World war two and Germany 1939-1935

• Initial reaction to the break out of war: Most Germans believed the attack on Poland was a reaction to Polish aggression and was designed to reclaim territory lost in the Treaty of Versailles, particularly the city of Danzig on the Baltic.
• Initial reaction to the break out of war: With Poland defeated and occupied, Hitler publicly offered to make peace with the western allies, while secretly ordering his generals to prepare for an invasion of France that winter. Britain and France refused to trust Hitler this time and the war continued.
• Initial reaction to the break out of war: Germans in 1939 could still remember the pain of 1918, their surrender and the subsequent punishment at Versailles. However, the vast majority of Germans reluctantly supported the war and signed up to play their part in the war effort.
• Impact: Rationing -

  • Rationing of food was introduced on 27 August 1939 and a points system for clothing was introduced in October 1939.
  • Autarky and rearmament meant consumer goods were already expensive due to low supply.
  • Germans’ diets became more monotonous, with lots of bread, potatoes and preserves.
  • There were meat shortages due to lack of imports from the USA.
• Impact: Rationing -

  • Many Germans feared a repeat of the shortages experienced during World War One.
  • Food entitlements depended upon the importance of individuals to the war effort: 'normal consumers', 'heavy workers' 'very heavy workers' – there were also categories for children, pregnant women.
• Impact: Rationing -

  • Jews' food entitlements were set below Aryans'.
  • The winter of 1939-40 was exceptionally cold and there were shortages of coal.
• Impact: Area bombing -

  • Up until the middle of 1942 the British had tried to target their bombing raids on industrial and military targets.
  • In 1942 RAF Bomber Command switched to a policy of ‘area bombing’ – targeting large industrial cities with incendiary bombs (bombs designed to cause fires), and not distinguishing between military and civilian targets.
  • On 30 May 1942 the first British ‘thousand bomber raid’ was launched against the German city of Cologne.
• Impact: Area bombing -

  • Over the next 3 years: 61 German cities, with a combined population of 25 million, were attacked; 3.6 million homes were destroyed; 7.5 million people were made homeless; 300,000 – 400,000 Germans were killed in the raids; and 800,000 people were wounded. However, German industrial production continued to increase until mid-1944.
• Impact: Area bombing -

  • The raids had a mixed impact on the morale of the German population as Nazi propaganda tended to downplay their impact and the number of deaths.
• Impact: Refugees -

  • At the outbreak of war, many Germans from the western regions bordering France, such as the Saar, fled east further into Germany. However, many returned soon after when immediate fighting with France failed to begin.
• Impact: Refugees -

  • The intensive British ‘area’ bombing campaign from May 1942 onwards, targeted at the industrial Ruhr region, created thousands of refugees as whole cities were flattened or burnt down.
• Impact: Refugees -

  • During the advance of the Soviet army through Poland and eastern Germany during 1944 and 45, much of the civilian population fled westwards to avoid the brutality of the Russian soldiers.
• Impact: Employment -

  • 13.7 million German men served in the army during the war, and this created a huge labour shortage on the home front.
  • As they did during World War One, women entered the workforce in large numbers, working in armaments factories and as medics.
• Impact: Employment -

  • The Nazis also made extensive use of forced labour, transporting hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war from Eastern Europe and elsewhere to Germany to keep the war effort going.
• Impact: Employment -

  • At the end of the war, eight million enslaved labourers and other ‘displaced persons’ became refugees inside Germany. In addition, 11 million ethnic Germans were either refugees or had been expelled from the countries surrounding Germany in the East.
• Opposition: Army and Youth - The war effort was generally supported, especially against the supposedly racially inferior Russians in the east. The allied bombing campaigns weakened enthusiasm for the war but it wasn’t until the Reich itself was invaded in 1945 that German civilians’ morale collapsed.
• Opposition: Army - In October 1939, after the successful invasion of Poland, Hitler ordered plans to be drawn up for the invasion of France, via Belgium. Fearing a repeat of the failure of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914, the head of counter-intelligence, Admiral Canaris, attempted to gain the support of the heads of the army for a coup against Hitler. Due to a harsh winter the plan dissolved.
• Opposition: Army - In July 1944, a group of army officers tried to assassinate Hitler. A bomb was planted by Colonel Stauffenberg at a meeting attended by the Fuhrer. It exploded, but Hitler survived. In retaliation, Stauffenberg was shot the same day and 5,000 people were executed in the crackdown on opposition that followed.
• Opposition: Youth - The main youth opposition group during the war was the Edelweiss Pirates, who were fond of singing anti-Nazi songs. In 1942 over 700 of them were arrested. In 1944, 13 members were publically hanged after the Pirates in Cologne killed the Gestapo chief.
• Racial persecution: Phase one (Polish ghettos) - The German conquest of Poland in autumn 1939 brought three million more Jews under Nazi control. Polish Jews were confined to ghettos and camps in terrible conditions, where hundreds of thousands died of starvation and disease.
• Racial persecution: Phase one (Polish ghettos) - Hitler is believed to have given the order to begin the attempted extermination of Europe’s 11 million Jews in 1941. This so-called ‘Final Solution’ to the question of what to do with Europe’s Jews led to phase two.
• Racial persecution: Phase two (Mass killings began) - During the German invasion of the USSR (June 1941), four specially created SS units called Einsatzgruppen followed behind the German army. Their task was to round up Jews, as well as communist officials and Russian army officers, and execute them. The victims were taken to the edge of towns and villages, forced to dig mass graves and then shot and buried in huge numbers.
• Racial persecution: Phase two (Mass killings began) - By the end of 1941, 500,000 Jews had been killed in this way and in total the victims of Einsatzgruppen numbered around 1.2 million. These mass killings were expensive and time consuming. The need to make the extermination process more efficient led to phase three.
• Racial persecution: Phase three (Extermination camps) - On 20 January 1942 Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst, held a conference in the Wansee suburb of Berlin. At this meeting it was agreed that all Jews under German occupation would be brought to Poland, where those fit enough would be worked to death and the rest exterminated.
• Racial persecution: Phase three (Extermination camps) - The biggest and most notorious camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 2.5 million Jews were murdered. Jews arrived at the camps on trains, where they were separated into two groups: those fit enough to work and those to be killed immediately – usually women, children and the elderly.
• Racial persecution: Phase three (Extermination camps) - Around six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, as well as several million others, including gypsies, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other ‘undesirables’. Up to 88 per cent of Polish Jews were killed and Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe were sent to the camps.
• Germany's defeat: The first German defeat in Europe came at Stalingrad in February 1943. Later, in 1945, Germany was invaded from both the east and west. The allied forces in the west, led by American divisions, crossed the Rhine into Germany from the beginning of March.
• Germany's defeat: By April the Soviet forces had encircled Berlin in the east, and Hitler committed suicide there on April 30. Germany surrendered to the Allies a few days later. Germany was then occupied and divided into four military zones, each controlled by one of the four allied powers: USSR, USA, Britain and France. Its capital Berlin was similarly divided amongst the occupiers.