Under the Dutch-German treaty made in The Hague on 8 April 1960, West Germany agreed to pay to The Netherlands the sum of 280 million German marks in compensation for the return. Passenger ships were also subject to Contraband Control because they carried luggage and small cargo items such as postal mail and parcels, and the Americans were particularly furious at the British insistence on opening all mail destined for Germany. Angry at the British export ban, the German Government accused the British of having deliberately sunk the Simon Bolivar, lost on 18 November with the loss of 120 people, including women and children. Spanish companies did important aircraft work for the Germans, Spanish merchants furnished Germany with industrial diamonds and platinum,[65] and General Franco, still loyal to Hitler because of his support during the civil war, continued to supply Germany with war materials, among them mercury and tungsten. By the end of September 1939, regular ocean convoys were in operation, outward from the Thames and Liverpool, and inwards from Gibraltar, Freetown and Halifax. Hitler assumed control over the whole of Western Europe and Scandinavia (except for Sweden and Switzerland) from the north tip of Norway high above the Arctic Circle to the Pyrenees on the border with Spain, and from the River Bug in Poland to the English Channel. Shortly after the German invasion of the Low Countries and France, the British took the first tentative steps towards the opening of a strategic air offensive aimed at carrying the fight to Germany. At this point Franco saw that the Royal Navy had reduced the German navy in Norway to an impotent surface threat, the Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain, the Royal Navy had destroyed much of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kbir, had also destroyed Italian battleships at Taranto and the British Army was routing the Italian army in North & East Africa. In early March, Admiral Raeder was interviewed by an American correspondent from NBC regarding the alleged use of unrestrained submarine warfare. Norway, with extensive mountainous areas relied on imports for half its food and all its coal; shortages and hunger quickly affected Belgium which, despite being densely populated and producing only half its needs, was still subjected to the widespread confiscation of food. Despite the humanitarian efforts, by late January 1942 between 1,700 and 2,000 men, women and children were dying in Athens and Piraeus each day, and Italy, which then occupied Greece, was forced to ship 10,000 tons of grain from her meagre domestic supplies, secretly to avoid unrest from her own people. Amid increasing reports of atrocities committed by her forces in these lands, such as the Nanking Massacre and the use of poison gas, world opinion turned against Japan,[6] and from 1938 America, Britain and other countries launched trade embargoes against her to restrict supplies of the raw materials she needed to wage war, such as oil, metals and rubber. Portugal was Europe's leading supplier of tungsten (and scheelite, another member of the wolframite series of tungsten ore minerals), annually providing Germany with at least 2,000 metric tons between 1941 and mid-1944, about 60 percent of her total requirement. In December 1941 the United States joined the economic warfare system that the British had created and administered over the previous two years. Be sure to note the roles of the three Allied leaders, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and how their interests influenced the way Germany was handled. In December 1940 Roosevelt, having won an historic third term as president declared that the U.S. would become the "Arsenal of Democracy", providing the weapons Britain and her Commonwealth needed without entering the war herself. Within hours the British liner Athenia was torpedoed by U-30 off the Hebrides with the loss of 112 lives, leading the Royal Navy to assume that unrestricted U-boat warfare had begun. One lesson that was learnt from World War I was that although the navy could stop ships on the open seas, little could be done about traders who acted as the middleman, importing materials the Nazis needed into their own neutral country then transporting it overland to Germany for a profit. Then some people thought and some people said that the war could be won by blockade alone without fighting, that Germany would suddenly collapse for lack of fuel, lack of special steels, even lack of food. On 16 August the Luftwaffe claimed to have destroyed Tilbury Docks and the Port of London, which normally handled a million tons of cargo per week. After all, the Western two-thirds of Germany had been fully integrated into the capitalist global market since WWII, while East Germany was ill-prepared to enter the Western markets and its industry was grossly inefficient by capitalist standards. Along with real-life accounts of German attacks on civilian fishing trawlers, news of attempts to defeat the magnetic mine, and official statistics of the monthly totals of seized cargoes, popular titles such as War Illustrated, Picture Post and the American magazine Life served up a weekly diet of photographs and patriotic accounts of the latest British or French war successes, often with captions such as, Mr Briton'll see it through After the German devastation of Coventry, the RAF raided oil refineries in Mannheim city centre on the night of 1617 December. [16], By the beginning of 1944 it was clear that the bomber offensive had not delivered the decisive defeat that was promised, and preparations were well underway for the invasion of Europe. At night, aircraft of RAF Bomber Command and RAF Coastal Command flew the short distance across the channel and attacked the shipping and barges which were being assembled in the ports at Antwerp, Ostend, Calais and Boulogne to carry the invasion force across, eventually destroying over 20% of the fleet. The German synthetic-oil programme was so successful and advanced that during the world fuel crisis of the 1970s, caused by conflict and uncertainty in the Middle East, large American industrial concerns such as Dow Chemical, Union Carbide and Diamond Shamrock began to reconsider the Nazi-era technology to see if it might provide a partial solution to their problems. Ukraine was a major industrial region. How the Welfare State Transformed European Life. The Second World War was the most destructive conflict in human history. After World War One, Germany was severely punished by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The United States and the Nazi Threat: 1933-37 Czechoslovakia had lost its grain, its gold reserves, mines, heavy industries and important textile industry. Years of international tension and aggressive expansion by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany culminated in the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. World War II left devastation in various parts of Europe, but especially in Germany. 27 chapters | This treaty was supposed to close all open questions regarding Germany and the aftermath of WWII and paved the way for German reunification. Of secondary importance was the defence of trade in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. However, by the end of December 1939 the Soviets didn't agree to start sending raw materiel since they weren't satisfied by German offers, citing refusal to get some of what they wanted and overly high prices on everyone else, and the actual trade within the framework treaty signed in August only took off in 1940 (see below). [3] Leith-Ross had represented British interests abroad for many years, having embarked on a number of important overseas missions to countries including Italy, Germany, China and Russia, experience which gave him a very useful worldwide political perspective. Instead, East and West Germany grew in wildly different directions depending on which side of that global battle they fell on. Scapa Flow was again selected as the main British naval base because of its great distance from German airfields, however the defences built up during World War I had fallen into disrepair. Portugal also defended her right to neutral trade, fearing German reprisals such as invasion or the bombing of her cities and shipping if she ceased tungsten shipments; however the US Secretary of State Cordell Hull believed that he could have achieved the objective if he had had wholehearted British support. After World War II, according to the Potsdam conference held between July 17 and August 2, 1945, Germany was to pay the Allies US$23 billion mainly in machinery and manufacturing plants. The Allies had practical control over the Suez Canal which provided passage between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean via Port Said at the northern entry to the canal. At the start of 1942 the Allies were yet to achieve a major victory. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. These treaties stripped the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary, joined by Ottoman Turkey and Bulgaria) of substantial territories and imposed significant reparation payments. (1) The Governments of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic reaffirm their renunciation of the manufacture and possession of and control over nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The Soviets also received 2.3 million tons of steel, 230,000 tons of aluminium, 2.6 million tons of petrol, 3.8 million tons of food and huge quantities of ammunition and explosives. The supreme commander of Allied forces, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to advance on a broad front to overcome the West Wall (Siegfried Line), but instead accepted British General Bernard Montgomery's Operation Market Garden, the plan to try to outflank the West Wall and drive into northern Germany to encircle the industrial Ruhr via the Netherlands. Political Reconstruction in Europe After WWII: History & Impact, Economic Reconstruction in Europe After WWII: Recovery Programs & Their Effect, US After WWII: Politics, Culture & Counter-Culture, Federal Republic of Germany | Government, History & Structure. [60], Russia had had a reputation as a backward, agrarian country, but the communist government was well aware of the dangers of overly relying on the Ukraine and of the need to modernise its industry. By the time the embargo ended in November 1944 an unusually early and harsh winter had set in, leading to the Dutch famine of 1944. In mid-September the Ministry published a list of 278 pro-German persons and companies throughout the world with whom British merchants and shipowners were forbidden to do business, subject to heavy penalties. Their strong armour, 11inch guns and 26-knot (48km/h) speed enabled them to out-match any British cruiser, and two of them, the Admiral Graf Spee and the Deutschland had sailed between 21 and 24 August and were now loose on the high seas having evaded the Northern Patrol, the navy squadron that patrolled between Scotland and Iceland. [citation needed]. This system was in essence a commercial passport applied to goods before they were shipped, and was used on a wide scale. Early Reports of the Nazi Persecution of Jews in the American Press (Spring 1933) On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed c hancellor of Germany. Post war Germany evolved into two separate Germanys. The Nazi leadership later grew bullish at the apparent success of the mine strategy and admitted they were of German origin, stating that "our objectives are being achieved". German civilian motor traffic had practically entirely gone over to producer-gas, which like all ersatz materials was grossly wasteful in manpower, and this, combined with her colossal losses in the field and the need to keep a disproportionately high percentage of its available labour on the land, had produced an acute manpower crisis requiring the use of some seven million foreign slaves in Germany alone. Even so, by early October the Allies were growing increasingly confident at the effectiveness of their blockade and the apparent success of the recently introduced convoy system. RAF assaults on medium-sized industrial towns to the east of the Rhine, the Ruhr and Berlin from mid-1942 also did little to weaken Germany economically. Many of the installations that had previously been reported as wiped out continued to operate. Instead, much of the value transferred consisted of German industrial assets as well as forced labour to the Allies. [15] The works were located in the area bounded by Hanover, Halle and Magdeburg, which was considered safe from land offensive operations, and a programme was initiated to relocate existing crucial industries nearest the borders of Silesia, Ruhr and Saxony to the more secure central regions. Although France, unlike Britain, was largely self-sufficient in food and needed to import few foodstuffs, she still required extensive overseas imports of weapons and raw materials for her war effort and there was close co-operation between the two allies. [56][58], In 1990, West Germany and East Germany signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany ('Two Plus Four Agreement') with the former Allied countries of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. In total the US provided Soviet Union with $11 billion worth of goods, including 4,800 Grant and Sherman tanks, 350,000 trucks, 50,000 jeeps, 7,300 Airacobra fighter aircraft, and 3700 light and medium bombers. flashcard sets. Germany was forced to send 40 freight cars of emergency supplies into occupied Belgium and France, and American charities such as the Red Cross, the Aldrich Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee began gathering funds to send aid. The average German worker worked for 10 hours a day 6 days a week; but although he may have had enough money to buy them, most items were not available, and shops displayed goods in their windows accompanied by a sign saying 'Not For Sale'[18][33], Such was the belief in the supreme strength of the Royal Navy that some thought that the blockade might now be so effective in restricting Germany's ability to fight that Hitler would be forced to come to the negotiation table.[34]. Men were allowed one overcoat and two suits, four shirts and six pairs of socks, and had to prove that the old ones were worn out to get new. Ships proceeding eastward through the English Channel with the intention of passing the Downs, if not calling at any other Channel port, should call at Weymouth for contraband control examination.
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