War

Background

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The buildup to World War II in Europe began with Hitler's move into the demilitarized Rhineland and his annexation of Austria. In 1938, he met with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich and demanded British acceptance of his decision to take over the German-speaking Sudetenland (in Czechoslovakia). In order to appease Hitler, Chamberlain accepted, with the agreement that Hitler would not invade the rest of Czechoslovakia. Yet, in March 1939 he occupied the rest of the country. Most historians, however, mark the official beginning of the war with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. World War II was, of course, one of the great global events of the 20th century and it marked the lives of all who lived through it. 

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In Europe, the place that bore the brunt of the war's killings was the borderland between Germany and the Soviet Union, which historian Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands: the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, central Poland, and western Russia. Here, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed fourteen million civilians (men, women, children) in addition to the soldier casualties. The Holocaust was not the genocide of German Jews -- it was mostly the extermination of Eastern European Jews. The Bloodlands, as we saw in the first exhibit, is where the Jews of Europe lived.

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The Holocaust could not have happened  without World War II.

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But what was World War II really about? For most of us, it has always seemed to be a simple story of good vs. evil, freedom vs. tyranny, Nazism vs. democracy. The story, as always, is more complicated. First of all, while the Soviet Union was on the allied side and in many ways won the war for the allies, by no means can we consider the Soviet Union under Stalin to represent freedom or democracy. And even the "democratic" allies like Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States were empires that maintained more than 600 million people under colonial rule.

 

Secondly, some historians, such as Richard Overy, argue that World War II was really about empire. Germany wanted to take its "rightful" place among imperial powers by creating its own empire over Europe. Meanwhile, Japan sought to become the imperial power of Asia. A war for empire was also a war for resources to feed growing populations, maintain the war effort, and obtain natural resources for industrialization. Not surprisingly, one of the places that suffered the most in the name of the British war effort was colonial India/Bengal, where a massive manmade famine occurred that took 2-3 million lives. Churchill's government knew their policy of requisitioning food from Bengal was causing starvation and did nothing to alter its plans. Moreover, about 5 million people from across the British empire joined the army. Yasmin Khan, a professor of South Asian history, makes an interesting point: "Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did" (India at War, xiii).

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Mark Mazower agrees with this analysis in Hitler's Empire. Here, lebensraum is the key idea for Hitler's imperialist aims -- living space for Germans to the east. The rich soils of Ukraine and Poland could provide land and food for Germany's population. What that meant for the people who lived there at the time, many of them Jewish, was the major question in 1939. And here we see the intersection of World War II, empire, ideology, and the Holocaust. 

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As such, the story of World War II in Europe and the Holocaust really turned with Hitler's rejection of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and his surprise invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in June 1941. From this point on, it was a conflict between Hitler and Stalin's imperial ambitions with the Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians caught in the middle.

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Historians do not even agree on when the war began. We commonly use the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 as the starting place. But Japan had already been at war with China for two years and had invaded Manchuria as far back as 1931.

 

In terms of the Holocaust, a number of questions remain open. When did the decision to exterminate Jews take place? By whom? Did it predate and cause the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union? Or was it an effect of the invasion and the incorporation of millions of Jews into the Nazi empire?

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This exhibit will examine the connections between the larger war and the Holocaust. In terms of Joseph and Myra's lives, it will also look at how the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (which by then included Lithuania and Latvia) led to the Holocaust, the Final Solution, and the concentration camps.

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Here are some specific questions you may want to think about as you peruse the War exhibit:

• • In what ways were the Holocaust and World War II interconnected? Did World War II cause the Holocaust or did the Holocaust cause the Eastern Front war?

  • What is the historical debate over  the beginnings of the plan for "extermination?" 

  • Does the origins of the "Final Solution" support the Intentionalist or Functionalist views of the Holocaust?

  • What stands out to you as particularly surprising or tragic about Joseph and Myra's story?

  • What do Joseph and Myra's stories tell us about the experiences of Jews in the Soviet Union/Baltic States compared to the experiences of German Jews? 

  • What questions does this raise for you about the Holocaust?

 

Click here for a timeline of the first years of World War II

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