Episode 6: History & Images
The final episode of World on Fire Season 2 presents us with a heart-rending future for Henriette and introduces new fronts to the war, including Germany’s advance into the Soviet Union and Japan’s attacks on China. Learn more about these events in this historical explainer for the Season 2 finale.
- 1.
Ravensbrück Prison Camp
Sculptures of women at the Ravensbrück National Memorial Henriette is finally caught by Nazi soldiers in Episode 6 and joins Albert in a prison outside Paris. Albert tells her she’s destined for Ravensbrück, “a camp where they send female political prisoners.” He gives her a sharp weapon, items for bribes, and watches her being led away.
Ravensbrück was a concentration camp established in northern Germany, unique in that it primarily had women inmates. It is infamous for unbearable conditions, slave labor, medical experimentation, and other brutalities. Male SS officers were camp administrators, but the staff was made up of only female guards. Women detainees were sorted into groups depending on why they’d been arrested—political prisoners, Jews, German religious prisoners, and those with “asocial” sexual views, for example. Each group wore a different colored cloth triangle on their uniforms.
The camp was “designed to accommodate 6,000 prisoners,” says The Jewish Virtual Library. “At the end of 1939 it had only 2,000 inmates,” according to Vad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. By 1944, however, “the relatively permanent inmates of Ravensbrück numbered 26,700.” As the Soviet Army entered the area “in March and April 1945 … the Nazis began to evacuate tens of thousands of these prisoners on death marches,” says The Weiner Holocaust Library. “Approximately one third died or managed to escape on route.” When the “advance guard of the Red Army arrived in Ravensbrück … the 3,000 prisoners remaining in the camp were liberated.”
Read Nina Orsten’s account of her escape from Ravensbrück. Her story is part of an archive of wartime memories assembled by the BBC entitled WW2 People’s War. [Note the escape is in Part 4 of her story. Part 1, 2, and 3 are also available to read.]
- 2.
Germany’s Operation Barbarossa
Soviet propaganda poster during Germany’s invasion of Russia, 1941 It’s September 1941 as Episode 6 winds down. The Chase family listens to radio news about the Nazi takeover of Kyiv, capital of the Soviet Ukraine. The Axis’ surprise invasion of the USSR had begun a few months earlier and was called Operation Barbarossa. Assembling “more than 3,500,000 troops for the attack … it’s considered one of the largest military operations in the history of modern warfare,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Though Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty back in 1939, peace with the USSR could not compete with the Führer’s long-held intention to expand his territories eastward. Hitler also viewed Russians and communism as enemies of the German people. He wanted to destroy “Stalin’s ‘Jewish Bolshevist’ regime” and enslave the nation’s “racially ‘inferior’ Slavic population,” says the Imperial War Museum. “By the end of September, [Kyiv] had fallen and over 650,000 Russian troops [were] killed or captured,” and by the end of 1941, German troops had advanced hundreds of miles further to Moscow, annihilating people and property in their path.
Warfare on this front continued into 1945; the Soviet Union proved far more resilient than the Nazis had anticipated. Watch a video from the Imperial War Museum about Operation Barbarossa’s ultimate failure.
- 3.
Japan’s War with China
‘The more I fight, the stronger I become,’ ca 1939 In another radio announcement at the end of World on Fire Episode 6, it’s reported that “Japan is continuing its attack on China and talks openly about its imperialist ambitions as it grows ever closer to declaring war on the West.” What was happening between these two East Asian countries at the time?
Conflict in East Asia started well before WW2 did. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 “because China was becoming united” under the Nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-shek, says the American Historical Association. In the US “there was a smug assumption that the seizure of Manchuria would “satisfy” the Japanese for a long time, because they would have to ‘digest’ 360,000 square miles of territory with a great variety of undeveloped resources. Actually, the Japanese did not pause or hesitate.”
By 1937, Japan controlled large sections of China, and “war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace,” says the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Germany and Italy invited Japan into the Axis alliance with the Tripartite Pact signed in September 1940. “By 1941, it was becoming increasingly clear that Japan intended to dominate all of east Asia,” says The National World War II Museum.
British Pathé offers this 1937 newsreel about the fighting between and Japan and China.
