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Ch. 34-2 Notes
The Conquest of Europe
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Date: ________________________ Pd: ____
Essential Questions
 What areas did the Axis Powers attack?
 What was life like in occupied Europe?
State Standards:
American History 8.2.6, 8.2.9, 8.2.12 (A, B, C, D)
World History 8.3.6, 8.3.9, 8.3.12 (A, B, C, D)
Geography 7.2.6. 7.2.9, 7.3.12 (A, B) 7.3.6, 7.3.6, 7.3.12 (A-E) 7.4.6, 7.4.6, 7.4.12 (A-B)
1. Germany seemed invincible.
A. Country after country fell including France.
B. Britain stood alone until the Soviet Union and America entered the war.
1. 1942- Allies (nations fighting the Axis powers) began winning the
war.
Hitler’s Conquest
Blitzkrieg in Eastern Europe
1. German used a new style of warfare.
A. Quick, concentrated attacks on land and water called blitzkrieg
“lightening war”.
B. In one week, Germany opened the way to Warsaw.
C. Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east.
D. September 27, 1939, Poland surrendered.
E. Hitler and Stalin divided Poland.
2. To gain access to the Baltic Sea, the Soviet government set up military bases
in the countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
A. They demanded bases in Finland, the Finns refused.
1. Soviets invaded Finland.
B. All through the “winter war” Finnish soldiers stubbornly battled the
Soviet army.
1. In March, Finland was forced to make peace and give up the disputed
territories.
Blitzkrieg in Western Europe
1. Although Britain and France were officially at war with Germany, no fighting
took place on the front during the winter of 1939-1940.
A. This was known as the “phony war’.
B. April 1940, Germany struck with lightening speed at Denmark and
Norway.
1. Both fell quickly to the invading German forces.
C. May 1940, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg surrender to Hitler.
2. France felt secure behind its Maginot Line, a string of heavily defended forts
along its border with Germany.
A. As in WWI, German troops went around the French defenses by attacking
through Belgium.
B. Tanks and motorized infantry burst through the French lines.
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C. The German advance drove a wedge between the French army defending
Paris and the British, Belgian and French forces on the coast.
3. More than 300,000 Allied troops retreated to Dunkirk on the English
Channel.
A. To recuse the trapped soldiers, every available vessel set sail from
England.
1. Fishing boats, tugboats, and private yachts, as well as merchant ships
and navy destroyers.
B. By June 4, 1940 about a week after the retreat, the soldiers were in
England.
C. The “miracle of Dunkirk” inspired and united the British people in their
resistance to Hitler.
4. German armies moved across northern France.
A. Millions fled.
B. June 10, Mussolini declares war on France and Italian troops invade from
the south.
C. To save Paris from destruction the French did not try to defend the city.
D. German troops marched in on June 14.
E. A few days later, the French government asked for an armistice.
F. Hitler arranged for it to be signed in the same railway car where Germany
had agreed to the armistice ending WWI.
5. Under the terms of the armistice, Germany occupied northern France
including Paris and the coast.
A. In the south a puppet French government was set up at Vichy (VEE-shee).
Britain holds out
1. With the defeat of France, Britain stood along against the Axis Powers.
A. Hitler made plans for an invasion, but hoped the British would agree to
surrender beforehand.
B. Winston Churchill, Britain’s new prime minister refused.
C. Hitler ordered his air force to start massive bombing of factories, airfields
and seaports.
D. August 8, 1940, the Battle of Britain began.
E. Almost every day that summer, hundreds of planes battled in the skies.
1. Royal Air Force (RAF) vs. Germany’ s air force.
F. By late fall, German losses in the Battle of Britain caused Hitler to give up
his invasion plans.
2. Britain still had to face terrifying air raids.
A. It became known as “the blitz”
B. German bombers struck at cities, day and night.
C. Through months of destructive air raids, the British held up well.
1. Londoners were determined to keep the capital running.
3. Pilots of the RAF were aided by radar, a new devise developed by British
scientists to spot enemy aircraft.
A. In addition, Allies had broken Germany’s secret code.
B. They had better information about Germany’s air strikes.
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4. The Blitz continued until spring of 1941.
A. British cities were heavy destroyed.
B. Thousands were died.
C. German submarines blocked supplies.
D. There was no money to buy supplies and equipment.
E. The United States was neutral so it could not lend money to Britain.
1. March 1941, Congress passed the “Lend-Lease Act”.
A. It allowed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to for the sell, lease or
lend of military equipment to a nation whose defense was vital to
America’s security.
The Invasion of the Soviet Union
1. Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union.
A. Hitler despised communism and he know that one day he would have to
move against the Soviet Union.
1. He wanted land for German settlers.
2. Grain to feed the German nation.
3. Oil, coal and Iron ore to supply the German war machine.
2. By June 1941, German troops were massing along the Soviet border.
A. On June 22, they swept into the Soviet Union in a front the stretched from
the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
B. Hitler was confident of the result saying, “We need only open the door
and the whole rotten building will collapse”.
3. Hitler’s attack brought the Soviet Union immediate offers of help and support
from Britain and the United States.
A. The Lend-Lease agreement was extended to include the Soviet Union.
The German onslaught
1. The German invasion devastated the western part of the Soviet Union.
A. By September 1941, German soldiers had surrounded the city of
Leningrad trapping 3 million people.
1. It lasted more than two years.
2. Nearly a million people died of starvation and disease.
2. The unprepared Soviet armies suffered terrible losses in the first months.
A. By September 2.5 million soldiers and thousands of tanks and planes
were lost.
B. The Soviet forces did not collapse completely.
C. As the soviets pulled back from the advancing German armies, they burnt
crops in the fields and destroyed equipment.
1. These “scorched-earth” tactics left no food or supplies for the German
forces.
3. Autumn rains and winter snow also slowed the German offensive.
A. Fresh Soviet troops arrived from Siberia with winter equipment.
1. Germans shivered in summer uniforms as the temperature dropped
to 30 degrees below zero.
2. German tanks and trucks would not start in the cold.
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3. The Russian winter stopped the German army much like it had
defeated Napoleon’s army more than a century before.
The Battle for Stalingrad
1. German forces held large areas of the Soviet Union.
A. The spring and summer of 1942 brought new attacks.
B. The main target was Stalingrad, which was a vital center for north-south
transportation.
2. In late August, German troops reached the outskirts of Stalingrad.
A. 600 German planes bombed the city.
B. 40,000 civilians dead.
C. Soviet soldiers and citizens fought the Germans street by street.
3. The Soviets prepare for a massive attack, encircle the German army in Stalingrad.
A. Late November, led by Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the Soviets struck.
B. The German commander begged Hitler to let his freezing exhausted army to
withdraw.
1. Hitler refused.
C. Finally in February 1943, the last of the German troops in Stalingrad
surrendered.
4. The Soviet victory marked the turning point in the war in Eastern Europe.
A. Soviet troops were beginning to move westward.
B. They eventually made their way to Berlin, the heart of the Nazi empire.
The North African Campaign
1. In the first year of the war, Hitler was expanding westward in Europe while
Mussolini took steps to establish Italian control over the Mediterranean.
A. Fall 1940, force of the Italian colony of Libya invaded Egypt.
1. Their aim, capture the Suez Canal from Britain.
B. Soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth nations forced an Italian
retreat.
C. To keep the British from taking Libya, Germany sent the Italians help.
1. Trained desert fighters of the Afrika Corps, led by field Marshal Erwin
Rommel.
2. Rommel and the British fought back and forth in the North African desert for
more than a year.
3. Rommel’s skill and tactics earned him a nickname “The Desert Fox”
4. In 1942, the British sent Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to block
Rommel’s advances towards the Suez Canal.
5. The two armies clashed at El Ala-mein (el ah-lah MAYN)
1. The retreating British made their stand.
A. Began a counterattack.
2. By November 1942, they had driven Rommel out of Egypt.
6. American forced joined the fight against Germany in December 1941.
A. 1941- Hitler declared war on America.
B. Early November 1942, Allied troops under American General Dwight D.
Eisenhower landed in French Morocco and Algeria.
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C. Although the French colonies were under the pro-Nazi Vichy government,
the French commander aided the Allies.
D. The Afrika Corps was soon trapped between the two Allied armies.
E. May 1943 the Allies held all of North Africa.
1. This ended the threat to the Suez Canal and made the Mediterranean
Sea safe for Allied ships.
2. It gave the Allies a base to invade southern Europe.
Europe Under Hitler
A policy of Terror
1. At its height, Hitler’s empire covered most of Europe.
A. Europe’s people would serve the “master race”.
B. Hitler and Heinrich Himmler would wipe out all “inferior” races – Jews,
Poles, Russians and others.
C. The Nazis regarded people of Germanic descent, such as Norwegians and
Dutch, as radical “cousins”.
D. Nazi plan, they were to go undergo reeducation to make them valuable
citizens of a “Greater Germany”.
1. Ukrainian, Polish and Czech children who looked German (blond hair,
blue eyes) were taken from their parents and sent to Germany.
A. Given to German parents and trained in German schools.
2. When Poland fell in 1939, Germans and Russians carried out programs of
murder and terror against the Poles.
A. Soviet forces sent 1 million Poles to labor camps in the USSR.
B. 15,000 Polish army officers were imprisoned by USSR.
1. 4,000 were executed in the Katyn Forest near the Dnieper River.
3. In western Poland, the Nazis built several concentration camps-camps were
political prisoners were held.
A. Nazis also set up resettlement programs. Thousands of farm families from
western Poland were moved to make room for German settlers.
4. Hitler used the resources of Europe to enrich Germany.
A. German soldiers ate food from France and Soviet Union.
B. Fought with weapon from Czech factories.
C. German tanks ran on Romanian oil.
D. Nazi officials decorated their homes with works of art stolen from
museums all over Europe.
5. Nazis demanded labor from the conquered peoples.
A. Several million were sent to forced labor camps in Germany.
B. Hundreds of thousands died from disease, hunger, mistreatment, and
exhaustion.
C. Of the five million Russians taken prisoner by the Nazi, three and a half
million died in the camps.
The Holocaust
1. Himmler’s deputy, Reinhardt Heydrich (HY-drick) was the chief planner of
the Nazi program to wipe out the Jews of Europe- one of Hitler’s main goals.
A. Heydrick’s plan was called “the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”
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B. The “final solution” was genocide.
1. A systematic murder of European Jews called the Holocaust.
2. All over Europe, Jews were rounded up and loaded into cattle cars and
shipped to death camps.
A. Gas chambers.
3. The most notorious Nazi death camp was Auschwitz in Poland.
A. At least 2 million people died there alone.
B. Those who were fit went to work camps; everyone else was put to death.
Resistance Movements
1. Nazi rule did not go unopposed.
A. In occupied countries people banded together to form resistance
movements.
B. In France and the Soviet Union they made hit-and-run attacks.
C. The Danish resistance protected almost all of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews by
smuggling them into neutral Sweden.
D. Greek and Yugoslav resistance fighters, called partisans, waged guerrilla
war against the Germans.
E. At its height the Polish resistance numbered 300,000.
F. Even Italians and Germans opposed their governments.
2. Resistance fighters attacked German patrols, led strikes and blew up
factories.
A. They printed underground newspapers.
B. They sent information to the allies on hidden radios.
C. They rescued downed pilots and helped them get to allied territories.
3. Resistance worker- men, women and children- took great risks.
A. The prison cell, concentration camp, torture room and firing squad
awaited those captured.
B. For every German soldier killed by am resistance fighter, the Germans
killed civilian hostages.
C. When Czech resistance fighters killed Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, the
Czech village of Lidice (LEE-dit-shus) of about 500 people was wiped out
in revenge.
1. Nazi forces killed the men of the village, shipped the women to labor
camps and sent the children to Germany.
4. Resistance took another form as government official and rulers fled occupied
countries and set up “governments in exile”.
A. Ordinary citizens who could escape to Britain joined army units that
fought with allied troops.
B. The Free French, led by General Charles de Gaulle (duh GAWL) including
survives Dunkirk.
C. Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Belgians, and Dutch also formed fighting units.