Category: World Civ-World War Two

IQ2 Debate: Neville Chamberlain Did The Right Thing

If you prefer, you can listen to the podcast version here

If ever a politician got a bum rap it’s Neville Chamberlain. He has gone down in history as the British prime minster whose policy of appeasement in the 1930s allowed the Nazis to flourish unopposed. He has never been forgiven for ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the Munich Agreement of September 1938, and for returning home triumphantly declaring “peace for our time”. The very word “appeasement” is now synonymous with him, signifying a craven refusal to stand up to bullies and aggressors. What a contrast to Winston Churchill, the man who took over as prime minister and who has ever since been credited with restoring Britain’s backbone.

But is the standard verdict on Chamberlain a fair one? After all, memories of the slaughter of the First World War were still fresh in the minds of the British, who were desperate to avoid another conflagration. And anyway what choice did Chamberlain have in 1938? There’s a good case for arguing that the delay in hostilities engineered at Munich allowed time for military and air power to be strengthened.

SPEAKERS FOR THE MOTION
  • John Charmley – Professor of Modern History
  • Glyn Stone – Professor of International History at the University of the West of England
AGAINST THE MOTION
  • Piers Brendon – Historian and former Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre
  • Sir Richard Evans – Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College, Cambridge University
CHAIR
  • Anne Applebaum

YOUR ASSIGNMENT:

Come to class with detailed notes—typed or written— from this debate. Your notes should detail:

  • EACH speaker’s arguments
  • Evidence deployed to substantiate their arguments
  • Rebuttals to arguments made
Use this note-taking formDownload

Legacies of WWII

  1. Watch this seven-minute video of colorized footage of Berlin in 1945

2. Watch this eighteen-minute video about the casualties of WWII

3. Examine WWII casualty data as presented on Wikipedia.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: Bearing in mind the sources above as well as previous knowledge, evaluate the complicated legacies of WWII.

  • Consider political, economic, and social legacies
  • Consider how WWII affected different countries very differently
  • Were there clear winners and losers?
  • You need not limit yourself to the sources given here
  • You may bullet point
  • You will submit your notes as homework

IQ2 Debate: The Allied Bombing of German Cities in WWII Was Unjustifiable

You can listen to a podcast version if you prefer.

No one doubts the bravery of the thousands of men who flew and died in Bomber Command. The death rate was an appalling 44%. And yet until the opening of a monument in Green Park this year they have received no official recognition, with many historians claiming that the offensive was immoral and unjustified. How can it be right, they argue, for the Allies to have deliberately targeted German cities causing the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians? Even on a strategic level the offensive failed to bring about the collapse of civilian morale that was its intention.

Others, however, maintain that the attacks made a decisive contribution to the Allied victory. Vast numbers of German soldiers and planes were diverted from the eastern and western fronts, while Allied bombing attacks virtually destroyed the German air force, clearing the way for the invasion of the continent.

SPEAKERS FOR THE MOTION

AC Grayling: Philosopher and author of Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified?

Richard Overy: Professor of history at Exeter University

FEATURING:

Antony Beevor: Award-winning historian of the Second World War

Patrick Bishop: Historian, author and journalist

YOUR ASSIGNMENT:

Come to class with detailed notes—typed or written— from this debate. Your notes will detail:

  • EACH speaker’s arguments
  • Evidence deployed to substantiate their arguments
  • Rebuttals to arguments made
Use this note-taking sheet and bring it to classDownload

High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history

The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers
 
 

'They raped every German female from eight to 80'

“Red Army soldiers don’t believe in ‘individual liaisons’ with German women,” wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. “Nine, ten, twelve men at a time – they rape them on a collective basis.”

The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour.

Read more from this excerpt of Anthony Beevor’s new book at the Guardain

Nuremberg Trial Bore Witness to the Nazis’ Worst Crimes

Rebecca West, the acclaimed British writer, covered Nuremberg for the New Yorker. In August 1946, as the case entered its 10th month, she wrote, “[T]he courtroom is a citadel of boredom. Every person attending it is in the grip of extreme tedium.” How could a trial for some of the most ghastly and massive crimes ever committed—crimes that continue to horrify and fascinate us—be dull? The answer lies in a most deliberate prosecutorial strategy, one to which we all owe a debt of gratitude today.

How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.

In his new book, The Nazis Next Door, Lichtblau reports that thousands of Nazis managed to settle in the United States after World War II, often with the direct assistance of American intelligence officials who saw them as potential spies and informants in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Lichtblau says there were whole networks of spy groups around the world made up of Nazis — and they entered the U.S., one by one.

Fresh Air Interview: 'Pope And Mussolini' Tells The 'Secret History' Of Fascism And The Church

It’s commonly thought that the Catholic Church fought heroically against the fascists in Italy. But historian David Kertzer says the church actually lent organizational strength and moral legitimacy to Mussolini’s regime. Kertzer recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe.

Neville Chamberlain Was Right to Appease

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, handing portions of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain to popular acclaim, declaring that he had secured “peace for our time.” Today the prime minister is generally portrayed as a foolish man who was wrong to try to “appease” Hitler—a cautionary tale for any leader silly enough to prefer negotiation to confrontation.

But among historians, that view changed in the late 1950s, when the British government began making Chamberlain-era records available to researchers

How Hollywood Helped Hitler

In devastating detail, an excerpt from a controversial new book reveals how the big studios, desperate to protect German business, let Nazis censor scripts, remove credits from Jews, get movies stopped and even force one MGM executive to divorce his Jewish wife.

Drawing on a wealth of archival documents in the U.S. and Germany, he reveals the shocking extent to which Hollywood cooperated and collaborated with the Nazis during the decade leading up to World War II to protect its business.

Indeed, “collaboration” (and its German translation, Zusammenarbeit) is a word that appears regularly in the correspondence between studio officials and the Nazis. Although the word is fraught with meaning to modern ears, its everyday use at the time underscored the eagerness of both sides to smooth away their differences to preserve commerce.

After WWII, Europe Was A 'Savage Continent' Of Devastation

In the introduction to his book, Savage Continent, Keith Lowe writes:

Imagine a world without institutions. No governments. No school or universities. No access to any information. No banks. Money no longer has any worth. There are no shops, because no one has anything to sell. Law and order are virtually non-existent because there is no police force and no judiciary. Men with weapons roam the streets taking what they want. Women of all classes and ages prostitute themselves for food and protection.

This is not the beginning to a futuristic thriller, but a history of Europe in the years directly following World War II, when many European cities were in ruins, millions of people were displaced, and vengeance killings were common, as was rape.

Here is Lowe interviewed on Fresh Air