The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Usedom

  Ustashe (Croatian militia)

  V-1 flying bombs

  V-2 rockets

  V-3 cannons

  vaccines

  Valerio, Colonel

  Valkyrie, Operation

  Vasilevskii, Aleksandr

  Vatican

  arranges visas for Jewish emigrants

  and ‘euthanasia action’ programme

  and genocide of Romanian Jews

  Papal Nuncio

  and deportation of Slovakian Jews

  and deportation of Italian Jews

  neutral status

  German and Austrian clerics

  see also Pius; Pius

  Vendel, Karl Ingve

  venereal disease

  Venice

  Venlo

  Verdun, Battle of

  Versailles, Treaty of (1919) see also Peace Settlement

  Verschuer, Otmar von

  Vichy France

  deportation of Jews from

  establishment of

  North African colonial territories

  discriminatory laws against Jews

  Vichy France - cont.

  despatch of civilian labourers to Germany

  administration of

  unpopularity of regime

  German troops take over

  militia

  see also P’tain, Marshal Philippe

  Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy

  Victoria, Queen

  Vienna

  Hitler’s early life in

  deportation of Jews

  coup conspiracy (1944)

  Red Army enters

  Vierny, Dina

  Vilna (Vilnius)

  Vinnitsa

  Vistula river

  Visual Arts, Reich Chamber for the

  Vitztbum, Count Heino

  Vlaminck, Maurice

  Voerde

  Vogelsang

  Vojvodina

  Volga Germans

  Volga, river

  Volksgemeinschaft (national community)

  Volkswagen factory

  Voronezh

  Voronov, Nikolai

  Voss, Hermann (anatomist)

  Voss, Hermann (director of Wiesbaden Museum)

  Waffen-SS see Military SS

  Wagner family

  Wagner, Adolf

  Wagner, Gerhard

  Wagner, Horst

  Wagner, Richard

  Wagner, Walter

  Wagner, Winifred

  Wahlmann, Adolf

  Walb, Lore

  Walter, Bruno

  Wanne-Eickel

  Wannsee Conference (1942)

  war crimes trials

  war economy

  War Medicine and Hygiene, Institute of

  Warsaw

  bombardment

  encirclement

  surrender

  in General Government

  execution of mayor

  bribery in

  rationing

  Jewish population

  ghetto

  extermination of Jews

  rescue of Jews

  uprising (1944)

  Warsaw Zoo

  Warthegau see Wartheland

  Wartheland

  Wartheland Prize

  ‘Waterfall’ (missile)

  Wawer

  Weber, Ilse

  Wehrkraftzersetzung (’undermining military strength’)

  Weichs, General Maximilian

  Weill, Kurt

  Weimar Republic

  far right

  violence of early years

  Party leaders evade legal responsibility

  army generals hope for downfall

  unpolitical army claim

  ‘White Rose’ youth movement and

  party-political animosities

  crises of

  Weinrich, Karl

  Weiss, Wilhelm

  Weissensee

  Weizs̈cker, Ernst von

  Welfare organization, National Socialist

  ‘Werewolf’ (Hitler’s field HQ)

  ‘Werewolf’ (partisan movement)

  Werner, Kurt

  West Germany (German Federal Republic)

  West Prussia

  West Wall

  Westerbork transit camp

  Wewelsburg

  Weygand, Maxime

  White Dream, The (film)

  ‘White Rose’ resistance movement

  Widmann, Albert

  Wieloncza

  Wienken, Heinrich

  Wiesbaden

  Wiesenthal, Simon

  Wilhelm Gustloff (cruise liner)

  Wilhelm Gustloff Foundation

  Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands

  Willrich, Wolfgang

  Wilm, Ernst

  ‘Window’ (anti-radar device)

  Windsor, Duke and Duchess of

  winter clothes for troops campaign

  ‘Winter War’ 1940 (Soviet Union/Finland)

  Wirth, Christian

  Wise Woman, The (Die Kluge; Orff)

  Wisliceny, Dieter

  Witebsk

  Witten

  Witzleben, General Erwin von

  Ẅhler, Otto

  Wolff-Metternich, Count Franz

  Wolff-M̈nckeberg, Mathilde

  wolframite

  ‘Wolf’s Lair’

  Wolfsburg

  Woman in the Moon, The (film)

  women

  League of German Girls

  ‘civilizing mission’ of German women in occupied Poland

  Nazi women’s organizations

  rape

  in Ravensbr̈ck concentration camp

  included in massacres of Jews east

  in ghettos

  in extermination camps

  in Auschwitz

  foreign workers

  in workforce

  propaganda on women’s roles

  and evacuation schemes

  prison population

  killing of Gypsy women

  wartime married life

  sexual morality

  in higher education

  medical experimentation on

  in resistance movements

  declining morale on home front

  conscription

  ‘wonder-weapons’ ; see also;

  ‘Word of the Week’ (poster)

  working classes

  enrolled as members of ‘master race’

  victims of bombing raids

  evacuees

  and resistance movements

  Woyrsch, Udo von

  Wren, Sir Christopher

  Wronki prison

  Wuppertal

  Wurm, Theophil, Bishop of Ẅrttemberg

  Ẅrttemberg

  Ẅrzburg

  Ẅrzburg University

  x-rays

  Yalta

  Yasnaya Polyana

  Yiddish

  Yorck von Wartenburg, Peter

  York

  Yugoslavia

  German invasion

  partition

  collapse of postwar state

  atrocities against Jews

  partisans

  copper mines

  resistance

  withdrawal of German forces

  see also Croats, Croatia; Serbs, Serbia

  Zakopane

  Zamboni, Guelfo

  Zamość

  Zawada

  Zeitzler, Kurt

  Zempelburg

  Zervas, Napoleon

  Zhukov, Georgi

  zinc

  Zion, The Protocols of the Elders of

  Zionists

  Zlocz’w

  Zurich

  Zweig, Stefan

  Zyklon-B (poison gas)

  I. The German Army enters Lódz in September 1939 to an ecstatic welcome from ethnic Germans, while the city’s Polish inhabitants look silently on.

  2. Redrawing the racial map of Europe: ethnic Germans from Lithuania cross the border with Germany at Eydtkau
in East Prussia in February 1941, entering the Reich under a banner bidding them ‘Welcome to Greater Germany’.

  3. Polish Jews are assembled for road-sweeping duties by German troops, September 1939.

  4. German air force troops round up a group of terrified Jews in the diarist Zygmunt Klukowski’s home town of Szczebrzeszyn.

  5. This still from I Accuse (1941), directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, shows the concert pianist Hanna Heyt, who is suffering from multiple sclerosis, asking her friend Dr Lang for advice; his opposition to assisted suicide is used as a foil for the film’s justification of the killing of the incurably ill.

  6. An assassination attempt that failed: the destruction caused in a Munich beer-cellar on the evening of 8 November 1939 by a bomb planted by the lone left-winger Georg Elser. Hitler left the hall shortly before the bomb went off.

  7. Rudolf Hess visits the Krupp armaments factory on I May 1940, flanked by Robert Ley (left) and Alfred Krupp (right).

  8. ‘The biggest traffic jam in history’: German armour squeezes through the narrow gorges of the Ardennes on its way to France on 11 May 1940.

  9. Hitler, with Albert Speer (left) and Arno Breker (right), at the Trocadéro in Paris during a brief private visit to the conquered city on 28 June 1940.

  10. Spying out the land: Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock (left) gauges the situation in the Crimea in May 1942, accompanied by General Fritz Lindemann.

  11. Operation Barbarossa: grenadiers of the third ‘Death’s Head’ tank division drive along a dusty road near Smolensk, September 1941.

  12. German soldiers burn a Ukrainian farm in September 1941 while the farmer’s wife protests in vain.

  13. Atrocity tourism: German troops take snaps as an alleged partisan is hanged in a Belarussian town in January 1942.

  14. Three and a third million Red Army prisoners of war died in German captivity, many of them while being transported from the front in open goods wagons like this one, photographed at Witebsk railway station on 21 September 1941: when winter set in, these wagons became death-traps.

  15. Bogged down before Moscow: German soldiers try to free a car from the mud in November 1941.

  16. The propaganda war against the ‘global enemy’: a Ministry of Propaganda poster shows Churchill and Stalin joining hands across the Continent in a ‘Jewish Conspiracy Against Europe’ in the summer of 1941.

  17. Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller (right), Security Service boss Reinhard Heydrich (middle) and Heinrich Himmler (left), overall head of the SS, meet in November 1939 to discuss Georg Elser’s attempt on Hitler’s life.

  18. Inside a women’s barracks at Auschwitz: this photograph, taken in January 1945, shortly after liberation, can only give a faint idea of the squalor and overcrowding to which the inmates were subject.

  19. Camp commandant Richard Baer, camp doctor Josef Mengele and former camp commandant Rudolf Höss in relaxed mood at the SS retreat known as the ‘Sun Huts’ outside Auschwitz in 1944

  20. Albert Speer demonstrates the increase in the production of artillery pieces under his management of the war economy in 1943.

  21. Tiger tanks in production, summer 1943.

  22. House-to-house fighting in Stalingrad at the end of 1942; but where have the houses gone?

  23. The face of defeat: a German soldier is taken prisoner at Stalingrad in January 1943.

  24. The long march into captivity: German soldiers pass before the ruined city of Stalingrad, January 1943.

  25. Germany in flames: Allied air-raids on Hamburg in July and August 1943 destroyed a large part of the city and killed 40,000 of its inhabitants. When this photo was taken, on 2 December 1943, all that remained of much of the city was dust and rubble.

  26. Strategic bombing caused widespread disruption of communications: a photo of Hamburg’s main railway station not long after the raids.

  27. General Gotthard Heinrici (right) and Field-Marshal Günther von Kluge (left) plan the next retreat.

  28. Red Army soldiers advancing on Warsaw in August 1944 pursue German troops running away from their shattered tank.

  29. V-I pilotless bombs sometimes carried propaganda leaflets such as this: the message on the reverse told Londoners that they were being ‘continually blasted day and night by those mysterious flying meteors’. ‘What good are all your planes, warships and tanks against that new German weapon?’ it asked.

  30. The gates of hell: workers going through the entrance to the underground factory where the V-2 rockets were made in the later stages of the war.

  31. Hitler with officers of the 9th Army on a brief visit to Wriezen, behind the Oder front, 3 March 1945. With him, standing in the front row, from left: Wilhelm Berlin, Robert Ritter von Greim, Franz Reuss, Job Oderbrecht and Theodor Busse.

  32. The German ‘Dad’s Army’: not all members of the ‘People’s Storm’ were as smartly dressed and well equipped as in this photograph taken in Hamburg on 29 October 1944, though many of them were probably as short-sighted.

  33. The young were drafted in to the ‘People’s Storm’ as well: Joseph Goebbels meets a teenage soldier at Lauban, Lower Silesia, in March 1945.

  34. Hermann Goring breakfasting in his Nuremberg cell on 26 November 1945. He committed suicide rather than face the hangman.

  35. Joachim von Ribbentrop contemplates his fate in the same prison. He was sentenced to death and hanged.

  36. Berlin’s Tauentzienstrasse after the end of the war, with the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm church in the background. The absence of able-bodied men meant that the responsibility for clearing the wreckage fell mainly to civilian women. The signs on the left mark the border between the British-occupied sector and the US sector of the city.