The Second World War (September 1, 1939 – September 2, 1945) is the second global war waged by all major powers in the 20th century. In Europe, it began on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland ordered by Adolf Hitler. In East Asia, the Empire of Greater Japan had been in the Second Sino-Japanese War with the Republic of China since July 1937 and in a border war with the Soviet Union from mid-1938.
| General information | |
|---|---|
| Date | September 1, 1939 – September 2, 1945 |
| Duration | 6 years and 1 day |
| Place | Europe, Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Southeast Asia, China, Mediterranean Sea, Middle East, Africa, North and South America skirmishes |
| Casus belli | Invasion of Poland by Germany and the USSR |
| Issue |
Allied Victory:
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The Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor in early December 1941 resulted in the entry of the United States into World War II and the beginning of the Pacific War, in which the European colonial powers were also involved. In the course of the war, two military alliances were formed, which are called Axis powers and allies (anti-Hitler coalition).
The main opponents of the National Socialist German Reich in Europe were the United Kingdom, headed by the war cabinet of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and (from June 1941) the Soviet Union, which was under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Many historians today argue that World War II only became a world war with the entry of the United States, as it linked the previously regional wars in Asia (1937) and Europe (1939) in 1941.
With the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, the fighting in Europe ended on May 8, 1945; the two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, and thus to the end of the war.
More than 60 countries around the world were directly or indirectly involved in the world war, and more than 110 million people carried weapons.
The numbers of victims in the war can only be estimated. More than 60 million people were killed in land, sea and air warfare. Estimates involving victims of the Holocaust (Shoah), Porajmos and other mass murders, forced labor, as well as war crimes and consequences of war range up to 80 million.
The Second World War in Europe consisted of blitzkriegs, conquest campaigns against Germany’s neighboring countries with the incorporation of occupied territories, the establishment of puppet governments and carpet bombing. In the territories conquered by the Axis powers and also in Germany, an ever-increasing resistance against National Socialism formed during the war years.
For the German Wehrmacht, the course of events in the theatres of war in Europe and the Mediterranean can be divided into three main phases:
- First phase: Attacks on Poland, Denmark/Norway, the Benelux countries and France, the Balkans and North Africa.
- The second phase began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
- The third phase followed in the West with the landing of the Allies in Normandy on June 6, 1944. In the east, about two weeks later, the Red Army opened its successful Operation Bagration.
Six European states remained officially neutral and did not participate directly in the fighting: Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Turkey (the latter until February 1945). The U.S. administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt had declared U.S. neutrality at the beginning of the European war, but as of November 1939, the new neutrality law and cash-and-carry clause allowed belligerent states to buy weapons and ammunition in the United States and transport them on their own ships. Direct deliveries from the USA were made possible by the Loan and Lease Act passed in February 1941. In August 1940, the U.S. Congress approved the construction of a large fleet that could be deployed in the Atlantic and Pacific.
With the entry into the war of fascist Italy ruled by Benito Mussolini, which was allied with the German Reich, parts of East and North Africa as well as the Mediterranean also became a theatre of war from June 1940. Italian troops fought in the East African campaign against British units for the colony of British Somaliland. From February 1941, the German Africa Corps supported the Italians in the parallel African campaign. After the two battles at El-Alamein in July 1942 and October/November 1942, Anglo-American troops landed in Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch) and the German and Italian troops had to surrender after the Tunisian campaign in May 1943.
The war against the Soviet Union was waged by the German army, Waffen-SS and Luftwaffe as a war of annihilation with the intention of winning Eastern Europe to the Urals as a (new) German settlement area for a future “Greater Germanic Reich”. The great turning point in the war was the battles for Moscow (winter 1941/1942) and the futile attempt to conquer Stalingrad in autumn 1942.
The west bank of the Volga in Stalingrad marked the easternmost point of the German advance on the Eastern Front. After the victory in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army counterattacked – from 1943 to the end of 1944, the occupied territories of the Soviet Union were gradually reconquered by the Red Army. With the destruction of Army Group Mitte in the summer of 1944, German defeat was inevitable. The German army units withdrew to the then eastern borders of the Reich. The joint attack of the Western powers (Great Britain, USA and Canada) on three fronts in Europe – landing in Sicily (July 1943), landing in Normandy (June 1944) and landing in southern France (August 1944) – was a step towards a foreseeable end to all fighting in Europe.
In October 1944, the German western border in the Aachen area was crossed fighting by the Western Allies and the eastern border by the Red Army in East Prussia. In their winter offensive in 1945, Troops of the Red Army reached the Oder on a broad front and opened the Battle of Berlin in mid-April. On April 25, 1945, American troops encountered Soviet troops on the Elbe. After Hitler committed suicide in Berlin’s Führerbunker on April 30, 1945, the city’s German troops surrendered two days later. On May 8, 1945, Field Marshal Keitel signed the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht; the war in Europe was thus over. The end of the war was celebrated by the victorious powers with several parades, including the Moscow Victory Parade of 1945 and the Berlin Victory Parade of 1945.
The Empire of Japan, which had been allied with the German Reich and Italy since 1940 in the Tripartite Pact, had destroyed most of the US Pacific Fleet in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Now the USA declared war on Japan, followed by declarations of war by Germany and Italy to the USA. The USSR remained neutral with Japan for the time being in accordance with the Neutrality Pact of April 13, 1941.
At the Arcadia Conference in Washington (December 1941/January 1942), the USA and Great Britain decided to defeat Germany first as the most dangerous opponent (“Germany first”). But from 1942 to 1945, protracted fighting also took place in East Asia (China, Burma, British Malaya, Thailand, French Indochina, Dutch East Indies), the Philippines and many islands in the Pacific (including New Guinea). The Japanese troops were able to occupy many of the European colonies and other countries such as Thailand and the Philippines by mid-1942.
It was not until the Battle of Midway in early June 1942, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy lost four of its six large aircraft carriers, that the Turning Point in the Pacific War brought about. As a result, the Allied soldiers were able to occupy smaller Pacific islands in “island jumping” often only with large losses. In order to accelerate the end of the fighting in East Asia, the new US President Harry S. Truman ordered in July 1945 to drop one atomic bomb each on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On September 2, 1945, The Second World War ended with the surrender of Japan.
“This war was a historically unprecedented attack on humanity, a destruction of all the cultural ideals that the Enlightenment had produced, a crash not seen before. He was Europe’s Armageddon.”In addition to the destruction of human lives, many historic districts and buildings were irretrievably lost due to the destruction of entire cities. This loss was followed by the reconstruction of affected European cities, whose cityscape would be replaced by war and new construction.
As a result of the Second World War, political and social structures throughout the world also changed. The United Nations Organization (UN) was founded, whose permanent members in the Security Council became the main victorious powers of the Second World War: the USA, Soviet Union, China, Great Britain and France. The European colonial powers Great Britain and France lost their overseas possessions, most of their colonies became independent. “It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War that the Second World War […] marked phase of history to the end.”
Prehistory
The revision of the international order after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 was a goal of all German parties and governments and in 1920 was also part of the program of the NSDAP, which had taken power in Germany in 1933. From 1935, the Hitler government gradually dissolved the Versailles Peace Order with the reintroduction of general conscription, the invasion of the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, the annexation of Austria (March 1938) and the separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement (September 30, 1938).
This was facilitated by the British and French appeasement policy, which aimed at a peaceful understanding with National Socialist Germany. After the “smashing of the rest of Czechoslovakia” in March 1939, only the British government and the French government protested. Shortly thereafter, under German pressure, Lithuania returned the Memelland to Germany. The First Slovak Republic became a German vassal state, which was closely bound to Germany by a “protection treaty”. Britain and France wanted to limit Germany’s drive for expansion and issued a guarantee declaration for Poland on March 31, 1939, which was converted into a formal alliance a short time later.
Japan’s expansionist policy began in the 1930s, when the influence of the military leadership on the imperial government grew stronger. Japan saw itself as a protecting and ordering power that was chosen to dominate the other East Asian peoples. The raw material deposits and the reservoir of labor offered by neighboring countries were intended to benefit the Japanese economy.
Initially, the main interest was in the Republic of China, whose heavily industrialized region of Manchuria was annexed in 1931 and declared a protectorate of Manchukuo. In response to the international protests, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933. At the end of 1936, Germany and Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact. In mid-1937, Japan began the Second Sino-Japanese War. Italy maintained close relations with the German Reich. It attacked Ethiopia in October 1935 and occupied Albania on April 7, 1939.
In the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, a Popular Front government led mainly by republicans, socialists and communists and supporters of a military revolt of General Francisco Franco fought each other. The Soviet Union and the French Popular Front supplied weapons and war material to the “Popular Front”. Italy and Germany supported the troops of Franco’s nationalists. The German government sent the Legion Condor, the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie (CTV), which contributed decisively to the victory of Franquism.
In the Munich Agreement (September 1938), Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy agreed on a peaceful solution to the Sudeten crisis, although Hitler would have secretly preferred a belligerent solution even then.
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union surprisingly concluded a “Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” later called the “Hitler-Stalin Pact.” In a secret additional protocol, the division of Europe into geographically precisely designated but otherwise undefined “spheres of interest” was decided. This ultimately amounted to the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and the unilateral conquest and occupation of other territories (including the Baltic states as well as parts of Finland and Greater Romania) by the USSR. This treaty enabled Hitler to start the war.
War aims and leadership of the great powers
The possibility that a full-scale war could occur was taken into account by the great powers, so they made appropriate preparations. The preparations for war, therefore, included, for example, the stockpiling of war-critical resources and goods as well as the expansion of civil protection programs.
Axis powers during the Second World War
Germany
In the European context, The Second World War was a war of robbery, conquest and extermination triggered by National Socialist Germany with the long-term goal of creating an unassailable German empire of conquered and dependent territories. From the very beginning, the aim was Germany’s position as a world power and the “racist reorganization of the [European] continent”.Classical power-political and racial-ideological motives were mixed.
These included, on the one hand, the acquisition of “living space in the East” with resettlement or extermination of the predominantly Slavic peoples living there, regarded as “racially inferior”, and on the other hand, the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. Both were justified by the anti-Semitic notion of “Jewish Bolshevism” as part of a conspiracy of “world Jewry,” which in the form of the Soviet Union was seen as a threat to the livelihoods of the “Aryan race” and the European civilization it represents.
According to the will of the National Socialist leadership, the ethnic group of the Slavs should first be subjugated and the conquered Eastern Europe should be made usable by German settlers, so-called defensive peasants (see map on the right). After the destruction of their elite, the Slavic peoples were to provide forever a reservoir of uneducated and subservient agricultural and unskilled workers. The European part of the Soviet Union was to be divided into territories under the leadership of Reich Commissars. Only Belarusians, Ukrainians and Baltic peoples were classified as livable peoples. In the words of Alfred Rosenberg, “Russianism [.] certainly very difficult years are ahead”.
The German strategy envisaged the use of a political and temporary opportunity for a strategic offensive. It pursued military, racial-hegemonic, economic and diplomatic goals. From a military point of view, the Blitzkrieg should allow a rapid and extensive gain of space in order to pre-empt the emerging superiority of the enemy armor. Thus, this strategy represented a special manifestation of the war of movement in combination with the decisive battle, which drew on German experience in the First World War. From an economic point of view, it should conserve resources so as not to burden industrial capacities to the detriment of the consumer economy. There should be no dissatisfaction among the German population because of a possible material shortage.
In order to secure the “home front” and in the sense of making optimal use of the conquered capacities, a two-front war was initially avoided, but on July 31, 1940, Hitler announced to his generals at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden the most serious decision he made during the Second World War: “In the course of this conflict, Russia must be settled. Spring 1941”. (Entry in Halder’s War Diary, July 31, 1940). Thirdly, the plundering of the occupied territories, especially in East-Central and Eastern Europe, the enslavement of their inhabitants in favor of the German Reich and its “Aryan” population, was intended to realize the racially motivated hegemonic ideas of National Socialism. The diplomatic acquisition of European and non-European allies was intended to secure this hegemonic position.
The outrage over the Treaty of Versailles, in particular, the harsh and perceived unjust demands for reparations as well as the unilateral blaming of the Central Powers found an echo in large parts of the German population. The revision of the Treaty of Versailles and the return of the German Reich to the circle of great powers had always been sought with particular emphasis by the German generals, the monarchist and anti-republican part of the German bourgeoisie and the economic elite. For the National Socialists, they were only a milestone.
In August 1936, in the secret memorandum to the Four-Year Plan, Hitler demanded the operational capability of the German army and the ability of the economy to war within four years in order to achieve a warlike “expansion of the living space or the raw material and food base” for the German Reich. On November 5, 1937, he clarified his war goals to the military and foreign policy leaders of the Reich. He rejected self-sufficiency and Germany’s return to world trade; only the acquisition of a larger habitat is a way out. His unalterable decision was to solve the German question of space by 1943/45 at the latest.
After October 13, 1943, the day of the Badoglio government’s declaration of war in Italy, the German Reich was in a state of war with 34 states and had only the Empire of Japan as a noteworthy ally. These two states fought, independently of each other, a hopeless war against the rest of the world. Another 18 states declared war on the German Reich by March 1945. Germany’s previous allies in southeastern Europe, Hungary and Romania, retired in 1944.
Finland signed a separate armistice with the USSR on September 19, 1944. Bulgaria was occupied by the Red Army in September, although it was not in a state of war with the Soviet Union. In Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and Montenegro, “people’s governments” were formed in December 1944, after the Red Army occupied Belgrade at the end of October 1944 and Tito had agreed in Moscow on how to proceed. After the retreat of the Wehrmacht, a communist government of the partisan colonel Enver Hoxha was formed in Tirana on November 10, 1944.
Italy
With the Treaty of Saint-Germain, after the First World War, Julian Veneto, Istria, Trentino and German-speaking South Tyrol passed to Italy. In October 1935, it invaded the Empire of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and annexed the country. This annexation, which violated international law, was part of Mussolini’s declared goal of resurrecting the Roman Empire. After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, Mussolini took a clear stand in favor of National Socialist Germany.
Without prior notice to Hitler, he had Albania occupied at the beginning of April 1939 and claimed that it was the counterpart to the German annexation of the Czech Republic about four weeks earlier. In the so-called Steel Pact of May 1939, Mussolini was contractually bound to Hitler and the German Reich. With Italy’s declaration of war on France and Great Britain, the country entered the war in Europe on June 10, 1940, because Mussolini’s false speculation led him to believe that it was all but over. The Tripartite Pact at the end of September 1940 created the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis between Germany, Italy and Japan.
Less than a year later, on June 23, 1941, Mussolini also joined the German war against the Soviet Union. Four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. With the landing of British and American troops in Sicily on July 10, 1943, the Italian campaign began. On July 25, 1943, the inner-party opposition in the Grand Fascist Council obtained the overthrow of Mussolini and had him arrested after a subsequent visit to King Victor Emmanuel III. Italy withdrew from the Axis alliance after the Armistice of Cassibile and re-entered the war on the side of the Allies.
Japan
The Empire on the Japanese islands lived in self-isolation for over 200 years, an opening was forced from 1853 by gunboat policy of the USA. The technical backlog was soon made up after the Iwakura mission to Western countries, in the course of the Meiji Restoration Japan also took over the colonial expansion of the world powers and began a territorial expansion on the Asian continent, which was primarily intended to secure important raw materials.
With the victory over the Tsarist Empire, Japan was the dominant power in East Asia from 1905 onwards. The other targets focused in particular on the Republic of China, which is considered weak. Encouraged by an expansionary dynamic, Japan saw the rising tensions in Europe as an opportunity to counter the growing US influence in the western Pacific Ocean (Commonwealth of the Philippines and US outer territories). In addition to the geostrategic considerations, there was the frequent interference of the armed forces in the affairs of civilian leadership and a mutual cultural aversion between broad sections of the population in Japan and the United States.
Japan, like the German Reich in Europe without its own oil reserves, was confronted with a deteriorating strategic starting position in East Asia over the years due to the growing importance of motorization. The main cause was his isolation from the alliance. China, the Soviet Union and the European colonial powers basically agreed with the predominant US unwillingness to accept Japanese expansion in the region.
In the east, this was the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, in the north the Soviet Union, in the west China and in the south/southwest, in addition to the US-led Philippines, British Malaya and North Borneo, French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. In addition, Australia, which belongs to the British Commonwealth, with its mandate area “Territory of New Guinea” was suitable as a base of operations against Japan due to its spatial extent and location.
This geostrategic starting point prompted the Japanese leadership, similar to the German leadership, to mix diplomatic instruments with a war of movement. Therefore, after a failed penetration into Soviet territory in 1938/39, it concluded a neutrality pact with the USSR in April 1941. The attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Force, whose construction was qualitatively oriented in the face of the limitations of the Washington Naval Agreement, was primarily intended to deal a decisive blow to the United States Navy in view of its increasing armaments. In Southeast Asia itself, Japan also focused in the first step on neutralizing concentrated military resources, such as the accumulation of B-17 long-range bombers on the islands of the Philippines archipelago. The subsequent Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia served to procure raw materials, primarily oil, and was intended to cut off the SUPPLY route to Australia for the USA.
Ally
Western Powers
On the Western Front, the war plans of the Western powers, similar to the First World War, essentially provided for a wear and tear of the German army. It was to be supplemented by bombing the big cities and blocking the German economic cycle.
Soviet Union
The communist leadership saw the Soviet Union surrounded by a fundamentally hostile capitalist world and considered war inevitable. For them, it was necessary to delay the war until the five-year plans had created the potential to be able to cope with a conflict. But this goal did not preclude an offensive in order to throw one’s own weight decisively into the balance at a favorable opportunity. With the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, Stalin believed that he had prevented a joint action of the capitalist powers against the Soviet Union and could play the role of a spectator in the self-destruction of capitalism for a long time.
After the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union deliberately appropriated lessons from the previous German rearmament. On land, it followed the German example of the Army Group, whose core was mobile and heavily armored divisions, and founded centrally coordinated air fleets, which enabled targeted close air support by significantly improving the flow of information. After the previous politically motivated decimation of the officer corps, Stalin delegated the operational leadership to Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, whose above-average competencies enabled the successful leadership of several million men.
Comparison of military potentials
| Year | GB | USSR | UNITED STATES | German Empire | Japan | Italy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1939 | 0,48 | 1,60 | 0,60 | 4,52 | 1,60 | 1,74 |
| 1940 | 2,27 | 5,00 | 0,70 | 5,76 | 1,70 | 2,34 |
| 1941 | 3,38 | 7,10 | 1,62 | 7,31 | 1,63 | 3,23 |
| 1942 | 4,09 | 11,34 | 3,97 | 8,41 | 2,84 | 3,81 |
| 1943 | 4,76 | 11,86 | 9,02 | 9,48 | 3,70 | 3,82 |
| 1944 | 4,97 | 12,23 | 11,41 | 9,42 | 5,38 |
War economy
“War economy in the Second World War” was the transformation of the national economies into a centrally administered economy through the total mobilization of economic resources to secure the material supply of the army and the nutrition of the population in order to achieve the war goals in the Second World War at all costs. In the process, market mechanisms were undermined. While initially the respective military tactics were decisive, the quantitative superiority of the war production of the Allies significantly influenced the course of the war from 1942 onwards.
Nazi Germany and Japan pursued a blitzkrieg tactic for which a high utilization of the existing industrial facilities should be sufficient for the production of a wide range of modern weapon systems (broad armor) and were not prepared for a longer war. The goal of the Allies was to win The Second World War in the manner of a war of attrition. Since 1928, the Soviet Union had systematically brought about a highly standardized mass production of weapons (deep armament).
After the beginning of the war, Great Britain and the USA had also begun to prefer the war economy over the consumer goods industry in the allocation of scarce resources such as materials, personnel and means of production. Only after the obvious failure of the Blitzkrieg strategy did a reorganization of the war economy take place in the German Reich and Japan in 1942, which then led to similarly high production levels as those of the Allies (armament miracle). In 1944, war goods production in the USA comprised 40% of gross national income, in Great Britain and Japan 50% each, and in the German Reich just over 50%.
A common war strategy was also to cut off the opposing parties from importing raw materials and food. The German Reich developed a high degree of ingenuity in replacing scarce raw materials with “home fabrics”. Through the “metal donation of the German people”, non-ferrous metals important for the war such as copper, brass, tin, zinc, etc. were also procured.
The war economy in the Second World War led to a significant expansion of women’s work, especially among the Allies. In the German Reich, Japan and the Soviet Union, forced labor was widespread.
| Sector | GB | USSR | United States | German Empire | Japan | Italy |
| Tank | 28.500 | 110.000 | 91.270 | 61.250 | 7.200 | light Pz (**) |
| Airplanes | 133.000 | 162.000 | 329.000 | 126.000 | 90.000 | n.a. |
| Artillery | 36.400 | 541.900 | 219.000 | 101.200 | n.a. | n.a. |
| Warships | 1.340 | 260 | 8.950 | 1.540 | 625 | n.a. |
(*) excluding submarines
(**) mainly Fiat-Pz with 2 cm gun
| Type | GB | USSR | UNITED STATES | German Empire | Japan | Italy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dreadnoughts | 15 | 1 + 2 (in B.) | 17 + 15 (in B.) | 4 | 10 + 3 (in B.) | 4 + 4 (in B.) |
| Battleships | – | – | – | 3 | – | – |
| Aircraft carrier | 7 | – | 7 + 11 (in B.) | – | 8 + 8 (in B.) | – |
| Heavy cruisers | 15 | 6 + 4 (in B.) | 18 + 8 (in B.) | 3 | 18 + 18 (in B.) | 8 |
| Light cruisers | 41 | – | 19 + 32 (in B.) | 6 | 20 + 17 (in B.) | 14 |
| Flakkreuzer | 8 | – | 4 + 2 (in B.) | – | – | – |
| Minelayer Cruiser | 1 | – | – | – | – | – |
| Destroyer | 113 | 81 | 171 + 188 (in B.) | 22 | 108 + 108 (in B.) | 128 |
| Torpedo boats | – | 269 | – | 20 | – | 62 |
| Submarines | 65 | 213 | 114 + 79 (in B.) | 62 | 63 | 115 |
The Second World War in Europe
From the invasion of Poland to the defeat of France, September 1939 to June 1940
In the first phase of the war, Germany (coming from the west) and the Soviet Union (coming from the east) conquered and occupied Poland (from September 1 and 17, 1939 respectively), Germany conquered Denmark and Norway (April–June 1940) as well as the Netherlands, Belgium and France (May–June 1940). The rapid defeat of France came unexpectedly for most people, not least for Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, Hitler did not achieve his main goal of keeping Britain out of the war, forcing it to surrender, or defeating it militarily. This became clear at the latest in October 1940 during the Battle of Britain. Great Britain remained the only state that was consistently capable of acting opponent of Germany from the beginning of the war.
The German invasion of Poland, 1939
Hitler had set the attack for August 26 at 4:30 a.m. on August 23 but withdrew the order at short notice the day before after learning that Italy was not ready for war and that England and Poland had contractually fixed their mutual commitments.
Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to attack Poland at 4:45 a.m. the following day on August 31, 1939. This directive also contained tactical instructions for the conduct of the Wehrmacht in the west and north (Baltic Sea entrances Kattegat and Skagerrak) and prohibited attacks against “the English motherland” with insufficient partial forces.
This military attack on the neighboring country was not preceded by a formal declaration of war. In order to justify the invasion of Poland, the German side fabricated several incidents, such as the fake attack on the Gliwice transmitter by SS members disguised as Polish resistance fighters on August 31. They untruthfully announced in Polish via radio a declaration of war by Poland to the German Reich. The flimsy trick was triggered from Berlin with the password “Grandmother died”. Almost three million German soldiers had marched to invade Poland. They had around 400,000 horses and 200,000 vehicles at their disposal. 1.5 million men had advanced to the Polish border, many with blank cartridges to pretend that they were only moving into maneuvers. However, the ambiguity was over when they received orders to load live ammunition.
The military attack began by the German ship of the line Schleswig-Holstein on the Polish position “Westerplatte” near Danzig and the Luftwaffe with the air raid on Wieluń on September 1, 1939. The Polish army with about 1.01 million soldiers faced 1.5 million German soldiers. Technically and in the manner of warfare, it was inferior. After the invasion of eastern Poland by the Red Army on September 17, 1939, the balance of power was again dramatically shifted in favor of the aggressors.
The Polish government, on the other hand, expected the support of France and Great Britain, which had issued an ultimatum to the German Reich on September 2 on the basis of the “Guarantee Declaration of March 30, 1939”. It called for the immediate withdrawal of all German troops from Poland. The British-French guarantee declaration would have obliged these states to launch their own offensive in western Germany no later than 15 days after a German attack. Hitler assumed that the two Western powers would allow it to be granted as well as when invading the “rest of Czechoslovakia”, and had the Western Wall occupied only weakly.
There was no attack by the Western powers, but Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3 after the ultimatum expired. However, the Chamberlain war government lasted only seven months, during which Britain remained largely passive in the war of seats.
By means of concentrated attacks as part of a “blitzkrieg” strategy, the Wehrmacht succeeded in encircling large units of the Polish defenders and winning boiler battles such as Radom (9 September) and the Bzura (until September 19).
On the night of September 17, after the destruction of organized Polish defense by the Wehrmacht, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland began in accordance with the secret additional protocol of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The next day, the Polish government fled from Warsaw to Romania via southeastern Poland. On September 28, President Ignacy Mościcki resigned from office in exile in Romania. It was not until 18 December 1939 that the new Polish government in exile declared a state of war with the Soviet Union. Britain and France did not agree.
From September 20 until the surrender, Warsaw was the target of intense airstrikes that claimed the lives of 25,000 civilians and 6,000 soldiers. The bombardments were carried out at maximum strength because Hitler wanted to demonstrate, which could also affect French and British cities. On September 26, some 120,000 Polish soldiers surrendered in the capital Warsaw after being trapped by German troops on September 18. Modlin Fortress was handed over on September 29 after a 16-day siege. Poland’s last troops surrendered on October 6 after the Battle of Kock.
On October 8, in the Brest-Litovsk Agreement, the German Reich and the Soviet Union divided the conquered territory along a demarcation line, which went down in history as the “Fourth Partition of Poland.” Not only the territories ceded after the Treaty of Versailles were reintegrated into the empire, but also large areas of central Poland including the city of Łódź. The rest of Poland became the German General Government, which was “administered” from Krakow.
The subsequent occupation was marked by extreme reprisals by the occupiers against the civilian population. Deportations to forced labor were only the most visible manifestation, especially Jews became victims of the National Socialist policy of race and extermination. In the eastern part of Poland, numerous “class enemies” were deported to the Gulag by the Soviet occupiers; the military elite was “liquidated” at Katyn and elsewhere.
Designed for a quick victory – and successful – tactics in the attack on Poland promoted the use of the term “blitzkrieg” and shaped the further warfare of Germany until the end of 1941.
Trench Warfare on the Western Front, 1939
On September 3, France and Britain declared war on Germany. As a result, a limited and rather symbolic offensive of the French against the Saar region began on September 5. The Germans offered no resistance and retreated to the heavily fortified West Wall. After that, it remained quiet on the Western Front. This phase is also known as the “seat war”.With the exception of a few artillery skirmishes, no Allied attacks took place. On the German side, the propaganda machine rolled in. With leaflets and slogans over loudspeakers, the French were asked “Why are you waging war?” or proclaiming “We will not shoot first”.
On September 27, Hitler issued an instruction to the High Command of the Army to draw up a plan of attack, the so-called “Yellow Case”. By October 29, the planning had been completed. They provided for two army groups to advance through the Netherlands and Belgium in order to crush all Allied forces north of the Somme.
Ultimately, however, no attack took place in 1939, as due to bad weather conditions and much greater losses in Poland than expected (22% losses for fighter planes, 25% for tanks), the attack was postponed twenty-nine times in total. In addition, several high-ranking officers of the High Command of the Army, which was stationed in Zossen near Berlin, had urged the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch, to oppose a premature deployment of the army against France. On November 5, Hitler warned against underestimating the French.
In addition, German troops had proven to be poorly trained during the invasion of Poland. Hitler was beside himself and wanted to hear examples of this. Brauchitsch was not prepared for this. Hitler threw out the general with the remark that he knew “the spirit of Zossen” and was ready to “destroy him”.Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder feared that his coup d’état soundings would be exposed, and the actual opponents of the regime, essentially the group of younger officers in the OKH, abandoned their coup plans.
Finnish-Soviet Winter War, December 1939 – March 1940
Since the beginning of the 1930s, Finland had adapted to the level of development of the other Nordic democracies, with which it was denominationally related through its Protestant-Lutheran character. In the field of foreign policy, they moved closer together when, in the autumn of 1933, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands merged to form the so-called Oslo states, which committed themselves to a close customs union. In 1935, the Finnish government Toivo Kivimäki committed itself to closer cooperation with the three other Scandinavian states in order to ensure common neutrality.
On November 30, 1939, Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Kirill Merezkov crossed the Finnish border in the so-called Winter War. The Red Army attacked with 450,000 men, 2,000 tanks and 1,000 aircraft and expected a quick victory. Their officers assumed that the Finns would welcome them as their brothers and liberators from the capitalist oppressors. The Soviet leadership underestimated the fighting power of the Finns, who with only 200,000 soldiers, including many reservists and youths, few tanks and aircraft, were able to prevent the attackers of the Red Army from breaking through the Mannerheim Line after high Soviet losses.
Finnish soldiers used simple but effective incendiary devices to fight tanks, which they called the “Molotov cocktail” after the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. The numerical superiority of the Soviet troops did not have a particular effect, because the forest terrain and the deep snow hardly allowed operations of the Red Army off the few roads and often only one regiment could fight in front of paved roads. In addition to these adversities, temperatures of minus 35 °C were added.
The Finnish army was supported by 12,000 volunteers from Sweden, although Swedish military officials had advised against it. Only after extensive regroupings and reinforcements was the Red Army able to achieve major breakthroughs on the Karelian Isthmus west of Lake Ladoga at the beginning of February 1940.
Sweden supported Finland indirectly without giving up its neutrality. Great Britain and France did not intervene in the war in favor of the Finns, as both states did not want another opponent of the war. Although the German Reich sympathized with Finland, military support did not take place because of the existing non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union.
The peace treaty, signed on March 12, 1940, stipulated that Finland had to cede large parts of western Karelia and the northern half of Lake Ladoga to the Soviet Union. As a direct reaction to the Soviet attack, Finland took part in the German War against the Soviet Union in 1941 in the Continuation War in order to reconquer the lost territories.
A major consequence of the Winter War was also that Stalin began a reorganization of the Red Army, in the course of which officers who had been exiled to Siberia in the course of the Great Terror were rehabilitated. This reorganization contributed significantly to the fact that the Red Army had more combat power in 1941 than the High Command of the German Army had assumed. At the end of the Winter War, the Finnish army had at least 25,000 dead and missing, the Red Army a multiple of this number. After the end of the Continuation War, Finland also had to cede the area of Petsamo on the Barents Sea to the Soviet Union in 1944 (1947). Finland thus lost its only year-round ice-free port.
Occupation of Denmark and Norway, April 1940
At the end of 1939, after the failure of iron ore imports from France (Lorraine Minette), ore deliveries from neutral Sweden covered 49 percent of German demand. They were transported from the Swedish mining areas near Kiruna by ore railway to the year-round ice-free loading port of Narvik in Norway. Norway, therefore, had an extraordinary economic and military significance for the German Reich. Another important raw material was Finnish nickel.
The British wanted to disrupt these important supplies of raw materials and prevent them as early as possible (→Altmark Incident), which is why on February 5, 1940, the landing of four divisions in Narvik had been agreed in the highest Franco-British War Council. On February 21, Hitler issued an instruction for the planning of companies in Scandinavia. On March 1, the company Weserübung was decided. It envisaged taking Denmark and using it as a “springboard” for the conquest of Norway. In March, the first attacks on British warships took place.
On April 5, the Allied Operation Wilfred began, in which the waters off Norway were to be mined and more troops were to be brought into the country. One day later, the German company Weserübung started. Almost the entire Kriegsmarine was mobilized and half of the entire German destroyer flotilla was sent to Narvik. On April 9, a mountain infantry division landed in Narvik.
The British military leadership considered a landing of the Germans to be quite unlikely, which led to only minor countermeasures being taken by the Allies. The Germans were able to extend their bridgehead without much resistance, so that on April 10, Stavanger, Trondheim and Narvik were already occupied, after Denmark had already been occupied without a fight. Britain occupied the Danish Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic on April 12, for strategic reasons.
In the attempt to occupy the capital Oslo, heavy units of the Kriegsmarine were used, which were not very suitable in the narrow waters of the Oslofjord. The German flagship, the heavy cruiser Blücher, whose first combat mission was their last, was sunk by Norwegian coastal batteries. Oslo was taken by airborne troops, later than planned by the Germans.
On April 13, nine destroyers and the battleship HMS Warspite sank the remaining eight German destroyers still in the Ofotfjord off Narvik in a second British attack. Two Navy light cruisers and numerous freighters were also sunk by British submarines and Royal Air Force aircraft.
On April 17, the Allies finally landed at Narvik and put the troops of the Wehrmacht under strong pressure with simultaneous massive shelling by ships of the Royal Navy. By April 19, large Allied units, including Polish soldiers and parts of the Foreign Legion, had landed in Norway. They conquered Narvik and pushed the mountain troops of the Wehrmacht back into the mountains.
Meanwhile, the weather in Norway improved, so that the Wehrmacht could consolidate its fronts and in attacks of German aircraft on May 3 off Namsos a British and a French destroyer could be sunk.
In the same month, Churchill decided to withdraw the Allies from Norway because of Germany’s successes in France. Before the 24,500 soldiers could be evacuated, however, they managed to invade Narvik and destroy the important port. On June 10, the remaining soldiers of the Norwegian armed forces finally surrendered, after which operation Weserübung was completed.
Norway under German occupation became a Reichskommissariat and part of the German territory, but was to remain as an independent state according to Hitler’s will. Later on, Norway was heavily fortified because Hitler feared an invasion. In February 1942, a puppet government was established under Vidkun Quisling.
Western Campaign, May/June 1940
On May 10, 1940, the attack of German units (“Fall Gelb”) began with a total of seven armies on the neutral states of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. 136 German divisions faced around 137 Allies.
The Netherlands was the first to stop its resistance. On May 13, Queen Wilhelmina and the government went into exile in London. After the rapid advance of Army Group A through the Grand Duchy and the bombing of Rotterdam, in which 814 inhabitants of the city were killed, the Dutch forces surrendered on May 15, 1940. Three days later, the former leader of the Austrian National Socialists, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, took over the office of Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands. The Dutch islands of Aruba and Curaçao (South America) were of great strategic importance during the World War because of their world’s largest oil refineries, which is why they were shelled by German and Italian submarines in 1942.
The Belgian army resisted for a little longer. By May 16, the fortresses of Liège, Namur and the Dyle were taken, on May 17 Brussels and the following day Antwerp. As a result, the German attackers succeeded in cutting off the Belgian troops north of this line from the British and French units, which had meanwhile advanced into Belgium. The Belgian government fled via France to Great Britain. On May 28, King Leopold III, who remained in the country, signed the surrender against the will of the cabinet. District President Eggert Reeder became head of the German military administration.
In order to bypass the northern section of the Maginot Line, neutral Luxembourg was used by the Wehrmacht as a transit area. After that, the Grand Duchy became a so-called “CdZ area”, which was subordinate to a head of the civil administration.
In France, the government and military had relied on the heavily fortified Maginot Line along the German-French border from Basel to Luxembourg. Because the Belgian Ardennes were considered difficult for tanks to pass, they were considered by the Allies to be a natural extension of the Maginot Line. Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein’s campaign plan, on the other hand, provided for an advance through the Ardennes with six tank and five motorized divisions to encompass the French and British troops at Boulogne and Calais from the south. Army Groups B and C should act more defensively. This plan was met by strong Allied forces, including the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force, advancing far north to come to the aid of the beleaguered Belgians and Dutch, leaving room for German Army Group A troops behind them.
On May 19, German units reached the Channel coast, about 100 km south of Calais. The advance further north on the Channel coast was so rapid that the British and French units were encircled at Calais and Dunkirk. This rapid and unexpected advance was later referred to by Churchill as the “sickle cut”.Hitler, in agreement with von Rundstedt and in contradiction to the opinion of other generals, decided to spare the battered tank force, to stop its advance and to leave the enclosure of Dunkirk to the Luftwaffe and the artillery regiments.
This gave the British three days to prepare for Operation Dynamo, which began on May 27. About 1200 ships and (also private) boats were able to evacuate a total of 338,000 soldiers, including 145,000 soldiers of the French army. About 80,000 soldiers, mainly French, remained behind. The British had lost 68,000 men in the fighting. Almost all remaining tanks and vehicles, most of the artillery and the existing supplies had to be destroyed.
From a military point of view, Hitler’s stop order, which enabled the evacuation of almost the entire British Expeditionary Corps, represented a serious tactical and, above all, momentous mistake in retrospect. The ability to continue the war would have become much more difficult for Britain after the loss of the Expeditionary Corps, as they were experienced professional soldiers. Thus, the Allies lost only the war material left on the beach, which could be replaced more easily. But Churchill’s rousing speeches in May and June 1940 also revived the courage of the British and strengthened the sense of the importance of war for the survival of freedom and democracy.
When the British withdrew, France prepared for defense. The “Fall Rot”, the actual battle for France, began on June 5 with a German offensive on the Aisne and the Somme. On June 9, German soldiers crossed the Seine. On June 10, Italy entered the war on the side of Germany and on June 21 began an offensive in the Western Alps, although the Pétain government had asked Italy for an armistice on June 20. On June 14, parts of the 18th Army occupied the French capital Paris. To prevent its destruction, it had been declared an open city and evacuated without a fight by the French troops. On the same day, German troops broke through the Maginot Line south of Saarbrücken, and the emblematic fortress of Verdun was also captured.
After German troops reached Orléans and Nevers on the Loire (260 km south of Paris) and Dijon on June 17, an armistice request from Philippe Pétain, the prime minister of the newly formed French government, arrived at Hitler’s headquarters. The Führer was then praised by Keitel as “the greatest general of all time”.Hitler met with Mussolini in Munich on June 18 to agree on the terms of the armistice. Hitler rejected the Far-reaching demands of the Duce, including Nice, Corsica and Savoy, as well as the use of ports and railways in Africa for military purposes. He was keen to prevent the continuation of the war by the French fleet and in the colonies.
Nevertheless, on June 21, Italy launched an offensive in the Alps that yielded only minor gains in terrain, including Mentone. The armistice conditions were presented to the French General Charles Huntziger on June 21, 1940 in the car of Compiègne von Keitel. On June 22, after rejecting almost all of its counter-ideas, the French delegation signed the ceasefire treaty. It entered into force on June 25 at 01:35 a.m., after the Italian-French armistice had also been signed the day before. France was only allowed to maintain 100,000 soldiers with light weapons; Artillery and tanks were not allowed. On July 1, 1940, the Wehrmacht demonstrated its victory over France with a grand parade on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.
The so-called “blitzkrieg” in the West had lasted only six weeks and three days, in which about 100,000 French, 35,000 British and about 46,000 German soldiers lost their lives. French fighter pilots shot down several hundred German fighter planes, and nearly 1,000 German fighter pilots were taken prisoner. France was divided into two zones: the north and west of France were occupied by German; Here were important airfields and naval bases (including Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, La Rochelle and Bordeaux) for the war against Great Britain.
The Wehrmacht attack prevented the execution of Operation Pike, which was in preparation, with which England and France wanted to destroy the oil wells of the Soviet Union in order to bring about a “complete collapse” of the Soviet Union.
Follow
Politically and strategically, after the victory in the West, the German Reich found itself in a situation that opened up fundamentally new options for the continuation of the war: for the war against Great Britain in the West, it had shifted the balances in the Mediterranean, and it could draw on the economic resources of Western Europe, Central Europe and East Central Europe and thus endure the war for a long time, among others, industrial goods from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, iron ores from Sweden (Kiruna iron ore mine) shipped to Germany via the Norwegian port of Narvik, agricultural products from Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Greece, industrial goods from Belgium and France, tungsten from Portugal and crude oil from Romania. Neutral Switzerland could be used for international monetary and foreign exchange transactions.
Three battleships of the French fleet, anchored in Mers-el-Kébir, were sunk or severely damaged by ships of the Royal Navy on July 3, 1940, after a British ultimatum, which remained unanswered, on Churchill’s orders, so that they could not fall into German hands (Operation Catapult). French sailors died in 1297. The eastern and southern parts of France remained under French control. Marshal Philippe Pétain ruled from Vichy the so-called “État français” as a puppet state of the German Reich.
In November 1942, the previously unoccupied zone was occupied by German and Italian troops after Anglo-American troops landed in North Africa (Operation Torch). The 50,000 soldiers of the Vichy government did not resist Germans and Italians. The rest of the demobilized French Navy was sunk by the crews in the military port of Toulon.
From the capitulation of France to the attack on the Soviet Union, June 1940 to June 1941
Despite France’s capitulation, the war continued as Britain did not accept Hitler’s so-called peace offer of July 19, 1940. Although the outcome of the war with Great Britain was still completely open, Hitler announced to the generals on July 31 his fundamental intention to prepare an attack on the Soviet Union for 1941. Shortly thereafter, on September 17, he postponed the company Seelöwe indefinitely.
Hitler strove to consolidate his rule over the “New Europe” and to secure it through further alliances with Spain, France, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Franco and Pétain opposed a formal alliance with Germany.
France libre
Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), previously Secretary of State for the Military, became the organizer of the resistance as “leader of free France” from exile in London. Mocked by the propaganda of the Vichy regime as Le Général micro and Fourrier (food sergeant) of the Jews, he called on his compatriots to resist. As early as 18 June 1940, he had addressed all the French in a radio speech: “France has lost a battle. But France did not lose the war!”He predicted that the industrial potential of the United States would turn the tide in this war. In doing so, he rejected the opinion of defeatists that Britain would be defeated within three weeks.
Battle of Britain, 1940/1941
National Socialist propaganda described the preparation of an invasion of Great Britain by eliminating the Royal Air Force as the “Battle of Britain”. Hitler did not believe in success and preferred a peace agreement with Great Britain, but only if it would give back the former German colonies and renounce influence in Europe.
In the two years between the Munich Agreement and the “Battle of Britain”, the British had improved their air defenses. Chain Home radar stations have been installed on the south and east coasts of the British Isles. British industry was able to produce more than 1400 fighter aircraft in the three months before the start of the Second World War. The Royal Air Force (RAF) successfully recruited pilots from the Commonwealth, France, the USA, Poland and Czechoslovakia, because for every one RAF pilot there were six Germans.
The situation was similar for the aircraft: In the Western campaign, about four German fighters and bombers came to a British fighter plane. For this reason, Dowding also used foreign volunteers as fighter pilots, first from the Commonwealth states of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but then also from Poland, the Czech Republic and France. A fifth of the nearly 3,000 “Spitfire” or “Hurricane” pilots deployed in the Battle of Britain did not come from Great Britain.
On July 2, Goering began the air battle with a limited offensive against shipping in the English Channel. Hugh Dowding, commander of British air defense, did not accept the challenge. The next phase began in mid-August. The RAF was to be smashed by destroying its aircraft in the air, while the fight against shipping continued. In August and September, British fighters shot down 341 German aircraft and lost 108 themselves.
The RAF had the advantage that the pilots of the downed aircraft were not lost to them every time, as long as they could save themselves with the parachute. In the next phase, the Luftwaffe concentrated its attacks on London. Hitler spoke of retaliation and complete annihilation after 60 RAF bombers had flown an attack on Berlin on the night of August 26 on Churchill’s orders, which had caused little damage. On September 7, the Luftwaffe attacked the London docks with 300 bombers and 600 fighters, but again lost more aircraft than the British fighter squadrons.
On September 15, the German attacks, dubbed “The Blitz” by the British, reached their peak with two daytime attacks. The German bombers were decimated and the fighters were turned away. The decision to attack London is considered a major strategic mistake with far-reaching consequences, as further attacks on London by the end of the year with an average of 160 bombers had little effect, militarily speaking, but were extremely costly for the Luftwaffe. On September 17, 1940, Hitler postponed “Operation Sea Lion” indefinitely.
The Air Force continued its night attacks in the winter and spring, not to prepare for the invasion, but to hit the industry and demoralize the population. In the Luftwaffe attack on Coventry on the evening of November 14, 1940, factories such as Armstrong Siddeley’s aircraft engine plant were the target, but the incendiary and explosive bombs also hit three-quarters of the residential areas and killed 568 residents. The term “coventrieren”, a coinage of the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, then found its way into German military jargon.
In total, about 43,000 civilians lost their lives in air raids on London, Coventry and other British cities in 1940/41. In London alone, 14,000 people were killed in 57-night raids between September 9, 1940 and New Year’s Day 1941. By October 1940, the Luftwaffe had lost 1733 fighter jets, the RAF 915.
“The air battle ended in a military stalemate, but was a political and strategic defeat of the first order for Hitler, who for the first time had failed to impose his will on a country.”Decisive for the failure of the Luftwaffe were the miscalculation of the effectiveness of the British radar systems and the guidance system as well as the lack of range of the German fighter aircraft. The British aircraft factories also produced more aircraft than the German ones.
With the end of the air battle, “the invasion had also collapsed.”On December 18, 1940, Hitler issued his formal instruction for Operation Barbarossa to “crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign even before the end of the war against England.”Hitler’s decision was also marked by “winning the final victory in the war by beating London via Moscow.”From May 1941, German air raids on Great Britain decreased significantly because bombers and fighter planes were needed for the imminent attack on the Soviet Union.
A total of 61,000 Britons lost their lives in German air raids, 8,800 of them in attacks with the “retaliatory weapons” V1 and V2.
Hitler’s Alliance Policy
After the war opponent Great Britain could not be defeated, Hitler looked for a way out. In his imagination, there were two possibilities: an attack on British positions in the Mediterranean or an attack on the Soviet Union, whose exploitation as a “living space in the East” had long been an integral part of his ideology.
First, he turned to the Mediterranean option. In June 1940, Spain’s dictator Franco was still prepared to enter the war on the German side. He called for Gibraltar, French Morocco, Oran and enlargement of the colonies of Spanish Sahara and Spanish Guinea, as well as previous large-scale supplies of weapons, raw materials and food. Hitler did not consider Spain’s support necessary at the time and gave evasive answers. When he met with Franco in Hendaye on October 23, Hitler showed a much greater interest in Spain’s entry into the war, which he proposed for January 1941. Spanish and German troops could conquer Gibraltar and thus seal off the Mediterranean to the west.
Foreign Minister Ribbentrop even went a step further in his mind and ventilated the idea of an anti-British continental bloc from Spain to Japan. However, Franco and Súñer, his son-in-law and later foreign minister, were no longer convinced of Britain’s imminent defeat. They did not allow themselves to be tempted to take ill-considered steps and deliberately repeated exaggerated demands for the supply of weapons. Hitler, on the other hand, had to take Vichy France into account with regard to Spanish colonial wishes in North Africa. Franco therefore only agreed to sign a protocol in which Spain declared its willingness to become a member of the Tripartite Pact and enter the war – with the proviso that the date should still be agreed jointly. Thus, the agreement was practically worthless for Hitler. In the internal circle he later “raged” about the “Jesuit pig” and the “false pride of the Spaniard”.
As in Hendaye with regard to Spain, two meetings with Pétain and Laval on October 22 and 24, 1940 in Montoire-sur-le-Loir left open whether there would be concrete cooperation with France. Hitler wanted, if not a declaration of war on England, then at least the defense of the French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East against attacks by the FFL and the British, as well as the surrender of bases on the African Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts for the naval war against Great Britain.
Marshal Pétain agreed in principle to cooperate with Germany, but indirectly rejected France’s entry into the war by pointing out that a declaration of war could only be pronounced by parliamentary resolution. Such a decision is questionable. The outcome of the meeting was therefore meaningless for the war against Britain. Nevertheless, a few days later, Pétain indicated in a radio speech that he would embark on the path of collaboration with Germany.
Italy had become Germany’s war ally in June 1940, shortly before the French capitulation. The Japanese ambassador Saburō Kurusu and the foreign ministers Galeazzo Ciano (Italy) and Joachim von Ribbentrop (Germany) signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin on September 27, 1940, which provided for mutual assistance for gaining hegemony over Europe and East Asia respectively. The provisions were not directed against the Soviet Union; rather, the US should be prevented from entering the war. Although the pact was a great propagandistic success, it remained without immediate effect for the formation of an active front against Britain.
In Eastern Europe, Hitler gained Romania as an ally, which was extremely valuable to him because of its strategic location and the oil fields at Ploiești. True, he had the Soviet Union demand Bessarabia, which had been lost after the First World War, as provided for in the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But in the summer of 1940, Hitler guaranteed Romania’s existence, which in turn withdrew from the League of Nations.
Italian Parallel War in the Mediterranean and East Africa, 1940/1941
Mussolini hoped that after the German Axis partner, Italy could also achieve military successes, although King Victor Emmanuel III had still made the realistic assessment in 1939 that the army was in a miserable state and that the officers were no good. After Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940, Mussolini had British positions in the Mediterranean and North and East Africa attacked. After minor Italian initial successes in Egypt and East Africa, the initiative was lost in the late summer and autumn of 1940. The counter-offensives of British and Commonwealth troops (Operation Compass) led to Italian defeats in Egypt, the eastern part of Libya (Cyrenaica) and East Africa in early 1941.
130,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner by the British. In February 1941, Hitler responded by sending the German Africa Corps (Operation Sonnenblume) to at least prevent Italy from losing the colony of Libya. In East Africa, Italy lost 30,000 soldiers (24,000 prisoners of war and 6,000 fallen) and its colonies there by the end of November 1941.
Mussolini’s great power ambitions had been directed towards the Balkans since the 1930s. On October 28, 1940, Italian units attacked Greece (Greek-Italian War). Mussolini believed in a quick victory; instead, the war turned into a fiasco. The Greek troops were well organized and familiar with the difficult terrain of the Pindos Mountains. “Within fourteen days, the expected triumph had turned into a humiliation for Mussolini’s regime” when the attackers were pushed back beyond Albania’s borders.
More significantly, the Axis position in North Africa was seriously weakened because, in the face of the looming debacle, much-needed Italian troops were moved from there to Greece. North Africa was of the utmost importance: if the weak British troops had been driven out of Egypt and the Suez Canal, the world war would have taken a different course.
Balkan Campaign, 1941
At the beginning of 1941, the German Reich tried to mediate in the Balkan conflict. Thus, Hitler proposed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to join the Tripartite Pact, but this was rejected. Greece also refrained from any attempt at mediation, as its army was able to force the Italian soldiers at the front to retreat. A major Italian offensive on March 9 turned into a disaster. On March 27, Yugoslavia finally acceded to the Tripartite Pact. The result was anti-German demonstrations and a coup d’état by the Serbian officer corps against the government of Prince Regent Paul, after which the accession was reversed.
This unexpected turn led to Hitler’s decision to attack Yugoslavia. He justified the attack as retaliation against a Serbian “criminal clique” in Belgrade. On April 6, units of the Wehrmacht crossed the border into Yugoslavia, and the Air Force began to reduce Belgrade to rubble (→ enterprise criminal court), although the capital had been declared an “open city”.The further advance took place as in a planned maneuver. On April 10, Zagreb was occupied, where on the same day the Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed. Belgrade was occupied by German troops on April 13. On April 17, the Yugoslav commanders signed the surrender of the Yugoslav army.
Also on April 6, the German campaign against Greece began. Unlike in Yugoslavia, the Greek resistance was extremely tough in places. Especially in the mountain areas and in the area of the heavily defended Metaxas Line, German soldiers made progress only slowly and with high losses. On April 9, Thessaloniki fell. At the same time, the Greek army in eastern Macedonia was cut off and the Metaxas line was more severely besieged. The Greek reinforcements from the Albanian front were stopped by German and Italian tank units and air raids as they advanced through the mountainous landscape. On April 21, 223,000 Greek soldiers had to surrender.
Meanwhile, the British units stationed in Greece set up a defense on Thermopylae. This was overrun on April 24, after which the Allies had to initiate an amphibious evacuation operation in which 50,000 soldiers were shipped to Crete and Egypt. On April 27, the Wehrmacht entered Athens.
On April 25, Hitler ordered Crete to be conquered with airborne troops, paratrooper units and the 5th Mountain Division in mid-May 1941. On May 20, 1941, German parachutists landed on Crete. They had high losses. The landed units were initially unable to capture airfields for supplies and reinforcements. Only through increased use of the Luftwaffe and after successful landings on contested airfields did the situation for the attackers stabilize. The Allies, including New Zealanders and Australians, defended Crete for a week until they had to leave for Egypt with about 17,000 men. Due to the high German losses, Hitler decided not to carry out any more airborne landings in the future. The attempt to conquer the strategically important island of Malta was therefore omitted.
From the Emergence of the Eastern Front to the Western Front, June 1941 to June 1944
Hitler discussed the intention to invade the Soviet Union on July 31, 1940 – parallel to the invasion plans against Great Britain – in a circle of the highest generals. At that time, Hitler still hoped that sooner or later Britain would give up and that on the basis of an “understanding with England” he could throw all his strength to the East to tackle his great goal of conquering “living space in the East”.If Russia is defeated, then England’s last hope is extinguished. On December 18, 1940, the order was given to attack the Soviet Union in May 1941.
The background to this decision was also the realization of the impossibility of landing on the British Isles, as long as the air force and navy were too weak to do so. Although not the sole motive, it was the desire to force London to withdraw from the war via Moscow. An attack on the Soviet Union was seen by Hitler as not very risky because he completely underestimated the political stability of the Soviet Union and its military potential.
On June 4, 1942, in Finland, in a confidential conversation recorded without Hitler’s knowledge, he openly admitted this underestimation to Mannerheim. Hitler was not alone in his miscalculation of Soviet military potential; almost all of his commanders shared them as well. On March 30, 1941, he announced to more than 200 senior officers in the Reich Chancellery that the impending war was a racial-ideological war of annihilation and should be waged without regard to international war norms. The commanders would have to overcome any personal remorse. In the East, “hardship is mild for the future.”None of those present took the opportunity to discuss Hitler’s demands again afterward.
With the attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, a new front was formed in eastern Germany on June 22, 1941. It became (along with the Japanese-Chinese) the longest-running front in World War II, claiming the most victims. The German troops conquered vast areas of the European part of the Soviet Union; Together with immediately advancing units of the SS and Einsatzgruppen, they had the task of ruthlessly exploiting the areas, killing some of their inhabitants and forcing the others into forced labor. Many tens of thousands of Jews were systematically killed.
Half a year later, the United States, which had already indirectly supported Britain, became Germany’s official opponent of war through Hitler’s declaration of war. America needed time to convert its economy to war. A confrontation of the Wehrmacht with Anglo-American land forces took place for the first time in November 1942 in North Africa (Operation Torch).
War against the Soviet Union, June 1941 to October 1942
The Balkan campaign had postponed the time of attack for an attack on the Soviet Union by four weeks. The attack did not take place until June 22, 1941. Although calculations on the German side showed that supplying the Wehrmacht was only possible up to a line along Pskov, Kiev and the Crimea, Hitler demanded the conquest of Moscow as part of a single, uninterrupted campaign. This showed his dangerous underestimation of the Soviet Union, which had already been expressed after the capitulation of France in June 1940 (see above).
Three army groups (North, Central, South) were ready for the attack. Army Group North (von Leeb) was to conquer the Baltic states and then advance into Leningrad. On the army group center (von Bock) lay the main load. She was to advance to Moscow and was accordingly strongly equipped. Army Group South (von Rundstedt) was to conquer Ukraine. Attacks against the Soviet Union were also carried out from occupied Norway. They targeted Murmansk, the port and the local railway line, the “Murman Railway”. The campaign also involved 600,000 soldiers from allied, neutral and occupied states. Later, 30,000 volunteers from neutral and occupied territories (including Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Caucasus) were added, mostly representatives of right-wing extremist or fascist currents in their home countries.
In the early morning of June 22, 1941, between 3:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m., the attack against the Soviet Union began. Although he had received several serious references, including from Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack and Richard Sorge, Stalin remained convinced that Hitler would not attack the Soviet Union before defeating Britain. The attack was led by 153 German divisions, including 19 tank and 12 motorized divisions, on a front length of 1600 km between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians. Two divisions operated from Finland.
Army Group Northern occupied the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and reached Novgorod in early September. Army Group Central reached Smolensk at the same time, which is on the direct route to Moscow. Army Group South had the task of conquering Ukraine and at the same time stood just before Zaporozhye in southeastern Ukraine.
The military commanders of the Red Army were not prepared for this largest military offensive in world history with just over three million army soldiers. Within a week, soldiers from the allied states of Romania, Italy, Slovakia and Hungary as well as Finland were added, which had no alliance with Germany and emphasized that there was a “continuation war” against the Soviet Union to reconquer the territories ceded in 1940. The Red Army had stationed nearly three million soldiers on the western border, who were far superior to the attackers with tanks, artillery and aircraft, but were not ready to fight.
Many of the Soviet soldiers on the border surrendered without resistance, while the motorized German troops were initially able to advance rapidly. The ability of the Soviet armed forces at that time to lead an attack or a war against Germany must also be strongly doubted according to recent findings. The first Wehrmacht report on the morning of June 22, 1941, on the other hand, gave the impression that Soviet troops had invaded East Prussia. He thus supported the pre-emptive war legend of Nazi propaganda, which presented the attack as a defensive war. In fact, the invasion of the Soviet Union was essentially an ideologically burnt war of conquest and annihilation with the goal formulated by Hitler years earlier of gaining “living space in the East.” This meant “a blockade-proof large empire” up to the Urals and beyond the Caucasus.
At noon on June 22, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov read out a speech on the radio announcing the outbreak of the war. It was not until eleven days later, on July 3, that Joseph Stalin addressed the people with a radio address. Before that, Minsk had been enclosed and occupied a little later. Hitler insisted for a long time on the okh on the priority of conquering Ukraine instead of Moscow.
The main goal of the Nazi leadership was to secure the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the grain in Ukraine. Hitler was convinced that this would make them invincible. Despite victorious cauldron battles, plan Barbarossa failed as early as August 1941 and triggered the so-called “August crisis” because large parts of the enemy escaped from these battles and regrouped, the surprise effect of the raid subsided, German losses increased and Hitler’s “zigzag of orders” to focus on Army Group Central or Army Group South piled up.
Only after the capture of Kiev and Kharkov was the advance on Moscow resumed on October 2. But already in October, it began to rain, in November frost set in with minus 22 degrees Celsius. As a result, the German offensive slowed down, getting stuck more and more often in mud or snow, and the attack on Moscow came to a standstill on December 5 due to Arctic temperatures of up to minus 50 °C and the stiffening Soviet resistance. The following day, a Soviet counter-offensive with units from the Far East well equipped for the Winter War under the command of Zhukov began, preventing a conquest of the capital Moscow by German troops.
The flight of the army group could be stopped by an unconditional stop order from Hitler, but his goal of “defeating the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign” had failed, “Barbarossa” had failed. The lost battle for Moscow was the geopolitical turning point of the Second World War, “the real turning point” because the series of German lightning victories broke off. The Wehrmacht lost about a third of its soldiers by the end of January 1942. Only half of one million fallen, missing or wounded could be replaced. The Red Army had even greater losses, with around 3.3 million prisoners, an unspecified number of dead and 2.2 million wounded and sick up to this point.
In the Continuation War, Finland tried, with German support, to reconquer the territories in Karelia lost to the Soviet Union in the Winter War. After achieving this goal in the summer of 1941, however, Finland did not remain defensive, but occupied disputed Karelian territories that had never been Finnish before until December 1941.
In response to the German attack, British and Soviet troops invaded Iran on August 25, 1941, as part of the Anglo-Soviet invasion. The aim of the attack was on the one hand to secure the oil production of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and on the other hand to take over the Trans-Iranian Railway in order to be able to supply the Soviet troops with British and US supplies on the way via Iran.
The Red Army had reorganized itself. The large arms production companies were moved to the Urals, out of reach of the German Air Force. On December 16, Hitler gave the order to stop. By the end of the year, however, the Wehrmacht was pushed back further. At the end of 1941, the interim economic balance was also sober: the loss of the Donbas had not led to the collapse of the Soviet economy, as Hitler had expected.
The “Reich Commissariat of Ukraine,” wrote an official working in the civilian profession as a professor of economics to the chief of Wehrmacht armaments, “proved to be a complete failure.” Young, poorly trained, “incompetent” officials who walked around with riding whips would practice brutal “mastery.” It is to be feared that “the overall mood of the Ukrainian people will turn against us.” The elimination of Jews in trade and crafts had destroyed the “backbone of the economy”. By letting the Russian prisoners of war starve to death, “overexploitation” of “available human labor” is being driven.
Hitler’s “Instruction No. 41” of April 5, 1942 (“Blue Case”) stipulated for the summer offensive that first Stalingrad on the Volga, then the Caucasus region up to the Turkish and Iranian borders should be conquered in order to get hold of the oil centers there. First, the Red Army counterattacked in the southern section of the front. In the Battle of Kharkov in May 1942, the attacking Soviet units were completely enclosed. Once again, nearly 250,000 Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. From May to July, Sevastopol and the Kerch peninsula in Crimea were conquered, which were to serve as a springboard for an offensive to the Caucasus. 150,000 Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner. Because Tobruk fell in North Africa in June 1942 (→ Company Theseus), Nazi propaganda after the crisis in winter again raised great hopes for an early overall victory.
At the end of June 1942, the summer offensive began in the south of the Eastern Front between Kursk and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, the importance of which Hitler had once again emphasized on June 1, 1942, at a meeting of commander-in-chief in Poltava of Army Group South: “If I do not get the oil from Maikop and Grozny, then I must liquidate this war.”Stalin foresaw similar consequences for the Soviet Union if “our most important waterway and soon our oil are lost.”On July 3, German forces crossed the Don at Voronezh.
Twenty days later, Rostov on the lower Don was conquered, but the number of prisoners remained low, as the Red Army – in contrast to 1941 – initiated a strategic retreat behind the Don, the Volga at Stalingrad and the Western and Central Caucasus. On the same day, July 23, “Instruction No. 41” (see above) modified in such a way that instead of the planned successive advances, two simultaneous advances into the Caucasus region and against Stalingrad were now planned. In contrast to the April directive, in which Halder’s handwriting was recognizable, this instruction went directly back to a decision of Hitler.
The General Staff had wanted to prevent them. “From then on, defeat was predictable.”Hitler also refused to take note of realistic estimates of Soviet tank production, which had actually reached more than four times that of Germany.
Army Group South was divided into Army Group A (→ Caucasus) and Army Group B (→ Stalingrad). The weaker Army Group B was given the task of conquering Stalingrad and then advancing down the Volga to Astrakhan, 75 km north of the Caspian Sea, in order to block the continuation of the so-called Persian Corridor. Army Group A was to occupy the east coast of the Black Sea, take possession of the Maikop and Grozny oil wells in the western Caucasus and finally, far south on the Caspian Sea, conquer Baku and its oil wells. This strategy can “only be described as outright madness”. In fact, it only reached the Western Caucasus and conquered Maikop to the north of it, whose oil facilities had been systematically destroyed.
The nearest and most important oil region of Grozny, the possession of which Hitler considered essential for the continuation of the war, was not reached. Thus, it became clear as early as mid-August that the operational goal of Army Group A would not be achieved; the attack on the pass heights of the Caucasus had to be stopped at the end of August 1942.
Army Group B was also unable to achieve its strategic goal, although Hitler had spoken of success on November 8, 1942, in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller: “I wanted to come to the Volga, at a certain point, in a certain city. […] It cuts off 30 million tonnes of traffic. […] There is no longer a ship coming up the Volga. That’s the crucial thing. “Although it conquered almost all of Stalingrad, it was surrounded by Soviet troops at the end of November 1942 and had to surrender on January 31, 1943.
When Hitler spoke with Goebbels in private at the Führer’s headquarters werewolf near Vinnitsa (Ukraine) on August 19, he had been overly optimistic: after the oil wells of Maikop, Grozny and Baku, Asia Minor would be conquered and then Iran, Iraq and Palestine in order to cut off the British from their oil supply. In the imminent attack on Stalingrad, he expects the conquest of the city within eight days. At the same time, disappointment grew in the Soviet Union over the failure of the Allies to open a “second front” in Western Europe.
Nevertheless, the aid deliveries made by the Americans on the basis of the Loan and Lease Act contributed significantly to the Fact that the Red Army was able to sustain the warfare. In addition to the military supplies supplied, food was important. For the Soviet soldiers, the cans with solid, pink pressed meat were called “Second Front”. More than half of the goods delivered to the USSR were food, measured by weight: “They were enough to provide every Soviet soldier with an estimated half a pound of food concentrate daily throughout the war.”
The previous losses (more than 1 million soldiers since the beginning of the Russian campaign), gigantic overstretching of the front, insufficient supplies and massive Soviet resistance brought the advance of Army Groups A and B to a standstill at the beginning of September 1942. As a result, there was a leadership crisis in the German High Command, in the course of which the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group A, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, and the Chief of Staff of the Army, Colonel General Halder, were dismissed by Hitler. Hitler himself (until 22 November 1942) took over the supreme command of the Army Group, Halder’s successor was General Kurt Zeitzler.
On October 4, 1942, the representatives of the Soviet High Command, Georgi Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky, discussed with the commanders of the fronts around Stalingrad (sovy. In November 1942, Operation Uranus interrupted the connection between Stalingrad and the German front west of the Volga. Operation Kolzo (Russian: Ring) completed the Soviet encirclement of Stalingrad.
Guerrilla Warfare
With the invasion of German troops, a transformation was initiated in occupied states of Europe in accordance with the National Socialist occupation- political, racial-ideological and population policy ideas, which the occupiers tried to enforce by means of repression. It mainly concerned the political and military-political resistance and the Jewish minority, which became the object of persecution and annihilation throughout the German sphere of influence.
With the General Plan East (see above), Heinrich Himmler, the Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Ethnicity, developed a comprehensive population and settlement policy concept for the colonialist “Germanization” of the occupied and yet-to-be-conquered Eastern territories. Especially the populations of Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia should be “quite held down”.
From the ruthless plundering of these areas, millions were threatened with starvation, which was accepted, if not welcomed, by the planners. After the decision for the “labor assignment” as the economically more productive treatment of the population, especially the Soviet Union, millions of forced laborers were deported to Germany. Repression and exploitation soon met with resistance.
In the Netherlands, for example, the police and railway workers went on strike. In France, there were armed attacks. In the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the resistance was particularly strong and often spread among different groups. Yugoslav partisans led by Tito were able to liberate individual contiguous areas, and in Greece, partisans of ELAS, EDES and EKKA controlled the mountainous parts of the country. In the Soviet Union, communist and anarchist groups fought the German occupation regime. Guerrilla warfare in the Soviet Union had been planned by the Red Army even before the war; Corresponding units were set up to continue the resistance against the occupiers in the hinterland of the front after the conquest of an area.
In general, guerrilla warfare was marked by numerous violations of martial law. The partisans usually did not take prisoners or forced them to desert. On the German side, the Commissar Order contained the instruction not to treat political commissars of the Red Army as prisoners of war, but to “dispose of them after separation has been carried out”. Thus, guerrilla warfare in Eastern Europe began as a systematic war of extermination. In Greece (Kefalonia, Chortiatis), France (Oradour, Maillé) and Italy (Marzabotto, Caiazzo) there were isolated massacres of hostile civilians.
Entry of the USA into the war, December 1941
The United States had initially maintained formal neutrality in the conflict. The isolationist mood in the US population prevented President Roosevelt from intervening directly on the side of Great Britain and the Soviet Union in the war.
Japan took advantage of the outbreak of World War II in Europe to occupy the northern part of French Indochina, forced Britain to close the Burma Strait, and in September 1940 concluded the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in Berlin, which was intended to prevent the United States from entering the war. With the Loan and Lease Act of March 11, 1941, the US Congress created the legal basis for the previously practiced support for Great Britain. On July 31, 1941, the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands froze Japan’s financial resources, which was virtually an embargo, so that the leadership of the Japanese Empire saw a war against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands as the only way to secure its imperialist ambitions in Southeast Asia.
After Japan’s attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the declaration of war by Germany and Italy on December 11, the U.S. was officially in a state of war with the Axis powers. Despite the Japanese attack and immediately after requesting a declaration of war on Japan in Congress, Roosevelt reminded his advisers that Germany remained the main target. The military instruction “Germany first” was confirmed during the Arcadia Conference (see above) with the decision to defeat Germany first as the most dangerous opponent and the only directly accessible opponent of Great Britain and the USSR. Moreover, the defeat of Germany would sooner or later bring about the collapse of Japan.
After Hitler’s declaration of war on the USA and the setback in front of Moscow, December 1941 became the turning point in world politics. From then on, Germany was no longer able to win the Second World War unequivocally.
Theatre of War North Africa, 1940 to 1943
Similar to the European theatre of war, the Italians in North Africa suffered severe setbacks against the British. The Italian offensive against Egypt in September 1940 came to a standstill after only 100 kilometers as a result of the destruction of the supply bases in Libya and Egypt. In the ensuing British counter-offensive, 130,000 Italians were taken prisoner by the British at the end of 1940.
In February 1941, the German Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel was therefore commissioned to support the unsuccessful alliance partner in its defense with two infantry divisions and an armored division of the newly formed German Africa Corps. He considered a defensive stance inappropriate, instead he wanted to attack. On March 31, he ordered the advance.
Already on April 10, German tanks stood in front of the eastern Libyan port city and fortress Tobruk, which had recently been expanded by the Italians and evacuated almost without a fight. After three unsuccessful attacks, Rommel had to postpone the conquest of Tobruk for the time being. Further advances could not be carried out due to supply bottlenecks, so that both sides switched to trench warfare. In November 1941, the British attacked again, with the occupation of the city finally succeeding in blowing up the siege ring.
On December 7, the Afrika Korps retreated to the Gazala Line (60 km further west). After Tobruk had twice resisted a conquest by the Afrika Korps, Rommel did not attack again until May of the next year (see Operation Theseus).
After heavy tank battles, the Axis powers succeeded in capturing Bir Hacheim on June 10, 1942. After that, the city and fortress of Tobruk were occupied on June 20, for which Rommel was promoted to Field Marshal General as the youngest officer of the Wehrmacht. The German and Italian successes were facilitated by the transfer of large parts of the British Mediterranean fleet to the Indian Ocean for the war against Japan.
Targets of the further advance through the Libyan desert were Alexandria and the Suez Canal. Shortly before the Egyptian railway station of El-Alamein, the British had built a 7-kilometer-wide defensive belt between the Mediterranean Sea and the Qattara Depression, in which the Axis offensive got stuck at the first Battle of El-Alamein (July 1942). On October 23, 1942, the new British commander Bernard Montgomery ordered the counterattack to the Second Battle of El-Alamein. The outnumbered Afrika Korps had to retreat.
The situation of the German and Italian troops in North Africa became hopeless after Allied troops landed in Casablanca and Algiers on November 8, 1942, in Operation Torch and thus the troops of the Axis powers in North Africa were pinched from two sides. On November 13 Tobruk fell back into British hands, on January 23, 1943, Tripoli.
German and Italian troops had already entered the French protectorate of Tunisia in November 1942 in order to stop the British and Americans landed in Morocco and Algeria. In February 1943, Rommel was able to inflict a heavy defeat on the Americans at the Battle of the Kasserin Pass near the Tunisian-Algerian border, but their further advance did not stop. In March and April, the troops of the Axis powers were encircled in the Tunisian campaign. Only on the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia was there still fierce resistance. On May 12, 1943 – Rommel had meanwhile been recalled from North Africa – his successor, General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, capitulated in Hammamet on the Peninsula of Cape Bon. On May 13, the Italian 1st Army also surrendered.
About 100,000 German and 150,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner. The German population reacted in horror to the high German losses in North Africa, which were interpreted as the final turn of the war. Behind closed doors, there was talk of a “second Stalingrad” or “Tunisgrad”. The overall balance of the war in North Africa also showed clear winners: Americans, British and French had a total of about 220,000 men in the fallen, wounded and missing including prisoners. For Germans and Italians, the losses added up to 620,000 men.
Italy, 1943 and 1944
After the success in Tunisia, Great Britain and the USA initially decided to land in Sicily in order to open the sea route between Egypt and Gibraltar – which would lead to a shortening of the previous shipping routes around Africa. The Soviet leadership would have preferred if the British and Americans had opened the second front in France, because they hoped that this would provide greater relief for its own front. Churchill refused because, in his view, it was still too early for an invasion of the West in 1943. But even after landing in southern Europe, the German Reich would no longer have been able to reinforce the Eastern Front in the summer of 1943. On July 10, 1943, Americans and British under the command of Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in southeastern Sicily (Operation Husky).
As a result, Hitler broke off Operation Citadel on July 13 and moved the II SS Panzer Corps from Russia to Italy on July 17 against Manstein’s will. Thus, the landing on Sicily had an effect, even if it was not the second front desired by Stalin. At a meeting on July 24, 1943, the Grand Fascist Council decided by 28:19 votes to return Italy to constitutional conditions. The majority hoped that this would improve the conditions for the Allies in the event of Italy’s surrender. The following day, King Victor Emmanuel III, in consultation with Dino Grandi and his allies, had Mussolini arrested after a visit to the Royal Palace of Carabinieri. Pietro Badoglio was appointed as the new Prime Minister. On August 17, 39,000 German and 62,000 Italian soldiers left Sicily and crossed the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland.
There, on September 3, two British divisions landed at Reggio Calabria against little resistance from the defenders. On the same day, the new Italian government concluded with the Allies the armistice of Cassibile, which was announced five days later by Eisenhower via “Radio Algiers”. As a result, the Axis case was triggered, in which 20 German divisions disarmed and interned half of the Italian army. On September 12, 72 German paratroopers in a commando action succeeded in freeing Mussolini from his captivity at the Hotel Campo Imperatore.
He proclaimed the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, which he led from the small town of Salò on Lake Garda, and continued the fight against the Allies on the German side. In the meantime, he considered the term “fascist” to be so ineffective in advertising that he renounced it in the name of the state. When the Italian soldiers stationed on the Greek island of Kefalonia resisted their disarmament, between September 18 and 23 about 5,000 Italians were captured and shot by German mountain troops. On October 13, the Badoglio government declared war on the German Reich. A partisan army of 256,000 women and men operated alongside the official Italian units.
The Allied advance in southern Italy was very slow. German soldiers defended their positions to the utmost, while in the hinterland the next defensive positions were already being excavated. On the Gustav Line between Ortona on the Adriatic Sea and the Gulf of Gaeta on the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Allied attacks were unsuccessful in the winter of 1943/44. Even an American landing (end of January 1944), north in the back of the Gustav Line, did not lead to the goal. Additional German divisions were transferred to Italy.
On February 15, 1944, during the Battle of Monte Cassino, the Benedictine mountain monastery, which was not occupied by the Germans and had a strategic location in the Gustav Line, was bombed from the air and two days later completely destroyed by artillery shelling. 50,000 German defenders, including many paratroopers of the landing on Crete, had entrenched themselves in front of (sic!) the monastery, which was unsuccessfully attacked by 200,000 Allied soldiers from 36 nations. Previously, Churchill had recklessly announced that Italy was “the soft abdomen of Europe.”It was not until three months later, on May 18, that New Zealand, Indian and Polish troops captured Monte Cassino.
After overcoming this obstacle, the Allies united their two fronts north and south of the Gustav Line on May 25 and began to advance further north. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Units in Italy, had Rome declared an open city. On June 4, Allied troops occupied the city without a fight. The Allied hope of being able to push the Wehrmacht back into the Alps was initially dashed on the defensive line in the northern Apennines between La Spezia on the Mediterranean and Rimini on the Adriatic, so that in 1944 the war in Italy “was far from over, but there could be no serious doubt about the outcome of this battle in the early summer of 1944.”
From July 2, 1944, Brazilian troops also took part in the Campanha da Italia after their landing in Naples, during which they reached Susa (Piedmont) in northern Italy on May 2, 1945. Of the approximately 25,000 Brazilian soldiers, 463 fell, buried in the military cemetery in Pistoia until 1960, then in a mausoleum in Rio de Janeiro. The reason for Brazil’s participation in the Second World War was the sinking of 13 Brazilian freighters and five merchant ships in the South Atlantic by German submarines in 1942, which killed 607 Brazilians.
From Stalingrad to Leningrad, October 1942 to March 1944
Despite the tense situation of forces and supplies, Hitler had ordered a simultaneous offensive against Stalingrad on July 23, 1942, in amendment to the original plan “Fall Blue” and against considerable reservations of army generals in addition to the southern offensive towards the Caucasus region. Army Group South was therefore divided into Army Group A (→ Caucasus) and Army Group B (→ Stalingrad). Originally, Stalingrad was to be conquered first as a transport hub and then the Caucasus region with its oil wells.
One after the other became the simultaneity of two offensives with dangerously overstretched flanks. In the course of the attack on Stalingrad, a German tank detachment reached the Volga on the evening of August 23, 1942; on the same day, about 600 aircraft of the Luftwaffe bombed Stalingrad, and the first units of the 6th Army were able to penetrate the outskirts of the city. In the Battle of Stalingrad, the attackers advanced in fierce individual battles for houses and streets only with high sacrifices. Eventually, the 6th Army ruled about 90 percent of the city turned into a pile of rubble, but full seizure failed.
A narrow, western bank of the Volga, where new troops from the eastern bank of the Volga were constantly landed, was held by the Soviet defenders despite high losses, including the grain silo and the “Red October” steelworks. The west bank of the Volga in Stalingrad marked the easternmost point of the German advance on the Eastern Front. This is commemorated today by the monumental Mother-Homeland statue.
On November 19, the Red Army’s major offensive operation Uranus against the Romanian and German lines began far northwest and south of Stalingrad with a huge encirclement movement. A few days later, the Soviet tank tops united at Kalatsch am Don. Thus, the 6th Army was largely encircled. The supply from the air promised by Goering was not sufficient, and the German units were quite immobile. A relief attack by the 4th Panzer Army, Operation Wintergewitter, led up to 48 kilometers to the siege ring, but had to be aborted on December 23.
Colonel General Paul assessed an attempt to break out due to a lack of fuel reserves as impossible, felt bound by Hitler’s stop order and did not give an order to break out of the cauldron nor did he want to capitulate. On January 10, 1943, seven Soviet armies opened the attack on the city. By January 23, they captured the Pitomnik and Gumrak airfields. On January 24, they managed to split the cauldron into a northern and a southern half. On January 25, the last JU 52 left the makeshift airfield Stalingradski.
On January 31, Paul, meanwhile promoted to Field Marshal General, went into Soviet captivity in view of the hopeless situation, without pronouncing an overall surrender of the 6th Army. This was followed by unregulated partial capitulations of units of the south boiler; the North Cauldron continued to fight until 2 February.
The Soviet losses amounted to 500,000 dead, the German army and its allies also lost half a million men – deaths and prisoners added up. When the BBC reported the capture of 91,000 German soldiers, the realization spread in Germany that Goebbels had lied to the population when he announced on the radio that the entire 6th Army had gone down fighting. The shock of this defeat was indescribable. Probably 110,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner of war, of whom only about 5,000 returned in 1955, among them Field Marshal Paulus, his chief of staff and most other senior officers.
The Battle of Stalingrad was, after the defeat against the British in the second Battle of El Alamein in early November 1942, the second, even greater catastrophe of the German Wehrmacht. It was the psychological turning point of the Second World War. From now on, it went back inexorably on all fronts, and the German’s doubts about the “final victory” increased massively, despite Goebbels’ Sports Palace speech on February 18, 1943 with the call for “total war” and the frenetic approval of their selected listeners. Thus, Heinz Boberach, editor of the Reports from the Reich after the war, came to the conclusion that with the defeat of Stalingrad in 1943 a change of mood had begun, which had been intensified by the capitulation of the German troops in North Africa (in May 1943) and the increase in air raids on the Reich.
On February 16, the city of Kharkov was abandoned by Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops under the command of SS Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser against Hitler’s orders in order to avoid imminent encirclement. Five days later, a German counter-offensive began. By March 14, the area was recaptured to central Donetsk, including Kharkov. Considerable terrain gains were achieved, the enemy was taught high losses and a closed front was restored. A potential collapse of the Eastern Front in the spring of 1943 was thus prevented. Another offensive in July 1943, Operation Citadel, was intended to encircle large sections of the Red Army in the front arch at Kursk and convince wavering allies of Germany’s strength after the defeat at Stalingrad.
The company culminated in the largest tank battle in history. The attack, which had been prepared for months, had been foreseen by the Red Army, which had prepared itself through deep defensive positions, and got stuck after a few days. The German advance was aborted at the height of the battle on July 13. The Wehrmacht lost more soldiers and material in a few days than in the months-long Battle of Stalingrad. The Soviet counter-offensive at Orel, which in turn pursued the goal of encircling parts of Army Group Central, and the transfer of the II SS Panzer Corps to Italy due to the landing of the Western Allies in Sicily on July 10 (Operation Husky) were the decisive reasons for the cancellation of Operation Citadel.
The German tank reserves lost in Operation Citadel could no longer be replaced; the losses thus meant the final turn of the war in favor of the Soviet Union. After several Soviet counter-offensives in the following months, the Wehrmacht had to retreat from the entire front, with the Battle of Crimea ending in a German defeat. Other major battles were the Battle of the Dnieper and the Dnieper Carpathian Operation. At the end of 1943, Kiev was reconquered by the Soviet army.
In mid-January 1944, the Eastern Front ran from Leningrad in the north through the Pripjet swamps to Crimea in the south. In the Leningrad-Novgorod operation, which began on January 14, 1944, the German siege ring around Leningrad was blown up in the same month. The following Soviet spring offensive brought further territorial gains, and the Wehrmacht had to retreat to Lake Peipus. On May 12, Crimea was again in Soviet hands. On June 9, the offensive began on the Finnish front on the Karelian Isthmus. At the end of June, this attack came to a halt at the level of the old border of 1940.
From the invasion to the end of the Second World War, June 1944 to May 1945
Western Front, 1944/45
At the beginning of 1944, Erwin Rommel took over the command of the German Army Group B on the Western Front north of the Loire. On January 21, 1944, the German Luftwaffe resumed attacks on London, which continued until April. While the Allies were busy accumulating huge amounts of supplies, the Germans reinforced their coastal fortifications on the Atlantic Wall.
The plan for Operation Overlord dates back to invasion plans drawn up in 1941 (Roundup, Sledgehammer, etc.) and had been revised in 1943 by the COSSAC staff under British Lieutenant General Sir Frederick E. Morgan for the final version. On August 19, 1942, around 6,000 infantrymen of the Canadian 2nd Division had attacked the port of the city of Dieppe, whose coast had been fortified by German troops as part of the Atlantic Wall. The operation (Operation Jubilee) was a disaster and prematurely terminated. More than 900 Canadians fell and nearly 2,000 were taken prisoner of war. The supporting Royal Air Force lost 106 aircraft – twice as many as the Air Force. The Royal Navy lost 33 amphibious landing craft. The test provided important insights for Operation Overlord in June 1944.
The Allied plan was to land with first two armies (one American and one British-Canadian) and then quickly advance inland. Hitler and the German planning staff were insufficiently prepared for the invasion. They awaited landing at pas-de-Calais, the narrowest point of the English Channel. The coast of the department of Calvados, where the Allies finally went ashore, was defended in places only with a few meters of barbed wire and a few MG nests.
Other sections were heavily fortified despite the OKW’s false expectations about the site of the invasion. In the invasion area, five landing sections were selected with the code names Juno, Gold, Sword (British/Canadian landing sections) and Utah and Omaha (US landing sections). The bombardment of the coast from the air and shelling from the sea went according to plan, but missed the first German line at Omaha Beach. This, together with the fact that the Germans had placed two divisions there instead of only one suspected division, led to very heavy losses (about 70 percent) of the first wave of landing soldiers.
On June 6, 1944, the so-called D-Day, and thereafter, Operation Neptune, the actual invasion enterprise, involved about 6700 ships, including more than 4000 landing craft, which landed a total of 175,000 Allied soldiers from the USA, Canada and Great Britain as well as around 200 Frenchmen. More than 11,000 aircraft supported Overlord with airborne operations. In the early morning of June 6, two U.S. airborne divisions launched their missions into the hinterland of the French coast on the English Channel. Due to the surprisingly strong German anti-aircraft fire and navigation errors, many machines did not reach the intended jump zones, so that the parachutists were dropped over large parts of the Cotentin peninsula.
Although the Allies had deployed enormous forces, they made very slow progress in places. On the other hand, due to the Allied air superiority and the large-scale destroyed rail network, the German side was unable to quickly move additional units to the Combat Zone of Normandy. The German troops in Normandy were surprised in an unexpected place because Hitler had spoken very often that the invasion would begin with a deceptive attack.
Von Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief West, had asked in the early morning for the release of two armored divisions stationed near Paris. Alfred Jodl had rejected this. It was not until around noon that Hitler agreed to the use of this reserve against the Allied bridgehead 150 kilometers away. His adjutants had hesitated until about 10 a.m. to wake Hitler, who had only gone to bed around three o’clock in the morning, because of a possible false report. “This delay was crucial.”
Cherbourg in the north of the Cotentin Peninsula was lost on June 26 after heavy US artillery fire and fierce street fighting (→ Battle of Cherbourg). The capture of Caen, a primary target of the first day of landing, proved difficult for the Allied troops of the British and Canadians on the east side of the Normandy bridgehead: the costly Battle of Caen ended only after six weeks. Caen was fully occupied on July 19.
On August 15, a second invasion of southern France began on the Côte d’Azur between Toulon and Cannes (Operation Dragoon). The landing involved 880 Allied seagoing ships, including four aircraft carriers, six battleships, 21 cruisers and over 100 destroyers, a total of 34 French ships and 1370 landing craft, as well as about 5000 aircraft. Three U.S. divisions formed the assault forces. The American and French troops hardly encountered any resistance and advanced quickly through the Rhône Valley to the north. By September, they had already reached the Vosges and Alsace.
In Normandy, on July 25, the Americans made an escape attempt from their bridgehead section (→ Operation Cobra), which in the following days led to the constriction of the Cotentin Peninsula to Avranches in the following days. In the east, U.S. units were able to quickly break through the German front at Saint-Lô after an initial delay. On August 6, the Germans launched a counterattack at Mortain (→ Operation Liège) under the leading commander-in-chief West, General Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. This was stopped after only two days, which led to the cauldron of Falaise with the help of the Northern Fighting British and Canadians.
The German city commander of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, ignored several orders from Hitler to defend Paris to the last man and then destroy it. He surrendered with his troops without a fight due to a lack of weapons. Because of the enormous abundance of material and absolute air supremacy, German troop accumulations could be crushed at any time, and the Allies made quite rapid progress in the following period.
During the airborne operation Market Garden near and in Arnhem, the II SS Panzer Corps was once again able to inflict a heavy defeat on US, British and Polish soldiers. Admittedly, they overstretched their supply lines in their rapid advance to the German West Wall; but after building new, fast supply routes (→ Red Ball Express), they managed to provide the fuel needed in large quantities. Already on September 3 Brussels fell, and the next day Antwerp could be occupied.
After the loss of the ports on the English Channel, the German Navy continued its submarine war from Norway. Until September 1, the Germans attacked London from launch pads in northern France with cruise missiles (V1) and missiles (V2). Both types, of which around 7500 and 3200 were launched respectively, were too imprecise to combat specific targets and could therefore only be used against large cities. In London, more than 6,000 people were killed by attacks with the V1. Work on the Friesenwall project was intended to prevent the landing of Allied soldiers on the German North Sea coast. However, it was not completed.
On October 21, after fierce fighting, US soldiers conquered Aachen as the first major German city. They later advanced from there to the Rur. The Battle of Hürtgenwald from October 1944 to February 1945 was the longest battle ever fought on German soil. A total of 35,000 German and American soldiers were killed. The heavily forested, hilly area and the wet and cold weather favored the German defenders, so that the US soldiers could not exploit their material superiority. It was not until February 1945 that the US Army managed to advance further to the Rhine. Also in the south, in Lorraine and Alsace, it remained with partial successes for the Allies: the fortress Of Metz and Strasbourg were occupied.
On December 16, the Germans launched the Battle of the Bulge to regain the upper hand in the West. The Allies lost 76,000 men, the Germans 90,000 men. The operational goals of the German attackers, to divide the fronts of the Allies, to advance in a broad front to Belgium and to occupy the Allied supply port of Antwerp, could not be achieved after initial successes. Walter Model told Albert Speer on December 23 that the offensive had failed. Guderian, Chief of Staff of the Army, wrote in retrospect that on December 24, 1944, “every soldier [with] eyes in his head” was aware of the failure.
At the end of December 1944, US troops reached their comrades encircled in Bastogne. On January 1, 1945, Operation Bodenplatte failed (a surprise attack by German fighters on 17 Allied front airfields). On January 3, the Allies launched an offensive despite extreme cold, and on January 8, Hitler Model finally approved the retreat.
Since the last significant German fuel reserves were consumed in the Battle of the Bulge and the Nordwind operation (January 1945), the army and especially the Luftwaffe were largely motionless in all theatres of war, because from the second half of 1944, the German hydrogenation plants for the production of synthetic gasoline were bombed again and again. It was therefore of no use that the German war economy could still deliver tanks and aircraft in large quantities.
On March 7, 1945, US soldiers reached the bridge at Remagen south of the Ruhr area, which had not been completely destroyed, so that they could set up a bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine. On March 23, Operation Plunder to cross the Rhine north of the Ruhr area at Wesel began with British, American and Canadian soldiers. Army Group B of the Wehrmacht under Field Marshal Walter Model with over 320,000 soldiers – more than in Stalingrad – was trapped in the Ruhr basin on April 1. Thus, from a military point of view, the war in the West was finally lost. The Army Group surrendered on April 18 because two-thirds of the soldiers were without weapons and deserted in bright droves. On the same day, US troops took Magdeburg, a day later Leipzig.
During the occupation of German cities in southwest Germany by French soldiers, “especially by a minority of the feared colonial soldiers from North Africa, there was extensive looting and numerous rapes. […] In Freudenstadt, the worst case, the looting and rape dragged on for three days.”The French troops moved on towards Rottweil and Stuttgart. At the same time, the British army rapidly advanced from the Lower Rhine to northern Germany.
On April 25, US and Soviet troops met south of Torgau on the Elbe. Thus, the German troops fighting on their home soil and in adjacent areas were divided into two separate combat rooms. On April 26, Bremen fell to the British. In quick succession, they took Lübeck (2 May) and Hamburg (3 May), while British-Canadian troops invaded Wismar.
On May 5, Colonel General Blaskowitz, whose troops were encircled in Holland, surrendered. While the British units conquered northern Germany, US troops quickly advanced into southern Germany and on to Tyrol-Vorarlberg, “often welcomed as liberators […]. Many soldiers simply let themselves be run over and captured.”The Americans occupied Munich on April 30. Stuttgart fell on April 22 to the French army, which advanced south to Vorarlberg. On May 3, the U.S. Army met at the Brenner Pass with their compatriots who had occupied northern Italy from the south.
In Italy, Bologna was occupied by Polish troops on April 21 as part of the Allied Spring Offensive, which began on Apri 9l, thus gaining access to the Po Valley. Benito Mussolini fled on April 25 from the Allies, who occupied Genoa on April 27, from Salò towards Switzerland. A day later, Italian partisans seized Mussolini in Dongo and shot him. On April 29, the partial surrender of The German units in Italy was signed in Caserta (Operation Sunrise), which came into force on May 2 at noon. On the same day, British troops marched into Trieste.
Eastern Front, 1944/45
In coordination with the invasion in the West, the Soviet Union succeeded in June, July, and August 1944 with Operation Bagration the complete destruction of Army Group Central. With a loss of 28 divisions of the Wehrmacht, it is considered the most costly defeat in German military history. The Red Army was able to advance from Belarus to just before Warsaw and to the border of East Prussia. On July 3, Soviet troops recaptured Minsk, further south from July 13 in Galicia another Soviet offensive advanced to Lviv and the Vistula. From this point on, the Wehrmacht was only able to resist the Red Army.
On August 1, the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army began, which was crushed after two months of fighting. On August 20, operation Yassy-Kishinev of the Red Army began on the Dniester, which achieved a resounding success against the German-Romanian Army Group Southern Ukraine. After the rapid encirclement of a large part of the Romanian army, King Michael overthrew the dictator Ion Antonescu in a coup d’état on August 23 and had the Romanian army stop fighting on Germany’s side on August 24.
When the Wehrmacht began the military occupation of Slovakia on August 29 due to increasing partisan activities, the Slovak National Uprising broke out there, which was supported by parts of the Slovak army. The successes of the Soviet Union forced the Wehrmacht to withdraw from Greece; On October 13, British units entered Athens. On September 5, the Red Army took Bulgaria; sure of the support of the Soviet Union, the Bulgarian Communists brought about a violent change in the form of government on September 9 and took over the leadership of the country.
The Finnish government concluded an armistice with the Soviet Union on September 19. On October 20, Soviet units and Yugoslav partisans under Tito captured the capital Belgrade. In the Baltics, Army Group North withdrew from Riga to Courland on October 13. In East Prussia, the Offensive of the Soviet Union came to a standstill in October after initial successes.
In the Battle of Budapest, the Hungarian capital was besieged and could not be captured by the Red Army until February 1945. At the beginning of 1945, the Red Army advanced north from Warsaw (liberation on January 17), cutting East Prussia off from the German Reich. Tens of thousands of Germans fled to the West during the Battle of East Prussia via the frozen Frische Haff.
During the transport of wounded and refugees across the Baltic Sea, several hundred thousand people reached the West. In the course of this rescue operation (Operation Hannibal), the former KdF ship Wilhelm Gustloff with thousands of people on board was torpedoed by the submarine S-13 of the Baltic Fleet on January 30 and sank at the height of Stolpmünde, where 11 days later the Steuben also became a victim of S-13. The sinkings of the Gustloff, Steuben, Goya (April 16, 1945) and Cap Arcona (May 3, 1945) with a total of more than 20,000 victims are considered the greatest disasters in shipping.
On January 27, 1945, Red Army soldiers liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which had been fled by the SS guards, where more than 1.1 million Jews had been murdered since 1941.
On the same day, the first Soviet units reached Küstrin and thus the Oder. In the Battle of Königsberg, the Soviet attackers finally occupied the city on April 9.
After the Vistula-Oder operation at the end of January 1945, the Red Army stood along the Oder and Neisse from Szczecin to Görlitz almost 80 kilometers from Berlin. From April 16 to 19, one of the largest battles of the Second World War was fought at the Seelow Heights. One million German soldiers, many of them young, hardly experienced recruits, with 1500 tanks, 10,400 guns and 3300 fighter planes, many of whom had to remain on the ground for lack of fuel, faced 1 million Soviet soldiers with 3155 tanks and 20,130 guns.
Other sources on the German side give 190,000 soldiers, 512 tanks, 2625 guns, 300 aircraft and 300-400 anti-aircraft guns. It was the most powerful fire strike of the entire war: On the first day, 1.2 million shells were fired, the tremors of which still made the walls shake in the east of Berlin, 60 km away. Further north, in Pomerania, Rokossowski’s “Second Belarusian Front” had 1.4 million soldiers, over 4,000 tanks and 23,000 heavy guns. In the south, on the Neisse, Konyev’s First Ukrainian Front had another 1.1 million soldiers and 2150 tanks. From the air, all fronts were supported by a total of 7500 fighter planes. Meanwhile, in the south, the Soviet siege ring around Breslau was closed on February 15, which did not fall into the hands of the Red Army until May 6.
Battle for Berlin
Five days after the start of the attack on the Oder, Soviet troops reached the northeastern city limits on April 21. In the Battle of Berlin, Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies advanced towards the center in concentric attacks and, after overcoming the Spree and Landwehr Canal, stood in front of the so-called “citadel”, the innermost sphere of influence of the “Nazi leadership”. On April 28, the attempt of the 12th Army under General Walther Wenck to horrify the trapped failed. On April 30, Adolf Hitler killed himself in the Führerbunker under the garden of the Reich Chancellery, and on the same day units of the Red Army captured the Reichstag building, the symbol of Hitler’s Germany for the Soviet Union.
The fighting, which increased in intensity towards the end, now concentrated on the anti-aircraft towers at the Zoobunker, the Tiergartenviertel, the Bendlerblock, the Gestapo headquarters, the Reich Aviation Ministry and the Humboldthain anti-aircraft bunker. The artillery shelling had pushed the population ever closer together, which had sought shelter in the area of the high bunker at Anhalter Bahnhof and in the underground railway stations.
On the night of May 2, most of the defenders’ numerous attempts to break out to the north and west failed. On the morning of May 2, SS units blew up the ceiling of the north-south S-Bahn tunnel under the Landwehr Canal and as a result, large parts of the U-Bahn network were flooded. On the same day, after negotiations with General Vasily Chuikov, the German combat commander Helmuth Weidling capitulated with the last defenders of the city.
Southeastern Europe
After the failure of the Balaton offensive in the spring of 1945, Hungary was completely conquered by the Red Army on April 4. In the Vienna operation, the Red Army, coming across the Burgenland border from the southeast, occupied Vienna in a pincer attack between April 4 and 13, shortly afterward Lower Austria, Burgenland and Styria. In the foothills of the Alps and in the north, the Soviet advance slowed down.
On May 3, AMERICAN troops occupied Salzburg and advanced further into the foothills of the Alps. On May 5, their advance detachments liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp and on May 7 met with the Red Army on the Enns River on the border of Upper and Lower Austria. On the same day, the Red Army reached Graz. On May 8, 1945, at 11:00 p.m. Central European Time, the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces came into force. Most of the 900,000 soldiers of Army Group Central (former Army Group A) under Field Marshal Schörner were taken prisoner by the Soviets. The Prague Uprising, which began on May 5, also claimed an unknown number of victims in connection with the initially disorderly expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia. On May 10, Soviet units entered Prague.
End of the war in Europe in 1945
One day before Hitler committed suicide on April 30, he had appointed Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as Reich President and Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as Reich Chancellor in his political will. After he had also taken his own life on May 1, Dönitz declared on the same day in a radio address the continuation of the military struggle against “the advancing Bolshevik enemy”. Dönitz wanted to ensure that as many German soldiers as possible were taken prisoner by the American-British instead of the Soviets.
After the last units in Berlin had capitulated on May 2, he set up his headquarters in Flensburg-Mürwik on May 3 and named a managing Reich government under Count Schwerin von Krosigk. On May 4, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, Admiral General Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, signed the partial surrender of the Wehrmacht for northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands on the Timeloberg near Lüneburg in the presence of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, which came into force on May 5 at 8 a.m.
After Eisenhower had rejected the request for a separate armistice with the Western Allies, Colonel General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of all German troops in Reims on May 7. It entered into force on May 8 at 23:01 Central European Time.
In another document, the ratification of this unconditional surrender by the High Command of the Wehrmacht and the Commanders-in-Chief of the Army, Air Force and Navy was agreed. This was done by signing another document of surrender at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst. In the late evening hours of May 8, the document was signed by General Field Marshal Keitel (for the OKW and the Army), General Admiral von Friedeburg (Kriegsmarine) and Colonel General Stumpff (Luftwaffe, as representative of the Commander-in-Chief GeneralFeldmarschall von Greim). Ratification dragged on until after midnight. Since the surrender was also not announced until 9 May in Moscow, 9 May was/is celebrated as Victory Day in the Soviet Union and in the post-Soviet states.
At the end of the war in Europe on May 8, the Channel Islands and the cities of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle were still under the control of the Wehrmacht in the west, northern Courland in the east and parts of the Aegean Sea in the southeast. In Denmark and Norway, too, German rule remained until the capitulation, in the Netherlands the provinces of North and South Holland as well as the province of Groningen. The German Empire itself was largely occupied, only the Alpine region, parts of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, most of Schleswig-Holstein and East Frisia were still under the control of German troops.
On May 8 and 9, countless German soldiers from the Soviet sphere of influence tried to enter the territories controlled by the Western Allies, especially those from the Bohemian-Moravian area. The vast majority did not succeed, especially since the US Army strictly adhered to the armistice conditions and held German soldiers in camps and handed them over to the Soviet Union. There was no prospect of escaping captivity for the enclosed Army Group Courland. On May 9, Stalin announced to the “peoples of the Soviet Union” that they were celebrating victory, but had no intention of “dismembering or destroying Germany.”
The three main victorious powers, the Soviet Union, the USA and Great Britain, celebrated the victory over Germany and Japan with large military parades in Europe and the USA respectively:
- Victory Parade in Moscow on June 24, 1945
- New York City Victory Parade on January 12, 1946
- London Victory Celebrations on June 8, 1946
In a unilateral declaration, the Supreme Soviet did not lift the state of war with Germany until January 25, 1955. On May 8, 1985, German Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker declared in his speech on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe and the National Socialist tyranny that it had entered the national culture of remembrance as liberation from National Socialism.
Neutral European states
The states of Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain remained neutral during the European war. Turkey nominally joined the Allies in February 1945 but is generally also counted among the neutral states due to its military non-participation.
Switzerland during the Second World War
Switzerland was able to maintain its independence and was never the target of a German offensive. Nevertheless, it armed itself intensively against a possible German invasion. The Rhine plain could be flooded in order to make it impassable for tanks – according to military findings due to the successful German western campaign through the Ardennes (see above). In the Réduit, 26,000 locally appropriately camouflaged bunkers and artillery positions were created. They should be able to remain on standby autonomously (independently) for up to six months.
General Henri Guisan moved army units to the Alps réduit around the Gotthard as its center. The concept of the Réduit national envisaged protracted mountain battles and the destruction of the Alpine transversals. The majority of the Swiss population accepted this defense concept. Critics, on the other hand, complained that the Axis powers could conquer the resource-rich Plateau with little effort and starve the army in the Réduit.
By 1942, the Réduit had reached its full effect thanks to the diminishing threat from the Axis powers and the completion of the fortifications. It seemed that an independent Switzerland with functioning freight transport through the Alps and because of the transfer of foreign currency would benefit these powers more than a conquered country with destroyed production facilities. After the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, Commander-in-Chief Guisan returned troops from the Réduit to the Swiss Plateau due to the relaxed Threat Situation.
In August 1942, there was a temporary complete border closure for refugees as the culmination of a generally very restrictive admission of Jewish refugees to Switzerland. Between 1939 and 1945, a total of around 300,000 people were admitted (about a third of whom were interned soldiers) and around 20,000 people were returned or expelled at the border.
Switzerland’s determination to defend its neutrality or the violation of its airspace against any attacker was beyond doubt internationally. After the air battles in the Pruntruter Zipfel in 1940, restraint had been ordered by the general, but British bombers on their way to Italy were also shelled on July 12, 1943 and two of them were brought down. In the event of accidental bombing of Swiss border towns by US pilots, they were interned for the rest of the war, if shot down.
In Switzerland, a total of 84 people were killed by British and US bombings between 1939 and 1945. (→ Allied bombings of Switzerland)
Between 1933 and 1945, around 1,000 Swiss citizens were interned in German concentration camps, and at least 200 died. No violent confrontation has claimed more Swiss lives in the last 200 years (→ Swiss in Nazi concentration camps).
Turkey in World War II
During World War II, Turkey maintained its neutrality after reaching an agreement in 1939 with the mandate power France on the annexation of the Syrian province of Hatay, a mandate of the League of Nations. France had accommodated Turkish demands for an end to its Syrian mandate in order to prevent Turkey from entering the war on the side of the German Reich.
On February 23, 1945, when Germany’s defeat was obvious, it declared war on the side of the Allies Germany and Japan in order to underline its claim to the province that had belonged to Syria under international law until 1939 after the war. Syria’s official position, on the other hand, continues to this day (as of February 2011) that the vote in Hatay’s parliament in 1939 on accession to Turkey was contrary to international law and that this province was part of Syria.
War in Asia and the Pacific
Japan’s Reorganization of East Asia
Japan had been involved in several wars before World War II. Under Tennō Yoshihito, Japan fought alongside the Allies in World War I, in which Japan was able to take over colonies of the German Empire, including part German New Guinea (Japanese South Sea Mandate). About ten years earlier, the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) had taken place because of the dispute over supremacy in Manchuria and Korea.
To overcome the economic crisis from 1929 onwards, influential politicians and military officials proposed a territorial expansion of Japan. From the 1930s onwards, they gained increased control over the government, including the office of prime minister; political opponents were persecuted and media censored. The aggressive commitment to a reorganization of the Pacific region was ostensibly aimed at ending the hegemony over the Asian countries and their colonies by Western, European states (Pan-Asia movement). In fact, it was the will to end Japan’s economic difficulties by forcibly securing raw material and sales areas as well as settlement land for emigrants.
Japanese expansion was initially directed against the Republic of China. After the Mukden incident on September 15, 1931, presumably staged by the Japanese themselves, the Manchuria crisis occurred three days later, and in February 1932 a Japanese vassal state of Manchukuo was established. After international protests over the actions in China, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933; In 1936 it joined the Anti-Comintern Pact.
On July 7, 1937, there was an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing, which the Japanese army used as an opportunity to invade northern China without a declaration of war and occupy the main ports along the entire Chinese coast. By occupying the hinterland of Hong Kong and Macau, it blocked almost the entire Chinese coast to cut off China’s overseas economic ties. These events are considered by some historians to be the actual beginning of World War II. Nevertheless, the war in China was very different from the war in Europe that began on September 1, 1939. In the spring and summer of 1940, when the German Wehrmacht overran the Netherlands, Belgium and France and “almost brought Britain to its knees”, there was no end in sight to the Asian War.
China was at a crossroads at the time, as the Communists under Mao Zedong and the Kuomintang nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek fought for supremacy in the country. The Communists had retreated to Yan’an after the Long March inland and intervened only sporadically in the fight against the Japanese.
Around December 8, 1937, Japanese troops reached Nanjing, the capital of the Kuomintang, and encircled it. Chiang Kai-shek had the capital moved to distant Chongqing. The occupation of the city led to the Nanking massacre over the next six weeks, in which at least 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered and about 42,000 women and girls of all ages were raped.
The reports of the murder and rape shook the world. Public opinion in the West, especially in the US, turned sharply against Japan. In July 1939, the U.S. government terminated an important trade treaty that had existed since 1911, affecting nearly a third of all Japanese imports. One way out of the increasing isolation seemed to be an alliance with Germany, which was endorsed by German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop.
The road to Pearl Harbor was not a one-way street, but in the summer of 1940, the Japanese leadership took decisive steps so that the two wars in Europe and Asia merged into a single global conflagration. Japan took advantage of the defeat of the Western powers and in June 1940 blackmailed Britain and France into stopping vital aid deliveries to Chinese nationalists via Burma and Indochina. The Dutch government in exile in London was pressured to export oil from the Dutch East Indies to Japan.It also installed Wang Jingwei in Nanking as head of a puppet government.
Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who had become prime minister for the second time in July 1940 after the dramatic events in Europe, had argued in a memorandum in the same year that the war in China would ultimately lead to a “Greater East Asian sphere of prosperity”, formed from Japan, Manchukuo and China, as well as former colonies of Great Britain, the Netherlands and France.
The term was coined by Matsuoka Yōsuke, foreign minister in Konoe’s second cabinet. The Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy of September 27, 1940, expanded the existing Anti-Comintern Pact to include mutual military support. In doing so, Japan rejected its neutrality proclaimed in September 1939 and underlined its aggressive foreign policy, especially towards China. The pact was not directed against the Soviet Union, but was primarily intended to keep the USA out of the war.
The US reaction quickly showed how baseless Matsuoka and Ribbentrop’s claims that the Tripartite Pact would act as a deterrent. In the White House, there was a growing view that Japan was an aggressive, belligerent power, an Asian counterpart to Nazi Germany that needed to be stopped. This view was confirmed when, in September 1940, when negotiations with the French were still ongoing, Japan forcibly occupied the northern part of French Indochina in two-day battles. The following month, the US imposed a total ban on exports of iron and steel scrap to Japan, and Britain reopened the Burma Strait to supply to China.
The Japanese leadership wanted to exploit the defeats of France and the Netherlands as well as the expected defeat of Great Britain in the war against Germany for a southern expansion (Indochina, Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore). On June 25, 1940, Army Minister Shunroku Hata said to his staff, “Let’s seize the golden opportunity! Nothing should stop us!”With a Japanese seizure of the British, French and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, the possibility of a collapse of China would have come within reach.
The establishment of a Japanese hegemonic power in East Asia and the hegemony of a Nazi Germany in Europe would also have meant that America would have faced an Old World jointly dominated by totalitarian powers, because the Soviet Union at that time seemed to peacefully delineate its sphere of influence with the Axis powers and Japan.
The year 1941 began with increased efforts by the US and Japan to avoid an impending war. At the same time, the Japanese war and conquest plans for Southeast Asia took concrete shape. In negotiations between U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and newly appointed Japanese Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura, the Japanese were willing to refrain from moving south if the Americans allowed them to subjugate China.
But the refusal to give Japan a free hand in China would ultimately trigger the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. On July 2, the decision was made in Japan to extend territorial claim to Southeast Asia, where the rich mineral resources of the Dutch and British colonies were a worthwhile target. Two days after the occupation of the southern part of Indochina, which was used as a springboard for this southern expansion, on July 26, 1941, the United States, Great Britain and its Dominions, as well as the Dutch East Indies, froze Japanese foreign assets in their countries, which was practically equivalent to a complete export embargo, including oil.
Because of this embargo, war remained supposedly the only alternative for Japan, because its oil reserves would be depleted in two years at the latest. On November 5, 1941, the decision was made in Tokyo to start the war the following month with attacks on Pearl Harbor, Malaya and the Philippines. The strategic goal was to gain control of Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific within eight months in order to be able to fight against the United States for a long time from this power base or to force it to a negotiated peace to Japan’s advantage.
At the same time, the conference participants expected that aid deliveries to China could be interrupted in the course of the expansion. Recent negotiations in Washington between Nomura, Special Envoy Saburō Kurusu and Hull to avoid war failed due to Hull’s uncompromising demand for the withdrawal of all Japanese troops from China and Indochina. In return, the US wanted to release the Japanese assets. As might be expected, When Hull arrived in Tokyo on November 27, Hull’s ten-point program was seen as an ultimatum – practically an insult. The Imperial Conference of December 1, 1941, stated that Japan could not tolerate the “extremely haughty, stubborn, and disrespectful” attitude of the United States.
In the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers sank five battleships in two waves, three of which were later refloated, and 14 other larger U.S. warships. Vice Admiral Nagumo, the commander of the Kidō Butai aircraft carrier group, did not allow a third wave of attacks to rise because he was concerned about the location of the three U.S. carriers not present, which could lead a heavy counterattack. As a result of this decision, docks and shipyard facilities, as well as supply depots and fuel depots, remained intact, allowing the U.S. to rapidly rebuild its Pacific fleet over the next six months.
The next day, the Congress of the United States declared war on Japan, which was followed on the same day by those of Great Britain, its Dominions and the Netherlands. On December 10, off the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, the British battlecruiser Repulse and the modern battleship Prince of Wales, which had been commissioned only a few months earlier, were sunk by Japanese torpedo planes. The sinking of the two capital ships was a clear sign of the looming loss of importance of such large warships compared to land- and sea-based air forces.
Over the next few months, the Japanese pushed further south and, ideologically prepared by the battle cry “Asia the Asian”, occupied European colonies such as Hong Kong, parts of Burma and India, British Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. In the Philippines, occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1945, “1 million Filipinos [.] massacred by Japanese soldiers.”
From Pearl Harbor to the Japanese Surrender
Within four months (December 1941 to March 1942), Japanese troops had taken control of large parts of Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific islands with about 450 million people. This was the largest expansion of Japanese power in the history of the Empire. The conquests of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies were particularly important for Japan because it had rich ore deposits, extensive rubber production and large oil fields. 139,000 Britons, Australians and Indians had to surrender on February 15, 1942, in Singapore, the “Gibraltar of the East” and Britain’s largest military base in Southeast Asia.
The Battle of Singapore is considered a symbol of the Japanese Blitzkrieg, later also of the brutality of Japanese soldiers, because of the Allied prisoners, more than 11,000 died of hunger and exhaustion during the construction of the Thailand-Burma railway. The invasion of Burma began on February 15, 1942, and the Dutch East Indies was captured in mid-March 1942. In the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur soon had to evacuate Manila and retreat to the island of Corregidor, where the last U.S. troops surrendered on May 5, 1942. Nothing seemed to be able to stop the Japanese.
After the conquest of Rabaul on the northeastern tip of the island of New Britain (January 1942), the Japanese had gained an excellent starting point for a further advance towards the Eastern Pacific and South Seas.
The Battle of the Coral Sea (early May 1942) ended in a draw (one sunken and one heavily damaged aircraft carrier on both sides), and the Japanese abandoned their intention to land at Port Moresby in southern New Guinea, allowing the Allies to hold an apron north of Australia. It was the first combined sea-air battle in naval war history. Despite the setback in the Coral Sea, Japanese forces have so far been able to be satisfied: 340,000 Allied soldiers had been captured, and the Allied fleets had lost eight battleships, two aircraft carriers, seven cruisers and numerous smaller warships.
In the Battle of Midway, in which Yamamoto assumed that the U.S. Navy had only two carriers left – which he also believed to be in the South Pacific – he believed he could challenge the remaining U.S. Pacific Fleet to a decisive battle. But the US fleet was informed in detail about the enemy’s plans thanks to its radio reconnaissance. In airstrikes by aircraft of three US carriers, the Japanese Navy lost four aircraft carriers and 200 aircraft with particularly experienced pilots and pilot trainers. Their fleet had been so badly weakened that Japanese superiority was lost in the sea-air war. The battle “is rightly considered the turning point of war in the Pacific Ocean.”
After the construction of an airfield on Guadalcanal, Japan could have threatened Allied shipping traffic between the US and Australia. The U.S. Navy deployed its only intact Marine Infantry Division (USMC) in August 1942 to capture the airfield, which quickly succeeded. The Japanese stubbornly tried to retake the island. Only after months of fighting did the Allies finally succeed in asserting themselves on the island (→ Battle of Guadalcanal). This success marked another turning point in favor of the U.S., which now not only owned more warships and aircraft, but was also tactically superior.
Very fierce fighting took place from late 1942 to mid-1944 in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Islands and the Mariana Islands. A successful tactical tool was “island hopping”, in which the Americans bypassed the strong Japanese bases, for example, the important Rabaul with its port and airfields, and fought their way closer to the Japanese main island of Honshū island by island.
At the beginning of 1943, the Americans succeeded in decrypting Japanese radio codes. This also increased the success of the U.S. submarines, whose steadily increasing successes played a significant role in the victory over Japan.
They torpedoed about a third of 686 Japanese warships. The Japanese Navy failed to develop an effective protection system for its transport shipping throughout the war. This was due both to the underestimation of submarine danger in Japanese military doctrine and to Japan’s great technological inferiority in the field of radar and underwater sound detection. Above all, the resulting shortage of fuel made it necessary to station naval units far outside the main combat areas, near fuel sources, which severely limited the tactical and strategic options of the Japanese fleet.
In April 1943, the Americans managed to shoot down five escort aircraft from Guadalcanal to Yamamoto’s plane, which was on an inspection flight. Admiral Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Navy, was killed in the crash of his plane into the jungle. The loss of this leader and identification figure was a severe blow to the Japanese public (→ Operation Vengeance).
In November 1943, shortly before the meeting with Stalin in Tehran, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo that the war against Japan, as well as the war against Germany, should end with unconditional surrender. Chiang Kai-shek was thus recognized not only as the representative of China, but also as the head of state of a great power.
In 1944, the success of the US task forces began, which surprisingly appeared off the coast of Japan with fast carrier raids and attacked targets of all kinds almost at will. The Japanese responded with the use of kamikaze planes and manned Kaiten torpedoes. The high losses of US warships expected by the Japanese did not materialize.
In the Battle of Saipan, which began in mid-June 1944, combined with the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese lost almost all the aircraft used, including crews and three aircraft carriers. The loss of Saipan triggered a political earthquake in Japan: the government of General Tojo had to resign and was replaced by a cabinet under General Koiso Kuniaki, who immediately lowered the age of conscription to 17 years.
From the end of October to the beginning of November 1944, during the landings on Leyte (Philippines), the naval and air battle took place in the Gulf of Leyte. Japan deployed most of its fleet, making the Battle of Leyte the largest naval battle of World War II. The Japanese lost almost all of their remaining naval force with four aircraft carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers and nine destroyers.
Only after the conquest of the Mariana Islands in the summer of 1944 was Japan within the radius of action of the new Boeing B-29 of the USAAF. The U.S. Air Force went on nightly carpet bombing from a relatively low altitude on the predominantly wooden Japanese cities, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. In the largest attack of its kind, about 85,000 people died in Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945, more than in any other air raid in World War II and almost as many as from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Further air raids destroyed numerous major Japanese cities by the end of the war.
During Operation Hailstone on February 17, 1944, the important Japanese naval base Truk on the Caroline Islands was attacked. Twelve torpedo bombers of the US carrier Enterprise were able to attack the Japanese ships lying in the lagoon during the first radar-based night attack. Despite the fierce defensive fire, they were only able to shoot down a US aircraft. With losses of over 200,000 GRT and severe damage to the facilities, this attack is also known as the Pearl Harbor of the Japanese.
The reconquest of the Philippines proved to be a long and loss-making, six-month campaign (October 1944–March 1945). The US losses, 8.000 men, were offset by disproportionately higher Japanese losses, as was usually the case in the Pacific War: 190,000 Japanese fell on the island of Luzon alone.
During the fighting on the Japanese islands of Iwojima and Okinawa, US ships were attacked by a large number of kamikaze planes. U.S. forces lost nearly 7,300 Marines and about 5,000 sailors and pilots. 36 ships of the US Navy sank, and nearly 400 aircraft were destroyed. The Japanese lost 113,000 soldiers and with the kamikaze machines around 7,800 aircraft.
After the fighting on Iwojima and Okinawa, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, with a B-29 bomber launched from Tinian. Shortly thereafter, on August 9, the second was ignited over Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, 70,000–80,000 people were immediately dead, in Nagasaki about 20,000.
The Soviet Union stood by its commitment made at the Yalta Conference to start the war in Europe in the Far East 90 days after the end of the war and to attack Japan and its allies. The Red Army complied with this to the day (8 August), after the neutrality pact with Japan had already been terminated in April 1945. Operation August Storm occupied Manchuria. The conquered territory was returned to the Republic of China by the Soviet Union in 1946 in accordance with the Allied war objectives (Cairo Declaration).
A few days later, on August 15, 1945, the Japanese Tennō announced in a radio address (Gyokuon-hōsō) the surrender of Japan, which was signed on September 2 in Tokyo Bay on the USS Missouri.
The occupation of Japan’s main islands was carried out solely by U.S. troops, while the other powers involved (Britain, the Soviet Union, and China) were involved in the occupation of the former Japanese outer territories.
The state of war between Japan and the Allies formally ended on April 28, 1952, with the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, but without the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union and India.
Strategic aspects
The strategy historian Colin Gray interprets the Second World War, with its operations on three continents by land, sea and air, as a complex event permeated by an “elegant simplicity in its course and structure”. According to Gray, the two main theatres of war, the Eastern Front and the Pacific region, were fundamentally independent of each other. However, important events such as the German declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor often established war-critical connections. What they had in common was above all that both campaigns were “huge siege operations”.In addition, Gray classifies The Second World War as a war of attrition, despite an increased combined combat command compared to the First World War, such as the Blitzkrieg.
Aerial warfare
When Poland was invaded, the Luftwaffe had air supremacy, as the Polish Air Force, with its largely obsolete aircraft, could offer little resistance. The air raids on Warsaw in September 1939 took place mainly on civilian targets. After the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Luftwaffe completely destroyed the old town on May 14, 1940, during the bombing of Rotterdam.
In the first months of the Battle of Britain, the German attacks were directed exclusively against military targets such as air bases, naval bases and the facilities of the chain-home radar chain. However, the units of the British Fighter Command were able to assert air superiority over the attackers. The air battle became more radical when the Luftwaffe launched a first attack on London on August 24, 1940, and Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin in retaliation. By the end of the year, around 14,000 people had died in London.
On November 14, 1940, the Luftwaffe carried out a heavy air raid on Coventry. At least 568 people were killed. In addition to vehicle and engine plants, thousands of homes were hit and the medieval St. Michael’s Cathedral was destroyed. National Socialist propaganda invented the term “coventrianism” for carpet bombing. From May 1940, the Royal Air Force attacked German cities (e.g. Munich Gladbach) and industrial plants such as the Deurag-Nerag refinery (→ air raids on Hanover). After the Luftwaffe aborted the Battle of Britain in early 1941 and moved much of its bombers and fighter planes to the east because of the planned attack on the Soviet Union, the RAF flew more night raids on major German cities.
During the air raid on Belgrade on April 6, 1941, the city, which could only be weakly defended, was largely destroyed by the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe played an important role in the German offensive against the Soviet Union, but could not decide either the Battle of Moscow or Stalingrad for the German side. German bombers and fighters were mostly only used for close air support of the army troops. The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) carried out the first bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942; from August 1942, the 8th Air Fleet of the USAAF began its own air raids in Europe.
Since the bombing raids with a few machines had high loss rates and mostly missed their target, the RAF proceeded from spring 1942, to send large groups of bombers to Germany in order to destroy cities on a large scale. On February 14, 1942, the British Air Ministry issued the “Area Bombing Directive”, which called for area attacks on civilian targets (inner city, residential areas and others). In it, the new Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command Arthur Harris was told that he could now use his forces without any restriction: “You are accordingly authorized to use your forces without restriction […]”.
In addition, Harris was informed that the operations should focus on the morale of the enemy civilian population – especially those of the industrial workers: “It has been decided that the primary objective of your operations should be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular the industrial workers”. The aim of moral bombing was not only to destroy industrial plants, but above all to weaken the population’s will to resist. In addition, the Dehousing Paper, written six weeks later, set out the strategic goals of the British air war against Germany.
The implementation of these goals began in 1942 with the air raids on Lübeck at the end of March and Rostock at the end of April. The first “thousand bomber attack” was directed against Cologne at the end of May (Operation Millennium), followed by numerous attacks on cities in the Ruhr area. In January 1943, Bomber Command flew the first major attack on Berlin. Here, for the first time, Scout planes dropped target marking bombs.
At the end of the same month, the USAAF also attacked submarine shipyards in Wilhelmshaven for the first time. In March 1943, the German armaments center Essen was attacked by the RAF and the Krupp cast steel factory was badly hit, which delayed the production of the Tiger and Panther tanks, which led to a relocation of the Zitadel company near Kursk. Goering withdrew more and more fighter squadrons from the Eastern Front for the protection of German cities.
The negative effects on the course of the war in the East were probably much greater than the shootings that the fighters were able to inflict on the Allied bombers. In the spring of 1943, the losses of the Allied bomber fleets became worrying. Not even a fifth of the RAF crews survived a cycle of 30 missions. The 8th U.S. Air Fleet lost so many aircraft to shoot-downs that this year it was no longer able to produce the air superiority necessary for the success of an invasion of Western Europe.
In August 1943, Hamburg was destroyed in Operation Gomorrah, in which an estimated 34,000 people lost their lives in the firestorm. The USAAF focused its daytime strikes mainly on industrial targets, while RAF bombers bombed the cities at night. The AMERICAN bomber units initially had considerable losses, for example in the attacks against Schweinfurt and Essen. When, from the spring of 1944, long-range fighters (P-38, P-47 and P-51) increasingly accompanied the bombers of the USAAF, the number of losses fell significantly. With the massive air raids, the Allies also hoped to provoke increased resistance against the Nazi regime and thus shorten the war.
In the course of 1944, Allied air superiority increased to such an extent that bombers flew into the Territory of the Reich almost daily. During the Big Week in February 1944, selected targets of the German armaments industry were attacked with 6,000 bombers by the RAF and USAAF. When, from May 1944, the refineries and hydrogenation plants, which were important for the war, including the Leunawerke, were increasingly bombed, the fuel supply to the army and in particular to the Luftwaffe was significantly impaired.
With the subsequent loss of 90% of German gasoline production, the war was also “lost in terms of production” for the German Reich, according to Armaments Minister Albert Speer. The air raid on Ploiești on August 19, 1944, destroyed another important source of fuel.
The heavy air raids on Dresden from February 13 to 15, 1945 killed between 22,700 and 25,000 people. To this day, they are the subject of controversial considerations between military necessity or breach of the international law of war at that time. At the same time, by the end of March 1945, smaller towns such as Pforzheim, Swinemünde, Würzburg, Hanau, Hildesheim, Wesel and Paderborn were still extensively destroyed. Around 600,000 Germans and 60,595 Britons died in the bombing war. Of RAF Bomber Command’s 125,000 volunteers, more than 55,000 have lost their lives, more than in any other British weapon.
With the two new developments of the V1 cruise missile and the V2 ballistic missile, the National Socialist leadership hoped for a “miracle weapon”. Since both had only a low accuracy, they were unsuitable for the targeted destruction of military targets.
Of the approximately 7500 V1s launched against England from June 1944, more than half were shot down by the British anti-aircraft, which was able to use the radar proximity fuze newly developed in the USA, as well as the fighter aircraft. But in the German population, the hope of a turn to the “final victory” could be awakened or kept awake again, for example in the whispering propaganda: “There is still something to come! That’s not all.” Its main function was to terrorize the British civilian population. By March 1945, about 3200 A4 missiles had been fired, mainly at London and later at the port of Antwerp.
In the Pacific War against Japan, after unsuccessful precision attacks from high altitude, the USAAF switched to carpet bombing from relatively low altitude on Japanese cities. The U.S. airstrikes on Tokyo in February and March 1945 almost completely destroyed the city, which consisted mostly of wooden houses, killing over 100,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the bombardments of other major cities. The final point was the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. On the one hand, they were supposed to force Japan to surrender militarily and, on the other hand, to send a political signal of military strength in the emerging bloc confrontation.
Atlantic and Submarine War
With the sinking of the British steamer Athenia on September 3, 1939, the German submarine war in the Atlantic began. Planned as a propaganda strike by Rear Admiral Karl Dönitz, Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien managed to enter the bay of Scapa Flow with U 47 on October 14, 1939, and sink the battleship Royal Oak of the British Navy at the main base of the Home Fleet, killing over 800 men.
While until the middle of 1940 mainly actions by individual submarines took place, after the conquest of France from five submarine bases (initially provisional, later with massive bunkers) on the Atlantic coast, submarines were able to reach the areas of operation in the North Atlantic and off the English Channel much faster. The Allied convoys were only weakly secured due to a lack of escorts. In addition, the submarine commanders used the new tactic of a nighttime surface attack, which rendered the Allied ASDIC sonar devices, which only located underwater targets, ineffective.
The subsequent sinkings by German U-boats were exploited by National Socialist propaganda; many commanders were stylized as heroes and decorated with medals. In 1940 and 1941, the Allies each lost 4.4 million GRT of ship space, compared to only 1.2 and 2 million GRT of new buildings.
In order to increase the pressure on the British supply transports and to support the submarine war, a squadron left Gotenhafen in May 1941 for the Atlantic. It consisted of the newly commissioned battleship Bismarck, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which was also only in service for a few months, and some destroyers. The action, code-named Operation Rheinübung, led to the sinking of the British battlecruiser HMS Hood on May 24, 1941 and ended three days later with the sinking of the Bismarck.
After Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, Vice Admiral Dönitz sent long-range submarines to the east coast of the United States (Operation Paukenschlag), where they arrived in the first days of January 1942. The initially poorly organized US coastal defense was helpless in the face of the attacks on merchant shipping. As defenses increased in the spring, submarine commanders moved to the Caribbean and the South Atlantic.
After torpedoing six Brazilian merchant ships there, killing nearly 1,000 sailors and passengers, Brazil was the only South American state to declare war on the German Reich on August 22, 1942, and sent an expeditionary force to Italy in 1944.
Other German boats operated in packs in the North Atlantic at the same time and were thus able to maintain the pressure on the convoys. This year there were several major convoy battles. In the autumn of the same year, the success of the submarines increased even further, as many Allied escorts were deployed to secure the transports to North Africa (material for Operation Torch). In 1942, 8.2 million GRT of Allied ship space were sunk; 7.2 million GRT were newly built (see below).
At the end of 1942, British cryptanalysts in Bletchley Park near London succeeded in breaking the radio traffic of the German submarines encrypted with the help of ENIGMA again. By deciphering German radio traffic, underwater sound detection from ships and radar detection from aircraft, a catastrophic situation arose for the German submarines from 1943 onwards.
In May 1943, the Allies were able to take full advantage of the improvement of the technical equipment of the escort ships through radar, ASDIC sonar devices, automatic radio dispatchers (huff-duff) and hedgehog grenade launchers, as well as their air superiority by means of escort aircraft carriers, so that 43 German submarines were sunk that month. Grand Admiral Dönitz then temporarily suspended the submarine war on May 20. “Thus, a decisive turn in favor of the Allies also occurred in the naval war.”
After the Allied landings in Normandy at the beginning of June 1944, the German submarine bases on the French Atlantic coast were soon partially lost; some could be defended as cut-off fortresses until the end of the war (including Lorient, St. Nazaire and La Rochelle). The submarines were pushed back into the North and Baltic Seas as well as Norwegian coastal waters or operated more frequently off the British east coast.
The then most modern type XXI submarine was no longer used until the end of the war. When the imminent surrender of the Wehrmacht became known, Operation Rainbow was launched on May 4, 1945: Although Dönitz’s order on that day was to hand over all ships, most of the submarines were sunk by their crews themselves. The remaining boats mostly called at British or US ports after May 8.
| Year | Lossd. Submarines | Balance sheet of the Allies (new buildings – sunken tonnage) |
|---|---|---|
| 1939 | 9 | − 478,000 GRT |
| 1940 | 21 | − 3,188,000 GRT |
| 1941 | 34 | − 2,414,000 GRT |
| 1942 | 88 | − 1,063,000 GRT |
| 1943 | 225 | + 10,974,000 GRT |
| 1944 | 247 | + 11,927,000 GRT |
| 1945 | 132 | + 3,376,000 GRT |
| Total | 782 | + 19,134,000 GRT |
Deliveries of war material to the Soviet Union
| Persian Golf | Pacific Ocean | North Atlantic | Black Sea | Soviet Arctic | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1941 | 13.502 | 139.299 | 153.977 | – | – | 360.778 |
| 1942 | 705.259 | 734,02o | 949.711 | – | 64.107 | 2.453.097 |
| 1943 | 1.606.979 | 2.388.577 | 681.043 | – | 117.946 | 4.794.545 |
| 1944 | 1.788.864 | 2.848.181 | 1.452.775 | – | 127.802 | 6.217.622 |
| 1945 | 44.513 | 2.079.320 | 726.725 | 680.723 | 142.538 | 3.673.819 |
| Sum | 4.159.117 | 8.243.397 | 3.694.231 | 680.723 | 452.393 | 17.499.861 |
| Percent | 23,8% | 47,1% | 22,7% | 3,9% | 2,5% | 100% |
Political aspects
War crime
In the course of the war, numerous war crimes against Jews, Sinti and Roma and Eastern Europeans were committed by German troops according to appropriate orders. During the Leningrad blockade, more than a million people starved to death. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war died in German collection camps. No preparations had been made for their subsistence accommodation and supplies, although the High Command of the Wehrmacht had already expected two to three million Soviet prisoners of war in March 1941 for the weeks after the attack, the summer and autumn of 1941. The Wehrmacht starved them to death out of indifference or purposefully; they died of disease, ill-treatment, forced labor or were murdered.
Axis and Allied troops carried out rape in most of the countries affected by the war. In the Wehrmacht, 5349 soldiers were convicted of sex crimes. How large the number of rapes actually committed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht was cannot be seriously estimated due to the lack of interest of the Wehrmacht leadership in prosecutions and the “dry source situation”.
Also, the extent of the sexual assaults by soldiers of the Red Army during their advance on German territory can only be speculated, since there are no approximate findings about it. Statistician Gerhard Reichling estimates that 1.9 million German women and girls were raped by Red Army men during the advance to Berlin, 1.4 million of them in the former eastern territories, during their flight and expulsion, and 500,000 in the Soviet occupation zone. Historians such as Norman Naimark assume tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands and possibly up to two million victims.
Catherine Merridale estimates the victims of rape by members of the Red Army at “ten, most likely even hundreds of thousands of German women and girls”.So far, there is no sufficient basis for estimating the number of German women who were raped by soldiers of the Western Allies.
Japan acted with great brutality against the Chinese in particular. This resulted in war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers in the Republic of China (Nanking massacre) as well as cruel medical experiments on prisoners. According to Chinese figures, between five and ten million Chinese civilians were killed. The bombing of Shanghai in 1937 was the prelude to the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia. The campaign cost the lives of a total of about 20 million people by 1945.
Unit 731 carried out cruel experiments on prisoners in camps; Japanese human experiments with biological pathogens on Chinese have become known. From 1932 to 1945, there were rapes of women and girls by Japanese soldiers in occupied territories. The exact number of rapes was never determined. Only in a few cases, such as the mass rapes during the Nanking massacre, are there more detailed investigations. The raped women and girls were often killed after the rape.
There was no prosecution by the Japanese military judiciary. Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese army deported an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 girls and women, mostly between the ages of 14 and 25, to military brothels as “comfort women” (ian-fu). About 100,000 of them came from the Japanese colony of Korea. In addition, there were girls and women from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia and also from Japan.
The women and girls had to serve about 30 to 40 soldiers every day. By the end of the war, about 70 percent of these women had died of disease, torture or starvation. In the last weeks of the war, thousands of the “comfort women” were murdered. The total number of civilians killed by the Japanese in connection with their warlike habitat policy is estimated at six to more than 14 million people.
After the end of the Second World War, 24 Germans were indicted in the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals, twelve of them sentenced to death by hanging, two were acquitted. In twelve subsequent trials, 185 people from the National Socialist leadership, doctors, lawyers and leading persons from the economy and officers from the High Command of the Wehrmacht were indicted, 24 of them sentenced to death by hanging (twelve of which were mitigated in prison sentences), 35 were acquitted. For the first time in history, politicians, military officers and other leaders had to answer personally for planning and waging a war of aggression and for crimes against humanity.
Criticized in the post-war period by many German politicians as victor’s justice, these trials are now regarded as the basis for modern international criminal law. In a further 745 war crimes trials, including in Hamburg, Dachau and Rastatt, at least 677 death sentences were pronounced, of which 212 were commuted to prison sentences. The majority of war criminals in the SS and Wehrmacht were never brought to justice.
Major Japanese war criminals were tried in the Tokyo trials by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. These trials ended with seven death sentences, 16 life sentences and two long prison sentences. In other trials, 984 death sentences were handed down and executed in 920 cases, 3716 people were sentenced to prison and 1000 were found not guilty.
Mass murders in the German sphere of influence
The disenfranchisement and persecution of the Jewish minority was an intrinsic part of National Socialist policy. In coincide with the expansion of the war through the invasion of the Soviet Union, the attitude towards the minority towards the policy of annihilation became radicalized. In Wehrmacht-occupied areas in Eastern Europe, Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD, police reserve units and Wehrmacht units murdered thousands of Jews under the pretext of fighting partisans. On December 18, 1941, Himmler noted in his service calendar that Hitler, at his request, had confirmed and ordered the previous actions of the Einsatzgruppen: “To exterminate the Jewish question / to exterminate as partisans.”
The “Commissar Order” of June 6, 1941, prompted Wehrmacht units and Einsatzgruppen to kill about 5,000 Red Army prisoners of war with actual or assumed political function. In order from Heydrich to the Einsatzgruppen (July 17, 1941), Jews were automatically equated with political commissars. By December 1941, about half a million people had been murdered by Einsatzgruppen and soldiers of the Wehrmacht in accordance with partisan and commissar orders, almost 99 percent of whom were Jews.
In many places, Wehrmacht units provided logistical support to the Einsatzgruppen. Even before the beginning of the campaign in the East, there were instructions calling for “ruthless and energetic crackdown, especially against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs and Jews.”The reality of the war went even further, when in the rear army areas entire villages were often burned down and all inhabitants were ruthlessly shot if they were only suspected of having provided shelter and food for partisans, while the partisans themselves had disappeared back into forests in time.
At the end of 1941/beginning of 1942, six extermination camps were set up in occupied Poland (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Kulmhof and for the “Aktion Reinhardt” Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka).In Birkenau (Auschwitz II), a new killing agent was used, which had already been tested on a smaller scale by the doctors in the euthanasia program: crystallized hydrocyanic acid (Zyklon B). By the end of 1942, out of 2.3 million Jews in the General Government, there were no longer 300,000 alive. In some countries (for example, Denmark, where Danish Jews were rescued), the government and/or the population resisted the deportation and murder of their Jewish fellow citizens.
About 200,000 Germans, most of them members of the Einsatzgruppen and other SS formations, were involved in the mass murders. By the summer of 1943 at the latest, the vast majority of Germans had at least expected that the Jews living in nazi domination would be killed. Many were aware of mass murders in Eastern Europe.
At least 13 million (probably about 15 million) civilians were murdered by Einsatzgruppen, SS members, Ordnungspolizei, Waffen-SS soldiers, Wehrmacht and allied troops of the Axis powers, such as the Croatian Ustasha.Most of the mass murders took place in the back of the Eastern Front on Soviet territory and in eastern Poland (at least twelve million).
Of the approximately 15 million civilians murdered in Europe, more than 6.2 million were of Jewish descent, as well as at least 220,000 Sinti and Roma, about 275,000 victims of “euthanasia” as well as homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons. Doctors were also involved in the murder of the mentally ill. In the General Government, in the occupied Soviet territories, in Yugoslavia and in France, countless partisans were not treated according to the law of war. In addition, there were numerous hostage shootings in all the occupied countries.
The liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945, has been the official “Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism” in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1996; this date has also been commemorated internationally since 2005. In the USA, there have been the Days of Remembrance since 1980, which last a week. In Israel, Yom haSho’a (“Day of Remembrance of Shoah and Heroism”) is a serious national holiday.
| Poland | SU | Hungary | Romanian. | Lit. | Dtld. | CSR | NL | Frank. | Lett. | Yugo. | Aus. | Greek. | Belg. | Ital. | Lux. | Total |
| 2900 | 1300 | 564 | 270 | 220 | 165 | 150 | 102 | 78 | 67 | 66 | 65 | 60 | 28 | 7 | 1 | 6043 |
Ian Kershaw wrote in To Hell and Back in 2015 that about 5.5 million Jews died in the course of the NSDAP’s anti-Semitic extermination policy after the escape routes to the USA or Palestine were blocked as a result of the World War.
Civilian population during the Second World War
Of all the states involved, the Soviet Union suffered the most civilian casualties. The example of Leningrad illustrates the extent of the millions of times starvation: After the city was surrounded by German troops at the beginning of September 1941, the population could no longer be adequately supplied. During the Leningrad blockade, about 470,000 people had already died by the summer of 1942.
The starving people aged so quickly that even close relatives no longer recognized them. First pigeons and seagulls were consumed, then cats and dogs. (Not even Pavlov’s famous test dogs at the Institute of Physiology were spared.) Estimates of the total number of victims range from 700,000 to 1,100,000 people at the end of the blockade on January 27, 1944.
In other countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe occupied by German troops (Poland, Serbia, Greece), the local population also had to pay a very high blood toll, because there, especially in Poland, “a war of annihilation was waged” In addition, there were hostage shootings in Serbia and Greece as part of the actual or alleged guerrilla fighting.
In the occupied countries of northern and western Europe (Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, northern and western France, British Channel Islands), the German Reich was keen to present itself as a “correct occupying power” for political and military reasons, as it ensured the discipline of the troops and saved resources. But even there, people who were classified as “racially inferior” and all those who the occupation regime considered resistant were never treated “correctly”.
Since no soldier in the world was paid as lavishly as the German one during the Second World War, they “literally bought the countries of Europe empty”. They sent millions and millions of field mail parcels from the front to their homeland. “Shoes from North Africa, from France velvet and silk, liqueur and coffee, tobacco from Greece, honey and bacon from Russia, herring en masse from Norway.” The addressees were mainly women. In the occupied part of France, the German soldiers were nicknamed “doryphores” (“Colorado beetles”), who eat everything bare.
The purchasing power of the German soldiers was strengthened by the fact that the favorable exchange rate for the Reichsmark was fixed in Berlin. “Now you get to buy all sorts of things for our money again,” wrote one soldier. The occupying power transported food, consumer goods and industrial products to Germany “in order to feed the Germans in the Reich and keep them happy.” As a result, prices rose in the countries occupied German; little by little, almost everything was rationed. The black market flourished. Individual divisions and people earned well from the Germans. Renault was able to increase its turnover fivefold by 1942 through the Wehrmacht’s motorization program. Many construction companies also made sales and profits on a large scale by building barracks, roads, airfields and other things for the occupying power.
For the German population, the war initially had no direct negative consequences. Although in the further course of almost all goods for daily use were rationed with ration cards or vouchers, there was no shortage of goods in the first years of the war. This was mainly due to the fact that many products and raw materials from the occupied countries were usually transferred to the territory of the Reich to the detriment of the local population.
The beneficiaries included 95 percent of Germans. They did not perceive National Socialism as a system of lack of freedom and terror, but as a regime of social warmth, as a kind of “feel-good dictatorship.”This also included the fact that the sport continued after a short break at the beginning of the war and, for example, the German football championship 1943/44 could take place completely. It was not until late 1944 that most of the sport had to be canceled. There were immediate effects for the German civilian population due to the increasing Allied air raids on German cities from the beginning of 1942 and the “totalization” of warfare the following year.
The manpower of the men conscripted to the Wehrmacht was partially replaced by prisoners of war and forced laborers from Western and Eastern Europe. From April to December 1942 alone, about 1.3 million civilian workers, half men and half women with an average age of about 20 years, were brought to Germany. In addition, there were 450,000 Soviet prisoners of war in 1942. Most of these civilian workers and prisoners of war were employed in industry.
When more and more armaments workers were conscripted for military service since late autumn, the German war economy lacked 1.5 million workers in the first half of 1943, which could not be compensated for by the increased service obligation of women. Between the beginning of 1943 and the end of the war, another 2.5 million civilian workers and prisoners of war were brought to Germany.
In August 1944, more than seven million “foreign workers” were working in Germany, mostly against their will and under increasingly brutal conditions. At the beginning of 1945, a quarter of all employees in the German economy were of foreign origin. Only through their use and that of prisoners of war was it possible for the German Reich to continue the war, which without it would have been lost by the spring of 1942 at the latest. The deployment of foreigners in agriculture also made it possible to keep the supply situation of the German population at a high level until the last phase of the war, which was decisive for the loyalty of the population to the regime.
From October 1944, the Volkssturm, i.e. “all men capable of weapons aged 16 to 60”, was called up to serve at the front. The cultural scene was maintained throughout the war, especially in films such as “Die Feuerzangenbowle” served to distract and distract from everyday war life. But war fatigue, overwork and exhaustion, as well as the feeling that one was helplessly exposed to events, made the aversion to the Nazi regime stronger in the autumn of 1944.
Hitler himself also came under criticism for conjuring up such suffering. An outward sign of this was that the greeting “Heil Hitler” has now disappeared. For the civilian population in the east of the empire, the effects of the war had their climax with the invasion and occupation by the Red Army. In the West, the invasion of British and American troops was mostly noted with relief by the German population.
War propaganda and propaganda war
Leaflets
During World War II, about 20 billion war leaflets were dropped behind enemy lines in Europe, and it can be assumed that the majority of the inhabitants of the countries involved in the war were reached by the leaflet contents.
German propaganda
Even before the Second World War, propaganda companies had been set up in the Wehrmacht to prepare the German population positively for the events of the war in the spirit of the Nazi regime. War reporting by radio and newsreel served information, Nazi propaganda and other purposes (e.g. belief in the final victory; see also propaganda film). Before the main film, the Deutsche Wochenschau reported positively on the progress of the war. Leni Riefenstahl followed the troops in Poland with a “special film troupe”. Misery and suffering, dying and death were largely ignored in all media. The Volksgenossen read the same newspapers, saw the same newsreels, heard the same Wehrmacht reports. It was a mixture of documentation and entertainment; also the real war pictures conveyed false war pictures.
During the war, Goebbels conjured up the imminent final victory in the synchronized media and glorified the successes of the Wehrmacht by presenting future positions of the German army as already achieved. He also predicted the capture of cities that were actually taken a few days later. Furthermore, Goebbels mocked opponents of Germany: he characterized Winston Churchill, for example, as a “drunkard” and thus emulated Hitler; in public speeches, he liked to repeat his characterizations of Churchill as a “gossiper” or “mendacious subject” or “lazy of the first order.”
The Nazi leadership justified the campaign against the Soviet Union with the “defense of the West against Bolshevism” and against the “Jewish-Bolshevik subhumans.” The soldiers of the (new) Eastern Front were told of the attack in the early morning of June 22 in a proclamation read by officers as “the securing of Europe and thus the salvation of all”. In 1942, the SS had the brochure Der Untermensch published, which depicted the Russians as racially inferior with inflammatory articles and grimacing images.
The foreign illustrated Signal was published from 1940 to 1945, reached a maximum circulation of 2.5 million copies and was temporarily printed in 20 languages. It had eight color pages and promoted a “New Order” in Europe with the alleged aim of defending against Bolshevism. The Pariser Zeitung (1941–1944), with a German and a French edition, published articles by well-known French personalities such as Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Georges Oltramare, Lucien Rebatet and tried to spread pro-German sympathies primarily through the cultural charisma of Germany. In addition, there were many other publications that spread the German perspective abroad.
In August 1942, Goebbels expressed in a propaganda order the concern “that the German people are currently swaying in large circles in the belief that the military events in the East […] would lead to an early end to the war”.Only after the defeat in Stalingrad (end of January 1943) can one speak of a “trough of the mood” in the German population.
On February 18, 1943, Goebbels called on the German population to go to total war in the Sports Palace speech. However, despite initially positive reactions from the population, its purpose of mobilizing human and material resources was limited; their effect quickly diminished. In the further course, the Nazi propaganda demanded the will of the population to resist “until the final victory”, against the “Anglo-American bomb terror” and the “frenzied vindictiveness” of the Red Army more and more, the closer the Allies advanced to the borders of the Reich.
British and US propaganda
In Great Britain, too, propaganda was made against the opponent of the war. In 1940, in several famous speeches, including the “Blood-Sweat-and-Tears Speech” and its sequel (We Shall Fight on the Beaches), Churchill succeeded in winning the consent of the British people for war and resistance against Germany. Consequently, he also had the so-called peace offer, the “appeal to reason, also in England”, which Hitler addressed to Great Britain in his Reichstag speech of July 19, 1940, rejected within an hour.
After the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war in December 1941, the USA highlighted the double threat from the West and East, the danger of the two-front war from the US point of view, so to speak. In 1942 they published a magazine called Victory (analogous to the German Illustrated Signal).
Broadcasting propaganda
The Second World War began in Europe with a fake, allegedly Polish attack on the Gliwice channel on the evening of August 31, 1939. The German population was informed the next day hourly by radio special reports that the Leader of the Wehrmacht had ordered the invasion of Poland. Just as he had begun with a lie on the radio, he also ended with a lie on the radio: on May 1, 1945, in the evening, Dönitz announced Hitler’s death via the Hamburg Germany station. This had overtaken him “at the head of his troops”.
In Germany, since the beginning of the war, the Ordinance on Extraordinary Broadcasting Measures threatened the listening of foreign broadcasters with severe penalties. In Great Britain, on the other hand, listening to German stations was allowed. During the war, the number of propaganda broadcasts increased in all participating countries.
On the German side, British and American immigrants who sympathized with Nazi policies were hired to address Britons in English. The most famous presenter was “Axis Sally”, whose broadcasts were broadcast by the Großdeutscher Rundfunk. Goebbels also launched the foreign radio station “Germany Calling”, whose presenters, especially the Irish-American National Socialist William Joyce, became known under the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw”.
The American radio journalist Edward R. Murrow created a new form of broadcasting in 1940 by reporting live reports for CBS directly from London, which had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. His broadcast “This is London” captivated millions of listeners in the USA to the radio and helped to push back the isolationist mood in the USA.
In May 1942, the BBC broadcast for the first time credible reports on the murder of Polish Jews. Because listening to so-called enemy stations was strictly forbidden in Germany, almost no one who knew about it from the radio passed on his knowledge to others – if he did, he could even face the death penalty “in particularly serious cases”. The weekly reports in the “World Chronicle” by Jean Rudolf von Salis on the Swiss national broadcaster Beromünster were regarded by millions of listeners in Central Europe as an objective assessment of the political and military situation in Europe. What is certain is that the Nazi regime did not succeed in fully enforcing its view of things. In May 1942, the BBC broadcast credible reports of the murder of Polish Jews, which were rebroadcast a month later, on June 26.
The German Wehrmacht report was broadcast daily on Großdeutscher Rundfunk at noon before the following news. In addition, there were special reports about outstanding successes, which were introduced on the radio with fanfare. Wehrmacht reports also mentioned combat operations of the enemy forces, for example, the air raids of the Allies on war targets and cities in the territory of the Reich. They had an official character and were the main source for the commentary on the events of the war in the media.
According to archivist Erich Murawski in 1962, the Wehrmacht reports sent in 2080 are a mixture of sober military reporting and political propaganda and are therefore regarded by historians as a valuable and questionable secondary sources. It was reported in a concise form; more detailed and sometimes exaggerated when successes were to be reported.
They largely avoided direct false reports, operated with omissions, tendentious highlights, trivializations as well as with euphemisms and obfuscations. Current studies place greater emphasis on the propagandistic character of the Wehrmacht report. The German military historian Jörg Echternkamp calls the practice of presenting the “euphemistic ‘front straightening’ in the Wehrmacht report” in a series of propagandistic pronouncements that “conceal” the “true facts” of the course of the war.
During the war in East Asia, the Japanese increasingly relied on radio propaganda against the Americans from 1943 onwards by broadcasting the program “The Zero Hour” via Radio Tokyo. For the predominantly female moderators who spoke American with a Japanese accent, the term Tokyo Rose became commonplace in GI parlance.
Resistance against National Socialism
The majority of the German population was initially sceptical about the beginning of the war, but was then blinded by the subsequent victory announcements. For fear of punishment, few people dared to actively speak out against the war. Centers of civil resistance were the “White Rose” (1942/43), the “Kreisauer Kreis” (1940/44) and the “Red Chapel” (1933/42).
Although the Wehrmacht stood behind Hitler’s ideas in principle and supported his warfare, from 1943 some generals clearly saw the inevitable defeat in mind and therefore relied on an armistice to give the Wehrmacht and the German population time to regroup the army and reorganize the state. On July 20, 1944, some resisters carried out an assassination attempt on Hitler in the Führer’s headquarters “Wolfsschanze”.
However, the attempt to kill Hitler failed, as did the subsequent attempt at a coup d’état in Berlin (→ Operation Valkyrie). The assassins were executed. A few soldiers rejected the war for ideological reasons and tried to shorten it by sabotage measures. The vast majority continued to fight until the end. Numerous German soldiers and aid units (including the police reserve) took part in war crimes, which provoked or encouraged resistance from the population in the occupied territories.
In Denmark (→ Danish Resistance), the population perceived the German occupation as “nightmare pressure”, in the words of the king. In the Netherlands, the Germans disarmed the local police because they feared an uprising. The pro-German movement of Vidkun Quisling in Norway was not followed by a mass movement of the population, the majority rejected the German occupation. The sharpest forms of Western European resistance were in France, where the Resistance, also called Maquis (after the Mediterranean bush scrub “maquis”), fought against the German occupation.
Resistance movements were stronger in Southeastern and Eastern Europe: large partisan armies fought in the Soviet Union, Greece (→ ELAS), Albania and Yugoslavia (→ Marshal Tito). The Polish “Home Army” could only hope for little external support. From the constant petty war against the German occupiers, the partisans often emerged victorious. Towards the end of the war, larger areas could be liberated from the German occupiers, such as Yugoslavia, where Tito subsequently took power, or Greece, where the hegemony of ELAS collided with British interests and led to the Greek Civil War. In Albania, which had been under Italian occupation from 1939 to September 1943, German troops moved in.
International block formation
With the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan in 1936, the foundation stone was laid for the later Germany-Japan-Italy axis. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact, relations with Japan initially deteriorated, but because Japan hoped to gain access to the French, Dutch and British colonies in Asia, at the end of September 1940 it entered into the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy , to which five South-Eastern European states joined.
Japan took the initiative as early as June 1940; but it was only after Hitler realized that it would not be possible to militarily eliminate Britain through an invasion that Hitler was ready to conclude an alliance with Japan. With this, the three partners pledged to support each other in the event that one of the partners were to be attacked by a power “that is not currently involved in the European war or the Sino-Japanese conflict.” Since the treaty was “in no way intended to affect the political status that currently exists between the three contracting parties and Soviet Russia,” it became clear that the treaty was primarily intended to deter the United States from entering the war.
Britain was able to prevent a German invasion in the Battle of Britain in the autumn of 1940 and relied on economic and military support from the USA. In particular, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to make the USA the “arsenal of democracy” against National Socialist Germany for reasons of power politics and ideology.
Great Britain received 50 destroyers in 1941 to ward off German submarines as a result of the “Destroyer-for-Bases Agreement”. In August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt met on a British warship in Argentia Bay (Newfoundland) and proclaimed the Atlantic Charter: rejection of all territorial changes without the consent of the peoples concerned and the right of all peoples to the form of government under which they want to live. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. Germany and Italy then declared war on the USA without being contractually obliged to do so (see above). . The European and East Asian wars had become world wars.
Allied War Conferences
At the Arcadia Conference (December 1941/January 1942 in Washington), Churchill and Roosevelt agreed as the most important decision to eliminate the German danger first: “Germany first”. In Casablanca (January 1943) they agreed to first end the war in North Africa with the conquest of Tunisia in the summer of 1943 and then to continue in Sicily and southern Italy. The invasion of Western Europe was postponed to 1944. During the Quadrant Conference in Québec (August 1943), Operation Overlord (invasion of Normandy) was decided and General Frederick E. Morgan was commissioned to draw up a detailed plan. In Cairo, Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek agreed to continue the war in East Asia until Japan’s unconditional surrender.
At the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference (October 19 to November 1, 1943), Hull, Eden and Molotov coordinated further cooperation, discussed the USSR’s entry into the war against Japan, and formulated, among other things, the Moscow Declaration: Demilitarization, Denazification, Democratization and Decentralization of Germany. The subject of the Tehran Conference (28 November to 1 December 1943) was the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin on the further course of action in the European theatre of war in 1944 and the period after an Allied victory over Germany.
At Yalta (February 1945), Germany was divided into four occupation zones. Zones of influence were agreed for East Central Europe and the Balkans. Stalin promised that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan two months after the German capitulation. At the Potsdam Conference, the demarcation of borders in Europe and the German reparations, the administration of occupied Germany and the ongoing Pacific War were to be discussed.
Consequences of the Second World War and victims
Number of victims
It is estimated that over 65 million people were killed during World War II. More civilians were killed than soldiers in combat. The Most affected was the Soviet Union with about 27 million people killed, about half of them as soldiers, three million of whom died as German prisoners of war. The Soviet casualty figures include the approximately 650,000 soldiers killed in the Baltic states annexed by the USSR in 1939/40.
In principle, figures on the deaths of the World War are often methodologically uncertain estimates, which are given differently in the literature. The following table is based, unless given in separate references, on data from the tenth volume of the series Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweiten Weltkrieg 2008 published by the Military History Research Office. This does not take into account neutral states and colonies. The estimates presented are usually based on official data from the respective governments. The number of war deaths of the states mentioned in the table amounts to a total of about 66 million, including at least 59% civilians.
| Land | Soldiers | Civilians | Total |
| Australia | 30.000 | 30.000 | |
| Belgium | 10.000 | 50.000 | 60.000 |
| Brazil | 463 | 1.000 | 1.463 |
| Bulgaria | 32.000 | 32.000 | |
| Republic of China | 3.500.000 | 10.000.000 | 13.500.000 |
| Denmark | 500 | 1.500 | 2.000 |
| Germany | 5.318.000 | 1.170.000 | 6.488.000 |
| Finland | 89.000 | 2.700 | 91.700 |
| France | 210.000 | 150.000 | 360.000 |
| Greece | 20.000 | 160.000 | 180.000 |
| Great Britain | 270.825 | 62.000 | 332.825 |
| India | 24.338 | 3.000.000 | 3.024.338 |
| Italy | 240.000 | 60.000 | 300.000 |
| Japan | 2.060.000 | 1.700.000 | 3.760.000 |
| Yugoslavia | 410.000 | 1.280.000 | 1.690.000 |
| Canada | 42.042 | 1.148 | 43.190 |
| Luxembourg | 2.944 | 657 | 3.601 |
| Malta | 1.000 | 1.000 | |
| New Zealand | 10.000 | 10.000 | |
| Netherlands | 22.000 | 198.000 | 220.000 |
| Norway | 7.500 | 2.500 | 10.000 |
| Austria | 100.000 | 130.000 | 230.000 |
| Philippines | 57.000 | 943.000 | 1.000.000 |
| Poland | 300.000 | 5.700.000 | 6.000.000 |
| Romania | 378.000 | 378.000 | |
| Soviet Union | 13.000.000 | 14.000.000 | 27.000.000 |
| Spain | 4.500 | 4.500 | |
| South Africa | 9.000 | 9.000 | |
| Czechoslovakia | 20.000 | 70.000 | 90.000 |
| Hungary | 360.000 | 590.000 | 950.000 |
| UNITED STATES | 407.316 | 407.316 |
In total, 3.3 million of the 5.7 million Red Army prisoners of war have died, most of them starved to death, but also fallen victim to diseases, ill-treatment, shootings or imprisonment in a special camp. This means that almost 58% of Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity. The number of Western Allied prisoners of war killed in German custody was significantly lower.
Of the 1.8 million French soldiers who were taken prisoner of war by the Germans, almost 50,000 died, or 2.8%.Of the 3.1 million German prisoners of war in Soviet custody, 1.1 million (35%) perished. China, where the war began in mid-1937 with Japanese aggression, had the second highest death toll with about 14 million people killed in the war. But in India, too, more than two million civilians starved to death in 1943 and 1944, most of them in Bengal, after rice imports from Japanese-occupied Burma failed to materialize.
Among the many wounded must be counted numerous soldiers condemned as deserters, who were depressed or mentally ill and therefore unable to serve in the military, and yet were convicted in order to maintain the “morale of the troops”. This happened not only in Germany, but also in other states involved in the war.
There were many civilians killed by bombing major cities such as Chongqing, Warsaw, Coventry, London, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Tokyo, Dresden and the Ruhr area. Many civilians were killed in the battles for Stalingrad, Breslau, Königsberg, during the Leningrad blockade and the starvation of Kharkov. The sinking of the refugee ships Armenija, Wilhelm Gustloff, Goya, Steuben and Cap Arcona claimed tens of thousands of victims. In the harsh winter of 1944/45, in penal camps of the Soviet Union and in the violent expulsion of people after the war, countless people died (for example, Sudeten Germans as a result of the Beneš decrees).
Many people were unable to flee national Socialist rule because states (such as the USA or Switzerland) temporarily closed their borders and did not grant asylum to (including Jewish) refugees.
The two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki directly or indirectly killed more than 230,000 people by the end of 1945.
Prisoners of War and Forced Laborers
A total of 11 million members of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS were taken prisoners of war, 7.7 million of them on the side of the Western Powers and 3.3 million on the side of the USSR.
Between seven and eleven million people were used for forced labor under the Nazi regime almost everywhere in the German Reich and the occupied territories. In some cases, they worked in factories next to concentration camp prisoners under similarly inhumane conditions, and for the lesser part, the living conditions resembled those of working artisan and peasant families. The Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, who was appointed as the supreme responsible for them, was sentenced to death and executed in 1946 during the Nuremberg Trials. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were also obliged to do forced labor as part of the reparations, especially in the Soviet Union (until 1956), but also in Western Europe.
After the end of the war, there were 6.5–12 million people in Europe designated as “Displaced Persons”, the majority of whom were liberated prisoners of war, forced laborers from formerly occupied states and concentration camp prisoners. These were accommodated in so-called DP camps until their repatriation or reception in third countries.
Material damage and war costs
The material damage was also enormous. In Germany, about four million people lost their homes, and 400 million cubic meters of rubble had to be cleared away. In Cologne, where 750,000 people had lived before the war, there were only 40,000. The “rubble women” became a symbol of tidying up and reconstruction. The German Reich had territorial losses of 114,549 km², which corresponded to 24.3% of the territory of 1939. About 12 million Germans lost their homes. Two million homes were destroyed in France, three in Japan and six million in the Soviet Union. Almost half of the railway tracks were damaged: in Germany 34,000 km, in Japan 50,000 km, in France 37,000 km.
The later victorious powers assumed in the final protocol of Yalta that the German Reich had caused damage of 20 billion dollars in Europe. In terms of annual national product, the damage was 140 percent in Germany ($4.8 billion), 130 percent in France ($2.1 billion), 300 percent in Poland ($2 billion) and 250 percent in the USSR ($12.8 billion). The Soviet Union was therefore to receive reparations worth 10 billion dollars.
In 1942, Germany’s spending on warfare amounted to 140 billion. RM (equivalent today: EUR 582 billion). This was offset by only Reich revenues of 69 billion. RM (today: EUR 287 billion). The rest was financed by new bonds. The war costs of the German Reich (e.g. military salary for millions of soldiers, widows’ pensions and the production costs for armaments) amounted to a total of 156 billion dollars at the end of the war (for comparison: USA: 206 billion dollars, Great Britain: 78 billion dollars). Germany’s war costs (156 billion dollars) and its war damages (4.8 billion dollars) (see above) resulted in the gigantic sum of 160.8 billion dollars (corresponding to today’s purchasing power and inflation-adjusted: 2.3 trillion US dollars).
Aftermath
As a result of the Second World War, Germany, Italy and Japan withdrew from the circle of the major military powers. The Western European states of France, the Netherlands and Great Britain were weakened to such an extent that they had to give up their colonial empires in the decades following the end of the war. In their place, the USA and the Soviet Union took their place as new world powers and, due to nuclear armament, as so-called superpowers.
Europe
After the end of the Second World War in Europe, the victorious powers discussed the future of Europe and Germany in Potsdam in July and August 1945. The aim of the Potsdam decisions had already been hinted at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.
Germany was divided into four occupation zones; its eastern territories (Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia) were placed under the administration of Poland and the Soviet Union, subject to a final peace settlement. This gave Poland a new border in the west (Oder-Neisse line) and in the east.
The Sudetenland, which had been incorporated by Germany through the provisions of the Munich Agreement of 1938, fell back to Czechoslovakia, as the de facto annexation in the course of the “destruction of the rest of Czechoslovakia” by the German Reich was subsequently declared null and void. Austria was restored as a state – this had already been announced by the later victorious powers in the Moscow Declaration in 1943 – and also divided into four occupation zones until it became independent in 1955 with the Austrian State Treaty.
Due to the de facto reduction of Germany’s territory decided by the three main victorious powers, between 12 and 14 million Germans (Silesians, Sudeten Germans, East Prussians, Pomerania, East Saxony (Reichenau district), East Brandenburgers, Danube Swabians and Danzigers) were expelled from their ancestral homeland (→ flight and expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe 1945–1950). For a long time, the death toll was given as 2 million or even more. Recent research shows that this two million figure was calculated as a result of population balances, while secured personal data based on death reports leads to a number of around 500,000 victims.3.5 million Poles lost their homes due to the subsequent westward shift of Poland’s eastern border.
The German and Japanese war crimes were tried in several trials (for example, the Nuremberg Trials). The Stuttgart confession of guilt by some leading Protestant Christians about failures in the time of National Socialism in October 1945 remained a rare exception in the beginning denazification events forced by the Allies.
The mostly destroyed cities and the lack of food – especially the lack of raw materials and fertilizers – caused a life of poverty among the population. Because many men had fallen in the war or become prisoners of war, “rubble women” had to remove the rubble in the cities. However, the importance of these is now increasingly doubted by research.
Food was only available through food stamps or from their own cultivation, which is why city dwellers drove en masse to the countryside to exchange material goods for food. In addition, at that time, the world’s leading German companies lost important patents and trademarks. This situation only changed as a result of the global post-war boom that soon followed, which was often referred to in Germany as an economic miracle.
Against all odds and at an astonishing pace, a new Europe was formed, which was divided in itself, but whose parts soon rested on more solid foundations than would have been imaginable immediately after the end of the war. In the midst of the lasting physical and moral scars left by the World War, the possibility of a Europe that would be more stable and prosperous than people could have ever imagined opened up.
Asia and Pacific
Japan had to return the occupied Pacific islands to Australia and Great Britain; it continued to lose Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), southern Alaska, the Kuril Islands and the Japanese South Sea Mandate area with the Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands. The Allied occupation of Japan sent with the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, which restored Japan’s sovereignty. Some Japanese islands, including the Ryūkyū Islands, remained under American military administration until 1972. The Chinese Civil War flared up again in 1945 and led to the division of China into today’s People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) until 1949.
Establishment of the United Nations
With the establishment of the United Nations Organization (UN) at the San Francisco Conference and the entry into force of the UN Charter on October 24, 1945, an attempt was made to transform the informal war alliance of the anti-Hitler coalition into a permanent institution for the maintenance of world peace. The initiative for this was largely taken by the late US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
At the heart of the Charter was the creation of a system to enable the peaceful settlement of disputes and controlled intervention in the event of violations, as well as to promote international cooperation. A special role as guarantors of world peace was envisaged for the main victorious powers USA, Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and China, which received permanent seats and a veto right in the United Nations Security Council. On December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, on the basis of which other internationally binding human rights treaties were later established, including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of The Crime of Genocide.
Bloc Formation and the Cold War
World War II transitioned relatively seamlessly into the Cold War in both Europe and Asia. Already during the war there were differences between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, which were not put in the foreground in favor of the common goal. These differences were not solely the fault of the Soviet Union. The atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki triggered an arms race between the US and the USSR. Likewise, the great expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence on the West and the constant communist advance in East Asia were not only a result of World War II, but also a reason for the Cold War.
In a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, Winston Churchill used the image of the “Iron Curtain” for the first time publicly to describe the now divided Europe. From about 1947 there were increasing tensions between the former allies (Truman Doctrine, two-camp theory). While the Western powers promoted parliamentary democracy in their zones of influence, the Soviet Union established so-called people’s democracies in the states of Eastern Europe under the leadership of the Communists.
As a result, tensions intensified and led to irreconcilable opposition between the former allies, to the long-lasting division of Germany and Europe, and to the beginning of the Cold War. NATO was founded in 1949; In response to West German rearmament and the accession of the Federal Republic of Germany to NATO (1955), the Warsaw Pact followed as a counterpart to the so-called Eastern Bloc states. With the collapse of the Eastern European dictatorships in the course of the revolutions in 1989, German reunification and the restoration of the right of self-determination of the peoples of the former Soviet republics, which coincided with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, further aftermath of the Second World War was eliminated.
Further succession conflicts
Other succession conflicts that are directly or indirectly related to the Second World War were:
- the ongoing Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), ending with the victory of the Communists and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, as well as the subsequent Taiwan conflict
- the Indonesian War of Independence (1945–1949)
- the Iran Crisis (1945–1946)
- the Greek Civil War (1946–1949)
- the French Indochina War (1946–1954)
- the beginning of the Middle East conflict, which escalated for the first time after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 in the Palestine War (1948–1949)
- the conflict related to the division of India into the states of India and Pakistan after independence (1947) and the associated Kashmir conflict, which led to the first Indo-Pakistani War (1947–1949)
- the Korean War in divided Korea (1950–1953), which was fought for the first time with the participation of the UN.
These and other conflicts were on the one hand related to the incipient bloc confrontation as conflicts over spheres of influence in a redesigned world situation, on the other hand to the intensified decolonization.
In parts of Eastern Europe, such as the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine, underground actions against Sovietization and Stalinism led by nationalist organizations (Forest Brothers, OUN) continued until the early 1950s took place even before the end of the war. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, resistance to the established systems of Soviet communist character erupted in several popular uprisings suppressed by the Red Army (uprising of June 17, 1953, in the GDR, Hungarian popular uprising in 1956).
Refurbishment and reception
The enormous scale of the Second World War has been reflected in several languages. In German, for example, it is often referred to only as “the war”. Likewise, for the relatively long and prosperous period of peace that followed the war in the industrialized countries, the term postwar period emerged in German and other languages as a linguistic demarcation from the events of war, which was rarely applied to other wars. In addition, war-related terms from their language of origin have found their way into the languages of other former war participants, such as “Blitzkrieg”, “Morale bombing”, “Baedeker Blitz” or “Ketsu-gō”.
Some historians speak of a second Thirty Years’ War, by which they mean the period between 1914 and 1945, because the Second World War cannot be understood without the course and consequences of the First World War. The leadership of the Nazi state had done everything in its power to prevent a defeat like the one in 1918 by stabilizing the home front and radicalizing the warfare.
Stabbing legend, the dictated peace of Versailles and militant anti-Semitism had prepared the ground for the aggressive Nazi foreign policy for the reorganization of Europe over the interwar period. Both wars also had in common that the enemy had been “demonized” by enemy images and the border between soldiers and civilians had been blurred. On the other hand, there are also important differences: for example, the uniqueness of the Second World War, which lies in the breach of civilization of the Shoah, or the almost unhesitating use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians such as in Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. De Gaulle spoke for the first time in September 1941 in a radio address from London from “la nouvelle Guerre de Trente Ans”.
The scientific reappraisal of the Second World War was first undertaken by American historians. About 300 former German officers also worked for the “Historical Division” on the basis of their own experience and the surviving file material.
Their work was also influenced by numerous memoirs of prominent combatants. By 1961, about 216 war memoirs had been published in book form, which shaped the public image of the war in the 1950s. Man Stein’s (see above) first autobiography under the title Verlorene Siege (1955) reached a circulation of 30,000 copies by 1961. He ignored war crimes and the murders of European Jews, such as, for example, In a similar way General Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus or Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz in their biographies.
Related works about the Second World War
Radiophony
The radio was throughout the war a fundamental propaganda weapon. Under nazi occupation, millions of Europeans secretly listened to the BBC every day, whose programs in all languages kept hope alive. Winston Churchill galvanized Parliament, the British nation and the occupied peoples with radio speeches, and Charles de Gaulle, nicknamed “General Micro” by Vichy propaganda, was for a long time only a voice for many French.
London radio hosted the famous chronicles of Jean Oberlé, Maurice Schumann and Pierre Dac as part of the programs “Honneur et Patrie” and “Les Français parle aux Français”. The enormous audience gained by their enemy, the formidable ultra-collaborationist orator Philippe Henriot, forced the Resistance to execute the latter (June 27, 1944).
The Belgians Jan Moedwil and Victor de Laveleye speak on behalf of their government in exile, Laveleye inventing a propaganda sign that quickly becomes famous. This is the executed sign V, to signify the first letter of the word Victory/Victory, with the index and middle finger of the hand, a sign that can execute, by defiance, the inhabitants of the occupied countries and which quickly becomes known worldwide thanks to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to whom it is often attributed, and wrongly, paternity.
Also passed to posterity were the anti-Nazi broadcasts of Thomas Mann, who played with Goebbels across the Atlantic, or the chronicles of George Orwell in Britain. Eager for unbiased news, many French speakers also appreciated Swiss radio, and in particular René Payot’s renowned editorials.
Each side used enemy nationals at its microphones to undermine the morale of its civilians and soldiers. As early as the Funny War, Goebbels had a French-speaking host identified as the pro-Nazi journalist Paul Ferdonnet speak to Radio-Stuttgart, not without success. William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw”, an American of Northern Irish origin, hosted pro-German propaganda programs for the United Kingdom, which were received by millions of listeners. The Japanese also used the services of various Japanese American or English-speaking speakers, referred to by the GIs as tokyo rose (“the Rose of Tokyo”). Conversely, Ml Paulus, the vanquished of Stalingrad, spoke on Moscow radio.
Five volumes of French chronicles of the BBC have been edited by Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac under the title Les voix de la liberté. Ici Londres, La Documentation française, 1975.
Journalism
Many great writers were war correspondents, such as the American Ernest Hemingway who testified to the liberation of Paris, or on the Russian front the novelists Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, who was the first journalist to discover the ruins of the Treblinka extermination camp.
Tightly censored by the Germans and their collaborators, and often compromised, the press was subjected to a severe purge in France liberated, the historian Patrick Eveno estimating that 90% of the titles disappeared or changed hands.
Le Temps was replaced by Le Monde in December 1944, L’Auto by L’Équipe, or Paris-Soir by Le Parisien Libéré. Founded in full secrecy, many newspapers of the Resistance also began a more or less long career, like Libération, Franc-Tireur or Dauphiné libéré. Combat, which attached Albert Camus to the Liberation, lasted until 1972, as did Les Lettres françaises de Louis Aragon, a literary magazine that saw its founders Jacques Decours and Georges Politzer shot by the occupier in 1942. Defense of France, founded in the basement of the Sorbonne on July 14, 1941, spawned France-Soir in September 1944.
In Belgium, the clandestine press is deployed, sometimes to find its tradition of the 1st World War, as in the case of the Libre Belgique printed very professionally, but, most often, in the form of sheets printed with modest means or newspapers of trade union origin. An extraordinary coup is achieved by a team of resistance fighters who imitate Le Soir, a newspaper dating back to the nineteenth century, but requisitioned by the Germans to become a pro-German sheet hence its nickname “Stolen Evening”.
The imitation distributed in kiosks resembles, at first glance, its model, but the content is riddled with news articles and anti-Nazi jokes. Thousands of copies are in the hands of the esbaudie population, but the Germans will not cease to discover the culprits, some of whom will be deported and shot.
Photography
Among the many war photographers, we can mention Robert Capa, present on D-Day on the beaches of Omaha Beach.
Many photos with authors less known to the general public have entered the collective memory, such as the famous photo of Americans planting the star-spangled banner on top of Iwo Jima, or that of the Soviets Yegorov and Kantara attaching the red flag on the Reichstag.
The V-J Day in Times Square, emblematic photo of “V-J Day” (Victory over Japan) remains the one that made the cover of Life Magazine, taken in Times Square on August 14, 1945 (East Coast Time); we owe it to the German photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt.
In the same way as the longest day, press photographers tried to immortalize with the shot that best captured the following events: Elbe Day (junction of American and Soviet Allied troops on German soil), V-E Day (victory in Europe) and V-D Day (victory over Japan).“
Literature and comics
Founded underground, Editions de Minuit maintained intellectual resistance in France, publishing in particular Le Silence de la mer de Vercors (1941), a call to oppose a dignified silence to the occupier’s attempts at seduction.
Collective collections such as Le Cahier noir or L’Honneur des Poètes (1943) responded to collaborationist writers such as Céline, Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet. Famous authors such as the Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun or the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile also put their pen at the service of the German cause.
One of the first comics intended to build youth on the unfolding of the conflict was The Beast Is Dead! by Calvo (June 1945).
Many writers chose not to publish during the war so as not to have to go through the services of publishers controlled by the occupier, such as André Malraux or Roger Martin du Gard. However, in France, where cultural life was particularly lively and brilliant during the war, a very large part of theatrical, literary or philosophical production made no reference to the ongoing conflict, many creators seeming to be more or less accommodating to the German stranglehold on their publishers in particular and on cultural life in general (Philippe Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande 1940-1944, Seuil, 1995).
Many poets wrote for the Resistance, such as Louis Aragon composing La Rose et le Réséda to exalt the union of “he who believed in heaven, he who did not believe in it”, or Paul Éluard composing Liberté or singing the martyrdom of Gabriel Péri. They were sometimes victims of repression, such as Robert Desnos in France, Kak Munj in Denmark.
Witnesses seeking to analyze the causes of war and defeat produced works that their recognized lucidity and finesse of writing still make usable today, such as the historian Marc Bloch (shot for Resistance by the Nazis) writing The Strange Defeat in the summer of 1940, or the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, militant of the Free France, publishing Through disaster in New York.
Many contemporaries kept diaries often of high quality, such as Ernst Jünger, assigned to the occupation forces in Paris, the resistant professor Jean Guéhenno in France, or in Amsterdam the very young Anne Frank, victim of the Holocaust.
The immense trauma caused by the Deportation was reflected in the immediate post-war period in the many stories immediately produced by survivors of the concentration camps, whether political (Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine, David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire, Prix Goncourt 1946) or Jews (such as Primo Levi).
After its conclusion, the Second World War would not cease to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration and reflection for authors, whether or not they had experienced the events. This is further evidenced, most recently, by the success in bookstores of Johnattan Littel’s Les Bienveillantes (2006).
Songs and poems
- It’s a Long Way to Tipperary: British song (1912)
- Bella ciao: Italian revolt song (1944).
- Lili Marleen: German song with lyrics inspired by a poem by soldier Hans Leip, with music by Norbert Schultze.
- Le Chant des partisans: French song with lyrics by Maurice Druon and Joseph Kessel to music by Anna Marly.
- Le Chant des déportés (or Song of the Marshes): song composed in 1934 by the inmates of the K.Z. of Borgermoor.
- From the halls of Montezuma…): American military song.
- Blood on the Risers: American military song (paratroopers) written at the time.
- Yankee Doodle (Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle Dandy…): American patriotic song.
- In the Mood: American instrumental by Glenn Miller.
- Les Ricains by Michel Sardou: evocation after the war.
- Various Soviet patriotic songs also marked this war, including Moskva (Moscow) and Stalingrad, evoking the resistance of these two cities, as well as Plaine Oh ma Plaine…. In addition, an older communist song then returned to the news, the Russian song of the Partisans (“At the call of the Great Lenin, the partisans rose…»).
- Fanny de Laninon, by Pierre Mac Orlan: a love story (“… she was my good friend…”), the war in three verses (“… Tonnerre de Brest fell, not on the right side, everything collapsed…”), the narrator’s despair despite the peace (“… I have nothing left in survival…»).
- Barbara, by Jacques Prévert: a love story (“… Flowing delighted blossoming…”), the war in three verses (“… Under this rain of iron fire of blood steel…”), the narrator’s despair despite the peace (“… But it’s not the same anymore and everything is damaged…»).
- Fleur de Paris (song) by Jacques Hélian.
Movies
While a number of propaganda films are unsurprisingly produced during the war, many of the achievements are primarily aimed at relaxing viewers in a very hard period. Goebbels thus deliberately produced many more Hollywood-style musicals or films than strictly Nazi works (The Jew Süss); however, Leni Riefenstahl’s contribution to the Triumph of the Will was regularly reproached to him in post-war Germany.
Stalin commissioned Sergei Eisenstein to make the film Alexander Nevsky (1938), transposing the coming conflict with the Germanic nation into the context of the medieval Baltic Crusades.
In the United States, it is the cartoon characters who take sides in the conflict; Projected before the film news, these cartoons had a strong impact on public opinion. Blitz Wolf is particularly representative, by Tex Avery.
References (sources)
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