Beginning of the Cold War Legacies of WWII By the summer of 1945 Europe lay in ruins At least 20 million Soviets including soldiers and civilians died in the war Between 9 and 11 million noncombatants died in Nazi concentration camps including about 6 million Jews and over 220000 Gypsies ID: 614360
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Slide1
Aftermath of the War
Beginning of the Cold War Slide2
Legacies of WWII
By the summer of 1945, Europe lay in ruins
At least 20 million Soviets, including soldiers and civilians died in the war
Between 9 and 11 million noncombatants died in Nazi concentration camps, including about 6 million Jews and over 220,000 Gypsies
One out of every five Poles died in the war
3 million of Poland’s 3.25 million Jews
Germans lost 5 million, 2 million civilians
France and Britain both lost fewer than WWI
350,000 French
civillians
400,000 US soldiers
Total of over 50 million people perished Slide3
Legacies of the War
Millions left homeless
25 million in the USSR
20 million in Germany
DPs- Displaced Persons- postwar refugees- numbers increased by concentration camp survivors, released POWs, and orphaned children
After the creation of Israel- over 330,000 European Jews left for the new Jewish stateBy 1952, 100,000 Jews had immigrated to the US
The streets were filled with small, tired caravans of people…All the vehicles looked the same: pitiful handcarts piled high with sacks, crates, and trunks. Often I saw a woman or an older child in front, harnessed to a rope, pulling the cart forward, with the smaller children or a grandpa pushing from behind. There were people perched on top, too, usually very little children or elderly relatives. The old people look terrible amid all the junk, the men as well as the women—pale, dilapidated, apathetic. Half dead sacks of bones.
- Woman in Berlin describing refugees in 1945 Slide4
Legacies of WWII
Nuremberg Trials (‘45-’46) – international military tribunal – tried the highest-ranking Nazi military and civilian leaders who had survived the war
War crimes and crimes against humanity
“denazification” procedures put in place Slide5
Conferences
By late 1943, negotiations about the post war settlement could not longer be postponed
Big Three meet at
Tehran
in November 1943
Discussed final assault on Germany American-British invasion of the Continent through France – Spring 1944 Allies also agreed to partition postwar Germany but differences over Poland were set aside Slide6
Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s advisers remarked:
We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day…we were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace- and by “we,” I mean all of us, the whole civilized human race. The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and far-seeing and there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine.Slide7
Conferences
Yalta Conference- February 1945
Roosevelt called for the “Declaration of Liberated Europe”
Agreed that each of the four allies would occupy separate zones of Germany and that the Germans would pay reparations up to $20 billion
Compromise on Poland
provisional government established (Communist and non-Communist) with free elections to determine new gov’t Roosevelt also sought Soviet military help against Japan
Creation of United Nations Slide8
Tensions Rise
Potsdam Conference – July 1945
Truman demanded free elections throughout eastern Europe
Stalin said can’t allow an anti-Soviet governmentSlide9
Emergence of the Cold War
March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had “descended across the continent”
Stalin said the speech was a “call to war with the Soviet Union”Slide10
Early Cold War Events 1945-1949
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe
Creation of the United Nations
American policy of Containment
The Truman Doctrine
The Marshall PlanThe Berlin Blockade/AirliftNATO/Warsaw Pact Slide11
Truman Doctrine
1947
US would provide financial aid to countries that claimed they were threatened by Communist expansion
US Congress agreed to provide $400 million in economic and military aid for Greece and Turkey
Support for “ free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” anywhere in the world Slide12
Marshall Plan
Truman Doctrine followed by the European Recovery Program
Marshall Plan
$13 billion for economic recovery of war-torn Europe
Belief that Communist aggression fed off economic turmoil
Soviet Union saw it as aggressive – “construction of bloc states bound to the USA”Slide13
Berlin Blockade
Divided into zones
British, French, and Americans gradually began to merge their zones economically and by 1948 making plans for unification for West Germany
Soviets respond with blockade of West Berlin in June 1948
hoped to secure economic control of all Berlin and force the Western powers to a halt
Risk of WWIII
Berlin Airlift
At its peak 13,000 tons of supplies were being flown into Berlin daily
Blockade lifted in May 1949 Slide14
New Military Alliances
NATO- North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in April 1949
Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal signed a treaty with the United States and Canada– West Germany, Greece and Turkey will also join
Agreed to provide mutual assistance if any one of them was attacked
1955- Warsaw Pact- formal military alliance for the Soviet Union
Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union