Nazi Germany: Encyclopedia II - Nazi Germany - World War II

Nazi Germany - World War II

In 1939 Germany's actions led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Poland, France, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands were invaded. Initially, the United Kingdom could do little to come to the rescue of its European allies and Germany subjected Britain to heavy bombing during the Battle of Britain. After invading Greece and North Africa, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. It declared war on the United States in December of 1941 after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

The persecution of minorities continued both in Germany and the occupied areas. From 1941 Jews were required to wear a yellow star in public, and most were transferred to ghettos, where they remained isolated from the rest of the population. In January 1942, at the Wannsee conference under the supervision of Reinhard Heydrich, a plan for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage) in Europe was hatched. From then until the end of the war some six million Jews and many others, including homosexuals, Slavs and political prisoners, were systematically killed and more than 10 million people were put into slavery. This genocide is called the Holocaust in English and the Shoah in Hebrew. (The Nazis used the euphemistic German term Endlösung—"final solution.") Thousands were shipped daily to extermination camps (Vernichtungslager, sometimes called "death factories") and concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, KZ), some of which were originally detention centers but later converted into mass-murder factories, or had death camps added to their facilities, for the purpose of killing of their inmates.

Parallel to the Holocaust the Nazis conducted a ruthless program of conquest, colonization and exploitation over the captured Soviet and Polish territories and their Slavic populations as part of their Generalplan Ost. According to estimates, 20 million Soviet civilians, three million non-Jewish Poles, and seven million Red Army soldiers died under Nazi maltreatment in what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War. The Nazis' plan was to extend German lebensraum ("living space") eastward, but their public pretext for launching the war in Eastern Europe was "to defend Western Civilization against Bolshevism".

By February 1943 the Soviets had defeated the Nazis at Stalingrad and began the push westward, winning the tank battle at Kursk-Orel in July. The Nazi regime was pushed back to the borders of Poland by February 1944. The Allies opened a second front in June 1944 in Normandy, a year and a half after the Soviets had turned the tide on the eastern front mostly on their own, with 5-15% of Soviet supplies coming from the west. Soviet troops moving westward met Allied troops moving eastward at the Elbe on April 26, 1945 (Cohen).

On April 30, 1945, as Berlin was being taken by Soviet forces, Hitler committed suicide. He was suceeded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, whose caretaker government sought a seperate peace with the Western Allies. On May 4–8, 1945 German armed forces surrendered unconditionally. This was the end of World War II in Europe and, with the creation of the Allied Control Council on June 5, 1945, the four Allied powers "assume[d] supreme authority with respect to Germany" (Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany, US Department of State, Treaties and Other International Acts Series, No. 1520).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "World War II", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki