Download The Largest, Costliest, and Deadliest Conflict WHAP/Napp “In World

The Largest, Costliest, and Deadliest Conflict
WHAP/Napp
“In World War II, for the first time, more civilians than soldiers were deliberately put to
death. The champions in the art of killing defenseless civilians were the Nazis. Their
murders were not the accidental byproducts of some military goal but a calculated policy of
exterminating whole races of people. Their first targets were Jews. Soon after Hitler came
to power, he deprived German Jews of their citizenship and legal rights. When eastern
Europe fell under Nazi rule, the Nazis herded its large Jewish population into ghettos in the
major cities, where many died of starvation and disease. Then, in early 1942, the Nazis
decided to carry out Hitler’s ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ by applying modern
industrial methods to the slaughter of human beings. German companies built huge
extermination camps in eastern Europe, while thousands of ordinary German citizens
supported and aided the genocide. Every day trainloads of cattle cars arrived at the camps
and disgorged thousands of captives and the corpses of those who had died of starvation or
asphyxiation along the way. The strongest survivors were put to work and fed almost
nothing until they died. Women, children, the elderly, and the sick were shoved into gas
chambers and asphyxiated with poison gas. Auschwitz, the biggest camp, was a giant
industrial complex designed to kill up to twelve thousand people a day. Most horrifying of
all were the tortures inflicted on prisoners selected by Nazi doctors for ‘medical
experiments.’ This mass extermination, now called the Holocaust (‘burning’), claimed
some 6 million Jewish lives.
Besides the Jews, the Nazis also killed 3 million Polish Catholics –especially professionals,
army officers, and the educated – in an effort to reduce the Polish people to slavery. They
also exterminated homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, the disabled, and the
mentally ill – all in the interests of ‘racial purity.’ Whenever a German was killed in an
occupied country, the Nazis retaliated by burning a village and all its inhabitants.
After the invasion of Russia the Wehrmacht [the armed forces of Nazi Germany] was given
orders to execute all captured communists, government employees, and officers. They also
worked millions of prisoners of war to death or let them die of starvation.”
~ The Earth and Its Peoples
2. The Nazi campaign to imprison inferior
1. Which is one major reason the Holocaust people included which of the following
is considered a unique event in modern
targets?
European history?
(A) Jews and Aryans
(A) Jews of Europe have seldom been
(B) only Jews
victims of persecution.
(C) Jews, homosexuals, disabled people,
(B) Civilians rarely were killed during air
Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies
raids on Great Britain.
(D) all residents of Allied countries
(C) Adolf Hitler concealed his anti-Jewish
feelings until after he came to power.
In what nation were the five largest
(D) The genocide was planned in great detail extermination camps located during World
and required the cooperation of many
War II?
people.
(A) Yugoslavia
(B) Germany
(C) Hungary
(D) Poland
Key Words/ I. World War II (September 1939 – September 1945)
Questions
A. By 1933, Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations
B. In 1935, Hitler rebuilt German military; violating Treaty of Versailles
C. In 1936, Hitler sent German troops into Rhineland, a demilitarized zone
D. In 1937, Hitler signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Italy and Japan
E. Hitler announced his Lebensraum or “living space” for Germany
F. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss (“union”)
G. Hitler also took over Sudetenland which had formerly been German
territory and given to Czechoslovakia after World War I (appeasement
on part of Britain/France at Munich Conference)
H. September 1, 1939: Germany invaded Poland and World War II began
I. Meanwhile, by 1936, Italy had completed its conquest of Ethiopia
J. Spain: civil war (1936-1939) and Franco came to power until 1975
K. Japan invaded China and Rape of Nanking occurred
L. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed Nazi-Soviet Pact: neutrality pact
II. A Different Kind of War
A. Germany’s Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), using tanks and airplanes
B. Historians refer to winter of 1939 and 1940 as the Sliztkrieg, or “phony
war” due to British and French strategy of waiting
C. On June 22, France surrendered
D. But Hitler’s attempt to knock Britain out of war failed
E. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, starting the
largest ground war in history (Operation Barbarossa)
F. German forces surrounded Leningrad placing it under the worst siege
III. The Changing Tide of War
A. Japan’s goal: establish its Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere
B. U.S.A.’s response was to impose economic sanctions
C. Japanese viewed as act of war, December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor
D. The second half of the war, 1942 through 1945, much different
E. Battle of Midway (June 1942), Battle of El Alamein (fall 1942), Battle of
Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943), Allies experienced victories
F. June 1944, in the famous D-Day invasion, British, Canadian, and
American troops crossed the English Channel and landed on the coast of
France and by 1945, Axis surrendered
G. August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima; three days later, Nagasaki: unconditional surrender
IV. Crimes Against Humanity
A. Even before war, Nazis operated apparatus of terror, formation of a
secret police (the Gestapo), concentration camps (such as Dachau)
B. Nuremberg Laws of 1935, deprived all German Jews of their civil rights
C. November 1938, Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), Jewish shops,
synagogues, and homes in Germany and Austria were attacked
D. Sometime in 1941 that order for genocide came down from above
E. Final Solution resulted in 12 million deaths
F. Nuremberg Trials (1946), to try remaining Nazi leadership
Reflections:
1. Which of the following had NOT
experienced fascist aggression or
takeover prior to World War II?
(A) Ethiopia
(B) Czechoslovakia
(C) Great Britain
(D) Spain
(E) China
4. Which member of the victorious
Allies emerged most dissatisfied
from the Versailles settlement?
(A) Germany
(B) France
(C) United States
(D) Japan
(E) Great Britain
2. The invasion of which country led
to the slowing and eventual reversal
of the German blitzkrieg?
(A) France
(B) Belgium
(C) The USSR
(D) Great Britain
(E) Spain
5. Which belligerent power of the
First World War carried out an
early exit from the hostilities and
negotiated a separate peace treaty?
(A) France
(B) The United States
(C) Russia
(D) Austria-Hungary
(E) Germany
3. Which is NOT true of the Nazi
death camps?
(A) Most were located in Poland.
(B) Escape was impossible.
(C) A variety of methods were
employed in carrying out
executions.
(D) They were staffed by German
and non-German guards.
(E) They were carefully planned
and constructed.
6. Which of the following periods
have been grouped together by
world historians into a time called
an “Age of Catastrophe” lasting
from 1914 to 1945?
(A) World War I, Great
Depression, Cold War
(B) Napoleonic Wars, World War
I, World War II
(C) World War I, Great
Depression, World War II
(D) World War II, Cold War, postCold War era
(E) Great Depression, World War
II, Cold War
Thesis Practice: Continuity and Change over Time
Analyze changes and continuities in Germany’s political and economic systems as well as
cultural values from 1871 to 1950.
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Reading:
“The Nazi bureaucrats in the Interior Ministry had brooded over these laws for some
time. The stumbling block was the problem of how to define a Jew. This was exactly the
problem that had blocked the anti-Semitic members of the Reichstag in the 1890’s from
proposing an anti-Semitic law. Who is a Jew? In the Nuremberg Laws, the Jew was defined
negatively as someone ineligible to German citizenship. The law provided that only persons
of ‘German or related blood’ could be citizens, and that citizenship was acquired by a
grant of a certificate of citizenship. This was called the ‘Law Respecting Reich Citizenship
of September 15, 1935.’ Jews were thus robbed of their citizenship and became
Staatsangehorige, subjects belonging to the state. The second law, the ‘Law for the
Protection of German Blood and German Honor’ of the same date forbade marriage and
sexual relations between Jews and Germans and imposed heavy penalties for
transgressions. Jews were also forbidden to employ German female servants under fortyfive years of age and were forbidden to display the German flag. Thirteen supplementary
decrees which followed delineate the whole course of Hitler’s anti-Jewish war down to the
last decree, which was published July 1, 1943, when the Reich was theoretically purged of
Jews.” ~ Nora Levin
“On the night of November 9, 1938, anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout the Reich,
which now included Austria and the Sudetenland. What appeared to be a spontaneous
outburst of national anger sparked by the assassination of a minor German embassy
official in Paris at the hands of Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen year-old Jewish youth,
was carefully orchestrated by the Nazi regime. Grynszpan’s parents were Polish Jews
living in Germany. They had been deported from Germany to Poland, but because Poland
refused to accept its Jewish citizens, they were stranded in limbo. From the border town of
Zbaszyn they wrote to their son in desperation. His immediate response was to seek
revenge. Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller sent a
telegram to all police units letting them know that ‘in shortest order, actions against Jews
and especially their synagogues will take place in all Germany. These are not to be
interfered with.’ Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by
synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to
intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent Aryan properties. Within forty-eight hours,
over one thousand synagogues were burned, along with their Torah scrolls, Bibles, and
prayer books. Seven thousand Jewish businesses were crashed and looted, ninety-six
Jews were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were destroyed. The
attackers were often neighbors. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested. To accommodate so
many new prisoners, the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen
were expanded.” ~ Michael Berenbaum
“There was no place to go. Jewish emigration to Palestine was severely limited by the
British. Neutral Switzerland was afraid of being overrun by Jews. The United States raised
a formidable series of paper walls to keep refugees out.” ~ Michael Berenbaum
Critical Thinking Question:
Why do you think the world community did not respond more actively to the Nuremberg
Laws and Kristallnacht and what might have happened had they responded more actively?
Do nations have a responsibility to the peoples of other nations? Explain your answers.