IB History Combat Operations and Allied Victory Notes

The Eastern Front: Operation Barbarossa and Mass Displacement

1. On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of the Soviet Union involving over 3 million soldiers. The front line stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Advancing German troops burned towns, tortured and killed resisters, and forced civilians to flee east along railway lines.
2. Nazi special operations divisions called Einsatzgruppen (labelled A, B, C, and D) accompanied the army. Their orders were to eliminate people the regime classified as enemies of the German Reich: Jewish people, Roma and Sinti people, and communists. Local collaborators assisted them.
   1. By 1943, 1.25 million Jewish people and hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians had been killed, and many thousands more had been displaced.
3. The German army captured around 3 million Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) between June and December 1941. Many were shot or starved. By 1942, Germany faced a serious labour shortage, so the government began deporting Soviet POWs to work in German factories and farms.
   1. Of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs taken during the entire war, only 2.4 million survived.

The Soviet Advance West: Scorched Earth and Mass Flight

1. By late 1942, German forces had pushed within 20 kilometres of Moscow. The Soviet army, better equipped for winter warfare, launched a counterattack on 5 December 1942.
   1. The Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk (July-August 1943) ended German attempts to control the Soviet Union, and the Red Army began advancing west through Belorussia (now Belarus), Ukraine, and Poland.
2. As the German army retreated, it used scorched earth tactics, destroying roads, railways, bridges, and power stations. Soldiers burned farms, settlements, and entire villages. Civilians in these areas were killed, taken as forced labourers, or forced to flee.

1. The Red Army's advance brought a wave of violence against Germans and anyone suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. Soviet soldiers looted homes, committed arson, and carried out widespread sexual violence.
   1. In January 1945, Marshal Georgi Zhukov urged soldiers to "deal the enemy a last and decisive blow" and to "exact a brutal revenge for everything." The advancing Red Army also liberated concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
2. When the Red Army reached East Prussia in January 1945, 2 million Germans fled. Some went west by land, others tried to reach the port city of Danzig by sea, only to be captured by Soviet forces. Between January and April 1945, roughly 7.5 million Germans left the eastern parts of Germany and Soviet-occupied Poland.
   1. Those who stayed faced intimidation, beatings, sexual violence, and the threat of death.

D-Day and Operations from the West

1. By 1944, Germany occupied most of Western Europe: Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and the Channel Islands. On 6 June 1944, the Allies launched Operation Overlord (D-Day), landing US, British, and Canadian forces on five beaches in Normandy, France. Led by US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the operation involved 3,000 landing craft, 2,500 ships, and 822 aircraft.
2. Operation Overlord succeeded for several reasons. German defences on the Atlantic Wall were only 18% complete, leaving a long coastline poorly defended. The Allies maintained the advantage of surprise. Allied air superiority allowed them to target German infrastructure and provide cover for the invasion.
   1. The French Resistance provided local support. Damaged Normandy infrastructure made it difficult for Germans to bring reinforcements quickly.
3. After Normandy, the Allies fought through France, liberating Paris in August 1944, then advanced toward Germany. The Battle of Remagen (March-April 1945) was one of the last major offensives. On 7 March, the US army captured the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine, the last remaining crossing into Germany.

Allied Bombing Campaigns and Their Impact on Displacement

1. From the west, the Allies pressed Germany in a two-fold operation. On land, troops closed in from France. From the air, British and US bombers targeted German industrial cities: Bremen, Darmstadt, Essen, Dresden, and Hamburg.
   1. The raids aimed to destroy weapons production, disrupt transport infrastructure, weaken morale, and force a surrender.
2. The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 remains one of the most controversial Allied actions. From 13 to 15 February, 800 bombers dropped 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries on the city. A 2010 historical commission revised the death toll estimate to between 22,700 and 25,000.
   1. Dresden was a major rail hub, but it was also a densely crowded city filled with refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army. Many Germans viewed the attack as unnecessary given the war's imminent end.
3. As the Allies entered German towns, Eisenhower's Proclamation No. 1 was read out, declaring that the Allied forces came "as conquerors, but not as oppressors" to overthrow Nazism. A curfew was imposed after 6pm, travel was restricted, and weapons were confiscated.
   1. The Office of the Military Government of the United States (OMGUS) then took over, often requisitioning housing from German residents, which contributed to further internal displacement (when people are forced to move within the same country).

The Concentration Camp System

1. The first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was built near Munich in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. It initially held political prisoners: communists, social democrats, and trade unionists. Over time, the system expanded into a network of camps across Germany and occupied territories, especially Poland.
   1. Some camps were used for forced labour. Others were set up specifically as extermination camps.
2. By the end of the war, the camps held Jewish people, Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet POWs, and gay people. Prisoners were transported by train or truck in conditions so overcrowded that people could not sit down. Many died before arriving, from starvation or suffocation.

Liberation of the Camps and the Fate of Survivors

1. On the night of 22 July 1944, Soviet forces reached Majdanek, a camp outside Lublin, Poland. The Nazi guards had fled so quickly that they failed to destroy the evidence of their crimes: gas chambers, ovens used to dispose of bodies, and the belongings of those murdered.
   1. For the first time, the horrors of the camps became known to the outside world.
2. As the Red Army advanced, it liberated more camps, including Auschwitz in January 1945. US and British forces liberated camps in the west. In most cases, Nazi guards attempted to evacuate the camps before the Allies arrived, forcing inmates to march away on what became known as death marches.
   1. At Auschwitz, nearly 60,000 prisoners were marched west toward Wodzislaw. More than 15,000 died from exposure to cold, starvation, or being shot by SS guards (the Nazi organization responsible for state security and running the camp system).
3. Survivors faced staggering challenges. They were in poor health from overcrowding, starvation, forced labour, and abuse. Many suffered long-term psychological and physical damage. Families had been broken apart, and survivors needed to search for loved ones.
   1. Some could return to their former homes, but many found those homes destroyed or occupied. Across all camps, an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people survived.

Allied Victory and the Occupation of Germany

1. The Red Army reached Berlin in April 1945.
   1. The city was bombed relentlessly, and about 70,000 Red Army soldiers were killed in the battle.
   2. Berlin fell to the Soviets on 2 May 1945.
   3. Hitler had already ended his own life in his bunker.
   4. Germany signed an unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945.
2. Germany and Austria were each divided into four zones of occupation, administered by Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
   1. Berlin was also split into four sectors.
   2. No central German government was established.
   3. Each zone was run independently by its occupying power, with an Allied Control Council coordinating joint decisions.
3. Allied troops set up camps for displaced persons, but conditions were often poor.
   1. The fighting had destroyed roads, railways, bridges, schools, hospitals, and public buildings.
   2. Partially destroyed buildings were often used to house people, which was dangerous because they were structurally unstable.
   3. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), established in 1943, took on the task of rehabilitating displaced persons.
   4. The Harrison Report later highlighted the unsanitary and inadequate conditions in many DP camps.

The Yalta Conference (February 1945)

1. In February 1945, the Big Three Allied leaders (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) met at Yalta in Russia, recognizing that German defeat was imminent.
   1. It was the last time all three would meet.
   2. Roosevelt died just two months later.
   3. Churchill lost the general election in July 1945 and was replaced by Clement Attlee.
2. Key decisions at Yalta included the following.
   1. Germany would surrender unconditionally and be divided into zones of occupation (initially three, later four when France was included).
   2. Berlin would be partitioned into four sectors.
   3. The question of reparations (payments to make amends) was left to a commission, though Stalin wanted them fixed at $20 billion.
   4. Poland would receive a provisional government until free elections could be held.
   5. Poland would be compensated for territory lost to the Soviet Union by receiving German territory to the west, though exact borders were left for later negotiation.

The Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945)

1. By July 1945, the war in Europe was over.
   1. Allied leaders met at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, Germany, from 17 July to 2 August 1945.
   2. Stalin still represented the Soviet Union.
   3. Truman had replaced Roosevelt, and Attlee replaced Churchill partway through the conference.

Border changes and population transfers

1. The Oder-Neisse line (the boundary following the rivers Oder and Neisse into the Baltic Sea) became Poland's provisional western boundary.
   1. Polish borders shifted west at the expense of German territories in Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia.
   2. The territory around the East Prussian city of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) was given to the Soviet Union.
   3. Germans from these transferred territories, as well as from Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were to be relocated.

Denazification and Germany's future

1. The Potsdam agreement required Germany to be demilitarized and denazified (the process of removing Nazis and Nazi ideology from public life, including investigations into individuals' involvement with the regime).
   1. The bureaucracy, judiciary, and education system were to be purged of Nazi influence and rebuilt on democratic principles.
2. Economically, Germany was to be treated as a single entity, but the Allies disagreed on how to do this.
   1. The US and Britain opposed demanding reparations, while Stalin insisted.
   2. The compromise was that each power would take reparations from its own zone, with the Soviet Union entitled to additional deliveries from the Western zones.

Displaced Germans and Poles

1. The displacement of ethnic Germans from contested territory was enormous.
   1. In May 1945, Poles forcibly occupied German territory and ejected the Germans living there.
   2. When Germany had invaded Poland in 1939, the Nazis expelled about 750,000 Polish people from western Poland and offered the vacated land to ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) from Eastern Europe: roughly 120,000 Baltic Germans, 136,000 from Soviet-occupied Poland, and 200,000 from Romania.
2. When Poland reclaimed this land after the war, those Germans were expelled.
   1. The Soviet Union displaced over 1 million people east from Soviet-occupied Poland.
   2. Between Stalin and Hitler, about 30 million people had been forced to move between 1939 and 1943.
   3. As German armies retreated, they abandoned newly established resettlements, adding to the growing numbers of displaced persons in Germany.
3. Many displaced persons within Germany tried to flee from the Soviet zone to the Allied zones.
   1. Groups of displaced persons of different nationalities banded together and roamed the countryside, often robbing shops, warehouses, and farmhouses to feed themselves.
   2. In areas where law and order had broken down, local populations viewed these groups as both a burden and a threat.

The Scale of Death and Destruction

1. The Second World War killed tens of millions across Europe.
   1. The Soviet Union lost 27 million people (13.7% of its pre-war population).
   2. Poland lost 6 million (16%).
   3. Germany lost 4.5 million soldiers and 1.5 million civilians (8.5% combined).
   4. Yugoslavia lost 1 million (6.3%), Hungary 450,000 (7%), and Greece 410,000 (5.8%).
   5. Even countries with lower absolute losses, like the Netherlands (210,000, or 2.9%) and Belgium (86,000, or 1.1%), suffered deeply.
2. Almost everyone alive in Europe at the war's end had lost friends or relatives.
   1. In some cases, entire communities had been destroyed and their few survivors scattered.
   2. Allied forces had to manage displaced persons while simultaneously restoring government functions, maintaining law and order, caring for camp survivors, processing POWs, and dealing with interned Nazi suspects.