Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [18]
* * *
Hitler won much support among the middle and lower-middle classes by pumping large sums of money into employment programs, many involving rearmament and heavy industry. In Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, affordable cars started rolling out of the first Volkswagen factory, founded in 1938.
That same year, Hitler’s troops were welcomed into Austria. Foreign powers, in an attempt to avoid another bloody war, accepted this Anschluss (annexation) of Austria. Following this same policy of appeasement, the Munich Agreement was signed in September 1938 by Hitler, Mussolini (Italy), Neville Chamberlain (UK) and Eduardo Daladier (France), and the largely ethnic-German Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia was relinquished to Hitler. By March 1939, he had also annexed Moravia and Bohemia.
* * *
Chester Wilmot presents an interesting account of WWII in The Struggle for Europe, told from the perspective of an Australian journalist slap bang in the thick of things.
* * *
Return to beginning of chapter
WWII
Early Years
A nonaggression pact was signed between Hitler and Stalin’s USSR in August 1939, whereby the Tokyo-Berlin-Rome axis (Hitler had already signed agreements with Italy and Japan) was expanded to include Moscow. Soviet neutrality was assured by a secret Soviet-German protocol that divided up Eastern Europe into spheres of interest.
In late August an SS-staged attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Poland, gave Hitler the excuse to march into Poland. This proved the catalyst for WWII; three days later, on 3 September 1939, France and Britain declared war on Germany.
Poland, but soon also Belgium, the Netherlands and France, quickly fell to Germany. In June 1941 Germany broke its nonaggression pact with Stalin by attacking the USSR. Though successful at first, Operation Barbarossa soon ran into problems and Hitler’s troops retreated. With the defeat of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad (today Volgograd) the following winter, morale flagged at home and on the fronts.
* * *
German engineers don’t always get it right. The U-1206, a WWII submarine, was sunk off the coast of Scotland after its complicated toilet system malfunctioned and the submarine had to surface.
* * *
Return to beginning of chapter
The Final Solution
At Hitler’s request, a conference in January 1942 on Berlin’s Wannsee came up with a protocol clothed in bureaucratic jargon that laid the basis for the murder of millions of Jews. The Holocaust was a systematic, bureaucratic and meticulously documented genocidal act carried out by about 100,000 Germans, but with the tacit agreement of a far greater number.
Jewish populations in occupied areas were systematically terrorised and executed by SS troops. Hitler sent Jews to concentration camps in Germany (including Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora) and Eastern Europe. Sinti and Roma (gypsies), political opponents, priests, homosexuals, resistance fighters and habitual criminals were also incarcerated in a network of 22 camps, mostly in Eastern Europe. Another 165 work camps (such as Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland) provided labour for big industry, including IG Farbenindustrie AG, producer of the cyanide gas Zyklon B that was used in gas chambers to murder more than three million Jews. The former headquarters of this conglomerate is now part of Frankfurt am Main’s university campus (Click here). Of the estimated seven million people sent to camps, 500,000 survived.
* * *
Of the dozens of books covering Nazi concentration camps, I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942–1944, edited by Yana Volakova, says it