Homework - For next class, you should read the notes "Overview of the Modern World" - there will be a quiz on this material. For Friday's class, you should read the assignment "Overview of Modern Asia" and answer the questions (these are available on the class web page and here).
Assignment for Documentary Video Project - click here
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
March 15 - Review for World War Two Test
The class will have a test on World War Two on Monday, March 21st. The test will have the short answer format that was common in the first part of the year - four questions will be asked and you will answer two of the questions.
Friday's class will be spent going over the material to be covered on the test.
Here are past test questions that you can use to study.
1. Did Hitler, both what he did after he come to power in Germany and in how he conducted war against other countries, demonstrate that Nazism is essentially a philosophy based on race?
2. Would it be correct to say that Hitler came to power by drawing on the bitterness, fear and pain, the Germans felt in the post-war period up through the Great Depression?
3. Why were the future World War Two Allies (Britain, France and the Soviet Union) unable to act against Hitler’s expansionism up to the outbreak of the Second World War?
4. Explain the statement “In the first years of the war, Germany was able to deal terrible defeats to Britain and Soviet Union but was unable to deal the knock-out blow”.
5. How did the brutality of the Nazi-Soviet war on the Eastern Front demonstrate Hitler’s plans for German “living space” and Stalin’s ruthlessness in defending the Soviet Union at all costs?
6. How did the Nazi’s policies toward the Jews change over time from when Hitler came to power in 1932 to the end of World War Two?
7. Why would it be correct to describe the Allied victory in World War Two as a result of American capital and Soviet blood? (Capital means industrial production)
8. Even though it was clear as early as 1943 that Nazi Germany would ultimately lose the war, why did the war in Europe only end after Nazi Germany had been militarily defeated and Nazi capital of Berlin had been captured by the Soviets?
Friday's class will be spent going over the material to be covered on the test.
Here are past test questions that you can use to study.
1. Did Hitler, both what he did after he come to power in Germany and in how he conducted war against other countries, demonstrate that Nazism is essentially a philosophy based on race?
2. Would it be correct to say that Hitler came to power by drawing on the bitterness, fear and pain, the Germans felt in the post-war period up through the Great Depression?
3. Why were the future World War Two Allies (Britain, France and the Soviet Union) unable to act against Hitler’s expansionism up to the outbreak of the Second World War?
4. Explain the statement “In the first years of the war, Germany was able to deal terrible defeats to Britain and Soviet Union but was unable to deal the knock-out blow”.
5. How did the brutality of the Nazi-Soviet war on the Eastern Front demonstrate Hitler’s plans for German “living space” and Stalin’s ruthlessness in defending the Soviet Union at all costs?
6. How did the Nazi’s policies toward the Jews change over time from when Hitler came to power in 1932 to the end of World War Two?
7. Why would it be correct to describe the Allied victory in World War Two as a result of American capital and Soviet blood? (Capital means industrial production)
8. Even though it was clear as early as 1943 that Nazi Germany would ultimately lose the war, why did the war in Europe only end after Nazi Germany had been militarily defeated and Nazi capital of Berlin had been captured by the Soviets?
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
March 9, 2016 - End of War in Europe
Homework - Use the following source materials about the end of the war to answer the assigned questions. The assignment is available on the class web page and here.
Source # 1 - Video about the Allied bombing raid on the German city of Hamburg - click here
Source # 1 - Video about the Allied bombing raid on the German city of Hamburg - click here
Source # 2 - Video on German tactics and actions in the end of the war - click here
Source # 3 - Video about Allied attack on Germany - click here
Note - You will have to be logged into your BHS Google Account to watch the video
Source # 4 - Video about how the Nazis punished Germans who spoke out at the end of the war - click here
Note - You will have to be logged into your BHS Google Account to watch the video
Source # 5 - This clip is a set of scenes from the German movie Downfall about the Battle for Berlin at the end of World War Two - click here
Note - You will have to be logged into your BHS Google Account to watch the video
This clip follows the story of Peter Kranz, a young German boy fighting in the Hitler Youth at the end of the war. It provides a back story for the famous picture, shown below, of Hitler awarding medals to Hitler Youth soldiers in the last days of the war.
Biography - Gunter Grass
Gunter Grass was born to a German family that ran a grocery store in the city of Danzig in 1927. Danzig was a German city that had been given to Poland in the Treaty of Versailles. Grass was twelve years old when the German army invaded Poland and retook the city. As a student, Grass was part of the Hitler Youth organization and then became an “air force helper” when he was in high school. Toward the end of 1944, when he was 17 years old, Grass was drafted into military service and served with an SS tank unit. In April 1945, he was wounded in battle and captured by the American army.
After the war, he went to work as a miner and stone mason, but began to become an artist and writer. In 1959, Grass published his first book, The Tin Drum. The book tells the story of a boy who is horrified by the adult world and decides to stop growing at the age of three. The boy protests the violence around him by pounding on a tin drum. Through this character, Grass described Danzig as the Germans took over and burned the synagogue, the war on the Eastern Front and Soviet take-over after the war. Within a few years of its publication, the book was seen as an important piece of literature that forced Germany to confront its Nazi German past.
The success of The Tin Drum made Grass an intellectual voice calling for the German people to take responsibility for Nazism. Many of his books are filled with characters who represented the difficulty post-war German society had with confronting its Nazi past. For example, one character is a school teacher who discovers a set of long forgotten letters she wrote as a committed member of the Nazi Youth, which included denouncing neighbors to the authorities, and is trying to decide whether to share the letters with her students. Another character is a former general who is re-fighting the war in a sandbox in his garage, while his daughter tries to defeat him again by playing the role of the Russians in these sandbox battles.
In one of his last books, Peeling the Onion, Grass addressed his own personal life in Nazi Germany and discussed his service as a member of the SS. In this book he wrote, “I was silent. Because so many others have kept silent, the temptation is great … to shift the blame onto the collective guilt, or to talk about oneself only figuratively in the third person: He was, saw, did, said, he kept silent.”
Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 and died in 2015.
Source # 6 - Excerpt from Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass – Grass wrote this book in 1979 after a trip to China
Pedestrians among bicycle riders repeating one another ad infinitum in dress and bearing, immersed in a jungle of bicycle riders in Shanghai, the city where eleven out of nine hundred fifty million Chinese live, foreign bodies in the mass, we were suddenly hit by an idea, a speculative reversal: what if, from this day on, the world had to face up to the existence of nine hundred fifty million Germans, whereas the Chinese nation numbered barely eighty million, that the present population of the two Germanys. And a moment later I was confronted by the image of a hundred million Saxons and a hundred and twenty million Swabians emigrating to offer the world their tight-packed industriousness.
In the midst of the cycling multitudes we were seized with terror. Is such a thought possible? Is such a thought permissible? Is such a world conceivable, a world inhabited by nine hundred fifty million Germans, who, even if the rate of increase is kept down to the bare 1.2 percent, will nevertheless multiply to something over one billion two hundred million Germans by the year 2000? Could the world bear it? Wouldn’t the world have to defend itself (but how?) against such a multitude? Or could the world put with as many Germans as there are Chinese today?
Friday, March 4, 2016
March 4, 2016 - Holocaust
Homework - Use the following source materials on the Holocaust to answer the assigned questions.
Source # 1- Video on World War Two and the Holocaust - click here
Source # 2 - Video of the Warsaw Ghetto and Invasion of the Soviet Union - click here
Source # 3 - Video of Nazi Holocaust Plans for Eastern Europe - click here
Source # 4 - Video on the Holocaust in Lithuania - click here
Source # 5 - Video on Einsatzgruppen - click here
You will have to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch
Biography - Vassily Grossman
Vassily Grossman was born to a Jewish family in Ukraine in the Russian Empire in 1905. He supported the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. He began writing short stories while he was an engineering students at Moscow State University. His early stories got the attention and support of high ranking Soviet leaders and by the early 1930’s, he became a full time writer.
In 1937, during the period of the Great Purge, Grossman had his first confrontation with the Soviet authorities when his wife was arrested because she had not denounced her first husband after he had been arrested as an “enemy of the people”. In response to his wife’s arrest he took the risky move of writing the head of the NKVD (the secret police) to complain that his wife was being held responsible for a man she had left. Surprisingly, his wife was released by the NKVD.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman became a war correspondent for a Soviet newspaper. In this role, he reported on many of the major battles of the war such as the battles for Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin. Grossman preferred to report on the lives and struggles of many of the ordinary Soviet soldiers and he spent a lot of time at the front lines of battles. His articles became a favorite read among the Soviet soldiers.
The Nazi Holocaust had a major affect on Grossman and he was one of the first reporters to bring the issue of the Holocaust to the world's attention. Grossman wrote about what the Soviet army encountered as it pushed the German army out of the Soviet Union. For example, when the Soviets liberated the region of Ukraine (which had one of the highest Jewish population in pre-war Europe), Grossman wrote, “There are no Jews in Ukraine… All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people have been murdered.” It was as the Soviet army advanced into Ukraine that he learned that his mother had been murdered along with 30,000 other people when her village had been captured by the Germans.
Grossman was the first journalist to arrive at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka in 1944. Grossman interviewed the survivors and the people who lived around the camp to write his article “Hell of Treblinka”. This article was used as evidence against the Nazi leadership at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Grossman went on to gather more evidence of Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union that he was compiled into a “Black Book”. However, following the war, Stalin wanted to downplay the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and focus on the general suffering of the Soviet people and ordered that Grossman’s work be supressed. This turned Grossman against the Soviet government.
Grossman turned his wartime experience into his major novel Life and Fate, which told the story of the war on the Eastern Front, but is focused mostly on the battle of Stalingrad and the events of the Holocaust. The novel tells the story on an epic scale that tells the story of many different characters from both the Soviet and German sides of the war as they fought in Stalingrad and suffered the Holocaust. Grossman finished the manuscript for the book in 1959. However, because the book was openly critical of the Soviet system, the government decided that it would not be published. In fact, the Soviet government considered it dangerous. The secret police raided Grossman’s house and confiscated all the copies of the manuscript, including the typewriter ribbons he used when writing the book. Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, to complain about how his book had been “arrested” and that he was “requesting freedom for my book”. A government official responded to Grossman letter by saying that the book could not be published for “two or three hundred years”.
A few years later, in 1964, Grossman died bitter over his treatment and the loss of his book. However, one copy of the manuscript of Life and Fate had escaped the Soviet authorities. Grossman had lent it to a friend who hid it at his country house. This copy of the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and was published in Europe in 1980. The novel was later published in Soviet Union in 1988 as the country opened up under Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika.
David watched the door close: gently, smoothly, as though drawn by a magnet, the steel door drew closer to its steel frame. Finally they became one.
High up, behind a rectangular metal grating in the wall, David saw something stir. It looked like a grey rat, but he realized it was a fan beginning to turn. He sensed a faint, rather sweet smell.
The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofia Levinson want to turn and see what he was looking at.
Her eyes–which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul–her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there–mute, blind, her eyes still open.
The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thing stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice–he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet–this world still preoccupied him.
All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he longer existed.
Sofia Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had falled behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the bird and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
“I’ve become a mother,” she thought.
That was her last thought.
Her heart, though, still had life in it; it still beat, still ached, still felt pity for the dead and the living. Sofia Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She was hugging David to her life a doll. Now she too was dead, she too was a doll.
Source # 1- Video on World War Two and the Holocaust - click here
Source # 2 - Video of the Warsaw Ghetto and Invasion of the Soviet Union - click here
Source # 3 - Video of Nazi Holocaust Plans for Eastern Europe - click here
Source # 4 - Video on the Holocaust in Lithuania - click here
Source # 5 - Video on Einsatzgruppen - click here
You will have to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch
Biography - Vassily Grossman
Vassily Grossman was born to a Jewish family in Ukraine in the Russian Empire in 1905. He supported the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. He began writing short stories while he was an engineering students at Moscow State University. His early stories got the attention and support of high ranking Soviet leaders and by the early 1930’s, he became a full time writer.
In 1937, during the period of the Great Purge, Grossman had his first confrontation with the Soviet authorities when his wife was arrested because she had not denounced her first husband after he had been arrested as an “enemy of the people”. In response to his wife’s arrest he took the risky move of writing the head of the NKVD (the secret police) to complain that his wife was being held responsible for a man she had left. Surprisingly, his wife was released by the NKVD.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman became a war correspondent for a Soviet newspaper. In this role, he reported on many of the major battles of the war such as the battles for Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin. Grossman preferred to report on the lives and struggles of many of the ordinary Soviet soldiers and he spent a lot of time at the front lines of battles. His articles became a favorite read among the Soviet soldiers.
The Nazi Holocaust had a major affect on Grossman and he was one of the first reporters to bring the issue of the Holocaust to the world's attention. Grossman wrote about what the Soviet army encountered as it pushed the German army out of the Soviet Union. For example, when the Soviets liberated the region of Ukraine (which had one of the highest Jewish population in pre-war Europe), Grossman wrote, “There are no Jews in Ukraine… All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people have been murdered.” It was as the Soviet army advanced into Ukraine that he learned that his mother had been murdered along with 30,000 other people when her village had been captured by the Germans.
Grossman was the first journalist to arrive at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka in 1944. Grossman interviewed the survivors and the people who lived around the camp to write his article “Hell of Treblinka”. This article was used as evidence against the Nazi leadership at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Grossman went on to gather more evidence of Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union that he was compiled into a “Black Book”. However, following the war, Stalin wanted to downplay the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and focus on the general suffering of the Soviet people and ordered that Grossman’s work be supressed. This turned Grossman against the Soviet government.
Grossman turned his wartime experience into his major novel Life and Fate, which told the story of the war on the Eastern Front, but is focused mostly on the battle of Stalingrad and the events of the Holocaust. The novel tells the story on an epic scale that tells the story of many different characters from both the Soviet and German sides of the war as they fought in Stalingrad and suffered the Holocaust. Grossman finished the manuscript for the book in 1959. However, because the book was openly critical of the Soviet system, the government decided that it would not be published. In fact, the Soviet government considered it dangerous. The secret police raided Grossman’s house and confiscated all the copies of the manuscript, including the typewriter ribbons he used when writing the book. Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, to complain about how his book had been “arrested” and that he was “requesting freedom for my book”. A government official responded to Grossman letter by saying that the book could not be published for “two or three hundred years”.
A few years later, in 1964, Grossman died bitter over his treatment and the loss of his book. However, one copy of the manuscript of Life and Fate had escaped the Soviet authorities. Grossman had lent it to a friend who hid it at his country house. This copy of the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and was published in Europe in 1980. The novel was later published in Soviet Union in 1988 as the country opened up under Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika.
Source # 6 - Excerpt from Life and Fate - this scene captures the thoughts of on of the novel's characters, Sofia Livinson as she dies in the gas chamber at Auschwitz with David, a young orphan met and befriends in the cattle car to death camp.
David watched the door close: gently, smoothly, as though drawn by a magnet, the steel door drew closer to its steel frame. Finally they became one.
High up, behind a rectangular metal grating in the wall, David saw something stir. It looked like a grey rat, but he realized it was a fan beginning to turn. He sensed a faint, rather sweet smell.
The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofia Levinson want to turn and see what he was looking at.
Her eyes–which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul–her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there–mute, blind, her eyes still open.
The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thing stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice–he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet–this world still preoccupied him.
All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he longer existed.
Sofia Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had falled behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the bird and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
“I’ve become a mother,” she thought.
That was her last thought.
Her heart, though, still had life in it; it still beat, still ached, still felt pity for the dead and the living. Sofia Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She was hugging David to her life a doll. Now she too was dead, she too was a doll.
Source # 7 - Video on Treblinka - click here
Biography - Samuel Willenberg
Samuel Willenberg was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Poland. He volunteered for the army when the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939. He was sent into combat to fight the Soviet army as it invaded Poland from the east. Willenberg was wounded fighting the Soviet army and was taken prisoner. He escaped three months later and returned to his home in central Poland, then under German control. Willenberg was forced, along with his sisters and parents, to move into a Jewish ghetto. Willenberg worked as a forced laborer until his family was able to escape the ghetto with forged documents. However, the family was rounded up and forced into another ghetto. From here, Willenberg was sent to Treblinka when the ghetto was liquidated in 1942.
When he arrived at Treblinka, Willenberg was wearing paint-stained work clothes and the Germans thought is was a manual laborer. Instead of sending him to the gas chambers to be killed, they selected him to do work at Treblinka. He was the only one on his train not sent to the gas chambers. He was sent to work sorting through the belongings of the people killed in the gas chamber. While doing this work, he found the cloths that his sisters had been wearing on their way to Treblinka.
Willenberg conspired with the other prisoners to revolt against the Nazis. In August 1943, they rose up in rebellion. Most of the prisoners were killed, but Willenberg was able to escape with a few other prisoners. He travelled to Warsaw where he joined the Polish Home Army and participated in the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans in September 1944. He was captured at the end of the battle for the city when the Germans put down the rebellion. However, he escaped the prison train and hid in the countryside until the Soviets liberated the region.
After the war, Willenberg joined the Polish army and worked to help Jewish families find their children who had been hidden by non-Jewish Polish families. However, life for Jewish people in post-war Communist Poland was very difficult and Willenberg immigrated to Israel where he worked as an engineer and studied art. He focused his art on memorializing the victims at Treblinka. He also wrote and spoke about his experiences. He died in February 2016
Source # 8 - Fate of German Jews - click here
Biography - Samuel Willenberg
Samuel Willenberg was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Poland. He volunteered for the army when the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939. He was sent into combat to fight the Soviet army as it invaded Poland from the east. Willenberg was wounded fighting the Soviet army and was taken prisoner. He escaped three months later and returned to his home in central Poland, then under German control. Willenberg was forced, along with his sisters and parents, to move into a Jewish ghetto. Willenberg worked as a forced laborer until his family was able to escape the ghetto with forged documents. However, the family was rounded up and forced into another ghetto. From here, Willenberg was sent to Treblinka when the ghetto was liquidated in 1942.
When he arrived at Treblinka, Willenberg was wearing paint-stained work clothes and the Germans thought is was a manual laborer. Instead of sending him to the gas chambers to be killed, they selected him to do work at Treblinka. He was the only one on his train not sent to the gas chambers. He was sent to work sorting through the belongings of the people killed in the gas chamber. While doing this work, he found the cloths that his sisters had been wearing on their way to Treblinka.
Willenberg conspired with the other prisoners to revolt against the Nazis. In August 1943, they rose up in rebellion. Most of the prisoners were killed, but Willenberg was able to escape with a few other prisoners. He travelled to Warsaw where he joined the Polish Home Army and participated in the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans in September 1944. He was captured at the end of the battle for the city when the Germans put down the rebellion. However, he escaped the prison train and hid in the countryside until the Soviets liberated the region.
After the war, Willenberg joined the Polish army and worked to help Jewish families find their children who had been hidden by non-Jewish Polish families. However, life for Jewish people in post-war Communist Poland was very difficult and Willenberg immigrated to Israel where he worked as an engineer and studied art. He focused his art on memorializing the victims at Treblinka. He also wrote and spoke about his experiences. He died in February 2016
Source # 8 - Fate of German Jews - click here
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
March 2, 2016 - War on the Eastern Front
Source # 1 - Video about Nazi goals and the attack on the Soviet Union - click here
Source #2 - This video clip from the German movie Generation War. This clip shows the fighting on the Eastern Front (in the Soviet Union) from the perspective of German soldiers. This clip shows the war in 1941 as the Germans are invading the Soviet Union. The two main characters are Lieutenant Wilhelm Winter and Private Friedhelm Winter, who serve in the same unit of the German army - click here
Note - you will need to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch this video
Source # 3 - Video about the experience of how experience of the people of the Soviet Union during the war and the Battle of Leningrad - click here
Biography - Lyudmyla Pavlychenko
Lyudmyla Pavlychencko was born outside of city of Kyiv, Ukraine in the Russian Empire in 1916. She joined a shooting club when she was young after she heard a boy in her neighborhood talk about how he was such a good shot. She said started shooting to “show that a girl could do as well.” Even though she described her own school years by saying that she was “unruly in the classroom”, she enrolled at Kyiv University to be a teacher. While in university she also worked in a military factory.
Pavlychenko was vacationing in the coastal city of Odessa when the Germans invaded in the Soviet Union in June 1941. She volunteered to join the army, but enlistment officers wanted to make her a nurse. When Pavlychenko insisted that she was good with a rifle, they forced to prove her ability during the battle of Odessa as the Germans attacked the city. They brought her to the front and handed her a rifle and ordered her to shoot two enemy soldiers on a nearby hill. They were her first two kills. However Pavlychenko did not include them in her battlefield tally because “they were test shots”.
After the Germans captured Odessa, Pavlychenko was assigned to the defense of the Sevastopol in Crimea. It was in the brutal battle to defend Sevastopol that Pavlychenko demonstrated her effectiveness as a sniper. She killed 309 enemy soldiers, including 100 German officers. Because of her ability, she was assigned to be a counter-sniper, which meant that she had to hunt enemy snipers on the battlefield. Operating as a counter-sniper was extremely dangerous since it required her to stay in position in the center of battlefield for hours, and sometimes days. She killed 36 German snipers. She said that killing Germans did not bother her because, “Every German who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.”
After the Germans captured Sevastopol, the Soviet army took Pavlychenko out of combat because she was too valuable to lose. She had already been wounded four times and the Germans had specifically begun to try to find and kill her. The Soviet Union honored her by putting her on a postage stamp.
In 1942, Pavlychenko was sent by the Soviet government to United States to get American support for the war against Germany. She was the first Soviet citizen to be a guest at the White House and went on to tour the United States with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt and Pavlychenko became friends and Roosevelt helped her with silly comments from the American media such as the New York Times which called her the “girl sniper” and said that she “wore no lip rouge, or makeup of any kind” and that “there isn’t much style to her olive-green uniform”. Pavlychenko replied to such comments by replying that “I wear my uniform with honor” and “who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”
When she returned to the Soviet Union she became an instructor for snipers and then served as a researcher in the Soviet Military after the war. She and Roosevelt remained friends and met again in 1957 when Roosevelt visited the Soviet Union. Pavlychenko died in 1974 in Moscow.
Source # 4 - Video from the Russian-Ukrainian film Battle for Sevastopol about Lyudmyla Pavlychenko. This video clip shows Pavlychenko in training to be a sniper and her first experience in battle - click here
Note - you will need to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch this video
Biography - Gregory Zhukov
Georgy Zhukov was born in 1896 to a family of peasants. In 1915, Zhukov was drafted into the Russian army and fought in World War One. He was awarded for his bravery and was badly wounded in battle. After the October Revolution, Zhukov joined Lenin's Bolshevik Party and became an officer in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. After the Civil War, Zhukov became an army commander of the Soviet Army in Siberia (far eastern Russia). Because he was so far away from the capital of Moscow, Zhukov was able to survive Stalin's "Great Purge" of the army (When Stalin ordered the secret police to arrest and kill the leaders of the army). As the commander of the Soviet Army in Siberia, Zhukov defeated the Japanese is a short war between the Soviet Union and Japan over the region of Mongolia in 1939. Stalin rewarded Zhukov by making him a commander of the overall Soviet Army in January 1941.
When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin ordered Zhukov to attack the Germans and not retreat. While he disagreed with Stalin's orders, Zhukov obeyed the orders and the result heavy Soviet losses. Stalin removed Zhukov from command when Zhukov argued against defending the city of Kyiv and instead recommended that the Soviet Army retreat. Stalin ignored Zhukov's advice and the Germans captured 600, 000 Soviet soldiers when they captured Kyiv. After the loss of Kyiv, Stalin changed his mind about Zhukov and put Zhukov in command of the defense of Moscow, the Soviet capital. By December of 1941, the Germany army was closing in on Moscow and it looked as if they might capture the city. Even Stalin made plans to evacuate the city.
The Battle of Moscow was one of the largest and most crucial battles of the whole war. Zhukov had to organize the defense of the capital of the Soviet Union with a badly beaten army with not enough weapons or supplies - some units went in to battle with only one rifle for every ten soldiers. Zhukov was able to bolster the defense of Moscow by convincing Stalin to move the Soviet army in Siberia to the defense of the city. The Siberian soldiers were equipped and experienced with fighting in winter conditions. They were able to stop the German advance and pushed the Germany army back 150 miles - saving Moscow from being captured. This was the first major defeat for the German army in the war and destroyed Germany's chance for a quick victory in the war. However, the cost of the battle was enormous - the Soviet lost more than 1.9 million soldiers. When Zhukov's deputy showed him the numbers of losses he told him to "hide it and don't show it to anybody!"
After the successful defense of Moscow, Zhukov was put in command of organizing the defense of the city of Stalingrad. The battle of Stalingrad was one of the most important battles of World War Two. Zhukov developed and led and attack on the German army at Stalingrad that surrounded the Germans and forced them to surrender in February 1943 - which eliminated an entire German army. The in the summer of 1943, Zhukov lured the German army into the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle of the war, which was another crushing defeat for the Germans. The combined defeats of Stalingrad and Kursk broke the power of the German army.
After the victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, Zhukov lead the Soviet Army as it drove the Germans out of the Soviet Union. Stalin was so pleased with Zhukov's military ability that he gave him the special distinction of leading the Soviet attack on the Nazi capital of Berlin in 1945. After a ferocious battle to capture the city, which ended when Hitler committed suicide before the Soviets could capture him, Zhukov oversaw the surrender of the remains of the Nazi German government.
After the war, Stalin was threatened by Zhukov's popularity with the Soviet military and the general population. Ever paranoid, Stalin removed Zhukov from his position as supreme military commander and assigned him to run the military in region in the southwest of the Soviet Union. After Stalin died, Zhukov was elevated to the position of defense minister in the Soviet Union. He died in 1974.
Source # 4 - Video clip from the opening scene from the movie Enemy at the Gates about the Battle of Stalingrad. This was one of the most important battles of World War Two and was the first major defeat for Germany in the war. This scene follows a Soviet soldier as he arrives at Stalingrad and is sent into the fighting - click here
Note - you will need to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch this video
Source # 5 - Video about the Battle of Kursk - American aid for Soviet war effort - click here
Source # 6 - Video clip from the German movie "Generation War which shows the war in 1943, after the Germans have lost the Battle of Stalingrad, and follows a group of German soldiers has they participate in the Battle of Kursk - click here
Note - you will need to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch this video
Source #2 - This video clip from the German movie Generation War. This clip shows the fighting on the Eastern Front (in the Soviet Union) from the perspective of German soldiers. This clip shows the war in 1941 as the Germans are invading the Soviet Union. The two main characters are Lieutenant Wilhelm Winter and Private Friedhelm Winter, who serve in the same unit of the German army - click here
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Source # 3 - Video about the experience of how experience of the people of the Soviet Union during the war and the Battle of Leningrad - click here
Biography - Lyudmyla Pavlychenko
Lyudmyla Pavlychencko was born outside of city of Kyiv, Ukraine in the Russian Empire in 1916. She joined a shooting club when she was young after she heard a boy in her neighborhood talk about how he was such a good shot. She said started shooting to “show that a girl could do as well.” Even though she described her own school years by saying that she was “unruly in the classroom”, she enrolled at Kyiv University to be a teacher. While in university she also worked in a military factory.
Pavlychenko was vacationing in the coastal city of Odessa when the Germans invaded in the Soviet Union in June 1941. She volunteered to join the army, but enlistment officers wanted to make her a nurse. When Pavlychenko insisted that she was good with a rifle, they forced to prove her ability during the battle of Odessa as the Germans attacked the city. They brought her to the front and handed her a rifle and ordered her to shoot two enemy soldiers on a nearby hill. They were her first two kills. However Pavlychenko did not include them in her battlefield tally because “they were test shots”.
After the Germans captured Odessa, Pavlychenko was assigned to the defense of the Sevastopol in Crimea. It was in the brutal battle to defend Sevastopol that Pavlychenko demonstrated her effectiveness as a sniper. She killed 309 enemy soldiers, including 100 German officers. Because of her ability, she was assigned to be a counter-sniper, which meant that she had to hunt enemy snipers on the battlefield. Operating as a counter-sniper was extremely dangerous since it required her to stay in position in the center of battlefield for hours, and sometimes days. She killed 36 German snipers. She said that killing Germans did not bother her because, “Every German who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.”
After the Germans captured Sevastopol, the Soviet army took Pavlychenko out of combat because she was too valuable to lose. She had already been wounded four times and the Germans had specifically begun to try to find and kill her. The Soviet Union honored her by putting her on a postage stamp.In 1942, Pavlychenko was sent by the Soviet government to United States to get American support for the war against Germany. She was the first Soviet citizen to be a guest at the White House and went on to tour the United States with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt and Pavlychenko became friends and Roosevelt helped her with silly comments from the American media such as the New York Times which called her the “girl sniper” and said that she “wore no lip rouge, or makeup of any kind” and that “there isn’t much style to her olive-green uniform”. Pavlychenko replied to such comments by replying that “I wear my uniform with honor” and “who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”
When she returned to the Soviet Union she became an instructor for snipers and then served as a researcher in the Soviet Military after the war. She and Roosevelt remained friends and met again in 1957 when Roosevelt visited the Soviet Union. Pavlychenko died in 1974 in Moscow.
Source # 4 - Video from the Russian-Ukrainian film Battle for Sevastopol about Lyudmyla Pavlychenko. This video clip shows Pavlychenko in training to be a sniper and her first experience in battle - click here
Note - you will need to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch this video
Biography - Gregory Zhukov
Georgy Zhukov was born in 1896 to a family of peasants. In 1915, Zhukov was drafted into the Russian army and fought in World War One. He was awarded for his bravery and was badly wounded in battle. After the October Revolution, Zhukov joined Lenin's Bolshevik Party and became an officer in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. After the Civil War, Zhukov became an army commander of the Soviet Army in Siberia (far eastern Russia). Because he was so far away from the capital of Moscow, Zhukov was able to survive Stalin's "Great Purge" of the army (When Stalin ordered the secret police to arrest and kill the leaders of the army). As the commander of the Soviet Army in Siberia, Zhukov defeated the Japanese is a short war between the Soviet Union and Japan over the region of Mongolia in 1939. Stalin rewarded Zhukov by making him a commander of the overall Soviet Army in January 1941.
When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin ordered Zhukov to attack the Germans and not retreat. While he disagreed with Stalin's orders, Zhukov obeyed the orders and the result heavy Soviet losses. Stalin removed Zhukov from command when Zhukov argued against defending the city of Kyiv and instead recommended that the Soviet Army retreat. Stalin ignored Zhukov's advice and the Germans captured 600, 000 Soviet soldiers when they captured Kyiv. After the loss of Kyiv, Stalin changed his mind about Zhukov and put Zhukov in command of the defense of Moscow, the Soviet capital. By December of 1941, the Germany army was closing in on Moscow and it looked as if they might capture the city. Even Stalin made plans to evacuate the city.
The Battle of Moscow was one of the largest and most crucial battles of the whole war. Zhukov had to organize the defense of the capital of the Soviet Union with a badly beaten army with not enough weapons or supplies - some units went in to battle with only one rifle for every ten soldiers. Zhukov was able to bolster the defense of Moscow by convincing Stalin to move the Soviet army in Siberia to the defense of the city. The Siberian soldiers were equipped and experienced with fighting in winter conditions. They were able to stop the German advance and pushed the Germany army back 150 miles - saving Moscow from being captured. This was the first major defeat for the German army in the war and destroyed Germany's chance for a quick victory in the war. However, the cost of the battle was enormous - the Soviet lost more than 1.9 million soldiers. When Zhukov's deputy showed him the numbers of losses he told him to "hide it and don't show it to anybody!"
After the successful defense of Moscow, Zhukov was put in command of organizing the defense of the city of Stalingrad. The battle of Stalingrad was one of the most important battles of World War Two. Zhukov developed and led and attack on the German army at Stalingrad that surrounded the Germans and forced them to surrender in February 1943 - which eliminated an entire German army. The in the summer of 1943, Zhukov lured the German army into the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle of the war, which was another crushing defeat for the Germans. The combined defeats of Stalingrad and Kursk broke the power of the German army.
After the victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, Zhukov lead the Soviet Army as it drove the Germans out of the Soviet Union. Stalin was so pleased with Zhukov's military ability that he gave him the special distinction of leading the Soviet attack on the Nazi capital of Berlin in 1945. After a ferocious battle to capture the city, which ended when Hitler committed suicide before the Soviets could capture him, Zhukov oversaw the surrender of the remains of the Nazi German government.
After the war, Stalin was threatened by Zhukov's popularity with the Soviet military and the general population. Ever paranoid, Stalin removed Zhukov from his position as supreme military commander and assigned him to run the military in region in the southwest of the Soviet Union. After Stalin died, Zhukov was elevated to the position of defense minister in the Soviet Union. He died in 1974.
Source # 4 - Video clip from the opening scene from the movie Enemy at the Gates about the Battle of Stalingrad. This was one of the most important battles of World War Two and was the first major defeat for Germany in the war. This scene follows a Soviet soldier as he arrives at Stalingrad and is sent into the fighting - click here
Note - you will need to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch this video
Source # 5 - Video about the Battle of Kursk - American aid for Soviet war effort - click here
Source # 6 - Video clip from the German movie "Generation War which shows the war in 1943, after the Germans have lost the Battle of Stalingrad, and follows a group of German soldiers has they participate in the Battle of Kursk - click here
Note - you will need to be signed into you BHS Google account to watch this video
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