The Second World War and the Holocaust

This is Unit Seventeen of Western Civilization Two, part one of two: the Second World War and the Holocaust, the exam's fourteenth band. Unit sixteen ended in Poland in September nineteen thirty-nine. This unit holds the two facts the anchor says the West could not absorb, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is that it holds them together on purpose. The first is total war generalized to the planet: one man's obsession, sixty million dead, most of them civilians, and a weapon that could extinguish life. The second is industrial murder: a nation at Europe's center using timetables and gas chambers to kill six million Jews, faster as it was losing. Part one carries the war from Poland to the surrender, the bargains at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, and the Holocaust through its laws, its ghettos and its bullets. Part two takes the gas, the camps, liberation and memory, and the methods. By the end you will be able to describe the war to the Channel. To describe it going global and east. To describe the turn and the end. To describe the bargains and the ruins. And to define the Holocaust and describe it to nineteen forty-one.

Five entries from Blitzkrieg to the Channel: cause and sides, Poland, the Ardennes, Dunkirk and Vichy, and Britain alone.

Unquestionably, the anchor says, one man's obsession.

WC2 1601 A War of Aggression: Causes, Sides, and Sixty Million Dead

The Second World War was, in the anchor's word, unquestionably caused by Hitler's obsession with an expanded German empire: a war of aggression by one belligerent. The Axis, Germany, Italy and Japan, fought the Allies, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Fifty-five to sixty million died, twenty-five million Soviets and six million Jews among them. Figures are the anchor's.

Tanks and planes beat trenches.

WC2 1602 Poland, September 1939: Blitzkrieg and the Lessons of 1918

On fabricated atrocities Germany invaded Poland on the first of September; Britain and France declared war, and the Soviets invaded from the east. Germany had learned from nineteen eighteen: tanks and planes beat trenches, over thirteen hundred planes on Poland, the anchor says. Armored divisions broke through, infantry followed. Poland capitulated in October. The anchor credits Blitzkrieg to de Gaulle; attributed.

The Line bypassed, not breached.

WC2 1603 The Phony War, the Maginot Line, and May 1940 Through the Ardennes

From September to May nothing moved on the French border: the Phony War. France sat behind the Maginot Line. In April Germany took Norway; on the tenth of May it struck the Netherlands and Belgium, and the main thrust came through the Ardennes forest France thought impassable, impenetrable in Pétain's word, the witness says. The Line was bypassed, not breached.

Wars are not won by evacuations.

WC2 1604 Dunkirk, the Fall of France, and Vichy

In late May over three hundred thousand British and French troops were lifted from Dunkirk by navy and fishing boats; wars are not won by evacuations, Churchill said. France surrendered on the twenty-second of June. Germany occupied the north; Pétain's Vichy regime ran camps, passed anti-Semitic laws and fought Britain at sea. The anchor's state of war with Britain was hostilities, undeclared.

Radar, factories, and never surrender.

WC2 1605 The Battle of Britain: Radar, Factories, Churchill

Only Britain was left. From July to September the Luftwaffe tried to destroy the RAF ahead of a Channel invasion. Radar gave warning, and British factories outbuilt German ones. By late September the invasion was abandoned; the Luftwaffe had lost forty percent of its planes. We shall fight on the beaches; we shall never surrender. The factory ratio is the anchor's; the percentage the witness's.

Four entries on the war going global and east: Lend-Lease, the pact that backfired and Pearl Harbor, Barbarossa, the halt in the snow, and the home fronts from Rosie to slavery in the Reich.

A pact that backfired.

WC2 1606 Lend-Lease, the Tripartite Pact, Pearl Harbor, and the Mediterranean Detour

Lend-Lease in March nineteen forty-one gave Britain support short of war. The Tripartite Pact of September forty backfired: after Pearl Harbor on the seventh of December forty-one Hitler declared war on the United States. Mussolini's failures in Greece, from October forty, and Egypt dragged Germany into the Balkans and Africa, Yugoslavia in April forty-one. The anchor's dates for the pact and Yugoslavia are corrected.

Every warning dismissed.

WC2 1607 Barbarossa, June 22, 1941: Stalin's Blindness and the Soviet Colossus

With Britain unbeaten, Hitler turned east, expecting Slavic collapse in ten weeks. Stalin dismissed every warning. Over three million troops crossed on the twenty-second of June nineteen forty-one into a sixth of the earth's land, the anchor says. The Soviet air force was destroyed, hundreds of thousands captured, commanders lost to the purges, the anchor's stress; locals welcomed the Germans.

Frozen engines, factories on trains.

WC2 1608 The Advance Halts: Partisans, Winter, and Factories Moved East

The welcome vanished under work gangs and murder, and partisans rose behind the lines. Supply stretched, mud came, then cold: frozen engines. The Germans froze in place in the winter of forty-one, eighteen twelve the anchor's parallel, one point four million German casualties its count. Whole factories were dismantled and moved east; by forty-three Soviet output exceeded German.

Annihilation, two ounces of butter, eight million slaves.

WC2 1609 The Home Fronts: Annihilation, Bombing, Rationing, Rosie, and Slavery in the Reich

Bombers reached civilians far from any front, and Germany waged a war of annihilation on Soviet civilians, seventeen million dead, the anchor says. Britain rationed butter to two ounces; women were conscripted in Britain and Russia and riveted in America, Rosie the witness's. Eight million slaves labored inside the Reich, slavery enforced by lethal violence, the anchor's word. Figures are the anchor's.

Five entries on the turn and the end: the five months of nineteen forty-two, Stalingrad and Kursk, Italy changing sides and the resistance, D-Day to Berlin, and the Pacific end.

Four carriers Japan could not replace.

WC2 1610 1942 Turns: Rommel, Midway, El Alamein, Torch

Into nineteen forty-two the Axis still advanced: Rommel toward Suez, Japan across the Pacific. Then Midway in June cost Japan four carriers it could not replace, industrial capacity to rebuild being the point. At El Alamein in October Montgomery pushed Rommel back, and Torch landed Americans in Vichy North Africa in November. El Alamein, Montgomery and Torch are witness-named.

The Wehrmacht's back broken on the Volga.

WC2 1611 Stalingrad, Kursk, and the Soviet Share

At Stalingrad on the Volga, the anchor's Black Sea corrected, fighting from late forty-two ended with the German army surrounded in November and surrendered in February forty-three, nearly a million Axis casualties, against Alamein's three hundred thousand. At Kursk that summer nine thousand Soviet tanks beat Blitzkrieg. The USSR broke the Wehrmacht's back, the anchor says.

A puppet republic, and thirty-five divisions tied down.

WC2 1612 Italy Changes Sides, and the Resistance

In July nineteen forty-three the king dismissed Mussolini and Italy made peace; Germany seized the north and set Mussolini over a puppet republic, and Italian partisans shot him in April forty-five. Resistance grew across occupied Europe: Tito's partisans tied down thirty-five German divisions in Yugoslavia, Soviet partisans numbered perhaps a hundred fifty thousand. Witness-built beyond the anchor's Balkans.

Normandy to Berlin in eleven months.

WC2 1613 D-Day to V-E Day

On the sixth of June nineteen forty-four British, American and Canadian troops landed in Normandy, a hundred sixty thousand by day two. By April forty-five the western Allies neared Berlin and the Soviets took it in eleven days. Hitler shot himself, two days after Mussolini was killed; Germany surrendered on the seventh of May, V-E Day the eighth.

Forty percent of Tokyo in three hours.

WC2 1614 Tokyo, Okinawa, Hiroshima, Nagasaki

From March nineteen forty-five incendiaries burned forty percent of Tokyo in three hours, the anchor says. Okinawa took two months. The bomb was tested on the sixteenth of July; Hiroshima followed on the sixth of August, Nagasaki on the ninth, the anchor's eighth corrected, hundreds of thousands dead, mostly civilians. Japan signed on the second of September.

Three entries on the bargains and the ruins: Tehran, Bretton Woods and Yalta; Potsdam, the zones and the United Nations; and an aftermath of displaced millions and two traumas.

Elections promised and never meant.

WC2 1615 Tehran, Bretton Woods, Yalta

At Tehran in nineteen forty-three the Big Three met, and Stalin kept the Polish land seized in thirty-nine. Bretton Woods in forty-four founded the IMF and World Bank. At Yalta in February forty-five, the anchor's January corrected, Stalin promised free elections he never meant, and Germany was divided into zones. Ninety percent of Allied casualties were Soviet, the anchor says.

Four zones, and a council that could act.

WC2 1616 Potsdam, the Zones, and the United Nations

At Potsdam in July nineteen forty-five the Allies, Truman for Roosevelt and Attlee for Churchill mid-conference, confirmed four occupation zones for Germany and Berlin, reparations partly in labor, and expulsions of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The United Nations, founded that year with a Security Council able to use force, replaced the League. Witness-built; the anchor names neither Potsdam nor four zones.

Two revelations remade the West's picture of itself.

WC2 1617 The Aftermath: Displaced Millions, the Expulsions, Two Traumas

The dead were mostly civilians; central and eastern Europe was displaced, its cities rubble, and some twelve million Germans were driven west, the scale the standard record. Even the victors were crippled. Two revelations remade the West's picture of itself: the Holocaust, and a weapon that could end life. Western Civilization rethinking itself, the anchor says.

Five entries on the Holocaust to nineteen forty-one: the word and the number, the other victims, the laws and Kristallnacht, Poland's ghettos, and the Holocaust by bullets.

Sacrifice by fire; catastrophe.

WC2 1618 Genocide, the Holocaust, and Six Million

Genocide, a word adopted after the war, means systematic state murder of a people; the Holocaust was its industrialized form, the only industrialized mass murder being the anchor's claim, with the Armenians and the Native Americans its precedents. About six million Jews died, two-thirds of Europe's and a third of the world's. Holocaust means sacrifice by fire; Shoah, catastrophe.

Eleven million in all, the witness's total.

WC2 1619 The Other Victims: Romani, Homosexuals, Slavs

Nazi racial ideology killed beyond the Jews: at least two hundred fifty thousand Romani, a count contested, at least six thousand homosexual men, Jehovah's Witnesses and leftists, and almost twenty million Slavic civilians, Poles and Russians. The anchor counts the Slavs as Nazi mass murder, not the Holocaust itself. Eleven million victims in all is the witness's total; figures are the anchor's.

Emigration forced, wealth extracted, then the first roundup.

WC2 1620 The Nuremberg Laws, Aryanization, and Kristallnacht

The Nuremberg Laws of nineteen thirty-five defined full Jews and stripped citizenship. The aim to thirty-nine was forced emigration with wealth extracted: property registered and Aryanized. Kristallnacht in November thirty-eight burned synagogues, a hundred seventy-seven by the anchor's count and twelve hundred by the witness's, jailed twenty thousand men, the first roundup for being Jewish, and fined the victims a billion marks.

Nowhere to run.

WC2 1621 Madagascar to the Ghettos: Poland's Three Million, 1939 to 1941

About half of Germany's Jews escaped before the war. Madagascar was one SS scheme. Poland's three million Jews, ten percent of its people, had nowhere to run; fifty thousand Polish elites were shot in Operation Tannenberg. From late nineteen thirty-nine Jews were fenced into ghettos, Warsaw's over four hundred thousand, on starvation rations; half a million died there. Figures are the anchor's.

Pits, and a method too slow and too public.

WC2 1622 The Einsatzgruppen: The Holocaust by Bullets

With Barbarossa in summer nineteen forty-one four Einsatzgruppen followed the army, marching Jews, Romani and the disabled to pits and shooting them. About a million died, the anchor says, the witness counting about two million, with Wehrmacht units, Order Police battalions and local Hiwis helping. The Holocaust by bullets, long overlooked. The method was too slow and too public.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe a war of aggression and its sides, Poland, the Ardennes, Dunkirk and Vichy, and radar and factories over the Channel. You can describe Lend-Lease and Pearl Harbor, Barbarossa and the halt in the snow, and home fronts of annihilation, rationing and slavery. You can describe Midway, Alamein and Torch, Stalingrad and Kursk, Italy changing sides, Normandy to Berlin, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can describe Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, the United Nations, and an aftermath of twelve million driven west and two traumas. And you can define genocide and the Holocaust, name the other victims, and describe the laws, the ghettos and the bullets. Part two takes the gas, Wannsee, the death factories and Auschwitz, revolts and liberation, memory and denial, four procedures, and the capstone.