World Civilizations II

Below are lecture notes, I will email the assignment page with the essay to topic. Lecture Notes The Crisis Deepens: World War 2 Even more than World War I, World War 2 was “total war.” The hope for liberal democracy after the Great War faded, particularly with the onset of the Great Depression, giving impetus to totalitarian governments. Italian fascism resulted from Italy's losses in the Great War, economic failure, and incompetent politicians. In 1919, Benito Mussolini organized the Fascio di Combattimento. Threatening “to march on Rome,” he was chosen prime minister in 1922. Legal due process was abandoned and rival parties were outlawed, but totalitarianism in Italy was never as effective as in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. In Germany, Adolph Hitler headed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis). A powerful orator, Hitler published his beliefs in Mein Kampf, but it was not until the depression that the Nazis received wide support. Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and a compliant Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving him, the Fuhrer, dictatorial power. Hitler rearmed Germany and created a terrorist police force, the SS. The Nuremberg laws excluded Jews from citizenship, and in the 1938 Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses and synagogues were burned and Jews beaten and killed. In 1928, Joseph Stalin announced his first five-year plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. Giant collective farms were created, and in the process 10 million lives were lost. Stalin's opponents were sent to Siberia, sentenced to labor camps, or liquidated. In Japan the multiparty system was weak, and in the 1930s, with the coming of the Great Depression, ultranationalists resorted to assassination and terror. Adolph Hitler's ambitions included his claim that Germany had to have living space in the east. He argued that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair; and when he announced that Germany had rearmed and when German troops occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, there was little reaction by Britain and France. Criticized for invading Ethiopia, Mussolini joined Hitler in forming the Rome-Berlin Axis. Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938. Believing that it meant “peace in our times”, Britain and France gave Hitler Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in late 1938. In August 1939 Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, and Germany launched the Blitzkrieg against Poland on September 1, 1939. After the winter's “phony war,” in April 1940, the Nazis attacked in the west. France's Maginot Line's fortresses were bypassed by Germany's panzer divisions, and France capitulated in June. The British army escaped at Dunkirk, and under Winston Churchill's leadership, Britain survived Nazi Germany's air assault in the Battle of Britain. Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, with 180 divisions, 8000 tanks, and 3200 airplanes, but Soviet resistance and the Russian winter led to stalemate and a Soviet counterattack. In 1931, the Japanese military seized Manchuria. When condemned, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. After an incident at Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge in 1937, war ensued between Japan and China. Imperial ambitions and economic concerns led Japan to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. America fought back, and the Japanese advance was ended at the naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942. By mid-1943 the Axis was driven out of North Africa, German submarine attacks were thwarted in the Atlantic, and a German army was defeated at the Battle of Stalingrad. In June 1944, Rome fell to the Allies and Normandy was invaded. The Soviets linked up with the western Allies in April 1945, and on April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide. After pursuing an “island hopping” strategy across the Pacific, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 8, 1945. In the Nazi empire, millions of slave laborers fueled the war machine. Anti-Semitism was central to Nazism. In the 1930s, Jewish emigration was encouraged, but ultimately the Final Solution was annihilation, notably in extermination camps where millions died in gas chambers. Up to six million Jews died in the Holocaust, along with Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. In Asia, Japan created the Great East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but only the Japanese prospered. In Russia, it was the Great Patriotic War. When Germany invaded, factories were uprooted and moved to the east. Soviet women played a major role, even in combat. The United States mainland was never endangered, and the United States became the chief arsenal for the Allies. The conflict brought population movements, social problems of shifting morals, and racial conflict, and 110,000 Japanese-Americans were placed in relocation camps. Fearing the loss of civilian morale, Hitler was slow to reduce consumer production, and total mobilization of the economy not implemented until 1944. Japan ordered conscription in 1938, values such as “Bushido” were emphasized, and Western influences proscribed. Both sides bombed civilians; the Luftwaffe bombed British cities during the Battle of Britain, and the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 killed 100,000 persons. Japanese cities suffered widespread bombing even before the atomic bomb. World War 2 was the costliest war in history. 21 million soldiers lost their lives, and civilian deaths numbered 40 million. The Soviet Union experienced the greatest losses: 10 million soldiers and 19 million civilians dead. At the end of the war in Europe, 100 million depended upon food relief. Approximately 30 million in Europe were “displaced persons.” With the exception of the United States, the economies of the belligerent nations were nearly destroyed. By the Yalta conference of February 1945, the Soviet Union controlled most of Eastern Europe. Germany was to be divided into zones of occupation, but Stalin would not allow free elections that might be anti-Soviet. The West feared Soviet expansion, the Soviets feared for their security. By Potsdam, July 1945, an ideological struggle had emerged, pitting totalitarian communism against democratic capitalism. In 1946, Churchill gave a label to the new Cold War reality: Europe was divided by “an iron curtain.”