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?
