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People’s Century Part 10 1939 Total War
The People’s Century was a masterful effort at oral history to summarize the 20th century done by a team of careful and thoughtful researchers. It is media history at
its best.
This film discusses how WWII was fought differently from WWI. It is disturbingly graphic. Be Warned. In between the questions are the contributions of eye witnesses
and participants from various walks of life: what did they say about it?
1. How had the 1936 movie, “Things to Come” forecast the nature of the new war that was about to break out?
2. What happened to the civilians in the countries affected by the German blitzkrieg ( lightening war) in Poland, France and the “Low Countries “- Belgium, Luxembourg,
and the Netherlands. How did the news cast in the film describe the “new German method of war” ? The Blitzkreig is what the Germans called it- it means Lightening
War.
Pierre Rondas: 1940 Louvain, Belgium
3. How did English and German civilians contribute to the war effort and prepare for war even if they were in school?
Elizabeth Finn: London, England, who worked in factories?
Horst Westphal: Hamburg, Germany
Margaret Zettel: Hamburg, Germany
4.
the Blitz on London, and the bombing of Plymouth and Hamburg
What was the point of the Blitz on London, and the bombing of Plymouth and Hamburg? How were people affected?
London: 1940 where did the civilians sleep? What did the German song sing about?
Plymouth: 1941 what were the numbers killed and wounded?
Betty Lawrence:
Sid Newham:
Hamburg: July 1943 RAF launched Operation Gommorah ( One wonders at the time lag between the Plymouth and Hamburg bombings. Was Britain too incapacitated to react any
faster?) When you visit Hamburg see the photographs of the aftermath of the bombing in the museum at St. Nikolai church spire: (“In Hitler’s Germany, it was a capital
crime for anyone to take non-official photos of war damage, so pictures of the ruined city are rare.”) Operation Gomorrah: 1943 Hamburg bombing shook Nazi regime?RAF
Bomber Command all but annihilated Hamburg at the close of July 1943. In the view of Air Chief Marshal Arthur T. Harris, the attacks on the “second city of the Reich”
were “incomparably more terrible” than any Germany had suffered to that point. “Bomber” Harris was right. His Bomber Command threw 2,355 sorties at Hamburg in 3
massive nighttime raids. July 28 firestorm killed more than 40,000 persons in and around Hamburg. The Hamburg raid was a shock to the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, and his
Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering. Reichsminister Albert Speer wrote: “Hamburg had suffered the fate Hitler and Goering conceived for London in 1940. “(
http://hitlernews.cloudworth.com/bombing-of-dresden-hamburg.php}
What were the civilian casualties of the fire bombing that burned 8 square miles at 1,800 degrees F. (more than all the deaths in the Blitz in England)
_________________
Hans Brunswig: did what?
Horst Westphal: after the bombing, surviving residents did what?
Margaret Zettel: did what?
5.
How were civilians mobilized for the war effort in the USA?
“Shorty” and Evelyn Brauckmiller:
6.
USSR was invaded, how were civilians treated
As the USSR was invaded, how were civilians treated? Why? What did the Germans plan to do with Slavic countries like Poland, Ukraine, Russia?
Alexandra Sakharova:
Sarafima Schibko:
Think on this: Wikipedia lebensraum:
It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to
repopulate the land with Germanic people.[2][3][4] The entire urban population was to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed
Germany and allowing their replacement by a German upper class.[2] The policy of Lebensraum implicitly assumed the superiority of Germans as members of an Aryan master
race who by virtue of their superiority had the right to displace people deemed to be part of inferior races.[3] The Nazis insisted that Lebensraum needed to be
developed as racially homogeneous to avoid intermixing with peoples deemed to be part of inferior races.[3] As such, peoples deemed to be part of inferior races living
within territory selected to be Lebensraum were subject to expulsion or destruction.[3] Nazi Germany also supported other nations’ pursuing their own Lebensraum,
including Fascist Italy.[5]
The Nazi regime invoked a variety of precedents to justify the pursuit of Lebensraum.[6] One was invoking the precedent of the United States.[3] Hitler declared that
the size of European states was “absurdly small in comparison to their weight of colonies, foreign trade, etc.,” which he contrasted to “the American Union which
possesses at its base its own continent and touches the rest of the earth only with its summit.”[3] Hitler noted that the colonization of the continental United States
by Nordic peoples of Europe that had a large internal market, material reproduction, and fertile biological reproduction, provided the closest model to that of
Lebensraum.[3]
7. How does war affect people’s views of the value of life? What was Hakudo Nakatomi encouraged to do to fulfill the Japanese policy in China in the Policy of the
Three All’s of __________, _____________ and ___________ all? How is he also a victim of his actions even until today?
