History of the second world war was terrible.

1. RETOLD FROM LITERATURE
HITLER’S WAR

2. Possible Causes of World War II
 The Paris Peace Conference was held by Allies in 1919, to
make the Treaty of Versailles that imposed a series of harsh
terms on Germany. The notorious ‘war guilt clause’ blamed
Germany for starting the war, and forced the Germans to pay
a massive war reparations bill.
 German territory was given to France, Denmark, Belgium,
Poland and the newly formed Czechoslovakia.
 Germany’s colonies were divided between the Allies,
including Australia, which claimed German New Guinea and
Nauru.
 The treaty also limited the German army to just 100 000 men,
abolished conscription, disbanded the air force, and limited
the production of weapons and munitions in German
factories. This created an unstable economy with mass
unemployment, as well as a sense of resentment and
bitterness.

3. • Italy was outraged that it received few benefits for joining the
Allies, contributing to the rise of fascism in this disillusioned
nation. The conference also laid the seeds of the war in the
Pacific.
• Japan was permitted to keep Chinese territory it had seized
from Germany but unsuccessfully tried to introduce a ‘racial
equality’ clause to the treaty, which was opposed by the
British delegation and by Australia in particular.
• Japan’s failure to ensure its equality with he other powers
contributed to the breakdown in Japan’s relations with the
West, and the rise of Japanese nationalism and militarism.

4. • The fierce anger of all Germany at the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923
brought what was now called the National-Socialist Party a broad wave of
adherents.
• The collapse of the mark destroyed the basis of the German middle class, of
whom many in their despair became recruits of the new party and found relief
from their misery in hatred, vengeance, and patriotic fervour.
• By November, 1923, “the Fuehrer” had a determined group around him,
among whom Goering, Hess, Rosenberg, and Roehm were prominent.
• In April, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment after his
participation in a putsch. Hitler’s sentence was reduced from four years to
thirteen months.
Germany during the Weimar Republic: 1923-27

7. Hitler ‘we must see to it that we get elbow room’
Weimar Germany (1919-1933)
Democratic republic
Had to sign Treaty of Versailles
Major economic problems
Challenged by Communists and Fascists.

9. The Road to War
 Great Depression, millions of people unemployed. In 1933, Adolf Hitler
became the dictator of Germany. Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s
problems. Nazi soldiers arrested many Jews and sent them to prison.
 Mussolini was Italy’s dictator. Italy was Germany’s ally. (With Japan
entering the war,) they were the Axis Powers.
 Poland, Britain, and France formed the Allied Powers, with the U S
participation later.
 In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. The Allies declared war on Germany.
World War II began. At the beginning of the war most Americans did not
want to fight in Europe again.

10. Mussolini was Italy’s dictator. Italy was Germany’s ally. They
were the Axis Powers.
Poland, Britain, and France formed the Allied Powers.
In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. The Allies declared war on
Germany. World War II began.
At the beginning of the war most Americans did not want to
fight in Europe again.
In 1940, Japan joined the Axis. Japan wanted to expand its
empire in Asia. In 1941, Japan destroyed U.S. Navy ships at
Pearl Harbor. U.S. declared war on Japan and joined the
Allies.

11. Hitler was a far less omnipotent Führer than had been
believed. His grip on his subordinates had weakened
with each passing year.
Three episodes –
1. the aftermath of the Ernst Röhm affair of June 30, 1934,
2. the Dollfuss assassination a month later, and
3. the anti-Jewish outrages of November 1938 –
show how his powers had been pre-empted by men
to whom he felt himself in one way or another
indebted.

12. Was Adolf Hitler a totally unscrupulous dictator?
 Hitler, the world’s most unscrupulous dictator, not only
never resorted to the assassination of foreign opponents
but flatly forbade his Abwehr to attempt it.
 Hitler had opposed every suggestion for the use of
potentially war winning lethal nerve gases Sarin and
Tabun, as that would violate the Geneva Protocol.
 However the process of bombarding open cities from the
air, was first started by Hitler.

13.  The Nazis’ wiretapping and code breaking agency, the
Forschungsamt, holds the key to many of Hitler’s
successes.
 The agency eavesdropped on foreign diplomats in Berlin
and – even more significantly:
 The agency fed to Hitler hour by hour transcripts of the
lurid and incautious telephone conversations conducted
between an embattled Prague and the Czech diplomats in
London and Paris during September 1938.
 Hitler was a powerful and relentless military commander
who also made mistakes.

14.  Adolf Hitler, (in 1920) when he just turned thirty years of
age, expressed no grand geopolitical ideas.
 His agitation pivoted on the terms dictated to Berlin’s
‘craven and corrupt’ representatives at Versailles.
 He tried to convince his audience that defeat in the World
War had been inflicted on them not by their enemies
abroad. But it was by the revolutionaries within – the Jew-
ridden politicians in Berlin.
 Hitler said that Germany disarmed was prey to the lawless
demands of her predatory neighbours.

15.  In November 1923, Hitler launched an abortive revolution
in Munich; he was tried, imprisoned in Landsberg fortress,
and eventually released.
 He published Mein Kampf and rebuilt the Party over the
next years into a disciplined and authoritarian force.
 This was done with its own Party courts, its brownshirt SA
guards and its black-uniformed ‘Praetorian Guard,’ the SS.
 He was at the head of a swollen army of a million Party
members when he arrived at the chancellery in Berlin in
January 1933.

17.  It was no mean feat for an unknown, penniless, gas-
blinded acting corporal to achieve by no other means than
his power of oratory and a driving, dark ambition.
 His oratory during these years had developed most
powerfully.
 His speeches were long and ex tempore, but logical. The
suggestive force gripped each man in his audience.
 As Robespierre once said of Marat, ‘The man was
dangerous: he believed in what he said.’

18. The progress of Hitler
 In 1928, he had but twelve seats in the Reichstag. In 1930, this became
107; in 1932, 230. By that time the whole structure of Germany had
been permeated by the agencies and discipline of the National -
Socialist Party.
 His progress was a complex and formidable development with all its
passions and villainies, and all its ups and downs. The pale sunlight of
Locarno shone for a while upon the scene. The spending of the profuse
American loans induced a sense of returning prosperity.
 The power in Germany and the enduring structure of Germany had
been the General Staff of the Reichswehr. On Jan. 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler
took office as Chancellor of Germany. On March 21, 1933, Third Reich
began. Hitler became all powerful for four years.

19. From the first day that he ‘seized power,’ January 30, 1933, Hitler
knew that only sudden death awaited him if he failed to restore pride
and empire to post Versailles Germany. His close friend and adjutant
Julius Schaub recorded Hitler’s jubilant boast to his staff on that
evening, as the last celebrating guests left the Berlin chancellery
building: ‘No power on earth will get me out of this building alive!’
History saw this prophecy fulfilled, as the handful of remaining Nazi
Party faithfuls trooped uneasily into his underground study on April 30,
1945, surveyed his still warm remains – slouched on a couch, with
blood trickling from the sagging lower jaw, and a gunshot wound in the
right temple – and sniffed the bitter almonds smell hanging in the air.

20. Hitler after 1933, when in office:
 Hitler’s power after 1933 would be founded, on having
kept his promises.
 In office, he would abolish the class war of the
nineteenth century.
 He would create a Germany of equal opportunity for
manual and intellectual workers, for rich and poor.
 His leaders, will be a minority, the one that makes
history, because the majority will always follow where
there’s a tough minority to lead the way.

21.  In power after 1933, Hitler would adopt the same
basic methods to restructure the German nation.
 He toughened his eighty million subjects for the
coming ordeal.
 The Germans were industrious, inventive, and
artistic.
 They had produced great craftsmen, composers,
philosophers, and scientists.
 A ‘wild, brave, and generous blue-eyed people.’

22.  In Germany, Hitler’s subjects were able to withstand
enemy air attacks – in which fifty or a hundred
thousand people were killed overnight – with a
stoicism that exasperated their enemies.
 Adolf Hitler had built the National Socialist
movement in Germany not on capricious electoral
votes, but on people.
 They gave him – in the vast majority, their
unconditional support to the end although at last,
Germany was once again defeated.

23.  When Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933,
Germany was an international bankrupt in an insolvent
world. There were millions of unemployed.
 At the end of March 1933 Hitler received a overwhelming
vote of popular support – after the occupation of the
Rhineland. His party increased its strength in the elections.
He had 288 of the Reichstag’s 687 seats and the
Communist party was banned.
 He enacted the laws he had promised, including decrees
designed to force the Jews out of Germany’s professions,
Germany’s trades, and eventually Germany.

24.  Hitler appointed a Minister of Propaganda and Public
Enlightenment, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, an eloquent 35-
year-old Rhinelander.
 To his Cabinet on March 11, 1933, Hitler explained:
 One of the chief jobs of the ministry will be to prepare
[the nation] for important government moves. . .
 The government’s measures would not begin until there
had been a certain period of public enlightenment.
 Goebbels cleansed the publishing houses by bringing
them into line or simply confiscating them.

25. Fritz Todt, chief engineer and Autobahn
 Maps and sketching in the new autobahns for Austria.
 Fritz Todt’s diary shows him lunching with Hitler: Hitler
formally asked him to oversee the army’s construction of
the West Wall.
 From 1937 on, the Elbe bridge at Hamburg particularly
interested Hitler.
 On March 30, 1938, Todt recorded in his diary,
‘Discussion with the Führer on the Hamburg suspension
bridge.’

26. Seeing Germany’s economic position in 1936:
 In detail, Hitler stated these two demands:
 ‘First: in four years the German army must be ready for
action; and
 Second, in four years the German economy must be
ready for war.
 Hitler told Goebbels in May of his vision of a United States
of Europe under German leadership.
 Germany, he ordered, must be ‘capable of waging a
worthwhile war against the Soviet Union,’

28. The Night of the Long Knives (1934)
Hitler destroyed the S A
Roehm and other top leaders were
executed.

30. Hitler’s comment on Weimar days: ‘Everywhere in government
agencies where there used to be just one man there are now
three or four. That’s got to stop. Only a brutal government can
make any headway against this paradise for parasites and
hangers-on.’
Germany needed a new Bismarck, said Hitler.
‘The dictator can reckon with a general strike the moment he
makes his appearance,’ he explained. ‘This general strike will
give him the ideal opportunity to purge the government
agencies.
Anybody who refuses to work on the terms that the dictator
(government) lays down finds himself fired.

31. Germans needed ‘a monarch-like idol’ – a ‘full-
blooded and ruthless ruler,’ a dictator who would rule
with an iron hand, like Oliver Cromwell, not such as
their present Royal pretenders, said Adolf Hitler.
‘When, after years of this iron rule, then is the time for
a mild and benevolent monarch whom they can
idolise. When training a dog: first it is given to a tough
handler, and then, when it has been put through the
hoops, it is turned over to a friendly owner whom it
will serve with all the greater loyalty and devotion.’

32. • By early 1937 the Nazi state could be likened to
an atomic structure:
• the nucleus was Adolf Hitler, surrounded by
successive rings of henchmen.
• In the innermost ring were Göring, Himmler, and
Goebbels –
• privy to his most secret ambitions and
• to the means that he was proposing to employ to
realise them.

33.  In the outer rings were the ministers, commanders
in chief, and diplomats, each aware of only a small
sector of the plans radiating from the nucleus.
 Beyond them was the German people.
 The whole structure was bound by the atomic
forces of the police state –
 People were bound by the fear of the Gestapo and
of Himmler’s renowned establishments at Dachau
and elsewhere. Germany, Italy and Japan were
Axis powers against whom the Allied fought.

35. The restoration of the German nation’s fighting capability
 Hitler forced through Göring’s big ‘civil aviation’ budget.
The Cabinet record related: ‘The Reich Chancellor [Hitler]
explained that . . . it is a matter of providing the German
nation in camouflaged form with a new air force, which is
at present forbidden under the terms of the Versailles
treaty.’
 He ceremonially turned the first spit of excavations
for Fritz Todt’s autobahn network at Frankfurt on Sept.
23, 1933 – a city where eight thousand men were
unemployed in 1932.
• He told Germans ‘Nobody will help us however if we
don’t help ourselves’.

36. Withdrawal from League of nations
 With his rearmament programme under way, the next
logical step was to disrupt the League of Nations.
 Hitler had earlier told that it resembled nothing if not a
ganging-up by the victors to ensure that they could
exact the spoils and booty of the World War from the
vanquished.
 Hitler withdrew from the League in Oct. 1933.

38. America Goes to War-1941
 In 1940, Japan joined the Axis as Japan wanted to expand
its empire in Asia. In 1941, Japan destroyed U.S. Navy
ships at Pearl Harbor. Thousands of Americans died. The
U S declared war on Japan.
 The United States joined the Allied Powers. The Axis
Powers declared war on the United States. Many
Americans joined the military. Americans supported the
war.
 The war was fought in Europe, North Africa, and the
Pacific. In May 1945, Germany surrendered.
 In August, Americans dropped atomic bombs on two
Japanese cities. Japan surrendered. World War II ended.

40. Who was Who in Third Reich
 Dr. Joseph Goebbels: Propaganda - Public Enlightenment.
 Domestic policy was controlled by whoever was most powerful in each sector –
 Hermann Göring as head of the powerful economics agency, the Four Year
Plan; and also the Forschungsamt, or ‘Research Office’; Luftwaffe’s commander
 Hans Lammers as chief of the Reich chancellery; or
 Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party boss; or
 Heinrich Himmler, minister of the interior and Reichsführer of the evil famed SS.
[Police State] ; Ernst Röhm of the [Storm Troopers] S A, (executed by Hitler)
 Dr. Robert Ley, labour leader, controlled German Labour Front.
 Dr. Fritz Todt, chief engineer for road network, bridges, buildings
 General Werner von Blomberg, Admiral Erich Raeder, Baron Werner von Fritsch
 General von Brauchitsch, Joachim von Ribbentrop for ‘foreign bureau,’ on
diplomatic missions

42. Churchill’s description of the German Führer
 Churchill referred to Hitler (in his book) as ‘A maniac of
ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most
virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast
– Corporal Hitler’.
 Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German
officer class in Munich by arousing soldiers and workers to
fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid
the blame of Germany’s defeat.
 As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism
developed from Fascism.
 Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which
were destined soon to plunge the world into even more
hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their
destruction, so wrote Churchill.

43. How did the War start ?
 Mussolini was Italy’s dictator. Italy was Germany’s ally. In
1940, Japan joined the Axis. They were the Axis Powers.
 Poland, Britain, and France formed the Allied Powers.
 In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Also later, Hitler directed his
forces to southern Russia and its oilfields. Russia declared
war on Germany. After ‘Lusitania’, American ship was sunk
U S joined war against Germany.
 After Japan destroyed U.S. Navy ships at Pearl Harbor and
the United States declared War on Japan.

44. How did the War continue?
 From 1943, the Soviet army inflicted a series of defeats on
Germany. By 1945, Germany had been forced out of most of
Eastern Europe; with Soviet troops occupying Russia, Poland,
Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic States.
 The Russians continued their advance into Germany, and
reached the German capital, Berlin, in April.
 In Western Europe, the Allies began major bombing
campaigns on Germany from 1942, initially focusing on
destroying airfields but later bombing industrial cities.

45. David Irwing concluded, the burden of guilt for
the bloody and mindless massacres of the Jews
rested on a large number of Germans (and non
Germans), many of them alive today, and not
just on one ‘mad dictator,’ whose order had to
be obeyed without question. He demanded that
Germany become a nation without class
differences, in which manual labourer and
intellectual each respected the contribution of
the other.

46. The public has got to learn to think as a nation. This will
weld it together. This cannot be done by persuasion alone,
but only by force. Those who won’t agree must get their
arms twisted. Our supreme commandment is to maintain
our unity. This process is today well under way. This is
why I built up my organisation and dedicated it to the
state. Our target is the restoration of German
might. That’s what I’m fighting for with every means. To
restore our might we’ll need the Wehrmacht, the armed
forces…

47. CONSEQUENCES OF THE HITLER’S WAR
 Hitler’s war left forty million dead in twelve years of
absolute power.
 War caused all of Europe and half of Asia to be wasted
by fire and explosives;
 War destroyed Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’
 War bankrupted Britain and lost her the Empire.
 War brought lasting disorder to the world’s affairs.
 World saw the entrenchment of communism in one
continent, and its emergence in another.