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Unit 7 Overview
Unit 7 Overview
Just 20 years after the end of the First World War, the world faced another, even more devastating global conflict, one in which great violence was aimed at civilian populations.
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
How was the scale of World War II different from World War I?
What were some problems left by the First World War that contributed to the Second World War?
How did economic and political instability lead to nationalism?
What were some results of extreme nationalism and authoritarianism during the war?
How did the number of democracies in the world change from 1930 to 1944?
: You look really relaxed.
: - Thanks, that World War I stuff
: really stressed me out,
: so I took a spa day.
: - Oh, it shows.
: - What's the next unit about?
: - Um, is the spa still open?
: - Oh, no...
: - Mm-hmm.
: (music playing)
: Hi, I'm Kim Lochner, and along with Colby Burnett,
: we're introducing Unit 7:
: Interwar and World War II.
: From 1914 to 1918,
: many people suffered through the First World War.
: They'd rather hopefully called it "the war to end all wars."
: The terrible trench warfare,
: gas weapons, artillery,
: and grinding conflict
: left a generation of men dead.
: The economies of major world powers and their colonies
: were destroyed.
: It seemed impossible that a war of that magnitude
: could ever happen again.
: However, only a few decades later,
: the world would start back down the road to conflict.
: It began first in Asia,
: then in the Mediterranean and Europe,
: and then spread around the world.
: The sons and grandsons
: of those who had fought in the First World War
: became the soldiers and sailors of the Second World War.
: And this second war would cause even more death and destruction
: than its predecessor.
: It would be fought more widely,
: drawing in and impacting people on battlefields
: across large parts of Africa, the Pacific Ocean,
: East and Southeast Asia, and Europe.
: And once again, the end of this conflict
: would bring only an unstable peace.
: The victorious allies
: divided into two armed camps in 1945,
: and the Cold War set in.
: In this course,
: we divide the First World War and the Second World War
: into two units.
: But we could instead take a look at the whole period
: between the 1914 start of the First World War
: and the 1945 end of the Second World War.
: By doing that, the years between the two wars
: look more like a brief interlude than a period of actual peace.
: It's as if the combatants
: were just taking a moment to catch their breath.
: The problems left by the first war
: included a broken global system,
: resentful defeated powers,
: victors squabbling over the spoils,
: a global economy hobbled by war reparations,
: and trauma-- both of veterans and of civilians--
: went unhealed.
: From this perspective,
: the Second World War looks inevitable.
: It seems like a logical result
: of the world's failure to solve these problems
: in the 1920s and '30s.
: COLBY: Another key problem that led to the Second World War
: was how the end of the First World War
: shifted people's perspectives about their own countries.
: Rather than discrediting militant nationalism
: as a war-mongering ideology,
: the peace process ultimately strengthened it.
: In the years following the armistice
: that concluded the First World War,
: various forms of nationalism crept back in.
: A new way of thinking of the state as a community emerged.
: It was very nationalist and authoritarian,
: meaning it required strict obedience.
: It was also based on ideas about race.
: In Germany, anti-foreigner and anti-minority sentiment
: was fueled by anger over its treatment
: following its defeat.
: Italians, who were technically citizens
: of a victorious state,
: resented the fact that they had been given little
: in the treaty that ended the war.
: Japan was also a member of the alliance that won the war,
: but found its appetite for new territory
: amplified by the small gains that it made in 1919.
: Many people in these countries
: agitated for revenge or for an empire.
: They were not alone.
: Nationalism was on the rise everywhere
: in the 1920s and '30s.
: In many places, it was stoked by racism.
: The vast casualty rates of the First World War
: produced fears about the size of each country's population.
: This in turn drove the so-called science of eugenics
: in the United States, Brazil, Europe, and elsewhere.
: Eugenics was an attempt to control reproduction
: in order to increase a nation's population
: and to create a "superior" race.
: It became popular between the wars in the hope of ensuring
: that a country would win the next war.
: Eugenics was based on false science.
: It was used to justify anti-immigrant policies,
: practices of racial discrimination,
: and nationalist hatred for other countries.
: Economic troubles,
: like the Great Depression beginning in 1929,
: also drove people to look for someone to blame.
: Authoritarian and totalitarian political parties,
: which promised order and prosperity
: at the price of individual freedoms,
: took advantage of this sentiment.
: They stole or intimidated their way into power.
: This was particularly true of fascist parties
: in Germany and Italy.
: Once these parties gained power,
: they kept it by pursuing popular policies
: of hyper-nationalism and discrimination
: against minorities and foreigners.
: Organizations for global cooperation tried to hold back
: these authoritarian parties and nationalist movements.
: The most extensive of these was the League of Nations--
: the world's first international political forum.
: But they failed,
: and their failure set the scene for the Second World War,
: which would bring a series of atrocities
: that exceeded anything that had come before.
: These horrors included:
: the wholesale slaughter of Chinese civilians
: by the Japanese army;
: the Soviet deliberate starvation and oppression
: of populations in Ukraine and Byelorussia;
: the Italian use of gas on Ethiopian civilians;
: the concentrated bombing of Spanish cities;
: and finally, the Nazi extermination camps
: in Germany and German-occupied Europe.
: In this unit, we ask the key question:
: How were these horrors of the Second World War possible?
: This question connects the First and Second world wars
: and the years in between
: into one longer history.
: As a result,
: we can understand the Second World War
: in a longer context.
: We can identify trends that led
: to extermination camps and genocide.
: And perhaps learn how to look out for them in the future.
: One way of beginning to identify
: what led to the Second World War and the terrors it created
: is by looking at data.
: We can revisit this chart of the number of democracies
: across the whole world over time.
: You may remember that we looked at this data in Unit 2,
: when we saw the number of democracies rising
: across the 19th century.
: But then the number levels off,
: suddenly dropping dramatically in the 1930s.
: In this chart, the definition of democracy
: is based on a measure called Polity IV.
: It defines a democracy as a system
: that has institutions
: in which individuals can play a political role,
: voting and expressing their preferences.
: This definition requires that the people in charge
: are kept under some control
: by courts, journalists, and other institutions.
: Clearly, the number of countries
: that were democracies by this measure
: were decreasing in the 1930s, as authoritarianism rose.
: KIM: We can also explore the turn
: towards authoritarianism and extreme nationalism
: by scale-switching.
: We can zoom in to explore smaller stories.
: One of the epicenters of authoritarianism
: was the city of Nuremberg.
: Nuremberg was a historically significant city
: in the center of Germany.
: In the early 1920s,
: it was still a mainly medieval-style city
: made up of small, old wooden houses and town squares.
: But then, the German authoritarian party--
: the Nazis-- came to power.
: They transformed Nuremberg
: into a city that reflected their policies.
: Huge buildings, especially a vast arena,
: were built to reflect the power of the state.
: The Nazis held massive rallies there
: to command and demonstrate the unity of the German people.
: Films were shot of these rallies,
: meant to inspire the Germans
: to believe in and obey the Nazis.
: In 1935, the Nazi leadership met at Nuremberg
: to implement policies.
: It is these policies that in many ways
: began the horrors of the Second World War.
: The Nazis blamed minorities within Germany
: for the country's economic woes.
: In particular,
: they singled out the Jewish population.
: Using eugenic theory,
: they defined Jews by biology, rather than religion.
: They passed laws stating
: that German Jews could not be citizens of Germany,
: and that they could not marry non-Jewish Germans.
: These race-based laws
: were perhaps the most extensive in Europe.
: But they were not unique to Germany.
: These laws were part of the horrors
: surrounding the Second World War,
: horrors that were reflected
: in the changing shape of Nuremberg itself.
: Nuremberg held one camp
: that was part of a large system of extermination camps
: in which the Nazi state killed 12 million people.
: The dead included not only Jews, but also Roma,
: Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals,
: political prisoners, disabled people,
: and the citizens of Eastern European states.
: This genocide--
: the attempt to extinguish entire peoples--
: was one of the principal horrors of the Second World War.
: This war was arguably a result of the unresolved conflicts
: of the three decades that preceded it.
: How would it influence the decades to come?
: Okay, I know our students are not children.
: - No.
: - But you're scaring the children.
: - And teaching, it's how we keep genocide from happening again.
: - Genocide has happened again.
: And happened again.
: - Now you're scaring the children.
: - (softly): Oh.