Chapter 24

A World in Flames1931-1941

Section 1: America and the World

Objectives:• Describe how postwar

conditions contributed to the rise of antidemocratic governments in Europe.

• Explain why many Americans supported a policy of isolationism in the 1930s.

The Rise of Dictators

Two causes of the rise of dictatorships after WWI were the peace treaty and economic depression.In 1919, Benito Mussolini (Il Duce) founded Italy’s Fascist Party.Fascism was a kind of aggressive nationalism that believed that the nation was more important than the individual.Fascism was also strongly anticommunist.By the end of the Bolshevik Revolution Vladimir Lenin had established Communist governments throughout the Russian empire and in 1922 renamed these territories the Union of Soviet Social Republics (USSR).By 1926, Joseph Stalin had become the new Soviet dictator and in 1927 he began to industrialize his country.Tolerating no opposition, the effort brought about the deaths of 8 to 10 million peasants who resisted the Communist policies.

Hitler and Nazi Germany

• Adolf Hitler fought for Germany in WWI and as a result of Germany’s surrender and the Versailles Treaty, developed a smoldering hatred for the victorious Allies and the German government that excepted the peace agreement.

• The political and economical chaos in postwar Germany gave rise to new political parties and one such party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or the Nazi Party.

• In November 1923, the Nazis tried to seize power by marching on city hall in Munich, Germany, intending to seize power locally and then march to Berlin.

• Hitler was arrested and while in prison wrote his autobiography titled Mein Kampf, “My Struggle.”

Mein Kampf

• In the book, Hitler called for the unification of all Germans under one government.

• He claimed that Germans, particularly blond, blue-eyed, Germans, belonged to a “master race” called Aryans.

• He argued that Germans needed more lebensraum, or living space, and called for Germany to expand east into Poland and Russia.

• According to Hitler, the Slavic people of Eastern Europe belonged to an inferior race.

• Hitler’s racism was strongest toward Jews, he believed that Jews were responsible for many of the world’s problems, especially for Germany’s defeat in WWI.

Hitler’s Rise to Power

• After his release from prison, Hitler changed tactics, instead of trying to seize power violently, he focused on getting Nazis elected to the Reichstag, the lower house of the German parliament.

• When the Great Depression struck Germany, many Germans began to vote for radical parties and by 1932 the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag.

• Many traditional German leaders supported Hitler’s nationalism and believed that, if they helped him become the leader of Germany legally, they could control him and in 1933 named him chancellor or prime minister.

• After taking office, Hitler called for new elections and had Storm Troopers to intimidate voters.

• After the elections the Reichstag, dominated by the Nazis, voted to give Hitler dictatorial powers.

• In 1934, Hitler became president which gave him control of the army.

• He then gave himself the new title of fuhrer, or leader.

Militarist Gain Control of Japan

• In Japan, as in Germany, difficult economic times helped undermine the political system.

• Many Japanese military officers blamed the country’s problems on corrupt politicians and believed that Japan was destined to dominate East Asia.

• Japanese military leaders and civilian supporters argued that the only way for Japan to get needed resources was to seize territory.

• They targeted the resource rich province of Manchuria in northern China.

• A group of Japanese officers decided to act without the government’s permission and in 1931 invaded Manchuria.

• After the invasion the Japanese government tried to end the war, but when Japanese prime minister began negotiations, officers assassinated him.

• From that point forward the military was effectively in control.

America Turns to Neutrality

• The rise of dictatorships and militarism after WWI discouraged many Americans and that the sacrifices they made during the war seemed pointless.

• Americans began to support isolationism, or the belief that the United States should avoid international commitments that might drag the nation into another war.

• In 1934 Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota held hearings to investigate the country’s involvement in WWI.

• The Nye Committee documented the huge profits that arms factories had made during the war, which created the impression that these businesses influenced the United States to go to war.

• Worried that growing German and Italian aggression might lead to war, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, which, based on the belief that arms sales had helped bring the United States into WWI, made it illegal for Americans to sell arms to any country at war.

• When, in 1936, a rebellion erupted in Spain after a coalition of Republicans, Socialist, and Communists was elected.

• The rebellion was led by General Francisco Franco. • Shortly after the Spanish Civil War began, the Congress passed

another neutrality act, banning the sale of arms to either side.

Roosevelt and Internationalism

• When he took office in 1933, President Roosevelt declared that “our international relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.”

• Roosevelt knew that ending the Great Depression was his first priority, but he was not an isolationist.

• He supported internationalism, the idea that trade between nations creates prosperity and helps to prevent war.

• Internationalist also believed that the United States should try to preserve peace in the world.

• FDR warned that the neutrality acts “might drag us into war instead of keeping us out,” but he did not veto the bills.

• In July 1937, when Japan invaded Manchuria, Roosevelt decided to help China claiming that sense neither had declared war then the Neutrality Act of 1937 did not apply.

Section 2: World War II Begins

Objectives:• Explain why Hitler

was able to take over Austria and Czechoslovakia.

• Describe the early events of the war and why Britain was able to resist the Nazis.

Avoiding War?

• Europe’s leaders had several reasons for believing, or wanting to believe, that Hitler could satisfied and war avoided.1. The fear of another

bloody conflict.2. Some believed that

Hitler’s demand for the unification of all German speaking regions made sense.

3. Many believe that the Nazis would be more interested in peace once they gained new territory.

Austria & Czechoslovakia

• Hitler’s first demands concerned Austria and Czechoslovakia.

• In late February 1938 Hitler stepped up his call for unification by threatening to invade German-speaking Austria, his native land, unless Austrian Nazis were given important government positions.Austria’s chancellor quickly gave in to these demands, but when he tried, weeks later, to put unification to a democratic vote Hitler sent troops into Austria and announced the Anschluss, or unification of Austria and Germany.

• Since Austrians shared a common culture and language with Germany, many people accepted the Anschluss.

• In Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, people spoke several different languages, had a democracy, and France and the Soviet Union as allies.

• The Czechs strongly resisted Germany ’s demands for the Sudetenland. (both pledged to assistance if Germany attacked)

Appeasement

• To prevent another war, representatives of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany agreed to meet in Munich, Germany to decide Czechoslovakia’s fate. At the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938, Britain and France agreed to Hitler’s demands, a policy that came to known as appeasement which is the policy of giving concessions in exchange for peace.

• Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had publicly promised to support France before Munich, gambled that sacrificing part of Czechoslovakia would satisfy Hitler, buying time for Britain’s military to get ready for war.

• When Chamberlain returned home he promised “a peace with honor… peace in our time,” but he also began to speed up British rearmament.

• The following March, in a brazen violation of the Munich agreement, Germany sent troops into Czechoslovakia and broke the country up into German satellite states.

Danzig and the Polish Corridor

• After the Munich conference, Hitler turned his sights on Poland.

• In October 1938 he demanded the return of Danzig, a Baltic Sea port with strong German roots that had been separated from Germany and the end of WWI, to German control.

• Hitler also requested a highway and railroad across the Polish Corridor, which separated western Germany from the German state of East Prussia.

• Hitler’s demands on Poland convinced the British and French that appeasement had failed.

• On March 31, 1939, the British announced that if Poland went to war to defend its territory, Britain and France would come to its aid.

• In May 1939, Hitler ordered the German army to prepare to invade Poland.

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact

• When Hitler ordered his army to prepare to invade Poland he also ordered his foreign minister to begin negotiations with the USSR.

• If Germany was going to fight Britain and France, Hitler did not want to fight the Soviets too.

• When German officials proposed the nonaggression treaty to the Soviets, Stalin agreed.

• On August 23, 1939 Germany and the USSR signed the nonaggression pact signaling to the leaders of Britain and France that Hitler had made the deal to free himself for war against their countries and Poland.What they didn’t know was that the treaty contained a secret deal between Germany and the Soviet Union to divide Poland between them.

The War Begins: Blitzkrieg in Poland

• On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the west and soon after the Soviets invaded from the east.

• On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the start of World War II.

• Poland bravely resisted Germany’s onslaught, but was no match for the Germans new type of warfare called blitzkrieg, or lightning war.Blitzkrieg, depending on radios to coordinate, used large numbers of massed tanks to break through and rapidly encircle enemy positions while waves of aircraft bombed enemy positions and dropped paratroopers to cut their supply lines.

• On September 27, the Polish capital of Warsaw fell to the Germans and by October 5, 1939, the Polish Army had been defeated.

The Fall of France

In contrast to the war in Poland, western Europe remained eerily quiet, being referred to as sitzkrieg, or sitting war by the Germans, as the “Bore War” by the British and the “Phony War” by the Americans.The British had sent troops to France where they waited along the Maginot Line, (a line of concrete bunkers and fortifications along the German border,) for the Germans to attack.

• After taking Poland, Hitler and his generals decided to attack Norway and Denmark before invading France.

• Hitler planned to go around the Maginot Line, meaning he would have to invade the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg, and on May 10, 1940 Hitler launched a new blitzkrieg in the west.

• The British and French had expected the Germans to attack and when they did the British and French raced north into Belgium.

• This was a mistake because instead of racing their tanks across the open countryside of Belgium, the Germans sent their tanks through the mountains of Luxemburg where they easily smashed through the French lines and raced to the English Channel.

• The British and French were now trapped in Belgium.

The Battle of Britain

• The had their backs against the English Channel and their only hope for escape was to evacuate by sea.

• Hitler suddenly, for unknown reasons, stop his troops allowing the Allied forces to escape in what became known as The Miracle at Dunkirk.

• Hitler did not anticipate the bravery or will of the British people or their new leader, Winston Churchhill.

• An invasion would be tricky and in order for it to happen the British Royal Air Force would have to be destroyed.

• In June 1940, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, began to attack British shipping in the English Channel, then in mid-August the Luftwaffe launched an all out air battle to destroy the British Royal Air Force.

• On August 23, German bombers accidentally bombed London, the British capital and Britain retaliated by bombing Berlin the following night.

• This angered Hitler whose new goal was to terrorize the British people into surrendering, but the badly outnumbered Royal Air Force, with the new technology of radar, saved Britain from invasion.

• Churchill told Parliament, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Section 3: The Holocaust

Objectives:• Describe Nazi prejudices against Jews and

early persecution of German Jews.• Explain the methods Hitler used to try to

exterminate Europe’s Jewish population.

Nazi Persecution of Jews

• During the Holocaust, the catastrophe that ravaged Europe’s Jews, the Nazis killed nearly 6 million Jews.

• The Nazis also killed millions of people from other groups they considered inferior.

The Nuremberg Laws

• In September 1938, the Nuremberg Laws took citizenship away from Jewish Germans and banned marriage between Jews and other Germans.

• One month later a decree defined a Jew as a person with at least one Jewish grandparent and prohibited Jews from holding public office or voting.

• Other laws prohibited Jews from having German sounding names and soon the passports of Jews were marked with a red “J” to clearly identify them as Jewish.

Kristallnacht

• On November 7, 1938, a young refugee shot and killed a German diplomat.

• In retaliation for the killing, an infuriated Hitler ordered his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to stage attacks against the Jews that would appear to be spontaneous popular reaction to the news of the murder.

• On the night of November 9, the anti-Jewish violence that erupted throughout Germany and Austria came to be called Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,” because broken glass littered the streets afterward.

• The Nazis had forbidden police to interfere while roving bands of thugs destroyed 7,500 Jewish businesses and 180 synagogues.

• Following that night the Gestapo, the government’s secret police, arrested at least 20,000 wealthy Jews, releasing them only if they agreed to emigrate and surrender all their possessions.

• The week after Kristallnacht, Nazi interior minister Herman Goering added insult to injury by fining the Jewish community to pay for the damage.

Jewish Refugees Try to Flee

• Kristallnacht and its aftermath marked a significant escalation in the Nazi policy of prosecution against the Jews.

• Between 1933, when Hitler took power, and the start of WWII in 1939, some 350,000 Jews escaped Nazi-controlled Germany.

• These emigrants include prominent scientist Albert Einstein and businesspeople like Otto Frank, who resettled his family in Amsterdam in 1933.

• Otto’s daughter, Anne Frank, would later keep a diary of her family’s life in hiding after the Nazis overran the Netherlands.

• By 1938 the American consulate in Stuttgart, Germany had a backlog of over 100,000 visa applications form Jews trying to leave Germany to come to America.

• Several factors limited Jewish immigration to the United States such as: (1) Nazi orders prohibited Jews from taking more than about $4 out of Germany; (2) many countries refused to accept Jewish immigrants; (3) United States laws restricted granting a visa to anyone “likely to become a public charge,” especially in a time of such unemployment.

• On May 27, 1939 the SS St. Louis entered the harbor in Havana, Cuba, with 930 Jewish refugees on board, most of which hoped to go to the United States.

• The ship circled off the Florida coast, after the refusal of the Cuban government to allow them to disembark, before being refused by the United States and returning to Europe where most perished in the Nazis’ “final solution.”

The Final Solution

• On January 20, 1942, 15 Nazi leaders met at the Wannsee Conference, held in a Berlin suburb, to determine the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

• Previous “solutions” had included rounded up Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs from conquered areas, shooting them and piling them into mass graves.

• Another method required forcing Jews and other “undesirables” into trucks and piping in exhaust fumes to kill them.

• These methods, however, proved to be too slow for the Nazis.

Concentration and Extermination Camps

• At Wannsee, the Nazis made plans to round up Jews from the vast areas of Nazi-controlled Europe and take them to centers known as concentration camps where healthy individuals would work as slave laborers until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, or malnutrition.

• Most others, including the elderly, the infirm, and young children would be sent to extermination camps, like Auschwitz, attached to many concentration camps, where they would be executed in massive gas chambers.

• Auschwitz housed about 100,000 people and its gas chambers were built to kill 2,000 people at a time and sometimes gassed 12,000 a day.

Section 4: America Enters the War

Objectives:• Explain how

Roosevelt helped Britain while maintaining official neutrality.

• Trace the events that led to increasing tensions, and ultimately war, between the United States and Japan.

FDR Supports England

• The Neutrality Act of 1939 was passed to revise earlier neutrality acts.

• Whereas the first 2 neutrality acts required cash and carry terms for non-war related materials and made it illegal to sell arms to warring nations, the revision allowed for the sell of arms on a cash and carry bases.

• In the Destroyers for Bases Deal, Roosevelt sent destroyers to Britain in exchange for bases in British territories, using a loophole to get around the cash and carry part of the neutrality act.

Edging Toward War

• The Lend-Lease Act was FDR’s next way of getting around the neutrality act’s requirement of paying cash for supplies, by stating that the United States could lend or lease arms to any country considered “vital to the defense of the United States.”

• The president argued that the United States should become “the great arsenal of democracy.”

• The Hemispheric Defense Zone was another way that FDR got around the neutrality act by declaring that the entire western half of the Atlantic was part of the Western Hemisphere and therefore neutral.

• He then ordered the US Navy to patrol the western Atlantic and reveal the location of German submarines to the British.

• In August 1941 FDR and Churchill met face-to-face on board American and British warships where they agreed on the Atlantic Charter which the two committed to a postwar world of democracy, nonaggression, free trade, economic advancement, and freedom of the seas.

• Churchill later said the FDR pledged to “force an incident’… which would justify him in opening hostilities” with Germany.

Japan Attacks the United States

• Between August 1939 and December 1941, FDR’s primary goal was to help Britain and its allies defeat Germany.

• He knew that he had to help protect the British navy in Asia by introducing policies to discourage the Japanese from attacking the British Empire.

• About 80% of Japans oil came from the United States and in July 1940, Congress passed the Export Control Act, giving FDR the power to restrict the sale of strategic materials to other nations.

• FDR immediately blocked the sale of airplane fuel and scrap iron to Japan, who responded by signing an alliance with Germany and Italy becoming a member of the Axis.

• In 1941 FDR began sending lend-lease aid to China hoping that China could tie Japan down and keep them from attacking elsewhere.

Japan Attacks Continues…

• The Japanese government appeared to be continuing negotiations with the United States in good faith.

• American intelligence, however, had decoded Japanese communications that made it clear that Japan was preparing to go to war with the United States.

• On November 27, American commanders at the Pearl Harbor naval base received a war warning from Washington, but Hawaii was not mentioned as a target.

• Japan’s surprise attack on December 7, 1941, sank or damaged 21 ships of the US Pacific Fleet, including 8 battleships, 3 cruisers, 4 destroyers, and 6 other vessels.

• The attack also destroyed 188 airplanes and killed 2,403 Americans.

• The next day FDR asked Congress to declare war…”Yesterday, December 7, 1941-a date which will live in infamy- the United State of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of Japan….”