with a unified “people” capable of exercising the collective will

Authoritarian States

• Communism and Fascism

Societal Visions

• Communism and fascism shared a desire to revolutionize state and society

• Soviet Communists strove to create an international brotherhood of workers

  • Economic exploitation would disappear and society would be based of radical social equality

  • Under Stalinism, the state aggressively intervened in all walks of life to pursue this social leveling

    • Used force to destroy upper and middle classes

    • The Stalinist state nationalized private property, pushed rapid industrialization, amd collectivized agriculture

• fascism: A movement characterized by extreme often expansionist nationalism, antisocialism, a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and military

  • Leaders who embraced fascism claimed that they were striving to build a new community on a national level

  • Fascists glorified war and military; the nation was the highest embodiment of the people

  • Like communists, fascists promised to improve the lives of ordinary workers

    • Fascist governments intervened in the economy, but unlike Communist regimes, they did not try to level class differences and national private property

      • Instead, they presented a vision of a community bound together by nationalism; all classes would work together together to build a harmonious national community

Race and Eugenics

• Where Communists sought to build a new world around the destruction of class differences, Fascists typically sought to build a new national community grounded in racial homogeneity

• eugenics: A pseudoscientific doctrine that maintains that the selective breeding of human beings can improve the general characteristics of a national population, which helped inspire Nazi ideas about “race and space” and ultimately contributed to the Holocaust

  • Embraced by Fascists, especially the Nazis

    • The Nazis maintained that the German nation had to be “purified” of groups of people deemed “unfit” by the regime

    • Led to the Holocaust; the attempt to purge Germany and Europe of all Jews and other undesirable groups by mass killing during WWII

      • The Soviets sometimes persecuted specific ethnic groups, but justified these attacks using ideologies of class, not race

Mutual Enmity

• Since both Communists and Fascists sought to overthrow the existing society, they were enemies

  • Resulted in a clash of ideologies

Stalin’s Soviet Union

• From Lenin to Stalin

The Five Year Plan

• Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)

  • Finished Lenin’s job of establishing the basic outlines of a modern totalitarian dictatorship after the Bolshevik Revolution and during the Russian civil war

• five-year plan: A plan launched by Stalin in 1928, and termed the “revolution from above”, aimed at modernizing the Soviet Union and creating a new Communist society with new attitudes, loyalties, and a new socialist humanity

  • Goal: to generate new attitudes, new loyalties, and a new socialist humanity

  • Means: Constant propaganda, enormous sacrifice of the people, harsh repression that included purges and executions, and rewards for those who followed the party line

  • The Soviet Union in the 1930s became a dynamic modern totalitarian state

The New Economy Policy (NEP)

• Although Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the Russian Civil War, the land that they ruled was shattered and devastated; farms were in ruins and food supplies were exhausted, industrial production had broken down

  • Led to riots by peasants and workers as well as an open rebellion by previously pro-Bolshevik sailors at Kronstadt

• New Economic Policy (NEP): Lenin’s 1921 policy to re-establish limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry in the face of economic disintegration

  • Permitted peasant producers to sell their surpluses in free markets as well as handicraft manufacturers to reaooear

  • Heavy industry, railroads, and banks remained wholly nationalized

• The NEP was a political and economic success

  • Political: It was a necessary compromise with the peasant majority of the Soviet Union

  • Economic: Brought rapid economic recovery; by 1926, industrial output surpassed, and agricultural production almost equaled prewar levels

Lenin’s Succession

• In 1924, Lenin died without a chosen successor, creating an intense struggle for power in the inner circles of the Communist Party

• The principal contenders were Stalin and Trotsky

  • Stalin: A good organizer but poor speaker and writer, no experience outside of Russia

  • Trotsky: Planned the 1917 Bolsehvik takeover, created the Red Army

Stalin’s Triumph

• Despite the fact that Trotsky was at an advantage, Stalin won because he was more effective at gaining the all-important support of the party and better able to relate Marxist teaching to Soviet realities in the 1920s

  • Stalin argued that the Russian-dominated Soviet Union had the ability to build socialism on its own whereas Trotsky maintained that socialism in the Soviet Union could succeed only if a socialist revolution swept throughout Europe

  • Stalin was also willing to break with the capitalist-appearing NEP and “build socialism”

• The Communists inherited the vast multiethnic territories of the former Russian empire which Lenin initially argued that these ethnic groups should have the right to self-determination even if they claimed independence from the Soviet State

  • Stalin argued for more centralized Russian control of these ethnic regions

• To get to this point, Stalin allied with Trotsky’s enemies to crush Trotsky and then moved against everyone who might have challenged by ascendancy

Stalin’s Soviet Union

• The Five-Year Plans

The First Five-Year Plan

• The first of these plans had staggering economic objectives

  • Total industrial output was to increase by 250%, with heavy industry growing even faster

  • Agricultural production was planned to increase by 150%, and ⅕ of peasants in the Soviet Union were to give up their private plots and join collective farms

• Stalin unleashed his “second revolution” for a variety of reasons

  • He was committed to socialism as they understood it

  • Feared a gradual restoration of capitalism; wished to promote the working classes; and were eager to abolish the NEP’s private traders, independent artisans, and property-owning peasants

  • Economic motivations; would allow the U.S.S.R to catch up with the West and overcome traditional Russian “backwardness”

Collectivization and the Kulaks

• Peasants had wanted to own land and finally had it, but Stalinists reasoned that landowning peasants would embrace conservative capitalism and pose a threat to the regime

  • At the same time, Communists believed that the feared and despised “class enemy” in the villages could be squeezed to provide enormous sums needed for all-out industrialization

• collectivization of agriculture: The forcible consolidation of individual peasants farms into large state-controlled enterprises in the Soviet Union under Stalin

• kulaks: The better-off peasants who were stripped of land and livestock under Stalin and were generally not permitted to join collective farms; many of them starved or were deported to forced-labor camps for “re-education”

  • Had benefited the most from the NEP

The Cost of Collectivization

• Large numbers of peasants opposed to the change slaughtered their animals and burned their crops rather than turn them over to state commissars

  • Number of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats in the Soviet Union fell by at least half

• State controlled farms were not any more productive

  • Output of grain barely increased; collectivized agriculture was unable to make any substantial financial contribution to Soviet industrial development in the first five-year plan

• Collectivization in the fertile farmlands of the Ukraine was more rapid and violent than in other Soviet territories

  • The drive against peasants snowballed into an assault on Ukrainians who had sought independence from Soviet rule after the First World War

  • In 1932, as collectivization and deporations continued, party leaders set levels of grain deliveries for the Ukrainian collectives at excessively high levels and refused to relax those quotas or allow food relief when Ukrainian Communist leaders reported that starvation was occurring

    • Resulted in man-made famine in Ukraine (1932-1933)

Industrialization

• A State Planning Commission, the “Gosplan” was created to set production goals and control deliveries of raw and finished materials

• Stanlinist planning favored heavy industry over the production of consumer goods, which led to shortages of basic proper necessities

• Despite all of the problems they faced, the Soviet industry had achieved rapid industrial growth

• The Soviet state needed heavy machinery for rapid development, and an industrial labor force was created almost overnight; peasants began working in steel mills across the country

  • Independent trade unions lost most of their power

  • The government could assign workers to any job anywhere in the country; passport system ensured that people could only move if they had permission

    • Rapid industrial growth led to urban development; more than 25 million people migrated to the cities

    • Workers usually lived in poor conditions, but also experienced some benefits of upward mobility

      • In old tsarist Russia, peasants were not considered people; now they are citizens of the U.S.S.R and have the right to get a job, education, leisure

Stalin’s Soviet Union

• Life and Culture in Soviet Society

Daily Life

• Daily life was difficult in Stalin’s Soviet Union

  • Lack of housing; millions moved into the city, but government built few apartments

  • Constant shortages of goods; because consumption was reduced to pay for investment, there was little improvement in the average standard of living in the years prior to WWII

  • Wages could purchase less goods

• Soviet workers received important social benefits; old-age pensions, free medical services, free education, day-care centers for children

  • Unemployment was unknown

Personal Advancement

• In the 1930s the Stanlinist state broke with the egalitarian policies of the 1920s and provided incentives for those who could serve its needs

  • Paid the mass of unskilled workers and collective farmers low wages, but offered high salaries and social privileges to its growing technical managerial elite

Women’s Roles

• Marxists had traditionally believe that both capitalism and middle-class husbands exploited women; the Russian Revolution of 1917 proclaimed equality for women

  • In the 1920s, divorce and abortion were made available; women were urged to work outside the home

• After Stalin came to power, he revoked many laws supporting women’s emancipation in order to strengthen the traditional family and build up the state’s population

• The Soviet’s opened higher education to women, who could now enter the ranks of the better-paid specialists in industry and science

  • Medicine became a woman’s profession

• The majority of women had to work outside the home; wages were so low that it was almost impossible for a family/couple to live only on the husband’s earnings

  • Peasant women had to work on farms, in factories, in construction

  • Men dominated the best jobs

Politicized Culture

• Culture was thoroughly politicized for propaganda and indoctrination purposes

  • Party activists lectured workers in factories and peasants on collective farms; newspapers, films, and radio broadcasted endlessly recounted socialist achievement capital plots

• Intellectuals were ordered by Stalin to become “engineers of human minds”; to exalt the lives of ordinary workers and glorify Russian nationalism

Stalin’s Soviet Union

• Stalinist Terror and the Great Purges

The Kirov Murder

• In late 1934, Stalin’s number 2 man, Sergei Kirov, was mysteriously killed

  • Stalin, who probably ordered Kirov’s murder, blamed the assassination on “Fascist agents” within the party

    • He used the incident to launch a reign of terror that purged the Communist Party of supposed traitors and solidified his own control

The Great Purges

• The “great purge” was a series of public show trials from 1936-1938 in which false evidence, often gathered using torture was used to incriminate party administrators and Red Army leaders

• Purges weakened the Soviet Union in economic, intellectual, and military terms, but left Stalin in command of a vast new state apparatus

  • The great purges brought substantial practical rewards to this new generation of committed Communists

The Purges’ Mysterious Origins

• Fearlful of resistance, Stalin and his allies used the harshest measures against their political enemies, real or imagined

  • Stalin found large numbers of willing collaborators for crime as well as for achievement

Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

• The Seizure of Power

The Weaknesses of Liberal Italy

• Fascists: Revolutionaries determined to create a new totalitarian state based on extreme nationalism and militarism

• Much of the Italian population was still poor, and many peasants were more attached to their villages and local interests than to the national state

• The papacy, devout Catholics, conservatives, and landowners remained strongly opposed to liberal institutions, and relations between church and state were often tense

The Postwar Crisis

• To win support for the war effort, the Italian government had promised territorial expansion as well as social and land reform, which it could not deliver because the Treaty of Versailles denied Italy of territorial gains

  • Unemployment and inflation soared after the war, creating hardship

    • In response, the Italian Socialist Party brhsn occupying factories and seizing land in 1920

• After the pope lifted his ban on participation by Catholics in Italian politics, a strong Catholic party had emerged

• By 1921, revolutionary socialists, conservatives, Catholics, and property owners were all opposed to the liberal government

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945)

• In 1914, he had urged Italy to join the Allies and for that he was expelled from the Socialist Party

• In 1917, Mussolini began organizing bitter war verterans like himself into a band of Fascists (from the Intalian word for “a union of forces”)

The Seizure of Power

• At first, Mussolini’s propgram was a radical combination of nationalist and socialist demands

  • Competed with the well-organized Socialist Party and failed to get off the ground

  • When Mussolini saw that his violent verbal assaults on rival Socialists won him growing support from conservatives and the frightened middle class, he shifted gears in 1920 and became a sworn enemy of socialism

• Mussolini and his private militia of Black Shirts grew increasingly violent

  • Black Shirts: Mussolini’s private militia that destroyed socialist newspapers, union halls, and Socialist Party headquarters, eventually pushing Socialists out of the city governments of Italy

• In 1922, Mussolini demanded the resignation of the existing government

  • In October 1922, a band of armed Fascists marched on Rome to threaten the king and force him to appoint Mussolini prime minister of italy

    • The threat worked and Victor Emmanuel II asked Mussolini to take over the government and form a new cabinet

• After widespread violence and a threat of armed uprising, Mussolini seized power using the legal framework of the Italian consitiution

Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

• The Regime in Action

Seeming Moderation

• At first he promised a “return to order” and consolidated his support among Italian elites

• Fooled by Mussolini’s apparent moderation, the Italian parliament passed a new electoral law that gave ⅔ of the representatives in the parliament to the party that won the most votes

  • Allowed Fascist Party and its allies to win an overwhelming majority in April 1924

The Matteotti Murder and its Aftermath

• A group of Fascist extremists kidnapped and murdered the leading Socialist politian Giacomo Matteotti

  • A group of prominent parliamentary leaders demanded that Mussolini’s armed squads be dissolved and all violence be banned

• Mussolini took advantage of the resulting political crisis

  • Declared his desire to “make the nation Fascist” and improsed a series of repressive measures

  • Abolished freedom of the press, and organized fixed elections

  • Arrested his political oppenents, disbanded all independent labor unions, and put dedicated Fascist in control of Italy’s schools

  • By the end of 1926, Italy was a one-party dictatorship under Mussolini’s unquestioned leadership

Popular Support

• Mussolini’s Fascist Party drew support from broad sectors of the population, in part because he was willing to compromise with the traditional elites that controlled the army, the economy and the state

• He also drew increasing support frm the Catholic Chruch

The Lateran Agreement (1929)

• Lateran Agreement: A 1929 agreement that recognized the Vatican as an independent sate, with Mussolini agreeing to give the church heavy financial support in return for public support from the pope

  • Because he was forced to comprimise with these conservative elites, Mussolini never established complete totalitarian rule

Characteristics of Fascist Italy

• The state engineered popular consent by staging massive rallies and sporting events, creating Fascist youth and women’s movements, and providing welfare benefits

  • Mussolini’s government was opposed to liberal feminism and promoted traditional gener roles

  • He gained support by manipulating popular pride in the grand history of the ancient Roman Empire

• Influenced by Hitler’s example, Mussolini’s government passed a series of anti-Jewisj racial laws in 1938

  • Jews were forced out of public schools and dismissed from professional careers

  • Extreme anti-Semetic persecution did not occur in Italy until late in World War II

• Mussolini’s government did much to turn Italy into a totalitarian police state

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

• The Roots of National Socialism

National Socialism

• National Socialism: A movement and political party driven by extreme nationalism and racism, led by Adolf Hitler; its adherents ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 and forced Europe into World War II

  • Grew out of nationalism and racism

The Origins of Hitler’s Worldview (1889–1945)

• After dropping out of highschool at age foruteen, he moved to Vienna, where he was exposed to extreme Austro-German nationalist who believed that Germans were superior and the natural rulers of central Europe

  • They advocated for the union of Austria and Germany and the violent expulsion of “inferior” peoples as the means of maintaining German domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

• Hitler developed an unshakeable belief in the crudest distortions of Social Darwinsim, the superiority of German races, and the inevitability of racial conflict

• Exposure to poor eastern European Jews contributed to his anti-Semetic prejudice

  • He claimed that Jews directed an international conspiracy of finance capitalism and Marxist socialism against German culture, German unity, and the German people

The Impact of WWI

• Rascist anti-Semitism became popular in the decades surrounding the First World War

  • These beliefs were rooted in centuries of Christian anti-Semitism

  • Were legitimized by nineteenth century developments in biology and eugenics

  • These ideas came to define Hitler’s worldview

The Nazi Party

• In late 1919, Hitler joined a tiny extremeist group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party, which denounced Jews, Marxists, and democrats as well as promised a uniquely German National Socialism that would abolish the injustices of capitalism and create a “people’s community”

• By 1921, Hitler has gained control of this growing party, which had been renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nazis for short

  • Hitler became a master of mass propaganda and political showmanship

The Beer Hall Putsch

• In late 1923, that republic seemed of the verge of collapse, and Hitler organized an armed uprising in Munich, the Beer Hall Putsch

• National Socialism had been born

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

• Hitler’s Road to War

Mein Kampf (My Struggle)

• Where Hilter laid out his basic ideas on “racial purification” and territorial expansion that would define National Socialism

• Claimed that Germans were a “master race” that needed to defined its “pure blood” from gorups be labeled “racial degenerates” (Jews, Slavs, etc.)

• The German race was destined to triumph and grow; it needed Lebensraun (living space) which would be found to Germany’s east, where Slavs and Jews lives

• Outlined a vision in which the German master race would colonize east and central Europe and ultimately replace the “subhumans” living there

• These ideas would ultimately propel the world into WWII

The Rise of National Socialism

• The Grea Depression of 1929 brought the ascent of National Socialism

  • Hitler promised German voters economic as well as political slavation

    • Appealed to middle, lower class groups

    • Became the largest party in the Reichstag by July 1932

The Nazi Seizure of Power

• The breakdown of democratic government helped the Nazi’s seize power

  • Chancellor Heinrich Brüning tried to overcome the economic crisis by cutting back government spending and ruthlessly forcing down prices and wigs, which only intensified Germany’s economi collapse, contributing to Hiter’s appeal

• Division on the left contributed to Nazi success

  • The Communists and Social Democrats refused to work together, so they were not ab,le to mount an effective opposition to the Nazi takeover

• On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the largest party in Germany, was appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

• State and Society in Nazi Germany

Consolidating Power

• To maintain appearances of a democratic government, Hitler called for new elections

  • In February 1922, the Riechstag building was partly destroyed by fire, so Hitler blamed Communists and convinced Hindenburg to sign emergency acts that abolished freedom of speech and assembly as well as most personal liberties

• On March 23m 1933, the Nazis pushed through the Reichstag the Enabling Act, an act that gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years

• Germany became a one-party Nazi state

  • The new regime took over the governemt bureaucracy intact, installing Nazis in top positions

  • A series of overlapping Nazi party organizations that were soley responsible to Hitler were created

• The Nazi state was often disorganized but suited Hitler’s purposes

  • The lack of unity encouraged competition among the state personnel, who worked together to fufill Hitler’s goals

• Once the Nazis were in command, they turned their attention to constructing a Nationalist Society defined by national unity and racial exclusion

  • Communists, Social Democrats, and trade union leaders were forced out of their jobs or arrested and taken to concentration camps

  • Nazis outlawed strikes and abolished independent labor unions, which were replaced by the Nazi controlled German Labor Front

The SA Purge

• The SA, the quasi-military band of 3 million toughs in brown shirts who had fought Communists and beaten Jews up before the Nazis took power, now expected top positions in the army

  • Hitler decided that the SA had to be eliminated because he wanted to win the support of the traditional military

• On June 30, 1934, the SS (Hitler’s elite personal guards) arrested an executed about one hundred SA leaders and other political enemies

“Coordination”

• A Nazi enforced policy that forced existing instiutions to conform to National Socialist ideology

  • All institutions were put under Nazi control

  • Life became anti-intellectual

The Racial State

• The Nazis persecuted a number of supposedly undesirable groups

  • Jews, Slavic peoples, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people considered handicapped

• Barbarism and state hatred were institutionalized with the force of science and law

  • Prejuice was presented in the guise of enlightened science, a means for creating a strong national state

The Nuremberg Laws (1935)

• Classified as Jewish anyone having three or more Jewish grandparents, outlawed marriage and sexual relations between Jews and those defined as German, and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship

• Convertion to Christianity made no difference

• Creation of a demonized outsider group may well have contributed to feelings of national unity and support for Hitler regime

Kristallnacht (1938)

• Wave of violence in which Nazi gangs smashed windows and looted over 7,000 Jewish-owned shops, destroyed many homes, burned down over 200 synagogues, and killed dozens of Jews

  • German Jews were then rounded up and made to pay for the damage

• By 1939, some 30,000 of Germany’s 50,000 Jews emigrated, sacrificing their property, to escape persecution

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

• Popular Support for National Socialism

Economic Recovery

• Hitler had promised the masses of economic recovery and he delivered

• The Nazi state launched a large public program to pull Germany out of the depression

  • Created jobs and instilled pride in national recovery

  • By 1938, unemployment had fallen to 2 percent and there was a shortage of workers

  • Between 1932 and 1938, the standard of living for the average worker increased moderately

• The persecution of Jews brought substantial benefits to ordinary Germans

  • Jews were forced out of their jobs and compelled to sell their homes and businesses; Germans stepped in to take their place

The Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community)

• The party set up mass organizations to spread Nazi ideology and enlist volunteers for the Nazi cause

• Millions of Germans joined the Hitler Youth, the League of German Women, and the German Labor Front

  • Though such programs falteered as the state increasingly focused on rearmament for the approaching war, they suggested to all that the German regime was working hard to improve German living standards

German Women

• Nazi ideologies championed a return to traditional family values

  • Outlawed abortion, discouraged women from holding jobs or obtsianing higher education, glorified domesticity and motherhood

• Women were instructed to raise young girls and boys in accordance to Nazi ideals

• The women that enrolled in Nazi organizations experienced a new sense of community and freedom

Opponents

• Oppenents of the Nazi were never unified, which helps explain their lack of success

• The regime imprisoned and executed their opponents

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

• Aggession and Appeasement

Aggressive Actions

• At first, Hitler carefully camouflaged his expansionist goals; Germany was militarily weak and Hitler proclaimed peaceful intentions

• Germany withdrew from the League of Nations in October 1933

• In March 1925, Hitler delcared that Germany would no longer abide by the Treaty of Versailles

  • Established a military draft and built up German army

    • France and Britain protested and awened against future aggressive actions

Appeasement

• appeasement: The British policy toward Germany prior to World War II that aimed at granting Hitler whatever he wanted, including Western Czechoslovakia, in order to avoid war

  • British appeasement was motivated by the pacifism of a population still horrified by WWI

  • They believed that Soviet Communism was the real danger and that Hitler could stop it

• When Hitler marched his armies into the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, violating the Treaty of Versailles and Locarno, Britain refused to act and France could do little without Britiish support

• Italy and Rome established the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936, which Japan also joined

  • At the same time, Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish Civil War, where their military helped aid General Francisco Franco’s revolutionary Fascist movement defeat the democratically elected republican government

• In late 1937, Hitler moved forward with plans to seize Austria and Czechoslovakia as the first step in his long-contemplated drive for living space in the east

  • Hitler forced the Austrian chancellor to put local Nazi in control of the government in March 1938

  • German armies moved in and Austria became two provinces of Greater Germany

• Hitler demanded that the territories inhabited by mostly ethnic Germans in western Czechoslovakia be ceded to Nazi Germany

The Munich Conference

• Returning from the Munich Conference in September 1938, Arthur Neville Chamberlain told cheering crowds that he had secured “peace with honor … peace for our time.”

  • This peace was short lived as Hitler’s armies invaded and occupied the rest of Czecoslovika

  • Chamberlain declared that Britain and France would fight if Hitler attacked his eastern neighbor; Hitler did not take thse claims seriously

The Hitler-Stalin Pact

• Each dictator promised to remain neutral if the other became involved in open hostilities

  • Stalin agreed because he remained distrustfil of Western intentions and because Hitler offered immediate territorial gain

• On September 1, 1939, German armies and warplanes smashed into Poland from three sides

  • Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany; WWII had begun

The Second World War

• German Victories in Europe

1939

• Hitler’s army crushed Poland in four weeks

1940

• France was taken by the Nazis

• By July 1940, Hitler rules practically all of continental Europe

  • Italy was a German ally

  • Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria joined the Axis Powers

  • Soviet Union, Spain, and Sweden were friendly neutrals

  • Only the Balkans and Britain remained unconquered

1941

• In June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and launched German armies into the Soviet Union along a vast front

  • By October, most of Ukraine had been conquered

  • Leningrad was practically surrounded

  • Moscow was besieged

The Second World War

• Europe Under Nazi Occupation

The New Order

• New Order: Hitler’s program based on radical imperialism, which gave preferential treatment to the Nordic peoples; the French, and “inferior” Latin people, occupied a middle position; and Slavs and Jews were treated harshly as “subhumans”

  • Occupied peoples were treated according to their place in the Nazi racial hierarchy

  • All were subject to harsh policies dedicated to ethnic cleansing and the plunder of resources for the Nazi war effrot

• Nordic peoples (Dutch, Norweigans, Danes) received preferential treatment

  • In Holland, Norway, and Denmark, the Nazis established puppet governments of various kindle though many people hated the conquers, the Nazis found willing collaborators who ruled in accord with German needs

Occupation Policies

• France was divided into two parts, with Germany occupying the north and the southwest remaining nominally independent

• In all conquered territories, the Nazis used a variety of techniques to enrich Germany and support the war effort

  • Occupied nations were forced to pay for the costs of the war and for the occupation itslef, and the price was high

The War of Annihilation

• From the start, the Nazi leadership had cast the war in the east as one of annihilation

• The Nazis set out to build a vast colonial empire where Jews would be exterminated and Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would be enslaved and forced to die out

• The murderous sweep of Nazi occupation in the east destroyed dthe lives of millions

Resistance

• In response to such atrocities, small but determined underground resistance groups fought back

  • They were hardly unified

• Resistance presented a challenge to the Nazi New Order

  • Poland had the most organized resistance as it had been occupied by Germany longer than any other nation

    • Underground members of the Polish Home Army, led by the government in exile in London, passed intelligence about German operations to the ALlies and committed sabotage

      • France, Italy, Greece, Russia, and the Netherlands took similar actions

German Response

• The German response was swift and deadly

• The Nazi army and the SS tortured captured resistance members and executed hostages in reprisal for attacks

• Despite reprisals, Nazi occupiers were never able to completely put and end to popular resistance to theri rule

The Second World War

• The Holocaust

The Holocaust

• Holocaust: The systematic effort of the Nazi state to exterminate all European Jews and other groups deemed racially inferior during the Second World War

Euthanasia

• Between 1938 and 1940, persecution turned deadly in the Nazi euthanasia (mercy killing) campaign

• 70,000 people with physical and mental disabilities were forced into special hospitals, barracks, and camps; they were murdered in cold blood because they were deemed to be “unworthy lives” who might “pollute” the German race

• The euthanasia movement was stopped after church leaders and ordinary families spoke out

Ghettos and Death Squads

• The German victory over Poland in 1939 brought some 3 million Jews under Nazi control

• Jews in German-occupied territories were soon forced to move into urban districts termed “ghettos”

  • Hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews lived in crowded and unsanitary conditions without real work or adequate sustenance

    • Over 50,000 people died under these conditions

• Three military death squads known as Special Task Forces and other military units followed the advancing German armies

  • They moved from town to town shooting Jews and other target populations

• The German armed forces murdered some 2 million civilians

The Final Solution

• In late 1941, Hitler and the Nazi leadership, in some still-debated combination, ordered the SS to implement the mass murder of all Jews in Europe

• The Germans set up an industrialized killing machine that remains unparalleled with an extensive network of concentration camps, industrialzied complexes, and railroad transport lines to imprison and murder Jews and other so-called undesirables, and to exploit their labor before they died

• The murderous attack on European Jews was the ultimate monstrosity of Nazi racism and racial imperialism

  • By 1945, the Nazis had killed about 6 million Jews and some 5 million other Europeans

Perpetrators and Motivations

• Some lay the guilt on Hitler and the Nazi leadership, arguing that ordinary Germans had little knowledge of the extermination camps or were forced to particpate by Nazi terror and totalitarian control

• Otheres conclude that far more Germans knew about and were at best indifferent to the fate of “racial inferiors”

• Some historians believe that widely shared anti-Semitism led “ordinary Germans” to become Hitler’s willing executioners”

• Others argued that heightened peer pressure, the desire toa advance in the ranks, and the need to prove one’s strength under the most brutalizing wartime violence turned average Germans into relucant killers

The Second World War

• Japanese Empire and the War in the Pacific

Racial-Imperial Ambitions

• According to Japanese race theory, the Asian races were far superior to Western ones

  • Voiced anti-Western views in speeches, schools, and newspapers

  • Glorified the warrior virtues of honor and sacrifice and proclaimed that Japan would liberate East Asia from Western colonialists

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

• The goal was to establish what the Japanese called the slogan “Asia for Asians”

  • In 1931, Japan invaded China

  • In 1940, Japan entered into a formal alliance with Italy and Germany

  • In 1941, Japanese armies occupied southern portions of the French colony of Indochina

• Japanese propagandists maintained that this expansion would free Asians from hated Western imperialists

  • Real power remained in the hands of the Japanese

  • Exhibited great cruelty toward civilian populations

The Japanese Offensives

• On December 7, 1941, Japan decided to launch a surprise attack on the U.S fleet based at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands

  • Sank every American battleship, but they ended up escaping unharmed; Brought the Americans into WWII

• In July 1943, the Americans and their Australian allies opened a successful island-hopping campaign that forced Japan out of its conquered territories

The Second World War

• The “Hinge of Fate”

The Grand Alliance

• Great Britain, the United States, Soviet Union

  • It had taken the Japanese surprise attack to bring the isolationist United States into the war

  • The British and Americans were opponents of Soviet Communism

• “Europe first” policy: Only after Hitler was defeated that they’d go after Japan (the lesser threat)

• Adopted a principle of unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan

Military Resources

• The United States harnessed its vast industrial base to wage global war

• Britain became a frontline staginga rea for a decisive blow on the heart of Germany

• Soviet Union had great military strength

Allied Victories