Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

4

World War II, 1939 to 1945

Tank production, World War II, C. 1939–C. 1945, by Terence

Cuneo. Hundreds of thousands of tanks were manufactured

during World War II. From the German Tiger to the

American Sherman, each nation engineered and produced

its own version of this artillery vehicle, which accelerated

the pace of battle and played a critical role in how wars

were won. As a result of new technological developments,

the static trenches that defined World War I were replaced

by a motorized war of motion in which armies advanced

great distances in short periods of time.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.1 The Causes of the War

Introduction

Europeans responded very differently to the outbreak of war in September 1939 than they had in August 1914. Then, war had been greeted everywhere with enthusi-asm; this time there was none. Instead, the mood, even among Germans, was one of reluctant acceptance. In France and Britain, surveys of public opinion revealed more resignation than excitement for the coming fight (Parker, 1997).

The two wars differed in other significant ways. World War II far surpassed World War I in its scale and in the horrors it produced. It engaged more countries, 61 against 28, and the major fronts extended beyond Europe to Asia. The number of deaths was much higher, and the dead were more likely to be civilians than soldiers. Civilian casualties were not collateral damage; militaries on all sides deliberately targeted noncombatants. World War II was what historian Thomas Zeiler has called a war of “annihilation” defined by the pursuit of victory “whatever the cost, and the utter destruction of the enemy in a form of warfare unlimited by economic, diplomatic or (on the whole) moral constraints” (Zeiler, 2011, p. 2).

4.1 The Causes of the War

World War II was actually two distinct but connected conflicts, and each had its own causes. German aggression in pursuit of Hitler’s dream of lebensraum, liv-ing space for the German race in the east, prompted the war in Europe; Japa- nese desire to build an empire at the expense of China and the European colonial powers prompted the war in Asia. Germany, Italy, and Japan formed the Axis Powers, though each only fought in their respective conflicts. Arrayed against them were the allied pow- ers of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and (after December 1941) the United States. These major allied powers fought in both conflicts, though the Soviet Union entered the war in Asia only in its last days.

The War in Europe

France and Great Britain had practiced appeasement in the face of Hitler’s repeated demands, but the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 ended this policy. When Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, a major step in his goal of achieving lebensraum, Britain promised to fight in support of Polish independence. Thus, two days after the invasion, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, beginning the European part of World War II.

The War in Asia

Japan’s imperial ambitions were driven largely by its desire to create a self-sufficient eco- nomic space. Japanese expansion began with its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and con- tinued with its occupation of French Indochina in early 1941. However, the Asian part of World War II only began with the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the declaration of war on Japan by the United States the follow- ing day.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

World War II can be divided into two broad phases: the first when the Axis coun-tries were on the offensive, the second when they were on the defensive. In Europe, the period of Axis success lasted until the German failure to take the Soviet city of Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943. In Asia, Japan was on the offensive from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, until the Allied victories at the naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in May and June 1942.

The Invasion of Poland

The first act of the war demon- strated how new technologies would transform combat. Advance- ments in tank and plane design accelerated the pace of battle. Ger- man tank commander Heinz Gude- rian had a strategy of rapid and continual forward movement. The Poles put up a valiant struggle, but the speed and power of the German tanks and aviation overwhelmed them. On September 17, the Soviet Union, acting under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (see chapter 3), invaded Poland from the east. Warsaw resisted for a few more days but fell to the Germans on Sep- tember 28 after enduring an aerial bombardment. This sustained bombing of a major city was another sign of things to come.

The Phony War The defeat of Poland was followed by a period known as the “Phony War.” Britain and France had declared war on Germany, and the French had mobilized their army. But aside from some brief naval engagements and the beginnings of a propaganda war, there were no major hostilities with the Germans until May 1940 (Zeiler, 2011).

Allied strategy was to build up their military and blockade Germany. In order to cut off Germany’s access to iron ore from Sweden, the British decided to plant mines along the coast of Norway, thereby preventing German access to the ports through which it was exported. This led Hitler to invade Norway and Denmark, which lay between Germany and its target, on April 6, 1940. The Danes offered virtually no resistance and surrendered immediately; the Norwegians held out for two months with support from British and French forces before surrendering on June 7.

The Winter War While the Phony War went on, real fighting took place in Finland. The Winter War began when the Soviets invaded Finland, which had been part of the Russian empire until 1917, in November 1939. The Finns were vastly outnumbered and had inferior weaponry, but they compensated by making effective use of the climate and the terrain; for example, their

Tanks were prominent in the German attack on Poland. World War II would be a war of rapid movement, not static trenches.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

troops wore white uniforms and used skis to move quickly over the snow and through heavily forested areas where Soviet motorized vehicles could not go. Even so, they could hold out for only a limited time, and on March 12, 1940, they agreed to a treaty in which they ceded the region of Karelia, which had a land border with the Soviet Union quite close to Leningrad. Twenty-five thousand Finns had been killed, but Soviet casualties were much higher, at 200,000 (Zeiler, 2011).

The Invasion of the Low Countries and France

The German invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France on May 10, 1940, opened the next stage of the war. Since 1918, the French had built and maintained the Maginot Line, a massive chain of concrete fortifications and other defensive emplacements that ran along its border with Germany but stopped at the Belgian border. This led them to assume that any German attack would come through the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands), as it had in 1914. The Germans did, in fact, attack there, but it was only a distraction; their main assault came farther south. Tanks with air support cut through the Ardennes forest and in only three days went around the Maginot Line. Caught off guard, the French were unable to respond quickly enough. Only a week after making their break- through, the Germans had advanced 135 miles into France (Figures 4.1 and 4.2).

Bres

London

Corsica

FRANCE

GREATER GERMANY

NETHERLANDS BELGIUM

LUXEMBOURG

GREAT BRITAIN

(French Ally)

IRELAND (Neutral)

PORTUGAL (Neutral)

SPAIN (Neutral)

SWITZERLAND (Neutral)

ANDORRA (Neutral)

ITALY (German Ally)

N

S

EW

German Invasion Routes

German Invasion of Western Europe 1940

Atlantic Ocean

Mediterranean Sea

English Channel

Bay of

Biscay

Channel Islands

North Sea

Paris

Sedan

Dunkerque

2000 Miles

Their innovative use of tanks allowed the Germans to outflank the Maginot Line of defenses and attack where the French least expected it. The rapidity of their advance almost trapped the British army, although it was able to escape at Dunkirk.

Figure 4.1: The invasion of France, May 1940

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

The German advance forced the British Expedi- tionary Force, the 315,000 man British Army in France, to retreat to the coastal town of Dunkirk. Between May 27 and June 5, the British evacuated 338,000 troops, including 140,000 French, Belgian, and Polish soldiers, under heavy aerial bombing, but they left behind vast quantities of armaments. The massive evacuation involved 765 ships, most of which were civilian.

This military catastrophe brought down the French government. Seventy-five-year-old Mar- shal Philippe Pétain, a hero of World War I who many believed could get the most favorable terms out of Hitler, was named Premier, and on June 25 he surrendered to the Germans. The conquest of France had taken only 45 days and cost the Ger- mans only 30,000 casualties.

Paris

Dover

Brussels

Frankfurt

Strasbourg

Cologne

Namur

Lille Maastricht

Liège

Essen Antwerp

Basel

Ardennes Mts.

GERMANY

FRANCE

LUXEMBOURG

BELGIUM

Maginot Line

N

S

EW

Weak fortifications Strong fortifications

After World War I, France built the Maginot Line of powerful fortifications to block the easiest invasion route from Germany.

Figure 4.2: The Maginot Line

The rapidity of the German conquest of France surprised even Hitler. He visited Paris on June 22, 1940.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

The Battle of Britain Following the fall of France, Hitler turned his attention to invading Great Britain. The superior strength of the British Royal Navy meant that the invasion could be success- ful only if the Germans could compensate by achieving control of the air. This required defeating the British air defenses, and on July 10, 1940, the German Air Force, known as the Luftwaffe, began its attack.

Disagreements among Luftwaffe com- manders led to a change in tactics, and at the end of August, the Germans began nighttime bombing raids on British cities, starting with Liverpool. The British called this the Blitz. The Luftwaffe targeted London on Sep- tember 7 and continued to bomb the city for 67 out of the next 68 nights. In three weeks 7,000 people were killed, and the number of casualties hit 40,000 by the summer of 1941 (Zeiler, 2011). The Germans had assumed that strategic bombing would break British morale. It did not; if anything, it had the opposite effect, strengthening their determination to resist the enemy.

The British won the Battle of Britain. Between July 10 and October 31, they

lost 792 planes, many fewer than the 1,389 lost by the Luftwaffe (Parker, 1997). More importantly, they forced Hitler to cancel his planned ground invasion. The British had a major asset in their radar network, which had been set up in 1938 and which allowed them to respond in a coordinated way to German attacks. They were also able to build more new planes than were the Germans although a shortage of trained pilots hampered them. (Remembering the effects of material privation on the German home front during World War I, Hitler delayed fully converting the German economy to war production until 1941.) Finally, they also managed to crack the powerful ENIGMA code system the Germans used. Such intelligence advantages would be a powerful tool for the Allies throughout the war.

The Battle of the Atlantic The Germans also tried to subdue Great Britain by disrupting its ability to import food and military supplies from Canada and the United States. This naval campaign ulti- mately failed, but it did significant damage and slowed British imports dramatically. From September 1939 to May 1940, the German Navy sank 562 ships; from June 1940 to February 1941, the number was 1,377; and from March to June 1941, 582. As a result, British imports fell from 44.2 million tons in the first year of the war to 31.5 million in the second (Parker, 1997).

Submarines, which used the new “wolf pack” tactic of sending groups of subs to attack Brit- ish convoys, inflicted the bulk of the damage. Eventually, the British developed improved sonar and radar systems that made it possible to locate submarines while they were still

Prime Minister Churchill walks through the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed by the German bombing on November 15, 1940.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

underwater. In May 1941, they were also able to crack the navy’s ENIGMA codes and learn about planned wolf pack attacks in advance, which allowed them to reroute their convoys.

The Role of the United States The United States responded to the outbreak of war in 1939 the same way as it had in 1914: It stayed out of the conflict. Even before the war started, Congress demonstrated its refusal to become involved in another European conflict by passing a series of Neutrality Acts in 1935, 1936, and 1937. These prohibited the United States from selling arms or war mate- riel or providing credit or loans to any country fighting a war. Once the fighting started, public opinion and most politicians supported the policy of isolationism. President Roo- sevelt responded to the invasion of Poland and the declaration of war by Great Britain and France by proclaiming U.S. neutrality. Even though polls showed that 80 percent of Americans wanted the Allies to win and more than half favored providing them support, Americans overwhelmingly were against getting involved in the war (Dallek, 1995).

However, in November 1939, Roosevelt convinced Congress to pass a new law that loos- ened the embargo on arms sales. This Neutrality Act of 1939 permitted the sale of weap- ons to countries at war. In principle, these sales were cash only, but Great Britain, which was very short of cash at the time, was allowed to pay for 50 World War I vintage naval destroyers by giving the United States 99-year leases on eight naval bases in the West Indies and Newfoundland.

In the spring and summer of 1940, the U.S. government began preparing for the possibil- ity of war. Congress introduced the draft and appropriated $37 billion, a larger sum than had been spent on World War I, to drastically expand the size of the Navy and Air Force (Zeiler, 2011). This massive new demand began to revitalize the economy, which had still not recovered from the Depression.

The British resistance to the German attack in the second half of 1940 made U.S. public opin- ion more favorable to providing them support. In December, Churchill informed Roosevelt that Britain could not afford to pay for its military supplies much longer; and on Decem- ber 29, 1940, Roosevelt delivered a radio address, one of his so-called “fireside chats,” on national defense. A British victory in the war, he said, was essential to U.S. national security, and providing Britain with the arms it needed to resist Germany was “a matter of realistic, practical military policy.” The United States was facing “an emergency as serious as war itself,” and he called on “the owners of plants . . . the managers, . . . the workers, . . . our own government employees” to put every effort into producing armaments as quickly as pos- sible. The United States had to become the “great arsenal of democracy” (Roosevelt, 1940).

Roosevelt’s pressure succeeded in getting Congress to do away with the ban on selling war materiel on credit. The Lend-Lease Act of March 11, 1941, allowed the U.S. govern- ment to provide combatant countries with weapons, food, and other supplies at no cost. By the end of the war, support under Lend-Lease amounted to $50 billion, with the bulk going to Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union (Zeiler, 2011) (Figure 4.3). German naval activity made delivering this assistance a problem, but the United States took a more active role in defending shipping lanes, posting Marines in Iceland and ordering the navy to escort ships of friendly nations. By September 1941, the United States was involved in an “undeclared naval war” with Germany. In October and November, Con- gress further relaxed the Neutrality Acts, making it possible for U.S. merchant vessels to be armed and to deliver cargoes to countries at war.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

Seattle San Francisco

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Dakar

Takoradi

New York

Recife

Melbourne

Pacific Ocean Panama

Canal

Atlantic Ocean

Arctic Ocean

Indian Ocean

Pacific Ocean

Lagos

Cairo

Calcutta Dinjan

Kunming

Vladivostok

NovosibiriskMoscow Arkhangelsk

Stalingrad

Tabriz Rashi

Bushire Bandar Shah

SIBERIA Over 50% Lend-Lease aid to USSR sent via

Alaskan route

1,700

60

60

320

Major sea supply routes Major aircraft supply routes Railways

Major sources of oil Annual oil production (million barrels)

Summer convoy route to USSR Winter Convoy route to USSR60

Lend-Lease supplied, valued in millions of US dollars

Locations of major Allied conferences

British Empire and Commonwealth as in 1940

French Empire as in 1940

Miami

Ascension Is.

Petropavlovsk

Algiers

Nikolayevsk TashkentBaku

Central and South America $501m

Liberia $12m Ethiopia $5m

Greece $82m Yugoslavia $32m

Turkey $43m

Saudi Arabia $19m

Iraq $1m

China $1,627m

Yalta

Moscow

Casablanca

Potsdam

USSR $10,982m

Norway $47m Poland $12m

Netherlands and Empire $251m

Iceland $4m

France and Empire $3.224m Cairo

Egypt $2m

Teheran Iran $5m

Placentia Bay

Bretton Woods

Dumbarton Oaks

Washington

Quebec Britain and Empire $31,385m

London

Malta

Reverse Lend-Lease from French and British Empires, $8,000m

Belgian Congo $159m

Anchorage Alaska Highway

built Mar-Oct 1942

Murmansk

Khartoum

B

B

B

B

B

B

B

B

B

B B

B

F

F

F

F

F FF F

F

The Lend-Lease Program was a major asset to a number of countries fighting against Germany and Japan. By the end of the war, $50 billion in aid had been provided; $31 billion went to Great Britain and $11 billion to the Soviet Union.

Figure 4.3: The Lend-Lease Program

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

War Aims In August 1941, even before the United States entered the war, Roosevelt met with Prime Minister Churchill on board a warship in Placentia Bay in Newfoundland to discuss com- mon war aims. The outcome of their talks was the Atlantic Charter, an eight-point docu- ment that set out “common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.”

First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;

Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self- government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;

Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;

Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;

Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see estab- lished a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;

Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;

Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. (Rosenman, n.d.)

The Charter’s objectives were clearly directed against the Nazis and intended to appeal to those countries suffering German occupation. For Roosevelt, at least, they were also intended to lead to decolonization after the war, although this was a goal Churchill did not share. In fact, people in many colonies later appealed to the Charter in their efforts to attain independence.

In December 1941, only weeks after the United States entered the war, the British and U.S. leaders met in Washington for the Arcadia Conference. The goal of unconditional surren- der was set out in the “Declaration by the United Nations,” which was issued on January 1, 1942. Among the original signatories were the United States; Great Britain and Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and South Africa from its empire; the Soviet Union; China;

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

and the governments in exile of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, Nether- lands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia. A number of other countries—Brazil, Ethiopia, Iraq, Mexico, Peru, and Turkey among them—signed later.

The Balkans Hitler had planned to attack the Soviet Union only after defeating Great Britain, but Brit- ish resistance and the rapid arms build-up in the United States led him to change his mind. Planning for “Operation Barbarossa,” the invasion of the Soviet Union, began in December 1940. The invasion was supposed to begin the following May but had to be delayed so that the Germans could help out their Italian ally in the Balkans.

The Italians had invaded Greece in October 1940, but the Greeks, with assistance from the British and the Soviets, held them off. Hitler decided to take charge, but to get to Greece the Germans had to go through Yugoslavia. On April 6, 1941, German planes bombed Belgrade. Meanwhile, troops stationed in Bulgaria invaded Yugoslavia and then Greece. By April 21, both countries had surrendered.

Operation Barbarossa: The Invasion of the Soviet Union

With the Balkans subdued, the invasion of the Soviet Union could begin. This massive operation would be the largest single-front armed conflict in human history (Zeiler, 2011). On June 22, 1941, an immense force of Germans and their allies, including 3.6 million troops, 3,350 tanks, and 2,700 planes, entered Soviet territory. As it turned out, this strug- gle would determine the outcome of World War II: The German failure to subdue the Soviets would ultimately lead to their defeat.

The Campaign The Red Army had 4 million troops, 10,000 tanks, and 7,500 planes, but the Soviets were nevertheless unprepared for the invasion. Stalin refused to believe an attack was imminent despite clear signs of German intentions, such as a troop buildup in Poland. As a result the Germans scored rapid early victories, including destroying 5,000 Soviet planes in the first six days of the operation. Hitler had envisioned a quick, 10-week campaign, in large part because of his racist beliefs. A German army handbook stated that Russians were “unsuited for modern warfare and incapable of decisive resistance against a well-commanded, well- equipped force” (Mazower, 2008, p. 140). Initially, it appeared he was right: By August, Leningrad had been surrounded. At the start of October, German forces were within sight of Moscow, and one million people were evacuated from the Soviet capital.

But at this point, the tide began to turn. On December 5, the Red Army counter-attacked and forced the Germans to retreat. By January 1942, the Germans, who were not equipped to fight in the Russian winter, had suffered more than 900,000 casualties.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

Stalingrad The Germans were still able to launch another powerful offensive. In the spring of 1942, they attacked the industrial region around Stalin- grad and the Caucasus, where the Soviet oilfields were located. When the Germans entered Stalingrad in September 1942, Hitler ordered all men killed and women sent to labor camps in Germany. The Bat- tle of Stalingrad was fought within the city, house to house and street to street. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet journalist, described what he saw:

Stalingrad is ashes. . . . The city has died after much suffering and looks like the face of a dead man who was suffering from a lethal disease and has finally found eternal peace. . . . Wounded men in their bloodstained bandages are walking along the Volga, right by the water. Naked people are sitting over the pink-evening Volga, crushing lice in their underwear. . . . A woman sick with typhoid fever has been hit in the stomach by a shell fragment. She hasn’t died yet. Cats are moving, and blood is dripping from them. (Zeiler, 2011, p. 200)

The Germans managed to take some two thirds of the city but could advance no further. While Stalingrad held out, Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov was able to move his massive armies into place around the city. Eventually the German Army was surrounded, and in February 1943, they surrendered despite Hitler’s order that they not do so. Stalingrad cost the Soviets 2.5 million casualties, but it was the turning point: From this point on, the Germans fought a defensive war in the Soviet Union (Parker, 1997).

Prisoners walk through the streets of Stalingrad, which are filled with destruction and despair. The Battle of Stalingrad was fought house to house and street to street, wreaking havoc and leaving the city in ruins.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

SOVIET UNION

LATVIA LITHUANIA

N

S

EW

SPAIN

IRELAND

GREAT BRITAIN

SWEDEN FINLAND

FRANCE

GERMANY

HUNGARY ROMANIAITALY

ALBANIA BULGARIA

GREECE Crete

Moscow

Leningrad

Stalingrad

Belgrade

Berlin Atlantic Ocean

Black Sea

Mediterranean Sea

North Sea

ESTONIA

YUGOSLAVIA

German Air Attacks German Land Attacks

German Conquests in Europe 1939–1942

NORWAY

DENMARK

Paris

POLAND Warsaw

0 500

MILES

This map shows furthest extent of Nazi conquests during the war.

Figure 4.4: German conquests in Europe, 1939–1942

The War in Asia: Japan Attacks

The great German success in Western Europe, the conquest of France and the Nether- lands, and the attack on Great Britain, provided Japan with the opportunity to begin to realize its ambition of replacing the European imperial powers as the dominant nation in Southeast Asia. In August 1940, the Japanese government announced the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a Japanese-led zone free of Western influence, and the following month Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

In June 1941, Japan occupied French Indochina. This prompted the United States, whose relations with Japan were already tense because of Japanese aggression in China, to impose an embargo on oil sales to Japan. The Japanese, who got some 80 percent of their oil from the United States, saw this as tantamount to an act of war. They decided that if they were to realize their goal of seizing an empire, they would have to make their move by December 1941, when their oil reserves would be almost gone. They also decided on a strategy of a preemptive assault on the United States’ Pacific fleet followed by attacks on European colonies in Asia.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

The war in the Pacific began with the surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The surprise worked: Six major vessels were sunk, 292 planes out of 400 were dam- aged or destroyed, and 2,403 servicemen were killed (Zeiler, 2011). Even though its aircraft carriers had been spared, the United States was at least temporarily removed as a naval threat in the Pacific.

The United States Enters the War The United States government reacted immediately to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The next day, President Roosevelt addressed Congress to request a declaration of war against Japan. He began his speech by declaring December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.” Congress was nearly unanimous in approving the declaration, which Roosevelt signed at 4:00 p.m.

As of December 8, the United States was at war with Japan, but with Japan alone. Only after Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11 did Roosevelt request a declaration of war against them. It was granted and signed that same day.

Japan’s Conquests Japan took full advantage of its success at Pearl Harbor. By mid-February it had conquered Guam and the Wake Islands, most of the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Burma fell in March, and the two remaining U.S. redoubts in the Philippines in April (Figure 4.5). By the middle of 1942, the territory Japan controlled was home to 371 million people. This far exceeded the 206 million in lands under German control (Zeiler, 2011).

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.2 The Axis on the Offensive

Peking

AUSTRALIA

NEW GUINEA

Philippine Sea

Indian Ocean

Pacific Ocean

Yellow Sea

East China Sea

Sea of Japan

South China Sea

Strait of M alacca

Iwo Jima

Java Sea

KOREA JAPAN

U.S.S.R.

CHINA

INDIA

BURMA

THAILAND FRENCH INDO-CHINA

Chungking Nanking Shanghai

Kunming Hong Kong

Rangoon

Mandalay

Bangkok

Saigon (occupied 1940-41)

Manila

Nagasaki

Yokohama Tokyo

Batavia

Darwin

0

0

1000 Miles

1000 Kilometers

Port Moresby

Hollandia

Mariana Islands

Guam

Caroline Islands

Palau Islands

Borneo

Sumatra

Java Timor

Leyte

Ryukyus

Sakhalin

MANCHURIA (MANCHUKUO)

Mindanao

Okinawa

Celebes

PHILIPPINES Luzon

FORMOSA

Singapore

MALAYA

U.S. British Dutch Japanese New Japanese conquests Burma Road Japanese attack routes

D

D

D

D

DD

J

J

J

J

J J

J

J

J

J

J

B

B

B

B

B

B

B

U

U

U

Kuala Lumpur

After bombing Pearl Harbor, the Japanese quickly conquered Western colonies in Southeast Asia.

Figure 4.5: Japanese conquests

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.3 The Nazi Empire

4.3 The Nazi Empire

In early 1942, Nazi Germany bestrode virtually all of continental Europe as a colossus. Nazi conquests included Poland, Austria, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Yugo-slavia, Greece, and a huge portion of western Russia, including the Baltics, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. German allies controlled the governments of Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. While Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal remained formally neu- tral, they all provided Germany with essential raw materials and, in the case of the Iberian states, even with a limited number of troops. Only Britain and the unoccupied portions of Russia remained free of German control.

German occupation policies varied widely from region to region, but everywhere their aim was to skim off or plunder key natural resources, including conscripted labor, from the lands that it directly or indirectly controlled. In general, as a Hungarian secret police officer summed up, “In the occupied territories, the German government endorses the principle that, thrusting considerations of popularity into the background, only a regime or a government can be tolerated which is permanently at the beck and call of Germany” (Mazower, 2008, p. 7). Otherwise, German occupation policy varied from relatively lenient in the more “Aryan” regions of western and northern Europe to brutal, bestial, and mur- derous in the lands to the east populated by “inferior” Slavs, Jews, and other groups Nazi ideology defined as “subhuman.” In addition to the six million Jews deliberately and sys- tematically murdered in the Holocaust, the Nazis also murdered about six million others in its occupation of the eastern lands of Poland and Russia including homosexuals, political opponents, Slavs, “gypsies,” and the supposedly mentally defective.

German Occupation Policies in Western, Northern, and Central Europe

In states ruled by German allies, including Italy, Vichy (nonoccupied) France, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, existing rulers kept their places; but their policies, especially in terms of natural resources like oil, were subordinated to Nazi foreign policy goals. In Nor- way, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Baltics, and the portion of France under direct Nazi occupation during the early part of the war, the Germans installed puppet governments but maintained the existing civil service structure, and German pressure on ordinary life was generally fairly light. German restraint in these areas prevented the rise of serious resistance movements before 1943, when it became obvious that Germany was losing the war (Pauley, 2009).

For a period, the Nazis used Denmark as a showpiece for their rule. The existing civil service remained in place; the government, monarchy, and parliament seemed to operate independently; and reasonably free elections were even allowed in March 1943 (William- son, 2007). However, when the election produced a large anti-Nazi majority, the Germans cracked down and declared martial law.

Vichy France was more typical of the German satellite regimes, with opposition political parties and unions banned, public debate strictly limited, “exceptional tribunals” estab- lished to treat political dissidents, and anti-Semitic policies vigorously pursued. The Nazi satellite regime established in Croatia under Dr. Ante Pavelic was perhaps the most bru- tal: Pavelic’s forces, known as Nationalists, or Utashe, massacred thousands of Serbians and killed virtually all of Croatia’s Jews.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.3 The Nazi Empire

Although the Nazi regimes in Western and Central Europe were generally far less vicious than in Eastern Europe, German war goals still dominated and extensive shipments of raw materials and food were shipped off to the ruling power, either directly or through taxes. Early in the war, thousands of unemployed from these regions volunteered to work in Germany, but later the Nazis also conscripted labor from them. In all, Germany extracted almost 100 billion German Reichsmarks, or about 25 percent of its total military expenditures, from occupied Europe, including over 60 billion Reichsmarks from France, the Low Coun- tries, Denmark, and Norway. These extractions permitted living standards in Germany to remain high until very late in the war; for example, German industrial workers ate twice as much bread, three times as much meat, and seven times as many fats as did their French

counterparts (James, 2003). Although actual fam- ine was rare in German-controlled Western and Central Europe, food rationing was common, and many people relied on the black market to survive.

The Germans organized Nazi parties in all of the allied and occupied lands and recruited units to join the German fight, arguing that only Germany could save Europe from barbaric Bolshevik domi- nation, while a successful German victory would unite all of Europe in a reign of unity and happi- ness. Thus, volunteer units from a wide variety of German satellites and allies, including Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Hungary, and Spain, fought under German command on the eastern front. Every- where Germany predominated, the secret police maintained an extensive presence; and opposition to German control risked jail, torture, or death, especially among the generally small percent- age of the population that was involved in active resistance. Many of these countries also witnessed a heavy German troop presence. In November 1943, there were 486,000 German military in Nor- way and Denmark and another 612,000 in the Bal- kans (Pauley, 2009).

German Brutality in Eastern Europe

The war of annihilation reached its peak in Poland and Russia, which were populated by Slavs and Jews who the Germans called untermenschen (subhumans). Although at first, especially in minority regions of Russia such as the Ukraine and the Baltic States (which Russia had seized in accordance with the terms of the 1939 Russo-German Non- Aggression Pact), Germans were often welcomed as liberating forces from Soviet tyranny, their barbaric policies soon alienated the native populations and greatly complicated Nazi war plans. Millions of civilians were executed in cold blood, deported to concentration camps, or literally worked to death as slave labor. The Germans systematically looted raw

The Tricolor Legion recruited men in Vichy France to fight with the Germans against the Soviet Union. The slogan at the bottom reads, “Against Bolshevism. For France. For Europe.”

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.3 The Nazi Empire

materials and anything else of value, although this ultimately conflicted with their long-range plans for the region.

The ultimate end of Hitler ’s Eastern policy, which he described in mid-1941 as requiring the application of “such terror as to crush every will to resist,” was to ethnically “cleanse” Poland and Western Russia of its native population and to replace it with 250 million Germans and other “Aryans,” such as Norwegians and Dutch. Thus, he told his top advisors that the end result would be “to Germanize the country by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Red- skins” (Mazower, 2008, p. 144, 150). Hitler was, in fact, quite fond of referring to U.S. treatment of its native peoples as a precedent. Before Ger- many’s collapse, millions of Jews and Poles who had lived in Poland and western Russia were expelled or slaughtered, and about 800,000 eth- nic Germans were resettled into Poland. Among the victims were 10,000 mentally ill people, as well as at least 250,000 “gypsies” (also known as Roma and Sinti).

Hundreds of thousands of these murders took place not in concentration camps but in the open air by German army units and special execution squads, the so-called Einsatzgrup- pen (Special Operation Groups). One appalled German officer declared that guilt would fall on the Germans for a hundred years “and not just on Hitler alone, but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and my children, the woman crossing the road now and the boy playing with a ball over there” (Williamson, 2002, p. 5). Hans Frank, the head of the occupation regime established by the Nazis, recalled how while visiting occupied Prague, he noted with surprise the large red posters that had been hung announcing that seven Czechs had been shot, since, “If I wanted to hang a poster for every seven Poles that were shot then all the forests in Poland would not suffice in order to produce the paper necessary” (Mazower, 2008, p. 75).

In Belorussia, an estimated 25 percent of the population died under the German occu- pation regime, which also burned down almost 10,000 villages. German forces treated Russian POWS with unremitting brutality and systematically starved or worked them to death, with the result that of 4 million Russian prisoners taken by February 1942, only about 1 million survived. More Russian prisoners died each day in German captivity than American and British prisoners during the entire war (Mazower, 2008). Overall, the Ger- man treatment of Soviet prisoners of war was so brutal that over half of the Soviet soldiers captured died in captivity; this compared to 4 percent of British and U.S. prisoners who died while prisoners of the Germans, and fewer than 25 percent of German war prisoners who died in Soviet captivity (McCauley, 2003).

Non-Jewish Poles were also deemed “sub- human” by the Nazis and were designated to be eliminated immediately or turned into a slave labor force. In this picture, a German soldier murders a Polish civilian.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.4 The Holocaust/The Shoah

4.4 The Holocaust/The Shoah

Aside from Adolph Hitler himself, probably no aspect of Nazi Germany or World War II has been the subject of greater scholarly and popular attention than the Holocaust, the systematic attempt by the Nazis to kill all the Jews of Europe. (More recently, the Hebrew word for the cataclysm, Shoah, has been increasingly used in Eng- lish.) Although a small band of Holocaust-deniers exists, no serious person can doubt the basic facts about it, which are supported by thousands of eyewitness accounts, hundreds of scholarly books, and literally tons of physical evidence. One need only visit the largest of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish), preserved today as a museum where visitors can see with their own eyes piles of eyeglasses, heaps of human hair, and mountains of suitcases brought there by those who arrived but never left alive, and whose ashes remain mixed today with the local soil.

Although the exact figures will never be known, the scholarly consensus is that the Nazis succeeded in killing about two thirds of European Jewry, or approximately six million of the roughly nine million Jews living in Europe at the beginning of World War II. These included about three million Polish Jews (from a total of 3.3 million), 1.5 million Russian Jews (from a total of 3.1 million), 300,000 Hungarian Jews (from a total of about 600,000), 210,000 Austrian and German Jews (from a total of 240,000 remaining at the beginning of World War II), and about 60,000 of the total of 70,000 Greek Jews (Richards & Waibel, 2005). The wartime Nazi-allied regimes of Croatia and Romania also engaged independently in murdering many of their Jewish citizens.

German execution squads shot over a million Jews, mostly in Poland and Russia, including 33,000 alone at Babi Yar ravine, outside of Kiev in the Ukraine. Most of the others were killed in specially constructed extermination camps, of which Auschwitz was the largest and most notorious. Along with its nearby sub-camp, Birkenau, it had the capacity to house 130,000 prisoners and was the site of about one million deaths, including about 300,000 in May and June, 1944, alone (Mazower, 2008). Other top-secret death camps, all in Poland, included

Chelmno, Belsek, Majdanek, Sobi- bor, and Treblinka, all of which, like Auschwitz, the Germans built with gas chambers and crematoria to first murder the victims and then dispose of the remains. (Unlike the others, which were built as extermi- nation camps from the beginning, Auschwitz was originally built as a labor camp, and the extermination facility was added later. This is the main reason that we have so much testimony from Auschwitz; at the other five camps, virtually no one survived to tell the tale.)

Managers made every attempt to run these extermination camps, and scores of other forced labor camps, as productive enterprises, so they

Jewish prisoners arriving at Auschwirz-Birkenau, probably in 1944. Those who were not chosen to work were sent to the gas chambers. They would be dead within hours.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.4 The Holocaust/The Shoah

collected everything of any value from the doomed and, whenever possible, recycled it. Clothing was distributed to bombed-out Germans, and gold teeth, which were extracted before the bodies were burned, were melted down and re-used. Before they led the doomed to the gas chambers, workers told them they were being taken to the showers, whereupon the doors to the chambers were sealed and poison gas was introduced through ceiling vents. The entire process, from arrival at the camp train station to cleaning out the gas chamber after killing the new arrivals, took less than two hours.

The Nazis murdered three million Jews in the gas chambers, and they worked or starved to death another one to two million under occupa- tion regimes or in slave labor or extermination camps. At Auschwitz and some other camps, Nazi doctors led by Joseph Megele, conducted horrific “medical” experiments on living prison- ers. Finally, another 250,000 to 350,000 died in the “death marches” that took place as the Germans retreated from Poland and forced the Jews in the camps there to leave with them.

In Their Own Words: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)

The only thing we had in our favour in Sobibor, which other camps didn’t have, I don’t know about Treblinka and Belzec, that they didn’t shave our hair, the inmates, and that we could take clean clothes from the transports, and change and we could wash ourselves.

And I think this was keeping ourselves clean wasn’t so dehumanising that people had in other camps with the dirt and filth. . . .

We were hungry. Not enough, sometimes we stole something from the transport, the people used to bring bread or, whatever, but there that was very risky, because most of the time when we walked to the barracks from the working place, they used to check us.

. . . the main thing that we could keep ourselves clean, and that’s why we had the courage and that will to do something, because when you’re way down physically, and filthy and dirty and shaven and this, you give up very fast, but I feel that kept us going.

(www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/raab.html)

Esther Raab was born in Chelmno, Poland, in 1922. She arrived at the Sobibor extermination camp in December 1943. In an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1992, she described what made it possible to resist the dehumanization that was so central to the experience of the Jews who were sent to the camps.

The Jewish inmates of Sobibor rebelled in October 1943, the only instance of such a revolt in the extermination camps. Esther Raab helped plan the uprising. Some 300 prisoners managed to escape; of these, only fifty or so were alive at the end of the war. Raab was one of them.

To explore the Holocaust Memorial Museum online, please visit www.ushmm.org.

Some Jews were spared immediate execution and were used as slave labor. In concentration camps such as Auschwitz, that were not only extermination camps, there were also political prisoners who worked as laborers.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.4 The Holocaust/The Shoah

Controversies About the Holocaust

If the basic facts about the Holocaust are well known, the scale and horror of these events nonetheless make any account of them seem unbelievable and unfathomable, especially since many key aspects remain in dispute among scholars. For instance, was the Holo- caust—which could be carried out under the cover of war’s chaos—part of a master plan in Hitler’s mind from the beginning of his rise to power? Or was it primarily a product of World War II, especially related to the Nazi desire to create lebensraum in Poland and Russia for future German settlers? Did Hitler personally approve of the Holocaust, or was it undertaken by high-level Nazi functionaries who had every reason to believe that he would have approved of it? At the time it occurred, was knowledge of the Holocaust widespread, especially among Germans, or did only the personnel directly involved in administering the death camps know about it?

Hitler’s Racism and Nazi Anti-Semitism before 1941 The argument that the Holocaust was a long-planned program by Hitler is primarily based on his well-known racial obsessions, combined with the fact that it was preceded long before the outbreak of the war by a long series of incremental forms of discrimination against German Jews. One can therefore quite logically view the Holocaust as a culminat- ing stage. (The Nazis themselves euphemistically referred to the Holocaust as the “final solution to the Jewish question.”) However, the Germans did not undertake a systematic attempt to kill, as opposed to grossly discriminate against, German and other European Jews before 1941. The fact that mass killings began in 1941 is consistent with either an interpretation that Hitler planned the Holocaust all along but waited for the war to begin to undertake it in a manner that could largely be hidden, or that it was related to the long- range planning for German lebensraum in Poland and Western Russia, and was seen as the most efficient path to those ends, one which would not have been “necessary” in the absence of German conquests during the war.

Racism was at the basis of all of Hitler’s thoughts and philosophy. In his view, the “Aryan” (Germanic) races were the highest form of humanity, while Jews were literally subhuman parasites whose only contributions were to infect the world and to undermine German racial purity. But although they were supposedly subhuman, Hitler also believed that the Jews, who constituted less than 1 percent of the German population during the 1930s, somehow controlled Germany’s culture, politics, and economy and were simultaneously responsible for the ravages of both Bolshevism and capitalism (even though these two systems were fundamental enemies of each other). Jews were in fact greatly overrepre- sented in business and the professions, but any claim that Jews controlled German soci- ety was complete fantasy (Pauley, 2009; Friedlander, 1997). Moreover, most German Jews were thoroughly assimilated and secular, and many were strong nationalists who viewed themselves as Germans first and Jews second. Nonetheless, at least as early as the mid- 1920s, Hitler wrote that eliminating the Jews from German life was the only solution to this “problem.” But he never explicitly advocated mass murder, and no existing docu- ments show his approval or initiation of the Holocaust.

However, German Jews experienced severe discrimination even before the outbreak of World War II (as, subsequently, did Jews in lands annexed to or allied with Germany). Soon after the Nazis came to power in early 1933, they excluded Jews from the German civil service and dismissed them from numerous positions in academia, the professions,

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.4 The Holocaust/The Shoah

and cultural institutions, although exceptions were sometimes made for those who had served in World War I or whose parents had been killed in the war. Jewish quotas were imposed for schools and universities, and Jews were completely banned from agriculture. Jewish authors were among the primary targets of the notorious mass book burnings organized in university towns across Germany on May 10, 1933. (About a century earlier, the great German poet Heinrich Heine had predicted, “Where books are burned, there in the end men will be burned too.”) The notorious 1935 Nuremberg laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and barred them from marrying “Aryans” or having sexual relations with them. The fundamental purpose of such treatment was to force Jews to emigrate, a policy that proved highly successful: By 1940 the German Jewish population declined by more than half from its 1930s total of about 525,000, and among those fleeing scores of distinguished scholars including Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein.

On November 9 and 10, 1938, the so-called Kristallnacht (night of broken glass), almost 20,000 synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses across Germany and Austria were physically attacked, looted, and/or burned, by organized groups of Nazis. Almost 100 Jews were killed, and nearly 30,000 were sent to concentration camps. After Kristallnacht, the persecution of Jews became more intense. All Jewish children were expelled from public schools, and Jews were forbidden from opening new businesses. Soon after, Jews were barred from public parks and beaches and from attending public cultural events such as concerts and the theater. They could not own cars or use public phones. Many of these anti-Semitic decrees were echoed in Italy, Croatia, France, Hungary, and Romania, in some cases primarily as a means of pleasing Hitler. Mussolini, for instance, only intro- duced anti-Semitic legislation in 1938, sixteen years after coming to power (Pauley, 2009). Following the German occupation of Poland in 1939, all Jews there were required to wear the Jewish star (a requirement imposed upon German Jews in September, 1941) and were ordered to move into especially established “Jewish residential quarters” (ghettos) in Pol- ish cities.

As late as 1940, however, documents indicate that the Nazis were seriously considering sending all European Jews to Madagascar. This is one of the key arguments against the position that the Holocaust was preordained from the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power. Thus, on May 25, 1940, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, who would supervise the Holocaust, wrote that he hoped that “Jews will be completely extinguished” through “large-scale emigration” to “Africa or some other colony” (Engel, 2000). The Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941 appears to have marked the critical turning point in the adoption of a policy of mass murder of the Jews, as it brought three million more Jews under German control. They became targets in the Nazis’ ideological struggle against communism, a system that they interpreted as a Jewish bid for world power (Williamson, 2002).

By this time the Ghettos had become unspeakably overcrowded. In Warsaw, 450,000 Jews were jammed into 1.3 square miles, with an average of more than seven people per avail- able room (Engel, 2000). They became the primary source for deportations to Auschwitz and the other death camps, and the Nazis pressured their allies to send “their” Jews to the East. Most German allies and occupied countries, including France, Norway, the Neth- erlands, Slovakia, and Croatia cooperated eagerly, but local resistance saved the lives of almost all Danish Jews by arranging for their secret departure for neutral Sweden. Both Hungary, which was involved in secret talks with the Allies, and Italy refused to turn over their Jewish citizens to the Nazis. The Hungarians paid for this refusal when Germany occupied the country in March 1944 and began to deport Hungarian Jews soon after.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.4 The Holocaust/The Shoah

Hitler and the “Paper Trail” of the Holocaust The historical controversy as to whether or not Hitler personally approved of or initiated the Holocaust results from the fact that the “paper trail” leading to the creation of the death camps is extremely incomplete and Hitler’s signature does not appear on any of the key documents. The clearest references to the Holocaust resulted from a meeting of top Nazi officials (not including Hitler) at Wannsee, outside Berlin, in January 1942. The conference minutes refer to the “coming final solution of the Jewish question” and note that as part of that solution, healthy young Jews would be used for forced labor, “dur- ing which a large proportion will no doubt drop out through natural reduction,” while among the surviving remnant “suitable treatment” would insure against the persistence of a physically resistant strain that “could, on its release, become the germ of a new Jewish revival” (Engel, 2000, p. 57). Although historians generally agree that “suitable treatment” here refers to the gas chambers, which were already under construction (or, in the case of Chelmno, in operation), nonetheless as historian David Engel notes, “to date no document has been found that refers explicitly to a mass murder plan in a way that leaves no room for conflicting interpretations,” and therefore it is “impossible to determine with certainty when mass murder became the regime’s preferred course of action towards Jews or where within the regime the initiative for mass murder originated” (Engel, 2000, p. 32).

Under these circumstances, of course, no document has explicitly tied Hitler to the Holo- caust, aside from vague passing references in some of his speeches and interviews, such as his widely publicized early 1939 statement to the German Reichstag that “if the interna- tional Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed” in bringing about a world war, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” (Engel, 2000, p. 31). Despite the lack of such documentation, everything we know about Hitler and the opera- tion of the Third Reich tells us that it is inconceivable that the Holocaust would have occurred without, at the least, Hitler’s approval. To quote from two historians of the holo- caust, “At the very least it must have been obvious to Hitler’s followers and officials that he favored such policies,” and “it has become increasingly clear that without Hitler’s insistence that a way be found to eliminate what his world-view taught him was the mor- tal danger Jews posed to humanity, the destructive process that can be identified in hind- sight would never have been set in motion” (Williamson, 2007, p. 397; Engel, 2000, p. 37).

Hitler’s personal approval was obtained during the early days of World War II for a program of extermination of the mentally disabled, a program that some scholars see as foreshadowing the Holocaust. Sterilization of the handicapped had been undertaken by Germany beginning in 1933 and was then fairly common in the Western world, including the United States. In Germany, highly disabled persons were labeled by the Nazis as “life unworthy of life,” and Hitler approved a program of “euthanasia,” or “mercy killing,” with regard to them in an October 1939 letter that declared that those who are “consid- ered incurable can be granted mercy death after a discerning diagnosis.” About 70,000 to 80,000 people were killed under this program, referred to by the code T4, before it was halted in August 1941 after it was publicly denounced by a leading cleric (James, 2003).

Who Knew About the Holocaust? Like the other controversies surrounding the Holocaust, the question of the extent to which ordinary Germans knew about it will likely never be completely settled. Certainly

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 The Axis in Retreat

any reasonably well-informed German was aware of the anti-Semitic measures taken by Nazi Germany during the 1930s, as well as Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and the Nazis’ racial obsessions. Moreover, it has become increasingly clear that far more Germans were personally involved in mass murders of the Jews of Poland and Western Russia than just those who helped to administer the death camps. The shootings that preceded the camps were undertaken by regular police and army units as well as by the Einsatzgruppen, with many thousands of Germans involved as either executioners or witnesses.

Nonetheless, this hardly proves that the mass of ordinary Germans were aware of such events. A far more reasonable assessment is that many, many Germans heard rumors about the Holocaust but either refused to believe the rumors or did not know what to think and that, in general, most non-Jewish Germans were more indifferent to the plight of the Jews than enthusiastically anti-Semitic (Friedlander, 1997).

Indifference or puzzlement was probably the primary reaction of many people outside of Germany as well. Enough reports about the Holocaust reached the West that on Decem- ber 17, 1942, a joint Allied declaration referred to reliable reports that German authori- ties “are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe” and warned that those responsible would “not escape retribution” and the “necessary practical measures to this end” would be undertaken (James, 2003, p. 196). Despite this highly publicized statement, most non-Germans were shocked to learn about the death camps when Nazi regime collapsed at the end of the war, and the western Allies (despite appeals from Jewish leaders to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz) took no specific measures aimed at preventing further mass slaughter of the Jews. Simi- larly, most countries refused to take substantial numbers of Jewish refugees before the war despite their knowledge of the increasing discrimination they faced in Germany.

Jewish Resistance

It is important to recognize that some European Jews did attempt to resist the Holocaust. There were some Jewish guerrilla groups scattered throughout Europe, but the most sig- nificant act of resistance, and the first act of armed resistance to the Germans in a con- quered city, was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In January 1943, the Germans decided to “liquidate” the Warsaw ghetto. The ghetto’s small Jewish Fighting Organization fought back and forced the Germans to withdraw. They returned with a larger force in April, but the Jewish resistance, which received some weapons from the underground Polish Home Army, held out for a month. In the end, 56,000 people surrendered; they were either shot on the spot or sent to concentration camps.

4.5 The Axis in Retreat

Their defense of Stalingrad cost the Soviets 2.5 million casualties, but it was also the turning point in the war in Europe. From this point on, the Germans fought a defen-sive war. The tide of the war in the Pacific had turned earlier. Japan’s defeat at the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in the spring of 1942 began a long period of retreat that lasted until the end of the war in August 1945.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 The Axis in Retreat

The Red Army Moves West

After Stalingrad, the Red Army began an offensive on all fronts. They had a four-to-one manpower advantage and were well equipped with tanks, planes, and trucks, including many from the U.S. Lend-Lease program. In August 1943, the Germans tried a counter- offensive at Kursk; it failed and from that point on the Soviet advance was unstoppable. Hitler prohibited his commanders from undertaking planned retreats, so from August 1943 to June 1944, combat on the eastern front fell into a standard pattern: The Soviets would launch offensives at various points along the front, plunging German mobile units into a continual state of crisis (Parker, 1997).

Italy Leaves the War

Of the three Axis powers, Italy was the weakest and its war ended first. Italy had been fighting Great Britain in North Africa since it entered the war; the United States and Ger- many both joined the campaign later on. The Allies were able to take the offensive in late 1942 and, after pushing combined Italian and German forces out of North Africa, they invaded Sicily in July 1943. This provoked a coup against Mussolini, who was arrested. When the Allies landed on the Italian mainland in September, the government asked for an armistice. The Allies had planned to reach Rome by October, but a stubborn German defense kept them out of the capital until June 4, 1944. The Germans, turned from allies into occupiers, began to exploit Italian resources and the Italian people as they did those of the other countries they occupied.

D-Day

The Allied invasion of France, Operation OVERLORD, finally took place in June 1944. Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill had agreed in 1942 on the need for the British and Ameri- cans to open a second front in France to relieve the pressure on the Red Army, and Sta-

lin came to believe that they were deliberately delaying. The landing itself, in Normandy in northwest- ern France, was preceded by more than 200,000 bombing missions by the British and U.S. air forces. On June 6, the hugely complex opera- tion involving 8,000 ships, 11,600 planes, 23,000 paratroopers, and 130,000 troops began. The Ger- mans had prepared by strength- ening their “Atlantic Wall” of concrete fortifications, dropping 2.5 million land mines, and mov- ing their best troops to France. The landing was costly—there were 9,000 casualties—but successful.

U.S. troops wade toward Omaha Beach during the Allied invasion of France.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 The Axis in Retreat

Once they had a foothold on the continent, the Allies began to push eastwards. Fierce Ger- man resistance made the Allied advance very slow, but it did not reverse the tide (Zeiler, 2011). Hitler did launch one final offensive on the western front in December 1944, but the Allies defeated his forces at the Battle of the Bulge.

Warsaw In conjunction with the Allied landing, the Red Army began a massive offensive on June 22, 1944. It was soon on the outskirts of the Polish capital, Warsaw. At the end of July, groups loyal to the Polish government in exile led an uprising against the occupying Germans. The Soviets, who had created their own Polish Committee of National Libera- tion, were not keen to support this rival political force; after initially doing nothing to help the rebels, they allowed the Allies to air drop supplies into the city and permitted some of their own Polish supporters to try and relieve it. This was far from sufficient, and after a few weeks, the Germans defeated the Poles and remained in control of the city. Rather than try to defend Warsaw against the Red Army, they evacuated the city and then leveled it.

The Invasion of Germany As the U.S. and British armies fought through France, the Red Army pushed the Germans back from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The Soviets defeated Romania in August 1944 and Bulgaria in September. They invaded Hungary, but took Budapest only in February 1945. By January 1945, the Allies were on the eastern and western borders of Germany.

The invasion of Germany began in February, and by the middle of April much of the coun- try was in Allied hands. On April 16, the Soviet assault on Berlin began. U.S. and Soviet forces met up at Torgau, south of Berlin, on April 26. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide, though German forces held out until May 2 (Figure 4.6). The new German authorities tried to get U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces, to accept a conditional surrender but, in line with the United Nations Declaration, he refused. Finally, on May 8, what became known as Victory in Europe (VE) Day, the Germans surrendered uncondi- tionally. Stalin insisted on a sepa- rate surrender ceremony to his forces in Berlin the next day. The fighting was not quite over: The final combat in Europe took place between Soviet and German forces in Czechoslovakia on May 11. The last German government, headed by Admiral Karl Dönitz and located in the town of Flens- burg, surrendered on May 23.

A Red Army soldier waves the Soviet flag over the German parliament building in Berlin, May 2, 1945.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 The Axis in Retreat

Surrender May 7 & 9, 1945 Allied Attack Routes

Front Line 1942

Territory held by Germany at Surrender

May 7 and 9, 1945 0 400

MILES

N

S

EW

Corsica

Sicily Sardinia

SOVIET UNION

SPAIN

IRELAND GREAT BRITAIN

BELGIUM

SWEDEN

FRANCE

SWITZERLAND

GREECE

TURKEY

BULGARIA

NORWAY

DENMARK

GENERAL GOUVERNEMENT

CROATIA

HUNGARY

NETHERLANDS

SLOVAKIA

GREATER GERMANY

ALBANIA

SERBIA

ROMANIA

FINLAND

ITA LY

Atlantic Ocean

Black Sea

Mediterranean Sea

North Sea

S

S

S S

S

S

This map illustrates the Allied campaigns that led to the defeat of Germany in May 1945. The Soviet Red Army covered much more territory in pushing the Germans back from their point of maximum advance.

Figure 4.6: The defeat of Nazi Germany, 1942–1945

Japan in Retreat

The Japanese advance came to a halt with two naval battles in the spring of 1942: the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4–8) and the Battle of Midway (June 4–7). The first of these battles introduced a new type of naval warfare conducted entirely by aircraft (Parker, 1997). The Allies quickly followed up these victories by going on the offensive. The Battle of Guadal- canal (August 7, 1942–February 9, 1943) was the beginning of the long, hard-fought naval and land campaigns that eventually pushed the Japanese out of the Philippines, Burma, and Borneo in 1944 and 1945. Strategic bombing of Japan itself began in November 1944. The Allies made their first landings in the Japanese home islands, on Iwo Jima in February 1945 and on Okinawa in April 1945.

Faced with invasion and saturation bombing of its major cities, including Tokyo, the Jap- anese government refused to surrender. In this context, President Harry Truman made the decision to drop the recently developed atomic bomb on Japan. The first bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6. At this point, the Soviet Union, which had not been involved in the war in the Pacific, declared war on Japan and invaded

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Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in north- ern China. On August 9, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender in a radio broadcast on August 15. The official end of the war, V-J Day, came on Sep- tember 2, when the Japanese signed the Instru- ment of Surrender.

Allied War Aims

World War II ended very differently from World War I. There was no armistice; there was no peace conference, and there were no treaties. In 1945, the victorious Allies demanded and received uncon- ditional surrender and then imposed their post- war plans on Germany and Japan. These plans had been developed at a number of conferences among Allied leaders between 1943 and 1945.

Casablanca, Quebec, and Cairo During 1943, the Allies held several conferences to plan their strategy. The first, attended by Churchill and Roosevelt, was held in Casablanca in January. Here they decided to undertake systematic day and night aerial bombing to destroy and dislocate the German war machine, as well as undermine the German people’s morale. Churchill and Roosevelt, joined by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, next met in Quebec City in August. At this meeting they began to discuss the future invasion of France, which would become Operation Overlord. Churchill and Roosevelt also signed a secret agree- ment to share nuclear technology.

At Cairo in November, President Chiang Kai-Shek of China joined the U.S. and British leaders to discuss the war in Asia. The Cairo Communiqué (December 1, 1943) repeated the intention to achieve the unconditional surrender of Japan. It also stated that Japan would lose all the territories in the Pacific it had taken by force since 1914, as well as all territory it had taken from China, and that Korea would become independent “in due course.”

Moscow In October 1944, Churchill met with Stalin in Moscow. The main item of business was to allot spheres of influence in southeastern Europe. Churchill recognized Soviet predomi- nance in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary in return for British predominance in Greece.

The “Big Three” The leaders of the three major Allied powers—Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—did not all meet together until November 1943, when they gathered at

The mushroom cloud that rose 20,000 feet over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, heralded a new weapon of unprecedented destructiveness.

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Teheran. They had two other meetings before the end of the war, and these gatherings were crucial in determining both military strategy and the future shape of Europe.

The Teheran Conference The first time that the “Big Three”—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—met together was at Teheran from November 28 to December 1, 1943. Stalin insisted that the invasion of France be launched in the spring of 1944; Roosevelt and Churchill agreed. They also began to discuss the shape of Europe after the war and, at Stalin’s insistence, set the postwar bor- ders of Poland. Finally, even though Stalin was reluctant to do so, they agreed in principle to create a new international organization, the United Nations.

The Yalta Conference The second and most important meeting of the Big Three took place in Yalta, in the Soviet Union, from February 4 to 11, 1945, just before the final invasion of Ger- many began. The main topic was how to deal with Germany once it had surrendered unconditionally. The plan was to divide it into three occupation zones, one for each of the Allies, and to divide Berlin the same way. (Stalin agreed that France too could have a zone but only if it came out of British and American territory.) Germany would then be demilitarized and denazified, and it would pay repa- rations, some of which would be in the form of forced labor. Stalin insisted that Poland’s borders be shifted west, with the Soviet Union taking the eastern part of prewar Poland with compensation to come from German territory. Stalin agreed to join the United Nations, although there were questions surrounding voting rights; he wanted all sixteen republics of the Soviet Union to be admitted as members, something Churchill and Roosevelt opposed. Finally, he told Roosevelt that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan three months after Germany surrendered.

The Potsdam Conference The last of the conferences took place in Potsdam, near Berlin, between July 16 and August 2, 1945. Harry Truman was now the President of the United States, and after the conference started, Churchill was replaced by Clement Atlee of the Labour Party as British Prime Min- ister. The main topic of the conference was defining the treatment of Germany, which had surrendered on May 8. Much of the overall approach had been decided at Yalta, but not the details. Germany, Berlin, and Vienna were to be divided into zones of occupation. Germany was to be subject to demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization, and

At the Yalta conference, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin made some of the most important decisions about the shape of postwar Europe.

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decartelization; and German war criminals were to be prosecuted. Germans living in terri- tory outside the country’s new borders were to be expelled, and the amount of reparations Germany was to pay were defined.

Poland was also a key topic. The country’s new borders were confirmed. In a compromise between Soviet and U.S./British positions, the country would initially be governed by a Provisional Government of National Unity, a coalition of the Polish government in exile and the Polish Communists.

4.6 World War II and Total War

World War II was even more of a total war than World War I had proven to be, affecting as it did all sectors of societies and wreaking far more civilian havoc, largely due to the extensive bombing of cities by both sides; Germany’s rapa- cious plundering and often murderous occupation policies, especially in Poland and western Russia; and by the fact that far more fighting occurred inside major cities, including Stalingrad, Warsaw, Budapest, and Berlin. World War II also produced even greater mobilizations of the home fronts and significantly greater technological developments than had World War I.

Organizing for War: The Home Fronts

By 1942, Germany, Britain, Russia, the United States, and Japan had converted or begun to con- vert their economies to a fulltime war basis. Total war meant, among other things, that governments funneled money and resources into war-oriented heavy industries and conscripted labor for the war and war-related employment. Women undertook employment on a massive scale, including in many industries that had previously excluded them.

Germany Apparently because Hitler expected that Russia would quickly collapse following the launching of Operation Barbarossa, he relied on the substantial military buildup that Germany had undertaken since the mid-1930s combined with a policy of plundering the occupied lands for foodstuffs, natural resources, and labor and obtaining materials from officially neutral countries such as Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden.

Once it was clear the Russian campaign would be a prolonged one, Hitler realized the need for coordinated wartime economic planning. Direction for this was given to his favorite architect, Albert Speer. Under Speer’s leadership, the production of military equipment

This English woman working in a tank factory was one of many women in all combatant countries who were employed in jobs that were closed to them before the war and would be closed again when it ended.

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increased massively. Thus, the number of planes produced increased from 11,000 in 1941 to almost 40,000 in 1944, and tanks increased from about 4,000 to almost 20,000 in the same period (Pauley, 2009). Despite the use of millions of prisoners of war and conscripted workers from the occupied lands (by 1944 over seven million foreign workers labored in Germany), the nation suffered from such severe labor shortages that in early 1943 Hitler decreed that all men between 16 and 65 and all women between 17 and 45 were obliged to register for war work. Nazi officials also had the authority to close all nonessential indus- tries and assign their employees for military-related work (James, 2003; Williamson, 2002). Foreign workers from lands the Nazis deemed to be relatively “Aryan,” such as Belgium and France, were treated reasonably well, but conscript workers from “inferior” lands such as Russia and Poland toiled in conditions that resembled slave labor.

Massive Allied bombing together with growing shortages of transport, raw material, and laborers led to a substantial decline in German consumer and military production by late 1944. Until then, German living standards had remained largely untouched, with produc- tion of consumer goods in 1943 at 90 percent of the prewar level, at least partly due to Ger- many’s extensive use of the forced labor of foreign workers and prisoners of war (Pauley, 2009). By late 1944 German cities were subjected to round-the-clock bombing, including the approach known as area bombing, which did not attempt to hit precisely defined tar- gets of military importance. Altogether, it is estimated that 300,000 Germans were killed and 750,000 seriously wounded by Allied bombing, while an estimated 11 million women, children, and elderly men were moved to rural areas by 1943–1944 (Stromberg, 1988). Another four to five million Germans fled to Germany from German-occupied territory in the east to avoid the Russian advance after late 1944, of whom an estimated 600,000 died in the process.

Italy Italy’s history during World War II is largely the story of one military disaster after another, at least substantially because the government failed to mobilize its people for the war effort (Finaldi, 2008). Alone among the major powers, Italy did not completely reorient its economy on a wartime basis, so that by the early 1940s only 23 percent of Italian gross domestic production was dedicated to the war, compared to 64 percent, 52 percent, and 61 percent for Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union, respectively. Due to the incompe- tence of the Fascist regime, Italian industrial production actually declined by 35 percent between 1940 and 1943 (Pauley, 2009).

Italian forces did not do well in the field and often had to be bailed out by Germany. These developments naturally led to growing unrest in the country, especially as Mussolini’s health and concentration seriously deteriorated. Adding to Italy’s miseries was the Allied bombing campaign, which contributed to serious food shortages (leading, in some cases to riots and strikes in 1942–1943), growing casualties among Italian troops fighting in Rus- sia, and the successful Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943.

On the night of July 24, 1943, the Fascist Grand Council met and asked King Victor Emman- uel III to remove Mussolini, which he did the following day. Mussolini was arrested, although two months later he was rescued by a unit of German paratroopers and restored as head of the so-called “Republic of Salò” in northern Italy, a German puppet regime entirely lacking in popular support.

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Great Britain Britain’s normal dependence upon other countries for food required the quick adoption of controls of imports and exports at the start of the war. The government allocated scarce resources to industry and also, for morale reasons, limited profits and rationed goods. Conscription was introduced in late 1941, with all men from 18 to 50 and all women from 20 to 30 subject to either civilian or military service (this was later expanded via a so-called “grandmother” clause to women as old as 50). By 1943, women composed over 35 percent of the workforce (a figure exceeded by Germany’s 51 percent) (Williamson, 2007).

Perhaps the most important home-front wartime development in Britain was the coming to power of Winston Churchill as prime minister in May of 1940. Churchill, like Prime Min- ister Neville Chamberlain, whom he replaced, was a Conservative, but he had opposed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler. Churchill was unambiguously committed to an unyielding prosecution of the war. He maintained an astounding degree of physical energy and repeatedly succeeded in rallying the English people for battle with his extraordinarily eloquent command of the English language. Thus, when British pilots succeeded in defeat- ing German plans for bombing England into surrender in the so-called “Battle of Britain,” Churchill declared that “never was so much owed by so many to so few.” Churchill reor- ganized the war cabinet and turned over direction of the economy to a small group known as the Lord President’s Committee. Although the bombing and rationing imposed severe hardships on the British people, they bore them with good grace largely due to a combina- tion of Churchillian rhetoric and the perception that sacrifices were being shared equally. Millions of English were evacuated to rural areas or shared nightly vigils in the subway stations to avoid the bombings, experiences that reinforced this sense of common sacrifice.

The Soviet Union Although Stalin had increased his army from 1.4 million to 3.4 million between 1937 and 1941, most of the benefits of this increase were lost by the massive purges of the 1930s, which claimed large numbers of senior military officers, removing most of the Red Army’s experienced leadership. Moreover, although Stalin believed that a Nazi invasion of Russia was just a matter of time and was repeatedly warned by his own intelligence services and by the Western Allies that Hitler was planning to invade Russia in mid-1941, he bizarrely failed to make plans for either a defensive or offensive war. He even dismantled some of Russia’s defensive fortifications on her western frontier in hopes of not giving Hitler any excuse to feel that Russia was not honoring their pact. He also continued to ship Hitler vital raw materials while ignoring clear signs of a German military buildup on Russia’s frontier. Those who urged that plans be made for a strategic withdrawal in case of a Nazi invasion were treated as traitors.

After a few weeks of what seemed like paralysis, Stalin recovered his nerve and began to organize a program of unyielding resistance. The Red Army followed a “scorched earth” policy where land was yielded to the Nazis but they could not use the resources, and, in an amazing feat of engineering, the Soviets dismantled huge numbers of industrial plants and moved and rebuilt them in the Russian interior. The entire population was mobilized for the war effort, with appeals to Marxist-Leninist philosophy and love for Stalin down- played in favor of stressing the need to defend the Russian soil, people, heritage, and homeland. In the Soviet Union, the war became the “Great Patriotic War.” The Soviets built 30,000 bombers and about 100,000 tanks during the war and outproduced the Germans in

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.6 World War II and Total War

every category of weapons, producing, for example, twice as many rifles and sub-machine guns. The Soviet Union also received equipment from the United States’ Lend-Lease pro- gram, including about 17,500 aircraft, 20,000 tanks, and more than a million trucks (Strom- berg, 1988; McCauley, 2003). Overall production increased from 59 percent of 1940 GDP in 1942 to 79 percent in 1944, despite the loss of about half of the Russian population and one third of productive capacity to the German advance by November 1941.

Warfare and Nazi depredations combined to kill a vast number of Soviet citizens. Stalin added to his nation’s misery by often shooting or deporting to labor camps returned POWs, who were viewed as traitors, and deporting to the east an estimated 3.3 million ethnic Rus- sian minorities such as the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars, whom he did not trust (McCauley, 2003). Nonetheless, Stalin’s brutal- ity could not compare with Hitler’s, and perhaps the single greatest fac- tor that spurred the Soviet war effort was the popular reaction against massive German atrocities during its occupation of Soviet lands. This was reflected in the fact that almost one million Russian women fought on the front lines, including as fighter pilots, not to mention their massive contributions behind the lines (Williamson, 2007).

Technology and Warfare

World War II was shaped by new technologies. In some cases, such as with airplanes and tanks, this meant improving weapons that had already been used in previous wars. In others, such as with rockets and the atomic bomb, there were totally new breakthroughs. The nature of the developments in military technology shifted strategies and tactics from defense to offense. A motorized war of motion in which armies advanced great distances very quickly replaced the static trenches that defined World War I. Military men also developed new tac- tics to use these new weapons to best effect. The German blitzkrieg, which combined planes, tanks, and sophisticated radio communications, was only the most outstanding example (Zeiler, 2011). Blitzkrieg did have one major drawback: It worked brilliantly over small dis- tances but could not be sustained across the vast expanse of the Soviet Union.

Airpower Airplanes made their debut in World War I but only as marginally used weapons. During World War II they became central. The technology had developed very rapidly in only twenty years. Fighter planes, such as the Germans’ Messerschmidt and the Americans’ Mustang, were faster, more maneuverable and had greater range than their predecessors. Bombers such as the British Avro-Lancaster and the U.S. Boeing B-17 had great range and could carry large numbers of bombs. The B-17 was known as the “Flying Fortress,” because it also carried gunners who could defend it against enemy fighter planes.

The Soviet mobilization of the home front included moving its heavy industry away from the front and creating new factories such as this one in the cliffs near Sebastopol. Notice the women working in the foreground.

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With their size and ability to cover large distances, these modern planes made possible a new military tactic: strategic bombing. The Germans had experimented with this during the Spanish Civil War (see chapter 3), but during World War II it became a major part of military strategy, particularly for the Allies.

The British, in particular, focused on the aerial bombing of Germany. Their preferred approach was to attack at night and use “area bombing,” which meant dropping large numbers of bombs without any attempt to hit specific targets. The United States pre- ferred daytime precision bombing of selected targets. The Combined Bomber Offensive announced at the Casablanca Conference called for both methods. The result was the complete destruction of numerous German cities and the creation of firestorms, extremely intense fires that draw in winds that supply more oxygen to feed the flames. According to one survivor in Hamburg,

children were torn away from their parents’ hands by the force of the hur- ricane and hurled into the fire. People who thought they had escaped fell down, overcome by the devouring force of the heat and died in an instant. Refugees had to make their way over the dead and the dying. The sick and infirm had to be left behind as they themselves were in danger of burning. . . . Posterity can only bow its head in honor of the fate of these innocents, sacrificed by the murderous lust of a sadistic enemy. (Noakes, 1943/1998, p. 554).

The most infamous bombing was that of Dresden (February 13–15, 1945). It was more lethal even than the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima (Parker, 1997). Allied strategic bombing killed and wounded around one million German civilians, while German bombing of Britain killed fewer than 60,000. In Asia, Japan bombed Chinese cit- ies between 1937 and 1943. The U.S. bombing campaign against Japan, which lasted from 1942 to 1945, claimed half a million lives.

Allied use of strategic bombing has been a source of much controversy. Historians and others have debated both its morality and its military effectiveness. On the latter point, subsequent military analysis demonstrated that precision bombing was more effective than area bombing (Parker, 1997). On the other hand, until they defeated the Germans at El-Alamein in November 1942, strategic bombing was the weapon the British could wield against Germany.

Rockets On June 13, 1944, the Germans introduced the V1, a pilotless plane they launched against British cities. (The name stood for “revenge weapon #1.”) It could travel 200 miles at a speed of 400 miles per hour and carried a payload of one ton. The British countered with improved antiaircraft guns that employed another technological development, radar, and which succeeded in shooting down three-quarters of the V1s fired. In September, the Ger- mans introduced the V2, a missile that traveled at a much greater speed, 3,600 miles per hour, and against which there was no defense. These were fired equally at London and at the Belgian port of Antwerp, which, following D-Day, had become a major landing point for Allied troops. The V2 killed 4,200 people and wounded more than 10,000 in the two cities; one hit an Antwerp cinema, killing more than 500. They were dangerous but came too late in the war to have any effect on the outcome.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.7 Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance

The Atomic Bomb The most frightening development of all was unleashed only in the last days of the war. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The idea that an atomic weapon was possible was born only in 1939, when German physi- cists split the atom, which made it theoretically possible to unleash unprecedented amounts of energy. Word spread quickly among the global scientific community, and soon many were writing to their governments advising them of the military potential—and threat— posed by this new development. The Germans began to work on developing a bomb imme- diately; the British, with French help, began in 1941. U.S. efforts to build an atomic bomb began only in 1942, after the country entered the war. President Roosevelt authorized the completely secret Manhattan Project, which came to employ 130,000 people and cost the equivalent of $22 billion. Many of the leading physicists involved, like the Italian Enrico Fermi and the Hungarian Leó Szilárd, were refugees from the fascist regimes in Europe.

The decision to use the atomic bomb has also been the subject of much controversy. The position of the U.S. government has always been that the bombs were used in order to prevent a long ground campaign in Japan that would have cost many American lives. Since the 1960s, scholars have questioned this explanation. Some argued that Japan could have been convinced to surrender had the terms been less harsh. Others have argued that the real reason for using the atomic bomb was to intimidate the Soviet Union. Yet others claimed that racial attitudes led the United States to use against the “nonwhite” Japanese a weapon they would never have used against “white” Germans.

4.7 Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance

Those countries conquered by the Germans experienced occupation in very different ways. Where the Germans allowed it, they found people willing to collaborate with them, but collaboration was not an option everywhere. Meanwhile, in all conquered countries there were people prepared to resist German rule.

Occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union

German plans for the Slavic people, which included Poles, Russians and, of course, Jews, whom they deemed racially inferior, were very clear: They were to be exterminated or turned into a slave labor force for the Germans who would settle in this new lebensraum.

The invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union were not just simple military campaigns; they were wars of extermination. In Poland, the invasion was accompanied by targeted killings of elites like professors, doctors, lawyers, and politicians. Led by the SS, the Ger- mans executed some 50,000 Polish civilians (Mazower, 2008). Later, measures were taken to turn the Poles into a labor force with no cultural identity: Universities and political and cultural organizations were closed down; Poles were forced out of the major cities, banned from swimming pools and public gardens, made to ride in the back of trains and buses, allowed to shop only at certain times, and required to salute all Germans in

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uniform. This amounted to cultural genocide. All Poles were also subject to compulsory labor service in Germany.

The campaign of cultural destruction was even clearer in the case of the Soviet Union. As both Communists and “racially-inferior” Slavs, the Russians were Hitler’s special enemy, and he ordered his forces to ignore the normal rules of war. The “Commissar Decree” of June 6 declared that Soviet Commissars, the Communist Party officials assigned to all military units, were not to be considered legal combatants and were to be immediately executed or given to the SS. This was followed up on June 12 with the “Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia.” The war against Communism, it said, demanded “ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs and Jews, and the total eradication of any active or passive resistance.” To ensure that these instructions were followed, the SS created four Einsatzgruppen to eliminate anyone deemed suspect, especially Jews occupying state or party positions (Mazower, 2008).

In 1942 researchers connected to the SS developed the “General Plan East,” which embod- ied the ultimate German goal. The Plan envisioned a Germanic realm reaching to the Ural Mountains with a population of between 500 and 600 million by the year 2000. This required dealing with the 30 to 50 million untermenschen who were already living there. The fate of Europe’s 11 million Jews had already been decided; whether the non-Jews would be exterminated, deported, or turned into a slave labor force was never determined.

Collaboration

Collaboration is an old word, but it acquired a new meaning during World War II. This came from the statement made by Marshal Pétain, the premier of Vichy France, after his meeting with Hitler in October 1940: “A collaboration has been envisaged between our two countries. I have accepted it in principle.” Collaboration in this sense was not a matter of how individu- als behaved; individuals could—and did—change their minds as circumstances changed. Historian Istvan Deak has defined it as “a set of relationships between the occupiers and the occupied mediated by a set of officially existing institutions.” This required “the presence of a country-wide bureaucracy staffed by the indigenous population with the occupier’s consent” (Deak, 2000, pp. 24–25). In other words, collaboration occurred between the institu- tions of government and was not just a matter of the behavior of individuals.

There were various motives for collaboration. In some places, for example Norway and Belgium, it was led by local fascists and driven by support for the Nazi regime. In others, such as France and Croatia, it was led by people who were not fascists and who sought to achieve political goals of their own.

France France was the paradigmatic case of collaboration. Under the terms of the armistice, the country was divided into occupied and unoccupied zones. The government, headed by Marshall Pétain, maintained its capital in the provincial town of Vichy, which gave its name to the entire regime. The French civil service functioned throughout the country, except for areas considered militarily sensitive, where the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, held sway. Vichy officials were overseen by a very small number of Germans.

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Pétain was an old-fashioned conservative who believed that France had lost its way and needed to free itself of the influence of Jews and Communists and return to “traditional values” of obedience, hard work, and family. He claimed to be leading a “National Revo- lution,” but real French fascists, who saw Pétain as simply backward-looking, disliked him. He also sought to retain France’s empire and never declared war on Great Britain.

Vichy very quickly took its own measures against Jews: The Statute of Jews of October 3, 1940, required them to wear a yellow star and excluded them from the civil service, the army, many professions, and media. The regime not only acquiesced in the deportation of Jews to the death camps, it went beyond what the Germans asked. The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup of July 1942 included 4,000 children the Germans had not ordered arrested. Overall, the Vichy government deported 76,000 French Jews; only 2,000 survived.

The government also cooperated in meeting Germany’s demand for labor. In February 1943 it created Compulsory Labour Service (STO), which sent young men born between 1920 and 1922 to work in the Reich. These increased labor demands led many young men to join the Resistance, which will be discussed further in an upcoming section.

In Their Own Words: Vidkun Quisling: The Collaborator

After England violated Norwegian neutrality by laying mine- fields in Norwegian territorial waters without meeting any opposition than the usual half-hearted protests from the . . . government, the German government offered the Norwe- gian government their help accompanied by a sincere reas- surance that they would respect national independence and Norwegian life and property. As an answer to this offer . . . the government called for regular mobilization and gave the Norwegian armed forces the unreasonable order to oppose the German help by means of armed force. The govern- ment itself has fled, without second thoughts, having put

the future of the country and its inhabitants at risk. Under these circumstances, it is the duty and the right of the National Unification movement to assume government power in order to protect the Norwegian people’s interests and Norway’s security and independence. . . . We are the only ones that can . . . save the country from the desperate situation the party politi- cians have put our people in. The government has stepped back; the National Movement has seized government power with Vidkun Quisling as Chief of Government . . . (“Vidkun Quisling`s speech on April 9th 1940,” 2008)

At 7:30 p.m. on April 9, 1940, Norwegian State Radio (NRK) in Oslo broadcast this unscheduled mes- sage. The speaker, Vidkun Quisling, was not an unknown name in Norway: He had been an army offi- cer and a diplomat. Between 1921 and 1926, he had worked with the great national hero Fridtjof Nan- sen in dealing with the famine in Ukraine. His book criticizing revolutionary Russia, published in 1931, made such an impression that he was invited to become Minister of Defense.

After leaving government in 1933, he helped found a new party, the Nasjonal Samling (National Unifica- tion), and became its fører (leader). The NS, which was anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, and believed in the racial superiority of the Nordic peoples, failed ever to elect a single candidate, and when Germany invaded Norway, Quisling was merely the leader of a miniscule fascist party. His decision to collaborate with the Germans turned his name into a synonym for traitor and led to his execution when the war was over.

Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling with a group of young girls.

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Norway Collaboration in Norway was led by Vidkun Quisling. After he was made prime minister by the Germans in 1942, Quisling began to create Nazi-style institutions and imposed anti-Semitic legislation even though Norway had fewer than 1,500 Jews.

Although Quisling claimed his goal was to protect the country’s independence, Norway paid a heavy price for its place in the German order. The financial cost of the occupation was an immense burden: Norwegians paid Germany seven times as much in money and goods per capita as the Danes and six times as much as the French. Some Norwegian women participated in the Lebensborn program, in which they mated with German men in order to produce “Aryan” children.

There was widespread informal opposition to the regime. Members of the NS experienced contempt and derision, even from their family and friends (Dahl, 1999). Norwegians also made use of chain letters as a tactic of resistance. One took the form of Ten Command- ments: “Thou shalt obey [the king of Norway] . . . thou shalt detest Hitler . . . thou shalt regard as a traitor every Norwegian who keeps company with Germans or Quislings at home” (Petrow, 1974, p. 104). Over 100,000 parents signed a petition against the impo- sition of obligatory youth service, and the bishops of the highly influential Norwegian Lutheran Church resigned en masse.

When liberation came in May 1945, it brought retribution, not just to Quisling and his immediate colleagues, but to thousands of Norwegians who had collaborated with the Germans or even simply belonged to the Nasjonal Samling. Between 1945 and 1950 some 50,000 people were punished for their activities during the occupation, including 25 who were executed. On a per capita basis, the official reckoning was more widespread in Nor- way than in any of the occupied countries of Western Europe. The ratio of people con- victed for any form of collaboration and given any punishment was 1,400 per 100,000 people compared to 1,200 in the Netherlands, 1,000 in Belgium, and only 300 in Denmark and France (Petrow, 1974).

Resistance

Whether collaboration was permitted or not, there was organized resistance everywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. It was often politically divided, and in many places the Com- munists emerged as the most powerful resistors. The effectiveness of the resistance and its impact on the outcome of the military conflict also varied, but only in Yugoslavia was the resistance decisive in defeating the Germans. One effect of the resistance was to turn World War II into an assortment of violent, local conflicts with serious consequences for the postwar years (Deak, 2000).

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.7 Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance

In Their Own Words: Marie Madeleine Fourcade: The Resistor

I carried on with my preparations . . . I took off my clothes and practiced holding the little batik dress in my teeth and a few banknotes in my hand. The main thing was not to take anything that might make a noise if dropped.

My watch showed three o’clock and, as I expected, there was a change of guard. . . . I banged on the door three separate times. No response but snores.

I undressed again and began my climb to freedom [but was interrupted by a car that pulled up outside and had to start again]. . . . Pushing my head through again was even more painful than the first time, but the pain and the fear of failure made me perspire profusely, which helped my skin to slip against the iron. After my neck I got one shoulder

through, then my right leg. Squeezing my hips through was sheer agony. The pain was appall- ing but I knew . . . that the pain I felt would be nothing compared with what would be in store for me with the Gestapo.

I suddenly found myself down on the pavement . . . Summoning all my remaining strength, I crossed the square on all fours and began to move as fast as my legs would carry me. (Four- cade, 1974, pp. 335–336)

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade (1909–1989) was born into a family with a tradition of military service. As a child, she lived for many years in Asia, and after returning to France she studied music in Paris. When her marriage failed and she found herself having to support two children, Fourcade got a job at a pub- lishing company.

The head of the company, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, was a military officer who, despite his extreme right-wing views, organized a resistance network that gathered information about German troops movements for the British. Fourcade helped him in this. When Loustaunau-Lacau was arrested, Four- cade took over as leader of the network, which came to have 3,000 members. In this excerpt from her memoir, she describes escaping from jail after having been arrested. Fourcade was made a member of the Legion of Honor after the war.

Five female members of the Resistance display the rifles they used to fight the Nazi garrison in Marseille before entry of allied troops, September 9, 1944.

France The initial resistance came from the Free French based in London and led by General Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle had opposed surrender, for which he was sentenced to death by the Vichy government. He built up an army in England that would take part in the liber- ation of its country after D-Day, and it was thanks to his efforts that France, which had suf- fered such a humiliating defeat, was, by the end of the war, considered one of the victors.

There was also an internal resistance in France, known as the maquis. It included a large number of separate groups representing diverse political positions. The most important were Communists, Socialists, Gaullists, and Catholics. A National Resistance Council was created in May 1943 to coordinate resistance activities. In March 1944 it issued a Charter setting out goals for the country after the liberation. These included universal suffrage, independent trade unions, nationalization of large industry, a minimum wage, compre- hensive social security, and equality for people in the colonies.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.7 Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance

The resistance was also responsible for much of the retributive justice that took place during the last months of the war. There were around 10,000 summary executions; more than 3,000 took place before D-Day and another 5,000 in the follow- ing few weeks (Deak, 2000). In addition, untold thousands of women were publicly humiliated for consorting with German soldiers, what was referred to as “horizontal collaboration,” by being paraded through the streets of their town and having their hair cut off.

There is no consensus on the number of people involved in the resistance. Estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000, although after the war the French government officially recognized 220,000 as having fought. Of these, some 10 percent were women.

Yugoslavia The Germans allowed the creation of an Indepen- dent State of Croatia run by the Croatian fascists, the Ustaše, and led by Ante Pavelic. It was respon- sible for such widespread violence against Roma,

Jews, and, especially, Serbs that even the Germans were shocked. One consequence was the emergence of two organized resistance movements. One, led by a Yugoslav military officer, Draza Mihailovic, was known as the Chetniks. The other, known as the partisans, was led by the Communist Josip Broz Tito.

Mihailovic was reluctant to attack Germans and risk the 100 to 1 reprisals that Hitler had promised; his strategy was to build up forces and wait for Allies. Tito’s strategy was to fight the Germans in order to take control of specific areas and establish a Communist mini-state. Unlike Mihailovic, who appealed primarily to Serbs, Tito appealed to Yugoslavs of all ethnic back- grounds. By August 1944, he had built an army of some 800,000 sol- diers. Women had a prominent role in Tito’s partisan forces: 100,000, almost all of them younger than 20, fought, and around 25,000 died.

Tito’s approach was the success- ful one. As the Germans withdrew across Eastern Europe, the parti- sans occupied more and more ter- ritory. On October 20, 1944, they liberated Belgrade, arriving ahead of the Red Army.

A young woman is having her hair shaved off as punishment for collaborating with the Germans, probably for having had sexual relations with a German. Montelimar, France, August 1944.

The mountain headquarters of Yugoslav resistance leader Josip Broz Tito.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.7 Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance

Yugoslavia also saw a particularly brutal local civil war. Chetniks and partisans fought each other, and as the partisans became more successful, the Chetniks began to collaborate with the Germans. Then came retribution against the Ustasha, who had run the Croat puppet state. As many as 30,000 were killed after the war ended, although Ante Pavelic and other top leaders managed to escape. Chetniks were also hunted down, and in 1946 Mihailovic was executed as a war criminal. Overall, Yugoslavs killed one million other Yugoslavs.

Italy The armistice, the Allied bombing campaign, German demands for labor, and the actions of Mussolini’s puppet Republic of Salò all combined to create an increasingly strong resis- tance movement in Northern and Central Italy. One historian has argued that the conflicts between Italians in the last years of the war were really three separate wars: a civil war between Fascists and anti-Fascists, a war of national liberation against the Germans, and a class war (Pavone, 1995).

Some 250,000 Italians were involved in the resistance and approximately 45,000 died by the end of the war. Women played important roles, often using gender stereotypes to their advantage; for example, unlike men, they did not need official permission to ride bikes in certain areas, which made them perfect couriers. As in France and Yugoslavia, the resistance in Italy was politically divided: The Communist Party’s Garibaldi Brigades accounted for about 40 percent, the progressive Justice and Liberty movement about 25 percent, and Socialists, Catholics, Liberals, and others made up the rest. The CLNAI (Committee of National Liberation for North Italy) brought together representatives of all resistance groups and was recognized by both the government of Italy and by the U.S. military authorities as their “fully empowered agent” for the transition from Fascist rule to regular government in the newly liberated territories (Morgan, 2007 p. 215).

Until the war ended on May 8, the killing of Fascists and their collaborators without any trial was legal in northern Italy, and this period was later extended until July 31. An offi- cial survey done in 1946 found that 9,000 people had been killed in the period immedi- ately after towns were liberated. The most famous of these deaths was that of the fallen dictator, Benito Mussolini.

Collaboration and Resistance in Asia

Japan’s defeat of the European imperial powers in Asia and its occupation of their colo- nies put the possibilities of collaboration and resistance before Asians as well. The Japa- nese presented themselves as the defenders of the Asian races against Western imperial- ism, and local populations in many places initially welcomed them. They also allowed local nationalists to carry on their activities so long as they emphasized that they were contributing to the Japanese war effort. In some places, such as Burma, the Philippines, and Vietnam, the Japanese even created nominally independent states. In Burma and the Dutch East Indies, nationalists took advantage of these opportunities. In others, such as French Indochina, nationalists fought against the Japanese presence. In both cases, once the war was over, these same nationalists would challenge attempts by European nations to reimpose colonial rule. Even though it was only temporary, Japan’s defeat of the Euro- pean powers served to weaken their hold on the subject peoples of the empires.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.8 Aftermath

4.8 Aftermath

World War II ended in victory for the Allies, but the costs, both human and material, were shared by virtually every combatant nation. These costs, which dwarfed those of World War I, were far from equally distributed, however. The immensity of the horrors of the Nazi empire also led the Allies to create the concept of “crimes against humanity” and to convoke an international court where leading Nazis were tried for these acts.

Why the Allies Won

There were two reasons that the Allies won the war. The first was that they had many more resources than the Axis powers and were able to use them more effectively. In terms of human resources, the Soviet Union had a seemingly limitless number of people it could put in uniform. The Allies also had much bigger and stronger economies, and for a war in which mobility, both on land and in the air, was crucial, they vastly outproduced their enemies. As Figure 4.7 shows, the production of aircraft favored the Allies by almost three to one (Parker, 1997).

When it came to tanks, Germany produced almost the same number as the Soviet Union: 84,000 to 87,000. The United States produced more than either, 101,000, and Great Britain another 27,000 (Parker, 1997).

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Figure 4.7: Production of aircraft

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.8 Aftermath

The second reason for their victory was that the Allies fought as an alliance. They shared resources, particularly through the U.S. Lend-Lease Act. They also coordinated their mili- tary strategy. Even though British and American political and military leaders often argued about tactics and strategy, Anglo-American coordination was particularly close. This was embodied in the creation of a single command structure for Europe headed by General Eisenhower. U.S. and British coordination with the Soviet Union was less intense, but both sides knew they needed the other to keep fighting in order to win. On the other side, the three Axis powers essentially fought their own individual wars with little coordination or joint planning. Additionally, Hitler was convinced of his unerring military genius and frequently imposed disastrous decisions on his professional military commanders.

The Costs of the War

The new technologies and the tactics they permitted made World War II a much more lethal war than its predecessor. They also changed the nature of warfare in a signifi- cant way: Those killed were more likely to be civilians than military combatants. Of the 55,483,000 people who perished during the war, more than half, 56 percent, were civilians. Only 44 percent were military personnel. In some countries, such as Greece and Yugosla- via, where there was a long and effective resistance movement, the share of civilian deaths was much higher. Collateral damage was not a concept the people prosecuting the war on either side understood, and both the Allies and the Axis gave equal weight to inflict- ing destruction on the battlefield and the home fronts (Zeiler, 2011). By the end of the war, European economies lay in ruins, and the United States, well removed from most of the actual fighting, emerged as the world’s economic powerhouse.

Military Casualties The number of military dead and missing during World War II was 24.4 million. The country that suffered the most military deaths by far was the Soviet Union, with 13.6 mil- lion, followed by China with 3.5 million and Germany with 3.25 million. France, which capitulated after only a few weeks, lost only 250,000 military personnel.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.8 Aftermath

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The number of military casualties suffered by each of the combatant countries during the war varied hugely. The Soviet Union bore the heaviest burden by a wide margin.

Figure 4.8: Military dead and missing

Civilian Casualties The number of civilian deaths, including the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, was even higher, standing at 25,090,000. Once again, the countries that suffered most were the Soviet Union, China, and Germany, although this time China had the most deadly experience, losing 10 million civilians, followed by the Soviet Union with 6 million, and Germany with 3.6 million. The United States had no civilian deaths at all; the United Kingdom, where no land fighting took place, had only 60,000; and Italy, where the land campaign was short, only 70,000.

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.8 Aftermath

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Figure 4.9: Civilian deaths

Rape There was another kind of human cost that is not often mentioned: the systematic rape of women. In Europe, this was most intense after the Red Army entered Germany and Austria. Here rape was “an official tool of the policy of annihilation” (Zeiler, 2011, p. 356). It has been estimated that as many as one million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers (Heinemann, 1996). In Asia, the Japanese forced some 200,000 women to work in military brothels. These “comfort women” came from all the territories conquered by Japan, but the largest number, perhaps the majority, were from Korea.

The Nuremberg Trials

On January 12, 1942, representatives of nine countries under German occupation met in London and signed the Inter-Allied Resolution on German War Crimes. In this document they affirmed that “acts of violence thus perpetrated against civilian populations are at variance with accepted ideas concerning acts of war and political offenses as these are understood by civilized nations” and that one of “their principal war aims [was] punish- ment through the channel of organized justice of those guilty and responsible for these crimes, whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them or in any way participated in them” (Text of resolution, 1942). The Allies agreed that trials would be held after the war, and on August 8, 1945, they issued the London Charter of the International Military

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CHAPTER 4Section 4.8 Aftermath

Tribunal, the document that set out the procedures and laws by which the prosecutions would be conducted. France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States each provided one prosecutor and two judges. The trials were held in Nuremburg, which had been the site of the great Nazi propaganda rallies of the 1930s.

The Nuremburg proceedings consisted of a number of separate trials. The first and most important was the Trial of the Major War Criminals, which began on November 20, 1945, and ended on October 1, 1946. The 24 defendants in the main trial found themselves charged with a new offense: crimes against humanity. The London Charter defined these as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts commit- ted against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the juris-

diction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated” (Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, 1945–1946). Ten of the defendants were sentenced to death, seven to prison, three were acquitted, one committed suicide before the trial began, and one was declared med- ically unfit for trial.

The Nuremburg Trials also served as a model for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which prosecuted Japanese for war crimes. Some 5,700 were charged, including 28 high-level military and political figures of whom 25 were convicted and 7 sentenced to death.

Conclusion

At the end of the war, Europe was much diminished from what it had been in 1939. The Japanese occupation had severely weakened the hold of European countries over their colonies. The massive material destruction had left much of the Euro- pean economy in ruins and confirmed its loss of global economic dominance. The horror of the Holocaust destroyed any remaining claim to European cultural superiority. Most tellingly, Europe itself was now divided into spheres of influence, and although those liv- ing in the “West,” countries in the United States’ sphere, had vastly more freedom than those living in the “East,” the Soviet sphere, both had large numbers of foreign troops on their soil. Europeans were no longer fully masters in their own houses. Could they con- tinue to rule over others? What would the future hold?

The Nuremburg trial in session, April 29, 1946. The accused sit on the left, surrounded by military guards, the judges are on the right. The concept of “crimes against humanity” was invented for these trials.

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CHAPTER 4Chapter Summary

Chapter Summary

The Causes of the War • World War II was actually two distinct but connected conflicts, one in Europe

and one in Asia. Each had its own causes.

The Axis on the Offensive • In Europe, the period of Axis success lasted until the German failure to take

the Soviet city of Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943. In Asia, it lasted until the Battles of Midway and the Coral Sea in spring 1942.

• The invasion of Poland was followed by the “Phony War” and the Winter War. • The Germans used Blitzkrieg tactics to defeat France quickly but failed to defeat

Great Britain in the Battle of Britain. • The United States initially proclaimed neutrality but began to provide support to

Great Britain. • Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, but its failure to take Stalingrad

in early 1943 marked the turning point in the war.

The Nazi Empire • German occupation policies varied widely from region to region, but their key

aim was to skim off or plunder key natural resources, including conscripted labor, from the lands that they controlled.

• The Nazis’ goal in Poland and Russia was to settle the land with Germans and other “Aryans.”

The Holocaust/The Shoah • The Germans murdered around six million of the nine million Jews in Europe. • Initially, firing squads and mobile gas units did the killing, but in 1942 these were

succeeded by six specially built extermination camps.

The Axis in Retreat • After the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviets began to push the Germans west. • Following D-Day in June 1944, the United States, Britain, and their allies slowly

pushed the Germans east toward Germany. • The Allied leaders developed their war aims during a number of conferences

between 1943 and 1945. The most important were Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam.

World War II and Total War • World War II was even more of a total war than World War I. • New technologies were central to the war, and these shifted the balance from

defense to offense. • The Allies made extensive use of strategic bombing.

Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance • The Germans found collaborators wherever they made collaboration an option.

Some collaborators were Fascists who shared the Nazis’ goals; others were not and sought to realize their own political objectives.

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CHAPTER 4End-of-Chapter Review

• There was organized resistance everywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. Resistance was usually politically divided.

• Only in Yugoslavia did a resistance movement defeat the Germans.

Aftermath • There were two reasons that the Allies won the war: They had more resources

than the Axis and used them more effectively, and they fought as an alliance, sharing resources and coordinating strategy.

• World War II was much more lethal than World War I. Civilian deaths outnum- bered military deaths.

End-of-Chapter Review

1. In the Battle of Britain

a. the British defeated a German invasion off the coast of Dover b. the Germans defeated Britain by invading Dover c. the British triumphed in an air war d. the German air force launched a successful attack on London

2. Nazi occupation policies were

a. equally brutal across Europe b. more brutal in Eastern than in Western and Central Europe c. more brutal in Western and Central than in Eastern Europe d. generally mild across Europe

3. Which is the most accurate statement?

a. Anti-Semitism developed as a major Nazi theme after World War II began b. Anti-Semitism was a long-standing but rather minor point in Hitler’s worldview c. Anti-Semitism was at the core of Hitler’s worldview d. Anti-Semitism was imposed on Hitler by his top aides

4. Which of the following played a major role in making World War II so lethal?

a. incompetent military leadership b. technology c. epidemic diseases d. all of the above

5. Armed resistance to the Germans was especially widespread and effective in

a. France b. Yugoslavia c. Spain d. Denmark

Answers: 1) c, 2) b, 3) c, 4) b, 5) b

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CHAPTER 4Web Links

Thought Questions

• In what ways did World War II differ from World War I? • What were the main characteristics of the Nazi empire? How did their rule differ

from place to place? • What were the principal features of the Holocaust? • What were the Allies’ war aims? Who defined them and how? • How important were collaboration and resistance to the course of the war? • Why was World War II so lethal?

Web Links

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact This non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, with a secret protocol regarding the disposition of Poland and the Baltic states, cleared the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which began WWII. www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1939pact.asp

We Shall Fight on the Beaches The speeches of Prime Minister Winston Churchill sustained British morale during the darkest moments of the war. This speech, delivered on June 4, 1940, after the retreat from Dunkirk, was perhaps the finest. www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/apr/20/greatspeeches3 (with audio)

The Flame of French Resistance In two speeches broadcast by the BBC on June 18, 19, and 22, 1940, Charles de Gaulle called on his compatriots to resist the Germans following the defeat of France. www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/apr/29/greatspeeches1

The Wannsee Protocol This account of a secret meeting of high-level officials held on January 20, 1942, is the strongest single piece of evidence that the Nazis intended to eliminate the Jews of Europe. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=2357

The Roma and the Holocaust Testimony of Anna W., a German-born Roma who survived Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/excerpts/annaw.html (includes video and audio)

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CHAPTER 4Key Terms

“Big Three” Nickname given to the main Allied leaders: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin.

Blitzkrieg Literally “lightning war,” a new approach to warfare invented by the Germans that combined planes, tanks, and sophisticated radio communications.

Collaboration Formal cooperation between the Germans and the government institutions of a country they conquered.

Extermination camps Six camps con- structed by the Germans in occupied East- ern Europe for the sole purpose of facilitat- ing the “Final Solution.”

Kristallnacht The “night of broken glass” (November 9–10, 1938) during which organized attacks took place against synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses across Germany and Austria.

Lebensraum German for “living space,” the idea held by Hitler that Eastern Europe was the land Germans should occupy and colonize to allow the “race” to grow.

Lend-Lease Act Act of the U.S. Congress that allowed the U.S. government to pro- vide combatant countries with weapons, food, and other supplies at no cost, while not formally entering the war.

Nuremberg Trials Trials of Nazis by the Allies that took place after the war in the city of Nuremberg.

Operation OVERLORD The Allied inva- sion of France that took place in June 1944. Also known as D-Day and the Normandy invasion or landings.

Partisans Name given to the Communist- dominated resistance movement in Yugoslavia.

Phony War The period between the Ger- man invasion of Poland and its invasion of France during which a state of war existed between it and Britain and France, but there were no significant battles between them.

Shoah The Hebrew word for the Holo- caust, which has become widely used in English in recent years.

Vichy The name given to the part of France, with its capital in the town of Vichy, that the Germans allowed to retain its own government after the French surrendered.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Month-long armed resistance in January 1943 by Jews against German plans to liquidate the ghetto.

Key Terms

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