Read, study and view the images in the following lecture. If you have any questions, send them to me via email (rreiman@sgc.edu).
Let's start by looking at the "butcher bill" for the war: Deaths and
Casualties in all theaters of the conflict
The second World War makes more sense if you divide it into seven chronological
phases:
(1) Blitzkrieg on Poland: September 1-3, 1939: Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. This triggered World Wat II because Britain and France responded by declarign war on Germany. After Poland was wiped out in three days by "lightening war" in the form of German tanks and bombers, Britain and France recoiled at the prospect of suffering a similar fate and refrained from firing the first shot. The Germans also were reluctant to attack the Allies, largely because Hitler wanted British support in a war against the Soviets. Notwithstanding the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, Hitler secretly wanted to make good on his promise in *Mein Kampf to seek Lebensraum (living space in Russia) by invading the Soviet Union. So he held back from attacking the Western Allies. The result was:
(2) Sitzkrieg (Phony War), Sep. 1939-May 1940. No fighting took place in the West as Britain and France still hoped against hope that the dogs of war could be put back in their boxes. The attack on Poland had come with stunning and sobering ferocity and the memories of the Somme, Verdun and the Marne were strong. But finally, in May 1940, Hitler attacked with a blitzkrieg invasion through Belgium, bypassing the much-ballyhooed Maginot Line, and shocking the world with the swiftness of his takeover of the Benelux nations and France. The result was:
(3) Blitzkrieg against the West, May 1940 to June 1941. This was the darkest period of the War for the Western alliance (but not for the people of Europe. The darkest period of the war for the people of Europe would be the fifth phase, described below) In just 6 weeks, France fell to the Germans, an event which had not happened at all in World War I and which shocked world opinion to the core. American public opinion, which had been isolationist, now began to swing sharply against the Nazis. Eighty percent of the American people continued to oppose the idea of a Declaration of War against Hitler (a statistic that was not going to change until Pearl Harbor), but after the Fall of France in June 1940, a majority of Americans approved of the concept of limited aid to Britain even at the risk of war. Still during this phase of the war, Britain was alone. Nazis troops prepared to invade Britain but 23 miles of water stymied them as it had stymied Napoleon. The result was a nine month air battle that changed the course of history, the *Battle of Britain (August, 1940-May 1941). British planes destroyed three times as many planes in the skies over England as the Germans had, but the Germans had 4 times as many planes as the English, so at that rate they would have won. But the British defied all expectations by winning the battle, and they did it because of two secret weapons. Click Here to see what those weapons were.
Impatient with his failure to defeat the British, Hitler made the second mistake of the war (after the decision to bomb British civilians in the Battle of Britain): In May 1941 he turned away from the British and decided to invade the Soviet Union. He thought he could kill two birds with one stone, destroying British morale with a successful and quick conquest of the Soviet Union, but ended up destroying himself in the process. The result was
(4) From the invasion of Russia (22 June 1941) to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941). Everyone knew at the time that these two events would determine the outcome of the war but noone knew how those two events would turn out. A quick victory over the Russians was predicted by most observers, and noone knew if the Japanese would conquer so much of the Pacific rim as to make American reconquest impossible. But all knew that these two events represented the turning point in the war.
(5) Midnight: December 7, 1941 to June 1942. The darkest months of the war for the forces of freedom. All news was bad for the Allies. From January to June, 1941, nearly the entire Asian Pacific rim fell to the Japanese. This was also the time in which the Holocaust (see below) arrived at a new and deadlier stage.
Some writers date the beginnings of the Holocaust to Hitler's ascension to power as Prime minister in 1933. Jews were banned from the civil service and banned from marrying non-Jews in 1935 by the terms of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Until November 1935, the Nazis also confiscated Jewish property when Jews emigrated and otherwise harrassed them legally in order to push them out of the country. On November 11, 1938, the Nazi state encouraged German citizens to beat Jews, vanadalize their businesses and burn Jewish churches, a pogrom (called KRISTALLNACHT)on a vast scale that shocked world opinion and which was accompanied by internment in concentration camps for many Jews. These were still not death camps, however. There was still time for other nations to rescue German's Jews, through relaxed immigration procedures. The world, including the US, turned its back on this opportunity, as all nations actually tightened their restrictions on immigration as night descended on European Jewry. In 1939, a boatload of European Jews, denied access to Havana, appealed to the U.S. to pemit entry as it sailed up the coast of the United States, by Miami, Savannah and New York City. The hapless voyage of the St. Louis was ignored by the Roosevelt administration and the occupants were forced to return to Germany, many becoming victims of the death camps later.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was the catalyst for Hitler's decision to start the mass murder of the Jews. Behind the advancing German army, special mobilized units, organized for the sole purpose of killing civilians on a vast scale, began machine-gunning men, women and children by the thousands. These killing squads operated under the cover of the advancing German army and tried to conceal their work. Within six months, 700,000 civilians had been killed. In Berlin in January 1942 the Wannsee conference was held at which the Nazis decided to organize the mass murder of all of Europe's Jews, placing mass murder on an assembly line. Nazi bureaucrats assembled country by country lists itemizing the number of Jews in each country (even Great Britain), and organized death camps across the map of Europe, to which rail lines were expected to bring Jews by the millions, to be "processed" (i.e., killed) at camps operating day and night. At the worst of these, Auschwitz in Poland, 2000 Jews were killed each day. (To take an online tour of this Hellish place, click here) To accelerate the process, poison gas was used. All the while the Nazis attempted to maintain secrecy, thinking logically that the Allied governments would care what they were up to. Victims were required to sign postdated cards to relatives before they were gassed, not to be mailed for a year in order to encourage the fiction that they were still alive and healthy. Yet, one of the most shocking things about the Holocaust was that, even when the world discovered the secret and confirmed what was going on (in November 1942), the world not only did next to nothing about it, but Allied governments worked to conceal the news from their people in order to dampen pressure for rescue that might somehow complicate efforts to win the war as rapidly as possible. When the Treasury Department of the United States discovered that the State Department was working with the British Foreign Office actually to obstruct rescue efforts by private citizens and groups, it threatened President Roosevelt with a public airing of what was sure to be a "nasty scandal." Only then, in January 1944, did Roosevelt create the War Refugee Board to rescue the remnant of Europe's Jews. The WRB saved 200,000 Jews but hundreds of thousands more might have been saved by an earlier effort. The result was that 6 million Jews perished (see map) in the worst example of mass murder organized as a policy of the state.
The reasons for the failure of rescue and the scale of the Holocaust, then, are as follows:
(1) The fanatical determination of the Nazis to spare no effort, and in fact
to divert resources away from the war effort, to ensure that the Jews be
murdered. Hitler was willing to lose the war against the Allies in order
to win the war against the Jews
(2) The allies were unwilling to risk
anything from the war effort to help the Jews. (See information on the campaign
to get the Allies to bomb Auschwitz for confirmation of this) The
combination of these two factors was catastrophic for Hitler's victims
(3)
the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust encouraged disbelief and inaction
(4) Allied immigration policies which were highly restrictive
(5) The
fact that information is not knowledge. It must be processed to become
knowledge, and civilized minds could not easily imagine the unimaginable
(6)
Antisemitism deterred action, at the highest levels of Allied societies and
governments
Other web sites useful for an understanding of the Holocaust:
Cybrary of the Holocaust
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
A
Brief History of the Holocaust
The sixth and seventh phases of World War II are as follows:
(6) Turning Point, 1942-1943: In 1942, the fates of Germany and Japan were
sealed. In June of that
year the American navy scored a decisive victory
over the Japanese at the Battle of Midway. The
United States, having broken
the Japanese code, knew of Japan's plans to attack at Midway and
therefore
enjoyed the benefit of surprise as well as its possession of an unsinkable
aircraft carrier,
Midway itself. Japan's navy was substantially sunk and it
would never recover from this defeat. After
Midway, the question was not
whether Japan would be defeated but when. It would take a bloody
island-hopping startegy to reach the Japanese mainland but all knew by 1942
that America would win
the Pacific war.
The British stopped the German advance in North Africa and the Russians
launched their first
sustained counterattack in the East, both in 1942. On
two fronts, therefore, the Germans were in
retreat by the end of the year.
Hitler's decision to countenance no prolonged retreat cost the German
army
dearly in men and materiel. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were captured in
the course of
these events, setting the stage for the Soviet's decisive
victory over the Wehrmacht (German's army),
in February 1943. This battle,
The Battle of Stalingrad, was the bloodiest in all of history, and it
displayed all the strength and weaknesses of the opposing sides: the
Russian's gift at encirclement, their hardiness in the face of the Russian
winter, German tenacity, and Hitler's appalling lack of strategic
skill as a
military commander. Once again, Hitler refused all appeals by the German General
Staff to
order a strategic retreat that would have saved hundreds of
thousands of soldiers and given them a
chance to fight another day. Besides
Hitler's blunders, the Germans were defeated by the same two
Generals who
defeated Napoleon, General "Mud" and General "Snow," as it was the coldest
winter on
record since 1812.
(7) Morning, 1944-1945: In 1943, 1944 and 1945 the Allied "Big Three"
(Churchill, Roosevelt and
Stalin) met in a series of wartime
conferences (Casablanca, Teheran and Yalta) to plot war strategy
and the postwar territorial arrangements that would be needed to decide the
disposition of German and
Japan's wartime empire. The seeds of the Cold War
were planted by Stalin's mistrust of the British and the Americans (specifically
his preposterous fear that they were planning a separate peace with Hitler
that would permit the Nazi dictator to remain as a firewall against
communism), and by the Allies'
hesitation to bear the losses that would be
incurred by the opening of a second front against the Nazis
in France. It
was not Machiavellian (or Metternichean) duplicity that explains Roosevelt's
refusal to
open a second front until the Spring of 1944, but simple domestic
politics. The American people wanted as few American boys as possible to die in
Europe and 1944 was an election year, and so he preferred
to let Russian
boys do most of the fighting and dying. Finally, the second front was opened
when
British, Canadian and American forces landed at Normandy on 6 June
1944. Meanwhile, the Russians
were driving toward Berlin from the East. When
the Russians occupied Eastern Europe before
February 1945 (when the Big
Three met at Yalta), Roosevelt's hands were tied. He could not dislodge
Russian troops without starting World War III, and the Russian troops were
there precisely because of the demands of the American electorate to delay the
second front as long as possible. It was indeed
ironic then that the
American people would later claim that Roosevelt sold Eastern Europe down the
river at Yalta or was tricked by a devious Stalin to make bad deals there.
In fact, that fate was sealed
earlier by the decision to delay the Western
front until June 6, 1944-- D-Day, a delay driven by the
demands of the
American electorate.
The decisions made at the Yalta conference are interesting because the agreements look quite good on paper. They have perhaps been criticized because the Russians broke them. But it is hard to see how Roosevelt could have prevented that from happening. Here are the Yalta agreements:
1. Russia agrees to attack Japan within 90 days of the end of the European
war. (In the days before
the atomic bomb was tested in July 1945, this
was necessary for the United States, which did not want
to invade Japan
alone)
2. The Allies agree to divide and administer Germany as 4 temporary
zones of occupation, each
controlled by a separate Ally. Temporary became 45
years but again this was because of the Cold
War.
3. Russia agrees to
join the United Nations as a permanent member of the Security Council
4.
Berlin is similarly divided into four zones of occupation. Stalin later held
onto Berlin in violation of the agreement and exacerbated the Cold War by trying
to push the Allies out.
5. Stalin agrees to free elections in Poland.
Again, Stalin broke this deal, again an incident of the Cold
War.
In April 1945, Hitler committed suicide as Russian troops occupied Berlin and
neared his Bunker. In
May, 1945, the Germans surrendered. In August,
1945, after US planes dropped two atomic bombs on
Japan, the Russians
declared war on Japan and the Japanese surrendered days later. The
bloodiest
war in
history was over.