Nazi Death Camps
The name Auschwitz , referring to a network of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, evokes the memory of the holocaust, one of the most evil episodes in history. Auschwitz I was constructed to meet the influx of Polish political prisoners in May 1940....
It’s Everybody’s War
With patriotic music and narration by Henry Fonda, this short subject about the home front in 1942 is fascinating. The Pearl Harbor attack was "stab in the back by an enemy we had tried to help." The fall of Corregidor brought the grim reality of war to America. Now...
Youth in the Third Reich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVUAIPMsZ60 After gaining control of the government in the early 1930s, the Nazis radically altered Germany's educational system. History was re-written along the intolerant lines of Aryan beliefs. Old texts, non-conforming...
Weihnachten Germany
How different is our enemy? Many German Christmas-time customs are familiar to Americans.
Japanese Women – War Effort
With early 20th century industrialization, many poor or unwed Japanese women worked in silk, textile, and weaving factories. Once married, however, women were expected to stop working for wages. Most worked without pay in agriculture. At war from 1937-1945, the lives...
Home Front Oregon
August 1942 In the first six months of 1942, Japanese forces, seasoned by a decade of war in China, swept across the Western Pacific. In Oregon, Coast Guard patrols and barbed wire fences criss-crossed ocean beaches. Reeling, the American military regrouped as war...
The Enemy Japan
This propaganda film with former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew narrating, was produced in 1942 by the U.S. Navy.
▶ German Newsreel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3MHIvUuJQ8 German proficiency is not necessary to understand this newsreel of German troops on the winter front, British & American POWS, and German families at home at Christmas 1942.
To Parents in Wartime
The United States Children's Bureau, created in 1912, was the first national governmental office in the world focusing solely on the well-being of children and their mothers. Throughout WWII, the Children's Bureau promoted the well-being of...
HEIMAT
This excellent 11-part mini-series, filmed for German television in 1984, relates the stories of people living in a small village in the Hunsrück Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany through the years 1919-1982. The series follows the citizens of the fictional...
Eleanor Roosevelt
As the mother of four sons on active duty, the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt became an important symbol of patriotism during WWII. She insisted that the White House practice the same food and gas rationing system as the rest of the country, participated in air raid...
Eugenics – Not Just Nazi Germany
This 1936 Nazi propaganda poster saying "We do not stand alone," shows a woman with a baby and a man holding a shield inscribed with the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (mandating compulsory sterilization). Behind the couple is a map of...
America’s Teenager Archie
The fictional "Riverdale" teenagers Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie and Jughead, reportedly based on real people John L. Goldwater met in his travels through the Midwest, who debuted in the winter of 1942, are still being read today.
Japanese American Relocation
In February 1942 FDR signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the military to “prescribe military areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded... for protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense...
WWII Enemies – Home Front
Images used with permission from: born1945 and Remembering the USA in the 1940s
A Child Dreams of Battle
In this 1915 German children's book the child has just awakened. He tells his mother "I was just in the field and killed all the enemy in some great battle." She smiles and tells him it was just a dream. But he can hardly grasp that all that beauty was just a...
Kabei – Our Mother
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BrRQ7aRoug KABEI (our mother) In this beautiful, touching movie set during the rise of ultranationalism, a mother holds her family together after her husband is jailed for dissident scholarship.
The Only Son
Ozu Ojiro's lyrical film The Only Son, unfolding in 1923, 1935 and 1936, depicts the contrast between rural and urban Japanese life. An ironic view of failed ambition, the film focuses on the relationship between a rural widowed mother who labored to get her son an...
Birth Control in Japan
In 1937, the women's rights activist Shidzue Katō opened a birth-control clinic in Tokyo with Margaret Sanger as the guest of honor. Soon, along with about five hundred left-wing men, Shidzue was arrested by the Tokkō (Special Higher Police) and the clinic was...
Birth Control – USA
Anti-birth control laws originating in 1873 with the Comstock Act, had their first legal challenge with Margaret Sanger’s arrest in 1916 for opening a birth control clinic. The 1918 Crane decision allowed women to use birth control for therapeutic purposes. In 1936,...
Japanese-American Immigration
After years of isolation, immigration from Japan was legalized in 1885 and about 1000 people left Japan to perform contracted work on sugar plantations in Hawaii. Although contract immigration was prohibited in the mainland United States, many "free immigrants"...
Mother’s Day
In honor of various goddesses, ancient Greeks and Romans celebrated mothers on a special day, as did Christians (during Lent in honor of Mother Mary). The holiday became known in England as Mothering Sunday. In the United States, the designation of a...
Boy’s Festival Day
日本語: 五月人形の段飾り - 1935; Wikimedia Commons Boy's festival Day, Tango no Sekku, is an ancient Japanese tradition celebrating boys on the 5th day of the 5th month (May 5). Families with boys fly carp-shaped streamers as symbols of strength and success, and inside homes,...
Brother Can You Spare a Dime?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovndTa7hQDE The historian Frederick Lewis Allen called 1932 the "cruelest year of the Great Depression." - Unemployed in USA ~ 12.5 million - One million transients on the move - Breadlines & beggars in unprecedented numbers
Coney Island
In contrast with Japan's graceful homogeneity, American culture was diverse and comparatively unrefined .