While the war was still wreaking immense destruction the
Allies pondered the immense problem of repairing the damage
afterwards. The death toll and material losses were staggering.
There are no exact figures, but a reasonable estimate would be
that 50 million lives were lost, about four times as many as in
the First World War. Half of them were civilians. Twentymillion
Russians perished, ten per cent of the population. In Poland
fifteen per cent of the population were killed. The Germans lost
five million, three quarters of them on the eastern front, and
half a million in the bombing. In western Europe the losses
were smaller, but as many died from Nazi crimes as in combat -
another peculiar feature of this war. As there was no civil government
in China, no exact figures are calculable but losses must
have been between three and eight million. It is estimated that
the genocide against the Jews claimed six million lives. The
Americans, who fought on both fronts, lost only 300,000
soldiers, but they had had to finance the equipment used in the
war by their allies and partners. The death of 200,000 people in
a few seconds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed how great the
toll a new war might bring.
The military operations resulted in several large migrations of
populations from Lorraine and Poland and the exchanges of
populations in the Tyrol, while others were caused by fear, such
as the exodus ofJune 1940 in France and the retreat ofa million
Germans before the advancing Red Army in 1945. In addition,
there were millions of prisoners of war. In Germany, prisoners
of war, conscripts in the compulsory labour forces and internees
in concentration camps amounted to nearly fifteen million. But
no country was spared. Workers withdrew across the Urals in
Soviet Russia and they migrated from the rural South to the
industrial North East in America. There were about 30 million
displaced persons in all. Several years after the end of the war,
a million were still interned in temporary7 camps without anywhere
to settle.
Material destruction was also gigantic, particularly because
fighting occurred over wide areas and because both camps advanced
and retreated over the same territories but also because
bombardments from the air and from the ground forces were
heavy and because reprisal operations were often devastating.
Germany, Soviet Russia, and Poland were most affected. A
Polish report estimated that 80 per cent of transport facilities,
50 per cent of agricultural livestock, and 31 per cent of the
national product were lost in the war. In Yugoslavia 20 per cent
of houses were destroyed. In France about 55,000 miles of
railways were destroyed and 24,000 miles were damaged;
1900 works of art were destroyed. Most cities in Germany and
Japan were reduced to rubble. Italy was ravaged from south to
north, but the richest region in the Po Valley escaped serious
destruction. Great Britain, too, did not escape. Only the United
States emerged from the war without the least material loss. But
the blind destruction of cities and works of art, attacks on civilians,
above all the Nazi crimes, in which scientists themselves
were accomplices, inflicted moral wounds, especially in Europe,
which were deeper and more difficult to repair than damage to
property.
Once again, the cost of the war was infinitely greater than the
problems which caused it. In a sense, the war did answer some
questions. The Allies did fulfil their aims and their victory did
restore collective and individual freedom in the occupied states.
The Allies had fought to preserve justice and law. The discovery
of Nazi atrocities demonstrated that these were not merelv propaganda
slogans. But the war arose out of political instability
and ii created new forms of instability.
World History
