HW 15

Chapter 10

A.
Total War: A war in which not only the armed forces of a country are involved, but its civilians in their daily lives.

Forced Labor: Self explanatory; people are essentially captured and forced to work as slaves in labor camps. In Europe, over 5 million people were taken to do forced labor in Germany; many died because of long hours and poor conditions.

Concentration Camp: Run by the Germans, "factories dealing in death" that were used as a way for the German to kill their enemies: they used starvation, sadism, "inadequate clothing", medical neglect, disease, beatings, hangings, etc. Millions of Europeans were forced into these camps over the course of the war.

"The Final Solution": This was the Nazi's plan for how to deal with the Jews in Europe. In 1942, the Nazis decided that the final solution was to exterminate all of the Jews in Europe, and to achieve this they built 5 concentration camps in Poland with gas chambers. More than 5 million people were killed in them between 1942 and 1945; before, Jews were mainly forced to live in ghettoes and/or were kept on starvation ratios, but at this point the Nazis had decided to just murder all the Jews, straight out.

Ghettoes: Walled off areas of towns which the Jews were not allowed to leave by Nazi orders. An example of a ghetto was the one at Warsaw, in which half a million Jews were trapped in a small area of the city and kept of starvation rations.

Extermination Camps: The concentration camps in Poland, in which more than 5 million people were killed between 1942 and 1945. They were equipped with gas chambers in which thousands of people could be killed at a time with poison gas.

Partisans: Bands of civilians that formed armed groups to resist invaders; known in France as the Resistance.

Guerilla War: "Unorthodox" war tactics were used to take advantage of a more powerful nation. Partisans and the Resistance used guerilla tactics by blowing up railways, roads and telephone lines, ambushing convoys, setting supply dumps on fire, and killing soldiers.

B.
1. A Chinese family in Sunkiang would have been affected by the war in at least the loss of their home. The city was in ashes by 1937, and most of the residents had evacuated. If the family was unlucky they might not have even survived.

2. A French family in Northeastern France would likely have been forced to flee the approaching German troops, losing their homes.

3. A Soviet aircraft factory worker would have been forced to move past the Ural mountains with the rest of the factory equipment in Russia.
4. A Jewish person anywhere in Germany in 1942 would have been affected by the "final solution", which basically entailed the extermination of all European Jews. The person would either have been sent to a concentration camp or would be in hiding.

5. The son of a Yugoslav partisan in 1943 likely would have been sent to Germany. When the Germans raided villages suspected of partisan activity, the child hostages were sent to Germany. The son could also be killed as well, depending really on the mood of the Germans at the time.