Topic 8 AP Exam Practice
Multiple-Choice Questions
Questions 1 to 3 refer to the passage below.
“The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. . . . The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were ‘racially superior’ and that the Jews, deemed ‘inferior,’ were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. . . .
To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. . . .
Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.”
Holocaust Encyclopedia,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
1. Which best helps explain the passage in its broader historical context?
- (A) Several European countries reached an agreement in Munich, in 1938, that allowed Germany to seize the Sudetenland.
- (B) World War II included the first use of atomic weapons in human history.
- (C) Political conflicts before and during World War II led to acts of genocide and other large-scale ethnic violence.
- (D) During Kristallnacht in 1938, Jews throughout Germany and Austria were beaten and killed.
2. The policy of the Japanese that most closely paralleled the conditions described in the passage was
- (A) forcing conquered peoples into deadly forced labor programs
- (B) engaging in surprise military attacks, such as the one on Pearl Harbor
- (C) attempting to liberate the people of Asia from Western imperialism
- (D) invading Manchuria after an attack on a Japanese railway station there
3. The campaign of genocide represented in the passage is most similar to which of the following examples?
- (A) the killing of 26 Republicans between August and September 1936 by fascists belonging to Franco’s regime
- (B) the massacre of a band of Lakota people on their way to the Pine Ridge Reservation for shelter from the winter by the U.S. 7th Cavalry in December 1890
- (C) the deportation and execution of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire
- (D) the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Short-Answer Questions
1. Use the passage to answer all parts of the question that follows.
“Japan used a highly developed military machine and a master-race mentality to set about establishing its right to rule its neighbors. . . .
If one event can be held up as an example of the unmitigated evil lying just below the surface of unbridled military adventurism, that moment is the Rape of Nanking. . . .
When the city fell on December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers began an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history. . . . Years later experts at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE) estimated that more than 260,000 noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers in Nanking in late 1937 and early 1938, though some experts have placed the figure at well over 350,000.”
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997)
2. Answer all parts of the question that follows.