Download File - Sinclair`s AP Resource

Chapter 24
A World in Flames
1931-1941
Section 1: America and the World
Objectives:
• Describe how postwar
conditions contributed
to the rise of
antidemocratic
governments in
Europe.
• Explain why many
Americans supported
a policy of
isolationism in the
1930s.
The Rise of Dictators
Two causes of the rise of dictatorships
after WWI were the peace treaty and
economic depression.
In 1919, Benito Mussolini (Il Duce)
founded Italy’s Fascist Party.
Fascism was a kind of aggressive
nationalism that believed that the
nation was more important than the
individual.
Fascism was also strongly
anticommunist.
By the end of the Bolshevik Revolution
Vladimir Lenin had established
Communist governments throughout
the Russian empire and in 1922
renamed these territories the Union of
Soviet Social Republics (USSR).
By 1926, Joseph Stalin had become
the new Soviet dictator and in 1927
he began to industrialize his country.
Tolerating no opposition, the effort
brought about the deaths of 8 to 10
million peasants who resisted the
Communist policies.
Hitler and Nazi Germany
•
•
•
•
Adolf Hitler fought for Germany in
WWI and as a result of
Germany’s surrender and the
Versailles Treaty, developed a
smoldering hatred for the
victorious Allies and the German
government that excepted the
peace agreement.
The political and economical
chaos in postwar Germany gave
rise to new political parties and
one such party was the National
Socialist German Workers’ Party,
or the Nazi Party.
In November 1923, the Nazis
tried to seize power by marching
on city hall in Munich, Germany,
intending to seize power locally
and then march to Berlin.
Hitler was arrested and while in
prison wrote his autobiography
titled Mein Kampf, “My Struggle.”
Mein Kampf
• In the book, Hitler called for the unification of all
Germans under one government.
• He claimed that Germans, particularly blond, blueeyed, Germans, belonged to a “master race” called
Aryans.
• He argued that Germans needed more lebensraum,
or living space, and called for Germany to expand
east into Poland and Russia.
• According to Hitler, the Slavic people of Eastern
Europe belonged to an inferior race.
• Hitler’s racism was strongest toward Jews, he
believed that Jews were responsible for many of the
world’s problems, especially for Germany’s defeat
in WWI.
Hitler’s Rise to Power
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
After his release from prison, Hitler
changed tactics, instead of trying to
seize power violently, he focused on
getting Nazis elected to the
Reichstag, the lower house of the
German parliament.
When the Great Depression struck
Germany, many Germans began to
vote for radical parties and by 1932
the Nazis were the largest party in
the Reichstag.
Many traditional German leaders
supported Hitler’s nationalism and
believed that, if they helped him
become the leader of Germany
legally, they could control him and in
1933 named him chancellor or prime
minister.
After taking office, Hitler called for
new elections and had Storm
Troopers to intimidate voters.
After the elections the Reichstag,
dominated by the Nazis, voted to
give Hitler dictatorial powers.
In 1934, Hitler became president
which gave him control of the army.
He then gave himself the new title of
fuhrer, or leader.
Militarist Gain Control of Japan
• In Japan, as in Germany, difficult economic times helped
undermine the political system.
• Many Japanese military officers blamed the country’s
problems on corrupt politicians and believed that Japan was
destined to dominate East Asia.
• Japanese military leaders and civilian supporters argued that
the only way for Japan to get needed resources was to seize
territory.
• They targeted the resource rich province of Manchuria in
northern China.
• A group of Japanese officers decided to act without the
government’s permission and in 1931 invaded Manchuria.
• After the invasion the Japanese government tried to end the
war, but when Japanese prime minister began negotiations,
officers assassinated him.
• From that point forward the military was effectively in control.
America Turns to Neutrality
• The rise of dictatorships and militarism after WWI discouraged many
Americans and that the sacrifices they made during the war seemed
pointless.
• Americans began to support isolationism, or the belief that the United
States should avoid international commitments that might drag the
nation into another war.
• In 1934 Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota held hearings to
investigate the country’s involvement in WWI.
• The Nye Committee documented the huge profits that arms factories
had made during the war, which created the impression that these
businesses influenced the United States to go to war.
• Worried that growing German and Italian aggression might lead to
war, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, which, based on the
belief that arms sales had helped bring the United States into WWI,
made it illegal for Americans to sell arms to any country at war.
• When, in 1936, a rebellion erupted in Spain after a coalition of
Republicans, Socialist, and Communists was elected.
• The rebellion was led by General Francisco Franco.
• Shortly after the Spanish Civil War began, the Congress passed
another neutrality act, banning the sale of arms to either side.
Roosevelt and Internationalism
• When he took office in 1933, President Roosevelt declared
that “our international relations, though vastly important,
are in point of time and necessity secondary to the
establishment of a sound national economy.”
• Roosevelt knew that ending the Great Depression was his
first priority, but he was not an isolationist.
• He supported internationalism, the idea that trade between
nations creates prosperity and helps to prevent war.
• Internationalist also believed that the United States should
try to preserve peace in the world.
• FDR warned that the neutrality acts “might drag us into war
instead of keeping us out,” but he did not veto the bills.
• In July 1937, when Japan invaded Manchuria, Roosevelt
decided to help China claiming that sense neither had
declared war then the Neutrality Act of 1937 did not apply.
Section 2: World War II Begins
Objectives:
• Explain why Hitler
was able to take
over Austria and
Czechoslovakia.
• Describe the early
events of the war
and why Britain was
able to resist the
Nazis.
Avoiding War?
•
Europe’s leaders had
several reasons for
believing, or wanting
to believe, that Hitler
could satisfied and
war avoided.
1. The fear of another
bloody conflict.
2. Some believed that
Hitler’s demand for the
unification of all German
speaking regions made
sense.
3. Many believe that the
Nazis would be more
interested in peace once
they gained new
territory.
Austria & Czechoslovakia
•
•
•
•
•
Hitler’s first demands concerned
Austria and Czechoslovakia.
In late February 1938 Hitler stepped
up his call for unification by
threatening to invade Germanspeaking Austria, his native land,
unless Austrian Nazis were given
important government positions.
Austria’s chancellor quickly gave in to
these demands, but when he tried,
weeks later, to put unification to a
democratic vote Hitler sent troops into
Austria and announced the Anschluss,
or unification of Austria and Germany.
Since Austrians shared a common
culture and language with Germany,
many people accepted the Anschluss.
In Czechoslovakia, on the other hand,
people spoke several different
languages, had a democracy, and
France and the Soviet Union as allies.
The Czechs strongly resisted
Germany’s demands for the
Sudetenland. (both pledged to
assistance if Germany attacked)
Appeasement
• To prevent another war, representatives of Britain, France,
Italy, and Germany agreed to meet in Munich, Germany to
decide Czechoslovakia’s fate.
At the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938, Britain and
France agreed to Hitler’s demands, a policy that came to
known as appeasement which is the policy of giving
concessions in exchange for peace.
• Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had publicly
promised to support France before Munich, gambled that
sacrificing part of Czechoslovakia would satisfy Hitler, buying
time for Britain’s military to get ready for war.
• When Chamberlain returned home he promised “a peace with
honor… peace in our time,” but he also began to speed up
British rearmament.
• The following March, in a brazen violation of the Munich
agreement, Germany sent troops into Czechoslovakia and
broke the country up into German satellite states.
Danzig and the Polish Corridor
•
•
•
•
•
•
After the Munich conference, Hitler
turned his sights on Poland.
In October 1938 he demanded the
return of Danzig, a Baltic Sea port
with strong German roots that had
been separated from Germany and
the end of WWI, to German control.
Hitler also requested a highway and
railroad across the Polish Corridor,
which separated western Germany
from the German state of East
Prussia.
Hitler’s demands on Poland
convinced the British and French
that appeasement had failed.
On March 31, 1939, the British
announced that if Poland went to
war to defend its territory, Britain
and France would come to its aid.
In May 1939, Hitler ordered the
German army to prepare to invade
Poland.
The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact
• When Hitler ordered his army to prepare to invade
Poland he also ordered his foreign minister to begin
negotiations with the USSR.
• If Germany was going to fight Britain and France,
Hitler did not want to fight the Soviets too.
• When German officials proposed the nonaggression
treaty to the Soviets, Stalin agreed.
• On August 23, 1939 Germany and the USSR signed
the nonaggression pact signaling to the leaders of
Britain and France that Hitler had made the deal to
free himself for war against their countries and
Poland.
What they didn’t know was that the treaty
contained a secret deal between Germany and the
Soviet Union to divide Poland between them.
The War Begins: Blitzkrieg in Poland
•
•
•
•
On September 1, 1939, Germany
invaded Poland from the west and
soon after the Soviets invaded from
the east.
On September 3, Britain and France
declared war on Germany, marking
the start of World War II.
Poland bravely resisted Germany’s
onslaught, but was no match for
the Germans new type of warfare
called blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
Blitzkrieg, depending on radios to
coordinate, used large numbers of
massed tanks to break through and
rapidly encircle enemy positions
while waves of aircraft bombed
enemy positions and dropped
paratroopers to cut their supply
lines.
On September 27, the Polish capital
of Warsaw fell to the Germans and
by October 5, 1939, the Polish
Army had been defeated.
The Fall of France
•
•
•
•
•
In contrast to the war in Poland, western
Europe remained eerily quiet, being referred
to as sitzkrieg, or sitting war by the
Germans, as the “Bore War” by the British
and the “Phony War” by the Americans.
The British had sent troops to France where
they waited along the Maginot Line, (a line
of concrete bunkers and fortifications along
the German border,) for the Germans to
attack.
After taking Poland, Hitler and his generals
decided to attack Norway and Denmark
before invading France.
Hitler planned to go around the Maginot
Line, meaning he would have to invade the
Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg, and
on May 10, 1940 Hitler launched a new
blitzkrieg in the west.
The British and French had expected the
Germans to attack and when they did the
British and French raced north into Belgium.
This was a mistake because instead of
racing their tanks across the open
countryside of Belgium, the Germans sent
their tanks through the mountains of
Luxemburg where they easily smashed
through the French lines and raced to the
English Channel.
The British and French were now trapped in
Belgium.
The Battle of Britain
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The had their backs against the English
Channel and their only hope for escape was
to evacuate by sea.
Hitler suddenly, for unknown reasons, stop
his troops allowing the Allied forces to
escape in what became known as The
Miracle at Dunkirk.
Hitler did not anticipate the bravery or will
of the British people or their new leader,
Winston Churchhill.
An invasion would be tricky and in order for
it to happen the British Royal Air Force
would have to be destroyed.
In June 1940, the German air force, the
Luftwaffe, began to attack British shipping
in the English Channel, then in mid-August
the Luftwaffe launched an all out air battle
to destroy the British Royal Air Force.
On August 23, German bombers
accidentally bombed London, the British
capital and Britain retaliated by bombing
Berlin the following night.
This angered Hitler whose new goal was to
terrorize the British people into
surrendering, but the badly outnumbered
Royal Air Force, with the new technology of
radar, saved Britain from invasion.
Churchill told Parliament, “Never in the field
of human conflict was so much owed by so
many to so few.”
Section 3: The Holocaust
Objectives:
• Describe Nazi prejudices against Jews and
early persecution of German Jews.
• Explain the methods Hitler used to try to
exterminate Europe’s Jewish population.
Nazi Persecution of Jews
• During the Holocaust, the catastrophe that
ravaged Europe’s Jews, the Nazis killed
nearly 6 million Jews.
• The Nazis also killed millions of people from
other groups they considered inferior.
The Nuremberg Laws
• In September 1938, the Nuremberg Laws took citizenship away from
Jewish Germans and banned marriage between Jews and other
Germans.
• One month later a decree defined a Jew as a person with at least one
Jewish grandparent and prohibited Jews from holding public office or
voting.
• Other laws prohibited Jews from having German sounding names and
soon the passports of Jews were marked with a red “J” to clearly
identify them as Jewish.
Kristallnacht
•
•
•
•
•
•
On November 7, 1938, a young refugee
shot and killed a German diplomat.
In retaliation for the killing, an infuriated
Hitler ordered his minister of
propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to stage
attacks against the Jews that would
appear to be spontaneous popular
reaction to the news of the murder.
On the night of November 9, the antiJewish violence that erupted throughout
Germany and Austria came to be called
Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,”
because broken glass littered the streets
afterward.
The Nazis had forbidden police to
interfere while roving bands of thugs
destroyed 7,500 Jewish businesses and
180 synagogues.
Following that night the Gestapo, the
government’s secret police, arrested at
least 20,000 wealthy Jews, releasing
them only if they agreed to emigrate and
surrender all their possessions.
The week after Kristallnacht, Nazi
interior minister Herman Goering added
insult to injury by fining the Jewish
community to pay for the damage.
Jewish Refugees Try to Flee
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Kristallnacht and its aftermath marked a significant escalation in the Nazi
policy of prosecution against the Jews.
Between 1933, when Hitler took power, and the start of WWII in 1939, some
350,000 Jews escaped Nazi-controlled Germany.
These emigrants include prominent scientist Albert Einstein and
businesspeople like Otto Frank, who resettled his family in Amsterdam in
1933.
Otto’s daughter, Anne Frank, would later keep a diary of her family’s life in
hiding after the Nazis overran the Netherlands.
By 1938 the American consulate in Stuttgart, Germany had a backlog of over
100,000 visa applications form Jews trying to leave Germany to come to
America.
Several factors limited Jewish immigration to the United States such as: (1)
Nazi orders prohibited Jews from taking more than about $4 out of Germany;
(2) many countries refused to accept Jewish immigrants; (3) United States
laws restricted granting a visa to anyone “likely to become a public charge,”
especially in a time of such unemployment.
On May 27, 1939 the SS St. Louis entered the harbor in Havana, Cuba, with
930 Jewish refugees on board, most of which hoped to go to the United
States.
The ship circled off the Florida coast, after the refusal of the Cuban
government to allow them to disembark, before being refused by the United
States and returning to Europe where most perished in the Nazis’ “final
solution.”
The Final Solution
• On January 20, 1942, 15 Nazi
leaders met at the Wannsee
Conference, held in a Berlin
suburb, to determine the “final
solution of the Jewish
question.”
• Previous “solutions” had
included rounded up Jews,
Gypsies, and Slavs from
conquered areas, shooting
them and piling them into mass
graves.
• Another method required
forcing Jews and other
“undesirables” into trucks and
piping in exhaust fumes to kill
them.
• These methods, however,
proved to be too slow for the
Nazis.
Concentration and Extermination Camps
•
•
•
At Wannsee, the Nazis made plans to round up Jews
from the vast areas of Nazi-controlled Europe and
take them to centers known as concentration camps
where healthy individuals would work as slave
laborers until they dropped dead of exhaustion,
disease, or malnutrition.
Most others, including the elderly, the infirm, and
young children would be sent to extermination camps,
like Auschwitz, attached to many concentration
camps, where they would be executed in massive gas
chambers.
Auschwitz housed about 100,000 people and its gas
chambers were built to kill 2,000 people at a time and
sometimes gassed 12,000 a day.
Section 4: America Enters the War
Objectives:
• Explain how
Roosevelt helped
Britain while
maintaining official
neutrality.
• Trace the events
that led to
increasing tensions,
and ultimately war,
between the United
States and Japan.
FDR Supports England
• The Neutrality Act of 1939
was passed to revise earlier
neutrality acts.
• Whereas the first 2
neutrality acts required cash
and carry terms for non-war
related materials and made
it illegal to sell arms to
warring nations, the revision
allowed for the sell of arms
on a cash and carry bases.
• In the Destroyers for Bases
Deal, Roosevelt sent
destroyers to Britain in
exchange for bases in British
territories, using a loophole
to get around the cash and
carry part of the neutrality
act.
Edging Toward War
• The Lend-Lease Act was FDR’s next way of getting around the
neutrality act’s requirement of paying cash for supplies, by stating
that the United States could lend or lease arms to any country
considered “vital to the defense of the United States.”
• The president argued that the United States should become “the
great arsenal of democracy.”
• The Hemispheric Defense Zone was another way that FDR got around
the neutrality act by declaring that the entire western half of the
Atlantic was part of the Western Hemisphere and therefore neutral.
• He then ordered the US Navy to patrol the western Atlantic and
reveal the location of German submarines to the British.
• In August 1941 FDR and Churchill met face-to-face on board
American and British warships where they agreed on the Atlantic
Charter which the two committed to a postwar world of democracy,
nonaggression, free trade, economic advancement, and freedom of
the seas.
• Churchill later said the FDR pledged to “force an incident’… which
would justify him in opening hostilities” with Germany.
Japan Attacks the United States
•
•
•
•
•
Between August 1939 and
December 1941, FDR’s primary
goal was to help Britain and its
allies defeat Germany.
He knew that he had to help protect
the British navy in Asia by
introducing policies to discourage
the Japanese from attacking the
British Empire.
About 80% of Japans oil came from
the United States and in July 1940,
Congress passed the Export Control
Act, giving FDR the power to
restrict the sale of strategic
materials to other nations.
FDR immediately blocked the sale
of airplane fuel and scrap iron to
Japan, who responded by signing
an alliance with Germany and Italy
becoming a member of the Axis.
In 1941 FDR began sending lendlease aid to China hoping that China
could tie Japan down and keep
them from attacking elsewhere.
Japan Attacks Continues…
• The Japanese government appeared to be continuing
negotiations with the United States in good faith.
• American intelligence, however, had decoded Japanese
communications that made it clear that Japan was preparing to
go to war with the United States.
• On November 27, American commanders at the Pearl Harbor
naval base received a war warning from Washington, but
Hawaii was not mentioned as a target.
• Japan’s surprise attack on December 7, 1941, sank or
damaged 21 ships of the US Pacific Fleet, including 8
battleships, 3 cruisers, 4 destroyers, and 6 other vessels.
• The attack also destroyed 188 airplanes and killed 2,403
Americans.
• The next day FDR asked Congress to declare war…”Yesterday,
December 7, 1941-a date which will live in infamy- the United
State of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by
the naval and air forces of Japan….”