Wwii the american perspective

2. World War II Snapshot
Deadliest conflict in human history:
• 70 m. killed
• 2/3 civilians
Total war:
• 100 m. military personnel
• TOTAL war

3. Two separatetheatres of conflict:
• Asia & Pacific (1931-1945)
• Europe & N. Africa (1935-1945)

4. Nuclear War
• Only war in which nuclear weapons of mass
destruction have been used in combat (so far):
• Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945
• Nagasaki, Japan, August 9, 1945

5. Axis Powers:
1. Nazi Germany (The Third Reich)
led by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Der Fuhrer
2. Fascist Italy
led by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, Il
Duce
3. Imperial Japan
led by Emperor Hirohito
Prime Minister Hideki Tojo

6. Grand Alliance of United Nations
(the Allies):
1. United Kingdom of Great Britain
led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill
2. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
led by General Secretary of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph
Stalin
3. United States of America
led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and President Harry S Truman
4. Free French Forces
led by General Charles de Gaulle

7. Country Population in
1939
Number of Dead total population
Killed
Soviet Union 175,500,000 23,600,000 13.44%
China 517,568,000 20,000,000 3.86%
Germany 69,623,000 7,503,000 10.77%
Japan 71,380,000 2,680,000 3.75%
France 41,700,000 562,000 1.35%
Italy 44,394,000 459,500 1.04%
Britain 47,760,000 450,400 0.94%
United States 131,028,000 418,500 0.32%
WWII Casualties:

10. Prelude:
Japanese Invasion of
Manchuria and China,
1931-1939

16. Act I:
The Drive for
Lebensraum
1935-1940

17. Late 1936:
Rome-Berlin
Axis

19. 1935-1936:
Italian
invasion of
Ethiopia

20. 1936: Axis backs Franco;
USSR backs Communists

23. Neville
Chamberlain:
“peace for
our time.”

25. August 1939:
Nazi-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact

31. September 1, 1939:
German blitzkrieg
invasion of Poland

33. September 3, 1939:
WWII begins

34. German Troops March into Warsaw

39. Invasion of Denmark & Norway
April 9, 1940

40. Invasion of the Netherlands,
Belgium, and Luxembourg
May 10, 1940

41. Invasion of France: May 13, 1940
Dunkirk
Dunkirk

42. June 4, 1940: Miracle at Dunkirk

44. France Surrenders
June, 1940

45. Vichy France

46. The French Resistance
The Free French
General Charles DeGaulle
The Maquis

47. Axis Alliance
1940

50. Act II:
The Battle of
Britain
1940-1941

57. “We shall defend our
island, whatever the
cost may be, we shall
fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the
landing grounds, we
shall fight in the fields
and in the streets, we
shall fight in the hills;
we shall never
surrender.”
- Winston Churchill

59. Great Britain $31 billion
Soviet Union $11 billion
France $3 billion
China $1.5 billion
Other European $500 million
South America $400 million
The amount totaled:
$48,601,365,000
U. S. Lend-Lease Act,
1941

66. Act III:
Axis Zenith
Operation
Barbarossa,
1941-1942:
Nazi Invasion
of USSR

67. Attack in the South
April 1941

68. Operation Barbarossa:
June 22, 1941

69. Soviet P.O.W.’s

71. Marched to
the forest.

72. Forced to undress.

73. Forced to dig their own grave.

74. Shot into a ditch.

75. Nazis executing a Jew at the edge of
a mass grave.
Ukraine, January 1942

76. Babi Yar Massacre
September 28 - 29, 1941

82. Japan
Attacks!
1941-1942

109. Act IV: The Allies Strike Back, 1942-1943

129. Sugar Rationing

130. Receiving his first ration book

134. Hollywood Helps out: Rita Hayworth

146. FDR’s Four Freedom Speech
• Get US to join War
• The Speech

160. Battle of Stalingrad:
Winter of 1942-1943
German Army Russian Army
1,011,500 men 1,000,500 men
10,290 artillery guns 13,541 artillery guns
675 tanks 894 tanks
1,216 planes 1,115 planes

175. Act V: Unconditional Surrender, 1943-1945

201. The Evolution of Death
In mid-March 1942, 75-80% of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20-25% had
perished.
Merely eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse.
- Christopher Browning
The first carbon monoxide experiments using
cars.
A “hell” van.
Zyklon-B crystals.

204. Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia.
Production of opera Brundibar.
(ghetto/transit camp)
Dachau, Germany.
(labor camp)Buchenwald, Germany.
(labor camp)
Bergen-Belsen, Germany.
(labor camp)
Drancy, France.
Courtyard used to round up
Jews for deportation.
(transit camp)
Westerbork, Netherlands.
Lighting Chanukah candles.
(transit camp)

205. Mauthausen, Austria.
Main entrance to the camp.
(labor camp)
Dora-Mittelbau, Germany.
Camouflaged entrance to the
underground rocket factory.
(labor camp)
Neuengamme, Germany.
On the left is the camp brick
factory.
(labor camp)
Ravensbruck, Germany.
(labor camp for women)
Oranienburg, Germany.
Political prisoners in the
camp yard.
(POW/labor camp)
Flossenburg,
Germany. The quarry.
(labor camp)

206. Prisoners were
forced to wear
these carriers on
their backs to
haul stones from
the quarry.
Carrying granite boulders on wooden
“backpacks” up the “stairs of death.”
Mauthausen, Austria.
Mauthausen Wiener Graben Quarry

208. Extermination Camps
• ~ 50% of Jewish victims gassed w/ Diesel exhaust
• ~ 50% killed by Zyklon-B
• Operation Reinhard camps:
• Belzec
• Sobibor
• Treblinka
• Other three camps
• Auschwitz
• Chelmno
• Majdanek

210. 100,000
Victims
Extermination Camps
Camp Deaths Survivors
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1.1-1.6 million 7,000
Belzec 600,000 2
Chelmno 152,000 2
Majdanek 170-235,000 <600
Sobibor 250,000 50
Treblinka 870,000-925,000 <100

211. Auschwitz
At Auschwitz, not only did man die, but the image of man died. - Elie
Wiesel

213. Lane separating barracks in
the main camp. On the left, in
the distance, is crematorium
#1.
The camp's double, electrified, barbed
wire fence and barracks.
Row of barracks in Auschwitz II.

214. Arrival
Jews on “the ramp”.
Entrance to Auschwitz I.
Entrance to Auschwitz II
(Birkenau).

215. Selection
Women & children on the left.
Men on the
right.

216. Those “fit” for work were
registered as prisoners.
Those “unfit” for work were
exterminated.

217. Unable to Work by David
Olère.
Around us, everyone was
weeping. Someone began
to recite the Kaddish, the
prayer for the dead. I do
not know if it has ever
happened before, in the
long history of the Jews,
that people have ever
recited the prayer for the
dead for themselves.
- Elie Wiesel in Night, recalling
what he experienced as a
teenager fresh off the transport
train at Auschwitz, 1944.

218. “Canada”

219. Registration

220. Political Criminal Antisocial Homosexual Emigran
t
Jehovah’s
Witness
Registration: Camp Badges
Gypsy
Jewish
Political
Jewish
Criminal
Jewish
Antisocial
Jewish
Homosexual
Jewish
Emigran
t
F P
Political
(French)
Wehrmach
t Prisoner
Political
Second-Time
Offender
Penal
Company
Prisoner Under
Special
Surveillance
Political
(Polish)

221. Hunger – Stealing
Bread
“Der Dieb” (The Thief )
Hunger - Looking for Food
“Auf der Suche nach
Kartoffelschalen”
(Looking for potato peels )
Soup Distribution
“Juden bekommen
zuletzt!” (Jews are last!)
Drawings of Ella Liebermann Shiber

222. Buna Factory,
Auschwitz III
(Monowitz).
Jewish women pulling cars of quarried
stones, Plaszlow, 1944.
Slave Labor
Assembly line at
the Bavarian
Motor Works
(BMW) aircraft
engine factory,
Allach, Germany.
Leaving for Work by David Olère.
Camp inmates are marched out to work past
victims of Nazi camp discipline.

223. Survival
“Muselmann”
German term describing
prisoners who were near
death due to exhaustion,
starvation or hopelessness.Prisoner throwing himself onto an
electrified fence, Mauthausen.
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope,
too, can be given to one only by other human beings. - Elie Wiesel

224. Medical Experiments
Low pressure
experimentation
resulting in death
from burst lungs.
Medical experiment at Buchenwald.
Survivor shows scar of
a wound deliberately
infected with dirt,
bacteria and slivers of
glass.
Immersed in freezing water at Dachau.

225. Gassings
SS camp guards
with
Zyklon-B canisters.
Gas chamber in
Crematorium I,
Auschwitz I.
The camp orchestra played to
calm fears en route to the gas

226. Gassings
Gassing,
David Olère.

227. The Value of a Life
These shoes represent one day's
collection at the peak of the gassings,
about twenty-five thousand pairs.
Rings

239. “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that
would be like the splendor of the mighty one... Now, I have become Death,
the destroyer of worlds.”
- J. Robert Oppenheimer

250. Epilogue: The Iron Curtain Descends, 1945

251. Each symbol indicates
100,000 dead in the
appropriate theater of
operations

252. Each symbol indicates
100,000 dead in the
appropriate theater of
operations