officially began on September 2, 1939. However, for the United States, it began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. With great haste following the attack, the United States managed to draft a military of more than two million strong by year’s end to fight the two-front war the country would face in Europe and the Pacific.
Immediately, troops were sent to training camps, and these young men found themselves invading North Africa by late 1942, landing in Italy in late 1943, and opening the western front on the shores of Normandy in France on D-Day in mid-1944. Fighting their way across France, the Allied soldiers pushed the German troops back. The Nazis attempted one last desperate offensive in December, 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge. This battle resulted in enormous U.S. losses with more than 100,000 casualties; however, the U.S. troops proved too much for the exhausted German army, and soon American troops found themselves in Germany in the first part of 1945. Swiftly moving across Germany with the Russians closing in on Berlin in the north, U.S. forces moved south, coming face-to-face with the Final Solution in April, 1945.
Scholars have struggled to come to a consensus regarding what constitutes the most accurate definition of the Holocaust, but effective pedagogy demands that educators clearly define the term for their students. The Texas Liberator App adopts the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s definition: “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.” The app acknowledges that the Nazis and their accomplices also employed the camps to commit genocide against many members of other victim groups. These groups include the Roma and Sinti, the disabled, Poles, Soviet Prisoners of War, communists, homosexuals, Catholic clergy, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Although not all victims died there, the Nazi camps were an integral and horrific component in the execution of these mass murders.
