World War II

● The interwar period

○ New generation of Germans that hated the previous generation for
conceding to the treaty of Versailles
● Adolf Hitler
○ Was actually Austrian
○ Father: Alois Sr. -> had a job as a civil servant
■ Heavy drinker (violent with wife and kids)
○ Mother: Clara
■ Very motherly
■ Spoiled children
○ Grew up hating authority figures and entitled
○ Bullied at school so he bullies little sister
○ Grew up with no vices
○ Ludwig Wittgenstein
■ Famous jew that was rich
■ Middle class Hitler hated the rich Jews
○ Used to be called Schicklgruber
■ Changed to Hitler cuz dad Aloi’s dad suddenly showed up
○ Suffered from Monorchism at teenage years
■ One testicle didn’t descend
○ Hated school and almost failed
■ Blamed the teachers (victim mind-set)
○ Applied for academy of fine arts
■ Was really good at copying architecture
■ Wasn’t good at painting people
■ Paintings were said to be uninspired so he was rejected
● He was banned from taking the entrance exam cuz he
took it too many times
■ He blamed Vienna and the immigrants
○ Enlisted as a soldier in Bavaria
■ Dispatch runner: messenger between trenches
■ Spent the rest of WWI recovering from injuries
○ Got a job as a military spy
● Nationalist Socialist Party (Nazi party)
○ Hitler was sent to investigate them but he eventually joined them
● Hitler’s beliefs
○ Pan Germanism: all German people must unite
○ Misogynist
○ Mein Kampf (my struggle)
○ Lebensraum (living space)
● Nazi economics and society
 ○ Pro-capitalist
○ Autarky: did not rely on international trade
○ Germany would sometimes close to international trade
● Pope Pius XII
○ Didn’t say anything publicly to avoid Hitler
○ Helped refugees privately
● From a young age, German children were taught to hate Jews
○ Marriage was meant to increase and maintain the Aryan race
■ Don’t pollute the bloodline
● Army: “in service of the Fatherland”
○ Makes kids eager to enlist in a war
● Adolf Hitler as the doctor of the German people
● Education made racism, war, and genocide a regular and acceptable thing
● Hitler Jugend/League of German girls (Nazi boy scouts)
○ Shoot guns and hate jews
○ Could graduate to the schutzstaffel
■ Elite police under Hitler’s control
● Race and racism (who does Hitler hate?)
○ Hitler banned strikes or unions but improved benefits
○ Hitler claimed your blood/race decides what kind of person you
become
○ Eugenics: master race through selective breeding
○ Racial Phrenology: the skull decides how smart you are
■ Black people = primates
■ Dumb bullshit that people believed in
○ Aryan: tall, white, and blonde
■ None of Hitler’s closest associates fit the Aryan standards
■ Aryan: actually based on language
■ Real Aryans came from India
■ Rebranded by Hitler
■ Swastika came from Buddhism

Why Hitler liked/hated Races Description

Aryan

Looked like Aryans Scandinavians/Dutch

Because of Anglo-Saxon British

takeover

Europeans who had their Latins (French, Italians,

language based on Latin Spanish)
Referred to Japan Asians Still acceptable
because alliance; “yellow”
Germans

Because some are born to Cripples useless

be a burden

They don’t have their own Gypsies

culture/country

Because they’re not Communists

capitalists

Because they’re Russian Slavs

Referring to males Homosexuals Lesbians are better

because no procreation because you can rape
them and get them
pregnant

Because they can’t pledge Jehovah’s witnesses

allegiance to higher than
god

Only good with “defiling Blacks

the race” and “race
music”

“Alien race” Jews Untermensch

(under/beneath man)

Biologically and culturally

different
○ Jews were said to be incapable of being integrated in Volksgeist
(national spirit)
○ Jews were to blame for WWI and great depression
○ Travelling displays showing what Jews looked like
■ There was also propaganda
■ Classes in school: “How to tell a Jew”
● “When Jews laugh”
● Hitler and Nazi Politics
○ 1933: Germany withdraws from League of Nations
○ 1934: Hitler becomes president (head of state) and chancellor
(head of government)
○ 1935: Hitler reintroduces conscription
■ Violates Treaty of Versailles (demilitarization)
 ● Hitler doesn’t care cuz League of Nations won’t do
anything
○ The Nuremberg Laws (1935): anti-semitic
■ Punishment for sex: public embarrassment
● Jewish man: execution
● Aryan woman: head shaven and short
imprisonment
■ Stripped Jews from citizenship
○ Kristallnacht: November 9-10, 1938
■ Night of breaking glass
■ Hitler’s men singled out Jewish institutions/shops/etc.
And broke the windows; killed Jews on the streets
■ Marked/vandalized window if not broken
■ People remained in Germany because they thought it
couldn’t get any worse
● Also very hard to leave because system was built
to deny you from leaving: pay 90% of yearly
income
● Japanese Empire in Asia
○ Main: protect German territories in Asia
○ Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: for Asians only
○ Take over Formosa (now Taiwan)
○ 1910: Take over Korea
○ 1930s: Rape of Nanking: December 13 1937-1938
■ Violent af: especially to women of all ages who were
raped and mutilated by Japanese soldiers
■ Show of power/authority/dominance
■ Tossed babies into the air and speared them with
bayonets then thrown into a ditch
■ Violence done all over and wherever they went
○ Comfort women: present in all countries Japan took over
○ League of Nations didn’t do shit
● Italy
○ Benito Mussolini (the dude in charge)
■ As a child: forced to go to sunday mass by his mom
● Rebelled by screaming, throwing tantrums, and
punching the people beside him
■ Raised by father/grandfather to be:
● Anti-church
● Socialist af
■ Father and brother died early/young so thought he
should do whatever already
 ■ Owned a socialist newspaper
■ Attacked Ethiopia
● Bombed Adama
● The Rhineland and the Axis
○ Hitler re-opened factories that used to make weapons to get out
of great depression
■ League of Nations suck, fuckin economic sanctions
○ 1939: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
■ Pact of non-aggression: Germany and Russia (Stalin)
● Will never touch each other
● Appeasement is bullshit: like Neville Chamberlain
○ Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister who wanted peace
at any cost
○ Just give Hitler what he wants
■ Hitler wanted land
○ Edouard Deladie: French Prime Minister
○ Hitler got Austria and Sudetenland
● Austria and Sudetenland: the douchebaggery begins
○ Hitler annexes Austria and Sudetenland (German speaking part
of Czechoslovakia)
○ Hitler was welcomed
● The invasion of Poland
○ Polish corridor: separates Germany and Prussia
○ Poland put up a fight
○ Poland made friends with Britain
■ British called out the act of war
■ September 3, 1939; declaration of war on Germany
● 2 days after Poland invasion
● From sitz to blitz
○ Slitzkreig: sitting war; this period had no battles
○ Germany carpet bombed Paris and London
○ Hitler survived 26 assassination attempts
■ Feels Stalin will betray him so he betrays him first
○ June 22, 1941; Operation Barbarossa begins
■ Invasion of Russia
■ Germans were so confident that they didn’t bring winter
clothes
■ They got to Russia as Russian winter began due to delays
■ Vehicles got stuck and soldiers died to frostbite
● The strange alliance
○ US, UK, and Soviet Union
 ○ Roosevelt (democracy), Stalin (communism), Churchill (replaced
Chamberlain)
○ Churchill had the US send supplies since they hadn’t entered the
war yet
○ Propaganda had to be used to indicate Russia was an ally
● Pearl Harbor
○ Catalyst for the US to enter the war
○ Pearl Harbor: Hawaii naval base (pacific)
○ Japan didn’t want any western power to bother their empire
○ US was shookdt cuz all previous wars were solely on foreign soil
○ Congress votes to declare war the following day
■ Canada and Britain joined as well
■ Japanese-Americans were evacuated to rural (Arizona
and Utah) ares
● Essentially concentration camps but nicer
● Weaponry and Tactics
○ Fighting was faster and deadlier
○ Blitzkrieg (lightning war)
○ 2 theatres: Western/European and Eastern/Pacific
○ Technology: better tanks, better bombs (fire and guided), radar,
and sonar
○ Norwegian ski soldiers are amazing
○ Tuskegee Airmen: 1st military aviators that were african-
americans
○ Code talkers: native-americans
■ Delivered messages to other units using Navaho
language
■ Uncrackable code
■ Movie: wind talkers
○ Japanese-americans (“Issei”) were sent to Italy (to avoid
defection)
■ Made to do the riskiest jobs
○ Minorities tend to be the most decorated
○ Kamikaze: suicide bombers powered by bushido
■ Bushido = death over dishonor
■ Better to die than to be taken alive
■ Wasn’t very effective
○ Nieves Fernandes: Huk Commander
■ Women were active in the ware
○ Children also suicide bombed soldiers
● The Holocaust/Shoah = burnt offering
○ At first, Hitler wanted the Jews to leave Germany
 ■ The US had racial quotas to accept people
■ Shanghai and Manila were havens for Jews
○ The kindertransports
■ Use trains to rural England
○ Hitler wanted it faster: depriving of medicine and food was old
method
○ Einsatzgruppen: paramilitary death squad
■ Firing squad basically
■ If you don’t denounce your faith, you die
■ Too slow and wasteful for Hitler
○ Gas busses; caused drivers to go insane
○ The final solution (gas chambers and labor camps)
■ Given striped uniforms and shaved heads to get rid of
individuality
■ Tight conditions = rampant disease
■ Starvation was another cause of death
■ Nazi experiments (especially on twins)
■ People really thought Jews were aliens which led to
dissections
● Sonderkommando: voluntary position held by Jews
○ Meant to bring people to ovens and gas
chambers
○ Lives longer and eats a little better
■ Concentration camps are open to the public today
■ Showers were a luxury for prisoners
■ Zyklon B (very lethal gas)
■ People sometimes committed suicide on the barbed wire
● The beginning of the end
○ June 6, 1944: Normandy Landing (D-day)
○ April 21, 1945: Soviets take Berlin and close in on Hitler’s
bunker
○ April 27, 1945: Mussolini is captured and killed by their own
people
■ Italians abuse Mussolini and his mistress’ corpses
■ When Hitler heard about this, he married Eva Brown
(died by Cyanide pill) and committed suicide (along with
Blondie, his dog) on April 30
○ May 7, 1945: Germany surrenders
● Hiroshima and Nagasaki
○ August 6 and 9 respectively (haha nice)
○ Japan didn’t surrender cuz bushido even without allies
○ Movies: grave of the fireflies
 ○ August 15, 1945: Emperor announced on radio that Japan will
pursue peace
■ Big deal cuz he was essentially a god
● After the war
○ Manila was bombed to hell
■ Intramuros was bombed by the allies cuz Japanese
occupation
○ Germans left behind corpses in concentration camps for the
allies to find as well as warehouses of shoes
○ Bodies go into shock when eating after starving so some Jews
died when fed chocolates
● Nuremberg Trials (1945)
○ High ranking Nazi officials committed suicide
○ Israel, Palestine, and Pakistan were created
○ United Nations and European Union were created
● Whose fault is it?