History

• Nazis' aggressive, expansionist foreign policy


  For lebensraum (living space)
• Germany must expand its living space to new land and soil
• Outbreak of World War II


  Axis vs. Allies
• On September 3 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany
• Allied countries against Axis countries

  • Germany
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Britain
  • France
  • Russia
  • USA
• In December 1941, America and Japan joined the war, and the war in Europe became a World War
• Hitler and Mussolini were both dictators of fascist countries
• Mussolini's fascist Italy joined the war on Germany's side
• Russia remained neutral at the beginning of the war, but joined in on the side of the Allies (Britain and France) when Germany attacked it in 1941
• Genocide


  Mass murder
• Annihilate


  Cease to exist, wipe out completely
• Genocide is intended to destroy a national, ethnic or racial group of people
• The Holocaust refers to a particular genocide, the mass slaughter of Jews by the Nazis
• Einsatzgruppen


  Death squads
• 'Final Solution'


  The name for Nazi Germany's plan for the systematic killing of European Jews
• The process of the extermination camps

  1. Victims crowded into cattle trucks and taken to extermination camps

  2. Victims ordered to undress and forced into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. They were locked inside, and poisonous gas Zyklon B was released into the rooms , victims died within 15 minutes

  
  

  3. After the gassing, everything valuable, like wedding rings was taken from their bodies3. After the gassing, everything valuable, like wedding rings was taken from their bodies

  4.Bodies pushed into giant ovens
• Kurt Gerstein, SS officer: 'He witnessed the gassing at Belzec death camp in August 1942 and wrote this account in May 1945, shortly before committing suicide'
• About 17 million voters out of 35 million had voted the Nazis into power in 1932, in Germany
• The Nazis received about half the vote, meaning that half the voters did not agree with Nazi policies
• It took great courage to resist the Nazi rulers, but despite the dangers, many people did resist
• The White Rose Movement

  • A small, non-violent resistance group consisting of students from the University of Munich
  • They spoke out against Nazism, and printed pamphlets
• Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were caught dropping leaflets at their university and were tried and executed by guillotine
• The Confessing Church


  • Opposed the Nazis, and was led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • Bonhoeffer was forbidden to speak in public, and forbidden to publish anything
  • He worked as a spy as part of a failed plot to assassinate Hitler
  • He was arrested and put in a concentration camp and executed by hanging
• Pastor Niemoller: 'He wrote a famous speech about resistance to Nazism'
• The Nazi German army entered the city of Warsaw in Poland in 1939, just after WWII broke out, and built a wall to enclose a part of the city, which became known as the Warsaw Ghetto
• The Nazis pursued a policy of 'slow and natural extinction' in the Warsaw Ghetto
• In 1941 and 1942, thousands of Jews from the ghetto were rounded up and transported to a death camp
• The remaining 65,000 Jews in the ghetto formed themselves into freedom fighter groups and prepared for an uprising, smuggling in weapons and digging escape tunnels
• In April 1943, the Nazis attacked the ghetto and were met with gunfire, but returned and set fire to the ghetto and threw poison gas into the sewers
• On 27 April 1945, the Allied forces were closing in on Germany, and Italy was on the verge of defeat
• Mussolini tried to flee from Italy, but was captured by Italian resisters and killed, and his body was hung for public display
• On 30 April, the Allied forces were closing in on Berlin, the capital of Germany
• Hitler committed suicide along with Eva Braun, his long-term mistress whom he had married just before their joint suicide
• On 2 May, the German army in Berlin surrendered to the Russian army
• On 7 May, the Germans signed an armistice and all their forces surrendered
• News of the surrender broke in the West on 8 May, and celebrations erupted throughout Europe
• The war between America and Japan was not yet over, however
• At the end of the war, Allied soldiers discovered the concentration camps
• The Italian army surrendered
• The defeat of Germany