Chapter 37: New Conflagrations: World War II

Vocabulary

• Revisionist Powers: Revisionists are people who wish to rewrite history to suit their own beliefs. Neo-Nazis are a prime example in that they say that the Holocaust never happened, or not as many Jews died as they actually did. 

• Rape of Nanjing: Japanese conquest and destruction of the Chinese city of Nanjing in the 1930s. 

• Spanish Civil War: The conflict (1936–39) between Nationalist forces (including monarchists and members of the Falange Party) and Republicans (including socialists, communists, and Catalan and Basque separatists) in Spain 

• Appeasement: A British and French policy in the 1930s that tried to maintain peace in Europe in the face of German aggression by making concessions. 

• Blitzkrieg: This was a military tactic employed by the Germans in the Second World War It was a style of rapid attacks through the use of armor and air power that used in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and France in 1939-1940. 

• Lend-lease program: Lend-Lease was the name of the program under which the United States of America supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, France and other Allied nations with vast amounts of war materiel between 1941 and 1945 in return for, in the case of Britain, military bases. 

• Co-prosperity sphere: The Co-Prosperity Sphere is an art gallery located in Bridgeport, Illinois, a neighborhood in Chicago. The gallery has been host to the Select Media Festival. 

• Collaboration: Collaborationism describes the treason of cooperating with enemy forces occupying one's country. As such it implies criminal deeds in the service of the occupying power, which may include complicity with the occupying power in murder, persecutions, pillage, and economic exploitation 

• Comfort Women: Comfort women is a euphemism for women working in military brothels, especially those women who were forced into prostitution as a form of sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. 

• Yalta Conference: A meeting between the Allied leaders Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in February 1945 at Yalta, a Crimean port on the Black Sea. The leaders planned the final stages of World War II and agreed on the subsequent territorial division of Europe. 

• Marshall Plan: A plan formulated by the United States, and officially called the European Recovery Program, that offered financial and other economic aid to all European states that had suffered from World War II, including Soviet Bloc states. 

• NATO/Warsaw Pact: NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was established by the United States in 1949 as a regional military alliance against Soviet expansionism. On the other hand, the Warsaw Pact, was also called the Warsaw Treaty Organization, was a military alliance formed by Soviet block nations in 1955 in response to rearmament of West Germany and its inclusion in NATO.

Focus Question #1

            Describe the degree of genocide in both Europe and Asia in the 1930’s and 40’s. To what extent was genocide evident during the Crusades, exploration of the Americas or present problems in Rwanda and Darfur.

The holocaust was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany throughout Nazi-occupied territory. Approximately two-thirds of the population of nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust perished. The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Various legislation to remove the Jews from civil society, predominantly the Nuremberg Laws, were enacted in Nazi Germany years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in Eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. The Third Reich required Jews and Romani to be confined in overcrowded ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were systematically killed in gas chambers.

Generally the societies that were treated poorly in the past are treated poorly now, for example in Rwanda the government favored the Tutsis over the Hutus that angered the Hutus so they went on a mass genocide against the Tutsis. In the past the Hutus had been involved with agriculture whereas the Tutsis were involved in skilled labor, which led them to succeed the Hutus.

Focus Question #2

            Compare and contrast the causes of World War II with those of World War I.

            Whereas imperialism, nationalism, and alliances both played large roles in the causes of both World War I and World War II, the type of nationalism was different in WWII and the weaponry involved during World War II was more advanced, and thus, more lethal.

Imperialism was one of the main causes of the Second World War, as it was in the First World War. Those that were leading these imperialist states were Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy, who both held a hunger for increasing their already conquered territories. Similar to World War I, World War II also contained the makings of several alliances before it began, these two sides were known as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. NATO included the United States, Canada, Western Germany, Turkey, and the majority of Western Europe. The nations involved in the Warsaw Pact included Eastern Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the majority of Eastern Europe. And just like in the First World War, nations were pulled into war via the alliances they had with other nations.

However, the weaponry of WWII was much more advanced, such as the creation of the atomic bomb, which was utilized by the United States in places such as Japan. The atomic bomb completely annihilated the Japanese peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The type of nationalism also varied. Whereas in World War I, Germany nationalism was based off attempting to prove that Germans were better then the British – in World War II, at the core of German nationalism was both the seeking of revenge and to show the world that Germany, and its peoples, could “emerge from the ashes”.