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The Second World War
History of Germany
Lecture 12
Schedule
1. The Road to War: German Foreign
Policy 1933 – 1939
2. The Lessons of the Great War
3. German Warfare on the Eastern Front
4. Total War and Society
5. Conclusion
German Foreign Policy 1933-1937
Oct. 1933
Germany leaves League of Nation and Disarmament Conference
Jan. 1934
Non-Aggression Pact with Poland
Jan. 1934
The Saar votes to return to Germany
March. 1935
Hitler announces conscription
April 1935
Stresa conference, Britain, France, and Italy protest against
German infringement of Versailles
June 1935
Anglo-German Naval Agreement on an enlarged German Navy
Oct. 1935
Italy invades Abyssinia
January 1936
Mussolini ends Italian guarantee of Austrian independence
March 1936
German troops reoccupy the demilitarised Rhineland
July 1936
Germany sends military to help the nationalist rebels in Spain
Nov. 1936
Axis Rome – Berlin announced; Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan
Nov. 1937
Italy joins Anti-Comintern Pact
March 1938
Invasion of Austria (Anschluss)
Sept. 1938
Munich conference of Germany, Italy, France, Britain
German Foreign Policy 1938-1939
Oct. 1938
Germany takes Sudetenland, Teschen to Poland
March 1939
Germany occupies Czechoslovakia
March 1939
Germany occupies Memel
March 1939
Britain and France guarantee Poland
Hinton, Weimar & Nazi Germany, p. 404
Schedule
1. The Road to War: German Foreign
Policy 1933 – 1939
2. The Lessons of the Great War
3. German Warfare on the Eastern Front
4. Total War and Society
5. Conclusion
Avoid a two-front war
23 August 1939
Nazi Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty
Molotov signs the German-Soviet nonaggression pact. Behind him are
Ribbentrop and Stalin.
Text of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact
Article I. Both High Contracting Parties obligate themselves to desist from any act of violence, any
aggressive action, and any attack on each other, either individually or jointly with other Powers.
Article II. Should one of the High Contracting Parties become the object of belligerent action by a third
Power, the other High Contracting Party shall in no manner lend its support to this third Power.
…
Secret Additional Protocol.
Article I. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States
(Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the
spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area
is recognized by each party.
Article II. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state,
the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the
rivers Narev, Vistula and San.
The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent
Polish States and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of
further political developments.
In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.
Article III. With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in
Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinterestedness in these areas.
Article IV. This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.
Moscow, August 23, 1939.
For the Government of the German Reich v. Ribbentrop
Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R. V. Molotov
Blitzkrieg strategy
The ‘Blitz’
THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST
MICHAEL - 15 NOVEMBER 1940
Prevent the collapse of the Home
Front
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Food and consumption
Leisure and entertainment
Forced labour by Jews and inmates of
concentration camps, Slavs, prisoners of war,
Ostarbeiter
Exploitation of occupied territories
Intimidation and Terror
Intensification of propaganda and Führer cult
Schedule
1. The Road to War: German Foreign
Policy 1933 – 1939
2. The Lessons of the Great War
3. German Warfare on the Eastern Front
4. Total War and Society
5. Conclusion
“The acquisition of new soil for the settlement of
the excess population possesses an infinite
number of advantages, particularly if we turn
from the present to the future…
If land was desired in Europe, it could be
obtained by and large only at the expense of
Russia…
Germany will either be a world power or there
will be no Germany...“
Hitler, Mein Kampf 1925
17 October 1941, Hitler Monologue, Führer Headquarters, in Madajczyk,
Generalny, pp. 69-70.
“The [eastern] region must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe, it
must be Europeanized! … The two or three million people we need [for
this program] can be found quicker than we think. We will take them
from Germany, the Scandinavian lands, Western Europe, and
America. Chances are that I will not live to see this, but in twenty years
twenty million people will inhabit this territory. In three hundred years we
will have a blossoming parkland of extraordinary beauty!
As for the people indigenous to the area, we will be sure to select those
[of importance]. We will remove the destructive Jews entirely. … We will
not enter Russian cities, they must die out completely.
There is only one task: Germanisation through the introduction of
Germans [to the area] and to treat the original inhabitants like Indians. …
I feel myself to be the executor of the will of History. What people think
of me at present is all of no consequence. Never have I heard a
German who has bread to eat express concern that the ground where
the grain was grown had to be conquered by the sword. We eat
Canadian wheat and never think of the Indians.”
“The Führer told me that the implementation of
German policy In Poland is a matter for the men
who are in charge of the General Government to
deal with themselves. He put it this way: We must
liquidate those people whom we have discovered
from the leadership of Poland; all those who
follow in their footsteps must be arrested and
then got rid of after an appropriate period.”
Hans Frank, Governor General of the General
Government, in May 1940
“The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don’t need
them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination
and German health services are unnecessary. The fertility
of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives
or practise abortion, the more the better. Education is
dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to one
hundred. Every educated person is a future enemy… As
for food, they won’t get any more than is absolutely
necessary. We are the masters. We come first.”
Letter from Martin Bormann, 1941
Putzger
“We must be honest, decent, loyal and
comradely to members of our own blood, but no
nobody else. What happens to a Russian or to a
Czech does not interest me in the slightest.
What the nations can offer in the way of good
blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by
kidnapping their children and raising them here
with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or
starve to death interests me only in so far as we
need them for slaves for our Kultur; otherwise, it
is of no interest to me.”
Himmler to SS officers at Posen in 1943
Oradour sur Glane: 1944
the Waffen-SS killed in
Oradour 197 men, 240
women, 205 children
Men, massacred in
Lidice, 10 June 1942.
192 men, 60 women, 88
children were killed
Overy, Russia‘s War
1. Es zittern die morschen Knochen
Der Welt vor dem roten Krieg,
Wir haben den Schrecken gebrochen,
Für uns war's ein großer Sieg.
Refrain:
Wir werden weiter marschieren
Wenn alles in Scherben fällt,
Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland
Und morgen die ganze Welt.
2. Und liegt vom Kampfe in Trümmern
Die ganze Welt zuhauf,
Das soll uns den Teufel kümmern,
Wir bauen sie wieder auf.
Refrain:
3. Und mögen die Alten auch schelten,
So laßt sie nur toben und schrei'n,
Und stemmen sich gegen uns Welten,
Wir werden doch Sieger sein.
Refrain:
4. Sie wollen das Lied nicht begreifen,
Sie denken an Knechtschaft und Krieg
Derweil unsre Äcker reifen,
Du Fahne der Freiheit, flieg!
Wir werden weiter marschieren,
Wenn alles in Scherben fällt;
Die Freiheit stand auf in Deutschland
Und morgen gehört ihr die Welt.
"If all the world lies in ruins,
What the devil do we care?
We still will go marching on,
For to-day Germany belongs to us
And to-morrow the whole world."
Diorama of the 900 day Siege of
Leningrad, 641,000 people died
Overy, Russia‘s war
Schedule
1. The Road to War: German Foreign
Policy 1933 – 1939
2. The Lessons of the Great War
3. German Warfare on the Eastern Front
4. Total War and Society
5. Conclusion
Albert Speer, 1905-1981
Fritz Todt, 1891-1942
“I ask you: do you believe with the
Führer and with us in the final
victory of the German people? I
ask you: Are you determined to
follow the Führer through thick
and hin in the struggle for victory
and to put up even with the
heaviest personal burdens?...
I ask you: Do you want total war?
Do you want it, if necessary, more
total and more radical than we
can imagine it today?“
Goebbels in the Berlin Sport
Palace, February 1943
Berlin, 1943
DHM, Berlin
Dresden in ruins 14 February 1945
Soviet soldiers raise the ‘hammer and sickle’ flag on the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945
Refugees
1945
DHM, Berlin
Schedule
1. The Road to War: German Foreign
Policy 1933 – 1939
2. The Lessons of the Great War
3. German Warfare on the Eastern Front
4. Total War and Society
5. Conclusion
The German Historikerstreit
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Ernst Nolte: Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will (The
Past That Does Not Want To Pass). Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986
Were the crimes of Nazi Germany uniquely evil in history?
Were Nazism and Nazi crimes a reaction to Bolshevism,
Red and Stalinist terror?
Did German history follow a special path (Sonderweg)
leading inevitably to Nazism?
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Jürgen Habermas: Recent Apologetic Tendencies In Our
History; Die ZEIT, July 11, 1986)
The myth of the “saubere
Wehrmacht“
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The SS is responsible for the war crimes, the
Wehrmacht has kept its honour
Justification strategy after WWII
Andreas Hillgruber: Zweierlei Untergang (Two Kinds of
Ruin)
Contra: Omer Bartov: Hitler´s Wehrmacht
Contra: Wehrmacht exhibition of the Institut for
Sozialforschung, Hamburg http://www.verbrechen-derwehrmacht.de
Question : Why did so many ordinary Germans as SS
men, as policemen, as Wehrmacht soldiers participate in
the crimes of the Nazi regime?