Third Reich & the Holocaust, Week 4: Trains & the Warsaw Ghetto

Carrying on the theme of the WW2 class, the Deutsches Reichs Bahn was essential in carrying out not only the military goals of the Reich, but the ideological ones as well.

Nazi Megastructures: Hitler's Death Trains

For this link we viewed minutes 46:37-54:40.

The clip begins at Auschwitz Birkenau, at the end of the line. We've been reading Night by Elie Wiesel, and this location is where his concentration camp experience begins, where he and his father are separated from his mother and sister, seeing them for the last time.

Trains in the Third Reich were the means of transporting people to ghettos and camps, a vital instrument for murder on an industrial scale.

We did not view this clip in class (by Yad Vashem), but it is worth mentioning here: The Ghettos

Warsaw Ghetto

This was the largest ghetto created, in November 1941, in German occupied Europe. For those Jews who were transported from here, their final destination was Treblinka, a death camp. As I've mentioned before each camp had different uses: labor, concentration, and death-- as the name indicates, this was for extermination of life. This next clip is from a survivor of Treblinka, someone who survived by carrying out the labor of the removal and burning of corpses. His last few minutes of description bring to mind the woman on Eli Wiesel's train to Birkenau-- Mrs. Schächter. She saw visions of fire and was hysterical the closer they got to Auschwitz. Survivor Testimony About Treblinka Death Camp

Rumors of Treblinka came back to the Warsaw Ghetto and mass deportations were underway. In 1942, approximately 254,000 were sent to Treblinka. After this, the Jews in the ghetto rose up in protest,  The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jews of the ghetto built bunkers and the Polish underground smuggled in weapons and explosives. They knew this uprising was doomed, but they felt it was better to choose their own death than be subjected to the horrors of Treblinka. Marek Edelman, a leader of one of the Jewish groups, who escaped through the Warsaw sewers, later said  that choosing to fight was "to pick the time and place of death." For men, women, and children long without choices and pushed along, this was their last stand.

In response to the uprising, SS forces moved into the ghetto block by block, burning houses with flame throwers.  While Edelman was able to escape, the SS found a large bunker filled with leaders of the uprising. They all ingested cyanide to avoid death at the hands of the SS.

The flamethrower scene I linked above is from the movie The Pianist, which is a 2002 movie about the true story of Wladislaw Szpilman, a famous Polish pianist who is forced into the Warsaw ghetto along with his father, mother, brother, and two sisters. His family was on a transport list and were lined up to board the train to Treblinka when someone recognized him and pulled him out of line. This saved his life, but his entire family was gassed upon arrival at the camp. After the uprising was squashed with the burning of the Great Synogogue of Warsaw, he evaded capture for several months. The Hiding Scene from The Pianist. Hiding out on the Aryan side, he helped smuggle weapons for the planned uprising. He was eventually found out by a German Army officer who, instead of doing what was expected, took Wladislaw and showed him a better place to hide. This German officer was a Captain Wilhelm Hosenfeld, and was later captured by Soviets and placed in a Soviet concentration camp. After the war, Wladislaw and the Polish government tried unsuccessfully to get Captain Hosenfeld to safety, and he died in the camp in 1952.

Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, has for many long years run a program, known as The Righteous Among the Nations. This program is designed to remember the "honored by Yad Vashem, are non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust. Rescue took many forms and the Righteous came from different nations, religions and walks of life. What they had in common was that they protected their Jewish neighbors at a time when hostility and indifference prevailed." Wladislaw Szpilman worked to make sure Captain Hosenfeld was on this list, and he was added in 2008. 

Also on that list of "The Righteous Among Nations" was Irena Sendler, a selfless Gentile who risked her life to save Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Her goal was to save as many children as she could by smuggling them out of the ghetto and placing the children with Polish families who would care for them until the end of the war. There is a Hallmark movie that tells the story of her role in saving the children called The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler. A quick google search brings up an astronomical number of hits, and I waded through many of them before finding this TED Talk about a high school project called "Life in a Jar" (also the title of the book). The Irena Sendler Project. She was able to smuggle out over 2,500 children. Most of these children lost their entire families to Treblinka.

The Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw Uprising Memorial

Modern Euro 2, Week Four: Operation Barbarossa & Trains

In the first week or two of this course, we discussed Hitler's goals.

1. Lebensraum (living space).
2. Propagation of Nazi ideology
3. Resources

Looking at a map, where would the Third Reich look that had plenty of space and resources? What country would have an ideology so rabidly against Nazi ideology that Hitler would want to subjugate and remove permanently? Look to the East. Russia. USSR. The Bolshevists. The Communists.

Resources, throughout history, have been a major reason for any type of skirmish or all out war. By looking at war through resources, rather than political and ideological differences, we can get a fresh understanding of why war happens. And we get to use our first John Green clip of the semester: World War II, A War for Resources: Crash Course World History

Which leads us to Russia, and a timeline refresher:

1939: 

• 23 August, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed; a nonaggression agreement between Germany and Russia, in the event that anything happens, Germany stays out of Russia, and Russia allows Germany to do what it plans on doing.
• 1 September, Germany invades Poland and WW2 begins

1940:

• 10 May, Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister
• 10 July- 31 October, Battle of Britain
• 25 August, RAF bombs Berlin
• 7 September- May 1941, The Blitz

1941:

• April, fall of Yugoslavia to Germany
• May, fall of Greece
• 22 June, Operation Barbarossa
• 9 July, fall of Minsk
• 5 August, fall of Smolensk
• 12 August, Hitler sends his center army group to Kiev instead of moving on to Moscow

Operation Barbarossa is the event that blasted the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact out of the water; the German invasion of Russia. This clip covers the relationship between the two countries prior to invasion and then the first few weeks of invasion. World War II in HD Color: Hitler Strikes East. We watched the first ten minutes of this video, but even though I pick clips apart, this entire documentary is stellar and the maps are fantastic.

Hitler's Barbarossa Blunders:

1) By the end of summer! Sound familiar? In the first war, Kaiser Wilhelm II believed it would be over by Christmas... and then it stagnated. The blitzkrieg (that had been successful heretofore in western Europe) of the East in the Second World War eventually stagnated, as well.

2) Hitler underestimated the size of the Russian military. While initially caught off guard, the Russian military's manpower far outstripped the Germany military. 

3) Hitler underestimated Russian ability to rapidly improve their technology and weaponry.

4) Hitler stopped just short of Moscow in the summer months, instead detouring south to help the souther flank in taking Kiev, which was rich in resources. Hitler had done this just a few months prior when he ended the blitz on London. If he had continued that operation, Britain could very well have fallen.

The second half of class was spent on German transportation and how pivotal it was to Hitler's goals.

This is probably one of my favorite documentaries (I've watched it several times) because it seems so simple. Trains and tracks. Hitler moved at great speeds in his invasions and warfare. He took the western portion of Europe in very little time. When he turned east, he could have just as quickly taken the west except he found a discrepancy between the gauge widths of the train tracks, and the invasion slowed. 

Nazi Megastructures: Hitler's Death Trains

For this class, we viewed the following minutes:

1) 5:18-13:48-- trains in Nazi Germany

2) 15:00-23:00-- trains taking Western Europe; Danzig; K-5

3) 31:24-34:00-- Operation Barbarossa

Third Reich & the Holocaust, Week Three: Organization of Forces & Kindertransport

If you've ever watched any documentary or clip or if you notice in this class concerning the Third Reich, you will inevitably come across terms like the SA, the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, the Einsatzgruppen, etc. This can be confusing as far as each group's purpose and where they fit in to the grand scheme of the Nazi power structure. I never found anything online or in my books that described or looked the way I wanted it to, so I subjected the students to my mad white board skills. This is a brief, not in depth look at the major groups you hear the most about with this subject.

Many times, there is confusion between the SS and SA and their role in the Wehrmacht (German armed forces consisting of the Luftwaffe (air force), Kriegsmarine (navy), and Heer (army). They are actually all three separate entities. Before Hitler came to power, in the interwar years, the German armed forces were the Reichswehr. Then, once he became Führer, it became the Wehrmacht. Under Hitler was Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command (Obercommando der Wehrmacht). He was the chief of the army, but once he was the Chief, the Commander-in-Chief of the army went to Walther von Brauchtisch (not written on the board). The Chief of the Navy was Karl Dönitz (pronounced like a combination of darn it and donuts). The Luftwaffe was helmed by the more familiar name of Hermann Göring. As with any military force, the objectives of these three branches were the invasion and conquests for Hitler's Lebensraum (living space). They were, for the most part, completely separate from the actions of the SA and the SS.

In the days following the First World War, returning German veterans were disillusioned and dismayed at their failures and the nothingness they returned home to: unemployment and breadlines, an unstable political scene, and a plethora of ideas of how life should be. Those men who were not ready to lay down their arms-- the thugs, brutes, and malevolent characters--wanted a purpose. The Treaty of Versailles had curtailed the military numbers, so these men could not maintain their military status. They created for themselves the Freikorps (Free Corps), a free army that was not connected to the regular army; otherwise known as a paramilitary group. They were virulently anti-Communist, antisemitic, and anti anyone else that fell into the "stab in the back" category of post WWI. This group grew into the fascist group called the SA-- sturmabteilung-- or Stormtroopers. Also known as the "brown shirts" in homage to the fascist paramilitary in Mussolini's Italy who were the "black shirts".  This SA was led by a man named Ernst Röhm and in the early days of the Nazi Party, was friends with Hitler and shared the passion for Nazism. The SA were excessively violent and took it upon themselves to enforce Nazi Party ideology and influence politics, like elections. They provided military protection for those like Hitler who spoke in promotion of the ideology and organized various public disturbances, such as the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 in Munich-- the same failed Putsch that landed Hitler in jail and afforded him the time to write Mein Kampf.

Hitler had many plans in his quick ascension to Führer. And Röhm would quickly found himself in the way. Röhm's first problem was that he was obsessively loyal to Nazi ideology and less loyal to Hitler. His second problem was he made plans to replace the German Reichswehr with his SA. He demanded the removal of German elites from power and replaced with fanatical Nazis. Hitler knew this wouldn't work in the big picture of consolidating his power and popularity within Germany. Hitler was backed into a corner on how to deal with Röhm, but finally had to make use of the opportunity to show that the SA under Röhm was too "revolutionary." On 30 June to 2 July 1934, the SS carried out the "Röhm Purge" or what would be better known as the Night of the Long Knives. Röhm was executed and the SS took the opportunity to kill other political opponents (100-150 dead) and take 1100 others into custody. As a consequence, Hitler was able to gain the backing of the German army who swore an oath to Hitler, not to Germany. After this purge and the death of President von Hindenburg, there was nothing in the way of Hitler becoming Führer. The SA still existed just without the influence it once had within the Nazi Party.

The SS-- Schutzstaffel-- had three main branches.  The Allgemeine SS (General SS), the Waffen-SS (armed SS), and the SS-Totenkopfverbände. The Allgemeine SS enforced Nazi policy on racial purity (with subgroups like the SD).  The Waffen-SS were combat units (specifically the Einsatzgruppen) that followed behind the army to take care of the civilians that didn't fall into the Nazi system of acceptable genetic breeding. After the invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), their duties were looting, confiscating property, and mass murdering Soviet Jews, Roma, and political opponents. In summer of 1941, Himmler, noting the "psychological burden that mass shootings produced on his men, requested a more convenient mode of killing be developed." This led to the mobile gas chambers or mobile killing units. Victims were put in vans and poisoned with carbon monoxide. The SS- Totenkopfverbände, the Death's Head Units, ran the concentration camps. Two smaller sub groups were the Gestapo and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst). The Gestapo were the Secret Police under Hermann Göring and later Heinrich Himmler. The director of the Gestapo was Reinhard Heydrich (he would become director of the SD) and later Heinrich Müller, who had the infamous Adolf Eichmann working for him. The SD was created by Himmler in 1931 to gather intelligence on Hitler's opponents within the Nazi Party, the leaders and activities of other political parties, and federal and local government officials. Once Hitler was Führer, he gave Himmler the power to carry out ideological Party policies.

The structure here is wildly confusing, and many times their roles changed throughout the 1920s and 30s. By the war years, new groups were formed from all three branches and the chain of command was questionable at times as it was constantly in flux and chaotic.

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The Nazi antisemitic policies were gradual, moving to block the basic rights of life and then locking them into a doomed future. The Path to Nazi Genocide: Part 3/4 covers the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s.

But then Kristallnacht... 9 November 1938.

Goebbels en Kristallnacht

For many it was too late to get out of Germany and German occupied territories, but there came a chance for families to part with their children, sending them off to safety on the Kindertransport.

Journeys to Safety: Memories of the Kindertransport is a short documentary from those now old children of the Kindertransport. As much as I can, I seek first hand accounts. It's not often to hear from the children who lived through such times.

Sir Nicholas Winton was the hero to 669 children who were able, with his assistance, get to England. There are dozens of videos and documentaries dedicated to the work this man did just prior to war breaking out. What Will Your Legacy Be?

For additional information on the Kindertransport and what the children did once getting to England, click this link: Kindertransport: A Journey to Life

Modern Euro 2, Week Three: The Battle of Britain & Bombing of Hamburg

My classes rely heavily on videos and links, and I'm always nervous for the day where it doesn't work. Today was that day. I don't think I've ever lectured that much in a two hour span, and now I'm just tired. Good thing is I had copious notes to wing it and the comfort of having more than a passing knowledge of today's topics.

When we study history, we typically view events in chronological order, and lump things into vague categories of this happened, then this happened, and then this happened, and in our minds we don't always grasp how something went down. The time period between the fall of France and the Battle of Britain is quite short. To recap some of last week's timeline and add on today's topics, I had this one the board:

1940

• 10 May: Churchill becomes Prime Minister
• 26 May- 4 June: Dunkirk evacuation
• 18 June: Churchill's Dunkirk speech, "I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin."
• 20 June: evacuation of the Channel Islands; 25,000-- mostly children-- leave the islands of Guernsey and Jersey for England; check out the book and miniseries The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
• 10 July- 31 October: Battle of Britain
• 25 August: RAF (Royal Air Force) bombs Berlin, enraging Hitler
• 7 September- May 1941: The Blitz

This timeline, other than showing how fast events were taking place, is a bit confusing towards the end. For the British, they view the Battle of Britain and the Blitz as two separate events even thought they occur during the same time periods. For the Germans, they view it as one event that spans form July 1940 to June 1941. The more I read up on this the more questions I had. It makes sense to say that when the first bombs dropped until they stopped would make the most sense. From what I have read, the Battle of Britain was the overall coastal battle and the Blitz was the direct bombing of London and other nearby cities. Either way, the primary objective of the attacks on Britain by Germany was to get Britain to negotiate a peace settlement, somewhat like the Treaty of Versailles in reverse where Germany could call the shots. However, Britain refused to capitulate, leading to eight months of day and night raids across England.

Known as Operation Sealion, Germany began with small scale bombing along the coast of southern England. Called störangriffe, these were nuisance raids, bombing convoy ships and small airfields. Later, on 13 August, this changed to Adlerangriff-- Eagle Attack-- and was a large force attack on RAF airfields and radar stations. These radar stations proved vital in Britain's defense. At this time, work was underway on the Enigma coding machines. For further study on this, see The Imitation Game, a movie about Alan Turing and these machines, and The Bletchley Circle, a television series on the women who worked with coding.

WWII in Colour: The Battle of Britain and the Blitz

The London Blitz, footage of the burning, ruins, and devastation.

The Battle of Britain was the first battle solely fought in the air. In eight months of bombing throughout Britain, 18,000 tons of explosives were dropped, claiming 40,000 civilian lives. 

Battle of Britain Statistics

"Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few," said Winston Churchill in a speech in September 1940 in regards to the defense put up by the RAF. A squadron of Polish air force fled Poland with the invasion and conquest of the Germans where they joined the RAF. Having lost everything in their home country, they continued the fight for another. Polish Fly Boys in the Battle of Britain were adamant and heroic in their retaliation with the RAF. As history goes, the war eventually ended, but the Polish pilots were not given their dues considering their sacrifices for a country was not home. The Cold War came to Poland, and the pilots were eschewed as Britain sought to distance itself from the Soviets. RAF pilot remembers WW2 betrayal as movie Huricane honors Polish heroes

For more reading on The Blitz, check out the book The Longest Night: The Bombing of London on May 10, 1941 by Gavin Mortimer. 

This became an iconic photograph for Londoners. Even amidst the destruction and smoke, the dome of St. Paul's cathedral brought hope.

Here are some layered photos of today and the rubble of the Blitz.

London's Biggest Blitz is newsreel coverage of the bombing of London, describing the bombings while talking up the hope and indomitable spirit of Londoners. "We'll give it to them back!" was the cry and retaliation was guaranteed. History is a shady business. The victors left glossing over what they did to be victors, the losers left to their shame, constantly reminded of their evilness. It's a reality of war. What is war? It's the oneupmanship of one group over another until one group loses as many resources, and men, and morale than the other group. It's only been in recent decades where the history of the second world war has begun to include how the Allies gained victory. In the link above the thought is clear: What Germans did to London, Britain and the Allies would see done to Germany. 

In this second newsreel from August 1943, the bombing of Hamburg, known as Operation Gomorrah,  optimistically recounts the raids, reminding those listening/watching that this is the natural course of war; Germany bombed first, we returned the favor. Which the bombing of London was a direct response to the bombing of Berlin by the RAF, if they wanted to play tit for tat. The narrator speaks of the hit to the port and other resources that would no longer benefit the Third Reich. In reality, "despite terrible loss of civilian life, there strange and awful irony: The horrific bombing runs affected Hitler's war machine only marginally. It did more to wound the morale of the German people and its army officers that it did production of munitions, which was back running full speed with a matter of weeks." (link to article) This newsreel is also careful to steer the imagery of the dead to being workers unable to labor for Hitler and his war away from the fact they were civilians, many of them women and children.

In comparison, eight months of the Blitz left 14,286 civilians killed and 20, 325 civilians wounded. For Hamburg, 2, 326 tons of bombs were dropped in forty-three minutes, creating a firestorm that engulfed the city, sucking in those desperate to escape and ripping apart buildings. 42,000 civilians were killed, and 37,000 were wounded. Over one million were displaced, unable to find their once homes in the aftermath as some roads completely disappeared in the rubble and the ferocious heat of the firestorm. Casualties were unrecognizable as the heat shriveled adults to child sized corpses. The raids on Hamburg have been called the most fatal attack of the war on a German city.

The Hamburg Firebombing is a link that discusses the firestorm, the aftermath, and the trauma of those who lived through this. 

This is St. Nicholai, or what's left of it. The steeple was used as a landmark for the Allies as they conducted their raids. You can see where the white stones have replaced those that were destroyed in the bombings. "Today, the remains of St. Nikolai serve as a memorial for the victims of war and tyranny from 1933 to 1945. The museum in the vault informs with its permanent exhibition 'Gomorrah 1943-- Hamburg's destruction through aerial warfare' of the destruction of Hamburg during the Second World War, as well as the causes and effects of the air raids." (pamphlet from St. Nikolai)

This memorial is for the prisoners of Neuengamme, a concentration camp on the outskirts of Hamburg. The prisoners here were laborers and were brought in to clear the rubble of the bombings. The plaque, in the stone of the floor of what would have been near the altar of the church, describes the sculpture and the laborers of Neuengamme.

The Third Reich & Holocaust, Week Two: Nazi Culture

What is anthropology? A quick google later and you get "the study of human societies and cultures and their development." Much of this class is based in the cultural anthropology, studying the values, social organization, and what laws/rules determine how a people live.

When we think of culture, European culture, we can clearly get a broad feel of most countries. The French have elaborate, functional architecture, they have easily recognizable music (the movie Ratatouilles or the Aristocats are good examples of the typical French style), the art is distinguishable as they boast art exhibit after art exhibit (Manet, Monet, van Gogh, etc.),and the literature is many times inherent of the French past: Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame-- the Victor Hugo greats.

Britain is the Globe Theater, Big Ben, St. Paul's, castles, Scotland, thatched roof cottages, Regency... the literature abounds: Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolkien; the art is medieval, a sturdy throw back to Celtic tradition. It's tea and biscuits.

Ireland makes you think of green, shamrocks, leprechauns, and quaint villages with a local pub. Celtic art permeates the culture even still today with its geometric designs and knots. It's James Joyce, the Book of Kells, and Oscar Wilde.

Italy is Rome, Venice, Florence... from the ancient Romans to the golden Renaissance, from ruins to the Sistine Chapel. Of course art is Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli, among dozens of others. The literature is Dante's Divine Comedy, The Decameron, Machiavelli, and Petrarch. And all this surrounded by bowls of pasta.

These things are all cultural identifiers for these countries, but what of Germany in the 20s and 30s? These other countries and cultures developed over centuries. While there were plenty of Germanic tribes and states, a unified Germany was barely sixty years old, had been plagued with many long years of war and even more years of unemployment and destitution. They had long wanted an identity, in fact a good bit of the reasons behind the first world war was to perpetuate their unified identity and make their own "place beneath the sun." The question was "Who did Germany want to be when they grew up?" Everyone had an opinion, there was no unifying political ideal, there really was no desire to figure out where they were going as a nation as for many the concern was about the next meal or the next season. A cultural and national identity was somewhere in the trenches of the Great War.

And then Hitler. His vision was overarching, a romanticized ideal, and something that could be recognizable German. He had a solid, unified political base, he made promises and he kept them, and he had a clean slate in which to create a culture based on a hybrid folklore from old, pre-Christian, pagan mythologies and themes, and racial, Aryan ideals.

Hitler's favorite German composer was Richard Wagner, and his works harkened back to an era of Germanic greatness. Lohengrin, Tristan & Isolde, Der Ring des Niebelungen bring forth epic themes of a Germanic past. The Ride of the Valkyries is perhaps one of his most well known works.  Hitler adored this. Of course, it also helped that Wagner was antisemitic and his views of race fell in line with Hitler's. On an off note, Hitler did not have an appreciation for another German composer, Mendelssohn, unsurprisingly because of his Jewish heritage.

But how did Hitler put his vision to reality?

Architectural greatness: Hitler's Supercity, Part 1 and Hitler's Supercity, Part 2

We stopped the second link about 4:25 and the building of the Olympic Stadium built for the 1936 Olympics. This event was the world stage to show the world the might and strength, proving to the world that the Third Reich were no longer a downtrodden nation held down by the Treaty of Versailles.

The Olympics: 1936

The movie Race is a great dramatization of the triumph of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a thumbing of the nose at the supposed racial superiority of the Aryan ideals.

Art in the Third Reich:

In September 1933, Joseph Goebbels (Reichsminister für Völkskaufklärung und Propaganda-- Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propoganda, a pompous title for a small, frail like man) established the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber). Using this office, he and Hitler began writing the guideline for "good" and "acceptable" culture. One idea Hitler proposed was an art exhibit of Nazi approved art, called the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (the Great German Art Exhibit).

Goebbels thought of one better: create an exhibit nearby the first exhibit that would show what unacceptable art in the Reich was. Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, better known now as the "degenerate art" exhibit. This exhibit would showcase the art of the now defunct Weimar Republic, Goebbels called the "era of decay." This was art that showed decadence, weakness of character, racial impurity, and mental disease.  Degenerate Art on Charlie Rose, gives examples of both exhibits.

Among the unacceptable artists were the modern artists, the impressionists, Kandinksky, Chagall, Picasso, and Otto Dix. We spoke of Otto Dix, The German Painter Who Fought in the Trenches last semester and how he used art to express his experiences in the Great War. You can imagine why Hitler was adamantly against Dix and his emphasis on the perils of war and its aftermath.

The degenerate art exhibit turned out to be wildly popular. Running from 19 July to 30 November, 1937, the exhibit saw over two million visitors, more than 20,000 per day.

Hitler's War on Literature:

Nazi Book Burning

In Berlin, the book burnings were in Bebelplatz, before the Humboldt University Library (on the right in the photo below).

This plaque is on the wall to the right of the main doors. "In this place Nazis destroyed the best works of German and World literature. The fascist book burning of 10 May 1933 be a reminder of imperialism and war."

Modern Euro 2, Week Two: The War Begins

Last week we moved along the timeline in the late 1930s with Hitler's land grabs of the Rhineland (1936), Austria with the Anschluss (1938), and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia (1938), and ended with the Munich Agreement in October 1938, where Neville Chamberlain (Prime Minister of Britain), Eduard Daladier of France, Hitler, and Benito Mussolini came to terms with German territorial actions with a continued policy of appeasement. Chamberlain returned to England and pronounced this moment as "peace in our time," and later made him a laughingstock as appeasement failed spectacularly with the invasion of Poland less than a year later.

This video runs a long at a quick pace, but that's how this new war began. It was a blitzkrieg, a "lightning war," a swift, all encompassing, utterly devastating assault. 1 September 1939 was the bringing of the Polish-German War, but with the week it would become the Second World War.

World War 2 Begins

Terms from this video:

1) Einsatzgruppen, translated as action groups; Death's Head Units or Regiments: the sole purpose of this group (separate from the German military) was to deal with the civilian element of the invaded population-- Soviet Jews, Roma, political dissidents, etc. They lotted, confiscated property, vandalized and destroyed property, and eliminated the "undesirables" in mass shootings.

2) fifth column: a group within a country at war who are sympathetic to or working for the enemies; e.g. Poles retaliated against the Germans living in Poland because of the invasion; that would make the Germans living in Poland the fifth column, because they were German and it was Germany that invaded.

Once the Poles capitulated in surrender to Germany, Hitler turned his eyes to the West, using the blitzkrieg tactics to swiftly take down the countries of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. In the interim war years, France built up the mighty Maginot line, a series of highly fortified defenses along the German border. This video, The Maginot Line, explains how it was created, how it held up, and how it failed in the long run.

10 May, 1940, saw the fall of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. In England on that day, Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister after a vote of no confidence was taken in the House of Commons. His "peach in our time" speech and appeasement policies saw him in a political fallout. In the days of his optimism of peace, Winston Churchill adamantly spoke out on Chamberlain's inaction and false sense of peace. As a result, Winston Churchill became the replacement for the disgraced Prime Minister Chamberlain.

12 May, 1940, France fell. In the readings for today, there was a blurb on the French Resistance. We will speak more on the Resistance efforts in the war throughout the semester. This video expands on the reading: French Resistance.

26 May, 1940, began the harrowing evacuation of troops at Dunkirk. This video, Remember Dunkirk,  aptly describes and illustrates the moments that lead up to the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF) and the French military being closed off at Dunkirk, unable to retreat any further.

There is a fantastic couple of movies that dramatize these events. In this first clip from the movie "Dunkirk", Dunkirk Rescue Civilian Boats, shows the civilian owned vessels of England crossing the Channel to aid the evacuation, amidst the bombings from land and air. The second movie is called "The Darkest Hour," and is the backstory of politics in London that was going on as Churchill became Prime Minister and the evacuation was taking place. I found a clip that married footage from both movies, overlapping in areas, to produce the visual of the BEF and the now famous speech made by Winstone Churchill.  Dunkirk Darkest Hour: We Shall Fight

For the audio of the original speech of Winston Churchill, use this video: We Shall Fight on the Beaches.

10 June, 1940, Italy declared war on France and Britain.

22 June, 1940, France signs an armistice with Germany, in the exact location, in the same train car as the armistice of World War One, on 11 November, 1918, a German enacted revenge for how the first world war ended.

Hitler was in Paris just a few hours after this Armistice, where he toured the city and made his way through the Arc de Triomphe. This video details the fall of Paris and Hitler's visit to the city: 1940: Hitler in Paris. Random fact: Hitler wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower, but the operators told him the elevators were not working at the time. Once he left he city, the elevators were once again
running smoothly. Coincidence?