The Second World War and the Holocaust

This is Unit Seventeen of Western Civilization Two, part two of two: the gas and the camps, liberation and memory, four procedures, and what the war did to the West's self-image. Part one ended at the pits, with a method too slow and too public. This part is what replaced it, and it pays off the unit's governing idea: total war and industrial murder held together on purpose, because the same civilization did both. In late nineteen forty-one the leadership chose murder; Wannsee coordinated it; six sites near rail lines killed arrivals within two hours through a peak of eighteen months; Auschwitz, the exception built to last, took western Europe's Jews and Hungary's. Fighters held the Warsaw Ghetto four weeks. The Holocaust ended because the war ended. Then the methods: the war by year with one turn each, four turning points sorted by what each turned, the Holocaust by stage, and three words the exam will not let you confuse. By the end you will be able to describe the gas and the camps. To describe the revolts, liberation and memory. To sequence the war and classify a turning point. To sequence the Holocaust and classify a site. And to state the capstone.

Three entries on gas and the camps: the decision and Wannsee, the six extermination sites and their short peak, and Auschwitz as the exception.

The leadership chose murder.

WC2 1623 Gas Vans, Zyklon B, and Wannsee

In late nineteen forty-one the leadership chose murder. Himmler ordered experiments: gas vans with carbon monoxide, then Zyklon B tested on Soviet prisoners at Auschwitz. In January forty-two at Wannsee the Final Solution was coordinated: work Europe's Jews to death or exterminate them; the Jews can no longer be fed, Eichmann's memo said. Auschwitz opened in forty, Majdanek in forty-one; the anchor's date is corrected.

Dead within two hours of arrival.

WC2 1624 Extermination Camps: The Peak of 1942 to 1943, and Treblinka

Extermination camps were not concentration camps: six sites in occupied Poland near rail lines, where arrivals died within two hours; Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were built in forty-two. The peak was short, early nineteen forty-two to late forty-three, half the Holocaust's Jewish victims, as the Polish ghettos emptied. Treblinka alone killed at least eight hundred thousand, mostly from Warsaw. Figures are the anchor's.

Eighty percent gassed, twenty enslaved, all tattooed.

WC2 1625 Auschwitz: The Exception Built to Last

Auschwitz gassed eighty percent on arrival and enslaved twenty, most of those spared worked to death; only there were prisoners tattooed. The complex spread twenty kilometers with factories and sub-camps, kapos over Jewish slaves. Built in concrete and steel, it was the destination for western Europe's Jews and grew in priority as the war turned. Percentages are the anchor's.

Two entries on resistance, the end and memory: the Ghetto Uprising, Hungary's Jews, death marches and liberation; then Nuremberg, the silence, Eichmann's trial and denial.

It ended because the war ended.

WC2 1626 Revolts, the Ghetto Uprising, Hungary 1944, Death Marches, Liberation

Jewish fighters held the Warsaw Ghetto four weeks in spring nineteen forty-three; prisoners rose in two camps. In summer forty-four Hungary's Jews, over four hundred thousand, were gassed at Auschwitz. In early forty-five the SS marched survivors west. The Soviets reached Auschwitz in January. The Holocaust ended because the war ended. The anchor's uprising year and Hungary total are corrected.

The desktop murderer, and a denial that is false.

WC2 1627 Nuremberg, Hilberg, Eichmann, Denial, Memory

Eisenhower ordered the camps documented. Nuremberg tried twenty-two men for crimes against humanity. Then decades of silence, until Hilberg's study of nineteen sixty-one and Eichmann's capture and trial in Jerusalem, the desktop murderer and the trains, made the Holocaust world-known. Denial from the seventies is false, as the anchor describes it; museums and curricula answered it.

Four procedures: the war on one line with one turning point per year, four battles sorted by what each turned, the Holocaust in six stages, and three words for three kinds of site.

Victory, overreach, the turn of forty-two, the grind.

WC2 1628 Sequencing the War, 1939 to 1945

Seven years on one line, one turning point per year. Nineteen thirty-nine: Poland in September. Forty: the Ardennes in May, Dunkirk, France's surrender in June, the Battle of Britain through September, the Tripartite Pact. Forty-one: Lend-Lease in March, Barbarossa on the twenty-second of June, Pearl Harbor in December. Forty-two: Midway in June, El Alamein in October, Torch in November, Stalingrad surrounded. Forty-three: Stalingrad's surrender in February, Kursk in July, Italy's fall, Tehran. Forty-four: D-Day in June, Hungary's Jews, the Warsaw Uprising. Forty-five: Yalta in February, Berlin and V-E Day in May, Potsdam in July, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, surrender on the second of September. The shape: two years of Axis victory, one year of overreach, then the turn at Midway, Alamein and Stalingrad within five months, then two and a half years of grinding back. Place each event in its year. The Ghetto Uprising is forty-three, not forty-four.

Shape, capacity, an army, a method.

WC2 1629 Classifying a Turning Point: Britain, Midway, Stalingrad, Kursk

Each of the anchor's four turned something different. The Battle of Britain, summer nineteen forty, turned the war's shape: Britain survived, so Germany had to fight east before west, and the pact bought Stalin nothing. Midway, June forty-two, turned the Pacific by capacity: four carriers lost that Japan could not rebuild and America could. Stalingrad, November forty-two to February forty-three, turned the eastern front by destroying an army, nearly a million Axis casualties, and ending Germany's grand strategy for oil and the Caucasus. Kursk, July forty-three, turned the method: the Soviets beat Blitzkrieg with anti-tank tactics and nine thousand tanks, and Germany never attacked in the east again. The anchor calls Kursk the real turning point and some historians prefer Moscow or Stalingrad; the course reports the dispute. Practice on El Alamein and D-Day, which turned theaters, not the war.

Exclusion, expulsion, concentration, bullets, gas, erasure.

WC2 1630 Sequencing the Holocaust, 1935 to 1945

The Holocaust has stages, and the exam tests that they came in order. Nineteen thirty-five: the Nuremberg Laws. Thirty-eight: Aryanization and Kristallnacht in November. Thirty-nine: Poland, Operation Tannenberg, the first ghettos. Forty: Auschwitz opened as a prison camp; Madagascar still discussed. Forty-one: Barbarossa in June and the Einsatzgruppen's million; the decision for murder that autumn; gas vans; Zyklon B tested. Forty-two: Wannsee in January; Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka; the peak begins. Forty-three: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in spring; revolts at Treblinka and Sobibor; the peak ends and the five camps close. Forty-four: Hungary's Jews at Auschwitz in summer. Forty-five: death marches in winter; Auschwitz liberated in January; Nuremberg begins in November. The pattern: exclusion, expulsion, concentration, bullets, gas, erasure, and each stage began before the previous had ended. Name the stage for each event. The anchor's dates are corrected at three points; figures attributed.

A district, a prison, a factory; Auschwitz was two.

WC2 1631 Classifying a Site: Ghetto, Concentration Camp, Extermination Camp

Three words the exam will not let you confuse. A ghetto was a fenced district of an existing city, from late nineteen thirty-nine, holding Jews in space for a fraction of their number on starvation rations while they worked; Warsaw and Lodz; half a million died in them of hunger and disease. A concentration camp was a prison camp, from nineteen thirty-three inside Germany, first for political enemies, then Jews, Romani and others, worked under lethal violence; Dachau, Buchenwald; tens of thousands of such sites. An extermination camp was built to kill on arrival, from early forty-two, six of them in occupied Poland near rail lines; Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek, and the exception. Auschwitz was both a concentration camp, from forty, and an extermination camp, Birkenau from forty-one, which is why it alone tattooed and why it alone had survivors in numbers. Practice on six names and say which word, or which two. The distinction is the anchor's; the witness lists the camps.

One capstone entry: two facts the West could not absorb, held together on purpose, and the three things unit eighteen inherits.

A civilization that did both.

WC2 1632 Total War and Industrial Murder: What 1939 to 1945 Did to the West's Self-Image

This unit holds the two facts the anchor says the West could not absorb, and it holds them together on purpose. The first is total war generalized to the planet. A war of aggression by one man's obsession took sixty million lives, most of them civilians, because the technology that had won the last war's stalemate, tanks and bombers, now reached every city, and because the state that fought it hardest, the Soviet Union, fought it with twenty-five million dead and factories moved a thousand miles. It ended with a weapon that could extinguish life. The second is industrial murder. A nation at Europe's center, with its universities and its railways, used timetables and contracted gas chambers to kill six million Jews, two-thirds of Europe's, plus millions of Romani, homosexuals, prisoners and Slavs, and it did so with regular soldiers, policemen and clerks, and it did so faster as it was losing, until the war ended it. The anchor's conclusion is that the distinction between civilization and barbarism, drawn since the Greeks, was undermined by the civilized. Three things followed that unit eighteen inherits. The victors had already divided Germany and Europe at Yalta and Potsdam before the peace, and the division held for forty-five years. The United Nations was founded on the ruins of the League with a council that could act. And the West, rethinking itself, would spend the next half-century answering a question this unit only asks: whether the science, the state and the nation it had built could be trusted with themselves. Sixty million dead by total war; six million by timetable. Figures are attributed throughout.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the decision for murder and Wannsee, six sites and a short peak, and Auschwitz as the exception built to last. You can describe the Ghetto Uprising, Hungary's Jews, the death marches and liberation, and the road from Nuremberg through silence to Eichmann's trial and a denial that is false. You can sequence the war as victory, overreach, the turn of forty-two and the grind, and sort four battles by shape, capacity, an army and a method. You can sequence the Holocaust as exclusion, expulsion, concentration, bullets, gas and erasure, and tell a district from a prison from a factory. And you can state the capstone: total war and industrial murder by the same civilization, which is this unit's one idea. Unit eighteen opens on the division that held for forty-five years.