World War II: ICSE Class X Project

Main causes of World War II

• Dissatisfaction with the treaty of Versailles
• Rise of Fascism and Nazism
• Japanese Invasion of China
• Failure of the League of Nations
• Invasion of Poland by Hitler (Immediate Cause)

Spread of the war

Axis Powers: Germany, Italy and Japan
Allied Powers: Britain, France, USA

Starting date of the war is generally considered to be September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by UK and France.

Amongst the main events are the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the start of Operation Barbarossa, the attack on Pearl Harbor and British and Dutch colonies in South East Asia, US dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

8 May is celebrated as the day of celebration in Europe.

Consequences of the War

• Defeat of the Axis Powers
• Formation of the UN. The United Nations was formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict.
• Independence of many Asian and African Nations
• The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the world’s leading superpowers post the war. This set the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 45 years.

Projects

Nazi Concentration Camps: ICSE class X History Project.

A concentration camp is a place (prison) where people are detained without following the due process of law. For example, during the second world war, Nazi Germany imprisoned lakhs of Jews in concentration camps with the purpose of torturing them and carrying out ethnic cleansing.

In a concentration camp, people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

Topic: Nazi Concentration Camps

Learning Objectives:
To understand the violation of Human Rights in these camps on the pretext of the Anti-Semitic propaganda.

• Life in a concentration camp
• Women during Holocaust
• Medical experiments
• Treatment to the handicaps
• Inside a Nazi Camp
• Gas chambers

On completion of the project students should be able to understand the horrors of the concentration camps, the Anti-Semitic propaganda and the holocaust. They will also understand the extermination process – extermination by means of merciless forced labor. ‘Extermination by labor’ – as this “compromise” was called between those who called for immediate extermination and those who sought to exploit Jewish labor until their very end.