HISTORY 322 Final: HIST 322 Final Exam
Spartacus uprising:
● End of December 1918. Spartacus League formed the communist party
● By January they owned the newspaper and launched the revolution saying we don’t have the
rights we need
● January 12th leaders of Spartacus were murdered by the Freikorps and army
● Once the league was squashed, germans head to the polls and 83% vote
● It was a subgroup of the USPD, revolution of the masses
● More radical but initially joined the USPD and sympathized with the Russian Revolution and
formed as a loose group to oppose the war in 1915
● Everything needs to be destroyed, demolished and build fresh w/ workers/women in mind
● Violence = necessary because no one will give up jobs voluntarily
● Later founded the KPD in 1918 (same as the communist party)
● Jan 5-12 1919: Spartacus Uprising had street barricades and poorly armed communists. The
Freikorps took position and someone called the army so the army came down to kill the
communists
○ Liebknecht and Luxemburg were taken to prison to be executed
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service:
● April 7th, 1933: Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
○ Can fire civil servants from office without grounds for action
○ Civil servants of non-Aryan descent are to be retired
○ Anyone politically questionable can be removed
Warsaw Ghetto:
● July and September - authorities deported around 300,000 Jews living in this ghetto
● 60,000 Jews remained in ghetto
○ 35,000 were given permission to stay - others had stayed in hiding
● Remarkable pushback against guards:
○ Smuggled in weapons and connected with Polish resistance army
○ Jews created militant resistant organization (ZOB)
■ Several hundred fighters
■ Wanted to establish connection with polish underground to beat the warsaw
○ ghetto Nazis reduce ghetto to rubble and move in with tanks
General Plan Ost:
● Invasion of USSR spells dramatic chaos
● Hunger plan
○ Meant to turn this area into a territory that could be settled by Germans and their slaves
○ Envisioned (over next 30 or so years) to deport 30 million ppl from that territory
■ All the slavs that couldn’t be used for labor = pushed out
■ Area = resettled with 500 million Germans and their slaves - Fantasy
■ Hunger Plan: can’t push all soviets out so they starve them (~3 million ppl)
■ Genocide becomes official policy
■ Relating calories to units of labor / bodies necessary to perform tasks
● Independent of racial consideration
■ Properly fed worker output vs. starved workers (not efficient)
● Must be regarded from National War economy as a loss
● Whoever doesn’t fit into this equation is not provided for
● Hunger plan racially reorders europe and provides the logistical rationale
to claim the territory
○ Only valuable workers will be kept alive
Stalingrad: August 23 1942-February 2nd 1943:
● Was the largest confrontation of World War II in which Germany and its allies fought the Soviet
Union for control of the city of Stalingrad
○ Costly defeat for German soldiers
○ Air raids
○ Hitler wanted to occupy Stalingrad
● Exuberant public → community of fate
● Russian army starts pushing back - by end of 1943, red army makes massive advancements and
gains a lot of the territory previously lost
○ 2.5 million German soldiers face 6 million Russian soldiers
■ Stalin had no consideration for lives of local population or his own soldiers
■ Horrific conditions for Russian soldiers
● Stalin begged the US to invade sooner
○ They didn’t
○ US didn’t win war against Nazis
■ Decision to not invade sooner was deliberate because it would weaken the soviet
union
● US was concerned with other geopolitical developments
Einsatzgruppen:
● Nazis establish special killing squads: Einsatzgruppen
● Target Polish professionals / leadership class
○ Initially, the four Einsatzgruppen consisted of 3,000 men
■ By then end of 1941, 26 police police battalions were operating on Soviet
territory and the combined strength of mobile killing units had grown to 33,000
■ By the end of 1942 the number of those assisting the Einsatzgruppen had reached
300,000
○ 60,000 of these people were killed at gunpoint by mobile killing squads targeting people
with positions of power
○ People who would have had opportunity to organize resistance
Operation Barbarossa
● Leap towards genocide
● June 1941 - official policy and implemented on a large scale after invasion of USSR
● Any Pole is in someway complicity/responsible for holocaust
○ Law that enshrines pure victimhood for Polish nation
○ Clearly victimized by Nazi Regime
○ Those deemed Germanic enough meant career opportunities
○ Nazis incentivized collaboration -- life was awful if you weren’t on their side
● Politics in E. Europe made collaboration not a choice
○ Smaller communities in eastern europe are more antisemitic
■ Nazis tap into reservoir of racial hatred
■ Who qualifies as a victim/perpetrator = confusing
○ Very few individuals/groups that are victims only (Jews, lives deemed unworthy of
living, targets of the Nazi racial state)
■ Different kind of victims that are results of actions of war
○ Most importantly, the operation opened up the Eastern Front, in which more forces were
committed than in any other theater of war in world history.
Lebensraum: Living Space
● Space as not just a physical thing - many things occur in these spaces, socially constructed, not
something that is there without us acting on it
● Only exists as such because we make meaning off of it - we interact with it
○ Just like time, only a socially constructed thing
● Nazis thought of space as a given - constant unchanging thing that they needed to live →
hence Lebensraum
○ Sole purpose of this is to accommodate those who live in it
○ Nazis assumed that space can be shaped by human action
● Natural, essential, spiritual quality can be destroyed but substance can never be destroyed
○ As it is for social institution
● Same as race - substance of race is unalterable by human action
○ Core of ideology of Lebensraum
○ Postulates a correspondence between race and space
○ Two concepts that are firm/hard/unmutiable by human action
○ Spaces that are calling for the germans to populate it
○ Vast territories are necessary for the fruitful and prosperous growth of any given growth
■ Core of ideology: only acquisition of space that is corresponding to the racial
makeup of the German nation is necessary for them to reach their full potential
■ If the Nazis had won the war - used the skulls/bones of German people and
would say this is the natural progression/fate of the people that the space rejected
■ Couldn’t have taken a different course
● Inherent in this pull between race and space that this was to unfold
precisely in this fashion
● This insistence on the way they were making the world is the way that
the world was naturally meant to be -- main potential of these types of
arguments
■ Most of these spatial thinkers were less modernists and more reactionary -
looking to the past to idealize ways of life that were lost and that Nazis wanted to
reconstruct them
■ Conceived of the city as an organism - something that grows organically through
the cultural distinction of the race
● Germans don’t really like cities: most of Germany’s jews are in urban
places, model of the city is adapted to anticipate bombings, drug/sex/rock
and roll, mobs, crime, moral decay (prostitution, venereal disease, urban
ills, etc)
Document Summary
By january they owned the newspaper and launched the revolution saying we don"t have the rights we need. January 12th leaders of spartacus were murdered by the freikorps and army. Once the league was squashed, germans head to the polls and 83% vote. More radical but initially joined the uspd and sympathized with the russian revolution and. It was a subgroup of the uspd, revolution of the masses formed as a loose group to oppose the war in 1915. Everything needs to be destroyed, demolished and build fresh w/ workers/women in mind. Violence = necessary because no one will give up jobs voluntarily. Later founded the kpd in 1918 (same as the communist party) Jan 5-12 1919: spartacus uprising had street barricades and poorly armed communists. Freikorps took position and someone called the army so the army came down to kill the communists. Liebknecht and luxemburg were taken to prison to be executed.
