A World in Flames 1939-1941

Chap

ter 1

9

The Rise of Dictators

The treaty that ended World War I (Treaty of Versailles) and the economic depression that followed contributed to the rise of dictatorships in Europe and Asia.

Italy developed the first major dictatorship in Europe.

In 1919 Benito Mussolini founded Italy’s Fascist Party.

Fascism was a kind of aggressive nationalism.

nation was more important than the individual

a nation became great by expanding its territory and building its military.

Facists were anti-Communist.

Backed by militia known as Blackshirts.

In 1917 the Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, set up Communist governments throughout the Russian empire.

The Russian territories were renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922.

The Communists set up a one-party rule.

By 1926 Joseph Stalin had become the new Soviet dictator.

In 1927 he began a massive effort to industrialize the country.

Millions of peasants who resisted the Communist policies were killed.

After WWI, political and economic chaos in Germany led to the rise of new political parties.

The Nazi Party was nationalistic and anti-Communist.

Adolf Hitler, a Nazi, called for the unification of all Germans under one government.

He believed certain Germans were part of a “master race” destined to rule the world.

He felt Jews were responsible for many of the world’s problems.

In 1933 Hitler was appointed prime minister of Germany.

Storm troopers intimidated voters into giving Hitler dictatorial powers.

Hard economic times in Japan after WW I undermined the country’s political system.

Many Japanese wanted to seize territory to gain much-needed natural resources.

In 1931 the Japanese army, without government permission, invaded the resource-rich province of Manchuria.

The military took control of Japan.

America Turns to Neutrality

Why did Americans support isolationism?

The rise of dictatorships in Europe & Asia after WW I

Refusal of European countries to repay war debts owed to the U.S.

Many Americans wanted to avoid international commitments.

The Neutrality Act of 1935 made it illegal for Americans to sell arms to any country at war.

Congress next passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, which continued the ban of selling arms to countries at war and required warring countries to buy nonmilitary supplies from the United States on a “cash and carry” basis.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported internationalism.

Internationalists believe that trade between nations creates prosperity and helps to prevent war.

Japan aligned itself with Germany and Italy, and these three countries became known as the Axis Powers.

Mussolini & Hitler Tojo

“Peace in Our Time”

In February 1938, Adolf Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless Austrian Nazis were given important government posts.

In March 1938, Hitler announced the Anschluss, or unification, of Austria and Germany.

(Code word for Germany taking over another country!)

Hitler also claimed the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a large German-speaking population.

Czechs strongly resisted German demand for the Sudetenland. France, the Soviet Union, and Britain threatened to fight Germany if it attacked Czechoslovakia.

At the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938, Britain and France, hoping to prevent another war, agreed to Hitler’s demands in a policy known as appeasement.

In March 1939, Germany sent troops into Czechoslovakia, bringing the Czech lands under German control.

Munich Conference

Britain and France tried to appease Hitler by “giving away” the Sudetenland to the Nazis

The results ofappeasement....

A Czech womanis forced to salute Nazi

soldiers as theymarch through

her town

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the USSR signed a nonaggression treaty, with a secret agreement to divide Poland between them. (aka: The Nazi-Soviet Pact)

The War Begins On September 1, 1939, Germany and

the USSR invaded Poland.

On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany; World War II was on!!!

The Germans used a blitzkrieg, or lightning war, to attack Poland.

The Polish army was defeated by October 5.

On April 9, 1940, the German army attacked Norway and Denmark.

Within a month, Germany overtook both countries.

After World War I, the French had built a line of concrete bunkers and fortifications called the Maginot Line along the German border.

When Hitler attacked France, he went around the Maginot Line by invading the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

The French and British forces quickly went into Belgium, becoming trapped there by German forces.

By June 4, about 338,000 British and French troops had evacuated Belgium through the French port of Dunkirk and across the English Channel, using ships of all sizes.

On June 22, 1940, France surrendered to the Nazis.

Germany installed a puppet government in France known as Vichy France.

Britain Remains Defiant

Hitler thought that Britain would negotiate peace after France surrendered.

He did not anticipate the bravery of the British people and their prime minister, Winston Churchill.

On June 4, 1940, Churchill delivered a defiant speech that rallied the British people and alerted the United States to Britain’s plight.

“Even though large tracts of Europe have fallen...we shall not flag or fail...We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Winston Churchill

British Prime Minister

To invade Britain, Germany had to defeat the British air force (Royal Air Force – RAF).

In the Battle of Britain, the German air force launched an all-out air battle to destroy the British Royal Air Force.

After German bombers bombed London, the British responded by bombing Berlin, Germany.

The Royal Air Force was greatly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), but the British had radar stations; could detect German bombers coming in!

Hitler was forced to cancel the Nazis’ planned invasion of Great Britain.

Churchill praised the RAF: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

British children - Survivors of the Battle of Britain

Nazi Persecution of the Jews

The Nazis killed nearly 6 million Jews and millions of other people during the Holocaust.

The Nazis persecuted anyone who opposed them, as well as the disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Slavic peoples.

The Nazis’ strongest hatred was aimed at all Jews.

In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took citizenship away from Jewish Germans and banned marriage between Jews and other Germans.

German Jews were deprived of many rights that citizens of Germany had long held.

By 1936 at least half of Germany’s Jews were jobless.

Anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout Germany and Austria on November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass.”

Ninety Jews died, hundreds were badly injured, thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed, and over 180 synagogues were wrecked.

The Germanpeople were

intimidated intoboycotting

Jewish businesses

Books written by Jewishauthors or dealing with

Jewish subjects in apositive way were burned

Jews were ordered to register with Nazi officials for “identification” purposes and

forced to wear yellow stars on their clothing.

Jews were rounded up and force-marched to trains in which they were packed like cattle.

They were then taken to concentration camps.

Many non-Jews risked their lives by hiding entire families of Jews in their homes. The most famous case was a young Jewish girl named Anne Frank who, along with her family, was hidden for two years in an attic. The Nazis eventually found them and forced them into concentration camps. Only her father, Otto, survived the Holocaust. We have her story from a diary that she kept.

The Final Solution

On January 20, 1942, Nazi leaders met at the Wannsee Conference to decide the “final solution” for what the Nazis called the “Jewish problem.”

The plan was to round up Jews and other “undesirables” in Europe and take them to concentration camps – detention centers where healthy individuals worked as slaves.

The elderly, the sick, and young children were sent to extermination camps to be killed in large gas chambers.

These are the faces of the men who attended the Wannsee Conference…the men who decided the fate of millions of innocent men, women, and children.

Nazis built concentration camps all over Europe.

Extermination camps were built mostly in Poland.

Thousands of people were killed each day at these camps.

In only a few years, Jewish culture had been virtually obliterated by the Nazis in the lands they had conquered.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp

THE RISE OF THE THIRD REICH

JEWISH GHETTOS

TRANSPORT TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS

ARRIVAL AT CONCENTRATION CAMPS

GETTING RID OF THE EVIDENCE

LIBERATION

Jewish children who were

subjected to inhumane

medical experiments at

the hands of Nazi “doctors.”