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M3:  Videos of Mr Crocker: Human Rights (1945)

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M3:  Videos of Mr Crocker: Human Rights (1945)

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1) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tQ1kJVv6aTWxL4W4TcsL3PfjVawcIS5Z/view

2) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V7f7vi5kzew3mdc6OTz7C1CDZuJpJX1z/view

3) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dCgswFBHGqUIKItZ_WtCBs9WfzGgJ_rq/view

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M3: video about how the universal declaration of human right came to be 

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M3: video about how the universal declaration of human right came to be 

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humanrights.com/what-are-human-rights/brief-history/the-united-nations.html

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M2: Videos and Maps from Class: Stalingrad, Kursk, Mongolia, Yellow River, China, Japan

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M2: Videos and Maps from Class: Stalingrad, Kursk, Mongolia, Yellow River, China, Japan

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1) Video 1 - Russia helped defeat Germany

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14g9iEe4jdAHVZoKg3KKq_a0LY7Z01Zw_/view

2) Video 2 - Russia helped defeat Japan

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1caEHwzsHWiZUvbUJNcoRWmO1os98bOM-/view

3) Video 3 - China helped defeat Japan

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1kmFFofeW0uMpuDLZpsBxrDgni_FePH/view

4) Map of Manchuria, Yellow River Dam and China

4a. Map from Class https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NOujXl5FXoQNdRaib2FE47xbQX1wh06k

4b. Map from Internet https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/File:Manchuria.png

5) Map of Battle of Stalingrad

https://omniatlas.com/maps/europe/19421122/

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M2: Russia Beats the Nazis at Battle of Stalingrad

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M2: Russia Beats the Nazis at Battle of Stalingrad

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Prelude to the Battle of Stalingrad

In the middle of World War II - having captured territory in much of present-day Ukraine and Belarus in the spring on 1942 - Germany's Wehrmacht forces decided to mount an offensive on southern Russia in the summer of that year.

Under the leadership of ruthless head of state Joseph Stalin, Soviet forces had already successfully rebuffed a German attack on the western part of the country - one that had the ultimate goal of taking Moscow - during the winter of 1941-42. However, Stalin's Red Army had suffered significant losses in the fighting, both in terms of manpower and weaponry.

Stalin and his generals, including future Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev, fully expected another Nazi attack to be aimed at Moscow. However, Hitler and the Wehrmacht had other ideas.

They set their sights on Stalingrad, because the city served as an industrial center in Russia, producing, among other important goods, artillery for the country's troops. The Volga River, which runs through the city, was also an important shipping route connecting the western part of the country with its distant eastern regions.

Ultimately, Adolf Hitler wanted the Wehrmacht to occupy Stalingrad, seeing its value for propaganda purposes, given that it bore Stalin's name. For similar reasons, the Russians felt a special need to protect it.

When Hitler proclaimed that upon taking Stalingrad all of the city's male residents would be killed and its women deported, the stage was set for a bloody, hard-fought battle. Stalin ordered all Russians strong enough to hold a rifle to take up arms in defense of the city.

The 6th Army of the Wehrmacht began their assault on August 23, 1942.

Battle of Stalingrad Begins

Russian forces were initially able to slow the German Wehrmacht's advances during a series of brutal skirmishes just north of Stalingrad. Stalin's forces lost more than 200,000 men, but they successfully held off German soldiers.

With a firm understanding of Hitler's plans, the Russians had already shipped much of the stores of grain and cattle out of Stalingrad. However, the city's 400,000-plus residents were not evacuated, as the Russian leadership believed their presence would inspire troops.

Within a few days of launching its attack, Germany's Luftwaffe air force had rendered the Volga River impassable to shipping and had sunk several Russian commercial vessels in the process. From late August through the end of the assault, the Luftwaffe conducted dozens of air strikes on the city.

The number of civilian casualties is unknown. However, it's believed that tens of thousands were killed, and that tens of thousands more were captured and forced into slave labor in camps in Germany.

By September, the Luftwaffe essentially had control of the skies over Stalingrad, and the Russians were getting desperate. Workers in the city not involved in war-related weapons production were soon asked to take up fighting, often without firearms of their own. Women were enlisted to dig trenches at the front lines.

And yet, the Russians continued to suffer heavy losses. By the fall of 1942, Stalingrad was in ruins.

'Not a Step Back!'

Despite heavy casualties and the pounding delivered by the Luftwaffe, Stalin instructed his forces in the city to not retreat, famously decreeing in Order No. 227: "Not a step back!" Those who surrendered would be subject to a trial by military tribunal and face possible execution.

With fewer than 20,000 troops in the city and less than 100 tanks, Stalin's generals finally began sending reinforcements into the city and surrounding areas. Fighting raged in the streets of Stalingrad, with both sides using snipers poised on the roofs of the city's buildings.

Russian generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky organized Russian troops in the mountains to the north and west of the city. From there, they launched a counterattack, famously known as Operation Uranus.

Although they again sustained significant losses, Russian forces were able to form what in essence was a defensive ring around the city by late November 1942, trapping the nearly 300,000 German and Axis troops in the 6th Army. This effort became the subject of a propaganda film produced after the war, The Battle of Stalingrad.

With the Russian blockade limiting access to supplies, German forces trapped in Stalingrad slowly starved. The Russians would seize upon the resulting weakness during the cold, harsh winter months that followed.

Russian Winter Sets In

As Russia's brutal winter began, Soviet generals knew the Germans would be at a disadvantage, fighting in conditions to which they weren't accustomed. They began consolidating their positions around Stalingrad, choking off the German forces from vital supplies and essentially surrounding them in an ever-tightening noose.

Thanks to Russian gains in nearby fighting, including in Rostov-on-Don, 250 miles from Stalingrad, the Axis forces - mostly Germans and Italians - were stretched thin. Through Operation Little Saturn, the Russians began to break the lines of mostly Italian forces to the west of the city.

At this point, German generals abandoned all efforts to relieve their beleaguered forces trapped in Stalingrad. Still, Hitler refused to surrender even as his men slowly starved and ran out of ammunition.

Battle of Stalingrad Ends

By February 1943, Russian troops had retaken Stalingrad and captured nearly 100,000 German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March. Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation.

The loss at Stalingrad was the first failure of the war to be publicly acknowledged by Hitler. It put Hitler and the Axis powers on the defensive, and boosted Russian confidence as it continued to do battle on the Eastern Front in World War II.

In the end, many historians believe the Battle at Stalingrad marked a major turning point in the conflict. It was the beginning of the march toward victory for the Allied forces of Russia, Britain, France and the United States.

In February 2018, Russians gathered in what is now known as Volgograd to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the conclusion of the battle that had ravaged their city.

Sources

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "75th Anniversary Of Victory In The Battle Of Stalingrad." rferl.org.

Barnes, T. (2018). "Russians take to streets in their thousands to mark 75 years since Battle of Stalingrad. Independent.co.uk.

BBC World Service: Witness. "The battle of Stalingrad." BBC.co.uk.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Battle of Stalingrad - Definition, Dates & Significance

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The Battle of Stalingrad was a brutal military campaign between Russian forces and those of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers during World War II. Germany's defeat in the battle marked a turning point of the war in favor of the Allies.

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M2: Russia Beats the Nazis at Battle of Kursk

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M2: Russia Beats the Nazis at Battle of Kursk

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Germany's Epic Defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad

By June 1942, Hitler had advanced into the Soviet Union and hoped to easily take the strategic city of Stalingrad, the namesake city of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. But Stalin rallied both Russian troops and civilians who dug in and vowed to fight to the end.

When the German Sixth Army reached Stalingrad in September, they were unprepared for the well-armed and well-trained Red Army. Ferocious fighting ensued as the Germans fought their way through the city, building by building, house by house and were met with heavy resistance. The carnage was horrific on both sides.

By mid-November, the Germans found themselves outnumbered, outgunned, extremely low on food and medical supplies and surrounded by Russians. They saw the writing on the wall and had a chance to escape but Hitler commanded they "hold their positions to the last man and the last round..." He also promised additional provisions - provisions that never arrived.

The Germans were unprepared for Russia's brutal winter and suffered freezing temperatures, starvation and disease. Left with little choice, German General Friedrich Paulus went against Hitler's orders and surrendered his weakened troops to Russia on February 2, 1943, an act which Hitler later called treason.

Germany's defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad was a pivotal point in the war. It pushed the Germans back to southern Russia and left them weak and on the defensive. It also showed the world they weren't invincible and deeply humiliated Hitler, who in response planned a massive offensive attack to permanently solve his Soviet problem.

The Strategic Kursk Salient

According to an article in ARMOR, Germany and Russia had reached an impasse by the winter of 1943 from Leningrad to the Black Sea. And at the center of the disputed area, a year's worth of fighting had created a massive salient (an outward-protruding bulge of land on a battle line) approximately 150 miles from north to south and 100 miles from east to west. At the center of the salient lay the Russian city of Kursk.

The salient became known as the Kursk Bulge and was a strategic location for Germany. Hitler needed to prove to his allies, the Axis Powers, and to the world that Germany was still a formidable enemy and in control of the Eastern Front. He also wanted the tactical advantage of controlling Kursk's railways and roads.

Both Sides Prepare for a Larger-Than-Life Battle

By 1943, Operation Barbarossa (Germany's invasion of Russia), the Battle of Stalingrad and other engagements had weakened Hitler's army by almost two million men. Desperate to fill the void, he recruited World War I veterans up to age 50 and young men from the Hitler Youth program previously exempt from serving on the front lines.

In March 1943, after squashing Russian resistance in Belgorod and Kharkov near the south of the Kursk Bulge, German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein wanted to take advantage of the momentum and the battle-weary Russian army and attempt to seize Kursk. But the Wehrmacht - Germany's unified military forces - chose to prepare for a later campaign along the Kursk Bulge instead so they lost their potential edge.

Over the next few months, Germany amassed over 500,000 men, 10,000 guns and mortars, 2,700 tanks and assault guns and 2,500 aircraft to mount an attack on the Kursk Bulge and take Kursk. But the Soviets knew something big was in the works and their war machine went into overdrive producing top-of-the-line tanks, artillery and aircraft.

The Red Army dug in and amassed a formidable arsenal which included almost 1,300,000 men, over 20,000 guns and mortars, 3,600 tanks, 2,650 aircraft and five reserve field armies of another half million men and 1,500 additional tanks.

At the north of the Kursk Bulge was Germany's 9th Army, made up of three Panzer divisions and over 300,000 men; at the south was their 4th Panzer Army, also with over 300,000 men and a combination of Panther and Tiger tanks. To the west was Germany's 2nd Army with around 110,000 men.

By the time Operation Citadel was a go, both sides were heavily armed, well-manned and prepared to annihilate the other in hopes of changing the course of the war.

Hitler Delays the Battle of Kursk

Germany was known for its blitzkrieg tactics-shock campaigns that concentrated firepower in a narrow area and confused and cut down the enemy. They planned blitzkrieg attacks north and south of the Kursk bulge and then intended to meet at Kursk in the middle of the salient.

Despite warnings from some of his generals to abandon Operation Citadel due to the Red Army's substantial fortifications, Hitler was determined to move forward, but not right away. The original start date was May 3, but Hitler chose to wait for better weather and the delivery of his new, state-of-the-art Panther and Tiger tanks, even though they'd never been field tested.

Russia took full advantage of the delay by bolstering its defensive zones around Kursk which included tank traps, barbed wire snares and nearly one million anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. With the help of Kursk civilians, they also dug a vast network of trenches extending at least 2,500 miles.

A successful blitzkrieg depends on the element of surprise and by the time Germany was ready to launch Operation Citadel, they'd lost that advantage.

To make matters worse, British Intelligence had cracked the infamous German Wehrmacht secret code and was regularly passing intelligence to the Soviets. The Soviets knew the Germans were coming and had ample time to prepare.

Operation Citadel Begins

In the early morning hours of July 5, 1943, among the beautiful, yellow wheat fields that surrounded the Kursk Bulge, Operation Citadel was ready to launch.

But before Germany could strike, the Soviets unleashed a bombardment hoping to preempt the German offensive. It delayed the Germans for about an hour and a half but didn't have a major impact.

The Germans unleashed their own artillery assault on the northern and southern parts of the salient, followed by infantry strikes on the ground supported by the Luftwaffe (Germany's air force). Later that morning the VVS (the Soviet's air force), attacked German airfields but were unsuccessful.

Still, the Red Army's ground defenses prevented German tanks from making much headway in the north and penetrating the heavily-armored salient. By July 10, the Soviets had halted the 9th Army's northern advance.

Battle of Prokhorovka

In the south, the Germans had more success and doggedly made their way to the small settlement of Prokhorovka, some 50 miles southeast of Kursk. On July 12, the tanks and self-propelled artillery guns of Russia's 5th Guards Tank Army clashed with the tanks and artillery guns of Germany's II SS-Panzer Corps.

The Red Army suffered huge losses but still managed to prevent the Germans from capturing Prokhorovka and breaching their third defensive belt, which effectively ended the German offensive.

The Battle of Prokhorovka is often referred to as the largest tank battle in history; however, Russian military historians with access to recently-opened Soviet archives claim the title belongs to World War II's little-known Battle of Brody, which took place in 1941.

The German Offensive Ends and Russia Begins

On July 10, Allied troops landed on the beaches of Sicily, forcing Hitler to abandon Operation Citadel and reroute his Panzer divisions to Italy to thwart additional Allied landings. The Germans attempted a small offensive in the south known as Operation Roland but were unable to breach the Red Army's might and withdrew after a few days.

In the meantime, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive, Operation Kutuzov, north of Kursk on July 12. They broke through German lines at the Orel salient and by July 24th had the Germans on the run and had pushed them back beyond Operation Citadel's original launching point.

Battle of Kursk Aftermath

The Soviets won the Battle of Kursk and ended Hitler's dream of conquering Russia. Arguably, Germany won the tactical battle but was unable to break through the Red Army's fortifications and so lost the advantage.

But the Soviets won at great cost. Despite outnumbering and outgunning the Germans, they suffered many more casualties and loss of armament. Definitive casualty data is hard to come by, but it's estimated there were up to 800,000 Soviet casualties compared to some 200,000 German casualties; some historians believe those numbers are much lower than the actual casualties.

Germany never regained momentum on the Eastern Front or recovered their loss of manpower and armor. Hitler and his Wehrmacht soon became reactive instead of proactive as they found themselves fighting battles on multiple fronts.

Sources

Analysis of the Battle of Kursk. ARMOR.

Battle of Kursk. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.

Battle of Kursk: The Soviet Union Halts the German Offensive. History Lapse.

Battle of Kursk. World War II Database.

The Biggest Tank Battle in History Wasn't at Kursk. War Is Boring.

The Kursk Gamble. The History Place: The Defeat of Hitler.

Why the Battle of Kursk Just Might Be the Most Misunderstood World War II Battle. The National Interest.

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By June 1942, Hitler had advanced into the Soviet Union and hoped to easily take the strategic city of Stalingrad, the namesake city of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. But Stalin rallied both Russian troops and civilians who dug in and vowed to fight to the end.

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M2: How Russia helped defeat the Japanese

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M2: How Russia helped defeat the Japanese

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WORLD WAR II

As the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on the Japanese army occupying eastern Asia. Within days, Emperor Hirohito's million-man army in the region had collapsed.

It was a momentous turn on the Pacific battleground of World War II, yet one that would be largely eclipsed in the history books by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same week 65 years ago. But in recent years some historians have argued that the Soviet action served as effectively as - or possibly more than - the A-bombs in ending the war.

Now a new history by a professor at UC Santa Barbara seeks to reinforce that view, arguing that fear of Soviet invasion persuaded the Japanese to opt for surrender to the Americans, who they believed would treat them more generously than the Soviets.

Japan's forces in northeast Asia first tangled with the Russians in 1939 when the Japanese army tried to invade Mongolia. Their crushing defeat at the battle of Khalkin Gol induced Tokyo to sign a neutrality pact that kept the USSR out of the Pacific war.

Tokyo turned its focus to confronting U.S., British and Dutch forces instead, which led to the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

But following the German surrender on May 8, 1945, and having suffered a string of defeats in the Philippines, Okinawa and Iwo Jima, Japan turned to Moscow to mediate an end to the Pacific war.

However, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already secretly promised Washington and London that he would attack Japan within three months of Germany's defeat. He thus ignored Tokyo's plea, and mobilized more than a million troops along Manchuria's border.

Operation August Storm was launched Aug. 9, 1945, as the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, and would claim the lives of 84,000 Japanese and 12,000 Soviet soldiers in two weeks of fighting. The Soviets ended up just 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Japan's main northern island, Hokkaido.

"The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through Moscow's mediation," said Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, whose recently published "Racing the Enemy" examines the conclusion of the Pacific war and is based on recently declassified Soviet archives as well as U.S. and Japanese documents..

"The emperor and the peace party (within the government) hastened to end the war expecting that the Americans would deal with Japan more generously than the Soviets," Hasegawa, a Russian-speaking American scholar, said in an interview.

Despite the death toll from the atomic bombings - 140,000 in Hiroshima, 80,000 in Nagasaki- the Imperial Military Command believed it could hold out against an Allied invasion if it retained control of Manchuria and Korea, which provided Japan with the resources for war, according to Hasegawa and Terry Charman, a historian of World War II at London's Imperial War Museum.

"The Soviet attack changed all that," Charman said. "The leadership in Tokyo realized they had no hope now, and in that sense August Storm did have a greater effect on the Japanese decision to surrender than the dropping of the A-bombs."

In the U.S., the bombings are still widely seen as a decision of last resort against an enemy that appeared determined to fight to the death. President Harry S. Truman and U.S. military leaders believed an invasion of Japan would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.

American historian Richard B. Frank has argued that as terrible as the atomic bombs were, they saved hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Japanese troops and civilians who would have perished if the conflict had gone on until 1946.

"In the famous words of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, (the bombs) were the 'least abhorrent choice' of a dreadful array of option facing American leaders," he said in an interview. "Alternatives to the atomic bombs carried no guarantee as to when they would end the war and carried a far higher price in human death and suffering."

Frank, who is writing a three-volume history of the Pacific war, said he continued to disagree with Hasegawa on the relative importance of the Soviet intervention and the A-bombs in forcing the surrender decision.

But he said they agreed that ultimate responsibility for what happened lay with Japan's government and Hirohito, who had decided in June to draft almost the entire population, men and most women, to fight to the death.

"Since no provision had been made to place these people in uniform, invading Allied troops would have not been able to distinguish combatants from non-combatants, effectively turning each village in Japan into a military target," Frank said.

The impact of the lightning Soviet advance comes through in the words of Japan's wartime prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, urging his cabinet to surrender.

He is quoted in Hasegawa's book as saying, "If we miss (the chance) today, the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea and Sakhalin, but also Hokkaido. We must end the war while we can deal with the United States."

V-J Day, the day Japan ceased fighting, came on Aug. 15 (Aug. 14 in the U.S.), and Japan's formal surrender followed on Sept. 2.

Dominic Lieven, a professor of Russian government at the London School of Economics, said anti-Soviet sentiment in the West tended to minimize Soviet military achievements.

Also, "very few Anglo-Americans saw the Soviet offensive in the Far East with their own eyes, and Soviet archives were not open to Western historians subsequently," he said.

More surprising, even in Russia the campaign was largely ignored. Although the scale of the Soviet victory was unprecedented, 12,000 dead against Japan hardly compared with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, in which 27 million Soviets died.

"The importance of the operation was huge," said retired Gen. Makhmut Gareyev, president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, who took part in the 1945 campaign. "By entering the war with militarist Japan ... the Soviet Union precipitated the end of World War II."

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How the Soviets helped Allies defeat Japan

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Operation August Storm was launched Aug. 9, 1945, as the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, and would claim the lives of 84,000 Japanese and 12,000 Soviet soldiers in two weeks of fighting.

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In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.

But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light.

On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin will play host to one of Moscow's largest ever military parades to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. More than 16,000 troops will participate, as well 140 aircraft and 190 armored vehicles, including the debut of Russia's brand new next-generation tank.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

It's a grand moment, but few of the world's major leaders will be in attendance. The heads of state of India and China will look on, but not many among their Western counterparts. That is a reflection of the tense geopolitical present, with Putin's relations with the West having turned frosty after a year of Russian meddling in Ukraine. When Russia's T-14 Armata tank broke down at a parade rehearsal on Thursday, the snickering could be heard across Western media.

Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.

Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism's destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

"It was the Western Allies' extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire 'butcher's bill' for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.

The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.

Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.

"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin."

By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. That it was yet able to turn back the German invasion is testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price.

In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:

When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.

To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.

"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.

By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.

For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.
Copyright: Washington Post

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Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler

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In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York.

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M2: How China helped defeat the Japanese

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M2: How China helped defeat the Japanese

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here does the modern Chinese superpower come from? Only 75 years ago, China was divided, impoverished, economically exploited and at war with ambitiously imperialist Japan. The notional rulers of China, Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist Kuomintang party, controlled a shrinking area of central and south-west China, fighting the Japanese with a poorly armed and trained army, and sometimes fighting the Chinese communists ensconced in China's north-west. In 1940, the Chinese nationalists seemed close to defeat and Japan's vision of a "Great East Asia Co‑Prosperity Sphere" (a Japanese-dominated Asian new order) looked closer than ever to achievement. Somehow, the rump independent China survived and, against considerable odds, became one of the victorious allies in 1945. But how?

The answer to this question has never much bothered western historians, who, for better or worse, have focused on what they see as the real war in Europe and the Pacific, where easily identifiable victories can be found and the explanation is clear. It is that neglect which has prompted Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history at Oxford, to write the first full account of China's wartime resistance against Japan, restoring a vital part of the wartime narrative to its rightful place. Now, for the first time, it is possible to assess the impact of the war on Chinese society and the many factors that explain the Japanese failure in China and the eventual triumph of Mao Zedong's communists in 1949, from which the superpower has grown. It is a remarkable story, told with humanity and intelligence; all historians of the second world war will be in Mitter's debt.

The sheer scale and complexity of the Sino-Japanese war is daunting enough and Mitter, perhaps wisely, does not get bogged down in the technical and tactical details of how the war was fought. There were armies numbering millions on both sides, a fact that explains why the Japanese expansion in the Pacific theatre ran out of steam in 1942. The Chinese war effort could not hope to match that of the more developed states, but it dominated the administrative and economic spheres in China, while condemning tens of millions of Chinese to high levels of deprivation and hunger throughout the conflict. Mitter does not add to the debate about deaths, occasioned by the obvious absence of reliable statistics, but suggests the current estimates of between 15 and 20 million dead may not be wide of the mark; at the least, more than 90 million Chinese became refugees in their own country.

Moreover, the war encouraged the political fragmentation of Chinese territory as Japanese encroachments grew. In the north and east, the Japanese conquered large areas, where they installed and collaborated with puppet regimes, including Puyi (the last emperor) in Manchuria. Mongolia was more or less under Soviet domination. In the south and east, rival warlords maintained an uneasy relationship with Chiang's nationalists. In Nanjing, Chiang's former colleague Wang Jingwei set up a rival nationalist government under Japanese supervision in 1940. In the north-west, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai created a communist-dominated territory in Yan'an. Making sense of the different polities is a challenge in its own right, but the many divisions also explain not only the difficulty Chiang had in ever establishing an integrated, sovereign Chinese state, but the problems faced by the Japanese as they confronted the vast land area and the mosaic of local rulers.

Mitter explores this complex politics with remarkable clarity and economy. At the heart of the story is Chiang Kai‑shek, the one leader the West or Stalin ever took seriously. The war he fought was long and bloody, starting in 1931 with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and escalating into full-scale conflict in July 1937, when both sides on the pretext of an incident at an ornate bridge at Lugouqiao (the so-called Marco Polo Bridge) near Beijing embarked on open war. The Japanese disregard for the Chinese as racial inferiors is well-known. Less familiar is Chiang's dismissal of the Japanese as "dwarf bandits" and his misplaced confidence that his large but ill‑equipped armies could match Japanese military skills. Chiang never seems seriously to have considered an armistice, but instead called for a "war of resistance to the end" ( Kangzhan daodi), which condemned many Chinese to years of harsh Japanese control, near famine conditions, and an increasingly brutal and terroristic Kuomintang regime.

The early years of war are in many ways the most arresting historically, partly because Chiang and Mao were largely on their own. Neither the Soviet Union nor the western powers wanted to be involved in war in China, and none of them was much interested in supplying money or goods. It is worth reflecting that for all the contemporary and subsequent criticism levelled at Chiang's war effort, the Chinese did not collapse entirely, unlike the European forces in Burma, Malaya and the East Indies, or the Americans in the Philippines. Mitter describes horrors on both sides. The Japanese "rape of Nanjing" - the one event of the war that is familiar worldwide - did happen, and Mitter will have no truck with Japanese attempts to explain it away. But he also explores the background that led Chiang ruthlessly to order the destruction of the dykes on the Yellow River to stop the Japanese advance, which left more than half a million Chinese dead and 4.8 million as refugees.

This story in itself says much about what was different in the Chinese war from war elsewhere. Reading Mitter, it is clear that for western readers understanding how Chinese society coped with total war requires a profound adjustment. Chinese fought Chinese, as well as Japanese. While the war with Japan was fought with terrible levels of atrocity, Chiang's security chief Dai Li (the "Chinese Himmler", apparently) ran a terror organisation that killed and tortured thousands of Chinese suspected of treason or of being communist. Wang Jingwei also had his security thugs, including Li Shiqun, a Shanghai gangster, whose Gestapo-like headquarters at "Number 76" in Shanghai proved too much even for the Japanese supervisors. Li was invited to dine at a hotel with Japanese secret policemen and died a day later from poison in his fish course. Chiang's resistance to the Japanese during the Pacific war (1941-45) forced the west to turn a blind eye to the campaign of terror that went with it.

One of the threads running through Mitter's account is Chiang's difficult relationship with the west, which treated him with a patronising disdain born of years of pseudo-imperialism. Mitter quotes a complaint from a British diplomat at Chiang's wartime capital at Chongqing about the "pitch of arrogance" in Chinese attitudes following humiliating defeat for British Empire troops in 1942 - a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. Chiang in the end had something to record. China did not surrender, nor were Chinese forces completely defeated. In 1945, the allies hardly bothered to acknowledge what China had done, but for eight years Japan had been bogged down in Asia, unable to focus on the expensive war against the west and exposed for all to see as an atrocious and self-interested imperial power.

The fact of Chinese victory, Mitter argues, opened the way for the Chinese people to begin the search for a new identity that went beyond the fractured allegiances of the wartime experience. Mao defeated Chiang four years later and the long story of the rise of modern China could begin. No one could ask for a better guide than Mitter to how that story began in the cauldron of the Chinese war.

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China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival by Rana Mitter - review

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here does the modern Chinese superpower come from? Only 75 years ago, China was divided, impoverished, economically exploited and at war with ambitiously imperialist Japan. The notional rulers of China, Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist Kuomintang party, controlled a shrinking area of central and south-west China, fighting the Japanese with a poorly armed and trained army, and sometimes fighting the Chinese communists ensconced in China's north-west.

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M1: Videos from Class: Holocaust and Gulag ( four 5-minute mini-lectures)

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M1: Videos from Class: Holocaust and Gulag ( four 5-minute mini-lectures)

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1) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CeGRlIpNMJ4Vwo2Z7zwXCcL3F-gt6SUO/view

2) https://drive.google.com/file/d/16tjS-UzbdoGLxydohc4XwsAZH1N5ibCP/view

3) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EbXju0Zrb2FSxI6_YoGBbdziIpIL4oox/view

4)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-dr3K3SF4HkgGqXAOSde8oEpNjL2dw0R/view

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M1: Holocaust and Gulag First-hand accounts

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M1: Holocaust and Gulag First-hand accounts

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Elie Wiesel (Concentration Camp)
Anne Frank (Nazi Ghetto)
Alexandr Solzenhitsen (Russian Gulag)

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M1: Holocaust and Gulag Films, Documentaries Stories

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M1: Holocaust and Gulag Films, Documentaries Stories

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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(Alexandr Solzhentisyn)

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M3: How the End of WW2 led to Human Rights & United Nations

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M3: How the End of WW2 led to Human Rights & United Nations

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1945 - End of World War II (video) | Khan Academy

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1945 marks the end of World War II. V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) is May 8th 1945. War doesn't end in the Pacific until August of 1945 with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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M3: Modern Day Human Rights Considerations

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M3: Modern Day Human Rights Considerations

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Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
It has been over 70 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been adopted. Still, many people all over the world still experience in their daily lives how much basic Human Rights are under pressure. Inequality, discrimination, no freedom of speech, religion, press...There is so much work to do to get human rights accepted, enforced, spread. And sometimes all we need is action in small places close to home.

So, what can YOU do, to make a difference? How can YOUR actions make human rights a bigger part of our global conversations and actions today?

Listen to the actions of three inspiring speakers the evening before Human Rights day. Be inspired and join the dialogue.

ABOUT SPEAKERS

Friday Odeh is Country Director for Accountability Lab Nigeria, a mentor to the WEF Abuja Global Shapers and he is volunteering with the UN Youth Association of Nigeria. His field of work focuses on social justice, youth development and the governance sector. Accountability Lab is an innovative non-profit supporting change-makers and responsible government leaders, by running multiple awards on the anti-corruption scene and involving young people in governance and law.

Nompendulo Mkatshwa is a Member of Parliament in the National Assembly for the African National Congress. Previously, she was leading the #FeesMustFall movement as the Student Representative Council President at Wits University and has a keen interest in furthering the rights of the marginalized and gender studies. Furthermore, she is Non-Executive Director of the Matthew Goniwe School of Leadership and Governance and a founding Director of the Yenza foundation.

Asma Khalifa is a Libyan activist and researcher; working in civil society on human rights, women's rights and youth empowerment. She co-founded Tamazight Women Movement, a think/do tank that works on indigenous women's rights issues in Libya and North Africa. On 2016, Asma received the Luxembourg Peace Prize during The World Peace Forum in the European Parliament in Luxembourg. Currently she is doing her PhD at the German Institute for Global Area Studies, researching the impact of war on agency and inter-gender relations.

The moderator for the event is Deborah Abrahams, a public speaking and communication specialist who works with rights activists from all over the world. As a trainer and coach, her clients range from government organisations and NGOs to commercial companies. Deborah has a background in both the performing arts and intercultural communication.

Event is co-organised with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, RVO, Cordaid and Humanity House.

Sign up today to make sure you have a seat.

If you can't attend, follow the live stream: http://bit.ly/HT-live

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Where do human rights begin? - Hague Talks

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Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or...

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Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the World, Social Justice & Human Rights Champion: United for Human Rights

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Learn about Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the committee that approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a lifelong humanitarian who worked to gain acceptance and implementation of the rights set forth in the Declaration. President Truman called her “First Lady of the World” for her achi…

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Simplified Version
This simplified version of the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been created especially for young people.

Nobody has any right to make us a slave. We cannot make anyone our slave.

Do you know your rights? This free interactive course will introduce you to your human rights so you will know them and defend them for yourself and others.

Do you know your rights? This free interactive course will introduce you to your human rights so you will know them and defend them for yourself and others.

An illustrated guide for children that explains human rights, with each of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in easy-to-understand language.

An illustrated guide for children that explains human rights, with each of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in easy-to-understand language.

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United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Summary: Youth For Human Rights Video

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Read a Simplified Version of The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights for Teens and Young Adults. Watch Videos and Learn More About the Fundamental Rights and Privileges That Everyone Has For Being Human.