
Open Aggression and World Responses
Subject
- History
Grade
6–12Language
English — USPublished
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About this Chapter
Between 1935 and 1939, Nazi Germany began taking aggressive steps toward rebuilding the German military and expanding the Third Reich across Europe. At the same time, Nazi hostility toward Jews within the Reich intensified, culminating in the 1938 pogroms known as Kristallnacht. This chapter explores the open aggression of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s toward both neighboring countries and individuals within its borders, as well as the dilemmas faced by leaders around the world in response.
Essential Questions
- What choices were available to world leaders in response to Nazi Germany’s aggression toward other countries and toward groups of people in the late 1930s? What factors influenced the choices these leaders made? Could the Nazi march toward European war have been stopped?
- What choices were possible for individuals in response to Nazi Germany’s aggression? In what ways could individuals influence the actions of governments? In what ways could they make a difference on their own?
- What are the consequences when a nation removes a group of people from its universe of obligation?
- At what point does a nation have a right or even a duty to intervene in the affairs of other nations?
Analysis & Reflection
Enhance your students’ understanding of our readings on Nazi Germany's aggression in the late 1930s with these follow-up questions and prompts.
- Create a timeline representing the key events presented in this chapter, and then consider the following questions:
- Historians have identified Kristallnacht as a key turning point in this period of history. Based on what you’ve learned, do you agree with this assessment? What other events from this chapter seem especially important to you?
- How did life in Germany change between 1935 and 1939? How did Germany’s position in the world change between 1935 and 1939?
- How did world leaders respond to Nazi aggression in Germany and beyond? What priorities guided their thinking? Why did foreign leaders fail to recognize the dangers that the Nazi regime posed?
- When does a country have a right or duty to intervene in the affairs of other countries? What events in this chapter have most influenced your thinking about this question?
- We often use the following terms to describe the range of human behavior in times of crisis: perpetrator, victim, bystander, upstander. How would you define each of these roles? What dilemmas and choices faced by individuals, groups, and countries described in this chapter have influenced your thinking about these roles?
- Historian Ian Kershaw has described the feelings of most Germans toward the restrictions on Jews during the 1930s as “indifference,” by which he means not “neutrality” but rather “turning one’s back on an evil in recognition that nothing can be done about it and . . . feeling that other concerns are more pressing or overwhelming.” To strengthen his argument, Kershaw later added such qualifying terms as “lethal indifference” and “moral indifference.”
How would you evaluate Kershaw’s argument in light of the readings in this chapter? What does indifference have to do with morality? How might indifference be lethal?
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