HI136 The History of Germany
Lecture 13
The Nazi War of Annihilation
Discussion Questions
• Were the crimes committed under the
National Socialist regime unique in
modern history?
• What is the Holocaust?
• What lessons, if any, can be learned
from the Holocaust?
The Polish Campaign, 1-28 Sept. 1939
Source: R. Overy, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich
Blitzkrieg
Campaigns in western Europe and the Mediterranean,
April 1940-April 1941
Source: The Encyclopaedia of the German Army in the 20th
Century
The Battle of Britain
• Air superiority
necessary if Germany
to mount an invasion of
the British Isles.
• Reasons for failure to
do so:
Paul Nash, Battle of Britain (1941)
– German aircraft had
limited range and were
designed to support land
forces
– Superior British fighter
planes
– Greater British fighter
production
– Radar
– Change of tactics
Europe,
Dec 1941
Operation Barbarossa
•
•
•
Largest land invasion ever seen
Three Army Groups made up of
German, Italian, Hungarian and
Romanian troops
Objective was to capture key
strategic areas: oil fields of the
Caucuses (South).
– Baltic coast and Leningrad (North)
– Ukraine & Moscow (Centre)
– oil fields of the Caucuses (South).
•
•
• Intended to be a repeat of
Blitzkrieg in the West
Armies covered vast distances but
didn’t achieve their objectives
Flaws:
– Operation started too late
– Deep penetration into Russia left
supply lines exposed
Source: R. Overy, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the
Third Reich (1996)
The SS and Jewish Policy
Reinhard
Heydrich, Security
Service leader
Adolf Eichmann,
head of Jewish
desk at Reich
Security Head
Office
• From 1939 SS tasked with
Jewish policy
• Emigration schemes
(Madagascar, Urals)
• ‘Jew-free’ Reich leads to
ghettoisation in General
Government, but
‘cumulative radicalisation’
(Mommsen) between
competing agencies
The decision for the Final
Solution
• Autumn 1941 (Operation Barbarossa):
elation of victory or realisation of
defeat?
• First tests of gas chambers at
Auschwitz on Soviet PoWs
• January 1942: conference at Wannsee
(Berlin) decides on European-wide
programme of mass murder, using
mechanised techniques
Map of Concentration Camps and Death Camps
The Holocaust
•
•
•
•
•
•
Jewish deaths in the Holocaust, showing
percentage of the population killed in each country
Source: H. Schulze, Germany: A New History
(1998)
•
55,000 Jews from the Łódz ghetto &
5000 Gypsies gassed in mobile gas
chambers in the winter of 1941-42.
200,000 killed in death camps at
Chelmno, Treblinka & Belzec in
August 1942.
By Dec. 1942 500,000 had been
gassed at Belzec alone.
Jews & Gypsies from all over Europe
transported to Auschwitz from spring
1942 onwards.
Estimated that around 1,600,000
murdered
at
Auschwitz
alone,
c.300,000 of which were not Jews.
‘Medical’ experiments conducted on
camp inmates.
Around 6 million Jews perished in the
Holocaust, plus hundreds of thousands
of others – Gypsies, homosexuals, the
mentally ill etc.
Roma and Sinti gypsies
Gypsies await their fate at Belzec camp
• Sinti & Roma
labelled workshy
• Ethnographic studies
of gypsies as IndoEuropean migrants
• Proportionally as
many gypsies died in
Holocaust as Jews
Models of radicalisation
• Intentionalists: top-down models based on
a Fuehrer order (lack of written evidence?)
• Incremental, step-by-step radicalisation, &
‘war against the Jews’ (Lucy Dawidowicz)
• Functionalists: polycratic, competing
bureaucracies radicalise from below
(Martin Broszat); ‘working towards the
Fuehrer’ (Ian Kershaw)
Holocaust: Height of Modernity?
• Pseudo-scientific justification derived from
rational Enlightenment ‘perfectibility of
mankind’
• Use of ‘factories of death’, but also
compartmentalisation of killing process
enabled distancing from murder
• Increasing ‘economisation’ of the
Holocaust to justify it in war effort (Aly &
Heim)
• Key commentators: Zygmunt Bauman
Holocaust: height of
barbarism?
Police Reserve Battalion 101,
stationed in occupied Poland
• Daniel Goldhagen:
focus on the ‘trigger
pullers’
• Need to explain sadistic
nature of violence
• ‘Eliminationist
antisemitism’ too
simplistic?
• Cf Christopher
Browning, Ordinary
Men, who cites peer
pressure, careerism, but
also psychological need
to conform to authority
WWII
Offensives
The Home Front
• Continued provision of leisure & entertainment
• “A reluctance to ask the public to bear sacrifices” (Craig), initially
led to limited state interference in the economy & a failure of
mobilize the full resources of the state
• Women not brought into the war effort on ideological grounds
• Surveillance of the population – the security forces on the lookout for signs of defeatism
• Intensification of propaganda & cult of the Führer
• Exploitation of occupied territories and forced labour
The War Economy
•
•
•
•
Albert Speer (1905-1981),
Minister of Armaments, 1942-45
•
The Nazis less successful at
mobilizing their economy than
the Allies.
Corruption,
inefficiency
and
disorder marred their efforts.
April 1942: Central Planning
Board set up – attempts to
rationalise the economy & make
better use of resources &
manpower.
Within 6 months production had
increased by 59%
But too little too late – ideological
concerns still led to wasting
resources and manpower.
Source: R. Overy, Russia’s War (1997)
Source: R. Overy, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich
The ‘New Order’ in Europe
•
•
•
Poster inviting Dutchmen to join the SS
Germany exploited occupied
territories, expropriating assets,
raw materials, art treasure, etc.
Foreign workers used to solve
the labour shortage – 7 million
foreign workers in Germany,
and a further 7 million in the
occupied territories by 1944.
Ambitious plans to colonize the
east – ghettoization &
‘liquidation’ of Jews, Slavs etc.
to make way for colonists.
‘The Turning of the Tide’,
1942-43
• 7 Dec. 1941: Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl
Harbour.
• 11 Dec. 1941: Hitler declared war on the USA, globalizing the
conflict.
• 5 Sept. 1942: German forces reached the Russian city of
Stalingrad.
• 23 Oct. – 5 Nov. 1942: Battle of El Alamein – the British 8th Army
defeated the Germans in North Africa and pushed them into
retreat.
• 8 Nov. 1942: Anglo-American forces invaded Morocco &
Algeria, cutting off the German retreat and trapping them in
Tunisia.
• July-August 1943: The British & Americans invade Sicily.
• Sept. 1943: Anglo-American forces move onto the Italian
peninsula. Germany occupies Italy.
Stalingrad: A 900-day Siege
• Confrontation between the two
dictators over the ‘City of
Stalin’ – neither would give in.
• Russian
counter-attack
in
November 1942 encircled the
German 6th Army.
• The Germans lost 750,000
men (killed or missing) and
91,000 were captured.
• A turning point in the war –
after Stalingrad the Germans
did nothing but retreat on the
eastern front.
Russian soldiers wave the ‘Hammer & Sickle’ flag from the roof of the Reichstag building, Berlin, May 1945
Reasons for Defeat
• The role of Hitler
• Fighting on multiple fronts
• The failure to fully mobilize the population and the
economy
• Flexibility
• Morale
• Key texts:
– Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (2008)
– Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (2006)