1935 open repudiation of Versailles conscription 1936 Rhineland AXIS: BERLIN-ROME BERLIN-TOKIO 1938, March: Anschluss of Austria Kurt von Schuschnigg, Chancellor plebiscite Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia) over 3 million Germans (23.4% of total population) Sudetenland 1938, 29 September: Munich Agreement Germany, Italy, Britain, France 1939: independent Slovakia Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia
1939 Berlin Auto Show 1937
Autobahn
The
Hindenburg Air Ship
“Act
brutally, 80 million people must obtain what is their right ... Genghis
Khan has sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with
a light heart ... for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of
reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so
for the present only in the East I have put my death’s head formations in place with the command relentlessly
and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish
origin and language.... Poland will be depopulated and settled with
Germans. ... As for the rest ... the fate of Russia will be exactly the
same.... After Stalin’s death—he is a very sick man—we will break the
Soviet Union. Then there will begin the dawn of the German rule on the
earth.” (Klaus Fischer: Nazi
Germany [NY, 1995], 439) “Whether nations live in
prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we
need them as slaves to our Kultur;
otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000
Russian women fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch
interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished.”
(Heinrich Himmler addressing SS
officers in Oct.1943)
Munich Agreement: “Peace for our
time”
Soviet-German non-aggression treaty
August 23, 1939
Heinrich Himmler SS “Schutzstaffel” GESTAPO (Geheime
Staatspolizei) SS
Einsatzgruppen http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/einsatz.html
Hermann Göring, Hitler’s successor Joseph
Goebbels, minister of propaganda
Albert
Speer, chief architect, Inside
the Third Reich
Albert Speer:
Imperial Chancellery, Berlin
BLITZKRIEG
1 September
1939
“Sitzkrieg” until May 10, 1940
15 JUNE: PARIS
BRITAIN:
“operation sea lion”
22 June 1941 Operation
Barbarossa
TEHRAN, November 1943
Churchill,
Stalin, Roosevelt
YALTA, February 1945
spheres of
influence