# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
World War II Part 2 - The Homefront: Crash Course US History #36

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
World War II Part 2 - The Homefront: Crash Course US History #36

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
World War II Part 1: Crash Course US History #35

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
World War II Part 1: Crash Course US History #35

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
history of Europe - The blast of World War II

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
World War II was the most destructive war in history. Estimates of those killed vary from 35 million to 60 million. The total for Europe alone was 15 million to 20 million-more than twice as many as in World War I. At least 6 million Jewish men, women, and children, and millions of others, died in Hitler's extermination camps. Nor were the Germans themselves spared. By 1945, in a population of some 70 million, there were 7 million more German women than men.

One after another, most of the countries in continental Europe had been invaded and occupied: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the U.S.S.R. and then, when the tide turned, Italy and Germany. Many countries had been fought over twice.

The resulting devastation had turned much of Europe into a moonscape: cities laid waste or consumed by firestorms, the countryside charred and blackened, roads pitted with shell holes or bomb craters, railways out of action, bridges destroyed or truncated, harbours filled with sunken, listing ships. "Berlin," said General Lucius D. Clay, the deputy military governor in the U.S. zone of postwar Germany, "was like a city of the dead."

Between 1939 and 1945, moreover, at least 60 million European civilians had been uprooted from their homes; 27 million had left their own countries or been driven out by force. Four and a half million had been deported by the Nazis for forced labour; many thousands more had been sent to Siberia by the Russians. When the war ended, 2.5 million Poles and Czechs were transferred to the U.S.S.R., and more than 12 million Germans fled or were expelled from eastern Europe. At one period in 1945, 40,000 refugees a week poured into northwestern Germany.

Death, destruction, and mass displacements-all had demonstrated how fragile and vulnerable Europe's proud nations had become. In most earlier conflicts the state's defenses had been its frontiers or its front line: its armies had been a carapace protecting the civilians within. Now, even more than in World War I, this was no longer so. Air raids, rockets, mass conscription, blitzkrieg invasion, commando raids, parachute drops, Resistance sabotage, and guerrilla warfare had put everyone, as the phrase went, "in the front line." More accurately, national frontiers had shown how flimsy they were, and the "front line" metaphor had lost its force. Even the distinction between civilians and soldiers had become blurred. Civilians had fought in Resistance circuits-and been shot, sometimes as hostages, and when the Allies or the Axis practiced area bombing, civilians were the main victims. The most extreme instances were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. They not only ignored the civilian-military distinction; they utterly transformed the nature of war.

Hitler's death camps, likewise, made World War II unique. The appalling product of spurious science, evil fanaticism, blind bureaucratic obedience, sadistic perversion, and pedantic callousness, they left an unhealing wound. They reminded humanity of the depths to which human beings can sink and of the vital need to expunge racism of all kinds-including the reflex, understandable at the time, of regarding the Germans as solely capable of committing Nazi-type crimes.

The Nürnberg trials were a further unique feature of World War II (although war trials were written into the treaties following World War I). By arraigning and punishing major surviving Nazi leaders, they undoubtedly supplied a salutary form of catharsis, if nothing else. They proved beyond a doubt the wickedness of Hitler's regime; at one point, when films of the death camps were shown, they actually sickened and shamed the defendants. In some eyes, however, the trials were tainted. Although scrupulously conducted, they smacked slightly of show trials, with the victorious Allies playing both prosecutor and judge. Given the purges of millions under Stalin, the participation of Soviet judges seemed especially hypocritical. The charges included not only war crimes, of which many of the accused were manifestly guilty, but also "waging aggressive war"-a novel addition to the statute book. Finally, a number of war criminals certainly slipped through the Nürnberg net. The overall intention, however, was surely honourable: to establish once and for all that international affairs were not immune from ethical considerations and that international law -unlike the League of Nations-was growing teeth.

In two further respects, World War II left a lasting mark on Europe. The first and most obvious was its division between East and West. Both U.S. and Soviet troops, from opposite directions, had helped to liberate Europe, and on April 25, 1945, they met on the Elbe River. They toasted each other and posed for the photographers; then the Soviets dug themselves into new defensive positions, still facing west.

It was not a confrontation, but it was symbolic. Stalin had long made clear that he sought to recover the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as the part of Poland that the Poles had seized after Versailles. He also expected a free hand in exerting influence on the rest of eastern Europe. At a meeting in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill had largely conceded this principle, proposing 90 percent Soviet influence in Romania, 90 percent British influence in Greece, 75 percent Soviet influence in Bulgaria, and a 50-50 split in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Cynical as this might seem, it was a tacit recognition of strategic and military facts. Similar considerations determined the East-West zonal division of Germany, which endured in the form of two German republics until their reunification in October 1990.

The fact that the U.S.S.R. and the United States now faced each other in Europe along the so-called " Iron Curtain" denounced by Churchill in his Fulton, Mo., speech on March 5, 1946, dramatized Europe's final legacy from World War II. This was a drastic reduction in wealth, status, and power.

In financial terms, World War II had cost more than the combined total of all European wars since the Middle Ages. Even Britain, which had been spared invasion, had been transformed from the world's biggest creditor to the world's biggest debtor, and much of continental Europe was obliged to continue living on credit and aid. Economically, all Europe's once great powers were dwarfed by the world's superpowers. Their status was diminished still further when their remaining colonies were freed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
History of Europe - WWII, Conflict, Nations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
History of Europe - WWII, Conflict, Nations: World War II was the most destructive war in history. Estimates of those killed vary from 35 million to 60 million. The total for Europe alone was 15 million to 20 million-more than twice as many as in World War I.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Editors

National Geographic Society

Producer

National Geographic Society

other

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Editors National Geographic Society Producer National Geographic Society other

# data[].attributes.body
World war 2 transformed Europe by the population declining.

# data[].attributes.body
Europe’s side during world war 2 was axis alliance.

# data[].attributes.body
The war lasted from September 1939-September 2 1945.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
World War II in Europe | American Experience | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
National Archives

1939
August: The Russians and the Germans sign a non-aggression pact. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin agree not to invade each other's borders. The two leaders secretly plan to divide Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe between them.

September: Employing blitzkrieg (literally, "lightning war") tactics, Germany invades Poland. Polish military forces are unprepared for the ferocity of Germany's attack.When efforts to negotiate a withdrawal fail, Britain and France declare war on Germany. World War II begins.

1940
May: As Germany marches into Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Winston Churchill replaces a disgraced Neville Chamberlain, the man responsible for the appeasement of Hitler, as prime minister of Great Britain.

June: Germany captures Paris, and France surrenders to the Nazis. Exacting revenge for his nation's defeat in the first Wold War, Hitler forces French officials to sign surrender papers in the same railroad car in which Germans signed the armistice of 1918.

July 10: The Battle of Britain begins. A three-month battle fought in the skies over Britain will include destructive bombing raids on London and other cities, but by the end of October, the British will hand Hitler his first defeat.

1941
March: President Franklin Roosevelt convinces a largely isolationist Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act, allowing the U.S. to sell or lend war materials to "any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States."

June: Roosevelt freezes German and Italian assets in the U.S.

August: Emerging from secret meetings conducted on warships off of Newfoundland, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt unveil the Atlantic Charter. The charter outlines goals concerning "the final destruction of Nazi tyranny," and a pledge to support "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live."

December 7: The United States is thrust into war when Japan launches a devastating surprise attack on the U.S. Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. President Franklin Roosevelt will ask the Congress to delcare war on Japan the following day, December 8th.

December 11: Germany and Italy declare war on the U.S.

1942
January: U.S. troops arrive in Europe. Through March, the number of troops shipped overseas averages about 50,000 per month - a number that will soar upwards of 250,000 per month in 1944.

August: Germany begins its assault on the Russian city of Stalingrad. In a battle that will rage for six months, and take hundreds of thousands of German and Russian lives, the Red Army finally defeats invading Nazis. The long, bloody battle proves to be a turning point in the war, as Germany begins a retreat from the Eastern Front.

1943
January: Roosevelt and Churchill hold a conference at Casablanca, Morocco. They affirm their goal of securing the Axis nations' unconditional surrender.

May: U.S. troops led by Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George S. Patton join forces with British troops under the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to defeat German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa.

June: Eisenhower is appointed commander of the U.S. forces in Europe.

July - September: Allied forces capture Sicily and key spots in southern Italy. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is overthrown and imprisoned. Hitler dispatches German troops to fend off an Allied advance in what will be a series of hard fought, costly battles.

November: The "big three," Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, convene in Teheran, Iran to discuss the invasion of Italy. It is the first time all three have met.

December: Eisenhower is named supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe.

1944
February: German aircraft production centers are the target of a massive bombing campaign by the U.S. Army Air Corps. Shortly thereafter, more than six hundred U.S. bombers raid Berlin. Despite the devastation caused by the bombing, Germany is able to maintain weapons and aircraft production levels.

June: The Allies capture Rome, Italy.

May 30: The Allied invasion of France commences; troops based in England begin their mobilization to cross the Channel, in a massive effort code-named Operation Overlord. Eisenhower will wait for a good weather forecast to determine the exact day of the invasion.

June 5: Overlord is set into motion. An advance wave of paratroopers flies to drop spots over France late in the evening, and descends into enemy territory.

June 6: D-Day. Over 160,000 Allied troops and 30,000 vehicles are landed along a 50-mile stretch of fortified French coastline and begin fighting on the beaches of Normandy.

July: The Allies take control of the French port city of Cherbourg. The retreating Germans, however, have left the city badly razed and booby-trapped.

August : After four years of German occupation, the Allies liberate Paris with the help of French resistance troops led by General Charles de Gaulle.

December 16: The Battle of the Bulge begins. Hitler sends a quarter million troops across an 85-mile stretch of the Allied front, from southern Belgium into Luxembourg. In deadly cold winter weather, German troops will advance some 50 miles into the Allied lines, creating a deadly "bulge" pushing into Allied defenses.

1945
January: By the end of the month, the Battle of the Bulge ends. Over 76,000 Americans have been killed, wounded, or captured. The Allies regain the territory they held in early December.

February 4-11: The last meeting of the Big Three - Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin -- takes place in the Soviet city of Yalta. Roosevelt and Churchill agree to allow Stalin to control the governments of Eastern Europe at war's end, thereby setting the stage for future Cold War clashes.

March: U.S. forces cross the Rhine River. The Germans retreat into Germany.

April 30: As Soviet forces push into Berlin, Adolf Hitler takes shelter in his bombproof bunker. There, he marries his mistress, Eva Braun, before poisoning her and shooting himself. His remains will never be found.

May 7: General Dwight Eisenhower accepts Germany's unconditional surrender at Reims, France. Germany likewise surrenders to Russia in Berlin.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
World War II in Europe | American Experience | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt convinces a largely isolationist Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act, allowing the U.S. to sell or lend war materials to "any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
World War II: Maps The Holocaust took place in the broader context of World War II. Still reeling from Germany's defeat in World War I, Hitler's government envisioned a vast, new empire of "living space" (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe. The realization of German dominance in Europe, its leaders calculated, would require war.

1939

After securing the neutrality of the Soviet Union (through the August 1939 German-Soviet Pact of nonaggression), Germany started World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany on September 3. Within a month, Poland was defeated by a combination of German and Soviet forces and was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

1940

The relative lull in fighting which followed the defeat of Poland ended on April 9, 1940, when German forces invaded Norway and Denmark. On May 10, 1940, Germany began its assault on western Europe by invading the Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg), which had taken neutral positions in the war, as well as France. On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany, which provided for the German occupation of the northern half of the country and permitted the establishment of a collaborationist regime in the south with its seat in the city of Vichy.

With German encouragement, the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states in June 1940 and formally annexed them in August 1940. Italy, a member of the Axis (countries allied with Germany), joined the war on June 10, 1940. From July 10 to October 31, 1940, the Nazis waged, and ultimately lost, an air war over England, known as the Battle of Britain.

1941

After securing the Balkan region by invading Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6, 1941, the Germans and their allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in direct violation of the German-Soviet Pact. In June and July 1941, the Germans also occupied the Baltic states. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin then became a major wartime Allied leader, in opposition to Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. During the summer and autumn of 1941, German troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union, but stiffening Red Army resistance prevented the Germans from capturing the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow. On December 6, 1941, Soviet troops launched a significant counteroffensive that drove German forces permanently from the outskirts of Moscow. One day later, on December 7, 1941, Japan (one of the Axis powers) bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States immediately declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States as the military conflict widened.

1942-43

In May 1942, the British Royal Air Force carried out a raid on the German city of Cologne with a thousand bombers, for the first time bringing war home to Germany. For the next three years, Allied air forces systematically bombed industrial plants and cities all over the Reich, reducing much of urban Germany to rubble by 1945. In late 1942 and early 1943, the Allied forces achieved a series of significant military triumphs in North Africa. The failure of French armed forces to prevent Allied occupation of Morocco and Algeria triggered a German occupation of collaborationist Vichy France on November 11, 1942. Axis military units in Africa, approximately 150,000 troops in all, surrendered in May 1943.

On the eastern front, during the summer of 1942, the Germans and their Axis allies renewed their offensive in the Soviet Union, aiming to capture Stalingrad on the Volga River, as well as the city of Baku and the Caucasian oil fields. The German offensive stalled on both fronts in the late summer of 1942. In November, Soviet troops launched a counteroffensive at Stalingrad and on February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviets. The Germans mounted one more offensive at Kursk in July 1943, the biggest tank battle in history, but Soviet troops blunted the attack and assumed a military predominance that they would not again relinquish during the course of the war.

In July 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily and in September went ashore on the Italian mainland. After the Italian Fascist Party's Grand Council deposed Italian premier Benito Mussolini (an ally of Hitler), the Italian military took over and negotiated a surrender to Anglo-American forces on September 8. German troops stationed in Italy seized control of the northern half of the peninsula, and continued to resist. Mussolini, who had been arrested by Italian military authorities, was rescued by German SS commandos in September and established (under German supervision) a neo-Fascist puppet regime in northern Italy. German troops continued to hold northern Italy until surrendering on May 2, 1945.

1944

On June 6, 1944 ( D-Day), as part of a massive military operation, over 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in France, which was liberated by the end of August. On September 11, 1944, the first US troops crossed into Germany, one month after Soviet troops had crossed the eastern border. In mid-December the Germans launched an unsuccessful counterattack in Belgium and northern France, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Allied air forces attacked Nazi industrial plants, such as the one at the Auschwitz camp (though the gas chambers were never targeted).

1945

The Soviets began an offensive on January 12, 1945, liberating western Poland and forcing Hungary (an Axis ally) to surrender. In mid-February 1945, the Allies bombed the German city of Dresden, killing up to 25,000 civilians. American troops crossed the Rhine River on March 7, 1945. A final Soviet offensive on April 16, 1945, enabled Soviet forces to encircle the German capital, Berlin.

As Soviet troops fought their way towards the Reich Chancellery, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies at Reims and on May 9 to the Soviets in Berlin. In August, the war in the Pacific ended soon after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 120,000 civilians. Japan formally surrendered on September 2.

World War II resulted in an estimated 55 million deaths worldwide. It was the largest and most destructive conflict in history.

Last Edited: Mar 14, 2007

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Germany started World War II in Europe on September 1, 1939, by invading Poland. War would continue until 1945. Learn more about WWII and genocide in Europe.