World War II 2

1. In August 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed a ten-year Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact that states that each dictator would promise to remain neutral if the other became involved in the war. Also, a secret protocol divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones. To gain living space for the Germans, Hitler initiated the blitzkrieg, the lightning war, which knocked out Poland in a month. The Soviet Union used its alliance with Germany to take Li-thuania, Estonia, Latvia, and the eastern half of Poland. After occupying Denmark, Norway, and Holland, German armies swept through southern Belgium, split the Franco-British forces, and trapped the entire British army at Dunkirk, where it managed to escape. France fell to the Nazis, and by July 1940, Hitler ruled almost all of western continental Europe with Italy as an ally and the Soviet Union and Spain friendly neutrals. To conquer Britain and its leader Winston Churchill, Germany sought to control the air before amphibiously invaded Britain. In the Battle of Britain, thousands of German planes attacked British airfields and key factories and dueled British defenders in the skies. Then, Hitler targeted civilian popula-tions in an attempt to break British morale. By September and October 1940, with increased aircraft production and the use of radar in anti-aircraft defense, Britain was beating Germany three to one in the battle, causing Germany to pull back. By April 1941, Germany had conquered Greece and Yugoslavia and forced Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria into alliances. In an attempt to conquer the Soviet Union, Hitler and his armies attacked it in June 1941. By October 1941, Leningrad was almost surrounded, Moscow was besieged, and Ukraine was overrun. They were, however, stopped in the winter.

2. In Hitler’s New Order, the Nordic peoples (the Dutch, Norwegians, and Danes) received pre-ferential treatment because they were racially related to the Germans. The French and oth-er Latin peoples were in a middle position where they were heavily taxed to support the Nazi war effort but were tolerated as a race. Conquered Slavs in the east were treated as subhumans. Hitler imagined that all Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would be enslaved and forced to die out, while Germanic peasants resettled the abandoned lands. To do this, he turned to his SS volunteers, who were supported by military commanders and German po-licemen, to do this program of destruction. In western Poland, the SS arrested and eva-cuated Polish peasants to cleanse the area and create a mass settlement space for Ger-mans. Polish workers and Soviet prisoners of war were transported to Germany, where conditions of slave labor were so harsh that 75% of Soviet prisoners died. The Nazi state condemned all European Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and captured communists to extermination. All German Jews began to be deported to Poland, where they and other Eu-ropean Jews were concentrated in ghettos and forced to wear the Jewish star and work as slaves. In Russia in 1941, the SS and regular army units forced Soviet Jews to dig giant pits, which became mass graves as the victims were lined up a mowed down by machine guns. In late 1941, Nazi leaders ordered the SS to stop all Jewish emigration from Europe so that every single Jew could be killed.

3. Jews were arrested, packed onto freight trains, and dispatched to extermination camps. Vic-tims were then taken to shower rooms, which were actually gas chambers. For fifteen to twenty minutes came screams and sobs of men, women, and children choking to death on poison gas, and then silence. Special camp workers yanked the victims’ gold teeth from their jaws, and the bodies were then cremated, or sometimes boiled for oil to make soap. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, as many as twelve thousand humans were slaughtered every day, with 6 million Jews dead by 1945. Concentration camps were camps where people worked for hours, and when they became too tired, they were killed. Historians generally put most of the guilt on Hitler and Nazi leadership, as ordinary Germans had little knowledge of the concentration camps and were forced to comply by Nazi terror and totalitarian control. However, new studies have shown a much broader participation of German people and popular indifference to the Jews’ fate. This could possibly be due to the extreme anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans. Also, local non-German officials in occupied countries coo-perated in the arrest and deportation of Jews. Only a few exceptional bystanders in Germa-ny tried to save the Jews. Most Germans and most people in occupied countries felt they had no personal responsibility for Jews and were not prepared to help them. With Nazi rac-ist propaganda, peer pressure, and wartime violence, many people were psychologically prepared to kill.

4. Only after Hitler invaded Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (and Hitler’s im-mediate declaration of war) did the Soviet Union and the United States join the Allies. Their first task was to overcome their mutual suspicions and build an unshakable alliance. First, President Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s belief that the United States should concentrate first on defeating Hitler. Only after victory in Europe would the United States turn toward Japan, the lesser threat. Second, the Americans and the British put immediate military needs first and postponed political question regarding the eventual peace settlement, avoiding conflicts that might have split the alliance until after the war. Third, the Allies adopted the principle of the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan to prevent Hit-ler from dividing his enemies. It also meant that Soviet and Anglo-American armies would come together to divided all of Germany and most of the continent among the victorious allies. The United States had a strong industry, a large population, and its national unity. It not only equipped its own armies but also eventually gave its allies $50 billion in arms and equipment, with Britain receiving the most and the Soviet Union receiving a fifth. The Brit-ish economy was completely mobilized, and the sharing of burdens through rationing and heavy taxes on war profits maintained social harmony. By early 1943, the Americans and the British were combining small aircraft carriers with radar-guided bombers to destroy German submarines. In the Soviet Unions, whole factories and populations were evacuated to eastern Russia and Siberia as the Germans advanced. War production was reorganized and expanded, supplying the Red Army. The Army was also well led by a new generation of talented military leaders. Stalin drew on the great support and heroic determination of the Soviet people, especially those in central Russia, as broad-based Russian nationalism be-came the powerful unifying force. The Allies had much of the resources of the world at their command. They were also aided by a growing resistance movement against the Nazis throughout Europe, even in Germany. If peasants in conquered areas welcomed the Ger-mans as liberators, the Nazi policies quickly changed the peasants’ views. After the Soviet Union was invaded, communists throughout Europe led the underground resistance, joined by patriots and Christians. Leaders who had fled from their native countries established governments-in-exile to gain secret information from resistance fighters and organize ar-mies.

5. In July 1942, the Germans renewed their offensive against the Soviet Union and occupied most of the city of Stalingrad in a month. In November 1942, Soviet armies counterattacked, defeating Romanian and Italian troops to the north and south of Stalingrad and trapping the entire German Sixth Army of 300,000 men. The Germans were systematically destroyed until 123,000 of them surrendered at the end of January 1943. In the summer of 1943, the Soviet armies took the offensive and began moving forward. By late spring 1942, Japan had created a great empire in East Asia, as they appealed to local nationalists against their European rulers. In the Battle of Coral Sea in May 1942, Allied naval and air power stopped the Japanese advance and relieved Australia from the threat of invasion. The Battle of Midway Island saw American pilots sinking all four of the attacking Japanese aircraft car-riers, giving Americans naval superiority in the Pacific. Using the principle of island hopping, the Americans and Australians began moving toward Japan. In May 1942, German and Ital-ian armies were defeated by British forces at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. In October, the British counterattacked in Egypt, and an Anglo-American force landed in Morocco and Algeria, driving the Axis powers from North Africa by the spring of 1943. Then, Allied forces invaded Sicily and mainland Italy. Mussolini was deposed of by the Italians, and the new Italian government accepted unconditional surrender in September 1943. Then, German commandos rescued Mussolini and put him at the head of a puppet government. German armies seized Rome and all of northern Italy, and fighting continued. Germany utilized total war in 1942, enlisting millions of German women, prisoners of war, and slave laborers, tripling German war production from early 1942 to July 1944. After an attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, the SS killed thousands of Germans. On June 6, 1944, American and British forces landed on the beaches of Normandy and broke through German lines and into Germany in March 1945. The Soviets reached the outskirts of Warsaw by August 1944 and continued to push southward into Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. In January 1945, the Red Army moved westward through Poland, and on April 26, it met American forces on the Elbe River. When Soviet forces moved into Berlin, Hitler committed suicide, and on May 7, Germany surrendered. In August, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered.

a. September 1, 1939: World War II starts; May 7, 1945: Germany surrenders; August 14, 1945: Japan surrenders.

b. October 25, 1936: Germany, Italy; September 27, 1940: Japan; November 20: Hungary; 23: Romania; 24: Slovakia; March 1, 1941: Bulgaria; 25: Yugoslavia; June 25: Finland; April 3: Iraq; January 25, 1942: Thailand.

c. September 1, 1939: Poland; 3: Australia, France, New Zealand, United Kingdom; 4: New-foundland, Nepal; 6: South Africa; October 2: Czechoslovakia; April 9, 1940: Norway, Den-mark; May 10: Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands; June 18: Free France; October 28: Greece; April 6, 1941: Yugoslavia; June 22: Soviet Union, Tannu Tuva; August 9: Mongolia; December 7: Panama; 8: United States, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua; 9: China, Philippines, Guatemala, Cuba; May 22, 1942: Mexico; August 22: Brazil; December 14: Ethiopia; January 17, 1943: Iraq; April 7: Bolivia; July 26: Colombia; September 9: Iran; December 1: Yugoslavia; January 27, 1944: Liberia; February 12: Peru; August 23: Romania; September 8: Bulgaria; 21: San Marino; October 26: Albania; February 2, 1945: Bahawalpur, Ecuador; 7: Paraguay; 15: Uruguay, Venezuela; 23: Turkey; 27: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria; March 1: Saudi Arabia; 27: Argentina; April 11: Chile.

d. France, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Serbia, Greece, Ukraine, eastern Soviet Union, Sakhalin Island of Soviet Union, Korea, China, Burma, Thailand, French Indochina, Malaya, Sarawak, Brunei, Philippines, North Borneo, Netherlands East Indies, New Guinea, and small American islands.

e. Western Front: France, Britain, the United States verse Germany; Russian Front: Soviet Un-ion verse Germany; Pacific Front: United States, Australian verse Japan.

f. Hiroshima and Nagasaki.