Week 29
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. In a state of total war, directly involving more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, resulting in 70 to 85 million fatalities, with more civilians than military personnel killed. Tens of millions of people died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), premeditated death from starvation, massacres, and disease. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, including in strategic bombing of population centers, the development of nuclear weapons, and the only two uses of such in war. World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by the United Kingdom and France on the 3rd of September, 1939. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan, along with other countries later on. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours: Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, and the fall of France in mid-1940, the war continued primarily between the European Axis powers and the British Empire, with war in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, and the Battle of the Atlantic. On 22 June 1941, Germany led the European Axis powers in an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front, the largest land theatre of war in history and trapping the Axis, crucially the German Wehrmacht, in a war of attrition. (Wikipedia)
REQUIRED READING
RECOMMENDED READING
We want to recommend to you for extra reading about the Third Reich, the three-volume study written by Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans. It has been his work of a lifetime and it is now complete and available in fine quality paperback editions or in used/new hardcover. (I would buy the "used" hardcovers since they are like new and often prices are the same as a new paperback) Let me print here some reviews of the first volume and then we will list all three volumes for your attention.
Review
"Richard J. Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich . . . gives the clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." —A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement
"Richard J. Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgable and reliable." —Mark Mazower, New York Times Book Review
"[A] first-rate narrative history that informs and educates and may inspire readers to delve even deeper into the subject." —Booklist
"Brilliant.” —Washington Post
“The generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served. . . . The book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and succeeds in its aim of giving “voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals.” —Denver Post
“One finally puts down this magnificent volume thirsty, on the one hand, for the next installment in the Nazi saga yet still haunted by the questions Evan poses and so masterfully grapples with.” ―Abraham Brumberg, The Nation
“This first part of what is Evans’ three-volume history of Hitler’s regime is the most comprehensive and convincing work so far on the gall of Weimar and Hitler’s rise to power.” ―Foreign Affairs
