Historians estimate that more than 4, Allied soldiers were killed on June 6, , alone, the first day of battle. Still, the attack on the German-controlled beaches of northern France was overwhelmingly successful. For the first time in the war, German soldiers in Western Europe were on the retreat. The end of the war was in sight. That was when Hitler ordered his last great offensive of the war. The Nazi counterattack began on December 16, , along anmile front in the Forest of Ardennes.
Snow was deep, and the American troops lacked experience. Given the chance to surrender, however, they refused. The fight lasted for several weeks, and the German army was forced to continue its retreat. As Allied forces drew closer to Berlin, they began to discover the full horror of the Holocaust.
They liberated multiple concentration camps,where hundreds of thousands of Jews were still being held. For most, the rescue had come too late—an estimated six million of them had already been killed. When Nazi leaders at last signed the document of surrender, on May 7, , people around the world took to the streets to celebrate.
In August, the United States military dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, one over of the city of Hiroshima, the other over Nagasaki. They hoped the powerful new weapon would convince Japanese leaders to surrender quickly. If you are watching for the first time on your smart phone or tablet, you will need to download the Zoom app from the app store on your device.
The Zoom app is free to download. Once the app is downloaded, click the Zoom webinar link for the program you are interested in.
It will then open the app, and you will enter the webinar room. You will need to provide your email address to participate in a webinar. If you are participating in a Zoom webinar for the first time on a computer, Zoom will prompt you to download and run a bit of software. Once downloaded and installed, click the Zoom webinar link for the program you are interested in. It will then open the application and you will enter the webinar room. On April 21, , two political parties united, creating a single, dominant party in what became East Germany.
Join Museum educators to discuss the few Americans who saw the atrocities of the Holocaust with their own eyes. Join us for an engaging roundtable discussion regarding the experiences of those who did the liberating and those who were liberated in Europe in , and how institutions and scholars preserve and teach this history.
Most scholars date the beginning of the Space Race to the middle of the s. By the winter of , millions of American military personnel were on the move, but they were not alone. More than 60, women wed by American servicemen during World War II hoped to leave their old homes behind and rejoin their husbands for a new life in the United States.
Interpreters and translators were the unspoken heroes of the Nuremberg Trials. The devastation of the Great War as World War I was known at the time had greatly destabilized Europe, and in many respects World War II grew out of issues left unresolved by that earlier conflict. In the mids, he secretly began the rearmament of Germany, a violation of the Versailles Treaty. After signing alliances with Italy and Japan against the Soviet Union , Hitler sent troops to occupy Austria in and the following year annexed Czechoslovakia.
Hitler had long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had guaranteed military support if it were attacked by Germany. The pact with Stalin meant that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded Poland, and would have Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation itself.
On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from both sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early Germany and the Soviet Union had divided control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression Pact.
On April 9, , Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the war began in earnest. In fact, the Germans broke through the line with their tanks and planes and continued to the rear, rendering it useless. Hitler now turned his attention to Britain, which had the defensive advantage of being separated from the Continent by the English Channel. To pave the way for an amphibious invasion dubbed Operation Sea Lion , German planes bombed Britain extensively beginning in September until May , known as the Blitz , including night raids on London and other industrial centers that caused heavy civilian casualties and damage.
Arguments between Hitler and his commanders delayed the next German advance until October, when it was stalled by a Soviet counteroffensive and the onset of harsh winter weather. With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the United States was the only nation capable of combating Japanese aggression, which by late included an expansion of its ongoing war with China and the seizure of European colonial holdings in the Far East.
On December 7, , Japanese aircraft attacked the major U. Germany and the other Axis Powers promptly declared war on the United States. After a long string of Japanese victories, the U. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of Midway in June , which proved to be a turning point in the war.
On Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomon Islands, the Allies also had success against Japanese forces in a series of battles from August to February , helping turn the tide further in the Pacific. Most suggest that some 75 million people died in the war, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians.
Many civilians died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.
The largest portion of military dead were 5. A quarter of the people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed. Germany sustained 5. Of the total number of deaths in World War II, approximately 85 percent—mostly Soviet and Chinese—were on the Allied side and 15 percent on the Axis side.
Many deaths were caused by war crimes committed by German and Japanese forces in occupied territories. An estimated 11 to 17 million civilians died either as a direct or as an indirect result of Nazi ideological policies, including the systematic genocide of around 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and an additional 5 to 6 million ethnic Poles and other Slavs including Ukrainians and Belarusians , Roma, homosexuals, and other ethnic and minority groups.
In Asia and the Pacific, between 3 million and more than 10 million civilians, mostly Chinese estimated at 7. The best-known Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which 50 to thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered. Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported that 2.
General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung. Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons. The Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during its invasion and occupation of China and in early conflicts against the Soviets.
Both the Germans and Japanese tested such weapons against civilians and sometimes on prisoners of war. The Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 22, Polish officers and the imprisonment or execution of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD in the Baltic states and eastern Poland annexed by the Red Army. The mass-bombing of civilian areas, notably the cities of Warsaw, Rotterdam and London, included the aerial targeting of hospitals and fleeing refugees by the German Luftwaffe, along with the bombings of Tokyo and the German cities of Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne by the Western Allies.
These bombings may be considered war crimes. The latter resulted in the destruction of more than cities and the death of more than , German civilians. However, no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed before or during World War II. The German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was responsible for the Holocaust, the killing of approximately 6 million Jews, 2.
About 12 million, mostly Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced laborers. In addition to Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags labor camps led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war POWs and Soviet citizens who were thought to be Nazi supporters.
Of the 5. Soviet ex-POWs and repatriated civilians were treated with great suspicion as potential Nazi collaborators, and some owere sent to the Gulag upon being checked by the NKVD. Japanese POW camps, many of which were used as labor camps, also had high death rates. While 37, prisoners from the UK, 28, from the Netherlands, and 14, from the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number of Chinese released was only After , the number reached 10 million.
About , of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia, and only 52, were repatriated to Java. Canada had a similar program. In addition, 14, German and Italian citizens who had been assessed as being security risks were also interned.
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