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Berlin lay well inside the Soviet zone of occupation and was a source of tension throughout the Cold War.

In the late 1950s, issues around Berlin sparked off one of the biggest of the Cold War crises.

The 'brain drain'

This created a bad impression of life in East Germany under its hardline communist leader, Walter Ulbricht.

Khrushchev became so troubled with this situation that in November 1958 he gave a speech in Moscow in which he gave the West an .

He demanded that, as Berlin lay in East Germany, the Western powers should withdraw their troops from Berlin within six months.

Summit meetings

Eisenhower did not want to give in to Khrushchev's demands, and believed a military presence was necessary to protect West Berlin's freedom. It was agreed to hold a summit meeting to resolve the ultimatum.

They held a conference in Geneva in May 1959, and then again in September 1959 at the US presidential residence Camp David in the US.

Although no agreement on the long-term fate of Berlin was reached, the ultimatum on Berlin was withdrawn by Khrushchev, and it was agreed that further negotiations would take place in Paris the following year.

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Background - The Berlin Wall - CCEA - GCSE History Revision - CCEA - BBC Bitesize

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Berlin lay well inside the Soviet zone of occupation and was a source of tension throughout the Cold War. In the late 1950s, issues around Berlin sparked off one of the biggest of the Cold War crises. This created a bad impression of life in East Germany under its hardline communist leader, Walter Ulbricht.

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After World War Two started in September 1939, the Nazis initially moved east, invading Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union.

This brought millions of Jewish people under their control. The Nazis decided to increase their persecution of Jewish people, and eventually resolved to murder them.

At the Wannsee Conference, senior Nazis set out how they would implement their plan to commit mass murder.

Video about the Holocaust

Video Transcript Video Transcript

Lotte:
Before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, our family had a good life in Germany. My brother and I had many friends at school and we were good students. My father worked buying and selling livestock around the country. We were Jewish and we were Germans. We led normal lives.

After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 our lives changed dramatically. The first thing we noticed was our parents whispering. They were fearful, worried all the time.

Nazi soldiers and supporters marched through the streets. Adolf Hitler shouted and screamed on the radio, spreading his hate and antisemitic views, that Jews and other groups were responsible for all of Germany's problems. I felt so confused and hurt. People started to look at us differently. Our housekeeper left us saying she could no longer work for us.

And then in 1938, 'Kristallnacht' the night of broken glass, that is what it was called, but it was far more than broken glass. The Nazi Party encouraged and helped organise it. Their supporters ransacked Jewish homes, schools and shops. Our synagogue was set on fire and destroyed. We were scared to worship. We were not allowed to go to school anymore. We no longer felt safe in our homes.

My mother arranged for me to get out of Germany on the Kindertransport. They were special trains that had been organised by the British and others to help transport Jewish children like me under 17 years of age out of Germany. We were to be resettled in other European countries where Jews were safer.

The Nazi guards with guns watched me as I walked to the train station. I was terrified that I would be arrested or worse at any moment, but I pretended to smile being polite. My mother broke down in tears as I boarded the Kindertransport train to the Netherlands. At Hook of Holland I was put on a boat for Britain. I was 14 years old. I wept, terrified as I sailed away from my home, my family, my mother and my brother, they stayed in Germany.

The Nazis started forcing Jews to wear yellow stars on their clothes, so they could be identified as Jewish and treated differently. Many people were taken by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, to the concentration and death camps. We never heard from them again. My father and brother escaped across the border to Switzerland, but my brother was put to work in a labour camp there and forced to build roads by the Swiss government.

I never saw my mother again. I later found out she had been taken to a concentration and extermination camp. She was murdered by the Nazis with six million other Jewish people.

The word 'Holocaust' comes from two Ancient Greek words: 'holos', which means 'completely', and 'kaustos', meaning 'burnt'. The original meaning of this word referred to a religious sacrifice, which the mass murder of Jewish people was not. As a result, many people prefer to use a different term, such as the Hebrew word 'Shoah', which means 'catastrophe'.

The and their collaborators and murdered many other groups of people, too. , and , Black people and mixed race people were targeted because they did not fit within the Nazis' racist idea of a master . This idea had first developed during the 1800s, and was based on the false belief that people from northern and western Europe were racially to groups of people from outside these regions. There is no scientific basis for these beliefs.

The Nazis' false belief in genetic superiority also led to the persecution and murder of people with disabilities. Gay men were targeted for slightly different reasons, mainly because the Nazis believed that they were 'failing' in their duty to the creation of the so-called 'Aryan race' by supposedly not having children.

Other groups of people were persecuted because they were political of the Nazi regime. , for instance, refused to accept Nazi rule because of their spiritual beliefs. They were also opposed to war. from the Soviet Union suffered persecution and murder on the basis of their political opposition to Nazi rule, and because they were from eastern Europe, and therefore not part of the so-called 'Aryan race'.

All of these groups of people were persecuted in different ways and for different reasons, all of which were rooted in Nazi ideas. There is more information about the persecution of these groups of people in this guide about non-Jewish victims of Nazism.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. This started World War Two. There were 3.5 million Jews living in Poland at the time.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews were forced to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David printed on it.

Conditions in ghettos were appalling. On average, there were between eight and ten people living in every room. Food rations were deliberately low. On average, people received 1,200 calories a day in 1940, and this later dropped further. Between 1940 and 1942, it is estimated that up to 100,000 people died of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.

In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This was codenamed 'Operation Barbarossa'.

As the German army advanced east, 3,000 troops, who were split into four units, rounded up groups of Jews and shot them dead. These four units of SS troops were called the . They often acted with the assistance of the , the , the German army and local . It is estimated over 2 million Jews had been murdered in this way by 1944.

Historians have referred to the Nazis' policy of committing mass murder by shooting as the 'Holocaust by bullets'.

Nazi Germany invaded and occupied many countries across Europe following the outbreak of war. Jews and other groups of people suffered persecution across the continent.

In January 1942, a meeting was held at Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin. Leading members of the Nazi government and the SS were present. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, who was head of the Reich Security Main Office. Heydrich had helped to organise 'Kristallnacht' and set up the Einsatzgruppen.

Extermination camps were built, and from 1942 the Nazis began what they called 'liquidating the ghettos'. This meant that people were taken out of the ghettos and sent to extermination camps.

Following the Wannsee Conference, the SS began the mass transportation of Jews from ghettos and Nazi occupied territory to extermination camps in Eastern Europe. There were six of these camps:

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Belzec

Chełmno

Majdanek

Sobibor

Treblinka

Gas chambers were built at the camps, where people were murdered. The camps also had crematoriums to burn the bodies, reducing them to ashes. These were constructed with the intention of carrying out the 'Final Solution', the mass murder of millions of Jewish people.

The largest death camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, built near Kraków, Poland. Approximately 1 million Jewish people were murdered at Auschwitz.

Like several other concentration and extermination camps, Auschwitz also had a number of sub camps, which were smaller camps attached to the main, larger camp.

Trains delivered people to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The trains were overcrowded and many people died on the journey.

On arrival at Auschwitz, people were split into two groups. One was those who were considered healthy enough to work, and the second was made up mainly of elderly people, women and children, who were sent straight to the gas chambers and killed.

Those selected for work were tattooed with a number when they arrived, had their hair shaved and were forced to wear a striped uniform. People were forced to do hard labour in very difficult conditions. When they became too frail to work, they were sent to the gas chambers.

Barracks were made up of wooden bunks. Each room was designed to hold up to 200 people, but often ended up with up to 2,000. People were forced to line up in roll call square every morning and evening to be counted. If the number of prisoners present did not match records, they were made to stand in the square until the missing people were accounted for.
Images of Auschwitz-Birkenau

6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. However, Jewish people found many different ways to resist Nazi persecution.Resistance was very common. Not all resistance was violent. For example, against Nazi orders, people in the ghettos established schools, to maintain education and morale.

Janina David, a Jewish child who lived in the Warsaw ghetto, remembered that parents would 'organise small groups of children, four or five at a time... we met once or twice a week in somebody's room... people learnt foreign languages: Latin, Greek, German, French, English'. People in the Łódź ghetto, Poland, even established a theatre. It opened in 1941 and mainly staged works written by Jewish artists. When the Nazis banned Jewish people from observing their religious customs, people resisted by continuing to practice their faith. Jews continued to observe religious festivals, such as Passover, and organised prayer groups.

Abraham Zwirek, a young Jewish man who lived in the Plock and Suchedniow ghettos, Poland, noted that 'religious customs among Jewish people became very strong, although conducted in a quiet way'. In the concentration and extermination camps, people resisted by smuggling messages and information about what was happening to the outside world.

There were also a number of instances of Jewish people using violent and armed resistance against the Nazis, in both the ghettos and the concentration and extermination camps:

Warsaw ghetto: In April 1943, Jewish residents of the ghetto ambushed SS officers who were intending to transport Jews to death camps. This was the first civilian uprising anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. The resisters threw grenades and Molotov cocktailsMolotov cocktail A homemade explosive device. at the SS soldiers, and they had support from resistance fighters outside the ghetto. The SS began burning down buildings in the ghetto and the uprising ended on 16 May 1943, with the blowing up of the Great Synagogue in the ghetto. It is estimated the SS had 110 casualties, and up to 13,000 Jews were killed by the SS. A concentration camp was built on the site of the ghetto ruins.

Treblinka: In August 1943, inmates at Treblinka seized weapons and set fire to buildings in the camp. Over 300 managed to escape and though many were captured and killed, it is estimated that 70 were not caught, and survived to the end of the war.

Auschwitz was liberated six months later, in January 1945. When the Nazis realised that Soviet troops were close, the SS tried to move surviving inmates from Auschwitz to the west, on foot. These were called death marches, as many of the inmates were too frail or ill to walk this huge distance.

Jan Hartman, a young Czech Jewish man who was forced onto a death march, remembered it as 'something unforgettable: the Polish countryside was under snow, freezing cold, January, the temperature must have gone down to 30 below zero or more, very cold'. When they arrived at Auschwitz, Soviet soldiers found 6,000 prisoners still alive.

Video - Survivor testimony

Video Transcript Video Transcript

Henri Kichka: (Speaking German) 1-7-7-7-8-9.

My name? No name. My address? No address. No school, no family. All my family died there.

They were arrested by Hitler, with me. I was one year in Auschwitz. It was horrible. It was not a life. It was dead. Only dead. My father, my mother, both sisters. They died in Auschwitz. They were gassed and burned.

The worst of all was the march of death. The death march. La marche de la mort. With the feet to march.

Reporter: No shoes?

Henri Kichka: It was horrible. All my feet are kaput!

I was 90% dead. After the war I was in a hospital, because I was very, very... a skeleton. I was a skeleton. I was in a sanitarium for lungs and in a hospital, and two years later I was married and I built a big family.

Antisemitism is an idea from crazy people. What for enemy is a Jew? He has no gun. He has no arms. They don't do the war. And I don't never understand why they hate so much the Jews. We are innocent.

The first days where I had to go in the school to tell my history, my horrible history, it was very difficult for me. I am crazy when I have to tell something what happened in the concentration camps.

But I know- I knew- that I had to tell it. And I told 10,000 people what I suffered there.

Question 3
Look at the picture below.

What is happening in this picture?

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Joseph Stalin was the leader of Soviet Russia from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Though Stalin and Adolf Hitler never met or spoke, their lives and their fates were inextricably linked. Both men loathed and feared the other, yet there was much Hitler and Stalin had in common. Both were born into humble backgrounds, their early lives shaped by destitution and impoverishment. As young men, both were drawn to radical political movements. Both became revolutionaries and unlikely national leaders, rising to power in the tumultuous years between the two world wars. Both promised progress, modernisation and better lives for their countrymen - but both were more concerned with consolidating and expanding their own power, rather than pleasing the people. Where the fates of Hitler and Stalin intersected, there would be little but war, conquest and misery for millions of Europeans.

Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovitch Dzhugashvili in 1879 in the Russian province of Georgia. The infant Dzhugashvili contracted smallpox, a disease that left him with permanent facial scarring. At the behest of his mother, Dzhugashvili entered a seminary to train for the priesthood - but he was soon expelled for behavioural problems and not paying his school fees. In 1903 he took a liking to the communist theories of Lenin and joined the fledgeling Bolshevik movement. Dzughashvili was tasked with raising funds for the party through criminal means: he organised and led bank robberies, initiated kidnaps and ransom demands, and used threats and violence to extort money. Dzhugashvili soon became a wanted man: he was arrested several times and sent to Siberian labour camps, though he invariably escaped. In 1912 he adopted a revolutionary codename, Stalin, meaning 'man of steel'.

By the start of World War I, Stalin's importance within the Bolshevik party had risen. In 1912 he was appointed to the Bolshevik Central Committee to advise on racial minorities, chiefly because of his own Georgian background. In 1917 he became editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda. Stalin did not play an active role in the October Revolution that elevated the Bolsheviks to power. After 1917 he served in the Bolshevik government as People's Commissar for Nationalities. He held this post until 1922 when he became General Secretary of the party. It was a seemingly insignificant position that no other leading Bolsheviks wanted - however it allowed Stalin to build a power base by recruiting allies and appointing them to government positions. By the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin wielded significant power at the highest levels and was in a position to push for control of the party. Lenin himself had expressed doubts about Stalin's capacity for leadership, calling him "too rude" - but within three years, Stalin had cemented himself at the helm of the communist regime in Russia.

Stalin was a ruthless and often cruel personality, obsessed with the idea that those around him were plotting his downfall. To hinder these threats and enforce his will, Stalin placed himself at the centre of a cult of personality. Propaganda and Soviet culture portrayed him as the saviour of Russia: a military genius, an ideological mentor and a kindly father figure, the protector of Russian children. Stalinist historians revised the narrative of the Russian Revolution to glorify and exaggerate Stalin's contribution; other figures - particularly his opponents, like Leon Trotsky, were either condemned as traitors or 'written out' of these histories. Stalin expanded Soviet secret police agencies, setting up a global network of agents and spies to report both on domestic opponents and the intentions of other nations. Within Russia, he instigated purges and show trials to eradicate potential opponents. In the 1930s he culled many of the 'old Bolsheviks' who had fought with him during the revolution; he then purged several high-ranking officers to limit the possibility of a military coup.

"For all the similarities that can be identified between Hitler and Stalin, there were big differences. Unlike Hitler, Stalin did not preach racial and national intolerance openly. In public, he spoke of friendship and equality between peoples. Hitler's use of pseudo-religious terminology found no comparison in Stalin's speeches. Hitler enjoyed the loyalty of his subordinates; Stalin motivated support through arbitrary terror. Hitler never brought Germany to a position of autarky; in Russia Stalin began to achieve it."
Martin Housden, historian

Stalin's policy priorities were not building a 'worker's paradise' or a classless society but protecting Russia from war and invasion. "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries," Stalin told his people. "We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." In 1928, Stalin launched the first of two ambitious five-year plans to modernise and industrialise the Soviet economy. These programs brought rapid progress - but also significant death and suffering. Stalin's decision to nationalise agricultural production dispossessed millions of peasants, forcing them from their land to labour on gigantic state-run collective farms. Grain was sold abroad to finance Soviet industrial projects, leading to food shortages and disastrous famines in the mid-1930s. Soviet Russia was dragged into the 20th century, transforming from a backward agrarian empire into a modern industrial superpower - but this came at an extraordinary human cost.

Despite Soviet Russia's rapid modernisation, Hitler had a low opinion of Stalin, calling him a "cunning caucasian". According to Hitler, Soviet progress had occurred in spite of, not because of Stalin. "Stalin is a clerk", Hitler said in 1941, "and he has never stopped being a clerk". As we have seen, Hitler loathed communism and those who preached and practised it. As early as 1934, the Nazi leader predicted a "final battle between German race ideals and pan-Slav [Russian] mass ideals". The ultimate goal of this war was lebensraum or control of the eastern territories. "We alone can conquer the great continental space," Hitler said, "and it will be done by us singly and alone, not through a pact with Moscow." Yet Hitler also knew it would be years before the German economy and military would be strong enough to launch such a battle. Stalin was aware of Hitler's aims and came to consider Nazi Germany to be the most pressing military threat to Soviet Russia. Both leaders trod carefully through the mid-1930s, careful not to provoke the other into a conflict - but pursuing policies of rearmament and military strengthening, in preparation for a war both knew was inevitable.

1. Joseph Stalin began life as a trainee priest, before becoming involved in radical politics and revolutionary groups.

2. By 1917 he was a high-ranking Bolshevik and played a leading role in the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet Union.

3. Though not groomed to lead, Stalin was cunning and manipulative and by 1928 was in charge of Soviet Russia.

4. Like Hitler, Stalin wanted to transform and militarise his country - and was paranoid about threats to his power.

5. Though they never met or even spoke, Hitler and Stalin loathed each other on political grounds. Both men hoped to buy time to prepare for the future Nazi-Soviet war they knew was inevitable.

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