HI136 The History of GermanyLecture 12

The Third Reich At War

The Polish Campaign, 1-28 Sept. 1939Source: 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:– German aircraft had

limited range and were designed to support land forces

– Superior British fighter planes

– Greater British fighter production

– Radar– Change of tactics

Paul Nash, Battle of Britain (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 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 look-

out for signs of defeatism• Intensification of propaganda & cult of the Führer• Exploitation of occupied territories and forced labour

The War Economy• 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.

Albert Speer (1905-1981),Minister of Armaments, 1942-45

Source: R. Overy, Russia’s War (1997) Source: R. Overy, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich

The ‘New Order’ in Europe• 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.

Poster inviting Dutchmen to join the SS

The SS and Jewish Policy• 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 agenciesReinhard

Heydrich, Security Service leader

Adolf Eichmann, head of Jewish desk at Reich Security Head

Office

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• 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.

Jewish deaths in the Holocaust, showing percentage of the population killed in each country

Source: H. Schulze, Germany: A New History (1998)

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?

Models of Radicalisation• Intentionalists: top-down models based on

a Führer 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 Führer’ (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: The Height of Barbarism?

• 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

Police Reserve Battalion 101, stationed in occupied Poland

‘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)