The Nazi New Order

• Hitler believed only the Germans could dominate and organize Europe.

The Nazi Empire

• Nazi empire stretched from English Channel to the outskirts of Moscow. It wasn’t anything close to an organized empire with an efficient government.
• There were some neutral states and there were some states that felt increasingly restricted by the Germans as the war progressed.
• Some areas were annexed by Nazi Germany and became a province of Germany while occupied Europe was controlled by German military or civilian officials. However, the existing authorities did not want German control and some were competing against German rule, resulting in inefficiency.
• Civil admins were established in Norway, Denmark, and Netherlands because the peoples were Aryan and related to the Germans therefore giving them leniency while the rest were “inferior” latin peoples such as those of France controlled by military administrations.
• Territories were exploited for resources because Germany could not keep up with the war effort.
• Nazi’s mistreated nations that were not occupied by Aryans and began to implement that racial program.
• Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, was put in charge of the Nazi racial ideals and was to evacuate the Slavic peoples and replace them with Germans. This policy was applied to the lands of west Poland and the new German provinces. Poles were uprooted and dumped in southern Poland. People were given designated areas in Poland. Hitler’s plan was to Germanize the lands to the east having Slavs, Poles, Ukrainians, and Soviets. SS officers commented that it was necessary to destruct 30 million Slavs in order to clear the way for German plans.
• Nazi New Order also meant the economic domination of conquered Europe to take resources. Germans seized everything from raw materials to food leaving only just enough to keep the inhabitants alive.
• Labor shortages led to German exploit of the human resources of the conquered nations. POWs were used in heavy labor but soon were wasted by maltreatment leading to death of 3 million.
• 1942- special office created to recruit labor for German farms and summer 1944, Germans had seven million foreign workers, 20 percent of the labor force.
• Another seven million were forced to work on their own lands. However, the labor created economic chaos in the countries and disrupted industrialization that could have possibly helped the Germans. The brutal treatment by the recruitment policies led to more  resistance against the Nazi occupants.

Resistance Movements

• The east especially had resistance to the brutality. Ukraine and the Baltic region once thought the Germans were liberators from the Communist regime but the maltreatment and brutality led them to fuel the guerilla warfare in the East.
• Active resistance involved the assassination of German officials, sabotage, anti-German newspapers, and spying on German military positions.
• Some countries created government in exile in Britain. In Yugoslavia, Josip Broz aka Tito, led a band of guerilla forces of 250000 and 100000 were women.
• Communist governments also led underground resistance movements.
• Women even joined in carrying messages, planting bombs in Nazi headquarters, smuggling Jews out into Neutral Sweden and dressing their husbands as women to protect them from the Nazi slaughters of males as a punishment for resistance.
• The White Rose Movement was a resistance movement within Germany where a small group of students and one professor at the University of Munich distributed pamphlets denouncing the Nazi regime as lawless criminals. Members were executed.
• Only one plan to overthrow the Nazis came close to success. Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg believed that elimination of Hitler would stop the Nazis. July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg plants a bomb in Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters and it goes off. It failed to kill Hitler and the plan was discovered. Hitler executed 5000 people.

The Holocaust

• The deliberate attempt to exterminate Jews was the most terrifying part of Nazism. Hitler believed the Jews to be the parasites that were hindrance to the Aryan race. At first he just wanted the Jews to leave with emigration policies. The Madagascar Plan was a plan by the Nazis to ship Jews to the island of Madagascar. The plan was impractical and a more drastic plan was implemented, called the Final Solution to the “Jew Problem” — total annihilation.
• After defeating Poland, Himmler created a special strike force Einsatzgruppen which was to round up all Jews and put them into ghettos. They were ordered to kill Jews in June 1941. They ordered Jews to dig pits and then would shoot them as the were finished digging and bury them there.
• Executioners had morale problems but their conscience was not impaired as they were to carry out commands unconditionally. Still this execution plan was too slow. Therefore a systematic approach was initiated using death camps, rounding up Jews on trains like cattle and shipped to Poland where the extermination centers were built with the most famous being Auschwitz-Birkenau.
• Medical technicians chose Zyklon B (Hydrogen Cyanide [HCN]) as the gas used to effectively kill people.
• Jan. 20, 1942, was when a conference was held to discuss the plan for the Final Solution. Reinhard Wannsee outlined the steps. He said it was more practical to sweep from west to east and bring them in group by group into transit ghettos, then further east. Death camps began operation in 1942 Spring. Jews were also being shipped from France, Belgium and Netherlands. The final solution took priority over the use of railroad for supplies and war necessities.
• Jews that arrived at camp were examined by doctors and those fit were sent into the camp to work while those that were not were sent to the extermination centers. 30 percent at Auschwitz were sent to labor while the rest were gassed. The goods and even the bodies of the Jews were sold. Some inmates received painful “medical” experiments. 5-6 million Jews were killed. 2/3 Jews in Europe died and 90 percent of Jews in Poland, Baltic, and Germany were killed.
• Nazis also killed another 9 million by shooting, starvation, and overworking. Gypsies of Europe were also an alien race and exterminated. Slavics were also deliberately killed and an addition of four million Poles, Ukrainians, and Belorussians lost their lives as slave laborers. Germans also killed homosexuals.

The Home Front

• WWII was total war on steroids. Economic mobilization and mobilization of women escalated as also the civilian deaths rose exponentially from bombings, extermination and attacks.

Mobilization of Peoples: Four Examples

GREAT BRITIAN

• Summer 1944, 50 percent of the British people were armed forces or civilian “war workers”. British were determined to utilize women and most under 40 years of age were called to do war work of some kind. Women took almost 50 percent of the civil service positions and women in agriculture doubled as “land girls”.
• Government encouraged “Dig for Victory” campaign to increase food production. Fields were dug up and used for “Grow Your Own Food” campaigns.
• There was still a food shortage in Britain due to German submarines sinking merchant ships.
• Food rationing became prominent while the diet became bread and potatoes.
• Hours after work were spent on the “Dig for Victory”, the Civil Defense, and the Home Guard. Even elderly were expected to manufacture airplane parts.
• British emph. on planned economy creating ministry for fuel and power to control the coal indust. and ministry for production to oversee supplies for armed forces.
• Most people seemed to accept that total war required government intervention.
• Tank production did manage to quadruple and aircraft grew three times as much.

THE SOVIET UNION

• Soviets treated the war as the Great Patriotic War because the greatest land battles were between Soviets and Germans. 2/5 people killed in the war were the Soviets. Joseph Stalin used supercentralization as his policy, conducting all military and political affairs. All organizations, civil and military, fell under Communist control.
• In the beginning, the defeats of the Soviets led to drastic emergency mobilization. Leningrad experienced nine hundred days of siege where the civilians ate dogs, cats, and mice. Factories in the exterior of Russia were packed up and moved inward. Machines were set in the ground and walls built around them. Kharkov Tank Factory created 25 T-34 tanks only then weeks after rebuilding.
• Widespread mobilizations created another Industrial Revolution. Stalin called it the “battle of machines” which the Soviets won. 78000 tanks and 98000 artillery were created and 55 percent of national income went for war materials.
• Soviet citizens experienced food shortages and housing scarcity. Workers lived in dugouts or dilapidated barracks.
• Women and girls also worked in the industries, mines, an railroads; holding 26-35 percent of the laborers in mines and 48 percent in oil industry. Soviet women were also to dig anti-tank ditches and be wardens for air-raids.They were also used as snipers and female pilots were known as “Night Witches”.
• Peasants bore the most burdens furnishing 60 percent of military forces but were also expected to feed the Red Army, Soviet people.
• German occupation reduced the farmland by 47 percent. Shortage of labor and equipment also hindered agricultural production as tractors were being used to carry military supplies.
• Overall the victory was won by total mobilization. Stalin quickly realized that people were not going to fight for communism but rather for “Mother Russia”. He use this propaganda to arouse the soviets and even gave speeches about past heroes including past Tsars.

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

• It wasn’t as hard in the US because they were not really being attacked at home other than the surprise Pearl Harbor attack. Eventually the US ended up being the arsenal for the Allies as the economy and labor force mobilized slowly at first but later quickly.
• The economy was never fully mobilized because of the reluctance of the industries to switch over to full time war operations. Too much production could lead to another depression after the war.
• Unemployment did not decrease until 1943 and women were not necessarily needed in the workforce. Small factories were shut down eventually because of fear of overproduction, a factor in the Great Depression.
• Partial mobilization caused social problems. Construction of new factories led to creation of boomtowns where many moved to in order to find employment but there was not enough housing, health facilities, and schools. This rapid growth led to social breakdown including the rise of teenage prostitution.
• Widespread movement of people was seen. Sixteen million men and women were in the military and another 16 million, wives and sweethearts, were looking for jobs and relocated. Over 1 million Af. Americans migrated from south to north to look for jobs in industry. Racial tensions resulted and led to even attacks on Af. Americans.
• Japanese American were treated the worst and force to go into camps and forced to take an oath of loyalty.

GERMANY

• Hitler believed the cause of the first loss in Germany was because of the collapse of the Home Front.
• To maintain morale, he refused to cut the consumer good production in replacement for armament. Blitzkreig allowed for quick victories and easy plunder for the Germans. But German losses and the joining of the US in the war led to economic change.
• Hitler needed to increase his armaments and put Albert Speel under control of the armaments. Elimination of waste and rationalizing procedures led to triple the production of armaments. Total mobilization was not implemented until 1944 when schools, theaters, and cafes were closed and Speer used all the remaining resources. It was too little and too late and therefore Germans still got defeated.
• Nazis reversed the ideology of the traditional women and allowed them to be employed as more men went to military service. But this increase of women was not enough and middle class women resisted employment. Labor conscription for women also did little to help

The Frontline Civilians: The Bombing of Cities

• Bombing was the common way of getting rid of military targets, enemy troops, and civilians. It was believed that the bombing would coerce the governments into surrender but this was not the truth. The luffwafe bombings set the standards for other British as the civilians did not panic. German bombings were sections of the cities and did not affect the entire city. Morale problems were not present…but the British still went and bombed the Germans, not learning that they would not panic also. Arthur Harris was the wartime leader of the British Bomber Command rearmed with 4-engine heavy bombers. Cologne was the first German city to be bombed.
• New strategy as the U.S. entered. American planes flew to accurately bomb transportation and war industry facilities. Command continued bombing the German cities with more than 100000 citizens. These raids led to shortage of foods, clothing and fuel. Incendiary bombs were bombs that created fires sweeping across cities. Hamburg was destroyed with 1800 degrees F temperatures and 50000 civilians died. Allied leaders began to stop because they saw the bombing terror as unnecessary.
• Evacuation of people in Germany was a failure as the rural villagers did not like the urban newcomers. Bombing failed to destroy morale and industrial capacity. The loss of the war could be blamed on the destruction of transportation systems.
• Bombing reached a new height when the A-Bomb was dropped. Americans sabotaged the Germans so they could not create a superbomb from uranium and then went on working with British scientists to create an atomic bomb under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer with his secret laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The first A-bomb was created and tested. B-29 Superbombers were first used as the bombing strategy in 1944.  Japanese factories were destroyed but the Japanese were still mobilizing. Fearing it would mean loss of American troops, Truman ordered the dropped A-Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 76000 near the epicenter of the explosion were destroyed. 140k people died in the city by end of 1945 and 50k more died from radiation effects. That was Hiroshima alone.

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