World War II: 70 Year Later Part 2

"...And so today, in this year of war, 1945, we have learned lessons—at a fearful cost—and
we shall profit by them. We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own
well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that
we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be
citizens of the world, members of the human community..."

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt on January 20th, 1945 in his Fourth Inaugural Address
The Axis Powers' begin to Lose

D-Day happened on June 6, 1944. It was planned for months. It came about via Soviet pressure. The Western
Allies on D-Day invaded Normandy on Omaha Beach. D-Day was successful, but a lot of Allied soldiers lost
their lives in the invasion. D-Day’s codename was Operation Neptune. The Allied invasion of Normandy
was the largest seaborne invasion in history. The Allies prepared for months for this invasion and tried to
mislead the Germans as to the date and location of the main Allied landings (which was codenamed
Operation Bodyguard). Hitler made German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to be in command of the German
forces. Rommel created fortifications along the Atlantic Wall since they knew that the Allied invasion was
coming. Group Captain James Stagg (or the Royal Air Force of the RAF) met with General Eisenhower to
discuss about the best time to invade from a weather standpoint. Before the amphibious landings, there
were extensive aerial and naval bombardments including an airborne assault. The landing of about 24,000
British, U.S., and Canadian airborne troops came about shortly after midnight. In 01:00, the first Navy hands
are ordered to man battle stations. The landing craft begin to be lowered into the water and paratroopers
cut phone lines and knock down telephone poles. In 0:300, Gliders begin to reinforce the paratroops. 9
minutes later, German radar detects Allied invasion fleet so Admiral Krancke of Germany ordered shore
batteries to prepare for invasion. At sunrise in 05:20, bombers drop bombs on German targets. Allied infantry
and armored divisions landed on the coast of France at 06:30.

The Allies divided the Normandy coast into five sectors of: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword Beach.
When the soldiers landed on the beach, they faced heavy gunfire from the Nazis. Omaha had the most
causalities. The beach was very dangerous, but courageous men fought the Nazis. Also, the Allies work with
the French Resistance movement (like the État-major des Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur or the London
based Forces of the Interior) to fight the Nazis in various locations in France during D-Day too. The Allies had
victory in Normandy, because German preparations weren’t finished, Germans were confused on what to
defend, the Allied had better air fighting resources, and transport infrastructure in France was disrupted (by
Allied bombers and the French Resistance. This made it hard for the Nazis to bring up reinforcements and
supplies). In total, D-Day consisted over 160,000 Allied troops and about 30,000 vehicles landing along a 50
mile stretch of fortified French coastline. The Allies were victorious. The Germans had 1,000 casualties while
Allied casualties were at least 10,000 human beings with 4,414 confirmed dead. Museums, war cemeteries,
and memorials are in the area today to commemorate the sacrifice of the Allies forces on D-Day.
After reassigning several Allied divisions from Italy, the Allies also attacked southern France. The landings
were successful and this led to the defeat of the German Army units in France. Paris was liberated by the
local resistance assisted by the Free French Forces, both led by General Charles de Gaulle on August 25,
1944. The Western Allies continued to push back German forces in Western Europe during the latter part of
the year. There was a failed attempt to advance into northern Germany spearheaded by a major airborne
operation in the Netherlands. So, the Western Allies slowly pushed into Germany. They unsuccessfully tried
to cross the Rur River in a large offensive. In Italy, the Allied advance slowed down when they ran into the
last major German defensive line. June 22, 1944 was the date when the Soviets started a strategic offensive
in Belarus (called Operation Bagration). This caused the almost complete destruction of the Germany Army
Group Center.

Soon after that, there was another Soviet strategic offensive forced German troops from Western Ukraine
and Eastern Poland. The successful advance of Soviet troops promoted resistance forces in Poland to initiate
several uprisings. The largest uprising would be in Warsaw where German soldiers massacred 200,000
civilians. There was the national Slovak Uprising in the south. It didn’t receive Soviet support and it was put
down by the Nazis. The Red Army used the wise, strategic offensive in eastern Romania. That cut off and
destroyed the many German troops there. A successful coup d’état came about in Romania and in Bulgaria.
This caused both nations to join the Allied side. The liberation of Paris by the Allies comes about in August
25, 1944. On that day, General Charles de Gaulle leads the victory parade in Paris. German POWs are led
through the streets with their hands on top of their heads.

In September 1944, the Soviet Red Army troops came into Yugoslavia and forced the rapid withdrawal of the
German Army Groups E and F in Greece, Albania, and Yugoslavia to rescue them from being cut off. Marshal
Josip Broz Tito led the Communist Partisans in Yugoslavia. What he did was that he led an increasingly
successful guerilla campaign against the occupation since 1941. He controlled much of Yugoslavia. His forces
delayed efforts against German forces south too. The Red Army with limited Bulgarian support assisted the
Partisans in a joint liberating of the capital city of Belgrade in October 20. Days later, the Soviets launched a
massive assault against German-occupied Hungary that lasted until the fall of Budapest in February of 1945.
There were massive Soviet victories in the Balkans. Yet, there was massive Finnish resistance to the Soviet
offensive in the Karelian Isthmus. There would be no Soviet occupation of Finland, so both sides signed a
Soviet-Finnish armistice on relatively mild conditions. Finland would join the Allied side.

In the Pacific, on July 1944, Commonwealth forces in Southeast Asia had repelled the Japanese sieges in
Assam. This pushed the Japanese back to the Chindwin River. By July 27, 1944, the Allies liberated Guam. The
Chinese captured Myitkyina. In China, the Japanese were having greater successes. The Japanese finally
captured Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang by early August. Soon after, they further invaded
the province of Guangxi, winning major engagements against Chinese forces at Guilin and Liuzhou by the
end of November and successfully linking up their forces in China and Indochina by the middle of December.
In the Pacific, the American forces continued to press back the Japanese perimeter. In mid-June 1944 they
began their offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands, and decisively defeated Japanese forces in the
Battle of the Philippine Sea. These defeats led to the resignation of the Japanese Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo,
and provided the United States with air bases to launch intensive heavy bomber attacks on the Japanese
home islands. In late October, American forces invaded the Filipino island of Leyte; soon after, Allied naval
forces scored another large victory during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval battles in history.
Historic Conferences and Agreements
US-USSR Mutual Aid Agreement (1942): This agreement was formed in order to allow the United States to
aid the USSR in military and other supplies in order for the Nazis and the rest of the Axis Powers to be
defeated.

Casablanca Conference (1943): This Conference dealt with the Allied Powers deciding on what to do in the
future in defeating the Axis enemies. In other words, it was meeting to outline the next phase of World War
II. It was held in the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, French Morocco. It lasted from January 14 to 24, 1943.
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill attended the meeting. Other people who attended were Generals
Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud (who represented the Free French forces). Primer Joseph Stalin didn’t
attend since he had to support the Soviet troops fighting the Nazis in Stalingrad. All parties agreed with to
support Chiang Kai-Shek in his usage of the Chinese armies to defeat the Japanese occupation of China.
They promise aid to the Soviets in their fighting against Germany. They united with the French to defeat the
Axis. They were unified in desiring the defeat of Germany and Japan. This conference promoted the ideal
that all Axis Powers must be defeated in terms of "unconditional surrender" which was controversial as
time went on in the war.

Moscow Conference (1943): This Conference took place in the Kremlin and the Spiridonovka Palace from
October 18 to November 1943. It was made up of a series of meetings between the foreign ministers of the
United States (like Cordell Hull), the United Kingdom (like Anthony Eden), China (like Foo Ping-sheung), and
the Soviet Union (like Vyacheslav Molotov). The meeting involved discussions about the necessity to end
the war with the Axis and to go forward as the war is over. It favored restoring democracy in Italy. They
wanted Austria to be liberated and they condemned the war crimes done by the Nazis and other Axis forces
during the war. The statement on Atrocities by the Axis Powers was signed by President Roosevelt, Prime
Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Stalin.
Cairo Conference (1943): The meeting happened from November 22-26, 1943. This conference dealt with
the Allies and Japan during World War II. It also related to the decisions about postwar Asia. The
Conference was held by Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Stalin didn't
attend, because Chiang was attending, which could cause friction between the Soviet Union and Japan.
Back in 1943, there was the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941. It was a five year agreement of
neutrality among both nations. The Soviets were not at war with Japan during 1943. Yet, the U.S., China,
and the U.K. were at war with Japan. The conference took place at a residence of the American
Ambassador to Egypt (Alexander Kirk) near the Pyramids. They decided that Japan must have
“unconditional surrender” via a military defeat. They agreed to want all lands stolen from the Chinese
(which would include Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores) to be restored to the Republic of China.
They wanted Japan expelled from all territories that were taken by them.

Teheran Conference (1943): This conference was codenamed “Eureka.” It was held from November 28 to
December 1, 1943. It was held in the Soviet Union’s embassy in Tehran, Iran. This was a strategy meeting
held among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill. This was the first major conference
where all three nations would talk about future of WWII. All three leaders had differing objectives. The
Soviets wanted more support and the Allies to target France on the Western front. The British wanted a
gradual push in Western Europe with the maintenance of the British Empire colonies. America wanted
continued support in the Pacific and for the Soviets to invade Japan. Stalin coordinated the conference,
because the Soviets won the decisive Battle of Kursk. All three men agreed with support the Yugoslav
Partisans. They desired Turkey to fight for the Allied side by the end of the year. The Allies would invade
France to free them from Vichy Nazi occupation by May 1944. Also, all three countries would keep close
touch with each other regarding future operations in Europe.

The Second Quebec Conference (1944): This meeting was a high level military conference from September
12, 1944 to September 16, 1944. The first one was in August of 1943. The chief represents were Winston
Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt including the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Canada’s Prime Minister William
Lyon Mackenzie King was the host but didn’t attend the key meetings. All parties agreed to form Allied
occupation zones in defeated Germany. They wanted the Morgenthau Plan to demilitarize Germany and
the continued U.S. Lend-Lease aid to British. They talked about the role of the Royal Navy in the war against
Japan.

Yalta Conference (1945): This conference was one of the most important, historic conferences of World
War II. This was the last major international conference of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It lasted from
February 4 to 11, 1945. It was held in the Livadia Palace near Yalta in the Crimea. It was codenamed “the
Argonaut Conference.” The meeting included Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Also, there were other people
there too. There was the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Motolov. Other British people included Field
Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, RN, Marshall of the RAF Sir Charles
Portal. There were the Americans there like General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States
army, and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, USN. The Yalta Conference was about the discussions of how to
deal with post-war Europe, establishing in dealing with Germany and Poland. America, the UK, and the
Soviet Union were called the Big Three too. The meeting discussed about the issue of the re-establishment
of nations of war torn Europe. Stalin by this time has conquered most of the Nazis forces on the Eastern
front. Soviet forces were in Poland and in parts of Romania. Red Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s forces
were only 40 miles from Berlin. Roosevelt wanted Russia to participate in the United Nations. Churchill was
always suspicious of Stalin. He just didn’t trust Stalin, because of ideological reasons.

Roosevelt also wanted Soviet support in the U.S. Pacific War. Churchill (including Roosevelt) wanted Stalin
to get free elections and democratic governments in Eastern and Central Europe, especially in Poland.
Stalin wanted a Soviet sphere of political influence in Eastern and Central Europe as he didn’t want the
Nazis to reestablish themselves ever again. Churchill supported the Polish government's in exile demands
while Stalin rejected them and wanted an independent Poland on his terms. Stalin promised to Roosevelt
that the Soviet Union will enter the war against Japan. The Soviets agreed to join the United Nations (given
that permanent nations in the UN had veto power in making decisions). Back then, the Red Army occupied
Poland and it held much of Eastern Europe. The Soviets had three times greater military power than the
Allied forces in the West. All three nations agreed to form post war occupation zones for Germany (in 3
zones, one of each for the three principal Allies). They gave France a zone of occupation and carved out of
U.S. and UK zones. They agreed that the Nazis must have unconditional surrender. Berlin was to be split in
four occupied zones. Germany must have demilitarization and denazification. Germany must pay
reparations in the form of forced labor. All agreed with Nazi war criminals being hunted down and brought
to justice. The Polish government, which was communist, was to be reorganized into a broader democratic
basis. The Polish eastern border would follow the Curzon Line, and Poland would receive territorial
compensation in the West from Germany. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Morgenthau had different ideas on the
division of Germany after WWII, but the eventual partition of Germany would include 4 zones (British,
French, American, and the Soviet). Other territories of Germany were annexed by other nations.

Stalin promised free elections in Poland. Stalin agreed to fight the Empire of Japan in the future. Roosevelt
at first was trusting of Stalin to follow the agreement. Stalin was fearful of Western suspicions. By March
21, Roosevelt's Ambassador to the USSR Averell Harriman cabled Roosevelt that "we must come clearly to
realize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and
democracy as we know it." Two days later, Roosevelt began to admit that his view of Stalin had been
excessively optimistic and that "Averell is right." Yet, FDR cabled to the Soviet leader on April 5: “It would
be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory, now within our grasp, such
distrust, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life, material
and treasure involved. Frankly I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers,
whoever they are, of such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”

A recent biographer of Lippmann summed up the columnist’s overall appreciation of the FDR policy in early
1945: “At Yalta FDR thought he had laid the groundwork for a durable peace. Stalin had agreed to enter the
war against Japan, to allow free elections in Eastern Europe, and to accept the American formula for a
United Nations resting on a great-power veto and spheres of influence. The United States would stand as
mediator between the rival imperialisms of Britain and Russia. With its overwhelming economic strength,
its predominance in Latin America, its undisputed naval power in the Pacific, its incomparable industrial and
military machine, its control over the world’s raw materials, the United States would have nothing to fear
from a devastated and war-impoverished Russia. This great scheme would all be codified in May, Roosevelt
thought, in San Francisco with the creation of the United Nations.” [Steel, p. 417] On the day of his death,
FDR did something progressive again. He sent Stalin a conciliatory cable from Warm Springs in which he
dismissed the Italian “secret surrender” controversy as a “minor misunderstanding” between Moscow and
Washington. Harriman refused to send that cable to Stalin. So, Harriman, Stimson, and others wanted
massive tensions between American and the Soviets, which ultimately caused the Cold War.
FDR knew of the errors of Stalin in his violations of democratic rights of many peoples, but he wanted
cooperation instead of conflict with the Soviets. In a telegram to Churchill on April 11, he wrote: "I would
minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another,
seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out as is the case of the Bern meeting"—a suspicion
by Moscow that the Allies were trying to cut a separate deal with German forces based in Italy. "We must
be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct." So, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted peace not
excessive tensions with the Soviet Union. The American view was reflected in the final Yalta agreement:
“The Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland should…be reorganized on a broader
democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad. This
new Government should then be called the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity.”

The pro-Soviet Lublin Polish government delayed in the free elections causing tensions. Later, many Eastern
European nations were occupied by the Soviets and turned into Soviet-controlled satellite states.
Eventually the United States and the United Kingdom made concessions in recognizing the then
Communist-dominated regions. All Allied Powers agreed with the Statement on liberated Europe.
Reactionaries today denounce Yalta to this very day as a giveaway to Stalin. Yet, the Yalta Agreement was a
realistic acknowledgement of how Europe was. Yalta didn’t give Stalin all of Eastern Europe, because
Eastern Europe was already heavily controlled or influenced by the Soviet Union in the first place. It would
be foolish for the US and the UK to fight the Soviets during Yalta since the Soviets had sacrificed their blood
to end Nazi oppression (and the Red Army has more military power than the rest of the Allied forces in
Europe during that time of early 1945. THE US AND THE UK didn’t have the military forces during that time
to defeat the Soviets completely anyway). Yalta would go down as an important meeting and a prelude to
Potsdam.
Postdam Conference (1945): This Conference lasted from July 17 to August 2, 1945. The meeting included
President Harry Truman, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and Communist Party
General Secretary Joseph Stalin. The world has changed since Yalta. The conference was held at Cecillenhof,
which was the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern (in Potsdam, occupied Germany). The
conference session included also Ernest Bevin, Molotov, William D. Leahy, Joseph E. Davies, and James F.
Byrnes. Times have changed. Churchill lost the election to Attlee, so Attlee was there too. The Potsdam
meeting about the Allied powers talking about post-war order, peace treaty issues, Germany, Poland, and
Indochina (or Vietnam). Churchill by this time continued his distrust of Stalin. The Soviet Union was
occupying Eastern and Central Europe. Stalin formed a communist government in Poland. President Harry
Truman was the new President after the passing of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945. Truman was
more on Churchill’s side on his views of the Soviets. Truman didn’t trust the Soviets that much and his
views were influenced by Harriman and Stimson including Byrnes. Truman was much more suspicious
about communist actions than Roosevelt was.
The Allies agreed to temporarily partition Vietnam at the 17th parallel (just North of Da Nang). British
forces would take the southern half of Vietnam while the northern half would be ruled by the Chinese. On
Germany, all sides agreed firmly. The Allies divided Germany via demilitarization, denazification,
democratically, decentralization, and decartelization. Germany and Austria would be divided into four
occupation zones. Berlin and Vienna would be divided into four zones too. They agreed to prosecute Nazi
war criminals. The German annexations of Europe would continue. Germany’s industry and agricultural
would never be used for explicit military purposes to. The agreement would make Poland a provisional
Government of National Unity (recognized by all three powers). The Polish government in exile wasn’t
recognized. Poles who were serving in the British Army should be free to return to Poland, with no security
upon their return to the communist country guaranteed. During the time, Truman had allowed the testing
of the atomic bomb in New Mexico. Truman had mentioned an unspecified "powerful new weapon" to
Stalin during the conference. Towards the end of the conference, Japan was given an ultimatum to
surrender (in the name of the United States, Great Britain and China) or meet "prompt and utter
destruction", which did not mention the new bomb. Truman was happy at the conference. On July 26,
1945, Churchill, Truman, and Chiang Kai-Shek (or the Chairman of the Nationalist Government of China)
issued the Potsdam Declaration which outlined the terms of surrender for Japan during World War II in
Asia. The many nations of the Baltic and Eastern Europe would be converted into Soviet Satellite states. In
essence, the Potsdam conference set the stage for the Cold War.
The Election of 1944
The Election of 1944 was one of the most important elections in American history as it was in the midst of
the end of World War II. During the quadrennial Presidential election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
defeated Republican Thomas E. Dewey on Tuesday, November 7, 1944. Before the election, President
Roosevelt had mass popularity and support because of his foreign and domestic policies. The New Deal
helped millions to escape poverty and mass starvation. The economy has grown massively as compared to
1933. FDR was re-nominated as President easily in the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Virginia Harry F.
Byrd refused to campaign against Roosevelt. In the convention, pro-segregationists, Wall Street interests,
and other anti-progressive abhorred Roosevelt’s political views, especially the New Deal (To this very
day, the reactionaries oppose many parts of the New Deal from Ted Cruz to Tea Party members). There
was one big controversy during the 1944 Democratic Convention. It was the election of who would be the
Vice Presidential candidate will be. At the time, Henry Wallace was the Vice President. Yet, conservatives
didn’t agree with his progressive views on race (as Henry Wallace opposed Jim Crow apartheid and he
criticized racism outright) and his views on economics. Wallace called for a worldwide “people’s revolution”
to end tyranny and oppression in the world. So, the conservative Democrats decided to act and prevent
Wallace from being the Vice President nominee. They failed in 1940 before when Henry Wallace was made
Vice President (as a product of pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt and others). Wallace was even spied by
Roald Dahl (who worked for British Intelligence, whose head was William Stephenson), because Henry
Wallace made critical statements against European colonialism.

Henry Wallace was very popular in America and throughout the world. He visited Costa Rica with great
support shown by the Costa Rican people. People knew that President Roosevelt’s health was failing him
and that the Vice President would replace him if he passed away while in office. So, the pro-Wall Street
crowd, the segregationists, the Democratic Party bosses, and other reactionaries acted to stop Wallace
from getting the Vice President spot. So, the reactionaries did an action called “Pauley’s coup” named after
Democratic party Treasurer and oil millionaire Edwin Pauley. This plan was executed by many Democratic
Party bosses like Mayor Edward Kelly of Chicago, Edwin Pauley, Edward Lynn of the Bronx, the National
Democratic Party chairman Robert Hennegan, and others. These party bosses chose the mostly unknown
Harry Truman (who was from Missouri, he was a Senator, and he was an ally of the Prendergast political
machine). Wallace had massive support in the floor at first. Then, Florida Senator Claude Pepper tried to
run to the get his name to support Wallace’s nomination. Pepper failed to go to the microphone to tell
about his support of Wallace. The, Mayor Kelly said that there was a fire hazard and the meeting was
adjourned by Senator Samuel Jackson (Jackson later apologized to Pepper saying to him that orders from
Hannegan wanted him to prevent Wallace from being nominated as VP). The Democratic Party bosses soon
made backroom deals and after the third ballot, Harry Truman was nominated as Vice President for the
Democratic ticket as they party bosses viewed Wallace as too liberal. If Henry Wallace was nominated as
Vice President, he would have been President in 1945 and the country could have been in a more
progressive direction.

By the end of 1944, as the image shows, the Allied Powers heavily defeated the evil Axis Powers.
For the Republican aside, many Republican Party candidates by 1944 included Governor Thomas E. Dewey
of New York, Governor John W. Bircker of Ohio, General Douglas MacArthur of New York, Harold Stassen of
Minnesota, Representative Everett Dirksen of Illinois, and Businessman Wendell Willkie of New York.
Robert Taft supported the conservative John W. Bricker. Many Republicans supported General MacArthur,
but he was leading Allied forces in Japan at the time. Thomas E. Dewey was ultimately nominated as the
Presidential candidate. Dewey was a moderate Republican and the Republican National Convention took
place in Chicago. The Republicans campaigned against the New Deal as they wanted smaller government
and a less regulated economy. Yet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the election in a landslide. He spoke
nationally. He spoke to labor union leaders. He had poor health, but he had a happy attitude throughout his
1944 election campaign. Roosevelt criticized the Republican claim that he had sent an U.S. Navy warship to
pick up his Scottish Terrier Fala in Alaska. He said that “Fala was furious” at such rumors. Many people have
shown laughter and applause at the speech. Dewey responded with a speech in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
on national radio accusing Roosevelt of being "indispensable" to corrupt big-city Democratic organizations
and American Communists; he also referred to members of Roosevelt's cabinet as a "motley crew." Yet,
Dewey lost. There were American battlefield successes in Europe and the Pacific during the campaign like
the liberation of Paris in August of 1944 and the successful Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October
of 1944. Roosevelt was unbeatable. The Socialist Norman Thomas ran for President too. Roosevelt won 36
states while Dewey only won 12 states. Most Americans supported Franklin Roosevelt to continue his
policies overseas and domestically. By the end of the 1944 Presidential campaign, President Franklin
Roosevelt and Vice President Harry Truman would be victorious.

The Axis Collapses and the Allied Victory

By late 1944, the Axis Powers were about to be defeated. Germany attempted its last desperate measure for
the success on the Western Front on December 16, 1944 by using most of its remaining reserves to launch
massive counter-offensives in the Ardennes. The Nazis wanted to split the Western Allies, and then encircle
large portions of Western Allied troops. In that way, the Nazis would capture their primary supply port at
Antwerp and prompt a political settlement. Yet, the Allies wanted the Axis enemy to have a complete
surrender. The Battle of the Bulge lasted from December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945. It involved one
major, desperate offensive made by the Nazis in order for them to try to force a treaty with the Allies while
still fighting the Soviets. The conflict took place in the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallaonia (in
Belgium, France, and Luxembourg) on the Western Front. The Americans were happy to liberate Paris and
many parts of France. The Canadians and the English took the port city of Antwerp while the Americans (with
Generals like Patton and Eisenhower) were targeting the Rhone River with German territory just beyond.
Hitler wanted to go to the port city of Antwerp and disrupt the Allied front (by disrupting their much needed
supply lines along with way). On December 16th, 1945, the Nazis executed their massive offensive first.
German 5th and 15th Panzer armies and the 6th and 7th Army (in about 250,000 Nazi troops and fiver
panzer or tank divisions) attacked the US VII forces in a line between Aachen and Bastogne.

This German surprise attack surprised the Allies. Many contingents like the U.S. 2nd Division at Elsenborn
and the 99th Division at Malmedy held their ground. The Nazis push into the Allied lines 50 miles causing a
bulge. The battle of the Bulge was filled with snow. The Allied and the Axis Powers would fight at the small
town of Bastogne. The Allied forces were dug in for weeks in strong fighting. U.S. General Omar Bradley sent
General Courtney Hodges’ 1st Army and General Patton’s 4th Armored Division to the town to head off
further German advance. The 101st Airborne was airdropped into Bastogne to aid in its defense. The 82nd
Airborne took the task in St. Vith. The Allies lines were fractured and independent defenses soon sprung
about.

There were poor weather conditions, so air support would not come immediately. On December 17th, 1944,
Allied prisoners of war are executed in cold blood by elements of the 6th SS Panzer Army in the Malmedy
Massacre. Over 80 U.S. prisoners of war (from the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion) were killed in
cold blood by the order of German Colonel Joachim Peiper in the Malmedy Massacre. The Nazis captured
the town of Stavelot in the same day of the 17th too. 2 days later, 2 components making up the U.S. 106th
Division at the Schnee Eiffel region are surrounded by the Nazis. About 6,000 Allied troops surrendered to
the encircling Germany Army at Schnee Eiffel on December 19, 1944. Then, the U.S. forces use a massive
counter attack and recaptured the town of Stavelot, Belgium on December 21, 1944. The Germans captured
St. Vith on December 21, 1944. In December 23nd, 2,000 Allied air sorties launched attacks against the
Germans on the ground. One day after Christmas 1944, the American 4th Armored Division (under
General George Patton) made its way to the beleaguered 101st Airborne at Bastogne and the
situation in the village is stabilized. Hitler refused to retreat at this point.

On December 31, 1944, U.S. troops recaptured Rochefort, Belgium, and the U.S. Army began an offensive
from Bastogne. British General Montgomery’s 29th Armored Brigade met up with the American 2nd
Armored Division to hold the point of deepest German penetration in check later on. On January 1, 1945, the
Germans begin to withdrawal from the Ardennes Forest in the Belgian-German border region. U.S. forces
massacred 30 SS prisoners at Chenogne in retaliation for the Malmedy massacre. The German Luftwaffe
aircraft failed to defeat the Allied forces. On January 12, U.S. and British Forces link up near La Roche-en-
Ardenne. By January 28, 1945, the Nazis are finished pushed out of the Ardennes. The Battle of the Bulge was
the last of the major German offensives in the war. It was a bloody war. This Battle would cause about
89,900 casualties (including 19,000 killed Americans, 47,500 wounded Americans, and 23,000
captured or killed Americans). The British had 1,408 casualties (including 200 British people killed,
969 British people wounded, and 239 British people missing). The Allies gained all the territory they had
in December of 1944. The victory of the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge meant that the war was definitely
soon to be over in a matter of months (with the Axis forces being defeated in Europe).
 These are very heroic black women. The left image has Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Harriet Ida Pickens on the
left side and the Sister to the right side is Ensign Frances Wills Thorpe. They are the first black American
women sworn in WAVES or the United States Naval Reserve (Women’s Reserve) on the date of December 22,
1944. 72 black women served in WAVES during World War II. The image on the center is of the woman
Ensign Phyllis Daley. The picture in the middle is from the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper on March 17,
1945. She was the first African American nurse in the Navy. The image to the far right shows African
American Women’s Army Corps veteran Violet Hill Askins Gordon. She served during World War II. She lived
in Chicago before she served. Violet and her unit was the only all-African American women unit to serve
overseas in England and France during the Second World War. She worked hard in the WAC. She celebrated
her 100th year birthday on 2016.
 She was Roza Shanina or Роза Шанина (1924–1945). She was a Soviet sniper during World War II. She was
very accurate with her shooting and was involved in the Battle of Vilnius. She was the first Soviet woman sniper to
rd
be awarded the Order of Glory and was the first servicewoman of the 3 Byelorussian Front to receive it.

January 27, 1945 was when the Red Army of the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz. On January of 1945, the
offensive was repulsed with no strategic objectives fulfilled. In Italy, the Western Allies remained stalemated
at the German defensive line. In mid-January 1945, the Soviets and the Polish people attacked in Poland.
They went from the Vistula to the Oder River in Germany and overran East Prussia. February 4, 1945 was the
date when U.S., British, and Soviet leaders met for Yalta Conference. The Allies forces agreed on the
occupation of post-war Germany and on when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan via Yalta.
On February 1945, the Soviets would go into Silesia and Pomerania. The Western allies finally go into
western Germany and closed to the Rhine River.
 One of the most brutal war crimes during WWII was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. It
happened on February 13, 1945. Germany was in ruins already. Without warning, Churchill ordered U.S.
and British bombers to drop about 3,900 tons of incendiary bombs on the non-combatant hospital city. It had
refugees fleeing from other destroyed cities. The bombs ignited a massive firestorm killing thousands of
human beings. It was a massacre of huge propositions and it was an overt war crime. The first stage of
firebombing stopped in February 15, 1945. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600
acres (6.5 km2) of the city center. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF
air raids followed, two occurring on March 2 and 17 April 17, 1945 aimed at the city's railroad marshaling
yard and one small raid on April 17 aimed at industrial areas. We should never forget Dresden.

On March 7, 1945, the Allies take Cologne and establish a bridge across the Rhine at Remagen. The U.S. 1st
Army soldiers and equipment poured across the Remagen bridge to Germany. They crossed the Rhine River
under heavy German fire and then the Allies succeeded in their actions. By March, the Western Allies cross
the Rhine north and south of the Ruhr. In that way, they encircled the Germany Army Group B while the
Soviets advanced to Vienna. On early April 1945, the Western Allies pushed forward in Italy and swept across
western Germany. The Soviet and Polish forces stormed Berlin in late April of 1945. Many Soviet troops
raped women in Berlin, which was evil. Rape is wrong and the rape of Berlin women should always be
condemned.
 FDR’s funeral procession was historic in Washington D.C. This picture shows about 300,000 people
watching this procession in D.C. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away in Warm Springs,
Georgia on April 12, 1945. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s passing was a shock to millions of
Americans. His life shows us that we will continue to promote the freedom of speech, the freedom of
worship, the freedom from want, and other true democratic rights. He was buried in the Springwood
estate in Hyde Park, New York.

These are Americans and Soviet forces meeting each other in April of 1945.

The American and Soviet forces linked up on the Elbe River on April 25, 1945. On April 30, 1945, the
Reichstag was captured, which signaled the military defeat of the Third Reich. Many changes in leadership
came about during this period. On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away. Harry
Truman is now the new President. Also, on April 12, 1945, Allied forces from America liberate the
Buchenwald and Belsen concentration camps. What they saw horrified them. They see massive stacks of
human bodies being dead and human survivors starving for food. There were a truckload of bodies from the
Buchenwald concentration camp. The Nazis were about to burn them, but the troops from the U.S. 3rd Army
came to liberate the camp. One survivor is Elie Wiesel who would be a Nobel Peace Prize recipient in the
future. He is a great author. In April, the Allies discover stolen Nazi art and wealth found in German salt
mines. Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower, along with Generals Bradley and Patton, inspected art
treasures stolen by the Nazis and hidden in underground salt mines. The Reichsbank wealth, SS loot, and
Berlin museum paintings that were removed from Berlin to a salt mine in Merkers, Germany. The Nazis also
stole wealth including art from Jewish people too. The Nazis were evil criminals and thieves.

Benito Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans on April 28, 1945. 2 days later, Hitler committed suicide and
was succeeded by Grand Admiral Karl Donitz. German forces surrendered in Italy on April 29. Total and
unconditional surrender was signed on May 7, 1945, which was to be effective by the end of May 8th. The
Germany Army Croup Centre resisted in Prague until May 11.

The person to the right is Dan Akee. He is an actual Navajo Code Taker of the Dine Nation. Code
Talkers (or Wind talkers) were Native Americans who used codes (via a secretive language that the
Japanese couldn’t decipher) as a means for the Allies to adequately fight the Japanese in the Pacific
theater. He served with the 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division from 1943-1945 as a Navajo
Code Talker. Sergeant Major Dan Akee also served at Iwo Jima, Saipan and Tinan, Marshall Islands.

The end of the war in the Pacific was very brutal. In the Pacific theater, American forces worked with the
Philippine Commonwealth forces to advance in the Philippines. They fought in Leyte by the end of April of
1945. They landed on Luzon in January of 1945 and captured Manila in March following a battle, which
reduced the city to ruins. There was fighting in Luzon, Mindanao, and other islands of the Philippines until
the end of the war. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, B-29 bombers of the US Army Air Forces struck Tokyo
with incendiary bombs which killed 100,000 people in a few hours. That was an obscene war crime. Over the
next few months, American bombers firebombed 66 other Japanese cities. This caused the destruction of
untold numbers of buildings and the deaths of between 350,000 to 500,000 Japanese civilians. In May 1945,
Australian troops have landed in Borneo, over running the oilfields there. By March, British, American, and
Chinese forces defeated the Japanese in northern Burma. The British reached Rangoon by May 3. Chinese
forces started to counterattack in the Battle of Hunan that happened between April 6th and June 7th, 1945.
American forces moved towards Japan. U.S. troops take Iwo Jima by March and Okinawa by the end of June.
At the same time American bombers were destroying Japanese cities, American submarines cut off Japanese
imports. This reduced dramatically Japan’s ability to supply its overseas forces.

The Philippines were liberated by July 5, 1945. July 11, 1945 would be
when Allied leaders would meet in Potsdam, Germany. They
confirmed earlier agreements about Germany and wanted
unconditionally surrender for all Japanese forces in Japan. The
Japanese government was conflicted on whether to make peace now
or later. On early August 1945, the United States dropped atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the past two decades, we have
more than enough research to document how military experts said
that it was unnecessary to drop atomic weapons in Japan since the
Japanese were nearly defeated and the changing of the unconditional This image shows General Douglas
surrender proposal would have ended the war sooner. Thousands of MacArthur landing at Leyte, during
Japanese died as a product of the drops of two atomic bombs, which the Battle of Leyte on October 20,
was totally evil. Between the two bombings, the Soviets fulfilled their 1944.
promise in the Yalta agreement by invading Japanese-held Manchuria
and quickly defeated the Kwantung Army. That was the largest Japanese fighting force. The Red Army also
captured the Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. By August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered. The surrender
documents finally were signed abroad the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri on September 2,
1945. This ended the war completely.

VE Day
This was the time when people celebrated the Nazis formally surrendering to
the Allied Powers. The date is on May 8, 1945.
The Atomic Bomb

The dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States were one of the most
controversial and devastating actions of World War II. The myth that Japan was not going to surrender has
been exposed by documentaries, authors, military generals, and historical scholars especially in the past 20
years. Today, we know a greater amount of information about the atomic weapons program and the attacks
in Japan. To start, we must begin with the origins of the atomic weapons program of America. America
began the program first in fear of the Nazis having nuclear weapons technology, which could be used
against Americans, etc. Yet, the Nazis abandoned atomic weapons research early on during WWII. In
December 1938, German physicists split the uranium atom. Many feared that the Nazis would have this
technology. Therefore, Albert Einstein, Szilard, and Eugene Wigner wrote letters to President Roosevelt to
create a program to establish an atomic bomb. FDR agreed to start it. Later, Einstein said (to chemist Linus
Pauling) that he regretted sending Roosevelt a letter in favor of establishing an atomic bomb, because of its
savage nature. At first, the process of creating such a bomb in America was slow. Wartime science
administrator James Conant put Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton to work on the bomb
design. First, scientists have to be called up like J. Robert Oppenheimer (who was a charismatic theoretical
physicist. He admitted that he had ties to Communist organizations and he was a strong progressive person),
Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe. In Met Lab in the city of Chicago, scientists were successful in creating the
first nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. They were lucky that they didn’t blow up the city of
Chicago.

Next, we have the establishment of the Manhattan Project being created by Americans in Los Alamos, New
Mexico. This project was headed by Brigadier General Leslie Groves. Groves and Oppenheimer worked
together, but each man had different personalities. Groves was conservative and Oppenheimer was more
progressive. Groves had a more angry personality. Groves’ assistant was Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols.
When Roosevelt passed away, Truman was President. Truman was heavily influenced by Stimson and others
who never trusted the Soviet Union. Truman was notified about the atomic bomb development program.
Scientists exploded the atomic bomb for the first time on July 16, 1945. It happened in the desert outside of
Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Trinity test exceeded expectation. It was an 18.6 kiloton blast.

Oppenheimer said the following when he thought about the test: “…I am become death, destroyer of
worlds.”

Groves gloated over the test as being great. Truman soon heard word of it. Truman never really trusted the
Soviet Union. Truman wanted to use the bomb as leverage against the Soviet Union, so the Soviets would be
subordinate to U.S. interests involving WWII and beyond. The Soviets planned to invade Japan, but the
Soviets didn’t trust Churchill who was bellicose against the Soviets for years. Roosevelt was more conciliatory
and moderate when dealing with the Soviet Union, which is why FDR called Stalin “Uncle Joe.” Japanese
leadership desired to surrender only if the unconditional surrender proposal from the U.S. was eliminated
including the elimination of the imprisonment of the Emperor of Japan. The U.S. would not budge and
refused any concessions on the unconditional surrender language. Politicians and scientists from America
tried to inspire Truman to not drop the bomb. Truman refused and he decided to drop it. Truman was
influenced by Byrnes and Stimson, who were reactionaries on foreign policy matters. Byrnes was an outright
racist and segregationist.

Even Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Douglas MacArthur opposed the decision to drop atomic weapons
in Japan. In 1989, historian Gar Alperovitz reported, “American leaders knew well in advance that the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not required to bring about Japan’s surrender;” and later, in his
847-page The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Random House, 1995), “I think it can be proven that the
bomb was not only unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary.” The popular myth “didn’t just
happen,” Alperovitz says, “it was created.” Adm. William Leahy, the wartime Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, wrote in 1950, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was
of no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to
surrender.” Japan by 1945 was on the verge of defeat with their cities and towns being massively bombed. A
simple change in the surrender terms could have caused Japan to surrender much earlier than September of
1945. On July 25, 1945, U.S. General Carl Spaatz, Commander of the Strategic Air Force in the Pacific
received directive to drop the atomic bomb in Japan. Enola Gay was the plane that housed the “Little Boy” A-
bomb. It was dropped in Japan from 1,900 feet above Hiroshima with a force equivalent to 12,500 tons of
TNT. This act was a crime against humanity and a crime against God. It was totally evil. Both blasts were
outright war crimes without question. Even I can’t detail the destruction in full detail. Children died instantly.
Grown human beings died with the organs dissolved. Many parts of Hiroshima were burned to the ground.
The skins of men, women, and children were burned off their flesh. Human death was everywhere. About
140,000 people died in Hiroshima by the end of the year. The second bomb was dropped in Nagasaki on
August 9, 1945. It had about 22,000 of TNT in equivalent. 70,000 died in Nagasaki by the end of 1945 from
the effects of the atomic bomb. Even to this day, the victims of those atomic blasts suffer illness. The atomic
bomb didn’t end world conflict at all. It started the Cold War and the Soviets had atomic bomb technology
from a spy working inside of Los Alamos. On August 16, 1945, Gen. Wainwright, a POW since May 6, 1942,
was released from a POW camp in Manchuria. The Soviets dropped their first atomic bomb in August 29,
1949. The evil atomic bomb drops in Japan reminds us about how valuable the dignity of human life is and it
shows us the destructive nature of war is.

VJ Day (The Axis Powers are totally Defeated)

On September 2, 1945 was the time when Japan officially surrendered.
 I’m glad that fascism was defeated after WWII.

Nuremberg

The Nuremberg Trials were some of the most important parts of World War II history. On September 15,
1944, Colonel Murray Bernays of the War Department’s Special Project Branch proposed part of the
framework that will be used in Nuremberg. Bernays proposed treating the Nazi regime as a criminal plot.
William Chanler (or a friend of the Secretary of War Stinson) suggested another part of the framework, which
is about waging of a war of aggression a crime. By February 1945 at Yalta, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin all agree
that a prosecution of Axis leaders should follow the expected conclusion of World War II. On April 1945,
President Truman asked Samuel Rosenman to approach the Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson and
inquire about his willingness to serve as chief U.S. prosecutor in a war crimes trial. Robert Jackson was
appointed as chief U.S. counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals by President Harry Truman on May
2, 1945. Hermann Goering surrendered to the Allies on May 6, 1945. He was transferred to Bad Mondorf in
Luxembourg. In Flensburg, Germany, the British took many of the Nazis to be tried in the Major War Figures
Trials (like Donitz, Jodl, Keitel, Rosenberg, and Speer. Himmler committed suicide) in May 23, 1945. By June
26th of the same year, Robert Jackson departed from Washington, D.C. to meet with his Allied counterparts
in London to discuss the legal proceedings against Nazi officials. There are disagreements on what to do.
The Americans and the British wanted the adversarial system while the French and the Soviets desired the
inquisitive system. The Allies agreed to prohibit the use of the defense of superior orders, although they
agree to allow its consideration in the mitigation of sentence. When Robert Jackson visited Nuremberg, it’s a
city that has been 91% destroyed by Allied bombs. In July of 1945, he goes into the Palace of Justice and
recommended it as a site for the upcoming trials. The Soviets wanted the trial to take place in Berlin within
their zone of occupation. The London Agreement was signed in August of 1945 that enabled the prosecution
of war criminals.

Major War criminals then are housed in Luxembourg and then are flown to Nuremberg where they are
incarcerated in prison adjacent to the Palace of Justice by August 12, 1945. Robert Jackson meet with
President Truman in September. Truman proposed to name former Attorney General Francis Biddle as the
American judge at Nuremberg, but Jackson didn't think highly of Biddle and suggests other people. Yet,
Biddle got the appointment. By October, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence (or the British representative) was elected
President of the International Military Tribunal or the IMT. Major war criminals are indicted in the same
month too. Robert Ley committed suicide before his trial. Ley was the former chief of the German Labor
Front. The trial of the major war criminals by the International Military Tribunal started on 10 a.m. in
Nuremberg, Germany on November 20, 1945. During the next day, all of the defendant plead “Not Guilty.”
Goering wanted to make a statement, but he was prevented from doing so. Justice Robert Jackson delivered
his opening statement for the prosecution.

On November 29, 1945, the prosecution introduced a film shot by Allied photographers in the liberated
areas. The footage is graphic and it describes the Nazi horrors. It caused weeping in the courtroom. Some
defendants appeared shocked by what they see and some seem bored. On December 13, 1945, the
prosecution introduces the grisly evidence from Buchenwald concentration camp that shown tattooed
human skin and the bodies of the victims of the Holocaust. By 1946, people testify including Nazis. In
October 1, 1946, the verdict comes out against the major war criminals are handed down by the
International Military Tribunal. 11 of the 21 defendants are sentenced to death. All appeals are rejected.
Goering committed suicide by swallowing a smuggled cyanide pill. 10 of the war criminals are hanged in
Nuremberg on October 16, 1946. More trials will come up too which will sentence Nazi war criminals for
their evil crimes in the years to come as well.

Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was one of the most controversial actions done by America during the WWII and Cold
War eras. The program has also been called Operation Overcast too. This program, in summary, was about
the OSS (or the Office of Strategic Services) getting over 1,500 German scientists, technicians, and engineers
(many of whom were Nazi war criminals) from Germany and from other foreign nations (like Argentina) to be
sent to America for employment in the aftermath of World War II. One great, recent book that talks about
this issue is Annie Jacobsen’s “Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligent Program that brought Nazi
Scientists to America” which was released in 2014. The program was conducted by the JIOA or the Joint
Intelligence Objectives Agency. Operation Paperclip was created as a way for the U.S. to prevent the Soviet
Union to receive massive German scientific expertise and knowledge. Ironically, the Soviet Union established
its competing program called Operation Osoaviakhim (which wanted to use German scientists for the same
purpose as Operation Paperclip).
To start, after the Nazis failed in Operation Barbarossa, the Siege of Leningrad, Operation Nordicht, and the
Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi Germany was in a logistical disadvantage. Their resources were depleted and many
Nazis knew that there were about to lose the war as early as 1943. The Soviet Union continued in its
westward counterattack which defeated the Nazis ultimately. So, in early 1943, the Nazis got many scientists,
engineers, and technicians to work on advanced technology and weaponry to fight the USSR and other
Allied forces. Many of the scientists were in the area called Peenemunde (in northeast coastal Germany).
Werner Osenberg, the engineer-scientist heading the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (Military Research
Association), recorded the names of the politically-cleared men to the Osenberg List, thus reinstating them
to scientific work. The lists of these scientists are found in the Osenberg List. In March of 1945, a Polish
laboratory technician found pieces of the Osenberg List stuffed in a toilet at Bonn University. The list was
reached by MI6, who sent it to U.S. Intelligence. Then, the U.S. Army Major Robert B. Staver or Chief of the
Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordinance Corps used the
Osenberg List to compile the list of German scientists to be captured and interrogated. Major Staver’s list
included Wernher von Braun or Nazi Germany’s premier rocket scientist.

The JIOA’s recruitment of German scientists started after the Allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1945.
American President Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August
1945. Truman’s order excluded anyone “overtly” found to “have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more
than a nominal participant in its activities or an active supporter of Nazi militarism.” Yet, these restrictions
would be rendered ineligible since most of the leading scientists that the JIOA had identified for recruitment
(like rocket scientists Wernher von Braun, Kurt H. Debus and Arthur Rudolph, and the physician Hubertus
Strughold, each earlier classified as a "menace to the security of the Allied Forces”). Also, in order to
circumvent President Truman’s anti-Nazi order and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA
worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. In that way,
the Nazi war criminals could come into America. The JOIA also expunged from the public record the
scientists’ Nazi Party memberships and regime affiliated. They were granted security clearances by the U.S.
government to work in the United States after their Nazi affiliations were eliminated from the documents.
Paperclip comes from the paperclips used to attach the scientists’ new political personae to their “US
Government Scientists” JIOA personnel files.

Operation Overcast had Major Staver’s original intent was to just interview scientists. That changed. On May
22, 1945, he transmitted to U.S. Pentagon headquarters Colonel Joel Holmes's telegram urging the
evacuation of German scientists and their families, as most "important for [the] Pacific war" effort. Most of
the Osenberg List engineers worked at the Baltic coast German Army Research Center Peenemünde,
developing the V-2 rocket. After capturing them, the Allies initially housed them and their families in
Landshut, Bavaria, in southern Germany. Starting on July 19, 1945, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)
managed the captured ARC rocketeers under Operation Overcast. The program was renamed Operation
Paperclip in March of 1946. Despite these attempts at secrecy, later that year the press interviewed several of
the scientists. Regarding Operation Alsos, Allied Intelligence described nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg,
the German nuclear energy project principal, as "worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans." In
addition to rocketeers and nuclear physicists, the Allies also sought chemists, physicians, and naval
weaponeers. Although Von Braun's interrogators pressured him, he was not tortured; however in 1944
another PoW, U-boat Captain Werner had been shot and killed while climbing the fence at Fort Hunt.
The Technical Director of the German Army Rocket Center or Wernher von Braun was jailed at P.O. Box 1142,
which was a military intelligence black site in Fort Hunt, Virginia in America. The prison was unknown to the
international community during that time period. It was operated by the U.S. in violation of the Geneva
Convention of 1929, which the United States had ratified.

The Nazi scientists gradually came into America at stages. The U.S. Navy in May of 1945 got Dr. Herbert A.
Wagner (or the inventor of the Hs 293 missile) and placed him in custody for 2 years. By 1947, he worked at
the Special Devices Center at Castle Gould and at Hempstead House, Long Island in New York State. He
moved to the Naval Air Station Point Mugu. In August of 1945, Colonel Holger Tofty (head of the Rocket
Branch of the Research and Development Division of the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Corps) offered initial one-
year contracts to rocket scientists. 127 of them accepted. By September 1945, the first group of seven rocket
scientists arrived at Fort Strong in Long Island in Boston harbor. These scientists include: Wernher von Braun,
Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard Rees, Wilhelm Jungert, and Walter
Schwidetzky.

Beginning in late 1945, three rocket-scientist groups arrived in the United States for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas,
and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as "War Department Special Employees.”

In 1946, the United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German fuel scientists at a Fischer-Tropsch
chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri. In early 1950, legal U.S. residency for some of the Project Paperclip
specialists was effected through the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico; thus, Nazi scientists
legally entered the United States from Latin America.

Eighty-six aeronautical engineers were transferred to Wright Field, where the United States had Luftwaffe
aircraft and equipment captured under Operation Lusty (Luftwaffe Secret Technology). Operation Paperclip
advanced as more German scientists came into America. Throughout its operations to 1990, Operation
Paperclip imported 1,600 men as part of the intellectual reparations owed to America and the UK in about
$10 billion in patents and industrial processes.
Reinhard Gehlen was one well known agent of Operation Paperclip. General Reinhard Gehlen was the former
head of Nazi intelligence operations against the Soviets. He was hired by the US Army and later by the CIA
to operate 600 ex-Nazi agents in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. In 1948, CIA Director Roscoe
Hillenkoetter assumed control of the so-called Gehlen Organization. With the full U.S. blessing, he created
the "Gehlen Organization," a band of refugee Nazi spies who reactivate their networks in Russia. These
include SS intelligence officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus
Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyon"), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked with Eichmann)
and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a personal friend of Hitler’s). The Gehlen Organization supplied the U.S. with
its only intelligence on the Soviet Union for the next ten years, serving as a bridge between the abolishment
of the OSS and the creation of the CIA. However, much of the "intelligence" the former Nazis provide was
bogus. Gehlen inflated Soviet military capabilities at a time when Russia is still rebuilding its devastated
society, in order to inflate his own importance to the Americans (who might otherwise punish him). In 1948,
Gehlen almost convinces the Americans that war is imminent, and the West should make a preemptive strike.
In the 1950's, he produced a fictitious "missile gap." Reinhard Gehlen promoted the Cold War heavily.

It is important to note that these Nazi scientists and doctors were responsible for murder, slavery, and
human experimentation. Some of them were acquitted of war crimes, some were convicted of war crimes,
and some never stood trial. These Nazi scientists from Operation Paperclip developed U.S. chemical and
biological weapons programs (as they knew of tabun and sarin). VX and Agent Orange were created in
America. Some of these former Nazis were involved in the development of growth of NASA. As more people
knew about this evil Operation Paperclip program, the American Federation of Scientists, Albert Einstein, and
others urged Truman to end it. Nuclear physicist Hans Bethe and his colleague Henri Sack asked Truman to
stop Operation Paperclip completely. Even Henry Wallace made a big mistake of pushing Truman to hire the
Nazis as a jobs program. The CIA approved of Operation Paperclip. As we know, the CIA and other U.S.
officials enacted sick experiments against human beings in Guatemala. Forced sterilization was once legal in
many states of America long before the end of WWII. The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service took up the study of
German chemical weapons at the end of the war as a means to continue in existence. George Merck both
diagnosed biological weapons threats for the military and sold the military vaccines to handle them. War
was business and business was huge for a long time to come.

During the decades after WWII, some of the scientists included in Operation Paperclip, were investigated
because of their activities during World War II. Arthur Rudolph was deported in 1984 and he wasn’t
prosecuted and West Germany granted him citizenship, which was a disgrace. Many scientists from
Operation Paperclip worked in NASA like Arthur Rudolph, von Braun, etc. The scientists in the Operation
Paperclip program worked in rocketry, aeronautics, medicine, biological weapons, chemical weapons, human
experimentation, and human factors involving space medicine, electronics, and intelligence.
Conclusion
The Second World War caused massive consequences for the world that affect us to this very day. World
War 2 was an inter-imperialist war between capitalist & fascist powers who wanted the mass resources of
the world. They competed for not only markets, but for the mineral wealth of the Earth too. After the war,
the Axis Powers were defeated convincingly. Not to mention that the Soviet Union grew in power and
influence after the war as they contributed mostly to the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. America was a
strong victor too. After World War 2, the Cold War existed (between America and the Soviet Union. After
the Cold War, the Soviet Union would end and be replaced with multiple nations including Russia). The USA
went from having a small Empire before 1941 to being the largest empire in the world by 1945. Today, after
seventy years of war, America has hundreds of military bases worldwide, massive telecommunications
services, massive satellites in space, multiple nuclear weapons, and huge capitalist markets. America rebuilt
European capitalism via the Marshall Plan. After WWII, some of the Allies formed NATO as a way for them
to enforce Western policies globally. The American empire grew into unprecedentedly levels after
European colonial empires declined in power. The Soviet Union was not perfect and the errors done by the
Soviet Union should not be justified. Yet, we should never follow capitalist exploitation either.

Another point must be outlined too. There is a big myth that Stalin’s actions (especially his anti-democratic
totalitarian policies) represent true socialism and the superior nature of capitalism. The truth is that the
USSR after the rise of Joseph Stalin was ruled by a small minority not the working majority (and the USSR
and the Eastern satellite states during the Cold War were highly bureaucratic and they weren’t made up of
real freedom and democracy just like Jim Crow in America back then violated the sacrosanct principles of
freedom and democracy). So, the USSR and the Western states had a small minority having preemptive
control over what happened in society, what resources were used, and they had privileges and power. That
is why the progressive 1956 Hungarian Revolution came about. It was a working class movement that
tried to overthrow a totalitarian government in Hungary. The Hungarian Revolution was suppressed, but
they inspired revolutionaries globally.
By the end of 1989, the Stalinist rulers were out of power in all six satellite states of East Germany, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. These events were part of the 1989 Revolutions (which
came about because of the economic crisis and other reasons in Europe). In the USSR itself, the annual
growth rate slowed decade after decade, from an annual average of 5.8 percent during the 1950’s, to 3.7
percent in the 1970’s, to just 1 percent in the 1980’s. Eastern Europe--its system synchronized with the
USSR--felt the same crisis. Meanwhile, the drudgery and alienation of work and the stifling of culture and
intellectual life created the tinder for an explosion to take place. Even when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to use
perestroika (in dealing with economic reforms) and glasnost (or openness, which dealt with political
reforms), it was too little and too late. Of course, we know what many of the protests were CIA-funded (or
co-opted by the Western elites. For example, it is a known historical fact that the counterrevolutionary
Solidarność movement was aided by the CIA), but tons of the protesters legitimately wanted democratic
rights in Eastern Europe and Russia. The fall of the Berlin Wall came about in November of 1989. It is
important to note that the Soviet Union after 1991 experienced a massive neoliberal push, which caused
massive economic inequality including other problems in Russia. In essence, socialism is about the workers
(including the people) having democratic control of the economy.

The American Empire readily supported dictators after WWII instead of the interests of the masses of the
people. For example, the U.S. aided Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran (via Operation Ajax. American
and British Intelligence worked in Operation Ajax in order to overthrow the democratically elected
President of Iran Muhammad Mossadegh), Mobutu in Zaire, Georgios Papadopoulos of Greece, Pinochet in
Chile, and other authoritarian dictators globally. The West's CIA not only committed fraud, but terrorism
internationally. The CIA evolved from the WWII’s OSS. The United Nations would be born in October 24,
1945. The original vision of the United Nations (as eloquently outlined by the late President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt) has been shattered, because the UN is dominated by imperial countries and capitalist interests.
We witness the massive growth of nuclear weapons since 1945. The G8 run most of the policies of the
United Nations (despite how many sincere people are in the U.N).
The IMF, the World Bank, GATT, and other institutions which were created after World War II have
executed free-market economic policies. The American Empire now is involved in executing the policies of
the so-called “war on terror,” which has caused many deaths too. We witnessed the global recession of
2007-8 (caused by massive Wall Street speculation and other actions), which has further expanded
economic inequality, poverty, and other economic problems globally. There is the rise of China in the 21st
century and the strength of Russia is not gone either. Also, WWII has inspired many good people who
fought for social justice and human dignity. The Axis Powers being gone from the Earth is a good thing.
German and Japanese imperialism was defeated in 1945. Now, we still face Western imperialism in our
generation. When ISIS and Al-Qaeda kill innocent human beings, then that is wrong. When Western drone
strikes kill innocent civilians, then that's wrong too. The expansion of the human rights of people of color,
of women, and of other human beings is a good thing. The ending of overt European colonialism in many
parts of the world is also a great thing. We have a long way to go. We learn lessons about World War II, so
we can never repeat such a destructive war ever again. To this very day, Nazi war criminals have been
caught and brought to justice.

*We ought to never lose hope. There is a remnant in our generation who desire peace and tranquility.
There is a remnant in our time that loves the truth and wants an end to oppression in the world. Also, we
have to continue in the fight against fascism. Fascism didn’t die in 1945. It continues today. We will never
support or endorse racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, classism, misogyny, and any other
injustice. We want freedom and justice for all in the human race.
Appendix A: African Americans and World War II

African Americans had a huge role in the events of World War II. To get a great picture of what this time was,
we have to explain what was happening. America during WWII was filled with lynchings, racial discrimination,
riots, labor strikes, and other serious events. Many black Americans joined WWII for many reasons. Black
people were drafted to go into war. Many African Americans felt that if they fight fascism overseas then they
would experience racial justice after the war was over. There were many who opposed the war since they
viewed the war as representative of hypocrisy (since the West was fighting bigotry overseas while black
people suffered racism at home). Yet, I’m glad that the Axis Powers were defeated by the Allied Powers. I
don’t agree with the droppings of atomic bombs in Japan though. Back then, the Armed Forces were
segregated by race. So, there were separate black units fighting in Europe and Asia. Black people were
forced to have menial jobs mostly in the Navy. During that time, the Marines had separate units based on
race. In 1776 and 1777, a dozen Black American Marines served in the American Revolutionary War. From
1798 to 1942, no black person served in the Marines.

There were many rebellions on U.S. bases worldwide by black people from 1942 to 1945. The reasons are
that black people suffered discrimination, racism, assaults, and murder by racists. Therefore, these rebellions
existed along with protests made by Brothers and Sisters against racial oppression. There were racial riots in
Mobile (in Alabama), Los Angeles, Beaumont (in Texas), Harlem, and Detroit in 1943 alone.
 This is one picture of the heroic Tuskegee Airmen.

In October 1940, Benjamin Oliver Davis, Sr. was named the first African American general in regular Army. On
January 13, 1941, the U.S. Army formed the 78th Tank Battalion. This was the first black armor unit. The
tankers reported to Fort Knox, Kentucky as a means for them to prepare for armored warfare training in
March of 1941. The 78th was redesigned on May 8, 1941 as the 758th Tank Battalion (Light). This was the
first of the three tank battalions compromising the 5th Tank Group, which was made up of black enlisted
men and white officers. The other two tank battalions were the 761st and 784th. Initially inactivated on
September 22, 1945 at Viareggio, Italy, the 758th was reactivated in 1946 and later fought in the Korean War
as the 64th Tank Battalion. In 1941, the U.S. Army created the Tuskegee Air Squadron who will soon be
known as the Tuskegee Airmen (they were comprised at first of the 99th Pursuit Squadron and later the
332nd Fighter Group). The U.S. Army Air Corps trained black pilots in July 19, 1941. They were known for
flying P-51 Mustang fighters. The Tuskegee Airmen never lost an escorted plane to the enemy during the
course of World War II. They were 926 members of the heroic Tuskegee Airmen. They carried out hundreds
of escort missions. A. Philip Randolph was supportive of WWII and he wanted civil rights for African
Americans.
 The person on the far right is Jackie Robinson, who was in the U.S. Army during WWII.

A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste proposed a march on Washington back during the 1940’s
to protest racial discrimination in war industries and propose the desegregation of the American Armed
forces. Franklin Delano Roosevelt feared this march and wanted to prevent it. So, he issued the Executive
Order 8802 or the Fair Employment Act (on June 25, 1941), which ending discriminating in the war industries.
This caused A. Philip Randolph to end his plans for a March on Washington. Another march will come later
by 1963. Some people felt betrayed because Roosevelt’s order applied only to banning discrimination in the
war industries and not the armed forces. Howard P. Perry was the first African-American US Marine Corps
recruit following Executive Order 8802. The Fair Employment Act was historic in the fight for African
American labor rights. In 1942, there are about 18,000 black people gathered in Madison Square Garden
where A. Philip Randolph starts his campaign to fight discrimination in the military, in war industries, in
government agencies, and in labor unions. In December 8, 1941, the United States entered World War II
following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Dorris “Dorrie” Miller, (who was an African American hero) was later
awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism during that battle.

During World War II, a massive migration of African American travel from the South to the North, the
Midwest, and the West. Some work in factories and some work in other jobs. This migration influenced the
development of the modern Civil Rights Movement in about a decade later. Wilma Beatrice Brown was the
first black American woman to receive a commission as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Civil Air Patrol. At 31 years
old, she trained pilots for the U.S. Army Air Forces.

In 1942, Charity Adams Earley became the first black woman commissioned officer in the Women’s Army
Auxiliary Corps (WAACs) while serving at Fort Des Moines. In 1943, the Naval Academy at Annapolis and
other naval officer schools accepted African American men for the first time. Also, in 1943, the Detroit Race
riots happened in June 20-21, which killed 34 people (including 25 black Americans). Other riots would
happen in Harlem, Mobile, Alabama, and Beaumont, Texas. The first black cadets graduate from the Army
light School at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. In the summer of 1943, there were 1400 African American
soldiers of the 93rd Infantry Division and the 32nd and 33rd companies of the Women’s Army Auxiliary
Corps (with approximately 300 women) being stationed in the Arizona desert at Fort Huachuca for training.
They are the largest concentration of black military personnel in the history of America during that time.
Entire African American crew in 1943 staffed the two American Navy Destroyer ships, the USS Mason and the
submarine chaser PC1264.
 The Sister to the left was the late Alberta Martin of Mount Airy in Philadelphia. She was an African
American nurse and a World War II veteran. The Sisters to the right are the first contingent of Black
American Women, or "WACs" to go overseas for the war. They were part of the Women's Army Corps
(WAC). This picture was taken on February 2, 1945.

In 1943, the black 99th Pursuit Squadron or the Tuskegee Airmen fly its first combat mission in Italy. In 1944,
there was the Port Chicago Munity. It first happened after a horrendous explosion on an ammunition ship
docked at the Port Chicago Naval Base on San Francisco Bay. The explosion on July 17 killed 320 men
including 202 African American sailors, who comprise half of the black personnel at the naval facility. When
50 black sailors refuse to return to the ships until their safety concerns are addressed, the Navy court-
martials them for mutiny. All are convicted and sentenced to prison. It was only after World War II ended
when most the convicted people were quietly released. In April of 1945, 2 U.S. Black soldiers were killed by
military police at a French army camp for allegedly talking to French women employed there. There are tons
of stories of African American soldiers who executed heroism during WWII.

This is a picture of Sister Inez Stroud, who was in WAC. This picture took place in 1943.
WAC stands for the Women Army Corps. This image is from the Betty H. Carter Women
Veterans Historical Project. She served in the WAC and in the U.S. Army from 1943 to
1969. She played music at Bethel AME Church (as she lived in both D.C. and Greensboro,
N.C.). She was born in Wilmington, North Carolina and lived from 1909 to 1994.
This man is Charles B. Hall. In 1943, he was the first black fighter pilot to down an enemy aircraft. Hall
was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his valor in this World War II action. His squadron
presented him with its own reward, a chilled bottle of Coke which was a precious commodity in the
Mediterranean theater. Hall was a member of the 99th Fighter Squadron.

The 6th Armored Division and the 80th Infantry Division liberated the concentration camp of Buchenwald.
African-American soldiers from Headquarters and Services Co. of 183rd Engineers Combat Battalion, 8th
Corps, Third Army arrived at Buchenwald on April 17, 1945. Among these soldiers was Leon Bass. The 183rd
Engineer Combat Battalion was attached to the 1126th Engineer Combat Group in April 1945. On April 12,
1945, the 1126th Engineer Combat Group was sent to the town of Eisenach. This town was 100 kilometers
from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Five days later, on April 17, 1945, several black soldiers were sent
to Buchenwald to deliver some supplies. For most of the liberated prisoners, this was the first time they had
ever seen a black man, and many of them would recall it later in their survivor accounts. Dr. Leon Bass and
William A. Scott, III both saw Holocaust victims and both said that they liberated Buchenwald. Gunther
Jacobs was a survivor of Buchenwald who had spent three and a half years in Nazi concentration camps.

In an interview with Jeff Bradley of the Denver Post in 1989, Jacobs said: “The first Black people I ever saw in
my life were the Black soldiers who liberated us on April 11, 1945.” Jacobs told Bradley that he had never
been able to speak out about what happened at Buchenwald, but he wanted to speak now “on behalf of his
Black liberators” whom he had never thanked. The Black GIs starred at the Holocaust victims and many of
them cried. So, the prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp liberated themselves at 3:15 p.m. on
April 11, 1945 when they took over the camp, killing some of the guards. The rest of the guards fled into the
nearby woods. When American soldiers in the 6th Armored Division saw the prisoners chasing down the
guards and shooting them, they followed the action to the camp. The next day, soldiers from the 80th
Infantry Division arrived in Weimar, five miles from the camp, and saw prisoners roaming around the town.
The soldiers followed the prisoners to the camp where they joined in as the prisoners beat to death the SS
guards who had been captured. According to one account, 76 SS soldiers were killed by the Americans.

In 1945, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. is named Commander Field, Kentucky. He is the first African American
to command a military base. Della H. Rainey was born in Suffolk, VA on January 10, 1912. She graduated
from Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing in Durham, N.C. She was the first black nurse commissioned as a
lieutenant in the U.S Army Nurse Corps or ANC during World War II. She served in Fort Bragg, N.C. She
served in Alabama and was Chief Nurse at Fort Huachuca. She was promoted to captain in 1945. There were
about 500 black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps during World War II. Recently, President Barack Obama met
with the oldest living WWII veteran. She is an African American named Emma Didlake of Detroit. Emma
joined the Women’s Army Auxillary Corps in 1943. She is 110 years old.

Appendix B: The evil Holocaust

There can be no discussion about World War II without discussion about the evil Holocaust or the Shoah
(which means destruction in the Hebrew language). The Holocaust was systemic genocide against human
beings by the Nazi regime. The Holocaust murdered six million Jewish human beings and millions of other
human beings. The word Holocaust has Greek origins meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis believed in the
racist lie that Jewish people and people of color (including others) were genetically inferior and they must be
exterminated. Racism is always linked to genocide. The racist myth of the superior race was promoted by the
Nazis from Hitler, Himmler, etc. Not only were the Jewish people murdered. The Holocaust killed Jewish
people, Roma (they live in Hungary, Romania, in Eastern Europe in general, and worldwide), the
disabled, those with mental illness, Slavic human beings (like the Poles, Russians, the Serbs, etc.),
black people, socialists, Communists, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals, Freemasons, etc. The Jewish
population of Germany was about 566,000 when Hitler was Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Hitler used the
SA and the SS to oppress people as an auxiliary police. On March of 1933, the Nazis opened Dachau
concentration camp near Munich.

Then, came Buchenwald near Weimar in Germany. There was also Sachsenhausen near Berlin in northern
Germany and Ravensbruck for women. These camps were opened in March 22, 1933. The Nazis boycotted
Jewish shops and businesses in April 1, 1933. The Nazis would strip Jewish immigrants of German citizenship.
In July, the Nazis forced sterilized people who were found to have a certain illness or condition by July 1933.
The rights of Jewish people were stripped. The Nazis passed a law in November to allow beggars, the
homeless, and the unemployed to be sent into concentration camps. Jewish people in Germany were banned
to join unions, banned to join the military, and banned to join Jewish cultural Unions in 1935. Jewish people
are registered by the Nazis. The Nazis destroyed the synagogue in Nuremberg too on August 11, 1938. The
Holocaust has been promoted in Mein Kampf and it has been called the “Final Solution.” The racist Nazis
scapegoated the Jewish people for economic problems and racist caricatures existed in German newspapers
and evil posters.

During the war, Jewish people and others were forced by the Nazis and their collaborators into ghettos,
transit camps, and forced labor camps. Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass came about in
November 9-10, 1938 as ordered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. This event was a coordinated,
massive attack by the Nazis against Jewish people all over Germany. It came after Herschel Grynszpan (or a
17 year old Jewish person living in Paris) shot and killed a member of the German embassy staff (named
Ernst vom Rath). Herschel was against the poor treatment that his father and family suffered at the hands of
the Nazis. On November 9, the regular German police stood by as Nazi storm troopers along with the SS
including the Hitler Youth members beat and murdered Jewish people. The Nazis broke into Jewish homes
and brutalized Jewish women and children. Jewish businesses and more than 1600 synagogues were burned
and destroyed in Germany, Austria, and other Nazi controlled areas. Some Germans found the violence
offensive and helped their Jewish friends and neighbors. About 25,000 Jewish men were rounded up and
later sent to concentration camps where they were often brutalized by SS guards and in some cases
randomly chosen to be beaten to death. Worldwide, people condemned Kristallnacht as a racist terrorist
campaign. 91 Jewish people were killed. Goring fined the Jewish people one billion marks when it was the
Nazis who burned buildings, killed innocent Jewish people, and caused the discretion of scrolls. The fire
department didn’t come to put out the fires. Shortly after Kristallnacht, the United States recalled its
ambassador permanently. One quote from Nazi newspaper on January of 1941, Der Stürmer, published by
Julius Streicher when he said: "Now judgment has begun and it will reach its conclusion only when
knowledge of the Jews has been erased from the earth."

"IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful
Corporation" is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the
American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other
European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In
the book, Black outlines the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through
generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data. The head of IBM back then was
Thomas Watson (who met with Hitler in June of 1937 in Berlin. Thomas Watson was a member of the
Bohemian Grove).

On March 1, 1943, American Jewish people in New York City hold a massive rally at Madison Square Garden
to pressure the U.S. government to help the Jewish people of Europe. There were many great Jewish
resistance leaders who opposed the Holocaust and Nazi tyranny. There was Mordechaj Anielewicz who
was the leader of the Jewish Combat Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He was killed in
action in 1943. Pawel Frenkiel was a Polish Jewish youth leader in Warsaw and a senior commander of the
Jewish Military Union killed in action defending the JMU headquarters. Abba Kovner, was a founder of the
United Partisan Organization in Vilna, who coined the phrase: "Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!" The
FPO was one of the first armed underground organizations in the Jewish ghettos under Nazi occupation.

When the Nazi spread across Europe, the Nazis and their collaborators persecuted Jewish people and non-
Jewish people living in other places other than Germany too. Millions of Soviet prisoners of war were
murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. Many Polish and Soviet civilians were
kidnapped and forced to be involved in forced labor in Germany and in Poland (when it was occupied by the
Nazis). The Nazis used the Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing units to kill Jewish people, Roma, and Soviet
state and Communist Party officials. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS killed more than one million Jewish
men, women, and children. Many Jewish people were kidnapped and shipped to extermination camps all
across Europe. People were gassed, shot, experimented on, and the whole nine yards.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Union’s Red Army on January 27, 1945. The death camp was located in
southern Poland. Auschwitz was a place of some of the greatest crimes and horrors of the 20th century.
From early 1942 to late 1944, transport trained sent Jewish people from throughout Nazi-occupied Europe
to the gates of Auschwitz. The camp had the infamous slogan of “Arbeit macht frei” or Work makes you free.
Over 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz. Hundreds of thousands of them were sent to gas chambers.
Others were exterminated via starvation, overwork, disease, and hideous medical experiments carried out by
people like Josef Mengele (who was called the “Angel of Death”). “People forget what Auschwitz was, and it
terrifies me, because I know to what kind of hell it leads,” said Roman Kent, 85. He concluded his remarks at
the 70th anniversary remembrance ceremony by stating, “We do not want our past to be our children's
future.”

During the end of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by trained or forced marches to try to prevent
the Allied liberation of a large number of prisoners. Yet, the Allied forces heroically liberated concentration
camp prisoners. The victims and survivors of the Holocaust would travel worldwide. Between 1948 and 1951,
almost 700,000 Jewish people emigrated into Israel including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe.
The last displacement camp (which was used by the Allies to help Holocaust survivors) ended by 1957. To
this day, people are fighting to find, try, and convict Nazi war criminals.

Appendix C: American Internment Camps

The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was one of the greatest injustices of American
history. A climate of xenophobia, racism, and bigotry has inspired the internment to take place. The
Immigration Act of 1924 denied Japanese people (who even lived in America after 1907) the right to become
naturalized U.S. citizens. The law also restricted further immigration from Japan. Some racist people
expressed paranoid lies about tons of Japanese people wanting to have sabotage during the war, which
wasn’t the case at all. These fears existed even before Pearl Harbor. Then, California Attorney General Earl
Warren called for the internment of Japanese Americans. Lieutenant Colonel John L. DeWitt had massive
anti-Japanese racism too. Even the racist FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said to Attorney General Francis Biddle
that mass evacuations aren’t necessary at first. Biddle informed Roosevelt that internment of Japanese
people wasn’t necessary. There were still racists who questioned the loyalty of Japanese people in America.
Later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was right on many issues) made one of his greatest mistakes
during his Presidency when he signed Executive Order 9066. This executive order laid the groundwork for
the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese people and Japanese Americans, from California, Washington,
and Oregon. Two thirds of Japanese people in America were U.S. citizens by birth.

Between 110,000 and 120,000 Japanese human beings were interned. The internment camps were mostly in
the West Coast, including Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, etc. Most of the camps were in California.
Japanese people were told to carry items and leave. Many people stole the resources of the homes and
farms of the Japanese when they went into the internment camps. The conditions of the internment camps
were horrible. People worked in the harsh elements. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire. Workers
were paid very less in money. Many Japanese doctors received $228 per year and a white senior medical
officer earned $46,000 per year. By February 1943, the United States government allowed some Japanese
Americans to fight in WWII via segregated units. Those who fought were Nisei or second generation
Japanese American people. The Issei were first generation Japanese Americans. In June 1943, the Supreme
Court in the Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi v. United States, decision ruled to maintain the application of
curfews against members of a minority group when the nation was at war.

The defendant, Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, was a University of Washington student who was accused of
violating the curfew and exclusion order, designated a misdemeanor by Public Law 503, a Congressional
statue introduced to enforce Executive Order 9066 and any subsequent military order. The Supreme Court
was wrong on that issue. It would take decades after WWII for a national apology for the Japanese victims of
interment would occur and the $1.5 billion for survivors of the internment camps. Many German Americans
(in the number of a total of 11,507 human beings) and Italian Americans (which lasted from 1941 to 1945)
were interned in bases and locations nationwide. In 2001 the US Attorney General reported to Congress on a
review of treatment by the Department of Justice of Italian Americans during World War II. In 2010, the
California Legislature passed a resolution apologizing for US mistreatment of Italian residents during the war.

By Timothy
 The Aftermath of World War Two

The following images show the Aftermath of WW2. They include the following:
1. The rise of two superpowers being America and the Soviet Union resulting in the Cold War.
2. The Marshall Plan being used to rebuild Western Europe and Japan.
3. The increase of decolonization leading to the independence of many African and Asian nations like Ghana,
Nigeria, and India.
4. The establishment of the nation of Israel.
5. The existence of the United Nations
6. The growth of Communism in Southeast Asian nations like in China (which the Communists won the Chinese
Civil War) and Vietnam.
7. There will be advanced technological growth, a post War economic expansion in the certain parts of the world
and increased standard of living in many areas of the world.

This work is dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, to the

resistance movements against the Nazis and against other
Axis fascists, to the Allies soldiers who fought tyranny, to the
innocent victims of the internment camps of America, to other
heroes of WWII, and to the civilians who died during WWII.
Peace and Blessings.