Download World War II, Part 2

WORLD WAR II, PART 2
The War in Europe
Operation ‘Barbarossa’, June 1941
• 4.5 million troops
• 3000 km line of attack
• Romanian troops
invade Ukraine
• Delayed 1 month to
help Italy fend off
British invasion of
Greece, fails to
capture Moscow
before winter
German tanks advance into USSR
Peak of Axis control, mid-1942.
Ethiopian troops with captured Italian
weapons, Addis Ababa, May 1941
Battle of ElAlamein, 1942
200,000 British-led
troops reverse
Rommel’s advance
toward Egypt. First
British victory
brings morale
boost and begins
driving Axis forces
back into Libya
after 2 years of
fighting. Sets stage
for invasion of
Sicily the next
summer.
Photos from desert battle of El-Alamein
Operation Torch, November 1942
The Holocaust Begins, 1941-1942
• ‘Einsatzgruppen’
mobile killing units will
kill 2 million, including
1.3 million Jews, in
Eastern Europe
• Jews, Roma put into
ghettos, labor camps
• Secret Wansee
Conference plans
extermination of Jews
Pogroms in Kaunas & Lviv, June 1941
4,000 killed by locals in Kaunas, 95%
of Lithuanian Jews die in WWII
Ukrainian nationalists help murder up to
9,000 Jews in Lviv, then part of Poand.
The Holocaust in France, 1942-1945
• 330,000 Jews living in
France in 1940
(150,00 of whom are
French).
• ‘Rafles’ begin 1941 in
north, spread to Vichy
1942 when Germany
assumes direct control.
• ‘Milices’ assist in
deportations.
• 75,000 are deported,
nearly all are killed.
Soviet victory at Stalingrad, Feb. 1943
‘Operation Husky’: amphibious invasion of
Sicily that launches ‘Italian Campaign’
Mussolini’s arrest, July 25, 1943
Italy’s Civil War, 1943- 1945
Operation ‘Overlord’: June 6, 1944
Photos from amphibious landing
Allies and Soviets Meet at the Elbe river
Photos of the Fall of Nazi Germany
Joseph Goebbels & wife Magda kill their
six children and then commit suicide
‘Statement on Atrocities’, Moscow 1943.
• “The United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union have received from
many quarters evidence of atrocities, massacres and cold-blooded mass
executions being perpetrated by Hitlerite forces in many of the countries they
have overrun and from which they are now being expelled … those German
officers of members of the Nazi party who have been taken part in the above
atrocities will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were
done in order that they may be judged and punished …
• Thus, Germans who take part in wholesale shooting of Polish officers or in the
execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages, or who have shared
in slaughters inflicted on the people of Poland or in territories of the Soviet Union
will know they will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the
spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.
• Let those who have hitherto not imbrued their hands with innocent blood beware
lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three Allied powers will
pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their
accusors in order that justice may be done.”
• Signed by President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin.
The Nuremberg Trials, 1945-46
• 24 Nazi leaders tried (Hitler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Himmler
•
•
•
•
already dead) for war crimes or crimes against
humanity;12 executed, mostly for orchestrating mass
murder
Turning point in international law, inspired new United
Nations and future International Criminal Court
Judges, prosecutors chosen equally from 4 Allied victors
Yet 10% of Germany members of Nazi party. Some
spirited away to US to work on nuclear program. In
Bavaria, 60% of civil servants still former Nazis in 1952.
1960s generation begins to question official ‘forgetting’
Defendants at Nuremberg