Week 12- World War II and the Holocaust

The Road to War 

Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

• Bloody brutal war  

• Grew increasingly violent and saw massacres on both sides 

• Systematic killings  

• Foreign powers became involved- Fascist Germany and Italy sent large amounts of military supplies to nationalists in Franco

• Italy sent soldiers, Germany sent bombs targeting civilians (Guernica was wiped out by German planes, the first mass civilian target)

• France, Britain, and US did not intervene  

• The Right Wing’s firepower was too much and won over Madrid  

• Some call this a dress rehearsal for WWII  

• US had become highly isolationist at this point 

German Rearmament 

• In violation of the Versailles Treaty, Germany began to rearm as soon as Hitler came to power. First in secret, then openly in 1835 

• Military expansion began rapidly, financed by massive deficit spending, stimulated the economy  

• In the 1920’s before Hitler came to power, the far right was talking about going beyond the German borders  

• Lack of space in Germany for all the Germans, wanted to reunite all the Germans within German borders. “Living Space” (Lebensraum) 

• Politics as Racial Struggle (Hitler)- only the fittest would survive States are only an expression of the racial people it represents.  

• States were always in competition with each other in the Darwinian struggle for survival and bound to have conflict 

• Goal to remilitarize the Rhineland in 1936, direct violation of Versailles Treaty

• Thought the French would respond and the German were not ready to respond, they would have retreated if France responded 

• Britain did not support France, and France did not want to respond alone

• Hitler who was Austrian, called for the unification of Germany and Austria from the beginning  

• Starts bullying the Austrian government in 1938 

• The day before the Austrian Referendum to see if they should join forces with Germany, Hitler invades in the Annexation of Austria  

Czechoslovakia 

• was the only surviving democracy of Europe at that time

• By March, Hitler invades the Czech part of Czechoslovakia and tells the Slovak half to declare independence or he will give them to Hungary 

Non Aggression Pact

• The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, also known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, was a non-aggression treaty signed on August 23, 1939, between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, secretly dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. 

• When Germany invades Poland, Soviet Union will not attack

German Invasion of Poland 

• Massacred, took POW, took regions for resettlement 

• Ethnic cleansing Green area of Poland of Pols and Jews and pushing into the Orange area (general government), or sent to Germany as slave labourers

• In the cities, they build Ghettos to keep the Jews separate from the German population so they don't have to interact with jews ie. Warsaw Ghetto

The Western Front 

• May 10- Hitler invaded Belgium, Netherlands, and France 

• Netherlands surrender 5 days after invasion  

• Fall of France: June 22 French surrender (6 weeks). Demoralized everyone in Europe who thought they had a fighting chance against Germany 

Battle of Britain: Germany’s continuous air raids on Britain

German Invasion of the Soviet Union June 22, 1941 

• Battle of Moscow- brutal fighting  

• Battle of Stalingrad (6 months), left the city in ruin, involved over 2 million soldiers  

• Turning point in the war, Soviets began to push the Germans back. Summer 1943. 

• Battle of Kursk in 1943 was largest tank battle in History involving 6000 tanks and 2 million soldiers

British and American soldiers are pounding Germany in Hamburg (July 1943)

• Soviets were urging the allies to divert Germany’s attention on their tropes overseas to fight a two-front war and attention away from Eastern Europe  

• Allies start to move their way up Italian Peninsula, starting the two-front war  

Lecture 2

Operation Bagration (June 22- August 19, 1944) 

• Dresden bombed by the allies 

Soviet Army takes Berlin 

• April-May 1945 

Germany surrenders 

• May 8, 1945

The Eastern Front and the Holocaust 

Soviet military casualties were 95% for both US and Soviets 

Soviet POWs 

• 2.2 million died in the first 6 months (shot and starved) 

• Soviet POWs second only to the Jews of victims to the Nazis 

• Soviet women transported to Germany for perform forced labour

“The Final Solution”/ The Holocaust 

• “The final solution” to what the Nazi’s called the Jewish Question 

• Hitler aimed for the complete racial reconstituting of europe 

• Nations were rearranged and millions of people were forcibly moved from their home, resettled, slave labourers 

• The term “Genocide” introduced in 1942 (a new term and new conception for destruction of nations)  

• 1941- order given to draw a complete plan for final solution of the Jewish Question  

• 6 million Jews killed, 2-500,000 gypsies, Slavs

Experiments of torture

• Exhaust fumes

• Zykon B: selected as most efficient way to pursue Genocide 

• Killing camps in Eastern Poland for Jews and others who were shipped by train in Europe  

• Systematic attempt to murder every last Jew on Polish ground 

• Auschwitz camp

• Gas chambers killed 1 million jews 

• Also a labour camps: almost all children killed upon arrival because they were too young to be considered for labour. As labourers get more frail, they were replaced with new ones 

Post-War Europe 

In Europe the end of the war saw population expulsion continue 

• Europe became a continent of displaced person 

• 50 million refugees in immediate post-war period 

• Ethnic cleaning targeted Germans after the war (5 million Germans were expelled or fled Germany and Eastern Europe)

Eastern poland gets given to Soviet Union  

The Nuremberg Trial Nov 20, 1945

• Trying to punish these deemed responsible for the war

• 12 german military officials were executed

• Cities destroyed: Dresden, Berlin, Warsaw 

• They talked about abandoning the city instead of rebuilding 

Stalin expected to be compensated for the mass destruction Soviets faced 

• Insisted on a buffer zone 

• These states got stalinized and turned into the Soviet Union