How to answer the questions Please Read The Wansee Conference is one of the questions in Part A–let us look at a few things that would help you to prepare, if you choose to answer this question. First, the thing that I would recommend most is try not to be general and vague, but specific and precise. Now, how would that apply here? First, the Conference met on January 20/1942–Wansee is about 30 minutes from Berlin. To have the precise date, is so much better than to say something like, it was a conference that met “during WWII”. Second, the Conference was called by the Head of German Reich Security Reinhard Heydrich. Third, there were 15 high level Nazis here. Each of these, were head of different departments in the Nazi Government or Task Force (for example, Rudolf Lange, who was part of the Command Staff of Einsatzgruppen A was one of the 15 present). Fourth, what did Heydrich want from these fifteen? This Heydrich made absolutely clear–he wanted unanimity. In other words, he wanted all to agree, that all 11 million Jewish people in Europe were to be killed at Death Camps that, except for one, were still to be built. (Chelmno was the only Death Camp that existed when the Conference met, but by July of 1942, five more were added–Belzec, Birkenau-Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka). Fifth, this Conference really grew out of what the Einsatzgruppen had already done in Russia, for by December of 1941, about a million Jewish people had been killed, but what was noticed by the SS command, was the psychological effects on those doing the shooting. With that then, the plan was to create a system of execution, that was totally impersonal, for those who ran it, where Jewish people were brought to Death Camps that were disguised as labor camps, and executed by gas, rather than by machine gun. This Conference represented the centralization of what the Nazis called the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. Part A below Define and give the significance of five of the following, each in a substantial paragraph.   1.Night of Long Knives              8.Battle of Britain 2.Berlin Blockade                      9.Tehran Conference 3.Bombing of Guernica            10. Iron Curtain Speech 4.Marshall Plan                          11.Battle of Stalingrad 5.Treaty of Versailles                 12.Wansee Conference   6.Policy of Appeasement         13. Cuban Missile Crisis 7.Enabling Act                          14.General Zhukov Preparation for Part B The following will help you to prepare for Part B of the assignment 2 X 25 = 50                  Part B   Answer two of the following, each in an essay.   1.      Discuss what led to the sudden Fall of France in World War II, for it resisted the German onslaught for 4 years in World War I yet fell in a little over a month in WWII.   2.      What were the various factors that enabled Lenin’s Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia, in late 1917?   3.      What enabled Mussolini to gain control of Italy in the 1920s? 4.      On June 28/1914, the heir to the Austrian throne was assassinated while on a visit to  4.      On June 28/1914, the heir to the Austrian throne was assassinated while on a visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia.  Trace why and how this murder of the heir, morphed over the next month, into the outbreak of World War I.   5.      Discuss the political, social, and intellectual impact of World War I on Europe.   6.      Hitler rose to power in direct opposition to the Weimar Republic.  What specifically enabled him to be successful?   7.      Stalin saw Russia as a solitary socialist state, surrounded by a sea of capitalist countries.  Examine the twin program of industrialization and collectivization, as his means of responding to Russia’s backwardness, and what he saw as the West’s belligerence.   8.      Why was Operation Barbarossa ultimately so unsuccessful, for in the early stages of the German advance, the Soviet Army seemed to simply stagger backwards, in the face of the onslaught.   9.      As the Russian army advanced on Nazi Germany in 1944, it appeared to be simply freeing countries like Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria from Nazi power, yet it increasingly became evident, those countries would remain under Soviet power.  Discuss Stalin’s creation of the Eastern Block.   10.    If Hitler’s view of the Jewish people was the origin of the Final Solution, the SS were the executioners who looked to make it a reality.  Discuss what was involved in the Holocaust, especially the mentality of mass murder that so characterized the Einsatzgruppen.   11.    Gorbachev, through his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, seemed to unleash forces he could not control.  Look to be specific in examining what Gorbachev wanted to overthrow, as well as what he looked to replace it with, and why that proved so problematic for him.