12: The Second World War and the Decline of European Primacy Flashcards
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that enabled those two powers to partition Poland between them. The pact was signed in Moscow in 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov Its clauses provided a written guarantee of peace by each party towards the other and a commitment that declared that neither government would ally itself to or aid an enemy of the other. In addition to the publicly-announced stipulations of non-aggression, the treaty included the Secret Protocol, which defined the borders of Soviet and German spheres of influence across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.
Soon after the pact, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September. After the invasions, the new border between the two countries was confirmed by the supplementary protocol of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty.
The pact was terminated on 22 June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, in pursuit of the ideological goal of Lebensraum.
Leon Blum
André Léon Blum was a French socialist politician and three-time Prime Minister. As a Jew, he was heavily influenced by the Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century. He was a disciple of French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès and after Jaurès’ assassination in 1914, became his successor. As Prime Minister in a Popular Front government of the left 1936–37, he provided a series of major economic reforms. Blum declared neutrality in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) to avoid the civil conflict spilling over into France itself. Once out of office in 1938, he denounced the appeasement of Germany.
When Germany defeated France in 1940, he became a staunch opponent of Vichy France. Tried (but never judged) by the Vichy government on charges of treason, he was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Ciano
Galeazzo Ciano was an Italian diplomat and politician who served as Foreign Minister in the government of his father-in-law, Benito Mussolini, from 1936 until 1943. During this period, he was widely seen as Mussolini’s most probable successor as head of government.
He was the son of Admiral Costanzo Ciano, a founding member of the National Fascist Party; father and son both took part in Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922. Ciano saw action in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–36) and was appointed Foreign Minister on his return. Following a series of Axis defeats in the Second World War, Ciano began pushing for Italy’s exit, and he was dismissed from his post as a result.
In July 1943, Ciano was among the members of the Grand Council of Fascism that forced Mussolini’s ousting and subsequent arrest. Ciano proceeded to flee to Germany but was arrested and handed over to Mussolini’s new regime based in Salo, the Italian Social Republic. Under German pressure, Mussolini ordered Ciano’s death, and in January 1944 he was executed by firing squad.
Tojo
Hideki Tojo was a Japanese politician, general of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and convicted war criminal who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association for most of World War II. During his years in power, his leadership was marked by extreme state-perpetrated violence in the name of Japanese ultranationalism, much of which he was personally involved in.
On the eve of the Second World War’s expansion into Asia and the Pacific, Tojo was an outspoken advocate for a preemptive attack on the United States and its European allies. Upon being appointed Prime Minister on October 17, 1941, he oversaw the Empire of Japan’s decision to go to war as well as its ensuing conquest of much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. During the course of the war, Tojo presided over numerous war crimes, including the massacre and starvation of civilians and prisoners of war. He was also involved in the sexual enslavement of thousands of mostly Korean women and girls for Japanese soldiers, an event that still strains modern Japanese-Korean relations.
After the war’s tide decisively turned against Japan, Tojo was forced to resign as Prime Minister in July 1944. Following his nation’s surrender to the Allied Powers in September 1945, he was arrested, convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in the Tokyo Trials, sentenced to death, and hanged on December 23, 1948. To this day, Tojo’s complicity in atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, the Bataan Death March, and human experimentation entailing the torture and death of thousands have firmly intertwined his legacy with the fanatical brutality shown by the Japanese Empire throughout World War II.
Prince Konoye
Prince Fumimaro Konoe was a Japanese politician and prime minister. During his tenure, he presided over the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the breakdown in relations with the United States which ultimately culminated in Japan’s entry into World War II. He also played a central role in transforming his country into a totalitarian state by passing the National Mobilization Law and founding the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
Despite Konoe’s attempts to resolve tensions with the United States, the rigid timetable imposed on negotiations by the military and his own government’s inflexibility regarding a diplomatic resolution set Japan on the path to war. Upon failing to reach a peace agreement, Konoe resigned as Prime Minister on 18 October 1941 prior to the outbreak of hostilities. However, he remained a close advisor to the Emperor until the end of World War II. Following the end of the war, he committed suicide on 16 December 1945.
Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain was a British politician of the Conservative Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler.
Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.
Joseph Kennedy
Joseph Patrick Kennedy was a prominent American businessman, investor and politician. He is known for his own political prominence as well as that of his children and was the patriarch of the Irish-American Kennedy family, which included President John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy.
KHe made a large fortune as a stock market and commodity investor and later rolled over his profits by investing in real estate and a wide range of business industries across the United States.ennedy was a leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community. President Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to be the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which he led from 1934 to 1935. Kennedy later directed the Maritime Commission. Kennedy served as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to late 1940. With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Kennedy was pessimistic about Britain’s ability to survive attacks from Nazi Germany. During the Battle of Britain in November 1940, Kennedy publicly suggested, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here [in the United States].” After a controversy regarding this statement, Kennedy resigned his position.
lend-lease
The Lend-Lease policy, as a program under which the United States supplied the United Kingdom Free France, the Republic of China, and later the Soviet Union and other Allied nations with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and 1945. Loaned on the basis that such help was essential for the defense of America, this aid included warships and warplanes, along with other weaponry. In general, the aid was free, although some hardware (such as ships) were returned after the war. In return, the U.S. was given leases on army and naval bases in Allied territory during the war.
Lend-Lease effectively ended the United States’ pretense of neutrality which had been enshrined in the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. It was a decisive step away from non-interventionist policy and toward open support for the Allies.
Guernica
Guernica is a town in the province of Biscay, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain. On April 26, 1937, Guernica was bombed by Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, in one of the first aerial bombings.
The raid was requested by Francisco Franco to aid in his overthrowing the Basque Government and the Spanish Republican government. The town was devastated The Bombing of Guernica, which went on continuously for three hours, is considered the beginning of the Luftwaffe doctrine of terror bombing civilian targets in order to demoralize the enemy. Pablo Picasso painted his Guernica painting to commemorate the horrors of the bombing
Schuschnigg
Kurt Schuschniggwas an Austrian Fatherland Front politician who was the Chancellor of the Federal State of Austria from the 1934 assassination of his predecessor Engelbert Dollfuss until the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany.
On 1 May 1934, Dollfuss had erected the authoritarian Federal State of Austria. After Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazi Otto Planetta during the July Putsch, Schuschnigg on 29 July was appointed Austrian chancellor. . Like Dollfuss, Schuschnigg ruled mostly by decree. Although his rule was milder than that of Dollfuss, his Austrofascist policies were not much different from the policies of his predecessor
Although Schuschnigg accepted that Austria was a “German state” and that Austrians were Germans, he was strongly opposed to Adolf Hitler’s goal to absorb Austria into the Third Reich and wished for it to remain independent.
When Schuschnigg’s efforts to keep Austria independent had failed, he resigned his office. After the Anschluss he was arrested, kept in solitary confinement and eventually interned in various concentration camps.
Danzig
When Poland regained its independence after World War I with access to the sea as promised by the Allies on the basis of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” the Poles hoped the Gdansk’s harbour would also become part of Poland.
However, in the end – since Germans formed a majority in the city, with Poles being a minority the city was not placed under Polish sovereignty. Instead, in accordance with the terms of the Versailles Treaty, it became the Free City of Danzig, an independent quasi-state under the auspices of the League of Nations with its external affairs largely under Polish control – without, however, any public vote to legitimize Germany’s loss of the city.
With the growth of Nazism among Germans, anti-Polish sentiment increased and both Germanisation and segregation policies intensified, in the 1930s the rights of local Poles were commonly violated and limited by the local administrationFrom 1937, the employment of Poles by German companies was prohibited, and already employed Poles were fired, the use of Polish in public places was banned and Poles were not allowed to enter several restaurants, in particular those owned by Germans.
Sudetenland
The Sudetenland is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans.
The Sudeten crisis of 1938 was provoked by the Pan-Germanist demands of Germany that the Sudetenland be annexed to Germany, which happened after the later Munich Agreement. Part of the borderland was invaded and annexed by Poland. Afterwards, the formerly unrecognized Sudetenland became an administrative division of Germany. When Czechoslovakia was reconstituted after the Second World War, the Sudeten Germans were expelled and the region today is inhabited almost exclusively by Czech speakers.
Memel
The Memel Territory was defined by the Treaty of Versailles in 1920 and refers to the northernmost part of the German province of East Prussia. It was put under the administration of the Entente’s Council of Ambassadors. The Memel Territory, together with other areas severed from Germany (the Saar and Danzig) was to remain under the control of the League of Nations until a future day when the people of these regions would be allowed to vote on whether the land would return to Germany or not.
On 9 January 1923, three years after the Versailles Treaty had become effective, Lithuania occupied the territory during the Klaipėda Revoltterritory was annexed by Lithuania.
By late 1938, Lithuania had lost control of the situation in the Territory. In the early hours of 23 March 1939, after an oral ultimatum had caused a Lithuanian delegation to travel to Berlin, the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Juozas Urbšys and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Treaty of the Cession of the Memel Territory to Germany.
The Battle of Memel began when the Red Army launched its Memel offensive operation in late 1944. The offensive drove remaining German forces in the area that is now Lithuania and Latvia into a small bridgehead in Klaipėda (Memel) and its port, leading to a three-month siege of that position. The bridgehead was finally crushed as part of a subsequent Soviet offensive, the East Prussian offensive, in early 1945. The Soviet Union annexed Memel and awarded it to the Lithuanian SSR.
Marco Polo bridge
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident was a July 1937 battle between China’s National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army.
Since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, there had been many small incidents along the rail line connecting Beijing with the port of Tianjin, but all had subsided. On this occasion, a Japanese soldier was temporarily absent from his unit opposite Wanping, and the Japanese commander demanded the right to search the town for him. When this was refused, other units on both sides were put on alert, and with tension rising the Chinese Army fired on the Japanese Army which further escalated the situation, even though the missing Japanese soldier had returned to his lines. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident is generally regarded as the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. This full-scale war between the Chinese and the Empire of Japan is often regarded as the beginning of World War II in Asia.
Maginot line
The Maginot Line is a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles and weapon installations built by France in the 1930s to deter invasion by Germany and force them to move around the fortifications. The Maginot Line was impervious to most forms of attack. In consequence, the Germans invaded through the Low Countries in 1940, passing it to the north. The line, which was supposed to be fully extended further towards the west to avoid such an occurrence, was finally scaled back in response to demands from Belgium. Indeed, Belgium feared it would be sacrificed in the event of another German invasion. The line has since become a metaphor for expensive efforts that offer a false sense of security.
Based on France’s experience with trench warfare during World War I, the massive Maginot Line was built in the run-up to World War II, after the Locarno Conference in 1925 gave rise to a fanciful and optimistic “Locarno spirit”. French military experts extolled the line as a work of genius that would deter German aggression, because it would slow an invasion force long enough for French forces to mobilise and counterattack. The Maginot Line was indeed invulnerable to aerial bombings and tank fire; it featured underground railways as a backup. However, the French line was weak near the Ardennes Forest. General Maurice Gamelin, when drafting the Dyle Plan, believed this region, with its rough terrain, would be an unlikely invasion route of German forces; if it were traversed, it would be done at a slow rate that would allow the French time to bring up reserves and counterattacks. The German Army, having reformulated their plans from a repeat of the First World War-era plan, became aware of and exploited this weak point in the French defensive front. A rapid advance through the forest encircled much of the Allied forces, resulting in a sizeable force having to be evacuated at Dunkirk leaving the forces to the south unable to mount an effective resistance to the German invasion of France.
