Unit 3: Nazi Rise

I apologize in advance; this unit does not do service to the complexity of WWI, but for the sake of time and the purposes of this course, this unit focuses very briefly on WWI as it will pertain to the rise of the Nazi party and the onset of the Second World War. The unit includes readings that discuss the events of the Armenian Genocide, the causes of WWI, as well as the impact of the Treaty of Versailles. At the end, I also have students study the Nazi Party Platform as a direct response to the events preceding and following WWI. Along with the response of George Grosz to Hitler's rise.

Activity 1:

Defining Genocide

Quickwrite: What makes an act violent?

After students share out their ideas, offer them the following situations to place on a barometer from least to most harmful.

Spectrum of Violence

Least Harmful  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Most Harmful

Imagine the world is populated by two groups : the purple people and the pink people

Where would the following acts fall on the spectrum above?

• 1. Spitting on someone because they are purple

  2. Calling someone a bad name because they are purple

  3. Beating up a random purple person walking down the street because they are purple

  4. Passing a law preventing all Purple people from getting jobs from pink people

  5. Ransacking a neighborhood, breaking windows of houses and painting graffiti on purple people’s houses

  6. Killing a purple family because they are purple

  7. Rounding up and taking all purple people to a school yard and killing them

Define Genocide:

Is a systematic extermination of a group of people on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, or other defining characteristics.

Components of genocide:

- systematic actions take

- to destroy or exterminate

- a group of people

- based on a specific characteristic of the group (i.e. race, ethnicity, religion)

Legal definition of Genocide came after the holocaust of WWII.

Genocide Convention of 1948

“Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as:

- killing members of a group;

- causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

- deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

- imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

- forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”

Activity 2: 

World War I

Begin the class by asking students:

In the twentieth century, have more people died as:

A) victims of war; or

B) victims of violence perpetrated by their own government?

Vocabulary:

Genocide – the deliberate killing of a large group of people especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation

Massacre – an indiscriminate brutal killing of people

Ottoman Empire – Turkish Empire establish in the 15th century which declined and collapsed after WWI

WWI – a war (1914–18) in which the Central Powers (Germany and Austria–Hungary, joined later by Turkey and Bulgaria) were defeated by an alliance of Britain and its dominions, France, Russia, and others, joined later by Italy and the U.S.

Crimes against humanity – An international criminal justice offence; the perpetration of acts of war upon a civilian, non-soldier population.

Sovereignty - the authority of a state to govern itself or another state

Mini-Lesson: 

Born in 1900, Raphael Lemkin devoted most of his life to a single goal: making the world understand and recognize a crime so horrific that there was not even a word for it. Lemkin took a step toward his goal in 1944 when he coined the word “genocide” which means the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. He said he had created the word by combining the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). In 1948, three years after the concentration camps of World War II had been closed forever, the newly formed United Nations used this new word in a treaty that was intended to prevent any future genocides.

Lemkin died a decade later. He had lived long enough to see his word widely accepted and also to see the United Nations treaty, called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by many nations. But, sadly, recent history reminds us that laws and treaties are not enough to prevent genocide.

Reading: 

“Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions”

Using the reading from Facing History, students become familiar with acts of vigilante justice that were attempted after WWI. They are also introduced to Lemkin and his anger at the events that came to light after Tehlirian was allowed to testify in his own trial. (For more resources on teaching the Armenian Genocide or Lemkin see the first units in my Transitional Justice Course)

Questions: 

1. What happened in Berlin on March 15, 1921? 

2. Who killed Talaat and Why? 

3. What evidence does this narrative provide to support the Allies' statement that Turkey was committing "crimes...against humanity and civilization"?

4. Based on this reading, what do you learn about the ability of nations (Turkey, France, Great Britain, Germany, etc.) to punish perpetrators of crimes against humanity? 

5. When should the international community impose laws on other countries? 

6. Lemkin wondered, “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?” What can be done to stop nations that turn against their own people? 

7. Lemkin was outraged when he heard that the mass murder of the Armenians went unpunished. How could he turn his moral outrage into action? What could he do? 

8. Without a court to judge the perpetrators, what options did the Armenians have after the genocide?  

Activity 3: 

The Aftermath of War

QW: How do you make peace between two rivals? What is a treaty?

I don't usually lecture, so I thought I would change it up by informing students that I would be giving them a short summary of WWI and that they should take notes in preparation of the quiz they would be taking at the end of the class. In this occasion it worked. Students were engaged and did fairly well on the quiz.

Mini-Lesson on WWI using PowerPoint:

Who – Allies (UK, France, Russia, (Triple Entente) Italy, Japan, Greece and the US )vs. Central Powers (Germany, Turkey/Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria)

What – Historians today still debate why the war was fought

Where – World Wide, Europe Trenches

When – 1914 (Gavrilo Princip (a Slav nationalist) assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)-1918 - World War I began on July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and ended when Germany surrendered.

Why – 1. Tangle of alliances 2. result of several decades of increasing tensions in Europe due to rising nationalism, imperial pursuits, and arms proliferation.

• 1. Who were the victors and losers?

  2. How many people died in WWI?

About 13 million soldiers died fighting in the war, which is twice as many as were killed in all of the major wars fought between 1790-1914

Activity WWI summary: 

Students will read the summary in groups and develop 5- 10 trivia questions that will then be used in a lightning round trivia game between the groups. 

World War I Summary & Analysis

The Big Picture: Who, What, When, Where & (Especially) Why

World War I was a watershed moment for America, a time when an isolationist[1] nation involved itself in world affairs and began the rise to the economic and military power that America is today. After keeping out of the conflict that had been ravaging Europe for nearly three years, President Woodrow Wilson took America to war only months after winning an election on the slogan "He Kept us Out of War." Claiming that American intervention was needed to “make the world safe for democracy,” Wilson sent over two million men to Europe, of whom over 100,000 would never return. World War I marked the end of the old order in Europe, and the beginning of what has been called the “American Century.”

The United States was not a nation ready for war in 1914. With a small army and a pitiful navy, the U.S. was no match for either side in the great conflagration[2] in Flanders' Fields. As the war continued, however, German use of submarines (U-Boats) to sink neutral shipping—including, most famously, the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 with the death of almost 1,200 people, 128 of them Americans—brought American public opinion to the Allied side. Constant British propaganda efforts, culminating in the Zimmerman Telegram[3] of February 1917, coupled with the German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and drew America into the war. Wilson quickly developed an ideological goal of freedom and democracy, and committed the people of the United States to fight for these principles.

When America entered the war in April 1917, nearly three years of horrific slaughter had bled the nations of Europe. Daily life in miserable trenches drove men insane; constant artillery bombardment killed without warning; massive infantry assaults through No Man's Land into barbed wire and machine guns caused the death of millions. New technologies including the machine gun, tank, airplanes, and barbed wire helped make the war the bloodiest the world had ever seen. As American soldiers landed in French ports by the thousands, the exhausted Allies screamed for the American units to be broken up and fed into the French and British lines under the command of French and British officers. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, refused, insisting that the Americans fight together in their own section of the trench line under American commanders. This rift within the Allied high command almost cost the Allies the war during the German Spring Offensive of 1918, but Pershing's insistence that American soldiers fight under American commanders sent an important message of American independence to the world.

American soldiers fought bravely and well in battles at Cantigny, Belleau Wood, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne Forest from May to November 1918. With nearly one million troops in the line by the end of the war, the American presence finally convinced the Germans that the war could not be won; they had managed to win a war of attrition[4] with France and Britain, but the influx of an endless supply of American troops meant that there was no way Germany could win. By November 1918, the writing was on the wall and on 11 November 1918, the guns fell silent along the entire line as an armistice was signed, signaling the end of the war.

While white American soldiers fought in their own units in their own part of the line, black troops were relegated to support duty, or sent to the French army to fight under French commanders. Despite the fact that American officers ordered the French not to treat the African-American soldiers with respect—lest they become "uppity" and learn what a non-prejudicial society was like—the French treated the black soldiers with the respect they deserved; the 395th Infantry, a black unit fighting with the French, won 171 commendations for valor. Upon returning home, Jim Crow racism was as rampant as ever in America, and more than 70 returning veterans were lynched in the first year after the end of the war. Still, the experience of black soldiers and the effects of the wartime Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities had a lasting impact on American society, and sowed the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement.

World War I was a turning point for America economically. With war orders flooding in from Europe, American manufacturers grew rich, and American industrial might began to lead the world. The international financial system set up its capital in New York during this period, and the war catapulted America into a leading role in economic and military affairs.

When President Wilson traveled to Paris for the peace conference that would lead to the Treaty of Versailles, he came armed with his Fourteen Points, an idealistic plan to reorder Europe with the United States as a model for the rest of the world. He failed to gain most of what he wanted as the French and British were more inclined towards a vengeful peace, requiring reparations[5] from Germany, than to any idealistic requests of the United States. The League of Nations, the one victory Wilson managed at the conference, was never ratified by the United States Senate, and, without the United States, it failed as a toothless organization that collapsed in the face of German and Japanese aggression in the 1930s.

[1] Isolationist - a policy of remaining apart from the affairs or interests of other groups, especially the political affairs of other countries.

[2] Conflagration - an extensive fire that destroys a great deal of land or property.

[3] The Zimmermann Telegram was a 1917 diplomatic proposal from the German Empire to Mexico to make war against the United States. The proposal was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. Revelation of the contents outraged American public opinion and helped generate support for the US declaration of war on Germany in April.

[4] Attrition - the process of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of something through sustained attack or pressure

[5] Reparations - the making of amends for a wrong, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged

Questions: 

1. On what six-word slogan did Woodrow Wilson base his presidential re-election 

    campaign of 1916? 

2. What disaster in 1915 drew American public opinion to support the Allied forces in the 

    war abroad? 

3. In what year did the United States enter World War I? 

4. Which advancements in warfare technology helped make World War I the bloodiest 

    war the world had witnessed thus far? 

5. What was the significance of General Pershing’s refusal? What was he risking? What 

    did America gain? 

6. Under whose guidance did African American soldiers fight? How were they treated 

    during the war? How were they treated when they came back home?

7. What is the name of the treaty that marked the official end to World War I? 

8. How was the US economically affected by the end of WWI? 

Activity: Quiz

WWI Quiz