Totalitarianism And WWII

A) Chapter Overview Paragraph:

• The broken shambles and devastation left behind by World War I fed directly into the more deadly conflicts of World War II. The extreme liberal swing of the 1920's was met with strong conservative reactions, which generated Fascism. In countries like Italy and Germany, far right parties took over government as the Great Depression was perceived by the public as being caused by the liberalism and socialism of the 20's. These bellicose Fascist leaders turned their ailing countries around by setting them into war overdrive, which in turn caused tension throughout Europe, especially with Hitler's repeated acts of aggression. The building tension finally exploded when Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war on Germany for the second time in so many years.

B) Top 10 People:

1. Benito Mussolini

• 1883-1945
• Was an Italian political figure who created Fascism
• He took over Italy with the support of his paramilitary organization, the Black Shirts, and he aligned with Adolf Hitler's Fascist Germany and formed the Axis.

     2. Adolf Hitler

• 1889-1945
• Was a German politician and leader of the Nazi Party that took over Germany in 1933
• He was a World War I veteran who founded the Nazi Party and took over the German government following the Reichstag Fire Decree. He built up the German war machine, which pulled Germany out of the Great Depression and into World War II. He also mass exterminated millions of people he deemed unworthy of living, such as the Jews.

    3.  Joseph Stalin

• 1878-1953
• Was a Russian political figure who took over as Premier of the Soviet Union and brutally enforced his rule.
• He eliminated his political opponents and summarily killed millions of his own people to insure that no one would ever dare oppose him, which nearly blew up in his face because he shot all the leaders of the army on the eve of World War II.

     4. Neville Chamberlain

• 1869-1940
• Was a Conservative British politician who was the Prime Minister before World War II.
• He was the man who came up with the policy of appeasement, which while popular among his people, ended up putting the Allies on the unprepared side on the eve of the war.

    5. Charles De Gaulle

• 1890-1970
• Was the leader of the Free French troops in exile from the Vichy government, which he led into the recapture of France and later served as the French President.
• He inspired the French people to resist the Nazi occupation with his inspiring speeches and he founded his own political party and was elected prime minister even after he retired to serve France yet again.

    6. Joseph Goebbels

• 1478-1535
• Was the Nazi Propaganda Minister who was a close friend of Hitler and the man responsible for swaying the public to hate the Jews.
• He was extremely successful in riling people up with his oratory and his use of propaganda, which played a key role in the establishment of the Third Reich.

   7. Dwight Eisenhower

• 1890-1969
• Was an American General and the Supreme Allied Commander on the Western Front.
• He gained fame with his successes in the North Africa campaign and with his leadership during the D-Day invasion of Nazi France.

   8.  Bernard Montgomery

• 1887-1976
• Was a British General who fought in both World Wars but distinguished himself in the second.
• His victory at the Battle of El Alamein turned the tide of the German Afrika Korps and made him Britain's top military leader who also took a major role in the D-Day invasion in the British target sectors.

   9. Erwin Rommel

• 1891-1940
• Was a German Field Marshall who distinguished himself in the North Africa campaign where he earned the name "Desert Fox"
• He was a very popular wartime figure in Germany due to his successes and was viewed as a gentlemen by the Allies and was never accused of any wrongdoing.

   10. Henrich Himmler

• 1900-1945
• Was a German military man who led the armed forces of Germany in World War II, including the secret police.
• He is blamed as the man most responsible for the Holocaust as the overseer of the concentration camps, but he committed suicide before he could divulge the full extent of his crimes following the war.

C) Top 10 Events:

1. Spanish Civil War

• 1936-1939
• Was a civil war that pitted the Democratic Second Spanish Republic that was backed by the Western allies and Russia against the National Fascists who were supported by Germany and Italy.
• The war was really used as a training ground for the Axis powers to try out new bombing techniques and the Blitzkrieg

     2. Remilitirization of the Rhineland

• 1936
• Was the bringing in of weapons and the marching of soldiers back into the Rhineland region of Western Germany.
• This was in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and would mark the first and not the last time Germany defied the will of the Allies.

    3.  Beer Hall Putsch

• 1923
• Was an attempted revolution by Hitler and his friends in the Nazi party.
• The overthrow failed and the perpetrators were thrown in jail, where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, Which served as a basis of Nazi ideology.

     4. Reichstag Fire

• 1933
• Was the burning of the German Parliament allegedly by Communists that resulted in Hitler's empowerment to Chancellor of Germany. 
• Many historians believe that the Nazis actually orchestrated the entire thing just to blame the Communists to have them quickly eliminated.

    5. Night of the Long Knives

• 1934
• Was a mass execution by Adolf Hitler of all the leaders and members of his political opposition and his own SA
• He did this to insure that no one from the organization, mainly Ernst Rohm, would challenge his authority, which had to be absolute as a Fascist dictator.

    6. Night of Broken Glass

• 1938
• Was an organized mass vandalism/attack on Jewish businesses and houses of worship throughout Germany.
• It was carried out by Hitler's storm troopers, who torched, looted, beat and killed many Jews in a mass terror attack that precluded to Hitler's future order to exterminate all of the Jewish people.

   7. D-day

• 6/6/1944
• Was the largest amphibious assault ever by the Western Allies against German-occupied France.
• The operation took a while to plan and involved thousands of boats and millions of people to break through the tough German defenses.

   8.  VE-day

• 5/8/1945
• Was the day where the European theater of war ended in a victory for the Allies.
• The Germans unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on the 8th, which caused massive celebrations throughout the free world.

   9. Battle of the Bulge

• 1540-1596
• Was a major offensive started by the Germans to separate the two armies and stop the allies from having a deep-water port.
• While the offensive did cause the eponymous bulge in the Allied lines, the mostly American region of the front managed to recover and pound Germany into submission.

   10. Siege of Stalingrad

• 1942-1943
• Was the largest battle on the Eastern Front and marked the turning point in the war against Germany.
• The German Army, with their summer uniforms, had a hard time with the Russian cold and despite the extent of the siege, the Russians did not give in to the Nazis and slowly started pushing them back into Germany.

D)Essay:

• Were the Allied powers justified in appeasing Hitler's Germany and his aggressive foreign policy?

          Negotiating with an enemy is always a difficult task because neither side know the future so they do not know the outcome of their decisions. In almost every case this is true, however there are certain cases where anyone with the IQ of a plant could figure out the outcome. The biggest failure at diplomacy was the Allied agreement to appease Hitler's bellicose Germany, which gave Germany free territory and gave nothing to the allies. The Allied powers, namely Britain and France, decided to take the coward's way out when negotiating with Hitler when it was quite clear that he would stop at nothing until the entire continent was cheering "Sieg Heil!" because they were scared of putting their countries back through the horrors of World War I.

          Following the end of World War I, Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed many limits on Germany in the hopes of stopping them from ever becoming a major military power again. The Allies imposed heavy war debts upon Germany, along with blaming them for the war and limiting their military capabilities. While at the drawing table this may have sounded like a good idea, when the treaty was put in effect, There was a great outpouring of anger in Germany. It was so great in fact that the Allies, under measures such as the Dawes Plan, reduced the penalties on Germany. Still, many within the German government, namely Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, viewed the Treaty of Versailles as a betrayal of the people by the government of the Wiemar Republic. The Allies, in effect, allowed the Treaty of Versailles to be ignored when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland and when he stopped paying the reparations.
          The Allies also placed quite a bit of misguided faith in their other established methods of diplomacy. The League of Nations, set up by the Treaty of Versailles, was designed to prevent World War I from ever happening again. The League was part of American President Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, which was the American justification for going to war, however the Americans never joined the League itself. The League therefore floundered dramatically and without any real power, the League was more symbolic than anything else. However, the Allies believed that the League of Nations would ensure world peace, which they clearly could have seen with the Italo-Abyssinian War,  nonetheless they decided to ignore the problem. Another useless invention cooked up by the Allies to assuage their fears of a vengeful Germany after their loss in World War I was the Kellogg-Briand Pact. The pact, signed between the American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, outlawed war as "an instrument of national policy". The pact included no sanctions and no real way to insure that the signatories would toe the line, yet the Allies still put their faith in it despite the fact that it was extremely flawed.
          Even after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement failed the first time, the Allies decided to stick with it rather than face the alternative of using actual force. In March 1936, Hitler openly violated the Treaty of Versailles for the first time by remilitarizing the Rhineland, to which the British did nothing and the French simply stared as the superior German Wehrmacht marched in saluting "Der Führer". So they told Germany to stop and Hitler said they would. He then marched into Austria, where he met no opposition, and the people were saluting "Der Führer". So they told Germany to stop and Hitler said they would. Hitler then marched into the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain negotiated a peace agreement and he proudly proclaimed that he had attained "Peace with honor...peace for our time". But Hitler took over all of Czechoslovakia instead of just the Sudetenland.  So they told Germany to stop and Hitler said they would. Chamberlain and the Allies apparently couldn't tell that Hitler had a tendency to not remember his pledges.
          Finally, the Allies realized that appeasement only served to give a false sense of security while Hitler extended his Axis of evil without firing a single bullet. When Hitler marched into Poland, the world went to war for the second time in 20 years. Not only was appeasement a terrible policy, it let the Allies enter the war unprepared because they had trusted in the untrustworthy. Though countries were still scarred from the horrors of World War I, they should have realized that appeasing Hitler's Germany only made the country greedier for more territory.

E) Top Dog Analysis:

• In terms of sheer might and totalitarian power, no leader in history has come close to the achievements of Joseph Stalin in Communist Russia. Stalin was born to a modest cobbler in rural Russia and was educated by a religious seminary, which influenced him greatly. He moved into St. Petersburg and became a rising star within Lenin's Bolsheviks as a brutal man who enforced the party line. During the Russian Civil War, Stalin was appointed by Lenin to be part of the five-man war council, called the Politburo, that ruled Soviet Russia to insure their victory. He greatly added to Russia during the war and the early 20's, earning back nearly all the territoriality seceded under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which, following Lenin's death in 1824, let him become the popular choice for the Premier of Russia. After seizing power, he quickly eliminated all the political allies he had made to get him there and replaced them with fanatics that were completely subservient to his will. He instituted many reforms in Russia, though not necessarily for the good of the people. He strengthened and expanded his secret police, developed a cult of personality, instituted two Five Year Plans, built up Russia's industry, and collectivized Russia's agricultural production, all the while enforcing his own bottom line by forcing millions of poor laborers to work on his immense projects. Stalin quickly built up Communist Russia to a world power status, so much so that the Western Allies were unsure whether or not they could trust him. He decided instead to sign with Nazi Germany, but they broke their pact with him and Communist Russia faced its ultimate test: the German war machine. With the German army literally at the gates of Moscow, Stalin charged his army to go on the offensive, which changed the course of the war to the Russian's favor. He also loosely allied with Britain and the United States during the many conferences they held together, and he emerged from the war the leader of a country that stretched from Berlin to Kamchatka. Though he was not the most merciful rulers, Stalin's Communist Russia emerged form the war as the dominant world power, equal to or more powerful than the United States.

F)Timeline:


G) Images: