GOAL OF EXPANDING GERMAN TERRITORY
One motivation for the German invasion of
the USSR was the desire to acquire
Lebensraum (living space) for the German
people to colonize, at the expense of the
Poles, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and
Baltic peoples.
Hitler and other Nazi leaders thought of this
goal in both racial and ideological terms.
The conquest of "living space" meant not only
German racial domination over the conquered
peoples, but a crusade against Judaism and
Communism.
German military and police authorities
intended to wage a war of annihilation against
the Communist state as well as against the
Jews.
THE NAZI IDEOLOGY OF RACE
Hitler, the Führer (Leader) of the Nazi party, formulated and
articulated the ideas that came to be known as Nazi ideology.
He thought of himself as a deep and profound thinker, convinced
that he had found the key to understanding an extraordinarily
complex world.
He believed that a person's characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and
behavior were determined by his or her so-called racial make-up. I
n Hitler's view, all groups, races, or peoples (he used those terms
interchangeably) carried within them traits that were immutably
transmitted from one generation to the next.
No individual could overcome the innate qualities of race. All of
human history could be explained in terms of racial struggle.
For the Nazis, assimilation of a member of one race into another culture
or ethnic group was impossible because the original inherited traits could
not change: they could only degenerate through so-called race-mixing.
While it classified Jews as the priority “enemy,” the Nazi
ideological concept of race targeted other groups for
persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation, including
Gypsies
People with disabilities
Poles
Soviet POWs
Blacks.
political dissidents
homosexuals
and so-called anti socials
as enemies and security risks either because they
consciously opposed the Nazi regime or some aspect of
their behavior did not fit Nazi perceptions of social norms.
They sought to eliminate domestic non-conformists and socalled racial threats through a perpetual self-purge of
German society.
The Nazis believed that superior races had not just the right
but the obligation to subdue and even exterminate inferior
ones
The Nazis pursued a strategic vision of a dominant German
race ruling subject peoples, especially the Slavs and the socalled Asiatics (by which they meant the peoples of Soviet
Central Asia and the Muslim populations of the Caucasus
region), whom they judged to be innately inferior.
For purposes of propaganda, the Nazis often framed this
strategic vision in terms of a crusade to save western
civilization from these “eastern” or “Asiatic” barbarians and
their Jewish leaders and organizers.
THE "ARYAN" RACE
But, Hitler warned, the German “Aryan” race was threatened
by dissolution from within and without.
The internal threat lurked in intermarriages between “Aryan”
Germans and members of inherently inferior races: Jews,
Roma, Africans, and Slavs.
The offspring of these marriages were said to dilute the
superior characteristics reflected in German blood, thus
weakening the race in its struggle against other races for
survival.
The interwar German state further weakened the German “Aryan”
race by tolerating procreation among people whom the Nazis
considered genetically degenerate and a harmful influence on the
hygiene of the race as a whole:
people with physical and mental disabilities,
habitual or career criminals,
and persons who compulsively engaged in socially “deviant
behavior” as the Nazis perceived it,
including homeless people,
allegedly promiscuous women,
people unable to hold a job, or alcoholics.
The German “Aryan” race was also threatened with
dissolution from without, because, according to Hitler, the
Weimar Republic was losing the competition for land and
population to the “inferior” Slavic and Asiatic races.
In this competition, the “Jewish race” had refined its
traditional Socialist tool -- Soviet communism -- to mobilize
the otherwise incapable Slavs and to deceive Germans into
thinking that the artificial device of class conflict overrode
the natural instinct of racial struggle.
Hitler believed that the lack of living space suppressed the
birthrate among Germans to dangerously low levels.
To make matters worse, Germany had lost World War I and
had been forced by the Treaty of Versailles to give up
thousands of miles of valuable land to its neighbors.
To survive, Hitler contended, Germany must break the encirclement
of the country by its enemies and conquer vast territories in the east
from the Slavs.
The conquest of the east would provide Germany with the space
required to vastly expand its population, with the resources to feed
that population, and with the means to realize the biological destiny
of being a master race with the appropriate status of a world power.
Education in the Nazi State
Education in the Third Reich served to indoctrinate students with the National
Socialist world view. Nazi scholars and educators glorified Nordic and other
"Aryan" races, while denigrating Jews and other so-called inferior peoples as
parasitic "bastard races" incapable of creating culture or civilization.
After 1933, the Nazi regime purged the public school system of teachers
deemed to be Jews or to be "politically unreliable."
Women were encouraged to have as many
children as possible otherwise, Hitler
warned, the German race would be overrun
by so-called inferior races.
They even received "mothers crosses",
medals that looked similar to military
decorations, in gold, silver, or bronze.
As the German army advanced deep into Soviet territory, SS and police units
followed the troops.
The first to arrive were the Einsatzgruppen tasked with identifying and eliminating
persons who might organize and implement resistance to the German occupation
forces.
RUTHLESS REPRESSION OF RESISTANCE
In the context of this brutal war of annihilation, German forces in 1941 had little regard
for the Soviet civilian population.
This was the result not only of Nazi propaganda -- in which the Soviet population was
portrayed as subhuman -- but also of the basic orders issued by the military leadership.
Hitler's directive for the attack on the Soviet Union, the "Barbarossa" decree, called on
the German troops to react to any type of resistance, even passive resistance, with
shooting.
German forces burned entire villages and shot the rural population of whole districts in
retaliation for partisan attacks.
On the other hand, military authorities made it clear that crimes committed by German
soldiers were not to be punished if they claimed to have ideological considerations as
their motive. This was an open invitation for soldiers to behave brutally.
Total War
In the mid-19th century, "total war" was identified by scholars as a separate class of
warfare.
In a total war, there is no difference between soldiers and civilians, as nearly every
human resource, civilians and soldiers alike, is part of the war effort. And a legit
target.
The Second World War is the best example of total war.
Why?
The level of national mobilization
the battlespace being contested, the scale of the armies, navies, and air forces raised
through conscription,
the active targeting of civilians (and civilian property),
the general disregard for collateral damage….this means who you kill or maim
and the unrestricted aims of the belligerents marked total war on an unprecedented
and unsurpassed, multicontinental scale.
Aerial view of bombs exploding during a German
bombing run over Poland in September of 1939
A ten-yearold Polish
girl named
Kazimiera
Mika
mourns over
her sister's
body. She
was killed by
German
machinegun fire
while
picking
potatoes in
a field
outside
Warsaw,
Poland, in
September
of 1939.
German advance guards and scouts are shown in a Polish town that has
been under fire during the Nazi invasion of Poland, September 1939
From a German soldier who fought in Russia :
"Do you know how we behaved to the civilians? We behaved like devils out
of Hell. We left those poor villagers to starve to death, thousands and
thousands of them. How can you win a war in this way?
We shoot villagers on the slightest excuse. Just stick them up against a wall.
We order the whole village out to watch. It’s a vicious circle. We hate them
and they hate us, and on and on it goes, everyone getting more inhuman.
The scene of devastation seen on Ordynacka Street in Warsaw, Poland on March 6,
1940. The carcass of a dead horse lies in the street among enormous piles of debris.
While Warsaw was under nearly constant bombardment during the invasion, on one
day alone, September 25, 1939, about 1,150 bombing sorties were flown by German
aircraft against Warsaw, dropping over 550 tons of high explosive and incendiary
bombs on the city
A young Polish boy returns to what was his home and squats among the ruins during a
pause in the German air raids on Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939. German attacks
lasted until Warsaw surrendered on September 28. One week later, the last of the Polish
forces capitulated near Lublin, giving full control of Poland to Germany and the Soviet
Union
A Russian woman
watches building
burn sometime in
1942
Five Soviet civilians on a platform, with nooses around their
necks, about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the
town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of
1941
1943. Soviet partisans hanged to deter others by the
Germans.
This trainload of men was described by German sources as Soviet prisoners en
route to Germany, on October 3, 1941. Several million Soviet soldiers were
eventually sent to German prison camps, the majority of whom never returned
alive
An execution of Jews in Kiev, carried out by German soldiers near Ivangorod, Ukraine,
sometime in 1942. This photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and
intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting
documentation on Nazi war crimes. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and
Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German
inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation],
Ivangorod."
After having
occupied a
village on
the
Leningrad
sector in
1942, Soviet
forces
discovered
38 bodies of
Soviet
soldiers that
had been
taken
prisoner by
the
Germans
and
apparently
tortured to
death
Three Russian war orphans stand amid the remains of what was once their home, in
late 1942. After German forces destroyed the family's house, they took the parents as
prisoners, leaving the children abandoned
This photo provided by
Paris' Holocaust
Memorial shows a
German soldier
shooting a Ukrainian
Jew during a mass
execution in Vinnytsia,
Ukraine, sometime
between 1941 and
1943. This image is
titled "The last Jew in
Vinnitsa", the text that
was written on the
back of the
photograph, which was
found in a photo
album belonging to a
German soldier
A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in
Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with
Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the
population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before
the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot.
http://www.the-map-ashistory.com/demos/tome08/05afinal_solution_holocaust_demo.php
Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz
Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department at
Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish,
died during World War II. Czeslawa was a Polish Catholic girl, from Wolka Zlojecka, Poland,
who was sent to Auschwitz with her mother in December of 1942. Within three months, both
were dead.
Video of arrival
at Auschwitz
Photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a 2005
documentary: "She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn't understand why she
was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo
(a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was
just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried
but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and
the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself
but I couldn't interfere. It would have been fatal for me."
Burned bodies of political prisoners of the Germans lie strewn about the entrance to a
barn at Gardelegen, Germany on April 16, 1945 where they met their death a the hands of
German SS troops who set the barn on fire. The group tried to escape and was shot by the
SS troops. Of the 1,100 prisoners, only 12 managed to escape.
Videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature
=player_detailpage&v=sHcJtU9dr6I
This is a clip of from Band of Brothers depicting the
discovery of a concentration camp
U.S. military authorities prepare to hang Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, 74, at Landsberg, Germany,
on May 28, 1946. In a Dachau war crimes trial he was convicted of using 1,200
concentration camp prisoners for malaria experimentation. Thirty died directly from the
inoculations and 300 to 400 died later from complications of the disease. His experiments,
all with unwilling subjects, began in 1942.
Three of the 19 camp guards tried and convicted by
a general military court at Dachau (separate from
the Nuremberg one) for atrocities committed at
Mauthasen await execution by hanging at Landsberg
prison.
Their names are Rudolf Mynzak, Wilhelm Mueller
and Kurt Kleiwitz.
Nation
Military
Civilian
Total
Bulgaria
18,800
140,000
158,800
Finland
82,000
12,000
94,000
3,250,000
2,445,000
5,695,000
Hungary
200,000
600,000
800,000
Italy
380,000
152,900
532,900
Japan
2,565,900
672,000
3,237,900
Korea
50,000
250,000
300,000
450,000
465,000
915,000
6,996,700
4,436,900
11,683,600
Germany
Romania
Axis Total
Nation
Belgium
Military
Civilian
Total
22,700
76,000
98,700
403,000
92,700
495,700
42,700
1,000
43,700
1,900,000
20,000,000
21,900,000
6,600
315,000
321,600
France
245,000
350,000
595,000
Greece
88,300
325,000
413,300
India
48,700
5,000,000
5,048,700
Netherlands
13,700
236,000
249,700
597,300
5,675,000
6,272,300
13,600,000
16,000,000
29,600,000
United States
407,000
6,000
413,000
Yugoslavia
305,000
1,355,000
1,660,000
17,792,800
49,786,800
67,079,700
Great Britain
Canada
China
Czechoslovakia
Poland
USSR
Allied Totals