Ike speaks to soldiers in Britain prior to D-Day
Section 12.3

June 6, 1944
Capture: Americans in landing craft, June 6, 1944

What events led these Americans to end up in Normandy, France?
Capture: Americans pull up to beach at Normandy

Describe December 7, 1941.
• “A date which will live in infamy.”
• Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii (naval base)
• Destroyed 19 battleships, 188 planes
• Killed 2, 400 Americans
• United Americans in call for war
– “Remember Pearl
Harbor”
Above: Pearl Harbor burning;
Below: FDR asks Congress for declaration of war on Japan

Mobilizing America
Capture: Times Square
Times Square: Summer of 1941

Allies
•
United States
•
Great Britain
•
Soviet Union
•
And many others
Axis Powers
•
Germany
•
Italy
•
Japan
Left to Right: Stalin, Roosevelt,
Churchill
“The Big Three

What was the Allied strategy for fighting
•
Defeating Germany
WWII?
is most important
•
Unconditional surrender of Axis powers
• “Closing the Ring”
–
Plan to encircle
Nazi Germany on all sides
•
Defensive war in
Pacific
World map showing areas of German and Japanese control

Barbarossa
Barbarossa: Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Union

Describe the invasion of the Soviet Union.
• Began June 22, 1941 (Summer)
•
Blitzkrieg tactics and surprise
• Surrounded Leningrad for 900 days
•
300 thousand Germans attacked
Stalingrad
•
Access to oil
•
Russians stopped advance
•
Marks to turning point of the war
•
Stalin bitter about lack of Allied support
Above: German tanks
Below: Hitler heads in three directions

Siege of Stalingrad
Capture: Siege of Stalingrad

Axis Powers by September of 1942
Map shows the peak of Axis Power

Hitler’s Plan: Operation Barbarossa
Capture the wheat fields of Ukraine, then advance east across North
Africa and South from Russia to capture the oil fields of the Middle East.
Oil Fields

• The Allies Finally Stopped Hitler’s Advance at Three Key Areas:
• Battle of Britain
• El Alamein in Egypt
• Stalingrad in Russia
See Map on Next Slide

In spite of these losses, Hitler was firmly entrenched in Western Europe. (Map shows
Allied counter-offensive)
Russian Advance
After Stalingrad
Allied Invasion of
N. Africa 11/42

To complete the encirclement of Hitler -‘Closing the Ring’the Allies needed to land somewhere in France. (Map shows location of Normandy Invasion)

Normandy Beach, France June 6, 1944
Old Glory finally planted on Omaha Beach

Place the following events in order from 1 st to last. Now put the year they occurred.
• Event
• Operation Barbarossa
• Treaty of Versailles
• Hitler named
Chancellor
• Munich Pact
• D-Day
• Invasion of Poland
• Pearl Harbor
• Year

What was Operation Overlord?
• Allied invasion of Europe
•
Began with D-Day
–
Deliverance Day/ Disembarkment
Day) June 6, 1944
•
Bad weather delayed invasion by one day
• Was it successful?
–
10 thousand casualties in two weeks
–
Allies built man-made harbor
–
Allowed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and equipment to gain foothold in western Europe
View from Higgins boat

Military funeral of D-Day dead
D-Day

• Hitler’s last major offensive
•
Caught Allies off guard
•
Goal was to capture
Antwerp
•
Germans surrounded town of Bastogne asked for surrender
– “Nuts” was the reply
•
Weather broke in
January and supplies replenished
Top: Map of the Ardennes; Bottom: corpses at Bastogne

Video capture: Americans at
Bastogne
Bastogne

The Progress of the War
Axis Nations
Allied Nations
Neutral Nations
Communist Nations World map showing the relative size and location of Axis and Allied nations

Capture from ‘Band of
Brothers’: Liberating the Camps

What was the Holocaust?
• Genocide or systematic murder of Jews, Gypsies,
Slavs, and others the
Nazis considered undesirable
• Final Solution
–
Nazi decision to attempt to exterminate the Jewish race from
Europe
•
6 million Jews murdered
(66% of the population in
Europe)
Entrance to the death camp at
Auschwitz II

Describe the process of the Final Solution.
• Occurred gradually over time
•
Nuremberg Laws of 1935
– German laws used to identify and discriminate against Jews in Germany
•
Could not attend schools, hold public office, sit on park benches
•
Must wear yellow star
• Ghettos (1939)
–
Jews were forced to reside in overcrowded, unsanitary areas of conquered cities
Above and below: Nazis persecuting Jews

The “Liquidation of the Ghetto”
Video capture: German troops enter the Warsaw Ghetto

“Wall of Death” for Polish political prisoners, before Auschwitz was turned into a death camp. Under the building on the right, Nazis first used poison gas to kill.

Describe the process of the Final Solution
•
Wannsee conference
–
Meeting in Berlin in 1942
– decision to systematically kill the Jews of Europe
• Einsatzgruppen (1940)
– Killing squads
– Rounded up Jews from conquered areas and executed them
• Concentration Camps
– 1 st for “political reeducation”
– slave labor, medical experiments, starvation, murder by gas chamber
Above: Auschwitz from the air

Mr. Morris by tracks at
Birkenau station near
Auschwitz

Crematoria with tourists and memorial candle

Clockwise from left, Gas Chamber, Zyklon B pellets, famous entrance with “Arbeit Macht Frei” arch, random line of doomed people

Dear Fellow Party Member [Parteigenosse] Luther!
Enclosed I am sending you the minutes of the proceedings that took place on January 20,1942.
Since the basic position regarding the practical execution of the final solution of the Jewish question has fortunately been established by now, and since there is a full agreement on the part of all agencies involved. I would like to ask you at the request of the Reich Marshal to make one of your specialist officials available for the necessary discussion of details in connection with the completion of the draft that shows the organizational, technical and material prerequisites bearing on the actual starting point of the projected solutions.
I want to schedule the first discussion along these lines for
10:30 a.m. on March 6, 1942 at 116 Kurfürstenstrasse,
Berlin. I therefore ask you that for this purpose your specialist official contact my functionary in charge there,
SS-Obersturmbannführer Eichmann.
Reinhard Heydrich

What was V-E Day?
• “Victory in Europe”
•
May 8, 1945
•
Germany surrendered unconditionally to the
Allies
•
FDR had died April 12
•
Hitler had committed suicide April 30
Above and below: newspapers proclaim Victory in Europe
•
US still at war with
Japan

VE Day
Capture: V-E Day