Modern World History Fall 2001
Web linked documents on the Japanese atrocities in China, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, Operation Barbarossa, and Hitler's "Testament."
This assignment has four parts--do all of them!
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The first link is to a description of "The Rape of Nanking," of the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during the attack upon and occupation of the Chinese city of Nanjing/Nanking in 1937. (Zhu mentions this event in the autobiography you will read at the end of this semester.) This description was first published in F. Tillman, "All Captives Slain,'' The New York Times, December 18, 1937, pp. 1, 10.
As you read this document, answer this question:
In his Autobiography, Fukuzawa explained that he thought the Japanese were "racially superior" to other Asian peoples--Can Japanese belief in "social darwinism" and racial superiority help us explain the "rape of Nanking"?
Click here for link to "The Nanking Massacre, 1937" at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/nanking.html
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The second link is to the "Non-Aggression Pact Between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic," signed in 1939. Within days of signing this agreement, Germany invaded Poland. The British and French had signed treaties promising to protect Poland against any invading enemy, and so Germany's action led to the start of World War Two in Europe.
As you read this document, answer the following question:
What advantage would this treaty have given to Hitler, and what advantage would the USSR have in signing such an agreement?
Click here for link to the "Non-Aggression Pact Between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic," at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/bluebook/blbk61.htm.
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The third link is to the orders that the German military issued to its field commanders during the June 1941 invasion of the USSR, which was code-named "Operation Barbarossa." Historians agree that the war on the Eastern Front was far more barbaric than anything that had come before it in Europe in World war Two, and many historians believe that this dehumanized German soldiers in a way that contributed to the Nazi policy of genocide. The order refers to how the German soldiers should treat members of the Soviet Communist Party.
As you read this document, answer these questions:
What does this order tell you about the ideological nature of the war on the Eastern Front? Did the Nazis feel that this was an "ordinary" war?
What does this order tell you about the kinds of behavior that the Nazis expected out of their soldiers in the war against the USSR?
Click here for link to The Commissar’s Order For “Operation Barbarossa” (June 6, 1941) at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/commissar.html.
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The last link is to a statement that Hitler wrote in April 1945, just before committing suicide. Hitler had drawn Germany into war against all of Europe and had conquered much of the continent. As the war intensified, so did Nazi racial policies (as we learn from Klemperer's diary). The Nazi regime intended to establish German "Aryan" rule over the "inferior" races of Europe, including in particular Slavs, Gypsies, and Jews. Hitler considered Jews the main threat to the "Aryans," and one of Nazis' chief aims was to make all German-controlled territories "Jew-free." Ultimately, this led to the mass murder of millions of people. But from late 1942 the war against the USSR turned into a series of defeats for Germany, while US participation in the war against Germany meant that Hitler now faced superior American economic might. By Spring 1945 the Soviet Red Army was closing in on Berlin from the East and US-led forces were closing in on from the West. Hitler, with his country burning around him, wrote this justification of his policies.
As you read this document, ask yourself this question:
Who did Hitler blame for the war, and what issue obsesses him to the end?
Click here for link
to Adolf Hitler, "My Political Testament" at http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/about_holocaust/documents/part1/doc72.html