USSR+4

=ELIZABETH HAMMOND, MELANIE GOMEZ, CHELSEA PEREZ, SAMANTHA VELAZQUEZ, MARILYN DIAZ= =__The Soviet Union__ = -The Nazi-Soviet Pact -The German Invasion -German treatment of Soviet citizens and soldiers -Battles of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad -Stalin’s leadership -Soviet treatment of German prisoners -The race to Berlin against the Americans

[] [] [] http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/ww2/barbarossa.htm []

chelsea. perez

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Three million German soldiers were reinforced by Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Croatian troops. Within weeks, German divisions conquered the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In September the Germans laid siege to Sevastopol and Leningrad, and by late October, the cities of Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov had fallen. Millions of Soviet soldiers were encircled, cut off from supplies and reinforcements, and forced to surrender.

According to Nazi ideology, Slavs were useless subhumans. As such, their leaders, the Soviet elite, were to be killed and the remainder of the population enslaved or expelled further eastward. As a result of these racist fantasies, millions of Soviet civilians were deliberately killed, starved, or worked to death. Millions of others were deported for forced labor in Germany or enslaved in the occupied eastern territories. German planners called for the ruthless exploitation of Soviet resources, especially of agricultural produce. This was one of Germany's major war aims in the east - http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007182 | ** ElizabethHammond **



Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in the biggest military operation the world had ever seen.

In a mere eight months of 1941-42, the invading German armies killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war through starvation, exposure, and summary execution. This little-known gendercide vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated mass killing in human history.

The total number of prisoners taken by the German armies in the USSR was in the region of 5.5 million. Of these the astounding number of 3.5 million or more had been lost by the middle of 1944 and the assumption must be that they were either deliberately killed or done to death by criminal negligence. [] - ** ElizabethHammond ** [] ** PICTURES : [] - ** ElizabethHammond **
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German [|POW’s] captured in campaigns in Western Europe, were held in Allied POW camps. These came under the inspection of the [|Red Cross] and all the evidence suggests that German POW’s held in Western Europe were well treated – accommodation was adequate as was food. The Red Cross took care of communicating with families. German POW’s captured on the Eastern Front had a far worse experience.

[] Melanie Gomez Under the 1929 Geneva Convention, POWs were entitled to a diet equivalent to that of the occupying troops. Given the circumstances in Europe at the end of the war, however, a 2,000-calorie diet, the recommended daily minimum, would have been impossible to maintain. The bulk of Allied shipping was now earmarked for the Pacific theater; only when the war had been won would supplies be diverted to Europe. In early April 1945, the United States was responsible for 313,000 prisoners in Europe; by month's end this total had shot up to 2.1 million. After the fall of the Third Reich, the number rose to a staggering 5 million German and Axis POWs. Of those, an estimated 56,000, or about 1 percent, died—roughly equal to the mortality rate American POWs suffered in German hands. Those held in Soviet-occupied territory fared far worse. Officially, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 Germans and 1,097,000 combatants from other European nations as prisoners during and just after the war. More than a million of the German captives died. The immense suffering Germany and her Axis partners had caused surely played a key role in the treatment of enemy POWs. "In 1945, in Soviet eyes it was time to pay," wrote British military historian Max Arthur. "For most Russian soldiers, any instinct for pity or mercy had died somewhere on a hundred battlefields between Moscow and Warsaw." Josef Stalin's regime was ill equipped to deal with prisoners: In 1943 as more enemy units fell into Soviet hands, death rates among POWs lingered around 60 percent. Roughly 570,000 German and Axis prisoners had already died in captivity. By March 1944, conditions began to improve, but for economic reasons: As its manpower was swallowed up in the war effort, the USSR turned to POWs as a surrogate work force. While POWs were not technically part of the gulag system, the lines were often blurred. Camps and detainment centers often comprised poorly constructed huts that offered scant protection from bitter Russian winter winds. The Soviet Union repatriated prisoners at irregular intervals, sometimes in large numbers. As late as 1953, however, at least 20,000 German POWs remained in Russia. After Stalin's death, those men were finally sent home. As a young teen in 1939, Milan Lorman witnessed the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the creation of Slovakia as a satellite state of the Third Reich. Lorman's father, a poor country teacher, diligently traced the family's Germanic roots to claim entitlements offered by the Third Reich to those of German origin. But there was a cost for such subsidies: In 1943 a letter arrived asking Lorman's father why his son, now 18, had not volunteered for the SS. The letter alluded to the cessation of entitlements should the teenager fail to join. Under great pressure, young Lorman accepted his fate and volunteered for the //Waffen SS//.http://www.historynet.com/german-pows-and-the-art-of-survival.htm Melanie Gomez

**//Waffen SS prisoners of the 12th SS Panzer Division taken at Caen 1944. These were some of the very first prisoners taken by the British during the fighting for Caen who's number included Luftwaffe personnel including both Fallschirmjäger and Field Division troops.//**
 * It is a fair assumption that the vast majority of German soldiers who survived the war spent some time in captivity, be it either Allied or Soviet. There were vast differences between the conditions endured by Germans captured by the Allies and the Soviets however and the main reason for this difference was the fact the Allies complied with the Geneva Convention and the Soviets did not. The Geneva Convention of 1929 was a bill of rights for every prisoner of war taken by an opposing side and should have been displayed openly in every PoW camp. The protecting Power which was a neutral government appointed by a belligerent to look after it's interests in enemy territory until the normal restoration of diplomatic relations was restored. Delegates from these countries were permitted to visit the camps and to investigate complaints. As well as these appointed delegates the International Red Cross were permitted to visit the camps and this soon became standard practice.**
 * Article 79 of the Geneva Convention entitled the International Committee to enforce the opposing powers to set up an Central Information Agency for the reception, recording and forwarding of information and replies to enquiries about prisoners of war and this agency was set up in 1939. There were two main powers who were not bound by these terms and did not apply these regulations to their prisoner of war procedures. These powers were Japan and the Soviet Union. Japan had signed but had not ratified it so in effect was not bound by it's terms. Russia had applied the terms of the Hague Convention of 1907 (which the Geneva Convention superseded) but failed to meet any of the requirements of the Geneva Convention during W.W.II and as a result no information was released on captured German troops and camp visits were not allowed for German prisoners in Soviet captivity. Germany followed suit and no visits or information on Soviet PoWs held on German territory were allowed to be released.**

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Soviet Union
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MARILYN DIAZ August 23, 1939), nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union that was concluded only a few days before the beginning of World War II and which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The Soviet Union had been unable to reach a collective-security agreement with Britain and France against Nazi Germany, most notably at the time of the Munich Conference in September 1938. By early 1939 the Soviets faced the prospect of resisting German military expansion in eastern Europe virtually alone, and so they began searching about for a change of policy. On May 3, 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin fired Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov, who was Jewish and an advocate of collective security, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, who soon began negotiations with the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Soviets also kept negotiating with Britain and France, but in the end Stalin chose to reach an agreement with Germany. By doing so he hoped to keep the Soviet Union at peace with Germany and to gain time to build up the Soviet military establishment, which had been badly weakened by the purge of the Red Army officer corps in 1937. The Western democracies' hesitance in opposing Adolf Hitler, along with Stalin's own inexplicable personal preference for the Nazis, also played a part in Stalin's final choice. For his part, Hitler wanted a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union so that his armies could invade Poland virtually unopposed by a major power, after which Germany could deal with the forces of France and Britain in the west without having to simultaneously fight the Soviet Union on a second front in the east. The end result of the German-Soviet negotiations was the Nonaggression Pact, which was dated August 23 and was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov in the presence of Stalin, in Moscow. The terms of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact were briefly as follows: the two countries agreed not to attack each other, either independently or in conjunction with other powers; not to support any third power that might attack the other party to the pact; to remain in consultation with each other upon questions touching their common interests; not to join any group of powers directly or indirectly threatening one of the two parties; to solve all differences between the two by negotiation or arbitration. The pact was to last for 10 years, with automatic extension for another 5 years unless either party gave notice to terminate it 1 year before its expiration. To this public pact of nonaggression was appended a secret protocol, also reached on August 23, 1939, which divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Poland east of the line formed by the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. The protocol also assigned Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence and, further, broached the subject of the separation of Bessarabia from Romania. A secret supplementary protocol (signed September 28, 1939) clarified the Lithuanian borders. The Polish-German border was also determined, and Bessarabia was assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. In a third secret protocol (signed January 10, 1941, by Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenberg and Molotov), Germany renounced its claims to portions of Lithuania in return for Soviet payment of a sum agreed upon by the two countries. The public German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact caused consternation in the capitals of Britain and France. After Germany invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east on September 17, meeting the advancing Germans near Brest-Litovsk two days later. The partition of Poland was effected on September 29, at which time the dividing line between German and Soviet territory was changed in Germany's favour, being moved eastward to the Bug River (i.e., the current Polish-Soviet frontier). The Soviets soon afterward sought to consolidate their sphere of influence as a defensive barrier to renewed German aggression in the east. Accordingly, the Soviet Union attacked Finland on November 30 and forced it in March 1940 to yield the Isthmus of Karelia and make other concessions. The Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were annexed by the Soviet Union and were organized as Soviet republics in August 1940. The Nonaggression Pact became a dead letter on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany, after having invaded much of western and central Europe, attacked the Soviet Union without warning in Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet Union's borders with Poland and Romania that were established after World War II roughly follow those established by the Nonaggression Pact in 1939–41. Until 1989 the Soviet Union denied the existence of the secret protocols because they were considered evidence of its involuntary annexation of the Baltic states. Soviet leaders were initially unwilling to restore prewar boundaries, but the transformations occurring within the Soviet Union in the early 1990s made it virtually impossible for Soviet leaders to combat declarations of independence from the Baltic states in 1991.

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Samantha Velazquez

The Battle of Moscow (Russian: Bitva za Moskvu) refers to the Soviet defense of Moscow and the subsequent Soviet counter-offensive that occurred between October 1941 and January 1942 on the Eastern Front of World War II against German forces. Adolf Hitler considered Moscow, which was the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the largest Soviet city, to be the primary military and political objective for the Axis forces in their invasion of the Soviet Union. A separate German plan was codenamed Operation Wotan. The original blitzkrieg invasion plan, which the Axis called Operation Barbarossa, had called for the capture of Moscow within three to four months. However, despite large initial advances, the Wehrmacht was soon slowed by Soviet resistance (in particular during the Battle of Smolensk, which lasted from July through September 1941 and delayed the German offensive towards Moscow for two months). Having secured Smolensk, the Wehrmacht was forced to consolidate its lines around Leningrad and Kiev, further delaying the drive towards Moscow. The Axis advance was finally renewed on September 30, 1941, with an offensive codenamed Operation Typhoon, the goal of which was the capture of Moscow before the onset of winter. After a successful initial advance leading to the encirclement and destruction of several Soviet armies, the German offensive was stopped by Soviet resistance at the Mozhaisk defensive line, just 120 km (75 mi) from the capital. Having penetrated the Soviet defenses, the Wehrmacht offensive was slowed by weather conditions, with autumn rains turning roads and fields into thick mud that significantly impeded Axis vehicles, horses, and soldiers. Although the onset of colder weather and the freezing of the ground allowed the Axis advance to continue, it continued to struggle in the face of the severe cold and stiffening Soviet resistance. By early December, the lead German Panzer Groups stood less than 30 kilometers (19 mi) from the Kremlin, and Wehrmacht officers were able to see some of Moscow's buildings with binoculars; but, handicapped by cold and exhausted troops, the Axis forces were unable to make further advances. On December 5, 1941, fresh Soviet Siberian troops, prepared for winter warfare, attacked the German forces in front of Moscow; by January 1942, the Wehrmacht had been driven back 100 to 250 km (60 to 150 mi), ending the immediate threat to Moscow and marking the closest that Axis forces ever got to capturing the Soviet capital. The Battle of Moscow is usually considered one of the most important battles in the war between the Axis Powers and the USSR, primarily because the Soviets were able to successfully prevent the most serious attempt to capture their capital. The battle was also one of the largest during World War II, with more than a million total casualties. It marked a turning point as it was the first time since the Wehrmacht began its conquests in 1939 war that it had been forced into a major retreat. The Wehrmacht had been forced to retreat earlier during the Yelnya Offensive in September 1941 and at the Battle of Rostov (1941) (which led to von Rundstedt losing his job), but these retreats were minor compared to the one at Moscow.
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 * :: The Battle of Moscow, 1941-1942 **



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It seemed that the Soviet Army, as desperate as they were, came up with victories when and where they needed them most. Stalingrad proved no exception to unfolding events along the East Front. Besieged by the German 6th Army (and backed by elements of the Italian, Hungarian and Romanian armies), the strategic Soviet city held out with minimal supplies and a dwindling band of defenders of the 62nd Army. German propaganda, based on the grand thrusts into and around Stalingrad, were already proclaiming victory for the German Army. By now, Hitler was all but committed to taking the city - at whatever cost necessary to ensure the German Army did not fail in a big way. Soldiers and supplies were pouring to the 6th Army to make sure the assault went Germany's way. German General Paulus was the man in charge. On the other side, Soviet Marshal Zhukov was planning his counteroffensive to help alleviate his beleaguered Stalingrad defenders. While a minimal number of supplies and replacements were sent into Stalingrad, Zhukov prepared his massive ground force a short distance away, committing whatever important elements came his way to the assault to come. Defense of Stalingrad now fell to a smallish pocket numbering some 5 miles across and contained in an industrial sector of the city, their backs against the Volga River. The Soviet winter nights set in and the environment now played against bodies and spirits of the 62nd Army. Despite all this, the defenders had repulsed a half-dozen or so offensives launched by the German 6th already.

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From the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), Hitler wanted to take the all-important port city of Leningrad - the revolutionary heart of the Soviet nation herself. Soviet offensives along other fronts forces a delay in the German advance so much so that the city and its citizens could enact lines of defense. The German allies in Finland took control of the Karelian isthmus to ensure the north was covered. The German Army arrived in the south and the stranglehold was in place. Volleying of control along various major fronts around the city saw supply routes closed and reopened and then closed again. During this time, the rations appropriated to the citizens of Leningrad had all but run out, effectively forcing the mass starvation of civilians. The frozen surface of Lake Ladoga was a prime route for Soviet forces and proved vital in supplying the dying city. The brutally cold north winters here made the lake passable for some time. The siege of Leningrad lasted until the spring 1943 to which thousands of Leningrad citizens died. Despite the hardship, the city was still beating with a heart of determination. As an industrial city, Leningrad continued to produce tanks and automatic weapons that were quickly sent to the frontlines for use against Germans. The Germans held fast for a time, ordering artillery barrages and aerial bombardments of the city in an attempt to break the will of the people and utterly burn Leningrad to the ground. A major Soviet offensive finally linked the city to the rest of the Soviet Union. The German Army, weary of constant combat and the brutal winters, was finally in retreat. Like other major Soviet campaigns in the war, success was ultimately theirs, however this coming at an extremely high cost in lives.

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Joseph Stalin was the second leader of the Soviet Union. His real name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, and he was also known as Koba (a Georgian folk hero) to his closest sphere. The name "Stalin" (derived from combining Russian stal, "steel" with "Lenin") originally was a conspirative nickname; however, it stuck to him and he continued to call himself Stalin after the [|Russian] Revolution. Stalin is also reported to have used at least a dozen other names for the purpose of secret communications, but for obvious reasons most of them remain unknown

Stalin spent his first years after the revolution building his post as general secretary secretly into the most powerful one in the communist party. After Lenin's death in 1924, a triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev governed against Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right wing of the party). Soon after, Stalin switched sides and joined with Bukharin. Together, they fought a new opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin's supremacy was complete. From this year, he could be said to have exercised control over the party and the country (although the formailities were not complete until the Great Purges of 1936-1938). The final stage of Stalin's rise to power was the ordered assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, where he had lived since 1936 (he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929.). Indeed, after Trotsky's death only two members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) remained - Stalin himself and his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Stalin consolidated his power base with the Great Purges against his political and ideological opponents, most notably the old cadres and the rank and file of the Bolshevik Party. Measures used against them ranged from imprisonment in work camps (Gulags) to assassination (such as that of Leon Trotsky and Sergei Kirov). Several show trials were held in Moscow, to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewere in the country. There were four key trials from 1936 to 1938, The Trial of the Sixteen was the first (December 1936); then the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); then the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938. Under the pretext of constructing `socialism in one country', Stalin terrorized large segments of the Soviet population, such as the Kulaks, a term for prosperous farmers who were disinherited when agriculture was collectivized. He also orchestrated a massive famine in the Ukraine in which an estimated 5 million people died. It is believed that with the purges, forced famines, state terrorism, labor camps, and forced migrations, Stalin was responsible for the death of as many as 40 million people within the borders of the Soviet Union. According to former National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stalin murdered an estimated 20 million people. In [|1939,] Stalin made the [|Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact] with [|Nazi] [|Germany] which divided [|Eastern Europe] between the two powers. The official Allied' version has been: In [|1941], however, [|Hitler] broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union (see [|Operation Barbarossa] ). Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance, but were ineffective against the advancing Nazi forces. Stalin was up to this point very wary of the Germans, and would not permit his armies to even assume defensive positions for fear of sending the wrong signals to Hitler. Up to the final moment, and the invasion by the Germans, he held out hope that the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact would buy him time to modernize and strengthen his military (recently weakened by purges). The Germans reached the outskirsts of Moscow in December, but were stopped by an early winter and a Soviet counter-offensive. At the battle of Stalingrad in [|1942] - [|43], after sacrificing an estimated 1 million men, the Red Army was able to regain the initiative of the war. With military eqipment aid of their allies the Soviet forces were able to regain their lost territory and push their over-stretched enemy back to Germany itself. From the end of [|1944] large sections of eastern Germany came under Stalin's Soviet Union occupation and on May 2, [|1945], the capital city [|Berlin] was taken. By some estimates, one quarter of the Russian population was wiped out in the war. There was, then, a huge shortage of men of the fighting-age generation in Russia. As a result, to this day, World War II is remembered very vividly in Russia, and May 9, Victory Day, is one of its biggest national holidays. Following World War II, Stalin continued his genocidal policies while exerting ruthless control over the Soviet Union and its satellite states until his death in 1953. More than 15 million Germans were removed from eastern Germany and pushed into central Germany (later called GDR German Democratic Republic) and western Germany (later called FRG Federal Republic of Germany). Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czech etc. were then moved onto German land. Other ethnic groups, like the Crimerian Tartars and Volga Germans, were moved to the Asian part of the Soviet Union. Millions of German POWs and Soviet ex-POWs were sent to the Gulags. The eastern European states occupied by the Red Army were established as communist Satellite states. Shortly before he died on March 5, 1953, Stalin accused nine doctors, six of them Jews, of [|plotting] to poison and kill the Soviet leadership.The innocent men were arrested and, at Stalin's personal instruction, tortured to obtain confessions. Stalin died days before their trial was to begin [Ed: added from Joseph Telushkin, //Jewish Literacy,// NY: William Morrow and Co., 1991].
 * Rise to power **
 * Purges and mass murders **
 * World War II **
 * Post-war era **

World War II began in Europe with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. For most of the next two years, German forces conquered or controlled much of continental Europe. At its height, German domination extended from the Atlantic coast of France to the Soviet city of Stalingrad on the Volga River; from the Arctic regions of Norway in the north to the deserts of North Africa. By the end of 1942, however, the Allies were on the offensive and ultimately drove back the German advance. The war in Europe ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945. - [] - ** ElizabethHammond **

media type="file" key="When_the_German_Army_Attacked.asf" width="300" height="300" - [] - ** ElizabethHammond **

media type="file" key="Cold_War__Blockade_Lifts_as_Big_4_Talk_Nears.asf" width="300" height="300" chelsea perez

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005164&MediaId=344 **ElizabethHammond

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/gallery_fi.php?ModuleId=10005164 - ElizabethHammond**