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The World at War

Using the tactics of Blitzkrieg, or ‘‘lightning war,’’ Hitler stunned Europe with the speed and efficiency of the German attack on Poland. Panzer divisions (a panzer division was a strike force of about three hundred tanks and accompanying forces and supplies), supported by airplanes, broke quickly through Polish lines and en-circled the bewildered Polish troops, whose courageous cavalry units were no match for the mechanized forces of their adversary. Conventional infantry units then moved in to hold the newly conquered territory. Within four weeks, Poland had surrendered. On September 28, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union officially divided Poland between them.

The War in Europe The War in Europe

Although Hitler was apparently surprised when France and Britain declared war on September 3, he was confi-dent of ultimate victory. After a winter of waiting (called the ‘‘phony war’’), on April 9, 1940, Germany launched a Blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway. One month later, the Germans attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. German panzer divisions broke through the weak French defensive positions in the Ardennes forest

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and raced across northern France, splitting the Allied armies and trapping French troops and the entire British army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Only by heroic efforts did the British succeed in a gigantic evacuation of 330,000 Allied (mostly British) troops. The French capitulated on June 22. German armies occupied about three-fifths of France while the French hero of World War I, Marshal Philippe Pe´tain (1856--1951), established a puppet regime (known as Vichy France) over the remainder. Germany was now in control of western and central Europe (see Map 6.1). Britain had still not been defeated, but it was reeling, and a new wartime cabinet under Prime Minister Winston Churchill debated whether to seek a negotiated peace settlement. Churchill, who doubted that Hitler could be trusted, was opposed.

The Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain As Hitler realized, an amphibious invasion of Britain could succeed only if Germany gained control of the air. In early August 1940, the Luftwaffe (German air force) launched a major offensive against British air and naval bases, harbors, communication centers, and war industries. The British fought back doggedly, supported by an effective radar system that gave them early warning of German attacks. Nevertheless, the British air force suffered critical losses and was probably saved by Hitler’s change in strategy. In September, in retaliation for a British air attack on Berlin, Hitler ordered a shift from military targets to massive bombing of cities to break British morale. The British rebuilt their air strength quickly and were soon inflicting major losses on Luftwaffe bombers. By the end of September, Germany

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had lost the Battle of Britain, and the invasion of the British Isles had to be abandoned.

At this point, Hitler pursued a new strategy, which would involve the use of Italian troops to capture Egypt and the Suez Canal, thus closing the Mediterranean to British ships and thereby shutting off Britain’s supply of oil. This strategy failed when the British routed the Italian army.

Although Hitler then sent German troops to the North African theater of war, his primary concern lay elsewhere;

he had already reached the decision to fulfill his longtime obsession with the acquisition of territory in the east. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had declared that future German Axis s atellites and allies, 194 1 Axis c onqu ests, 1939 –194 2 Allied off ensiv es, 19 42–1 945

Soviet annexations, 1939–1940 World War I

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MAP 6.1

MAP 6.1 World War II in Europe and North AfriWorld War II in Europe and North Afri ca.ca. With its fast and effective military, Germany quickly overwhelmed much of western Europe. However, Hitler overestimated his country’s capabilities and underestimated those of his foes. By late 1942, his invasion of the Soviet Union was failing, and the United States had become a major factor in the war. The Allies successfully invaded Italy in 1943 and France in 1944.

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QWhich countries were neutral, and how did geography help make their neutrality an option? View View an anian animated vmated versioersion of thin of this map or res map or related mlated maps ataps at www.cengage.com/ www.cengage.com/

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The Russian Campaign

The Russian Campaign Hitler was now convinced that Britain was remaining in the war only because it expected Soviet support. If the Soviet Union were smashed, Brit-ain’s last hope would be eliminated. Moreover, the Ger-man general staff was convinced that the Soviet Union, whose military leadership had been decimated by Stalin’s purge trials, could be defeated quickly and decisively. The invasion of the Soviet Union was scheduled for spring 1941 but was delayed because of problems in the Balkans.

Mussolini’s disastrous invasion of Greece in October 1940 exposed Italian forces to attack from British air bases in that country. To secure their Balkan flank, German troops seized both Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941. Hitler had already obtained the political cooperation of Hun-gary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Now reassured, Hitler or-dered an invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in the belief that the Soviets could still be decisively de-feated before winter set in. It was a fateful miscalculation.

The massive attack stretched out along an 1,800-mile front. German troops, supported by powerful panzer units, advanced rapidly, capturing two million Russian soldiers.

By November, one German army group had swept through Ukraine and a second was besieging Leningrad; a third approached within 25 miles of Moscow, the Russian cap-ital. An early winter and unexpected Soviet resistance, however, brought a halt to the German advance. For the first time in the war, German armies had been stopped. A counterattack in December 1941 by Soviet army units newly supplied with U.S. weapons came as an ominous ending to the year for the Germans. ‘‘We knew we were in trouble,’’ one German war veteran remarked to me many years later, ‘‘when we became aware that many Russian

soldiers were armed with American rifles.’’

The New Order in Europe The New Order in Europe

After the German victories in Europe, Nazi propagandists created glowing images of a new European order based on the equality of all nations in an integrated economic community. The reality was rather different. Hitler saw the Europe he had conquered simply as subject to Ger-man domination. Only the GerGer-mans, he once said, ‘‘can really organize Europe.’’

The Nazi empire, which at its greatest extent stretched across continental Europe from the English Channel in the west to the outskirts of Moscow in the east, was organized in two different ways. Some areas, such as western Poland, were annexed and transformed into German provinces.

Most of occupied Europe, however, was administered in-directly by German officials with the assistance of col-laborationist regimes.

Racial considerations played an important role in how conquered peoples were treated. German civil

administrations were established in Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands because the Nazis considered their peoples to be Aryan, or racially akin to the Germans, and hence worthy of more lenient treatment. Latin peoples, such as the occupied French, were given military ad-ministrations. All the occupied territories were ruthlessly exploited for material goods and manpower for Ger-many’s labor needs.

Because the conquered lands in the east contained the living space for German expansion and were popu-lated in Nazi eyes by racially inferior Slavic peoples, Nazi administration there was considerably more ruthless.

Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, was put in charge of German resettlement plans in the region. His task was to replace the indigenous population with Germans, a policy first applied to the new German provinces created in western Poland. One million Poles were uprooted and dumped in southern Poland. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans (descendants of Germans who had mi-grated years earlier from Germany to different parts of southern and eastern Europe) were encouraged to colo-nize designated areas in Poland. By 1942, two million ethnic Germans had been settled in Poland.

The invasion of the Soviet Union inflated Nazi vi-sions of German colonization in the east. Hitler spoke to his intimate circle of a colossal project of social engi-neering after the war, in which Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would become slave labor while German peas-ants settled on the abandoned lands and Germanized them. Nazis involved in this kind of planning were well aware of the human costs. Himmler told a gathering of SS officers that the destruction of 30 million Slavs was a prerequisite for German plans in the east. ‘‘Whether na-tions live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture.

Otherwise it is of no interest.’’⁴

Labor shortages in Germany led to a policy of ruthless mobilization of foreign labor. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the four million Russian prisoners of war captured by the Germans, along with more than two million workers conscripted in France, became a major source of manpower. In 1942, a special office was created to recruit labor for German farms and industries. By the summer of 1944, seven million foreign workers had been shipped to Germany, constituting 20 percent of Germany’s labor force. At the same time, another seven million workers were supplying forced labor in their own coun-tries on farms, in induscoun-tries, and even in military camps.

The

The HolocausHolocaustt No aspect of the Nazi new order was more tragic than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe. By the beginning of 1939, Nazi policy focused on promoting the ‘‘emigration’’ of German

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Jews from Germany. Once the war began in September 1939, the so-called Jewish problem took on new di-mensions. For a while, there was discussion of the Mada-gascar Plan---a mass shipment of Jews to the African island of Madagascar. When war contingencies made this plan impracticable, an even more drastic policy was conceived.

The SS was given responsibility for what the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish problem---the an-nihilation of the Jewish people. Reinhard Heydrich (1904--1942), head of the SS’s Security Service, was given administrative responsibility for the Final Solution. After the defeat of Poland, Heydrich ordered his special strike forces (Einsatzgruppen) to round up all Polish Jews and concentrate them in ghettos established in a number of Polish cities.

In June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were given new re-sponsibilities as mobile killing units. These death squads followed the regular army’s advance into the Soviet Union. Their job was to round up Jews in the villages and execute and bury them in mass graves, often giant pits dug by the victims themselves before they were shot. Such constant killing produced morale problems among the SS executioners. During a visit to Minsk in the Soviet Union, Himmler tried to build morale by pointing out that

he would not like it if Germans did such a thing gladly. But their conscience was in no way impaired, for they were sol-diers who had to carry out every order unconditionally. He alone had responsibility before God and Hitler for everything that was happening,. . .and he was acting from a deep un-derstanding of the necessity for this operation.⁵

Although it has been estimated that as many as one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, this ap-proach to solving the Jewish problem was soon perceived as inadequate. Instead, the Nazis opted for the systematic annihilation of the European Jewish population in spe-cially built death camps. Jews from occupied countries would be rounded up, packed like cattle into freight trains, and shipped to Poland, where six extermination centers were built for this purpose. The largest and most famous was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Zyklon B (the com-mercial name for hydrogen cyanide) was selected as the most effective gas for quickly killin g large numbers of people in gas chambers designed to look like shower rooms to facilitate the cooperation of the victims.

By the spring of 1942, the death camps were in op-eration. Although initial priority was given to the elimi-nation of the ghettos in Poland, Jews were soon also being shipped from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and eventually from Greece and Hungary. Despite desperate military needs, the Final Solution had priority in using railroad cars to transport Jews to the death camps.

About 30 percent of the arrivals at Auschwitz were sent to a labor camp, and the remainder went to the gas chambers. After they had been gassed, the bodies were burned in crematoria. The victims’ goods and even their bodies were used for economic gain. Women’s hair was cut off, collected, and turned into mattresses or cloth.

Some inmates were also subjected to cruel and painful

‘‘medical’’ experiments. The Germans killed between five and six million Jews, more than three million of them in the death camps. Virtually 90 percent of the Jewish populations of Poland, the Baltic countries, and Germany were exterminated. Overall, the Holocaust was responsi-ble for the death of nearly two of every three European Jews (see the box on p. 134).

The Nazis were also responsible for the death by shooting, starvation, or overwork of at least another nine to ten million people. Because the Nazis considered the Gypsies (like the Jews) an alien race, they were system-atically rounded up for extermination. About 40 percent of Europe’s one million Gypsies were killed in the death camps. The leading elements of the Slavic peoples---the

The Holocaust: An Image from Buchenwald.

The Holocaust: An Image from Buchenwald. When Allied troops began to occupy Nazi concentration camps in Germany, Austria, and Poland at the end of World War II, they were stunned by the horrific scenes of inhumanity that they observed there: ovens still filled with the charred remains of prisoners; piles of bodies rotting in uncovered graves;

emaciated survivors who greeted the troops with vacant eyes and frequently died within hours or days of their liberation. Sometimes, however, the most poignant images were deceptively simple, though frightening in their connotations—piles of shoes, of eyeglasses, or even of children’s toys, all left by the victims of the Nazi terror. Shown here is a pile of thousands of wedding rings found in a cave near the camp at Buchenwald.

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clergy, intelligentsia, civil leaders, judges, and lawyers---were also arrested and executed. Probably an additional four million Poles, Ukrainians, and Belorussians lost their lives in the concentration camps or as slave laborers for Nazi Germany, and at least three to four million Soviet prisoners of war were killed in captivity. The Nazis also singled out homosexuals for persecution, and thousands lost their lives in concentration camps.

War Spreads in Asia War Spreads in Asia

On December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft at-tacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The same day, other units launched assaults on the Philippines and began advancing toward the British colony of Malaya. Shortly thereafter, Japanese forces seized the British island of Singapore, invaded the Dutch East Indies, and occupied a number of islands in the Pacific Ocean. In some cases, as on the Bataan peninsula and the island of

Corregidor in the Philippines, resistance was fierce, but by the spring of 1942, almost all of Southeast Asia and much of the western Pacific had fallen into Japanese hands.

Placing the entire region under Japanese tutelage, Japan announced its intention to liberate Southeast Asia from Western rule. For the moment, however, Tokyo needed the resources of the region for its war machine and placed its conquests under its rule on a wartime footing.

Japanese leaders had hoped that their strike at American bases would destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet and persuade the Roosevelt administration to accept Japanese domination of the Pacific. The American people, in the eyes of Japanese leaders, had been made soft by material indulgence. But the Japanese had miscalculated. The attack on Pearl Har-bor galvanized American opinion and won broad support for Roosevelt’s war policy. The United States now joined with European nations and the embattled peoples of Na-tionalist China in a combined effort to defeat Japan’s plan to achieve hegemony in the Pacific.

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The systematic annihilation of millions of men, women, and children in extermination camps makes the Holocaust one of the most horrifying events in history. The first document is taken from an account by Rudolf Ho¨ss, commandant of the ex-termination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the second docu-ment, a French doctor explains what happened to the victims at one of the crematoria described by Ho¨ss.

Commandant Ho

Commandant Ho¨¨ss Describes the Equipmentss Describes the Equipment The two large crematoria, Nos. I and II, were built during the winter of 1942--43.. . . They each. . .could cremate c. 2,000 corpses within twenty-four hours.. . . Crematoria I and II both had underground undressing and gassing rooms which could be completely ventilated.

The corpses were brought up to the ovens on the floor above by lift.

The gas chambers could hold c. 3,000 people.

The firm of Topf had calculated that the two smaller cremato-ria, III and IV, would each be able to cremate 1,500 corpses within twenty-four hours. However, owing to the wartime shortage of materials, the builders were obliged to economize and so the undressing rooms and gassing rooms were built above ground and the ovens were of a less solid construction. But it soon became ap-parent that the flimsy construction of these two four-retort ovens was not up to the demands made on it. No. III ceased operating al-together after a short time and later was no longer used. No. IV had to be repeatedly shut down since after a short period in operation of 4--6 weeks, the ovens and chimneys had burnt out. The victims of the gassing were mainly burnt in pits behind crematorium IV.

The largest number of people gassed and cremated within twenty-four hours was somewhat over 9,000.

A French Doctor Describes the Victims

A French Doctor Describes the Victims