IP&T Prezi History Class

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Although he initially headed a coalition government, he quickly eliminated his government partners. Thus began the beginning of his reign, known as "The Third Reicht."

Coat of arms of the Weimar Republic, 1919–33, and Nazi Germany, 1933-1935. As hitler slowly took power, he used the Weimar Rupublic's Symbol until it was replaced by the Nazi Swastika as Hitler took complete control of Germany.

Hitler ordered the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Gestapo to assassinate his political enemies both in and outside the Nazi Party. With his own private army he began his reign of terror.

Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazi politicians believed that the non-German Germanic peoples of Europe, such as the Scandinavians, the Dutch, and the Flemish, racially belonged to the superior Aryan Herrenvolk. Hitler announced that he wanted to do away with the "unnatural" division of the Nordic race into many different countries. Hitler began the gathering and extermination of the Jewish people, first in Germany, continuing as he began to invade the rest of Europe.

Jews were gathered as families, seperated into men, women, and children, and sent off on trains to work at "Labor Camps"

These "Labor Camps" turned out instead to be extermination camps, where Jews were worked to death, or sentenced to gas chambers or firing squads.

The Allied Forces consisted of "The Big Three," The United States of America, Great Britain, and Russia. This force fought back against Hitler and the Germans in an all out front, hitting back at occupied Europe to push Hilter and the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy).

The Axis advance was stopped in 1942 after the defeat of Japan in a series of naval battles and after devastating defeats of European Axis troops in North Africa and at Stalingrad. In 1943, with a series of German defeats in Eastern Europe, the Allied invasion of Fascist Italy, and American victories in the Pacific, the Axis had lost strategic initiative and passed to strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded France, whereas the Soviet Union regained all territorial losses and invaded the territory of Germany and its allies.

The Normandy landings were the landing operations of the Allied invasion of Normandy. The landings commenced on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 (D-Day). The assault was conducted in two phases: an air assault landing of 24,000 British, American, Canadian and Free French airborne troops shortly after midnight, and an amphibious landing of Allied infantry and armoured divisions on the coast of France. The operation was the largest amphibious invasion of all time, with over 160,000 troops landing on 6 June 1944. 195,700 Allied naval and merchant navy personnel in over 5,000 ships were involved. The landings took place along a 50-mile (80 km) stretch of the Normandy coast divided into five sectors: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

Japan continued to fight, despite Germany and Italy's surrender. The United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, 1945. Between the two bombs, on 15 August 1945 Japan surrendered, with the surrender documents finally signed aboard the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, ending the war.

The Allied forces were the victor after the complete surrender of the Axis powers. In an effort to maintain international peace, the Allies formed the United Nations, and adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, as a common standard of achievement for all member nations. America continues to this day to be the greatest country in the world, upholding its place as the standard for the nations.

A Brief Overview of World War Two