THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

•Went into effect in January 1920, with 42 members.

•Eventually 63 governments joined the League, but total membership at one time never exceeded 58.

•The United States never joined.

•Germany joined in 1926, and the Soviet Union in 1934.

•Before the League came to an end, Japan, Italy, Germany, and 14 other states, mostly Latin American, had withdrawn, and in 1939 the Soviet Union was expelled.

•The League depended heavily on arbitration, judicial settlement and international law, in which global leaders had great faith in the early 20th century.

•The League established the Permanent Court of International Justice.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1930s)Inflation in Germany: 1914: $1 = 4.2 marks1923: $1 = 4.2 trillion marks

Unemployment, 1920s and ’30s:Britain: 25%Germany: 40%

Overproduction in Europe:Tariffs; no free trade

Use of oil: slump in coal industries

Drought in parts of the US: New Deal

DOROTHEA LANGEMigrant motherNipomo, California. 1936.

In the early 1930s, Lange began taking pictures of the breadlines and waterfront strikes of Depression-era San Francisco. In 1935 Lange began her landmark work for the Farm Security Administration, a Federal Agency.

WALKER EVANSSouthern sharecropper family, 1938

RUSSIA IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

17th century – enserfment

1861 – Emancipation of serfs; local councils of serfs; rise in urban labor

1860s to 1880s – Railways; factories

Rise of intelligentsia – anarchists (1860s); Bolsheviks (by 1890s)

1905 – defeat by Japan; march to Winter Palace; Tsar Nicolas II grants civil liberties and creates Duma in January

By 1907 – Reversal of gains of 1905, curtailment of civil liberties

1914-1917 – 2 million Russian troops dead in World War 1, 4-6 million captured/wounded

March 1917 – strikes in Petrograd; provisional government

October 1917 – return of Lenin in April; spread of Leninist ideas

Petrograd soviet assembly

Workers’ militia gathers in Petrograd, 1917

Occupation of the Winter Palace, 1917

March 8, 1917.With 2 million

Russian troops dead in the war, Russian

women chose the last Sunday in

February to strike for "bread and

peace". Four days later the Czar was forced to abdicate

and the provisional government granted

women the right to vote. March 8 is now

celebrated worldwide as International

Women’s Day.

Comrade Lenin Sweeps the Globe Clean, 1920Mikhail Cheremnykh and Victor Deni

Festivities marking the opening of the second congress of the Comintern, 1921Boris Kustodiev

The Tsars exiled convicts to remote territories in the Russian north, where winters last nine months and lakes freeze into solid blocks of ice. The trickle became a flood as Stalin’s regime built a vast

network of labor camps. At its peak in the 1930s and '40s, the system held millions of people. Prisoners were made to build towns, industries and railroads.

Today, the grand Soviet plan to industrialize the Arctic is a fading memory. A World Bank-supported project seeks to relocate thousands of people from collapsing Arctic cities to new homes further

south.

Russian peasants going to the kolkhoz, or collective farm

Forced collective farming led to mismanagement, famines

(especially in the Ukraine), and the death of many millions

The murder of socialist leaders in Germany in 1919 was followed by the rise of the Weimar Republic

Wolfgang Willrich

1932

GROWING PROPAGANDA

END OF WEIMAR REPUBLIC

November 1918: Military defeat of Imperial Germany, revolution breaks out.

1919: New German government forced to sign Versailles Treaty. Few Germans accept the new "German Republic", despite a constitution which promises all citizens equal rights and social welfare

1926: Germany becomes member of League of Nations.

1920s: Berlin is a major center of art and science in Europe. National Socialists are gaining support and prestige.

1930s: Depression. In 1932, six million unemployed in Germany. Inefficient government because of unstable coalitions.

1932: Chancellor Franz von Papen drives democratic government of Prussia (largest state) out of office, no resistance.

1933: President Hindenburg appoints Hitler Chancellor. At first, Hitler's opponents do not see through the pseudolegality of the "seizure of power". By the time they realize that the National Socialist government is pursuing the permanent destruction of the republic, Hitler has already obtained the decisive instruments of power for establishing a dictatorship.

Demonstration in Berlin, 1930. The Reichsbanner, an organization independent of political parties,

continually calls on citizens to demonstrate for the Republic. Its membership in the 1920s included about three million members from every party of the Weimar

Coalition loyal to the Republic, particularly from the ranks of the Social Democrats and labor unions.

The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew…Today he passes as 'smart,' and this in a certain sense he has been at all times. But his intelligence is not the result of his own development … For what sham culture the Jew today possesses is the property of other peoples, and for the most part it is ruined in his hands … there has never been a Jewish art … above all the two queens of all the arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to the Jews … the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed.

The Jew has always been a people with definite racial characteristics and never a religion; only in order to get ahead he early sought for a means which could distract unpleasant attention from his person. And what would have been more expedient and at the same time more innocent than the 'embezzled' concept of a religious community? For here, too, everything is borrowed or rather stolen.

NAZI PROPAGANDA AGAINST THE DISABLEDThis frame from a filmstrip shows that the money needed to support a person with a

hereditary disease can support an entire family of healthy Germans for the same amount of time.

Left: A Jewish-owned store in Berlin. November 10, 1938. Right: Jews arrested during Kristallnacht line up for roll call at the Buchenwald concentration camp. November 1938.

KRISTALLNACHT, NOVEMBER 9, 1938

Left: A chart of signs to distinguish different inmates of concentration camps. Signs were sewn or attached to prisoners’ clothes.

Above: A boy shows his identification tattoo. When the number of deaths rose, some camps started tattooing identification numbers on sick and old prisoners, so they could be identified regardless of clothes.

Above: A victim of Nazi medical experiments,

Buchenwald.

Below: Dr. Josef Mengele, the physician in

charge of experiments.

A victim of a Nazi medical experiment is immersed in icy water at the Dachau concentration camp. SS doctor Sigmund Rascher oversees the experiment. Germany,

1942

A prisoner in a compression chamber loses consciousness (and later dies) during an experiment to determine altitudes at which aircraft crews could survive without oxygen. Dachau, Germany, 1942.

MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Martin Niemöller, pastor(January 14, 1892 - March 6, 1984)

"When the Nazis took away the Communists, I was silent;I wasn't a Communist.

When they locked up the Social Democrats, I was silent;I wasn't a Social Democrat.

When they took away the labor unionists, I was silent;I wasn't a labor unionist.

When they took away the Jews, I was silent;I wasn't a Jew.

When they took me away, there was no one left to protest."

THE “BANALITY OF EVIL”

Hannah Arendt Adolf Eichmann

Evil occurs not because of the presence of hatred, but because of the absence of those imaginative capacities that can make the human and moral aspects of our activities clear to us. Eichmann failed to exercise his capacity of thinking, which would have permitted self-awareness.

Thinking is different from knowing. Thinking persistently makes us ask questions that cannot be answered from the standpoint of knowledge, questions we cannot refrain from asking. Thinking does not yield positive results that can be considered settled; rather, it constantly returns to question again and again the meaning that we give to experiences, actions and circumstances.

Adapted from Majid Yar (2001), http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/arendt.htm