Soviet foreign commissar Viacheslav Molotov signs the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in Moscow on August 23, 1939.

Explosion on the USS Lexington, probably caused by the detonation of warheads stored on the ship, during the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942.

 

Germany, Italy, and Japan had formed the Axis alliance in May 1939 and committed themselves to world conquest. After Germany invaded western Poland on September 1, the Soviet Union

invaded eastern Poland on September 17. The two invading countries had made a secret agreement to divide Poland and allow several Baltic states to be in the Soviet sphere of influence. After Poland was defeated in early October, the Soviets forced Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to allow Russian troops on their soil. The Soviets next turned to Finland, which refused to cooperate, leading to the Russo-Finnish War. Although Soviet forces finally broke through the Mannerheim Line in February 1940, they suffered heavy losses, which led the rest of the world to underestimate Soviet military capabilities.

German dive bombers continue blitzkrieg

German JU-87 dive bombers, commonly known as Stukas, fly in formation on April 30, 1940. The blitzkrieg attacks of Spring 1940, led by these airplanes, ended the Phony War, a deceptive lull in fighting after the invasion of Poland that Germany used to gear up its arsenal.

Germany, France, and Britain, meanwhile, had entered a period known as the Phony War, which mainly involved blockades, mine laying, and sporadic naval action. That six-month lull ended in April 1940, when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Hitler followed that action with a blitzkrieg attack on France on May 10, 1940. By June 22, the Battle of France was over, and Germany now occupied Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Italy, which chose to remain neutral during the early stages of the war in Europe, had finally declared war on Britain and France on June 10.

Operation Barbarossa

Hitler now set his sights on Britain, but the German Army was stymied by British resistance during the Battle of Britain and turned east to launch Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. That decision proved to be a costly blunder, however, as stiff Soviet resistance, particularly during the siege of Leningrad, drained German resources and manpower. The United States remained neutral in the summer of 1941, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt steered massive amounts of economic and military aid to the Allies—Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—through the lend-lease program.

Japanese aircraft carrier Shokaku under attack by the USS Yorktown on May 8, 1942 during the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Although Japan controlled large areas of China by 1941, the Japanese military had grown weary of China's guerrilla warfare tactics and turned its attention instead to Southeast Asia. After Japan invaded Indochina on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in America, a maneuver that cut off all trade between the two nations and deprived Japan of crucial U.S. oil supplies. In response, Japan's leaders decided to wage a war against the United States and launched a surprise air attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7; the United States declared war on Japan the following day. On December 11, Japan's allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States.

The U.S. Pacific fleet emerged from the Pearl Harbor attack severely crippled, and without naval protection, U.S. forces in the Philippines and other Pacific islands were quickly overrun. The British faired no better; they lost Hong Kong on December 25 and were crushed at the Battle of Singapore in February 1942, resulting in the loss of the Malay Peninsula to the Japanese. The Netherlands suffered the same fate; Japan controlled most of the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) by the end of February.

With U.S. industry producing ships, planes, and submarines at record rates, the U.S. Navy quickly recovered from its debacle at Pearl Harbor. In May 1942, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Americans dealt a severe blow to the Japanese. In June, the Battle of Midway again demonstrated growing U.S. superiority in both weapons and in the tactics of carrier-based naval operations. At the same time, the U.S. submarine fleet was wreaking havoc on Japanese military and commercial shipping by choking off the island nation from vital supplies.

During World War II, Jimmy Doolittle led the audacious April 1942 bombing raid on Japan from the decks of an aircraft carrier. He was one of the most important generals to serve in the conflict.

[Hulton Archive]

Meanwhile, U.S. general Douglas MacArthur began a strategy of "island hopping," by which U.S. forces took control of the many isolated Japanese outposts in the Pacific theater. He moved first on New Guinea and then launched an invasion of Japanese outposts in the neighboring Solomon Islands; he took Guadalcanal after terrible fighting in February 1943. U.S. forces moved ever closer to mainland Japan by taking Guam and Saipan in the Mariana Islands in the summer of 1944.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur was one of the most controversial soldiers in U.S. history. Although he commanded a successful army in the Pacific during World War II, he was later dismissed by President Harry S. Truman for disobeying orders during the Korean War.
 

In October of that year, MacArthur led a powerful invasion force to the Philippines. There, off the island of Leyte, in what became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the U.S. Navy dealt the Japanese fleet another near-fatal blow. The conquest of the Philippines was largely complete by March 1945, and in April, U.S. marines took the island of Okinawa, very near the Japanese coast. The stage was now set for a final, massive invasion of Japan itself.

U.S. marines of the 1st Division climb a seawall during the Inchon invasion on September 15, 1950. The Inchon landing was a brilliant strategic coup that turned the tide of the war against North Korea.

In the European theater during 1942-1943, German forces in the Soviet Union remained bogged down at Leningrad and suffered devastating losses at the Battle of Stalingrad, resulting in a full-scale German retreat from the Eastern Front in early 1943. Meanwhile, the British Royal Air Force and the U.S. Air Force had intensified the Allied bombing campaign in 1942 and seriously damaged German industrial capacity. Not yet prepared to invade German-occupied France, Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill decided to first challenge the German Army in the North African campaign.

British prime minister Winston Churchill speaks at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on March 4, 1946. In his famous speech, Churchill coined the term "iron curtain" as he painted a picture of the post-World War II world and the emerging struggle between democracy and communism.

Striking out from Casablanca in Morocco in November 1942, British and U.S. forces under Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower conquered areas of Algeria held by the French Vichy regime (a puppet government set up by Hitler after his conquest of France). Moving east, the Allied forces met the Germans in an important engagement at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943 and finally forced a German surrender of all of Tunisia in May that same year.

Next, the Allies prepared for the Italian Peninsular campaign. On July 10, 1943, U.S. and British forces began the Sicily invasion; the Italians rebelled against fascist ruler Benito Mussolini, whom King Victor Emmanuel III arrested on July 25. Then, on September 2, the Allies began invading mainland Italy, and Italy surrendered six days later. In response, the Germans invaded Rome and restored the fallen Italian dictator. Fighting against German troops, the Allied advance slowed, but a risky landing behind German lines on a beach at Anzio in January 1944 eventually succeeded, and American forces entered Rome on June 4.

Two days later, on June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed on the coast of France in what became known as the D-Day invasion. Fighting was brutal, but the Allies managed to take control of several beachheads, which they would expand in the following months as they drove on into Germany. Free French Forces, fighting under resistance leader Gen. Charles de Gaulle, and U.S. troops entered Paris on August 25 to the delirious cheers of liberated Parisians.

While another invasion force entered France from the south and bombing raids from England continued to destroy homes and industry in Germany, the Allies pushed on to the German frontier on the Rhine River. There, on December 16, the Germans mounted one final, desperate offensive against the relatively weak center of the U.S. lines. Known as the Battle of the Bulge, it did not last long. Hitler's armies were running out of resources, including crucial fuel supplies, and were throwing inexperienced boys and old men into their ranks to make up for increasing losses. Fighting in bitter cold, the Allies pushed the Germans back for the last time.

Now all that remained was to push on into Germany toward the capital in Berlin. Earlier in the war, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that they would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender from the Germans. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was not likely to settle for anything less, either, as the Soviets had done the heaviest fighting of the entire war. The battles on the Eastern Front were the biggest in human history, and losses—in military personnel, equipment, and civilian casualties—were staggering.

The Soviets had also encountered the brunt of the Germans' death camps—including Auschwitz—in eastern Europe, where Hitler had attempted to annihilate the Jewish race and any "inferior," non-Aryan peoples who challenged the Nazi Party's views of racial purity. Many of the millions of victims of the Holocaust had been Soviet citizens before the war, and Soviet losses over the course of the war totaled as many as 25 million people killed.

By early 1945, the combined effect of Allied bombing, invading U.S. and British troops from the west, and vengeful Soviets in the east had reduced much of Germany to rubble. The Soviets carried out the attack on Berlin and captured it by the end of April. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath Berlin on April 30 as the Soviets closed in. On May 8, V-E Day, remaining German forces finally surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.

The war in Europe was over, but Japan still remained undefeated. The prospect of invading the island nation was daunting, especially in the face of projected bitter resistance from the Japanese people. Roosevelt had died in April, and when Vice President Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency, he learned of the newest and deadliest U.S. weapon—the atomic bomb. U.S. military leaders urged its use to force the Japanese into surrender.

Hoping to end the war rapidly with minimal loss of American life, Truman gave the order to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima when the Japanese refused to surrender unconditionally. On August 6, 1945, a U.S. plane named the Enola Gay dropped the first of two bombs, which instantly killed 80,000 people and caused unprecedented damage. Three days later, after the Japanese still did not surrender, the second atomic bomb fell on the city of Nagasaki and also instantly killed 80,000. The Allies accepted Japan's surrender on August 14, V-J Day, and on September 2, in Tokyo Bay aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, members of the Japanese government signed articles of unconditional surrender.

Thus ended the most destructive war in history, one that has changed the face of the modern world. About 50 million people died during the war, half of them civilians, and the conflict consumed at least $2 trillion of the world's wealth. Vast stretches of the earth were devastated, cities lay in rubble, and millions were homeless. Europe, in ruins, would no longer be the center of global economic, political, or military power. Japan's empire was destroyed and the nation humiliated. Nazi death camps and the millions who died in them revealed the depths of human misery and evil. The Hiroshima bombing and Nagasaki bombing demonstrated the awesome destructive power of atomic weapons and forever altered calculations about international relations and military power. The United States and the Soviet Union, former allies, would soon find themselves pitted against each other in an increasingly hostile cold war. Finally, the world faced the monumental task of rebuilding, recovering, and forging a new world order.

References:
Stokesbury, James L., Short History of World War II, 1980; Weinberg, Gerhard L., Germany, Hitler, and World War II, 1995; Zabecki, David, ed., World War II in Europe: An Encyclopedia, 1999

West Berlin soldiers guard the Berlin Wall in 1961. The wall was a concrete barrier, built in 1961, that separated democratic West Berlin from communist East Berlin throughout much of the cold war.

 

Home - Simon Wiesenthal Center 

The number of children killed by Hitler and his Nazis is not fathomable and full statistics for the tragic fate of the children will never be known. Estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children during the Holocaust. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children.

Plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhoods, the children had witnessed the murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. They faced starvation, illness and brutal labor, until they were consigned to the gas chambers.

This is the story of the children of Izieu - but there are no happy endings. In 1944 the Nazis from Lyon sent three vehicles to the tiny French village to exterminate the children of the orphanage known as La Maison d'Izieu. Here 44 Jewish children in age from 3 to 18 were hidden away from the Nazi terror that surrounded them.

On the morning of April 6, 1944, as the children all settled down in the refectory to drink hot chocolate, the Nazis led by the Butcher of Lyon Klaus Barbie, raided the Home, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks like sacks of potatoes.

The Jewish Children Of Izieu

The little children were deported to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz and murdered immediately upon arrival. Of the forty-four children kidnapped by the Nazis in Izieu, not a single one survived. Of the supervisors there was one sole survivor, twenty-seven year old Lea Feldblum.

Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, who brought Klaus Barbie to justice in 1983, later wrote: "Forty-four children deported - no mere statistic, but rather forty-four tragedies which continue to cause us pain ..."

The Izieu Children

Eleven-year-old Liliane Gerenstein, born January 13, 1933 in Nice, France, wrote a heart-rending letter to God just days before the children of Izieu were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz:
 

"God? How good You are, how kind and if one had to count the number of goodnesses and kindnesses You have done, one would never finish.

God? It is You who command. It is You who are justice, it is You who reward the good and punish the evil.

God? It is thanks to You that I had a beautiful life before, that I was spoiled, that I had  lovely things that others do not have.

God? After that, I ask You one thing only: Make my parents come back, my poor parents protect them (even more than You protect me) so that I can see them again as soon as possible.

Make them come back again. Ah! I had such a good mother and such a good father! I have such faith in You and I thank You in advance."
 

- Louis Bülow  

The Soviet troops were led to the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and took the bodies with them as they moved west with the Soviet's Third Army. Each night the remains were buried, often in the woods, and then dug up when it was time to move on.

Finally, Hitler and Braun were buried behind Smersh's East German headquarters in Magdeburg, and remained for 25 years under a yard later owned by a waste-disposal firm.

It was not until 1970 that the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were dug up from Magdeburg and destroyed.

The rest of Eva Braun's family survived the war. Her mother, Franziska, who lived in an old farmhouse in Ruhpolding, Bavaria, died at the age of ninety-six, in January 1976.