World War II

World War II overview

September 1, 1939 – September 2, 1945

• World War II, the largest and deadliest

con ict in human history, involved more
than 50 nations and was fought on land,
sea and air in nearly every part of the
world. Also known as the Second World
War, it was caused in part by the economic
crisis of the Great Depression and by
political tensions left unresolved following
the end of World War I.
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 World War II overview

• The war began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and raged across the globe
until 1945, when Japan surrendered to the United States after atomic bombs were
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of World War II, an estimated 60 to 80
million people had died, including up to 55 million civilians, and numerous cities in
Europe and Asia were reduced to rubble.
• Among the people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps as
part of Hitler’s diabolical “Final Solution,” now known as the Holocaust. The legacy of
the war included the creation of the United Nations as a peacekeeping force and
geopolitical rivalries that resulted in the Cold War.
Countries and Alliances of WW II
 The Allies
• The Allied Powers were led by Great Britain, the
United States, and the Soviet Union. These
countries were led by British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and
Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. They formally allied by
signing the Declaration by United Nations on
January 1, 1942.
• Fifteen other independent states also signed the
Declaration on that date. In addition, the Declaration
was signed by the governments-in-exile of another
eight states that were occupied by the Axis powers
at the time. Twenty-one other states declared war on
Germany and signed the Declaration by March 1945.
• Unlike the Allies, the Axis powers never developed
institutions to coordinate foreign policy or direct
combined military operations. Nevertheless, they
pledged mutual military and political support.
 The Axis
• The three principal partners in what was eventually
referred to as the Axis alliance were Germany, Italy,
and Japan. These countries were led by German
dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini,
and Japanese Emperor Hirohito. In September 1940,
the three countries formalized their alliance through
the Tripartite Pact.
• Five other countries subsequently joined the Tripartite
Pact and became Axis powers. They were Bulgaria,
Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Each of
Germany’s six European Axis allies participated in the
Holocaust by murdering Jews or by transferring them
to German custody to be murdered.
 Formation of the Axis Alliance

• In the late 1930s, each of the three powers that would form the Axis alliance launched campaigns of
territorial expansion that alienated most of the world’s other major powers.
• Italy invaded Ethiopia (then also known as Abyssinia) on October 3, 1935.

• Japan had already seized Manchuria (a part of China) on September 18, 1931. Then, on July 7, 1937,
Japan invaded the rest of China, initiating the war in the Paci c.
• Germany began its pre-war expansion in 1938 by annexing Austria and the Sudetenland (a part of
Czechoslovakia). In March 1939, the Germans divided the rest of Czechoslovakia between the German-
controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the newly created satellite state of Slovakia.
• Their aggression against other states left Germany, Italy, and Japan with few friends among the world’s
countries. To end their isolation, the three nations began to draw closer and entered into treaties and
pacts.
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 Causes of World War II
Treaty of Versailles

• Following World War I, the victorious Allied

Powers met to decide Germany’s future.
Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of
Versailles.
• Under this treaty, Germany had to accept
guilt for the war and to pay reparations.
Germany lost territory and was prohibited
from having a large military.
• The humiliation faced by Germany under
this treaty, paved the way for the spread of
Ultra-Nationalism in Germany.
 Causes of World War II
Failure of the League of Nations

• The League of Nations was an international

organization set up in 1919 to keep world peace.
• It was intended that all countries would be members
and that if there were disputes between countries,
they could be settled by negotiation rather than by
force.
• The League of Nations was a good idea, but ultimately
a failure, as not all countries joined the league.
• Also, the League had no army to prevent military
aggression such as Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in Africa
or Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in China.
 Causes of World War II
The Great Depression 1929

• The worldwide economic depression of the

1930s took its toll in di erent ways in
Europe and Asia.
• In Europe, political power shifted to
totalitarian and imperialist governments in
several countries, including Germany, Italy,
and Spain.
• In Asia, a resource-starved Japan began to
expand aggressively, invading China and
maneuvering to control a sphere of
in uence in the Paci c.
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 Causes of World War II
Rise in Fascism

• Victors’ stated aims in World War I had been “to make

the world safe for democracy,” and postwar Germany
was made to adopt a democratic constitution, as did
most of the other states restored or created after the
war.
• In the 1920s, however, the wave of nationalistic,
militaristic totalitarianism known by its Italian name,
fascism.
• It promised to minister to peoples’ wants more
e ectively than democracy and presented itself as
the one sure defense against [Link]
Mussolini established the rst Fascist, European
dictatorship during the interwar period in Italy in 1922.
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 Causes of World War II
Rise in Nazism

• Adolf Hitler, the Leader of the German National Socialist

(Nazi) party, preached a racist brand of fascism.
• Hitler promised to overturn the Versailles Treaty, restore
German wealth & glory and secure additional
Lebensraum (“living space”) for the German people,
who he contended deserve more as members of a
superior race.
• In 1933 Hitler became the German Chancellor, and in a
series of subsequent moves established himself as
dictator.
• Moreover, in 1941 the Nazi regime unleashed a war of
extermination against Slavs, Jews, and other elements
deemed inferior by Hitler’s ideology.
 Causes of World War II
Policy of Appeasement

• Hitler openly denounced the Treaty of Versailles and began

secretly building up Germany’s army and weapons.
• Although Britain and France knew of Hitler’s actions, they
thought a stronger Germany would stop the spread of
Communism from Russia.
• An example of appeasement was the Munich Agreement of
September 1938. In the Agreement, Britain and France
allowed Germany to annex areas in Czechoslovakia where
German-speakers lived.
• Germany agreed not to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia or
any other country. However, in March 1939, Germany broke
its promise and invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Even
then, neither Britain nor France was prepared to take military
action.
 Leading up to World War II

• The devastation of the Great War (as

World War I was known at the time) had
greatly destabilized Europe, and in many
respects World War II grew out of issues
left unresolved by that earlier con ict. In
particular, political and economic
instability in Germany, and lingering
resentment over the harsh terms imposed
by the Versailles Treaty, fueled the rise to
power of Adolf Hitler and National
Socialist German Workers’ Party,
abbreviated as NSDAP in German and the
Nazi Party in English
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 Leading up to World War II
• After becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler
swiftly consolidated power, anointing himself Führer
(supreme leader) in 1934. Obsessed with the idea of the
superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called
“Aryan,” Hitler believed that war was the only way to gain
the necessary “Lebensraum,” or living space, for the
German race to expand. In the mid-1930s, he secretly
began the rearmament of Germany, a violation of the
Versailles Treaty.
• After signing alliances with Italy and Japan against the
Soviet Union, Hitler sent troops to occupy Austria in 1938
and the following year annexed Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s
open aggression went unchecked, as the United States
and Soviet Union were concentrated on internal politics
at the time, and neither France nor Britain (the two other
nations most devastated by the Great War) were eager
for confrontation.
 Outbreak of World War II (1939)

• In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the German-Soviet
Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in London and Paris. Hitler had
long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had
guaranteed military support if it were attacked by Germany. The pact with Stalin meant
that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded Poland, and would have
Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation itself. On September 1, 1939,
Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later, France and Britain declared war on
Germany, beginning World War II.
•
 Outbreak of World War II (1939)

• On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from both
sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early 1940 Germany and the Soviet Union had divided
control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression
Pact. Stalin’s forces then moved to occupy the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania) and defeated a resistant Finland in the Russo-Finnish War.
• During the six months following the invasion of Poland, the lack of action on the part of
Germany and the Allies in the west led to talk in the news media of a “phony war.” At
sea, however, the British and German navies faced o in heated battle, and lethal
German U-boat submarines struck at merchant shipping bound for Britain, sinking more
than 100 vessels in the rst four months of World War II.
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 What was the Holocaust ?

• The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe's

Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the
Second World War. This programme of targeted mass
murder was a central part of the Nazis’ broader plans to
create a new world order based on their ideology.
• The Nazis’ programme of anti-Jewish persecution began
as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. At rst, they
used antisemitic legislation and restrictions alongside
vicious propaganda to create a culture of segregation
and hostility. This process of victimisation was intended
to isolate Jewish people from the wider population in
order to encourage them to emigrate. In reality, the
number of people leaving uctuated – nding places to
go was di cult and the costs of doing so were high.
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 What was the Holocaust ?

• The process of persecution escalated in the

late 1930s, before developing into a campaign
of mass murder during the course of the
Second World War. The large scale killing
began during the German invasion of the
Soviet Union in June 1941. Mobile execution
squads known as Einsatzgruppen made up of
Nazis and supported by local collaborators
operated behind the advancing German line.
They massacred over a million Jewish civilians
in their newly occupied territories in the name
of security. Tens of thousands of Roma were
murdered alongside Jews as part of this
operation.
 What was the Holocaust ?

• From the beginning of 1942 these massacres were consolidated into a programme of
co-ordinated annihilation. Millions of Jews were deported from ghettos or holding
camps to be killed. Most were sent to a small number of purpose-built killing centres
called death camps, but as the war developed, thousands more were sent to
concentration camps to be worked to death in service of Germany’s deteriorating war
e ort. This Nazis were central to this process, but they did not act alone and relied on
the support and complicity of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe.
• Jewish people sent to concentration camps were incarcerated alongside hundreds of
thousands of others who had been enslaved and victimised by the Nazis in pursuit of
their new world order. Political opponents, homosexuals, prisoners of conscience,
Roma, Jehovah Witnesses, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and others were killed or died
in camps as a result of neglect, starvation or disease.
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 Hitler’s Racism

• Hitler’s racism: not just the Jews

• Hitler viewed the world as an arena for the permanent struggle between peoples. He
divided the world population into high and low races. The Germans belonged to the
high peoples and the Jews to the low ones. He also had speci c notions about other
peoples. The Slavic people, for instance, were cast as inferior, predestined to be
dominated
• Hitler felt that the German people could only be strong if they were 'pure'. As a
consequence, people with hereditary diseases were considered harmful. These
included people with physical or mental disabilities, as well as alcoholics and
'incorrigible' criminals. Once the Nazis had come to power, these ideas led to the forced
sterilisation and killing of human beings

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