GOAL OF EXPANDING GERMAN TERRITORY One motivation for

GOAL OF EXPANDING GERMAN TERRITORY One motivation for the German invasion of the USSR was the desire to acquire Lebensraum (living space) for the German people to colonize, at the expense of the Poles, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Baltic peoples. Hitler and other Nazi leaders thought of this goal in both racial and ideological terms. The conquest of "living space" meant not only German racial domination over the conquered peoples, but a crusade against Judaism and Communism. German military and police authorities intended to wage a war of annihilation against the Communist state as well as against the Jews.

THE NAZI IDEOLOGY OF RACE Hitler, the Führer (Leader) of the Nazi party, formulated and articulated the ideas that came to be known as Nazi ideology. He thought of himself as a deep and profound thinker, convinced that he had found the key to understanding an extraordinarily complex world. He believed that a person's characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and behavior were determined by his or her so-called racial make-up. I n Hitler's view, all groups, races, or peoples (he used those terms interchangeably) carried within them traits that were immutably transmitted from one generation to the next. No individual could overcome the innate qualities of race. All of human history could be explained in terms of racial struggle. For the Nazis, assimilation of a member of one race into another culture or ethnic group was impossible because the original inherited traits could not change: they could only degenerate through so-called race-mixing.

While it classified Jews as the priority “enemy, ” the Nazi ideological concept of race targeted other groups for persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation, including Gypsies People with disabilities Poles Soviet POWs Blacks. political dissidents homosexuals and so-called anti socials as enemies and security risks either because they consciously opposed the Nazi regime or some aspect of their behavior did not fit Nazi perceptions of social norms. They sought to eliminate domestic non-conformists and socalled racial threats through a perpetual self-purge of German society.

The Nazis believed that superior races had not just the right but the obligation to subdue and even exterminate inferior ones The Nazis pursued a strategic vision of a dominant German race ruling subject peoples, especially the Slavs and the socalled Asiatics (by which they meant the peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the Muslim populations of the Caucasus region), whom they judged to be innately inferior. For purposes of propaganda, the Nazis often framed this strategic vision in terms of a crusade to save western civilization from these “eastern” or “Asiatic” barbarians and their Jewish leaders and organizers.

THE "ARYAN" RACE But, Hitler warned, the German “Aryan” race was threatened by dissolution from within and without. The internal threat lurked in intermarriages between “Aryan” Germans and members of inherently inferior races: Jews, Roma, Africans, and Slavs. The offspring of these marriages were said to dilute the superior characteristics reflected in German blood, thus weakening the race in its struggle against other races for survival.

The interwar German state further weakened the German “Aryan” race by tolerating procreation among people whom the Nazis considered genetically degenerate and a harmful influence on the hygiene of the race as a whole: people with physical and mental disabilities, habitual or career criminals, and persons who compulsively engaged in socially “deviant behavior” as the Nazis perceived it, including homeless people, allegedly promiscuous women, people unable to hold a job, or alcoholics.

The German “Aryan” race was also threatened with dissolution from without, because, according to Hitler, the Weimar Republic was losing the competition for land population to the “inferior” Slavic and Asiatic races. In this competition, the “Jewish race” had refined its traditional Socialist tool -- Soviet communism -- to mobilize the otherwise incapable Slavs and to deceive Germans into thinking that the artificial device of class conflict overrode the natural instinct of racial struggle. Hitler believed that the lack of living space suppressed the birthrate among Germans to dangerously low levels. To make matters worse, Germany had lost World War I and had been forced by the Treaty of Versailles to give up thousands of miles of valuable land to its neighbors.

To survive, Hitler contended, Germany must break the encirclement of the country by its enemies and conquer vast territories in the east from the Slavs. The conquest of the east would provide Germany with the space required to vastly expand its population, with the resources to feed that population, and with the means to realize the biological destiny of being a master race with the appropriate status of a world power.

Education in the Nazi State Education in the Third Reich served to indoctrinate students with the National Socialist world view. Nazi scholars and educators glorified Nordic and other "Aryan" races, while denigrating Jews and other so-called inferior peoples as parasitic "bastard races" incapable of creating culture or civilization. After 1933, the Nazi regime purged the public school system of teachers deemed to be Jews or to be "politically unreliable. " Women were encouraged to have as many children as possible otherwise, Hitler warned, the German race would be overrun by so-called inferior races. They even received "mothers crosses", medals that looked similar to military decorations, in gold, silver, or bronze.

As the German army advanced deep into Soviet territory, SS and police units followed the troops. The first to arrive were the Einsatzgruppen tasked with identifying and eliminating persons who might organize and implement resistance to the German occupation forces.

RUTHLESS REPRESSION OF RESISTANCE In the context of this brutal war of annihilation, German forces in 1941 had little regard for the Soviet civilian population. This was the result not only of Nazi propaganda -- in which the Soviet population was portrayed as subhuman -- but also of the basic orders issued by the military leadership. Hitler's directive for the attack on the Soviet Union, the "Barbarossa" decree, called on the German troops to react to any type of resistance, even passive resistance, with shooting. German forces burned entire villages and shot the rural population of whole districts in retaliation for partisan attacks. On the other hand, military authorities made it clear that crimes committed by German soldiers were not to be punished if they claimed to have ideological considerations as their motive. This was an open invitation for soldiers to behave brutally.

Total War In the mid-19 th century, "total war" was identified by scholars as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, there is no difference between soldiers and civilians, as nearly every human resource, civilians and soldiers alike, is part of the war effort. And a legit target. The Second World War is the best example of total war. Why? The level of national mobilization the battlespace being contested, the scale of the armies, navies, and air forces raised through conscription, the active targeting of civilians (and civilian property), the general disregard for collateral damage…. this means who you kill or maim and the unrestricted aims of the belligerents marked total war on an unprecedented and unsurpassed, multicontinental scale.

Aerial view of bombs exploding during a German bombing run over Poland in September of 1939

A ten-yearold Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika mourns over her sister's body. She was killed by German machinegun fire while picking potatoes in a field outside Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939.

German advance guards and scouts are shown in a Polish town that has been under fire during the Nazi invasion of Poland, September 1939

From a German soldier who fought in Russia : "Do you know how we behaved to the civilians? We behaved like devils out of Hell. We left those poor villagers to starve to death, thousands and thousands of them. How can you win a war in this way? We shoot villagers on the slightest excuse. Just stick them up against a wall. We order the whole village out to watch. It’s a vicious circle. We hate them and they hate us, and on it goes, everyone getting more inhuman.

The scene of devastation seen on Ordynacka Street in Warsaw, Poland on March 6, 1940. The carcass of a dead horse lies in the street among enormous piles of debris. While Warsaw was under nearly constant bombardment during the invasion, on one day alone, September 25, 1939, about 1, 150 bombing sorties were flown by German aircraft against Warsaw, dropping over 550 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the city

A young Polish boy returns to what was his home and squats among the ruins during a pause in the German air raids on Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939. German attacks lasted until Warsaw surrendered on September 28. One week later, the last of the Polish forces capitulated near Lublin, giving full control of Poland to Germany and the Soviet Union

A Russian woman watches building burn sometime in 1942

Five Soviet civilians on a platform, with nooses around their necks, about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of 1941

1943. Soviet partisans hanged to deter others by the Germans.

This trainload of men was described by German sources as Soviet prisoners en route to Germany, on October 3, 1941. Several million Soviet soldiers were eventually sent to German prison camps, the majority of whom never returned alive

An execution of Jews in Kiev, carried out by German soldiers near Ivangorod, Ukraine, sometime in 1942. This photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod. "

After having occupied a village on the Leningrad sector in 1942, Soviet forces discovered 38 bodies of Soviet soldiers that had been taken prisoner by the Germans and apparently tortured to death

Three Russian war orphans stand amid the remains of what was once their home, in late 1942. After German forces destroyed the family's house, they took the parents as prisoners, leaving the children abandoned

This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier

A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1, 700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot.

http: //www. the-map-ashistory. com/demos/tome 08/05 afinal_solution_holocaust_demo. php

Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department at Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1. 5 million people, most of them Jewish, died during World War II. Czeslawa was a Polish Catholic girl, from Wolka Zlojecka, Poland, who was sent to Auschwitz with her mother in December of 1942. Within three months, both were dead. Video of arrival at Auschwitz

Photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a 2005 documentary: "She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn't understand why she was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn't interfere. It would have been fatal for me. "

Burned bodies of political prisoners of the Germans lie strewn about the entrance to a barn at Gardelegen, Germany on April 16, 1945 where they met their death a the hands of German SS troops who set the barn on fire. The group tried to escape and was shot by the SS troops. Of the 1, 100 prisoners, only 12 managed to escape.

Videohttp: //www. youtube. com/watch? feature =player_detailpage&v=s. Hc. Jt. U 9 dr 6 I This is a clip of from Band of Brothers depicting the discovery of a concentration camp

U. S. military authorities prepare to hang Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, 74, at Landsberg, Germany, on May 28, 1946. In a Dachau war crimes trial he was convicted of using 1, 200 concentration camp prisoners for malaria experimentation. Thirty died directly from the inoculations and 300 to 400 died later from complications of the disease. His experiments, all with unwilling subjects, began in 1942.

Three of the 19 camp guards tried and convicted by a general military court at Dachau (separate from the Nuremberg one) for atrocities committed at Mauthasen await execution by hanging at Landsberg prison. Their names are Rudolf Mynzak, Wilhelm Mueller and Kurt Kleiwitz.

Nation Military Civilian Total Bulgaria 18, 800 140, 000 158, 800 Finland 82, 000 12, 000 94, 000 3, 250, 000 2, 445, 000 5, 695, 000 Hungary 200, 000 600, 000 800, 000 Italy 380, 000 152, 900 532, 900 Japan 2, 565, 900 672, 000 3, 237, 900 Korea 50, 000 250, 000 300, 000 450, 000 465, 000 915, 000 6, 996, 700 4, 436, 900 11, 683, 600 Germany Romania Axis Total

Nation Belgium Military Civilian Total 22, 700 76, 000 98, 700 403, 000 92, 700 495, 700 42, 700 1, 000 43, 700 1, 900, 000 20, 000 21, 900, 000 6, 600 315, 000 321, 600 France 245, 000 350, 000 595, 000 Greece 88, 300 325, 000 413, 300 India 48, 700 5, 000 5, 048, 700 Netherlands 13, 700 236, 000 249, 700 597, 300 5, 675, 000 6, 272, 300 13, 600, 000 16, 000 29, 600, 000 United States 407, 000 6, 000 413, 000 Yugoslavia 305, 000 1, 355, 000 1, 660, 000 17, 792, 800 49, 786, 800 67, 079, 700 Great Britain Canada China Czechoslovakia Poland USSR Allied Totals