1 / 114

Victory

Victory. 3312686. In the cities of the victorious allies, thousands flooded the streets to celebrate victory and the end of the war. 2695975. 3162521. 50433081. 51259647 . 3312686. 3312667. A returning sailor kisses a complete stranger in the celebration of VE Day in New York City. .

gurit
Download Presentation

Victory

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Victory 3312686

  2. In the cities of the victorious allies, thousands flooded the streets to celebrate victory and the end of the war. 2695975 3162521

  3. 50433081 51259647

  4. 3312686

  5. 3312667

  6. A returning sailor kisses a complete stranger in the celebration of VE Day in New York City. 50433084

  7. Apparently, grabbing a quick kiss from a strange girl wasn’t so uncommon. 97267099

  8. 76644830

  9. 50625869

  10. 50372517

  11. 50462058

  12. 3374453

  13. 83567917

  14. 3274785

  15. 50694167

  16. 50478107

  17. One woman tries to even the score. 50625880

  18. One soldier feels like he really had won the war. 2667160

  19. However, not everyone on the winning side felt like a winner: "Above the muzzle of our window & from all the other cells of the Lubyanka [Prison] we too, former prisoners of war & former front line soldiers, watched the Moscow Heavens, patterned with fireworks & crisscrossed by the beams of search lights. That victory was not for us."-- Alex Solzhenitsyn on victory celebrations seen from his prison cell 3310163

  20. A young wife (left) and German mother joyously greet their husband and son as they return safely from the son. Millions of other wives and mothers weren’t so lucky. 50803376 50803376

  21. Two Germans return from a Russian POW camp on one pair of legs. 50693958

  22. American soldiers make first contact with allied Russian soldiers (including women who fought in combat) in an historic meeting at the Elbe River. In fact, it happened so fast, that it had to be restaged several days later so higher ranking officers could be present and make it look official. 2638694 52675181

  23. However, beneath the façade of camaraderie all was not well between the erstwhile allies. Soon new rivalries would emerge and with them a new kind of war, the Cold War between former allies who now found their common enemy gone. 52128277

  24. Holocaust 2001405

  25. It was the perfect fusion of obsessive hatred with the modern state and technology.

  26. It was what happens when everything goes wrong.

  27. Not all those killed in World War II were soldiers or incidental civilians caught in military operations. Much of the killing was deliberately and methodically carried out against helpless civilians, including women and children. The most infamous such operation was the Holocaust. The Holocaust, in the narrower interpretation of the word, refers to the organized state program for the mass extermination of the Jews. Nazi efforts intensified as the war progressed, ultimately claiming 6,000,000 out of 10,000,000 European Jews. Given more time, they might very well have completed the job. 2658713 2658713

  28. As early as the publication of MeinKampf(1924) Hitler laid out how he was going to exterminate the Jews. Unfortunately, many or most people failed to take him at his full word, figuring he would institute harsh policies, but nothing on the scale of the Holocaust. However, almost from the moment he became chancellor in 1933, Hitler instituted ever more cruel policies against the Jews, from boycotts of their businesses through the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938), all the while rounding up larger numbers for his concentration camps.* *The term concentration camp seems to have originated with the Boer War in South Africa, when British forces would round up and concentrate the Boer civilian population in overcrowded unsanitary camps to prevent them from offering aid to Boer forces roaming the countryside. 82139236

  29. However, plans for organized mass exterminations didn’t form until the invasion of Russia (1941), which put millions of new potential victims under Nazi rule. Initial efforts of mass executions by firing squads proved inefficient, so a more efficient industrial organization was created, referred euphemistically by Nazis as the Final Solution or Solving the Eastern Question. 53313247

  30. The first stage was rounding up Jews, many of whom had already been isolated and concentrated in ghettos in Poland. SS officials (who carried out the Holocaust under the command of Heinrich Himmler) crammed them into railroad boxcars, where the occupants suffered from heat (or cold), and lack of ventilation, food, water, and sanitary facilities. Any who died en route were deemed too weak to be useful anyway, thus conserving poison gas to use on others. 56460826

  31. Arriving at the camps, family members were separated from one another by gender, including separating the children from their parents). As they were processed, a Nazi official would send them either to the right (for forced labor) or left (for extermination). 56460387

  32. The labor camps were a slower death sentence, as inmates were worked to exhaustion during excessively long shifts while being given little food to sustain them. The prevailing attitude was that their deaths just eliminated more Jews while opening space for new laborers. 89237115

  33. For those sent to execution, the most common method was asphyxiation in the gas chambers. Inmates might be told they were just taking showers, although rumors had filtered out about the real purpose of these “showers”. Hydrogen cyanide pellets were released, which, when coming into contact with the air would vaporize into poison gas and filter down to the inmates below. Often, panic would ensue, with the victims clawing over one another trying to get to the door, which of course was locked. 2641681

  34. The next stage in the process was disposing of the huge numbers of corpses in as efficient and sanitary way as possible. For this, inmates hosed down the bodies of their comrades in the gas chamber and carried them to the camp ovens or crematoria, where they were burned. In addition to the easy disposal of bodies, this also destroyed much of the evidence of what had been done. 51919570

  35. The death camps were run with a businesslike efficiency that may have helped Nazi officials emotionally detach themselves from their horrible tasks. Those denying the existence or extent of the Holocaust ignore the Nazis’ almost obsessive policy of keeping intricate records of proceedings. Besides the names of millions of victims (such as those on the chart to the left), we even have receipts for shipments of the hydrogen cyanide pellets (AKA Zyklon-B) used to produce the poison gas in the gas chambers, and such things as the rubber gaskets used to seal the windows looking in on them to make sure everyone was dead. 89236993

  36. Liberated victims of Buchenwald. The author and future Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, is the seventh prisoner from the left on the second row from the bottom next to the post. 2659764

  37. A Buchenwald victim 79660636

  38. Stacked bodies of victims at Buchenwald 92424850

  39. One of the Buchenwald ovens with the charred remains of its victim still inside. 50701159

  40. Watches looted from Buchenwald inmates. 3314147

  41. Wedding rings taken from inmates of Buchenwald to be melted down to gold bars. 2667609

  42. Caps for teeth and dentures taken from inmates of Buchenwald to be melted down to gold bars. 3089217

  43. Tattooed skin taken from inmates of Buchenwald to be made into purses and lampshades for the camp commandant’s wife. 92926092

  44. Security was so tight at the camps that there were apparently no escapes until two Czech Jews got out in 1944. Victims of a camp’s electric fence were left where they died as a warning to other prisoners not to try to escape. The Nazis were so adamant about keeping specific proceedings in the death camps secret that, when a Nazi colonel’s wife was mistakenly sent to Auschwitz, they executed her even though the mistake had been caught in time, fearing that she would tell the outside world what she had seen there. 52832696

  45. When American soldiers came upon and liberated Hitler’s camps, they were totally uninformed and unprepared for they saw. Tragically, many GIs, wanting desperately to help, gave the prisoners more food than their bodies, still in low metabolism starvation mode, could take. As a result, many Jewish inmates’ bodies went into shock from overeating and died. Overall, 40% of those freed from the camps didn’t survive the first few weeks of their freedom. 50597266

  46. Edward R. Murrow’s account of Buchenwald after its liberation is about as poignant description of such a scene as was written then. “There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were plowing…” 2664205

  47. “…[I] asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description….” …”As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it….” 51347511

  48. “….In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only 6 years old. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die…” Below left: Auschwitz; right: Buchenwald Auschwitz 2658734 50597191

  49. “…We went to the hospital [pictured below]. It was full. The doctor told me that 200 had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said: “tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.” He pulled back the blanket from a man's feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move….” Belsen Survivors of the Hanover-Anhelm camp (above) & Ebensee concentration camp (right) 2424244

  50. “….I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge....showed me the daily ration. One piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every 24 hours. He had a chart on the wall. Very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each 10 men who died. He had to account for the rations and he added: ‘We're very efficient here….’” 79660637

More Related