Dictatorships+and+the+Second+World+War

__Chapter Outline__
I. Authoritarian States II. Stalin's Soviet Union III. Mussolini and Fascism IV. Hitler and Nazism in Germany V. Nazi Expansion and the Second World War

__**Key Terms and People**__


 * Totalitarianism ** Of, relating to, being, or imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed.


 * Fascism ** a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.


 * Five-year plan ** any plan for national economic or industrial development specifying goals to be reached within a period of five years, esp. as undertaken by the Soviet Union and China.


 * New Economic Policy ** (in the Soviet Union) a program in effect from 1921 to 1928, reviving the wage system and private ownership of some factories and businesses, and abandoning grain requisitions.


 * Collectivization ** policy adopted by the Soviet government, pursued most intensively between 1929 and 1933, to transform traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union and to reduce the economic power of the kulaks (prosperous peasants). Under collectivization the peasantry was forced to give up their individual farms and join large collective farms (kolkhozy). The process was ultimately undertaken in conjunction with the campaign to industrialize the Soviet Union rapidly. But before the drive began, long and bitter debates over the nature and pace of collectivization went on among the Soviet leaders (especially between Stalin and Trotsky, 1925-27, and between Stalin and Nikolay Bukharin, 1927-29).


 * Kulaks ** in Russia a comparatively wealthy peasant who employed hired labor or possessed farm machinery and who was viewed and treated by the Communists during the drive to collectivize agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s as an oppressor and class enemy.


 * Black shirts ** A member of a fascist party organization having a black shirt as part of its uniform, especially an Italian fascist.

**Lateran agreement** Mussolini reconized the Vatican as a tiny independednt state; agreed to give the church heavy financial support

Enabling act a provision in a law that confers on appropriate officials the power to implement or enforce the law.
 * Nazism ** is the ideology and practice of the Nazis, especially the policy of racist nationalism, national expansion, and state control of the economy.


 * Appeasement ** to bring to a state of peace, quiet, ease, calm, or contentment.

**Blitzkrieg** "rapid attack," 1939, from Ger. Blitzkrieg, from Blitz "lightning".


 * New Order is ** the system of political and economic control and of social organization that prevailed in Germany and its subject countries during the Nazi era; National Socialism.


 * Europe First ** the promise of huge military aid under America’s policy of Europe first helps solidify the anti Hitler coalition.


 * Joseph Stalin ** was a Soviet politician. The successor of Lenin, he was general secretary of the Communist Party (1922-1953) and premier (1941-1953) of the USSR. His rule was marked by the exile of Trotsky (1929), a purge of the government and military, the forced collectivization of agriculture, a policy of industrialization, and a victorious but devastating role for the Soviets in World War II.


 * Great Purge **


 * Adolf Hitler ** was Austrian-born founder of the German Nazi Party and chancellor of the Third Reich (1933-1945). His fascist philosophy, embodied in //Mein Kampf// (1925-1927), attracted widespread support, and after 1934 he ruled as an absolute dictator. Hitler's pursuit of aggressive nationalist policies resulted in the invasion of Poland (1939) and the subsequent outbreak of World War II. His regime was infamous for the extermination of millions of people, especially European Jews. He committed suicide when the collapse of the Third Reich was imminent (1945).


 * Final Solution**
 * Benito Mussolini ** an Italian dictator of the twentieth century. Mussolini formed a fascist government in Italy in the 1920s and allied Italy with Germany as one of the Axis powers of World War II. Mussolini, known as //il Duce// (“the leader”), was shot by his Italian opponents near the end of the war.

** __Outline__ ** **Section 1: Authoritarian States** __A. Conservative Authoritarianism__ __B. Radical Totalitarian Dictatorship__
 * Weimar Republic**
 * National Socialist German Workers Party**
 * Leon Trotsky**
 * Karl Lueger**
 * Gerneral Paul Hindenburg**
 * Neville Chamberlin**
 * Nazi Storm Troopers (the SA)**
 * German Social Democrats**
 * Enabling Act**
 * March on Rome**
 * Munich Conference**
 * Rolf Hess**
 * Nuremburg Laws**
 * Grand Alliance**
 * Heinrich Himmler**
 * Daniel Goldhagen**
 * Elie Halevy**
 * Leaders of various governments tried to prevent existing social order, thus relying on obedient bureaucracies, vigilant police departments, and trustworthy armies.
 * Popular participation in government was forbidden or limited to such natural allies as landlords, bureaucrats and high church officials.
 * Old-fashioned authoritarian governments did not have the abililty nor the desire to control many aspects of their subjects' lives. These governments limited their demands to taxes, army recruits, and passive acceptance.
 * After the First World War, this kind of authoritarian government revived, especially in the less-developed eastern part of Europe.
 * These lands lacked a strong tradition of self-government, with its necessary restraint and compromise. Many of these new states were torn by ethnic conflicts that threatened their very existence.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Dictatorship appealed to nationalists and military leaders as a way to repress such tensions and preserve national unity.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Large landowners, the church, and members of the middle class often looked to dictators to save them from progressive land reform to communist agrarian upheaval.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Some of the conservative authoritarian regimes adopted certal Hitlerian and fascist characteristics in the 1930s, but their general aims were limited.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The concept of __totalitarianism__ emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, although it is frequently and mistakenly seen as developing only after 1945 as part of anti-Soviet propaganda during the cold war.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In 1924, __Benito Mussolini__ spoke of the "fierce totalitarian will" of his movement in Italy.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">With the alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939, all "doubts" about the totalitarian nature of both dictatorships, "were swept away for most Americans."
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Early writers believed that modern totalitarian dictatorship burst on the scene with the revolutionary total war effort of 1914-1918.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">A French writer, __Elie Halevy__, put in his influential //__The Era of Tyrannies__// that the varieties of modern totalitarian tyranny-fascism, Nazism, and communism- could be thought of as "feuding brothers" with a common father: the nature of modern war.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Lenin__ had showed how a dedicated minority could achieve victory over a less determined majority and subordinate institutions and human rights to the needs of a single group- the Communist party- and its leader; also inspired imitators, including Adolf Hitler.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Numerous Western political scientists and historians argued in the 1950s and 1960s that the totalitarian state used modern technology and communications to exercise complete political power; the state tried to take complete control of everything and deviation from the norm, even in art or family behavior, could become a crime.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The vision of total state represented a radical revolt against liberalism; liberals stood for rationality, peaceful progress, economic freedom, and a strong middle class, totalitarians believed in willpower, preached conflict and worshiped violence.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Totalitarianism was a permanent revolution, an unfinished revolution, in which rapid, profound change imposed from on high went on forever.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Soviet communism__, growing out of Marxian socialism, seized all private property for the state and crushed the middle class.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Nazi Germany__, growing out of extreme nationalism and racism, criticized big landowners and industrialists, but both private property and the middle class survived.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The concept of __fascism__, which was a term of pride for Mussolini and Hitler, was born in the 1930s and was criticized heavily; the Orthodox Marxists argued that fascism was the way powerful capitalists sought to create a mass movement capable of destroying the revolutionary working class.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Section 2: Stalin's Soviet Union** <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__A. From Lenin to Stalin__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__B. The Five-Year Plans__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__C. Life and Culture in Soviet Society__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__D. Stalinist Terror and the Great Purges__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__A. The Seizure of Power__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__B. The Regime in Action__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Section 4: Hitler and Nazism in Germany ** <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__A. The Roots of Nazism__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__B. Hitler's Road to Power__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__C. The Nazi State and Society__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__D. Hitler's Popularity__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Section 5: Nazi Expansion and the Second World War** <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__A. Aggression and Appeasement, 1933-1939__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__B. Hitler's Empire, 1939-1942__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__C. The Grand Alliance__ <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__D. The Tide of Battle__
 * __Joseph Stalin__ cautiously consolidated his power and eliminated his enemies in the mid 1920s; he launched the first five year plan- the "revolution from above," as he termed it.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-weight: normal;">The Soviet Union became a dynamic, modern totalitarian state in the 1930s due to Stalin.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-weight: normal;">In 1921, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, but they ruled a shattered and devastated land. **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-weight: normal;">The economy was declining and peasants as well as works started riots causing Lenin to change course; he announced the __New Economic Policy (NEP)__, which limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry; it was shrewd and successful both politically and economically.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Politically, it was a necessary but temporary compromise with the Soviet Union's overwhelming peasant majority.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Economically, the NEP brought rapid recovery.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The economy recovered and there was a struggle for power when Lenin had left no chosen successor when he died in 1924; possible considerations included the stolid __Stalin__ and the flamboyant __Trotsky__.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Joseph Dzhugashvili__, who later became known as Stalin, won because he was more effective at gaining the all-important support of the party.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin developed a theory of "socialism in one country" that was more appealing to the majority of communists than Trotsky's doctrine of "permanent revolution."
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin was willing to break with the NEP and "build socialism" at home appealed to young militants in the party, who detested the capitalist-appearing NEP; he gradually achieved supreme power between 1922 and 1927.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The first five year plan had staggering economic objectives.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin later unleashed his "second revolution" for a variety of interrelated reasons.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Communist writers of the 1920s called for "cursed problem" --the problem of the peasants.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin then decided on a war against the peasantry in order to bring it under the control of the state and to make it pay for the costs of the new socialist offensive.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">That war was __collectivization__- the forcible consolidation of individual peasant farms into large, state-controlled enterprises.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Peasants all over the Soviet Union were ordered to give up their land and animals, and became members of collective farms.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The __kulaks__, the better off peasants, Stalin instructed party workers to "liquidate them as a class."
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Many starved or were deported to forced-labor camps for "re-education."
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Large numbers of peasants slaughtered their animals and burned their crops in sullen, hopeless protest.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The state had to invest heavily in agriculture, building thousands of tractors to replace slaughtered draft horses.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin himself confided to __Winston Churchill__ at Yalta in 1945 that 10 million people had died in the course of collectivization.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In Ukraine the drive against peasants snowballed into a general assault on Ukrainians as reactionary nationalists and enemies of socialism.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The result was a terrible man-made famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, which probably claimed 6 million lives.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Collectivization, justly called the "__second serfdom,__" was a cruel but real victory for communist ideologues.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The industrial side of the five-year plans was more successful- indeed, quite spectacular; Soviet industry grew four times its size.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The sudden creation of dozens of new factories required a great increase in total investment.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The money for investment was collected from the people by means of heavy, hidden sales taxes.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Two other factors contributed importantly to rapid industrialization: firm labor discipline and foreign engineers.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Thus Stalin's planners harnessed even the skill and technology of capitalist countries to promote the surge of socialist industry.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The aim of Stalin's __five-year plans__ was to create a new kind of society and human personality as well as a strong industrial economy and a powerful army.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Because consumption was reduced to pay for investment, there was no improvement in the average standard of living.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Life was hard in Stalin's Soviet Union; but was by no means hopeless.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The masses of people lived primarily on black bread and wore old, shabby clothing.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Idealism and ideology had real appeal for many communists, who saw themselves heroically building the world's first socialist society while capitalism crumbled.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Soviet workers did receive some important social benefits, such as old-age pensions, free medical services, free education, and day-care centers for children; and millions struggled for an education.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the 1920s, divorce and abortion were made easily available and women were urged to work outside the home and liberate themselves sexually.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">After Stalin came to power, sexual and familial liberation was played down, and the most lasting changes for women involved work and education.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Young women were constantly told that they had to be fully equal to men; education opportunities were open to men as well as women.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Medicine practically became a woman's profession; however, men continued to dominate the very best jobs.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Intellectuals were ordered by Stalin to become the "engineers of human minds," and it was important for them to glorify Russian nationalism.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Ivan the Terrible__ and __Peter the Great__ became worthy forerunners of the greatest Russian leader of all- Stalin.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Although the government persecuted religion and turned churches into "museums of atheism," the state had both an earthly religion and a high priest-- Marxism-Leninism and Joseph Stalin.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the mid-1930s, the great offensive to build socialism and a new socialist personality culminated in ruthless police terror and a massive purging of the Communist party.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">At a small gathering in __November 1932__, even Stalin's wife complained bitterly about the misery of the people and the horrible famine in Ukraine.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin showered her with insults, and she died that same night, apparently by her own hand.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin's number two man, Sergei Kirov, was suddenly and mysteriously murdered; he used this incident to launch a reign of terror.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In August 1936, sixteen prominent Old Bolsheviks confessed to all manner of plots against Stalin in spectacular public trials in Moscow.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The secret police arrested a mass of lesser party officials and newer members; at least 8 million people were probably arrested, and millions of these were executed or never returned from prisons and forced-labor camps.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin and the remaining party leadership recruited 1.5 million new members to take the place of those purged, which were often sons of workers, who had studied in the new technical schools, and they soon proved capable of managing the government as well as large-scale production.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">His mass purges remain baffling, for almost all his historians believe that those purged posed no threat and confessed to crimes they had not committed.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stalin had found large numbers of willing collaborators for crime as well as for achievement.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Section 3: Mussolini and Fascism in Italy **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-weight: normal;">Mussolini's movement and his seizure of power in 1922 were important steps in the rise of dictatorships in Europe between the two world wars.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He began as a revolutionary socialist, but then turned against the working class and successfully sought the support of conservatives.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Mussolini and his supporters were the first to call themselves "fascists"- revolutionaries determined to create a certain kind of totalitarian state.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Relations between church and state were often tense, and class differences were also extreme; a powerful revolutionary socialist movement had developed.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Only in Italy did the Socialist party unanimously opposed the war from the very beginning.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The war worsened the political situation; workers and peasants felt cheated: to win their support during the war, the government had promised social and land reform, which it did not deliver after the war.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">After the war, the pope lifted his ban on participation by Catholics in Italian politics, which caused a strong Catholic party quickly emerged.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The young Mussolini urged that Italy should join the Allies, a stand for which he was expelled from the Italian Socialist party for; later he fought at the front and was wounded in 1917.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He had a private army called the __Black Shirts__, which was growing and beginning to turn violent.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Few people were killed, but socialist newspapers, union halls, and local Socialist party headquarters were destroyed.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Mussolini allowed his followers to convince themselves that they were making a real revolution of their own, forging a strong, dynamic movement that would help the little people against the established interests.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Mussolini demanded his own appointment into power by the king; fascists threatened the King, __Victor Emmanuel III__, which resulted in being immediately granted dictatorial authority for one year by the king and the parliament.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Mussolini's ministers included old conservatives, moderates, and even two reform-minded Socialists.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">It is speculated that he ordered the murder of __Giacomo Matteotti__, who was the leader of the Socialists in the parliament.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He declared his desire to "make the nation Fascist," he imposed a series of repressive measures.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Freedom of the press was abolished, elections were fixed, and the government ruled by decree.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Mussolini arrested his political opponents, disbanded all independent labor unions, and put dedicated Fascists in control of Italy's schools.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Then he created a fascist youth movement, fascist labor unions, and many other organizations; his Fascist party never became all-powerful.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He controlled and propagandized labor but left big business to regulate itself, profitably and securely; there was no land reform.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He drew increasing support from the Catholic church.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the __Lateran Agreement of 1929__, he recognized the Vatican as a tiny independent state, and he agreed to give the church heavy financial support.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Mussolini abolished divorce and told women to stay at home and produce children.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In 1938, women were limited by law to a maximum of 10 percent of the better-paying jobs in industry and government.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">His government did not pass racial laws until 1938 and did not persecute Jews savagely until late in the Second World War, when Italy was under Nazi control.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Only twenty-three political prisoners were condemned to death between 1926 and 1944.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Nazism grew out of many complex developments, of which the most influential were extreme nationalism and racism.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Adolf Hitler traveled to Vienna and soaked up extreme German nationalism, which was particularly strong there.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">They often advocated union with Germany and violent expulsion of "inferior" peoples as the means of maintaining German domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler was deeply impressed by Vienna's mayor, Karl Lueger; Karl showed Hitler the enormous potential of anti-capitalist and anti-liberal propaganda.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He eagerly absorbed virulent anti-Semitism, racism, and hatred of Slavs; becoming his most passionate convictions, his explanation for everything.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Jews, he claimed, directed an international conspiracy of finance capitalism and Marxian socialism against German culture, German unity, and the German race.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler was a fanatical nationalist, but war was also his reason for living; he was convinced that Jews and Marxists had "stabbed Germany in the back," he vowed to fight on.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He joined a tiny extremist group in Munich called the German's Workers' party, which promised unity under a uniquely German "national socialism" that would abolish the injustices of capitalism and create a mighty "people's community."
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler was also inspired by Mussolini's recent easy victory and had brought together the idea of Nazism.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He concentrated on building his National Socialist German Workers' party, or __Nazi party__.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">By 1928, the party had 100,000 highly disciplined members under Hitler's absolute control.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He began promising German voters economic as well as political and international salvation.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler rejected free-market capitalism and advocated government programs to bring recovery.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the election of 1930, Nazis became the largest party in the __Reichstag__.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">A master of mass propaganda and psychology, he had written in his autobiography, //<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Mein Kampf__ //<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">, that the masses were the "driving force of the most important changes in this world" and were themselves driven by fanaticism and not by knowledge.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler and the Nazis also appealed strongly to German youth; "National Socialism is the organized will of the youth," proclaimed the offical Nazi slogan.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He excelled in the dirty, back room politics of the decaying __Weimar Republic__; which brought him to power.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He gained support from those in the army as well as big business.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">They thought they could use Hitler for their own advantage to get increased military spending, fat contracts, and tough measures against workers; they wanted him to become chancellor.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">On __January 30, 1933__, Adolf Hitler, leader of the largest party in Germany, was legally appointed __chancellor__ by Hindenburg.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler moved rapidly and skillfully to establish an unshakable dictatorship.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He had convinced __President Hindenburg__ to sign dictatorial emergency acts that pratically abolished freedom of speech and assembly as well as most liberties.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler immediately outlawed the Communist party and arrested its parliamentary representatives.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Nazis pushed through the Reichstag the so-called __Enabling Act__, which gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">They moved to smash or control all independent organizations.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Only the Nazi party was legal.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the economic sphere, one big decision outlawed strikes and abolished independent labor unions, which were replaced by the __Nazi Labor Front__.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Modern art and architecture were ruthlessly prohibited.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The __Nazi storm troopers (the SA)__, the quasi-military band of 3 million toughs in brown shirts who had fought communists and beaten up Jews before the Nazis took power, expected top positions in the army and even talked of a "second revolution" against capitalism.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler decided that the SA leaders had to eliminated.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">His elite personal guard-the SS- arrested and shot without trial roughly a thousand SA leaders and assorted political enemies.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The SS's leader was __Heinrich Himmler__, joined with the political police, the Gestapo, to expand its network of special courts and concentration camps.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">From the beginning, Jews were a special object of Nazi persecution.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In 1935, the infamous __Nuremberg Laws__ classified as Jewish anyone having one or more Jewish grandparents and deprived Jews of all rights of citizenship.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">A well-organized wave of violence, known to history as "__Kristallnach__t," smashed windows, looted shops, and destroyed homes and synagogues.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Jews pled Germany in fear.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler had promised the masses economic recovery-"work and bread"- and he delivered.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He also appointed as Germany's central banker a well-known conservative named __Hjalmar Schacht__, who skillfully restored credit and business.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In 1936, an openly aggressive Hitler broke with Schacht, and Germany turned decisively toward rearmament and preparation for war.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">For millions of people, economic recovery was tangible evidence that Nazi promises were more than show and propaganda.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">For the masses of ordinary German citizens who were not Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, or homosexuals, Hitler's government meant greater equality and more opportunities.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The new Nazi elite included many young and poorly educated dropouts, rootless lower-middle-class people like Hitler who rose to the top with breathtaking speed.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler's rabid nationalism, which had helped him gain power, continued to appeal to Germans after 1933.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Not all Germans supported Hitler, however, and a number of German groups actively resisted him after 1933.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Tens of thousands of political enemies were imprisoned, and thousands were executed.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Opponents of the Nazis pursed various goals, and they were never unified, a fact that helps account for their ultimate lack of success.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">A second group of opponents arose in the Catholic and Protestant churches.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Some high-ranking army officers, who feared the consequences of Hitler's reckless aggression, plotted against him, unsuccessfully.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The guiding and unique concepts of Nazism remained space and race- the territorial expansion of the superior German race.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler formed alliances with other dictators and began expanding.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The inevitably broke out, in both the West and the East, for Hitler's ambitions were essentially unlimited.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In 1945, Germany and its allies lay in ruins, utterly defeated. Thus the terrible Nazi empire proved short-lived.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">When Hitler was wear, he righteously proclaimed that he intended to overturn the "unjust system" established by the __Treaties of Versailles and Locarno__-but only by legal means.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">As he grew stronger, and as other leaders showed their willingness to compromise, he increased his demands and finally began attacking his independent neighbors.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler realized that his aggressive policies had to be carefully camouflaged at first, for Germany's army was limited by the Treaty of Versailles to only 100,000 men.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He felt strong enough to walk out of a sixty-nation disarmament conference and withdraw from the __League of Nations__ in October 1933; sought to incorporate independent Austria into a greater Germany.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In 1935, Hitler established a general military draft and declared the "unequal" disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles null and void, other countries appeared to understand the danger.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Britain adopted a policy of appeasement, granting Hitler everything he could reasonably want (and more) in order to avoid war.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The first step was an __Anglo-German naval agreement__ in June 1935 that broke Germany's isolation.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The second step came in March 1936 when Hitler suddenly marched his armies into the demilitarized Rhineland, brazenly violating the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Many powerful conservatives in Britain underestimated Hitler; they believed that Soviet communism was the real danger and that Hitler could be used to stop it.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In 1935, Mussolini decided that imperial expansion was needed to revitalize Italian fascism; Hitler supported Italy energetically and overcame Mussolini's lingering doubts about the Nazis.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The result in late 1936 was an agreement on close cooperation between Italy and Germany, the so-called __Rome- Berlin Axis__.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Germany and Italy intervened in the long, complicated __Spanish civil war__, which broke out in July 1936.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">White proclaiming peaceful intentions to the British and their gullible prime minister, __Neville Chamberlain__, Hitler told his generals his real plans.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">His "unshakable decision" was to crush Austria and Czechoslovakia at the earliest possible moment as the first step in his long-contemplated drive to the east for living space.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler forced the Austrian chancellor in March 1938 to put local Nazis in control of the government.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The next day, German armies moved in unopposed, and Austria became two more provinces of Greater Germany.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He began demanding that the pro-Nazi, German speaking minority of western Czechoslovakia- __the Sudetenland__ -be turned over to Germany.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The democratic Czechoslovakia was prepared to defend itself.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">War appeared inevitable, but appeasement triumphed again.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Chamberlain and the French agreed with Hitler that the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany immediately.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler's armies occupied the Czech lands in March 1939, while Slovakia became a puppet state; he was seizing them as captive peoples.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">When Hitler tried to confront Poland, Chamberlain declared that Britain and France would fight if he attached his eastern neighbor; he did not take these warnings seriously.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">On __September 1, 1939__, German armies and warplanes smashed into Polond from three sides.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Two days later, Britain and France, true to their word, declared war on Germany; the __Second World War__ had begun.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Using planes, tanks, and trucks in the first example of a __blitzkrieg__, or "lightning war," Hitler's armies crushed Poland in four weeks.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">After occupying Denmark, Norway, and Holland, German motorized columns broke through southern Belgium, split the Franco-British forces, and trapped the entire British army on the beaches of Dunkirk.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The British withdrew their troops but not their equipment.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Aging marshal __Henri-Philippe Petain__ formed a new French government- the so-called __Vichy government__- to accept, and German armies occupied most of France.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Only Britain, led by the uncompromising __Winston Churchill__, remained unconquered.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">He proved to be one of history's greatest wartime leaders, ralying the British with stirring speeches, infectious confidence, and bulldog determination.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the __Battle of Britain__, up to a thousand German planes attacked British airfields and key factories in a single day, dueling with British defenders high in the skies.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">British aircraft factories increased production, anti-aircraft defense improved with the help of radar, and the heavily bombed people of London defiantly dug in.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Britain was beating Germany three to one in the air war in 1940.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler was not a reasonable person.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">His lifetime obsession with a vast eastern European empire for the "master race" dictated policy.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">So in __June 1941__, German armies suddenly attacked the Soviet Union along a vast front.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Leningrad was practically surrounded, Moscow was besieged, and most of Ukraine had been overrun.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Japanese had occupied __French Indochina__ in July 1941, causing the United States to retaliate by cutting off sales of vital rubber, scrap iron, oil and aviation fuel.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at __Pearl Harbor__ in Hawaii, which Hitler then declared war on the United States.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler, the Nazi leadership, and the loyal German army were positioned to greatly accelerate construction of their "New Order" in Europe, and they continued their efforts until their final collapse in 1945.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler's __New Order__ was based firmly on the guiding principal of Nazi totalitarianism: racial imperialism.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Slavs in the conquered territories to the east were treated with harsh hatred as "subhumans."
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Himmler and the elite corps of SS volunteers shared Hitler's ideology of barbarous racial imperialism, and they rarely wavered in their efforts to realize his goals.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In Poland, the SS arrested and evacuated Polish peasants to cleanse the region and create a "mass settlement space" for Germans.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Nazi state also condemned all European Jews to extermination, along with many Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and captured communists.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Some deported all German Jews to occupied Poland; there they were concentrated in ghettos, compelled to wear the Jewish Star, and turned into slave laborers.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">They forced Soviet Jews to dig giant pits, which became mass graves as the victims were lined up on the edge and cut down by machine guns.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Hitler ordered deportation to be halted and mass murders to continue, but at a more rapid pace.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Most of the victims were taken by force to "shower rooms" that were actually gas chambers.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">There bodies were then cremated or sometimes boiled for oil to make soap.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">This became known as the __Holocaust__.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">By 1945, 6 million Jews had been murdered.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The extreme anti-Semitism of "ordinary Germans" led them to respond to Hitler and to become his __"willing executioners"__ in World War II.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Allies' first task was to overcome their mutual suspicions and build an unshakable alliance on the quicksand of accident.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__President Roosevelt__ accepted Churchill's contention that the United States should concentrate first on defeating Hitler.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Americans and the British put immediate military needs first.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Allies adopted the principle of the "unconditional surrender" of Germany and Japan.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The British economy was totally through rationing and heavy taxes on war profits maintained social harmony.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">By 1943, the Americans and the British were combining small aircraft carriers with radar-guided bombers to rid the Atlantic of German submarines.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Broad-based Russian nationalism, as opposed to narrow communist ideology, became the powerful unifying force in what was appropriately called the __"Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland."__
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union had the resources of much of the world at their command; they were also aided by a growing resistance movement against the Nazis throughout Europe, even in Germany.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Germans renewed their offensive against the Soviet Union in July 1942, driving toward the southern city of __Stalingrad__ and occupying most of the city in a month of incredibly savage house-to-house fighting.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In November of 1942, Soviet armies counterattacked; they quickly closed a trap and surrounded the entire __German Sixth Army__ of 300,000 men.
 * T<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">his resulted in a catastrophic defeat for the Germans.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Unlike the Nazis, the Japanese made clever appeals to local nationalists, who hated European imperial domination and preferred Japan's so-called __Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.__
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the __Battle of the Coral Sea__ in May 1942, Allied naval and air power stopped the Japanese advance and also relieved Australia from the threat of invasion.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the __Battle of Midway Island__, American pilots sank all four of the attacking Japanese aircraft carriers and established American naval superiority in the Pacific.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Then, Americans and the Australians nevertheless began "island hopping" toward Japan.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Combined German and Italian armies were finally defeated by British forces at the __Battle of El Alamein__, only seventy miles from Alexandria.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Italy and Germany then began fighting, when German armies seized Rome and all of northern Italy.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">German resistance against Hitler failed.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">After an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, SS fanatics brutally liquidated thousands of Germans.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">American and British forces under __General Dwight Eisenhower__ landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, in history's greatest naval invasion.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The Allies had closed their vise on Nazi Germany and overrun Europe.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">As Soviet forces fought their way into Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, and on May 7 the remaining German commanders capitulated.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Three months later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Mass bombing of cities and civilians, one of the terrible new practices of World War II, had ended in the final nightmare- unprecedented human destruction in a single blinding flash.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">On __August 14, 1945__, the Japanese announced their surrendered.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The __Second World War__, which had claimed the lives of more than 50 million soldiers and civilians, was over.

**__ Battles of WWII __**
1. Battle of Stalingrad 2. Battle of El Alamein 3. Battle of the Coral Sea 4. D-Day 5. Operation Sea Lion 6. Operation Barbarossa

**<span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Quiz for this chapter:__ **

 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">[|http://www.salem.k12.va.us/staff/jhinkle/solreview/WWII.ppt#1]

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__Videos associated with this chapter:__

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__<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Timeline of World War ll in Europe: __

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