UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGOGICA Y TECNOLOGICA DE COLOMBIA

INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE INSTITUTE

ENGLISH 4 CRTITICAL THINKING ABOUT WORLD WAR II

1. ANSWER:

Why Germany hated the treaty of Versailles?

The Germans hated the Treaty of Versailles because the purpose of the treaty was for
Germany to accept full responsibility for the war, in addition to paying irrational debts and
giving up part of its territories.
Hitler subsequently violated the treaty on several occasions.

Why would people in a country support a dictator?

People support dictators, because they earn their trust alluding to their most radical and
superior thoughts, such as the exile of foreigners cause they think that these people don’t have
the right to live in a country where they were not born, or take away the jobs of the people who
born there, dictators also are supported by promulgating the fallacy of racial superiority and
several promises of economic and social progress, these ideas are accepted by the common
people cause the dictator direct his words mainly to the most vulnerable population of the
country poor people with low educational levels. And once the people are convinced of dictator
´s ideals, anyone who opposes him will be violently silenced, which generates fear in the
people, causing them to submit and accept the dictatorial ideas. In turn, the population with a
high economic and social level is convinced to support the dictatorship by promising less taxes
and more government support for their companies, which makes it convenient for these people
to perpetuate the dictator's mandate out of convenience and greed.

Why did Germany/ japan/ Italy allow a dictator to take control of the country?

Germany:

The effect of the great depression of 29 is felt throughout the world, causing the German
economy get weaken and the unemployment rate to skyrocket. This generate an increase of
nationalism in 1933, which allowed the rise to power of the National Socialist Party led by Adolf
Hitler who won his position thanks to his gift for oratory.

Italy:

King Victor Emmanuel III, in 1922 appointed Benito Mussolini as president to save the country
from the economic crisis and bank failure. With the policy threatened by the fascist squads
called “Black Shirts”, created through violence, by defeating a strike of the Confederation of
Workers with a terrorist strategy, that was the decision of the King, when he received him in
the Palace with a black shirt and heard him : excuse me the dress because I come directly
from the battlefield, he swore to him to exercise power.

In 1926, political parties were abolished, the political police and special courts for the defense
of the State were created.

In 1928 the Great Fascist Council already exists and the Chamber of Fascists and
Corporations is constituted, replacing the parliament of ideological plurality. In the political
background is the boring propaganda phrase: "Mussolini is always right."

The Italian people continue to be subjected to acts of massification, they lose their rational
identity before the multitudinous delirium.

The leader solves all the problems for him, and if he does not solve them it is not his fault but
that of his ministers and executors.

Japan:

On December 25, 1926, Hirohito (Emperor Showa) ascended the throne of the Emperor of
Japan after the death of his father.

In the first part of his reign until 1945, he witnessed the increase in the influence of the military
power over the government. The imperial army was excluded from the government since 1900,
although it practiced the assassination of politicians, most notably Prime Minister Tsuyoshi
Inukai in 1932. Since then the military controlled politics until defeat in the war.

In turn Hideki Tōjō was a Japanese military man, who became Prime Minister of Japan. He
was the intellectual architect of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, which would eventually
lead to the war against China and, later, to the world war. During the world war, while he was
prime minister, numerous war crimes were carried out in the territories occupied by the
Japanese armed forces, such as the execution of prisoners or even the use of chemical and
biological weapons. In metropolitan Japan itself, the military police (Kenpeitai) and other
security forces turned the country into a true police state, while political life was reduced
around the para-fascist movement Taisei Yokusankai, or the Association for the Support of the
Imperial Regime. As a result of the cascade of military defeats that followed in 1942 and 1943,
Tōjō was forced to resign from all his posts in July 1944.

At the end of the war, and after a failed attempt to commit suicide, he was arrested by the new
American authorities.

What was the Manhattan project?

Was the code name for a scientific research project carried out during World War II by the
United States with partial assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada. The ultimate goal
of the project was the development of the first atomic bomb. Scientific research was led by
physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer while security and military operations were run by
General Leslie Richard Groves. The project was carried out in numerous research centers, the
 most important of which was the Manhattan Engineering District located in what is now known
as Los Alamos National Laboratory.

What did happen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945?

On December 6 and 9 of 1945, two nuclear attacks were perpetrated in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, ordered by President Truman against the Empire of Japan, which contributed, along
with the Soviet-Japanese War, to the surrender of Japan and the end of the Second World
War. After six months of heavy bombardment of 67 other cities, the Little Boy nuclear weapon
was dropped on Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed by the detonation of the Fat
Man bomb on Thursday, August 9, on Nagasaki. Between 105,000 and 120,000 people died
and 130,000 were injured. To date, these bombings constitute the only nuclear attacks in
history.

Explain the holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratically organized and state-sponsored

persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust
is a word of Greek origin that means "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in
Germany in January 1933, believed that the Germans were a "superior race", and that the
Jews were "inferior" and that they represented a threat to the so called German racial
community.

2. Complete the chart

3. Describe the pictures using your own words (70 words)

Hitler caused a change in mentality and culture of the German people by promoting the culture
of hate towards Jews and inciting war against countries that were not on his side, this through
rhetoric and oratory to convince the people and through violence towards those who opposed
to regime. What caused an increase in military publicity and the instigation of young people to
become part of the German troops in the future, through the Hitler Youths where the Nazi way
of thinking was imposed on young people promoting hatred and sophistry of race superiority.

With the rise of the war, the industries of all countries were made available to the governments
to become arms industries, which generated several advances in the war technologies of the
time, such as a significant advance in the models of tanks of both sides of the war. At the
same time, the internationalization of the war meant that the battlefields were in foreign
countries separated by kilometers of sea or land, which made it difficult to send supplies,
weapons and reinforcements to the battlefields, thanks to this an important advance in the
branch of operations research to determine how much armament, ammunition, supplies and
reinforcements are need to send to each battle point in an optimal way.
The attack of the Japanese Empire to Pearl Harbor occurred in December 1941 and shocked the
American people, so much so that this attack made that the country join to the Second World War,
the neutrality that characterized it until that moment disappeared and strengthened support for Great
Britain becoming a full alliance. The fact that the attack took place while negotiations were taking
place and were prospering, caused that this infamous attack was classified as a war crime and cause
that a few years later the United States attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.

Hitler's antisemitic philosophy, motivated by the fallacy of an aryan race propagated to the German
people, made Jews victims of discrimination and persecution by the Germans who sought to
exterminate them as they would with a plague, using inhumane methods such gas cameras for the
most unfortunate and those with more luck were forced to carry out forced labor in concentration
camps where they lost their individuality and became one more number among the thousands of
Jewish prisoners.
The leaders of the allied side were acclaimed by their peoples since the people were motivated by
revenge after the attacks suffered by the allied countries for the axis powers. Even so, they are
responsible for the death of thousands of soldiers and civilians not only from the axis powers, but also
from their own countries since they never put themselves on the front lines of the war and instead
sent thousands of young people to fight by convincing them with false patriotic ideals.