
The Germans did not achieve surprise and were not able to outflank or break through into enemy rear areas during the operation.[103] Several historians assert that Operation Citadel was planned and intended to be a blitzkrieg operation.[i] Many of the German participants who wrote about the operation after the war, including Manstein, make no mention of blitzkrieg in their accounts.[j] In 2000, Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson characterised only the southern pincer of the German offensive as a "classical blitzkrieg attack".[104] Pier Battistelli wrote that the operational planning marked a change in German offensive thinking away from blitzkrieg and that more priority was given to brute force and fire power than to speed and manoeuvre.[105]
Although the factory had been expected to begin production in 1943, shortages of labor and raw materials meant start-up had to be postponed repeatedly.[64] The Allies bombed the plant in 1944 on 20 August, 13 September, 18 December, and again on 26 December. On 19 January 1945, the SS ordered that the site be evacuated, sending 9,000 inmates on a death march to another Auschwitz subcamp at Gliwice.[65] The plant had almost been ready to commence production.[66] From Gliwice, prisoners were taken by rail in open freight wagons to Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The 800 inmates who had been left behind in the Monowitz hospital were liberated on 27 January 1945 by the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army.[67]
After the selection process was complete, those too ill or too young to walk to the crematoria were transported there on trucks or killed on the spot with a bullet to the head.[168][169] The belongings of the arrivals were seized by the SS and sorted in an area of the camp called "Canada", so called because Canada was seen as a land of plenty. Many of the SS at the camp enriched themselves by pilfering the confiscated property.[170]
On 19 November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a two-pronged attack targeting the weaker Romanian and Hungarian armies protecting the German 6th Army's flanks. The Axis forces on the flanks were overrun and the 6th Army was cut off and surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Adolf Hitler ordered that the army stay in Stalingrad and make no attempt to break out; instead, attempts were made to supply the army by air and to break the encirclement from the outside. Heavy fighting continued for another two months. By the beginning of February 1943, the Axis forces in Stalingrad had exhausted their ammunition and food. The remaining units of the 6th Army surrendered. The battle lasted five months, one week and three days. Show less
This is the punishment card of a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau, dated 24 October 1942. In German it reads: “Trotz verbot hinter haus 7 seine Grossnotdurft verrichtete”. In English this means: “Despite being forbidden, the prisoner went behind block 7 to relieve themselves”. The prisoner would have been severely punished for going to the toilet without permission as a warning to other prisoners.
The Reichswehr and Red Army collaborated in wargames and tests in Kazan and Lipetsk beginning in 1926. During this period, the Red Army was developing the theory of Deep operations, which would guide Red Army doctrine throughout World War II. Set within the Soviet Union, these two centers were used to field test aircraft and armored vehicles up to the battalion level, as well as housing aerial and armored warfare schools through which officers were rotated. This was done in the Soviet Union, in secret, to evade the Treaty of Versailles's occupational agent, the Inter-Allied Commission.
The prisoners put up various forms of resistance to the tyranny of the camp. Resistance organisations helped inmates to obtain medicine and food, documented Nazi crimes, supported attempts to escape and sabotage, tried to put political prisoners into positions of responsibility, and prepared for an uprising. A total of 667 prisoners escaped from Auschwitz, but 270 of them were caught in the vicinity of the camp and immediately executed. The best-known escape was that of two Slovak Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg (Rudolf Vrba) (link in Czech). They managed to cross into Slovakia and to tell Jewish leaders - and through them the world - about the terrible reality of Auschwitz, about which they wrote an extensive report. On the 7th of October 1944, there was an uprising by the Sonderkommando working in the gas chambers. The prisoners managed to destroy one of the gas chambers, and thus to hinder the extermination process. All the rebels died. A group of young female prisoners was also executed for having smuggled gunpowder to the rebels from the factory in Monowitz.

Use of bunkers I and 2 stopped in spring 1943 when the new crematoria were built, although bunker 2 became operational again in May 1944 for the murder of the Hungarian Jews.[47] Crematorium II, which had been designed as a mortuary with morgues in the basement and ground-level incinerators, was converted by installing gas-tight doors, vents for the Zyklon B to be dropped into the chamber, and ventilation equipment to remove the gas thereafter.[48] It went into operation in March 1943. Crematorium III was built using the same design. Crematoria IV and V, designed from the start as gassing centers, were also constructed that spring. By June 1943, all four crematoria were operational. Most of the victims were killed using these four structures.[49]
Allied armies began using combined arms formations and deep penetration strategies that Germany had used in the opening years of the war. Many Allied operations in the Western Desert and on the Eastern Front, relied on firepower to establish breakthroughs by fast-moving armoured units. These artillery-based tactics were also decisive in Western Front operations after Operation Overlord and the British Commonwealth and American armies developed flexible and powerful systems for using artillery support. What the Soviets lacked in flexibility, they made up for in number of rocket launchers, guns and mortars. The Germans never achieved the kind of fire concentrations their enemies were capable of by 1944.[107]
Blitzkrieg also has had some influence on subsequent militaries and doctrines. The Israel Defense Forces may have been influenced by blitzkrieg in creating a military of flexible armored spearheads and close air support. The 1990's United States theorists of " Shock and awe" claim blitzkrieg as a subset of strategies which they term "rapid dominance".
Since the end of the Holocaust, succeeding generations have striven to understand how such a horrific event as the Holocaust could have taken place. How could people be "so evil"? In an attempt to explore the topic, you might consider reading some books or watching films about the Holocaust. Hopefully, these reviews will help you decide where to begin.
By Guderian's account he single-handedly created the German tactical and operational methodology. Between 1922 and 1928 Guderian wrote a number of articles concerning military movement. As the ideas of making use of the combustible engine in a protected encasement to bring mobility back to warfare developed in the German army, Guderian was a leading proponent of the formations that would be used for this purpose. He was later asked to write an explanatory book, which was titled Achtung Panzer! (1937). In it he explained the theories of the tank men and defended them.
Beginning with the British air raids on Cologne in May of 1942, the Allies launched a strategic bombing campaign that would target cities and industrial plants across the Reich for the next three years. In the summer of 1942, Germany and its allies focused on the Soviet Union unsuccessfully. The Soviet Union gained the dominant role, which it would maintain for the rest of the war.
Once the strategic Schwerpunkt had been identified, the attack could commence, using the concept of Kesselschlacht (“cauldron battle”). A frontal attack would immobilize the enemy while forces on the flanks would execute a double envelopment, forming a pocket called a Kessel (“cauldron”) around the enemy. Once surrounded, the opposing army, demoralized and with no chance of escape, would face the choice of annihilation or surrender.
Use of armoured forces was crucial for both sides on the Eastern Front. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, involved a number of breakthroughs and encirclements by motorised forces. Its goal according to Führer Directive 21 (18 December 1940) was "to destroy the Russian forces deployed in the West and to prevent their escape into the wide-open spaces of Russia."[90] The Red Army was to be destroyed west of the Dvina and Dnieper rivers, which were about 500 kilometres (310 mi) east of the Soviet border, to be followed by a mopping-up operation. The surprise attack resulted in the near annihilation of the Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily (VVS, Soviet Air Force) by simultaneous attacks on airfields,[91] allowing the Luftwaffe to achieve total air supremacy over all the battlefields within the first week.[92][93] On the ground, four German panzer groups outflanked and encircled disorganised Red Army units, while the marching infantry completed the encirclements and defeated the trapped forces.[94] In late July, after 2nd Panzer Group (commanded by Guderian) captured the watersheds of the Dvina and Dnieper rivers near Smolensk, the panzers had to defend the encirclement, because the marching infantry divisions were still hundreds of kilometres to the west.[91]
It is badly lighted, full of draughts, with the brick floor covered by a layer of mud. The water is not drinkable; it has a revolting smell and often fails for many hours. The walls are covered by curious didactic frescoes: for example, there is the good Häftling [prisoner], portrayed stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and rosy cranium, and the bad Häftling, with a strong Semitic nose and a greenish colour, bundled up in his ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head, who cautiously dips a finger into the water of the washbasin. Under the first is written: "So bist du rein" (like this you are clean), and under the second, "So gehst du ein" (like this you come to a bad end); and lower down, in doubtful French but in Gothic script: "La propreté, c'est la santé" [cleanliness is health].[108]
A column of inmates reached the Gross-Rosen complex. Throughout February, the terribly overcrowded main camp at Gross-Rosen was cleared, and all 44,000 inmates were moved further west. An unknown number died in this last journey.[244] In March 1945, Himmler ordered that no more prisoners should be killed, as he hoped to use them as hostages in negotiations with the Allies.[245] Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.[246]
Auschwitz Birkenau was the principal and most notorious of the six concentration and extermination camps established by Nazi Germany to implement its Final Solution policy which had as its aim the mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe. Built in Poland under Nazi German occupation initially as a concentration camp for Poles and later for Soviet prisoners of war, it soon became a prison for a number of other nationalities. Between the years 1942-1944 it became the main mass extermination camp where Jews were tortured and killed for their so-called racial origins. In addition to the mass murder of well over a million Jewish men, women and children, and tens of thousands of Polish victims, Auschwitz also served as a camp for the racial murder of thousands of Roma and Sinti and prisoners of several European nationalities.
Blitzkrieg, as practiced by the Wehrmacht during World War II, was a tactical action executed with extreme competence. It involved the coordination of all forces and it had a very small margin of error. But this coordination that made it such a successful tactic is the main thing missed when Blitzkrieg is referenced in day-to-day conversations that focus only on the speed by which a certain position is secured. All the other items we discussed (initiative, focus and tempo) fall apart without this synchronization.

Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl was the first to suggest, in May 1944, that the Allies bomb the rails leading to Auschwitz.[224] At one point British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that such a plan be prepared, but he was told that precision bombing the camp to free the prisoners or disrupt the railway was not technically feasible.[225][not in citation given] In 1978, historian David Wyman published an essay in Commentary entitled "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed", arguing that the United States Army Air Forces had the capability to attack Auschwitz and should have done so; he expanded his arguments in his book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (1984). Wyman argued that, since the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz III had been bombed three times between August and December 1944 by the US Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, it would have been feasible for the other camps or railway lines to be bombed too. Bernard Wasserstein's Britain and the Jews of Europe (1979) and Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) raised similar questions about British inaction.[226] Since the 1990s, other historians have argued that Allied bombing accuracy was not sufficient for Wyman's proposed attack, and that counterfactual history is an inherently problematic endeavor.[227]
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