The New Order in Europe

The German conquest of continental Europeforced millions of native peoples to labor for the Nazi warmachine.

Reading Connection Did you know that four millionenslaved African Americans were freed after the Civil War inthe United States? Read to learn about the Nazi plan to useslave labor.

In 1942, the Nazi regime stretched across conti-nental Europe from the English Channel in the westto the outskirts of Moscow in the east. Nazi Europewas usually organized in one of two ways. Someareas, such as western Poland, were directly annexedand made into German provinces. Most of occupiedEurope, however, was run by German military orcivilian officials with help from local people willingto collaborate with the Nazis. Because the Nazis con-trolled all Europe, they were able to carry out one ofthe most horrible atrocities in human history—themurder of some six million Jews, as well as otherpeople they judged unfit for the new German Reich.

The camps were the final stage of genocide, butthe Nazi plan for exterminating the Jews began withthe movement of Jews and other “undesirables.”

Resettlement in the East Nazi administration inthe conquered lands to the east was especially ruth-less. These lands were seen as the living space for Ger-man expansion. They were populated, Nazis thought,by racially inferior Slavic peoples. Hitler’s plans for anAryan racial empire were so important to him that heand the Nazis began to implement their racial pro-gram soon after the conquest of Poland.

Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, was put incharge of German resettlement plans in the east.Himmler’s task was to move the Slavic peoples outand replace them with Germans. Slavic peoplesincluded Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, andUkrainian. This policy was first applied to the newGerman provinces created from the lands of westernPoland.

One million Poles were uprooted and transferred tosouthern Poland. Hundreds of thousands of ethnicGermans (descendants of Germans who had migratedyears ago from Germany to different parts of southernand eastern Europe) were brought in to colonize theGerman provinces in Poland. By 1942, two millionethnic Germans had been settled in Poland.

The invasion of the Soviet Union made the Naziseven more excited about German colonization in theeast. Hitler spoke to his intimate circle of a colossalproject of social engineering after the war. Poles,Ukrainians, and Russians would be removed fromtheir lands and become slave labor. German peasantswould settle on the abandoned lands and “German-ize” them.

Himmler told a gathering of SS officers that 30 mil-lion Slavs might die in order to achieve German

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Many of Europe’s Jews perished in the deathcamps. The most notorious was at Auschwitz whereRudolf Höss was the commanding officer. Hössdescribed what happened to Jews when they arrivedat the camp:

“We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz toexamine the incoming transports of prisoners. Theprisoners would be marched by one of the doctorswho would make spot decisions as they walked by.Those who were fit for work were sent into thecamp. Others were sent immediately to the exter-mination plants. Children of tender years wereinvariably exterminated since by reason of theiryouth they were unable to work. . . . At Auschwitzwe fooled the victims into thinking that they wereto go through a delousing process. Frequently theyrealized our true intentions and we sometimes hadriots and difficulties due to that fact.”

Rudolf Höss

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plans in the east. He continued, “Whether nationslive in prosperity or starve to death interests me onlyinsofar as we need them as slaves for our culture.Otherwise it is of no interest.”

Slave Labor in Germany German labor shortagesled to a policy of rounding up foreign workers. In1942, a special office was set up to recruit labor forGerman enterprises. By mid-1944, seven millionEuropeans were working in Germany. Another sevenmillion workers were forced to labor for the Nazis intheir own countries, sometimes in military camps.

The use of forced labor often caused problems, how-ever. Sending so many workers to Germany disruptedindustrial production in the occupied countries thatcould have helped Germany. Then, too, the brutal wayin which Germany recruited foreign workers led moreand more people to resist the Nazi occupation forces.

Describing What was Hitler’s visionfor the residents of eastern Europe?

The Holocaust

Adolf Hitler’s philosophy of Aryan superiorityled to the Holocaust.

Reading Connection Have you seen films about theHolocaust? Read to find out how the Nazis planned to extermi-nate the Jews.

No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terri-fying than the deliberate attempt to exterminate theJews. Racial struggle was a key element in Hitler’s

Reading Check

world of ideas. To him, racial struggle was a clearlydefined conflict of opposites. On one side wereHitler’s “master German race,” creators of humanprogress. On the other side were the Jews, parasites,in Hitler’s view, who were trying to destroy Germansand control the world.

Himmler and the SS closely shared Hitler’s racialideas. The SS was given responsibility for what theNazis called their Final Solution to the Jewish prob-lem. The Final Solution was genocide, the physicalextermination of the Jewish people.

The Einsatzgruppen Reinhard Heydrich, head ofthe SS’s Security Service, was given the task ofadministering the Final Solution. Heydrich createdspecial strike forces, called Einsatzgruppen, to carryout the Nazi plans for the extermination of the Jews.After the defeat of Poland, he ordered these forces toround up all Polish Jews and put them in ghettos setup in a number of Polish cities.

Conditions in the ghettos were horrible. Familieswere crowded together in unsanitary housing. TheNazis attempted to starve residents by allowing onlyminimal amounts of food. Despite suffering, resi-dents tried to adjust, and some ghettos organizedresistance against the Nazis.

In June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were given thenew job of acting as mobile killing units. These SSdeath squads followed the regular army’s advanceinto the Soviet Union. Their job was to round up Jewsin their villages, execute them, and bury them inmass graves. The graves were often giant pits dug bythe victims themselves before they were shot.

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Anne Frank1929–1945Dutch Holocaust victim

Anne Frank was one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust. When the Nazisbegan to round up Jews in the Netherlands, the Frank family, along with another fam-ily, moved into a secret annex above a warehouse owned by the family business.Employees of the Frank family provided food and a lifeline to the outside world.

Anne remained hopeful. She kept a diary to while away the time spent in hiding.On July 15, 1944, she wrote, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are reallygood at heart.”

On August 4, 1944, the Nazis found the secret annex of the Frank family. Anne andher sister were sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany. There they diedof typhus. Anne’s father, Otto Frank, who survived, later found Anne’s diary. Published in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank became an international best-seller.

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The leader of one death squad described theirmethods:

“The unit selected for this task would enter a vil-lage or city and order the prominent Jewish citizensto call together all Jews for the purpose of resettle-ment. They were requested to hand over their valu-ables to the leaders of the unit, and shortly beforethe execution to surrender their outer clothing. Themen, women, and children were led to a place ofexecution which in most cases was located next to amore deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then theywere shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpsesthrown into the ditch.”

The Death Camps Probably one million Jews werekilled by the Einsatzgruppen. As appalling as thatsounds, it was too slow by Nazi standards. Theydecided to kill the European Jewish population inspecially built death camps.

Beginning in 1942, Jews from countries occupiedby Germany (or sympathetic to Germany) wererounded up, packed like cattle into freight trains, andshipped to Poland. Six extermination centers werebuilt in Poland for this purpose. The largest wasAuschwitz (OWSH•VIHTS).

About 30 percent of the arrivals at Auschwitz weresent to a labor camp, where many were starved orworked to death. The remainder went to the gaschambers. Some inmates were subjected to cruel andpainful “medical” experiments.

By the spring of 1942, the death camps were in fulloperation. First priority was given to the eliminationof the ghettos in Poland. By the summer of 1942,however, Jews were also being shipped from France,Belgium, and Holland. Even as the Allies were win-ning the war in 1944, Jews were being shipped fromGreece and Hungary. Despite desperate militaryneeds, even late in the war when Germany faced

554 CHAPTER 11 World War II

N

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500 kilometers0Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area projection

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UNION OF SOVIETSOCIALIST REPUBLICS

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Minsk

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Smolensk

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Majdanek

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The Nazis devoted extensive resources to what they termedthe Final Solution.

1. Interpreting Maps How many concentration campsare shown on the map? How many death camps?

2. Applying Geography Skills What geographical factorsdo you think were involved in the Germans’ decisionsabout the locations of the death camps?

Concentration campDeath campLocation ofEinsatzgruppenInternationalboundary, Jan. 1938

Major Nazi Camps

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555CHAPTER 11 World War II

Jews from the Warsaw ghetto surrendering after their rebellion in 1943

utter defeat, the Final Solution had priority in usingrailroad cars to ship Jews to death camps.

The Death Toll The Germans killed between fiveand six million Jews, over three million of them in the death camps. Virtually 90 percent of the Jewishpopulations of Poland, the Baltic countries, and Ger-many were killed. Overall, the Holocaust was respon-sible for the death of nearly two out of every threeEuropean Jews.

The Nazis were also responsible for the deliberatedeath by shooting, starvation, or overwork of at leastanother nine to ten million non-Jewish people. TheNazis considered the Roma, sometimes known asGypsies, to be an alien race. The Roma were roundedup for mass killing. About 40 percent of Europe’s onemillion Roma were killed in the death camps.

The leading citizens of the Slavic peoples—theclergy, intellectuals, civil leaders, judges, andlawyers—were arrested and killed. Probably an addi-tional four million Poles, Ukrainians, and Belorussianslost their lives as slave laborers for Nazi Germany.Finally, at least three million to four million Sovietprisoners of war were killed in captivity.

This mass slaughter of European civilians, partic-ularly European Jews, is known as the Holocaust.Jews in and out of the camps attempted to resist theNazis. Some were aided by friends and evenstrangers, hidden in villages or smuggled into safeareas. Foreign diplomats would try to save Jews by

issuing exit visas. The nation of Denmark savedalmost its entire Jewish population.

Some people did not believe the accounts of deathcamps because, during World War I, the Allies hadgreatly exaggerated German atrocities to arouseenthusiasm for the war. Most often, people pre-tended not to notice what was happening. Evenworse, collaborators (people who assisted theenemy) helped the Nazis hunt down Jews. The Allieswere aware of the concentration camps and deathcamps but chose to concentrate on ending the war.Not until after the war did they learn the full extentof the horror and inhumanity of the Holocaust. ; (See page 775 to read an excerpt from a French doctor’sdescription of the Holocaust in the Primary SourcesLibrary.)

Children in the War Young people of all ages werealso victims of World War II. Because they wereunable to work, Jewish children, along with theirmothers, were the first ones selected for the gas

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only “in teaching simple arithmetic up to 500, thewriting of one’s name, and that God has ordered obe-dience to the Germans, honesty, diligence, and polite-ness. I do not consider an ability to read as necessary.”

At times, young people were expected to carry theburden of fighting the war. In the last year of the war,Hitler Youth members, often only 14 or 15 years old,could be found in the front lines. In the Soviet Union,children as young as 13 or 14 spied on German posi-tions and worked with the resistance movement. Somewere even given decorations for killing the enemy.

Summarizing What was the Nazis’Final Solution?

The New Order in Asia

The Japanese conquest of Southeast Asiaforced millions of native peoples to work for the Japanesewar machine.

Reading Connection How would you feel if you wereseparated from your family and forced to work for a foreigncountry? Read to learn about the Japanese policies in theoccupied areas of Southeast Asia.

Japanese war policy in the areas in Asia occupiedby Japan was basically defensive. Japan hoped to useits new possessions to meet its need for raw materi-als, and also as an outlet for manufactured goods. Toorganize these possessions, Japanese leaders included

them in the Greater East AsiaCo-Prosperity Sphere, theeconomic community sup-posedly designed to providebenefits to the occupied areasand the home country.

Japanese Policies TheJapanese had conqueredSoutheast Asia under the slo-gan “Asia for the Asiatics.”Japanese officials in occupiedterritories quickly made con-tact with anticolonialists.They promised the peoplethat local governments wouldbe established under Japanesecontrol. Such governmentswere eventually set up inBurma, the Dutch East Indies,Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Reading Check

American and Filipino prisoners of war wereheld in the Philippines. What role did prison-ers of war play in the Japanese war effort?

History

556 CHAPTER 11 World War II

chambers upon their arrival in the death camps ofPoland. Young Jewish males soon learned to look asadult as possible in order to survive. Altogether, 1.2million Jewish children died in the Holocaust.

Many children were evacuated from cities duringthe war in order to avoid the bombing. The Germanscreated about 9,000 camps for children in the country-side. In Japan, 15,000 children were evacuated fromHiroshima before its destruction. The British movedabout 6 million children and their mothers in 1939.Some British parents even sent their children toCanada and the United States. This, too, could bedangerous. When the ocean liner Arandora Star washit by a German torpedo, it had 77 British children onboard. They never made it to Canada.

Children evacuated to the countryside did notalways see their parents again. Some of them, alongwith many other children, became orphaned whentheir parents were killed. In 1945, there were perhaps13 million orphaned children in Europe.

In eastern Europe, children especially sufferedunder the harsh occupation policies of the Germans.All secondary schools in German-occupied easternEurope were closed. Their facilities and equipmentwere destroyed.

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, said of theseSlavic children that their education should consist

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In fact, real power rested with Japanese militaryauthorities in each territory. In turn, the local Japanesemilitary command was directly subordinated to theArmy General Staff in Tokyo. The economic resourcesof the colonies were used for the benefit of the Japanesewar machine. The native peoples in occupied landswere recruited to serve in local military units or wereforced to work on public works projects.

In some cases, these policies brought severe hard-ships to peoples living in the occupied areas. In Viet-nam, for example, local Japanese authorities forciblytook rice and shipped it abroad. This led directly to afood shortage that caused over a million Vietnameseto starve to death in 1944 and 1945.

Japanese Behavior At first, many Southeast Asiannationalists took Japanese promises at face value andagreed to cooperate with the Japanese authorities. InBurma, for example, an independent governmentwas set up in 1943 and declared war on the Allies.Eventually, the nature of Japanese occupation poli-cies became clear, and sentiment turned againstJapan.

Japanese officials provoked such attitudes by theirarrogance and contempt for local customs. In theDutch East Indies, for example, Indonesians wererequired to bow in the direction of Tokyo and to rec-ognize the divinity of the Japanese emperor. In Burma,Buddhist pagodas were used as military latrines.

Like German soldiers in occupied Europe, Japa-nese military forces often had little respect for the lives of their subject peoples. After their conquest of Nan-jing, China, in 1937, Japanese soldiers spent severaldays killing, raping, and looting. After the conquest

of Korea, almost 800,000 Korean people were sent toJapan, most as forced laborers.

In construction projects to help their war effort, theJapanese made extensive use of labor forces com-posed of both prisoners of war and local peoples. Inbuilding the Burma-Thailand railway in 1943, forexample, the Japanese used 61,000 Australian, British,and Dutch prisoners of war and almost 300,000 work-ers from Burma, Malaya, Thailand, and the DutchEast Indies. An inadequate diet and appalling workconditions in an unhealthy climate led to the death of12,000 Allied prisoners of war and 90,000 workers bythe time the railway was completed.

Such Japanese behavior created a dilemma fornationalists in occupied countries. They had no desireto see the return of the colonial powers, but they didnot like what the Japanese were doing. Some turnedagainst the Japanese. Others simply did nothing.

Indonesian patriots tried to have it both ways. Theypretended to support Japan while actually sabotagingthe Japanese administration. In French Indochina, HoChi Minh’s Communist Party made contact with U.S.military units in southern China. The Communistsagreed to provide information on Japanese troopmovements and to rescue downed American fliers inthe area. By the end of the war, little support remainedin the region for the Japanese “liberators.”

Examining What was Japan’s warpolicy in the occupied areas of Southeast Asia?

Reading Check

557CHAPTER 11 World War II

Checking for Understanding1. Vocabulary Define: implement, geno-

cide, adjust, collaborator.

2. People Identify: Heinrich Himmler,Reinhard Heydrich.

3. Places Locate: Poland, Auschwitz.

Reviewing Big Ideas4. Explain what the Nazis meant by the

Final Solution. How did Hitler’s commit-ment to the Final Solution hinder Ger-many’s war effort?

Critical Thinking5. Evaluating What

was the impact of the Holocaust on his-tory? What lessons does the Holocausthave for us today?

6. Cause and Effect Create a chart givingexamples of Hitler’s actions to create aNew World Order in Europe and theoutcome of his efforts.

Analyzing Visuals7. Examine the scene pictured on page

555. Based on your reading, describethe series of events that will most likelyfollow.CA HR 3

8. Persuasive Writing Imagine youare a member of Hitler’s inner circlewho is alarmed about the Final Solu-tion. Compose a letter to Hitler, out-lining why he should abandon plansto send Jews to the death camps.

CA 10WA2.4a,c

Hitler’s Actions Outcome

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