Ww2 Collaboration Analysis

(1) Resistance as well as collaboration occurred in all German-controlled areas of Europe during World War II. Give specific examples of both, and of their consequences.
An example of collaboration with the Germans was the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Under this 1939 pact the two nations agreed not to attack the other if it were to be in war another country, regardless of who started it. The treaty essentially bought time for both leaders as it allowed them to get what they want without the other interfering. During the first two years of World War II while the Soviets and Nazis were collaborating with each other (before Hitler’s invasion of the SU) the territory of what is now Poland and Ukraine was invaded and split between the two
dictatorships. The territory that is now Ukraine suffered under brutal Soviet repressions between 1939 and 1941, including 1.2 million Ukrainians deported to Siberia and the shooting of 15,000 Ukrainian. The Soviets and Nazis conducted massive population transfers without regard for the people involved. Hitler wanted Germans in the Reich and Stalin wanted Slavs. Between the late 1930s until the end of the war, the Soviet and Nazi regimes murdered fourteen million people. During the years that Stalin and Hitler collaborated with each other, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the world.
The allied landings in Normandy and the resumption of devastating SU offensives in the east finally convinced a number of Hitler’s generals that the war was a lost cause. As a result, resistance was seen in the German army. Field Marshall Rommel sought to persuade Hitler to sue for peace in the west in order to reinforce the eastern front. He believed that the continuation of war would only lead to total destruction of his country. Hitler refused however. Rommel was among a number of high ranking officers who were prepared to seize power by force if Hitler failed to take appropriate action to avoid the impending catastrophe. Rommel was injured in a battle against France in 1944 so was unable to play a part in the unfolding military resistance, so the leader of the resistance was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. He joined the already existing military conspiracy under General Friedrich Olbricht. Together they reworded an already existing plan to unseat Hitler, code name operation Valkyrie. On July 20 1944, Stauffenberg planted a bomb under a conference table in Hitler’s east Prussian headquarters bunker during a briefing session. Everything went wrong in the delayed assassination attempt. 4 were killed however Hitler only got minor injuries. That same evening Stauffenberg and his leading coconspirators were shot by a hastily assembled firing squad. The coup attempt failed not only because of the delay in the assassination but because the vast majority of high ranking officers remained loyal to the regime. To have violated their oaths of personal loyalty to Hitler would have constituted a breach of traditional standards of military honor. As a result, the conspirators received no encouragement from the allies.
Another example of resistance to occupied German was the resistance to Nazism because it involved treason against one’s own country. Resistance played a significant role in a number of countries, particularly in Yugoslavia. By the middle of 1943 partisan resistance to the Germans and their allies had grown from the dimensions of a mere nuisance to those of a major factor in the general situation. In many parts of occupied Europe the enemy was suffering losses at the hands of partisans that he could ill afford. Here, guerilla fighters under Marshall Josip Tito tied down a number of German divisions throughout the war and succeeded in liberating the country before the arrival of the red army in Belgrade in late October 1994. The Partisans staged a guerrilla campaign which enjoyed gradually increased levels of success and support of the general populace, and succeeded in controlling large chunks of Yugoslav territory. The movement grew to become the largest resistance force in occupied Europe, with 800,000 men. The partisans succeeded in liberating the country but lost an immense number of lives
(2) The Holocaust of World War II was the worst case in recorded history of state-directed genocide, targeting a particular ethnic group. Why did Germany adopt this policy of racial extermination? What alternative solutions had been considered, and why were they rejected?
The Final Solution (the answer to Germanys “Jewish Problem”) was the systematic killing of millions of Jews, put into place primarily by the top Gestapo brass, Adolph Eichmann and Reinhardt Heidrich. The genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of German policy under Nazi rule and the realization of a core goal of the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler. Because no other country wanted to take Germanys Jews and those that had taken them in the past now refused to do so, logistically it was impossible to keep them in one area. To Hitler, Jews were both a threat, and also a drag on resources. The easiest solution was genocide. Hitler desired more "living space" for Germany and also aimed to foster an Aryan race, to do so he must eliminate the Jews. He also blamed Jews for Versailles and Bolshevism. Hitler's hatred of Jews was real; it was not just a propaganda tool used to gain power and was the reason for the genocide.
Before the Wannsee conference (the meeting in which the final solution was coordinated) Hitler pursued alternative options to handle the Jewish problem. One was the ghettos. ghettos were city districts (often enclosed) in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions in which starvation, disease and random killings/deportations flourished. Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities. The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939. The Germans regarded the establishment of ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options to realize the goal of removing the Jewish population. The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw ghetto (1940-3), where more than 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. 300,000 Jews perished as a result of the Warsaw Ghetto, a rate that was not quick enough for Hitler.
Another alternative Hitler imposed before the final solution was the Madagascar plan. It was a suggested policy of the Nazi government of Germany to relocate 4 million European Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa. In 1937, Poland sent a commission to Madagascar to determine the feasibility of forcing Jews to emigrate there. Members of the commission had very different conclusions. The leader of the commission, Major Mieczyslaw Lepecki, believed that it would be possible to settle 40,000 to 60,000 people in Madagascar, a grossly inflated number as the island did not have the capacity to house a mass amount of immigrants. In 1940, the Nazi Regime was looking for a solution to the “Jewish Problem.” The idea of Madagascar was again brought to the forefront. France had now fallen to Germany, leaving the island of Madagascar under the control of the Germans. Adolf Eichmann drafted a new recommendation that called for the relocation of 4,000,000 Jews to the island and for the creation of a giant ghetto to hold them which would remain under the control of the SS. Financing for the project would be provided from profits gained through the confiscation of Jewish property. The program was considered a winning proposal from all sides. The Jews would be removed from Europe while gaining a new homeland where they would have complete autonomy while still under the control of the Germans. At the same time, the Germans could exploit the propaganda possibilities of showing their generosity in establishing the colony. This "territorial final solution" was not entirely altruistic for the simple fact that the final result of this relocation would most likely have been the deaths of most of those deported due to disease and starvation. The operation was given the codename “Endoloesung” as official preparations began. Transportation of the Jews to the island was now a major concern. The Germans planned to evacuate the 4,000,000 Jews to Madagascar over a period of four years. In order to accomplish this 1,000,000 people a year needed to be transported. The original thought was that the British Naval Fleet would be used once the Germans were able to defeat Great Britain. However, the battles with Great Britain were not as successful as those in Poland and France had been. This resulted not only in the German’s inability to use British ships for transport, but the danger for German ships to make the crossing to the island.The Madagascar Plan was falling apart. With the inability to defeat the British, the transport would not be as easy. Other problems including the United States entry into the war and British and Free French forces recapturing the island led to the complete abandonment of the idea. The Germans were now forced to the find a new solution now that deportation was not an option. It is believed that the failure of the Madagascar Plan led directly to the Final Solution arrived at during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

(3) Describe the German planning and preparations for the Holocaust, as well as the actual implementation of the project in all parts of German-controlled Europe.
Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the persecution and segregation of Jews was implemented in stages. After the Nazi party achieved power in Germany in 1933, its state-sponsored racism led to anti-Jewish legislation, economic boycotts, and the violence of pogroms, all of which aimed to systematically isolate Jews from society and drive them out of the country. Since WW 1 Hitler was clear about his prejudice for the Jews. After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, anti-Jewish policy escalated to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jewry. The Nazis first established ghettos (enclosed areas designed to isolate and control the Jews) in central and eastern, Poland. Western European Jews were deported to these ghettos where they lived in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions with inadequate food. After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS and police units (acting as mobile killing units) began massive killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities. By autumn 1941, the SS and police introduced mobile gas vans. These paneled trucks had exhaust pipes reconfigured to pump poisonous carbon monoxide gas into sealed spaces, killing those locked within. They were designed to complement ongoing shooting operations. On July 17, 1941, Hitler tasked SS chief Heinrich Himmler with responsibility for all security matters in the occupied Soviet Union. Hitler gave Himmler broad authority to physically eliminate any perceived threats to permanent German rule. Two weeks later, on July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Hermann Goering authorized SS General Reinhard Heydrich to make preparations for the implementation of a "complete solution of the Jewish question." The Final Solution—the systematic gassing of millions of Jews—was put into place primarily by the top Gestapo brass, namely Adolph Eichmann and Reinhardt Heidrich. Hitler wanted to permanently rid the world of all Jews as he blamed them for Germanys hardships. The Ghettos were liquidated and the jews sent to the camps via cattle train, many died on the trains due to the numbers placed in each cattle car, on arrival at the camp they were took off and told they had to be cleaned before going further they were stripped, given towels and sent to the showers which were in fact gas chambers then killed and cremated.The SS were in control of the murders which were committed from the summer of 42 after the construction of the camps at Chelmo, Belzic, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdenik and most famously Auschwitz Birkenau - though there were smaller camps, these camps were located in Poland. Each camp and a commandant and staff guards etc as well as sonderkommando, prisoners picked from those that were brought to the camp to be killed who were made to deal with the dead bodies. It should be noted while most camps were purely extermination some like Auschwitz worked the inmates to the point of exhaustion then killed them.
The Wannsee Conference was a conference of representatives from all the government and party agencies whose cooperation in the final solution would be required for smooth operations. It was held on 20 January 1942, in a villa in the Berlin lakeside suburb of Wannsee. It was presided over by SS-Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and Security Service. Heydrich summoned fourteen men representing the governmental and military branches most involved in implementing the practical aspects of the Final Solution. The purpose of the conference was to coordinate departmental policies, allocate tasks associated with the projected European wide deportations and remove any bureaucratic obstacles that might get in the way. The new solution was to be the Final Solution. It was estimated at this meeting that 11 million Jews resided in Europe, including 330,000 in England (though England was not occupied, they were planning ahead). The plan was to evacuate Jews from west to east. Supposedly, Jews were to be sent to the East to work in forced labor. In plain language this conference brought to attention that Jews were to be worked to death, and those that survived would be killed by other means. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan, presumably approved by Hitler, for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe and French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) to German-occupied areas in eastern Europe, and the use of the Jews fit for labour on road-building projects, in the course of which they would eventually die. Instead, as Soviet and Allied forces gradually pushed back the German lines, most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived. Aomg the 11 million killed in the holocaust, 6 million were Jews.

(4) The Wannsee conference may be fairly described as the archetypical example of what Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem called the “banality of evil.” What was the conference about, who participated, and what did it achieve?
On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Originally planned for December 8th, the Japanese Attack on Pearl harbor caused it to be postponed.
Representing the SS at the meeting were: SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and one of the SS chiefs Heinrich Himmler's top deputies; SS Major General Heinrich Müller, chief of RSHA Department IV (Gestapo); SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief of the RSHA Department IV B 4 (Jewish Affairs); SS Colonel Eberhard Schöngarth, commander of the RSHA field office for the Government General in Krakow, Poland; SS Major Rudolf Lange, commander of RSHA Einsatzkommando 2, deployed in Latvia in the autumn of 1941; and SS Major General Otto Hofmann, the chief of SS Race and Settlement Main Office.
Representing the agencies of the State were: State Secretary Roland Freisler, Ministerial Director Wilhelm Kritzinger, State Secretary Alfred Meyer, Ministerial Director Georg Leibrandt, Martin Luther (Foreign Office); State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart, State Secretary Erich Naumann, State Secretary Josef Bühler and Ministerial Director Gerhard Klopfer.
The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews.
At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference (1) to inform and secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies relevant to the implementation of the “Final Solution,” and (2) to disclose to the participants that Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RSHA with coordinating the operation. The men at the table did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken, but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime.
At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the National Socialist regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and other police and military units, which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were killing Jews in Serbia. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the Final Solution policy that Heydrich
announced.
Not present at the meeting were representatives of the German Armed Forces and the Reich Railroads in the German Ministry of Transportation. The SS and police had already negotiated agreements with the German Army High Command on the murder of civilians, including Soviet Jews, in the spring of 1941, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. In late September 1941, Hitler had authorized the Reich Railroads to transport German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to locations in German-occupied Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union, where German authorities would kill the overwhelming majority of them.
Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution." In this figure, he included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). For Jews residing in the Greater German Reich and holding the status of subjects of the German Reich, the Nuremberg Laws would serve as a basis for determining who was a Jew.
Heydrich announced that “during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.”
The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations.”
Despite the euphemisms which appeared in the protocols of the meeting, the aim of the Wannsee Conference was clear to its participants: to further the coordination of a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews.
In 1940 after more than a decade of depression, nearly 9 million people were out of work. As late as Pearl Harbor, 3 million were out of work. Vast reservoirs of physical productive capacity also lay unused including factories, heavy construction, equipment, machine-tool stocks, planes, trucks and railcars. As much as 50% of capacity stood idle in automobile plants alone. As the war came to America, all these dormant resources could be swiftly directed to the martial purpose with minimal disruption to the fabric of peacetime. And that is exactly what FDR did. The US commanded a virtually self-sufficient continental economy.

(6) Describe the buildup and early deployment of the armed forces of the United States from 1940 through 1942.
The US Army of World War II was created from a tiny army in the span of three years. In June 1939 the Regular Army numbered 187,893 men, including 22,387 in the Army Air Corps. The National Guard totaled 199,491 men. The major combat units included nine infantry divisions, two cavalry divisions, a mechanized cavalry (armor) brigade in the Regular Army and eighteen infantry divisions in the National Guard. Modern equipment and training was for the most part nonexistent/poor. FDR had to cobble a war administration out of the patchwork mobilization machinery lapped together during the period of American neutrality. The outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 led to a gradual expansion of the Army under FDR. By 1940, legislations being passed began to fuel engines of the war economy. On August 27, 1940, Congress approved the induction of the National Guard into federal service and the activation of the Organized Reserves to fill the ranks of this new Army. It also approved in the Selective Service and Training Act of September 1940. Signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, the Act established the first peace-time draft of untrained civilian manpower in United States history. Under the Selective Training and Service Act, all American males between twenty-one and thirty-six years of age registered for the draft. If drafted, a man served for only twelve months. According to the Selective Training and Service Act's provisions, drafted soldiers had to remain in the Western Hemisphere or in United States possessions or territories located in other parts of the world. The act provided that not more than 900,000 men were to be in training at any one time. Units of the National Guard, draftees, members of the Enlisted Reserve Corps, and the reserve officers required to train them all entered active service as rapidly as the Army could construct camps to house them. During the last six months of 1940 the Active Army more than doubled in strength, and by mid-1941 it achieved its planned strength of 1.5 million officers and men. Before 7 August 1941 National Guard units were not required to serve active duty outside of the western hemisphere and draftees were inducted for a maximum of one year of service. But on 7 August 1941, by a margin of a single vote, Congress approved an indefinite extension of service for the Guard, draftees, and Reserve officers. During the 27 months before America joined the war, congress was rapidly approving policies that allowed for the buildup of the US army and in allowing the US to sell weapons and machinery to the allies.
By the autumn of 1941 the Army had 27 infantry, 5 armored and 2 cavalry divisions; 35 air groups; and a host of supporting units in training within the continental United States. But most of these units were still unready for action, in part because the United States had shared so much of its old and new military equipment with the nations actively fighting the Axis triumvirate of Germany, Italy, and Japan. On 7 December 1941 the Army consisted of 1,685,403 men (including 275,889 in the Air Corps).

(8) “What happened to the Japanese,” writes David Kennedy, “was especially disquieting in wartime America precisely because it so loudly mocked the nation’s best image of itself….” What happened, and why?

(7) Describe daily life on the American home front during World War II, with particular attention to the social impact of economic expansion, population migration, the changing role of women, and the nature and extent of rationing.