The Second World War was the last world war to
be fought with conventional weapons and the first
to end with the use of the nuclear bomb, which
raised the threat that any third world war could end
in the destruction of the majority of the human
population. The Second World War also became a
new kind of total warfare with the deliberate killing
of many millions of civilian non-combatants.
The major technical advance was aerial warfare.
That cities could be reduced to rubble from the
air was first demonstrated by the Germans in
Spain in 1937 with the destruction of Guernica.
In 1939 it was the turn of Warsaw, and in 1940
of Rotterdam and Coventry. Britain and the US
from 1942 to 1945 retaliated with mass bombing
of the majority of Germany’s cities, with heavy
casualties to civilian populations and widespread
destruction. The Allied bombing of Dresden,
crammed with refugees from the east, just before
the war ended has been singled out for particular
condemnation. By February 1945 the devastation
of German cities no longer affected the outcome
of the war. The Germans fought on in desperation.
There seemed to be no alternative. Fear,
especially of Russian revenge, maintained the
resistance. Nor did the devastation prevent the
rapid expansion of war production in Germany.
Was the great loss of human life justified by the
military results? Post-war official Germany
estimates that 593,000 civilians were killed.
Vengeance on the Allied side was a subsidiary
motive for the bombing offensive. The lives of
more than 50,000 aircrew and an enormous
industrial war effort would not have been
expended for mere vengeance. Photographic
reconnaissance of the destruction of the industrial
Ruhr region and other cities seemed at the time
to justify these raids as crippling blows against
Germany’s capacity to wage war. There can be
no doubt that German resources were destroyed
and wasted in reconstruction and that this weakened
Germany’s war effort. But more specific
strategic bombing of, for instance, synthetic fuel
plants and communications was more effective
and did severely impede the German war effort
from 1944 to 1945. The brilliant German armaments
minister, Albert Speer, could no longer
make good the losses within the shrinking Reich.
Furthermore, before the invasion of France in
1944 the land war waged by the Allies was minor
relative to the struggle on the eastern front. The
bombing offensive was the only major weapon
available to wage a war whose impact would be
felt by the Germans until the Allied military buildup
was sufficient to defeat the German armies in
the west.
During the Second World War the distinction
between combatants and non-combatants was not
so much blurred as deliberately ignored. The
factory worker was seen as a combatant. In most
contemporary eyes, as the war progressed, this
justified their destruction and the destruction of
their home from the air. Children, women, the
old and the sick were killed and maimed in this
new type of warfare. The Germans, Japanese and
Italians went beyond even what, in the Second
World War, came to be considered legitimate
warfare against all those involved in the war effort.
What would have been in store for Europe, Asia
and Africa if Germany and Japan had won the war
can be seen from their ruthlessly brutal behaviour
as occupying powers. The contrast with the First
World War in this respect could not be greater.
Murder and terror became deliberate acts of
policy.
Hitler’s Reich was no respecter of the human
values of those regarded as belonging to lesser
races, or of the lives of the Germans themselves.
The ‘euthanasia’ programme, for example, was
designed to murder ‘useless’ incurably ill or mentally
handicapped German men, women and children.
Many thousands of gypsies, classified as
‘non-Aryans’, were murdered in Auschwitz.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose faith would not allow
them to be subservient to Hitler’s commands,
were persecuted and killed, as were countless
other civilians of every nationality who were
defined as opponents of the ideals of the regime.
Hostages were picked off the streets in the occupied
countries and shot in arbitrary multiples for
the resistance’s killing of German soldiers.
Offences against the occupying powers were punishable
by death at the discretion of the local military
authorities. To hide partisans or Jews meant
the death penalty if discovered or denounced. For
the Jews in Europe, who were not so much opponents
as defenceless victims, a unique fate
awaited: physical destruction, as foretold in
Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939.
Yet, side by side with these horrors, the
German armies fighting the Allied armies in the
west behaved conventionally too and took prisoners
who were, with some notable exceptions,
treated reasonably. In Russia, however, the
German army became increasingly involved with
the specially formed units attached to the army
commands, which committed atrocities on a huge
scale. Here, there was to be no ‘honourably’ conducted
warfare.
More than 3 million Russian prisoners of war in
German hands died through exposure and famine.
Himmler, who as head of the SS organisation
wielded ever-increasing power, later in the war
recognised the waste of manpower involved, and
Russian prisoners of war and civilians were used as
forced labour in German war industries. Many
died from exhaustion. On the Allied side, some
300,000 German prisoners of war in Russian
hands never returned to Germany. There was also
the Soviet murder of Polish officers at Katyn, their
bodies discovered by the Germans in mass graves
in April 1943. The full horror of this slaughter
was only revealed by Russia’s new leaders in
September 1992. The orders to shoot Polish officers
and civilians in prison for suspected enmity to
the Soviet Union were signed in March 1940 by
Stalin himself and by three Politburo comrades,
Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, at the suggestion
of Beria, chief of the secret police. In the forest
of Katyn, near Smolensk, 4,421 Polish officers
were shot. They were only a proportion of the
total victims. Another 17,436 soldiers and civilians
were murdered as well. All the Soviet leaders,
Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, were told
of the dark secret in the files, which were kept in a
special safe. Brezhnev minuted, ‘Never to be
opened’; Gorbachev passed on some information
to the Polish government. The Yeltsin government
revealed the full account of the murders.
Japanese troops also became brutalised. To be
taken prisoner was regarded as a disgrace. Allied
prisoners of war were treated inhumanely by the
Japanese military authorities, and thousands of
them died. Many were employed together with
forced Asian labour on such projects as the construction
of the Burma–Siam railway. By the time
that death line was completed in October 1943,
100,000 Asians and 16,000 Europeans had lost
their lives. In China, the Japanese slaughtered
civilians – tens of thousands.
The horrors and ordeals, the depravity and
brutality behind the battlefronts, the mass murder
of millions are an inseparable part of the history
of the Second World War. The atrocities cannot
be set aside by the misguided argument that those
on one side cancel out those on the other.
In Poland, and then in Russia, the German
conquerors displayed a degree of barbarism that
has no parallels with Germany’s conduct during
the First World War. In the 1930s, for tactical rea-
sons, Hitler had been prepared to work with the
Poles, and his view of them was quite favourable.
The authoritarian Polish state, the Polish brand
of anti-Semitism and official Poland’s anti-
Bolshevism made them, in Hitler’s eyes, suitable
junior partners. But Poland’s courageous resistance
in 1939 changed all that. With the exception
of the Jews, who were all seen as destroyers of the
Aryan race, Hitler’s views of what to do with other
‘races’ such as Slavs was opportunistic. He cared
nothing for their lives. In destroying the Polish
intelligentsia he was not so much following a racial
policy as taking what he regarded as the most efficacious
practical steps to root out the strong sense
of Polish nationalism. The same ‘racial’ inconsistency
is noticeable in the treatment of the
Ukrainian population. Vengeance for the slightest
resistance to his will was a dominant element of
Hitler’s character. Parts of western Poland were
annexed by Germany and settled with ‘German’
farmers, mainly the so-called Volksdeutsche, ethnic
Germans who for generations had lived in Eastern
Europe.
The greater part of the rest of Poland was
organised as a colony called the General
Government of the Occupied Polish Territories
headed by Hans Frank, a fanatical, brutal Nazi
since the earliest days of the party. In this colony
the Poles were to rise to positions no higher than
workers. Frank described his fief in November
1940 as ‘a gigantic labour camp in which everything
that signifies power and independence rests
in the hands of the Germans’. Frank, himself, typically
for the strife-torn Nazi German administration,
engaged in much infighting with the SS,
who obeyed no one except Heinrich Himmler.
The Ukraine, with Frank’s General Government,
was selected by the SS for the majority of the sites
of the extermination camps, such as Treblinka.
Frank approved of the murder of the Jews,
objecting to their settlement in the General
Government. In December 1941 he declared:
‘Gentlemen, I must ask you to arm yourselves
against all feelings of pity. We must destroy the
Jews wherever we meet them wherever possible.’
The majority of the Polish people would
survive so long as they served their German
masters and lost all national consciousness. What
the Nazis had in store for the Jews was so incredible
that, even when the facts leaked out, most of
the Jews still surviving in German-occupied
Europe could not believe it, nor was the horror
fully grasped abroad. Indeed, the hell the Nazis
created in the death camps of the east, like hell
itself, is so far removed from human experience
as to be scarcely real and credible. The Holocaust
forms one of the most difficult aspects of modern
history to explain and understand.
Hitler, in conditions of peace, that is before the
outbreak of war in 1939, could not order the
mass murder of German, Austrian and Czech
Jews within Germany. If the German sphere was
to be made judenrein, free of Jews, their forced
emigration was the only option. For Hitler, the
Jews had another possible value; they could be
used to blackmail the West. He believed National
Socialist propaganda that behind the scenes the
Jews were influential in pulling the strings of
policy in Washington, London and Paris. His aim
was to conquer continental Europe piecemeal.
The next target was Poland. In January 1939 he
therefore threatened in his well-known Reichstag
speech that the Jews would perish if Britain,
France and the US resisted his aggression on the
continent by unleashing a general war.
Until Germany attacked the Soviet Union in
June 1941, there seemed to be a small chance of
a Western peace. Jews in Germany and conquered
Europe were still allowed to live. Hitler liked to
keep options open: alternative solutions to isolate
the Jews and drive them out of Europe altogether
were considered, such as the plan to banish them
to Madagascar. That from the start he had no
moral inhibition against mass murder, if that
should prove the best course, cannot be doubted.
During the summer and autumn of 1941, millions
of ‘Bolshevik’ Jews, the mortal enemy in his
eyes, were added to the millions of European
Jews already under German control, and mass
emigration or expulsion overseas was no longer a
possibility. Nor, with so much non-Jewish slave
labour falling into German hands, Hitler calculated,
would Jewish slave labour be needed. The
option of mass murder as the final solution now
became the most desired and practical course.
As Hitler’s own pep talks to the generals during
the spring of 1941 show, on the eve of the
attack on Russia, the ‘racial’ war was now being
openly launched. That spelt doom for the Jews,
the race that Hitler saw as a pestilence in human
society. He could now repeat his Reichstag speech
of January 1939, this time as a justification to the
German people for the destruction of Jewry. In
the light of this analysis Nazi policies followed a
path that had, inevitably, to end in genocide.
By every means available, the Nazis attempted
before 1939 to ‘clear’ Germany of Jews by forcing
them to emigrate. The Germans were not alone
in following such policies. The Poles, too, before
the war hoped to ‘solve’ their Jewish problem by
promoting forced emigration of the Polish Jews.
Anti-Semitism was virulent all over Europe and in
the US. But discrimination was not a part of government
policy in any Western country, offending
as it does against basic civil rights and
freedoms. Entry of Jews to settle outside
Germany was restricted. Unemployment was high
everywhere so any increase of labour was not
welcomed, especially if caused by immigrants
deprived of their money and possessions. Western
governments were preoccupied with their own
problems during the depression years. And it
always has to be remembered that before 1942
no government in the West could conceive what
‘Final Solution’ lay in store for the Jews on the
German-dominated continent.
Britain, holding the League Mandate for
Palestine and having promised the Jews a National
Home there had a special responsibility to aid the
Jews. Until German persecution became more
severe, the majority of German Jews, however, did
not wish to emigrate to Palestine. When they desperately
sought to leave Germany after November
1938 and would have gladly escaped to Palestine,
the British government was more concerned to
safeguard its vital strategic interests in the Middle
East. Palestine had become a cauldron of conflict
between Arabs and Jews and the British occupiers.
In Arab eyes both the Jews and the British authorities
were European colonisers of Arab lands. The
Arabs, moreover, could see that the increased
Jewish immigration had its roots in European
anti-Semitism, which strengthened Zionism.
British governments tried to extricate themselves
from these conflicting interests without satisfying
either the Zionists or the Arabs. Finally, in May
1939 the British government took the decision
that the Arabs would have to be appeased by
promising to limit Jewish immigration to 75,000
over the next five years and, after that, the government
promised the Arabs that further immigration
would be subject to the consent of the
Arab majority.
Public opinion and voluntary organisations
before 1939 gave the efforts to rescue the Jews a
dynamism that governments lacked. Germany’s
European neighbours, and the US and Latin
America, accepted German and Austrian Jews in
tens of thousands. Although the Nazis were ready
at first to expedite their exit even after the war
broke out, the exodus was slowed down to a trickle
by the war. In all, more than half the German Jews,
some 280,000, succeeded in finding refuge
between 1933 and 1939, many, however, only
temporarily as Hitler overran the continent. The
Jews so saved came from Germany and from the
countries – Austria and Czechoslovakia – occupied
by Hitler before the outbreak of war in 1939. They
represented only a very small proportion of
Europe’s total Jewish population.
In Poland in 1940 many Polish Jews were
killed wantonly, and the whole Jewish population
was herded into ghettos, as in the Middle Ages,
by fencing off or building a wall around a part of
a city and leaving the Jews to fend for themselves.
The two largest were in Warsaw and Lodz. In the
ghettos the Germans could secure what was practically
slave labour to supply the German armies.
Undernourished and overcrowded, the ghetto
population was decimated by disease and exhaustion.
The planned massacre designed to kill every
last Jew was begun on the day, 22 June 1941,
when the German armies invaded the Soviet
Union. These terrible killings of men, women and
children in Russia, machine-gunned next to the
open graves they had been forced to dig, had
been deliberately worked out beforehand. Hitler’s
full brutality is revealed by the record of a Führer
Conference held at his headquarters on 16 July
1941 in which he spoke of his aims and referred
to Russian orders to start partisan warfare behind
the German front. Hitler saw in this order ‘some
advantages for us; it enables us to exterminate
everyone who opposes us’. The actual task for the
open-air killings was assigned to special SS
detachments, the Einsatzgruppen. The German
army and special police units recruited in
Germany, too, became heavily implicated in the
mass murder. Nazi ideology had come to be
widely accepted by ordinary people. Hitler and a
small leadership group could not have committed
such crimes without thousands of active helpers
and an uncaring attitude to the victims by many
more even where it was not actually hostile. The
‘Final Solution’ in the Soviet Union avoided all
need for transport and special camps or ghettos.
In Poland, the Jews were not perishing fast
enough. Then the destruction had to be planned
of the Jews remaining in German-occupied
Europe, and of the Jews living in the countries of
Germany’s allies. After discussions among the
Nazi leaders an order to Heydrich, a subordinate
of Himmler, was issued by Göring on 31 July
1941 to draw up plans for the destruction of non-
Russian Jewry on a systematic basis. In accordance
with these instructions Heydrich called the
notorious conference on 20 January 1942 of
senior administrators from the various Reich ministries
who would be involved and which took its
name from Wannsee, a favourite picnic area just
outside Berlin, where they met. It was assumed
that the Jews in the rest of Europe could not be
massacred as in Russia. Though there were several
concentration camps in Germany itself, these
could kill only tens of thousands, not millions!
The greatest concentration of Jews was already in
Poland, so to Poland and the east the Jews were
to be transported: ‘Europe will be combed from
west to east.’ What ‘resettlement’ really meant
was clear from the record of the conference:
the Jews capable of work will be led into these
areas in large labour columns to build roads,
whereby doubtless a large part will fall away
through natural reduction . . . The inevitable
remainder will have to be dealt with appropriately,
since it represents a natural selection
which upon liberation is to be regarded as a
germ cell of a new Jewish development.
No one present could doubt that what was
being planned was, indeed, mass murder. Adolf
Eichmann of the SS, who was present and was one
of the principal organisers of the Holocaust, later
testified that the atmosphere was one of general
agreement; no one raised difficulties or moral
objections. The eastern ghettos now became transit
stations as the plans were implemented. The
construction of the Auschwitz extermination camp
had already begun before the Wannsee Conference.
Others followed, among them Chelmno,
Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka. These camps of mass
murder were specifically equipped to kill thousands
every day, generally in large gas chambers. The
‘selection’ of those to be murdered as unfit to work
was done on arrival from the rail transports arriving
straight at the camps; the remainder, a smaller
number and never the old, the sick or children,
were allowed to survive some weeks longer. There
were very few long-term survivors.
Mass murder was so huge in extent that historians
cannot tell for certain even to the nearest
million how many people perished. Despite the
virtual hopelessness of their situation in some
ghettos and camps, a few Jews did resist, and with
such weapons as could be smuggled in fought
against German troops, thus at least selling their
lives dearly. The whole world learnt of the Jewish
rising of the Warsaw ghetto in April and May
1943 and its destruction. Less well known were
risings in a number of extermination camps, in
Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibór in
October of the same year, for instance. A few
thousand more Jews were able to escape into the
forests in Poland and the Ukraine, and operated
as partisan units. They were not always welcome,
and they were sometimes killed by their compatriots
as well as by the Germans. Before the war
was over, between 5 and 6 million Jews had been
murdered. Nazi ideology was so widespread that
it is unrealistic to limit responsibility for these
crimes to Hitler and his henchmen. While
Germans, soldiers, the SS and officials were overwhelmingly
responsible, they were aided in their
work of destruction by some sections of the conquered
peoples of Europe in every country.
In Germany knowledge was widespread,
brought home by soldiers and SS on leave from
the east. How much the Germans were actually
told can be seen from an article written by
Goebbels and published in the ‘respectable’
weekly journal Das Reich on 16 November 1941.
That world Jewry started the war, he wrote, was
proven beyond dispute:
The Jews wanted their war, and now they have
it. What is now coming true is the Führer’s
prophecy of 30 January 1939, in his speech to
the Reichstag, when he said that if international
Finance Jewry once more succeeded
in driving the peoples into a world war, the
result would not be the bolshevising of the
world and thereby the victory of the Jews, but
the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.
We are now witnessing the fulfilment of that
prophecy, and a destiny is being realised which
is harsh but more than deserved. Feelings of
sympathy or pity are entirely inappropriate . . .
[Jewry] according to its law, ‘an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth’, is now perishing.
The demand of the German authorities that all
Jews be handed over for the terrible Final
Solution being prepared for them was one of the
deepest moral challenges faced by occupied
Europe and Germany’s allies during the Second
World War. There was not one response that was
uniquely French, Polish, Dutch or Hungarian.
The response was multi-faceted. There was the
‘official’ collaboration of governments – and even
this was not uniform – and then there was the
response of institutions, the churches above all,
and of ordinary people. In every corner of Europe
there were some individuals who risked their lives
to shelter Jews. The Jews who survived in
Germany were mainly those in mixed Jewish–
Christian marriages. They, too, were on the list
for incarceration, possibly murder but they came
last in the plan for the ‘Final Solution’ and the
war was over before they could be dealt with.
Several hundred Jews were hidden from humanitarian
motives or managed with forged papers to
pass themselves off as Aryan. The Christians who
protected Jews in Germany were heroic, their
number pitifully small – far fewer than in Poland
or other occupied countries. In Germany the
opportunities for the non-privileged Jews (those
not married to Christian spouses with offspring)
to survive were so slight as to be negligible in
practice.
Poles and Jews had lived for centuries together,
but in separate communities. Even in 1931, most
of the 3 million Jews in Poland were largely unassimilated,
although those who were assimilated
were well represented in the professions and the
middle class. Under the Nazi occupation anti-
Semitism was reinforced by propaganda, but there
were Poles who, though they did not like Jews,
helped them because they hated the Germans
more. There were also Poles who actively assisted
the Germans to round up Jews. Several thousand
Poles, however, out of feelings of pity, hid Jews at
great risk to themselves, for the penalty was death.
It has been estimated that between 50,000 and
100,000 Polish Jews survived, some fighting as
partisans or with the Red Army. In Warsaw
15,000 found hiding places, many more than in
Berlin. Had more Germans made efforts to protest
at the persecution of the Jews, Hitler would have
found it far more difficult to carry out the
Holocaust.
In the Netherlands, Belgium, France and,
above all, Italy the Jews stood a better chance of
survival. Many Jews were hidden in homes, in
monasteries and in villages. Official Vichy France,
however, gave some aid to the Germans in rounding
up the Jews, including French citizens of
Jewish faith, for transportation to the death camps
in the east. Uniquely, all but 500 of about 7,000
Jews living in Denmark were rescued by the
Danish resistance by being ferried across to
Sweden. The Danish resistance had been alerted to
their imminent deportation by Dr Duckwitz, a
courageous German official in Copenhagen who
had learnt of their intended fate from a leak passed
on by someone in the Gestapo. The fate of the
Danish Jews who did not escape was extraordinary.
The Nazi rulers in Berlin maintained the fiction
that Denmark had remained a sovereign country
and the Danes were therefore permitted to continue
to protect all Danish citizens, including
Danish Jews. The 500 Danish Jews were deported
to the privileged ghetto of Theresienstadt, where
they were housed separately in much better conditions
than the other Jews. They remained in contact
with the Danish authorities, who insisted on
providing for them to the end of the war. None
were transported to the extermination camps further
east and almost all of them survived and
returned to Denmark after the liberation. They
were the fortunate exception. Dr Duckwitz also
survived and is honoured as ‘one of the righteous’
at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in
Jerusalem.
Germany’s ally, Italy, on the other hand, in
practice protected Jews despite Mussolini’s anti-
Jewish legislation. Until Italy’s capitulation and
the consequent German occupation, the Italian
military authorities in their Croatian zone and in
the Italian zone of France prevented both
German troops and police from arresting Jews for
transportation east or murder by the Croatian
Ustachi on the spot. The Italian army would have
nothing to do with the brutal mass murder of the
Jews being instigated by the Germans and their
‘allies’ and either sabotaged orders or simply
refused to carry them out. Feelings of humanity
and decency were not extinct.
In occupied Europe local police could be
found to do the dirty work of the Germans for
them. In some cases they would have been shot
had they disobeyed. In others the work was done
with enthusiasm. The public silence of the Pope
and the Vatican and of the German Protestant
churches signifies a massive moral failure. In contrast,
in Holland Catholic churches and many
Protestant churches read protests from the pulpit
after the first Dutch transport of Jews. Priests and
pastors, wherever Germany held power, suffered
martyrdom for their personal protest. Bishop
Galen of Münster publicly condemned the
murder of some 60,000 to 80,000 feeble-minded
and incurably ill Germans in the so-called
‘euthanasia’ programme but failed to raise his
voice for the Jews. Hitler feared that the people’s
war effort might be undermined by an open
onslaught on religious beliefs. A strong public
movement by the German churches and military,
might have saved countless Jewish lives. Hitler
and his regime were sensitive to, and watched, the
reactions of the German people. There was no
such public movement.
The importance and nature of resistance to
the Nazis within Germany itself and in Nazidominated
Europe varied enormously. Conspiratorial
by necessity, it came into the open in acts of
violent sabotage and several attempts on Hitler’s
life, the most spectacular – the 20 July 1944 plot
– almost succeeding when an explosive charge
went off a few feet from Hitler at his headquarters
in East Prussia. The composition of the resistance
ranged from members of the pre-Nazi Weimar
political parties to individuals moved by moral
considerations. Thus in Munich a small group of
students and teachers who called themselves the
White Rose distributed, until they were caught
and executed, thousands of leaflets condemning
the barbarities of the Nazis. But the only resistance
that had the power actually to remove Hitler
came from within the army and culminated in the
bomb plot of 20 July 1944. The officers involved
saw clearly that the war was lost and hoped by
removing Hitler to be able to make peace with the
Western allies while keeping the Russians out of
Germany. Others were less materialistically motivated.
Had Hitler been killed, the plot might have
succeeded, though Britain and America would
certainly have refused to make peace on any terms
other than unconditional surrender.
Successful armed resistance, tying down considerable
numbers of German troops, was carried
out by Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. And in
France, while Pétain and the Vichy regime
enjoyed overwhelming support, a sizeable minority
joined the French resistance, undertaking
sabotage and supplying a ‘secret army’ which
returned aircrew shot down in France and
Belgium on an escape route back to England by
way of neutral Spain. In the east, Russian partisans
acted as auxiliaries of the Red Army and interrupted
the supply routes of the Wehrmacht. But in
occupied Europe there was not one simple struggle
against Nazi Germany. Among the resistance
fighters themselves there was conflict after the
communists joined the resistance after Hitler’s
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The struggle in Yugoslavia between the royalist
Colonel Mihailovic and the communist leader,
Tito, led to civil war between them as well as war
against the Germans. In Poland, the Home Army
was as bitterly opposed to the Polish communist
partisans as to the common German enemy. Here
Stalin had the last word. The Polish government
in exile in London, and the Home Army, which
took its orders from London, attempted to frustrate
or at least impede Stalin’s plans to bring
Poland under communist control. In August
1944, as the Red Army reached the River Vistula,
the Home Army began to rise in Warsaw against
the Germans. Their intention was to prove to the
world that Poles, not the Russians, had liberated
the Polish capital. The Poles seized half the city
and fought bitterly for two months until their
capitulation to the Germans on 2 October.
Warsaw was entirely destroyed. Soviet help was
cynically withheld by Stalin. Only during the last
stages were Russian supplies dropped; they could
only prolong the doomed struggle, resulting in
the deaths of still more Polish Home Army fighters
holding out in the sewers of the city. The
Soviet command had even prevented Polish units
fighting with the Red Army from battling their
way to the city. Soviet airfields were closed to
relief flights from the West. Surrender terms were
finally agreed by the Home Army with the
Germans on 2 October 1944 and three days later
General Bor-Komorowski, with the exhausted
remnants of the fighters, gave up the struggle.
Surprisingly the Home Army were well treated as
prisoners of war, probably in order to increase
hatred between the Poles and the Russians.
During the early stages of the rising auxiliary
SS units committed terrible atrocities against the
civilian population, until regulars were brought in
to crush resistance. The total (mainly civilian)
casualties in Warsaw reached about 200,000. The
Germans lost some 2,000 killed and 9,000
wounded. Polish military casualties were far
higher: 17,000 killed or missing and 9,000
wounded. Politically and militarily the anticommunist
Polish underground had been destroyed,
leaving a vacuum which Stalin was able
to fill with communists ready to follow Soviet
orders. The Warsaw rising marked one more milestone
in the tragedy of Poland and signalled to
the rest of the world the ruthlessness of which
Stalin was capable in furtherance of the Soviet
Union’s post-war plans.
In the West this conflict between the communist
and anti-communist resistance did not flare
into civil war but a similar pattern emerges. As the
defeat of Nazi Germany drew close, the resistance
was as concerned with questions of post-war
political power as with fighting the Germans. The
Nazi answer to all resistance from whatever
quarter was terror.
Houses were burnt to the ground in reprisals
and people not involved in the resistance were
killed wholesale. The destruction of the village of
Oradour-sur-Glane in France and of Lidice in
Czechoslovakia, and the massacres that took place
there, are among the best known of such barbarities.
But these were just two of the thousands of
atrocities that became a common occurrence in
German-occupied Europe. The terrible reprisals
taken by the German occupiers raise the question
whether the Allies should have actively encouraged
resistance and parachuted agents into the
occupied countries, many of whom lost their
lives. All over Europe, from northern Italy to
Norway, large German forces were tied down.
The Nazi new order could not be imposed anywhere
unchallenged, and the German forces
could not relax their vigilance amid populations
of which significant sections were hostile. Even
though the active resistance was a minority, it
made an impact out of proportion to its numbers.
The Japanese had been at war since 1937. They
sought to justify their wars of expansion at home
and abroad both as self-defence and as fulfilling a
mission of liberating Asia from Western imperialism.
In its place Japan would build a Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Japanese, to
emphasise the solidarity of eastern Asia against the
West, chose to call the war they had launched the
Greater East Asian War. The real intentions of the
Japanese leaders can be deduced from the decisions
taken at secret conferences in Tokyo rather
than from the rhetoric of their propaganda. First
consideration in all the conquered regions was to
be given to military needs. Local economies were
to be strictly controlled and independence movements
discouraged. No industry was to be developed
in the southern region, which was to
become the empire’s source of raw materials and
a market for its goods. The Japanese saw themselves
as the superior people who possessed the
right to subordinate and exploit the conquered
peoples. Everywhere propaganda and indoctrination
sought to reinforce the superiority of everything
Japanese. For the indigenous peoples, foreign
Western rule was replaced by more brutal
foreign Japanese rule. To compete with America’s
resources the Japanese mercilessly extorted all
they could from the occupied lands.
Even before the war had been launched a
secret conference in Tokyo on 20 November
1941 settled the general principle of Japanese
occupations. Local administrations were to be
utilised as far as possible, but each territory was
placed under military government and subordinated
to Japan’s needs. The Japanese government
never worked out any really coherent plan for the
future of eastern Asia. Some territories of particular
strategic importance, such as Malaya, would
remain under direct Japanese control; others, the
Philippines and Burma, were promised eventual
‘independence’ but only if they became cooperative
satellite states. Japanese attempts to win over
the mass of Asian peoples to support the war
against their former colonial masters were almost
totally a failure. The great majority of the ordinary
people did not see the conflict as their war.
Equally, there was little active support for the
departed Westerners against the Japanese, except
in the Philippines. In Burma, and especially in the
Philippines, sections of the population became
vehemently anti-Japanese. But on the whole the
peoples saw themselves as suffering from a war
between two foreign masters struggling for ultimate
control over them. In India, as has been
seen, the political leaders sought to make use of
the situation to promote genuine independence.
Of all the peoples under Japanese rule, the
Chinese suffered the most – both in China and
wherever Chinese communities had settled in
south-eastern Asia. In Singapore after its fall,
there was a terrible bloodbath of Chinese and at
least 5,000 were massacred. Japanese barbarities
against the Chinese population, which constituted
about a third of the total population of
Malaya, drove them into armed resistance.
Japanese terror tactics thus proved counterproductive.
With the Japanese as masters instead
of the Europeans, local administrations continued
to function, with the indigenous junior administrators
carrying out the orders of their new
masters. With the need to fight the war, the
Japanese left the social order intact and tried to
preserve the status quo. To win over the population
and channel nationalist feelings, they set up
Japanese-controlled mass movements. The constant
emphasis on Japanese superiority, however,
alienated the local populations.
Some nationalist leaders, because of their popularity,
such as Sukarno in Indonesia, were able
to gain a degree of genuine independence in
return for promising to rally the people to cooperate
with the Japanese war effort. More concessions
were promised to the Burmese and Filipinos
in 1943 as the war began to go badly for the
Japanese. In August 1943 Burma was proclaimed
independent, but in alliance with Japan and at war
with the Allies. In October the Japanese sponsored
an independent Philippine republic and in
the same month Bose proclaimed a provisional
Indian government in exile. In mainland China
puppet governments had been set up from the
first; Manchuria had been transformed into
Manchukuo in 1932 with its own emperor,
Pu-yi; another Japanese-controlled government
of China was set up in Nanking in 1938. But
plunder, rape and massacre were routinely perpetrated
by the Japanese troops in China. Despite
a veneer of local autonomy in some regions
under Japanese occupation, the reality of the coprosperity
sphere was not liberation but Japanese
domination and imperial exploitation.
In 1942 the Japanese had won large territories
in Asia at small cost. The Americans prepared
their counter-offensive across the Pacific, straight
at the Japanese heartland. This is how Japan was
defeated while its armies still occupied the greater
part of what had been conquered at the outset of
the war. The fall of the Japanese-held island of
Saipan, in July 1944, placed American bombers
within range of Tokyo. The Americans hoped to
bomb the Japanese into submission. The massive
raids brought huge destruction on the flimsily
constructed Japanese houses. On 10 March 1945
one of the most devastating air raids of the whole
war was launched against Tokyo. The fire storm
created destroyed close on half the city and
caused 125,000 casualties. In May and June 1945
the bomber offensive spread to sixty other major
towns throughout Japan.
On 6 August 1945, for the first time, a new
weapon was used, the atom bomb that devastated
Hiroshima. The destruction and suffering were
appalling. Most of the city was destroyed, 66,000
people were killed in an instant and even more
succumbed to a new man-made illness, radiation
sickness. For decades the atom bomb claimed
victims from among the survivors. The casualties
from the spring raid on Tokyo by fleets of Super-
Flying Fortresses were greater, but what filled the
world with awe and horror was that a single plane
dropping just one bomb from out of the blue sky
could produce such suffering and destruction. A
second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three
days later, again causing great loss of life. In the
face of such a war the Japanese surrendered.
The Second World War was waged simultaneously
in Asia, Europe and North Africa by huge
armed forces on all sides, backed by tanks and aircraft
in numbers hitherto unknown and, in its
closing stages, with a new weapon releasing the
devastating power of nuclear fission. The destruction
and maiming on a global scale exceeded anything
known before. The war caused not only
many millions of dead and wounded, but also
inflicted on millions more forcible population
migrations and wholesale destruction of towns
and villages – a sum total of virtually unimaginable
human misery.
As the tide of the war turned, the German people
increasingly suffered the ravages of war. The losses
on the eastern front alone matched the bloodbath
of the First World War on all fronts. The great
majority of the German war dead died fighting in
Russia. The bomber commands of the Allies
inflicted devastation as city after city was laid to
waste during the last months of the war. Above all
else, the German people feared the Russians, bent
on revenge. Ethnic Germans and German colonisers
fled from the advancing Russian armies,
retreating into Germany. The Sudeten Germans,
who had lived in Czechoslovakia before 1938,
were driven out. Most of the Germans living in
Polish-occupied eastern German regions from
East Prussia to Silesia – assigned to the Poles for
administration in compensation for territorial
losses to the Soviet Union – were driven out or
fled in terror from the Poles and Russians.
‘Orderly and humane’ population transfers were
sanctioned by the Allied Potsdam Conference in
the summer of 1945. But the mass exodus of 15
million people immediately after the war was certainly
not orderly and was frequently inhumane.
Pent-up hatreds against the Germans burst out
and were vented not only on the guilty supporters
of Hitler’s regime but also, indiscriminately, on
tens of thousands of innocent people, on children
and the sick. The exodus from Eastern and central
Europe began during the last months of the war
and continued after the war was over. Although
relatively few were deliberately murdered, in all as
many as 2 million Germans are estimated to have
died as a result of the privations they suffered.
Mere statistics cannot convey the tragedies
that befell almost every family in Europe. The
4.5 and 5 million. Proportionately to their population,
the Jews suffered the most; only a minority
of those in Europe at the outbreak of the
war survived to its end. For Britain, France and
Italy, however, the Second World War casualties
did not repeat the bloodbath of the First
World War. British military and civilian deaths
totalled 450,000, to which must be added those
of the empire: 120,000. The French figures are
approximately 450,000 dead; the Italians lost
410,000 dead. Yugoslav, Hungarian, Polish and
Romanian losses were heavy. In central Europe,
the Poles suffered far more even than their neighbours.
American deaths on the European and
Pacific fronts numbered 290,000. No one knows
how many million Chinese died in the war; the
figure may well be in excess of 10 million; about
2 million Japanese are estimated to have lost their
lives in the war. The physical destruction has
largely been made good in the years since the war.
But the loss of lives will continue to be mourned
as long as the generations that experienced the
war are still alive. The ordeal of the Second World
War also serves as a lasting warning to future generations
of what national aggression, evil leaders
and the intolerance of peoples can lead to.
World History
