19-2 & 19-3
I. “Peace in Our Time”
A. In February 1938, Adolf Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless Austrian Nazis were given important government posts. In March 1938, Hitler announced the Anschluss, or unification, of Austria and Germany.
B. Hitler claimed the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a large German-speaking population. Czechs strongly resisted Germany’s demand for the Sudetenland.
C. France, the Soviet Union, and Britain threatened to fight Germany if it attacked
Czechoslovakia. At the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938, Britain and France, hoping to prevent another war, agreed to Hitler’s demands in a policy known as appeasement.
D. In March 1939, Germany sent troops into Czechoslovakia, bringing the Czech lands under German control.
E. Hitler demanded the return of Danzig—Poland’s Baltic Sea port. He also wanted a highway and railroad across the Polish Corridor. These demands convinced the British and French that appeasement had failed.
F. In May 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland by the German army.
G. On August 23, 1939, Germany and the USSR signed a nonaggression treaty, with a secret agreement to divide Poland.
II. The War Begins
A. On September 1, 1939, Germany and the USSR invaded Poland. On September 3,
Britain and France declared war on Germany—starting World War II.
B. The Germans used a blitzkrieg, or lightening war, to attack Poland. The Polish army was defeated by October 5.
C. On April 9, 1940, the German army attacked Norway and Denmark. Within a month, Germany overtook both countries.
D. After World War I, the French built a line of concrete bunkers and fortifications called the Maginot Line along the German border. When Hitler decided to attack France, he went around the Maginot Line by invading the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The French and British forces quickly went into Belgium, becoming trapped there by German forces.
E. By June 4, about 338,000 British and French troops had evacuated Belgium through the French port of Dunkirk and across the English Channel, using ships of all sizes.
F. On June 22, 1940, France surrendered to the Germans. Germany installed a puppet government in France.
III. Britain Remains Defiant (pages 593–594)
A. Hitler thought that Britain would negotiate peace after France surrendered. He did not anticipate the bravery of the British people and their prime minister, Winston Churchill. On June 4, 1940, Churchill delivered a defiant speech that rallied the British people and alerted the United States to Britain’s plight.
B. To invade Britain, Germany had to defeat the British air force. In the Battle of Britain, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, launched an all-out air battle to destroy the British Royal Air Force. After German bombers bombed London, the British responded by bombing Berlin, Germany.
C. The Royal Air Force was greatly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe, but the British had radar stations and were able to detect incoming German aircraft and direct British fighters to intercept them.
I. Nazi Persecution of the Jews (pages 595–598)
A. The Nazis killed nearly 6 million Jews and millions of other people during the Holocaust. The Hebrew term for the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews before and during World War II is Shoah.
B. The Nazis persecuted anyone who opposed them, as well as the disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Slovic peoples. The Nazis’ strongest hatred was aimed at all Jews.
C. In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took citizenship away from Jewish Germans and banned marriage between Jews and other Germans. German Jews were deprived of many rights that citizens of Germany had long held. By 1936 at least half of Germany’s Jews were jobless.
D. Anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout Germany and Austria on November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass.” Ninety Jews died, hundreds were badly injured, thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed, and over 180 synagogues were wrecked.
E. Between 1933 and the beginning of World War II in 1939, about 350,000 Jews escaped Nazi-controlled Germany. Many of them immigrated to the United States. Millions of
Jews remained trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe because they could not get visas to the United States or to other countries.
II. The Final Solution
A. On January 20, 1942, Nazi leaders met at the Wannsee Conference to decide the “final solution” of the Jews and other “undesirables.” The plan was to round up Jews and other “undesirables” from Nazi-controlled Europe and take them to concentration camps—detention centers where healthy individuals worked as slave laborers. The elderly, the sick and young children were sent to extermination camps to be killed in large gas chambers.
B. After World War II began, Nazis built concentration camps throughout Europe.
Extermination camps were built in many concentration camps, mostly in Poland.
Thousands of people were killed each day at these camps.
C. In only a few years, Jewish culture had been virtually obliterated by the Nazis in the lands they conquered.