I love history. Especially military history. What’s the most iconic example of military history? Well, that would have to be one of the most interesting wars in history. World War Two!
World War Two was fought between 1939-1945 by the two biggest alliances in the world at the time: the Allied Powers and the Axis powers.
In class we have been discussing World War Two for a few months now. We’ve been focusing on the main battles fought during the war, as well as the differing perspectives of the countries involved in the war. The first assignment we where given was to write a book review on a World War Two related book chosen from a list our teacher gave us. I have already made a blog post on this, you can read it below.
A big focus on this unit was exploring all the different perspectives countries had about the war, not just the Canadian ones, and why countries fought in it, who was responsible for causing it and who should win and why. One way we explored different perspectives was by interviewing a German World War Two veteran. His name was Helmut.
Helmut fought for Germany in the last year of the war. He fought on the eastern front while he was in his early twenties. As we listened to the story of his survival, we all gained a better understanding of what he had gone through and what the German perspective of the war was. As he spoke, we asked questions and recorded every word he spoke. This provided us with the information we needed to do our next project.
Our next project was to make a 3-5 minute podcast on one of Helmut’s stories. My podcast focused on Helmut’s first night on the Russian front. During this first night, he dug a trench, evaded gun fire, blew-up not one but two Russian tanks, and took a shrapnel wound to the head. Incrediable, right? If you’d like to hear his story, please click the link to my podcast.
Our final Socials project was to team up as a class to create a website that focused on the countries that were in war and their perspectives of World War Two . We did this by dividing into groups with each group responsible for representing a single country. I was in the Soviet Union group with Aiden and Willa.
The hardest part of our project was finding information about the perspectives of USSR civilians that lived through the war. This is because there is very little USSR civilian accounts on record due to how scarce paper was, how strict censorship policies were and the fact that USSR civilians, as a group, included people from several different cultures and former countries that now formed the USSR.
After our class finished our first draft, we went around the class giving feed back to each other about what we liked on their country’s page and what we believed could use revision.
Afterwards, we presented our website to Kathleen Barter. Kathleen is a District Administrator in the North Vancouver School District and has a degree with a major in History and a real interest in this subject. She gave each of our groups helpful and specific feedback on what they could do to improve their website page. My group was told to add more information on the civilians perspective of the war. As I previously mentioned, this was challenging, however I managed to get the work done and it ended up making the page much better.
This was probably one of my most favourite units we’ve done! It was fun to learn about World War Two and we were extremely fortunate to actually interview a veteran that fought during the war, on the German side! If I where to make the website over again, I would add in more perspectives from different areas of the USSR (Russia, Ukraine, etc.). All in all though, I think it went very well and I’m happy with what we’ve accomplished.
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I really liked this blog post, the formatting is a little weird as there is lots of extra space. But overall it was interesting to read and I really liked how you went in depth and talked about helmut and where he fought. You included lots of great information, images and links.