Stamps of France: 1943 French Coat-of-Arms Set

New set from 1943. French Coat-of-Arms from Ile-de-France, Lyonnais, Britany and Provence.


Nova série de 1943. Brasões-de-Armas da Ilha-de-França, Lyonnais, Bretanha e Provença.

The 1943 French Collection  // A Colecção Francesa de 1943

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Stamps of France: Île-de-France Coat-of-Arms

ÎLE-DE-FRANCE

Île-de-France is the wealthiest and most populated of the twenty-seven administrative regions of France. It consists mostly of the Paris metropolitan area. Most of Île-de-France is covered by the Paris "aire urbaine" (metropolitan area), a statistical area encompassing the Paris "pôle urbain" (urban area) and its couronne périurbaine (commuter belt).

With 11.7 million inhabitants, Île-de-France is not only the most populated region of France, but also has more residents than Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Finland, Greece, Portugal, or Sweden, and has a population comparable to that of the U.S. state of Ohio or to that of the Canadian province of Ontario. It is the fourth most populous country subdivision in the European Union, after England, North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria.

Economically, Île-de-France is the world's fourth-largest and Europe's wealthiest and largest regional economy. It is the wealthiest metropolitan area in the European Union, and if it were a country, it would rank as the 15th wealthiest in the world.

Created as district "de la région de Paris" in 1961, it was renamed after the historic province of Île-de-France in 1976, when its administrative status was aligned with the other French administrative regions created in 1972. Its name literally means "Island of France", possibly from ancient Frankish Liddle Franke, "little France". Despite the name change, Île-de-France is still popularly referred to by French people as the région Parisienne (the "Paris region") or RP. However, its inhabitants are more and more referred to as "franciliens", an adjective created in the 1980s.

Coat-of-Arms

Old Coat-of-Arms: "Azure, with lilies seeded" and actual Coat-of-Arms: "Azure, with three golden lilies".

The coat of Ile-de-France, shield or flag of arms (armorial flag), is an emblem who doesn't have an official recognition, although in 2010 the Monnaie de Paris has produced a piece of 10 € three fleurs-de-lis to represent the region, and this coat is the official insignia of the gendarmerie of the Île-de-France. However, the current Regional Council of Ile-de-France uses a logo, a red star with 8 irregular branches.

This shield is actually that of the former estate of the kings of France, which the Ile-de-France derives its existence. It is sometimes replaced by the emblem called "old France" (Azure, with lilies seeded) as shown by a stamp of twenty francs issued on 1 May 1943, or the crests of several regional scouts. The lilies of heraldry so-called "France" and "old France" are found in many coats-of-arms of cities in Île-de-France: Cachan, Montreuil, Juziers, Paris, Puteaux, Saint-Denis, Villepinte, etc...

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Germany On Stamps: Sandomierska Tower

KRAKÓW SANDOMIERSKA TOWER

The Sandomierska Tower is one of the three towers built during the reign of Casimir Jagiellon (1447-1492). This tower belongs to Wawel Castel in krakow. Built on a quadrate base, it has seven storeys furnished with holes for fire-arms.

In 1462, the "new tower" was mentioned after the murder by decapitation of six councilors by Jędrzej Teczynski. According to the tradition, were imprisoned gentry from the Land of Sandomierz.

The lower floors of the tower were rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth century was in poor condition. In 1856 it was rebuilt by the Austrians. Modifications have been removed by Zygmunt Hendel in the years 1911-1914. The recent restoration works carried out in 2003-2004 by architect Peter and Dr. Stepien.

Stanislaus Karch, including reconstructed three shooting bays, porch, third floor, the outer staircase leading to the porch and restored the original layout of floors in the upper floors of the tower.

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Germany On Stamps: General Government

 GENERAL GOVERNMENT

 (GENERAL GOUVERNEMENT)

The General Government (General Gouvernement) refers to a part of the territories of Poland under German military occupation during World War II and that were a separate part of "Greater Germany".

In August 1941, former Polish districts of Eastern Galicia (now a Ukrainian territory) were added to the General Government by decree of Adolf Hitler. On 26 October 1939, Hans Frank was appointed Governor-General of the occupied territories. In March 1941 Hitler made a decision to "turn this region into a purely German area within 15-20 years." He also explained that "Where 12 million Poles now live, is to be populated by 4 to 5 million Germans. The Generalgouvernement must become as German as Rhineland".

In 1943, the government selected the Zamojskie area for further German colonisation. German settlements were planned, and the Polish population expelled amid great brutality, but few Germans were settled in the area before 1944.

The Final Solution

In 1942, the Germans began the systematic extermination of the Jewish population. The General Government was the location of four of the six extermination camps with the most extreme measures of the Holocaust. The genocide by gassing of undesired "races", chiefly millions of Jews from Poland and other countries, was carried out between 1942 and 1944.

Overall, 4 million of the 1939 population of the General Government area had lost their lives by the time the Soviet armed forces had entered the area in late 1944.

The German Plans

It was German policy that a small number of (non-Jewish) Poles, like other Slavic peoples, were to be reduced to the status of serfs, while the rest would be deported or otherwise eliminated and eventually replaced by German colonists of the "master race".

Various plans regarding the future of the original population were drawn, with one calling for deportation of about 20 million Poles to Western Siberia, and Germanisation of 4 to 5 million; although deportation in reality meant that the population wouldn't be removed but all of its members put to death as happened to other groups in execution of similar plans. In the General Government, all secondary education was abolished and all Polish cultural institutions closed.

The End

As the Soviets advanced through Poland in late 1944 the General Government collapsed. Frank was captured by American troops in May 1945 and was one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. During his trial he converted to Catholicism. Frank surrendered forty volumes of his diaries to the Tribunal and much evidence against him and others was gathered from them. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and on October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on October 16.

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Germany On Stamps: German Occupation of Poland at WWII

 POLAND

Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north. It is a unitary state made up of sixteen voivodeships. The total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres (120,726 sq. mi) and has a population of over 38 million people.

Poland is a member of the European Union, NATO, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Economic Area, International Energy Agency, Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, International Atomic Energy Agency and G6.

History

The establishment of a Polish state is often identified with the adoption of Christianity by its ruler Mieszko I, in 966, over the territory similar to that of present-day Poland. The Kingdom of Poland was formed in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a long association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin, forming the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth ceased to exist in 1795 as the Polish lands were partitioned among the Kingdom of Prussia, the Russian Empire, and Austria. Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic in 1918.

Two decades later, in September 1939, World War II started with the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invasion of Poland. Over six million Polish citizens died in the war. Poland re-emerged several years later within the Soviet sphere of influence as the People's Republic in existence until 1989. During the Revolutions of 1989, 45-year long communist rule was overthrown and the democratic rule was re-established. That gave foundations to modern Poland, constitutionally known as the "Third Polish Republic".

Despite the vast destruction the country experienced in World War II, Poland managed to preserve much of its cultural wealth. There are currently 14 heritage sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in Poland.

Since the end of the communist period, Poland has achieved a "very high" ranking in terms of human development.

THE SEPTEMBER CAMPAIGN

At the end of First World War Poland acquire several German provinces like West Prussia, Poznan and Upper Silesia under the Treaty of Versailles.

When Adolf Hitler rise to power in Germany pursued a rapprochement policy with Poland improving German-Polish relations, culminating with a non-aggression pact in 1934. With this pact he neutralize the possibility of France and Poland establish any kind of pact against Germany, before had a chance to rearm.

After dismembered the Czechoslovak state in March 1939, under no reaction from France and England, Hitler negotiate a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939.

The German-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which stated that Poland was to be partitioned between the two powers, enabled Germany to attack Poland without the fear of Soviet intervention.

With the invasion of Poland, Germany wants to conquer the so called "Polish Corridor", a territory located in the region of Pomelia, part of the West Prussia, with access to the Baltic Sea. This corridor divides the Germany from the Germany East Prussia and from the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk), an important port city with a predominantly German population, and split from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. From East Prussia and Germany in the North, German forces by the command of General Fedor Von Bock and from Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units by the command of General Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack. After heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 28, 1939. Britain and France, standing by their guarantee of Poland's border, had declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939.

The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. The demarcation line for the partition of German and Soviet occupied Poland was along the Bug River.

In October 1939, Germany directly annexed all territories near German's eastern border: West Prussia, Poznan, Upper Silesia, and the former Free City of Danzig.

The remainder of German-occupied Poland (including the cities of Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, and Lublin) was organized as the so-called "General Gouvernement" (General Government) under a civilian governor general, the Nazi party lawyer Hans Frank.

Nazi Germany occupied the remainder of Poland when it invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Poland remained under German occupation until January 1945.

GERMAN FORCES, PLANS, COMMANDERS AND ARMIES

The Forces

Germany had a substantial numerical advantage over Poland and had developed a significant military prior to the conflict. The Army had some 2,400 tanks organized into six panzer divisions, utilizing a new operational doctrine. It held that these divisions should act in coordination with other elements of the military, punching holes in the enemy line and isolating selected units, which would be encircled and destroyed. This would be followed up by less-mobile mechanized infantry and foot soldiers. The Luftwaffe (air force) provided both tactical and strategic air power, particularly dive bombers that disrupted lines of supply and communications. Together, the so-called "new" methods were nicknamed Blitzkrieg (lightning war).

The Luftwaffe forces consisted of 1,180 fighter aircraft: 290 dive bombers, 1,100 conventional bombers and an assortment of 550 transport and 350 reconnaissance aircraft.

In total, Germany had close to 4,000 aircraft, most of them modern. Due to its prior participation in the Spanish Civil War, the Luftwaffe was probably the most experienced, best trained and best equipped air force in the world in 1939.

The Polish Army had approximately a million soldiers, but less than half of them were mobilized by 1 September. The Polish military had fewer armored forces than the Germans, and these units, dispersed within the infantry, were unable to effectively engage the enemy.

Polish cavalry brigades were used as a mobile mounted infantry. The Polish Air Force was at a severe disadvantage against the German Luftwaffe, although it was not destroyed on the ground early on, as is commonly believed.

The Polish Air Force lacked modern fighter aircraft, but its pilots were among the world's best trained, as proven a year later in the Battle of Britain, in which the Poles played a major part.

Overall, the Germans enjoyed numerical and qualitative aircraft superiority.

There were also over a thousand obsolete transport, reconnaissance and training aircraft. However, for the September Campaign, only some 70% of those aircraft were mobilized. The tank force consisted of two armored brigades, four independent tank battalions and some 30 companies of tankettes attached to infantry divisions and cavalry brigades. The Polish Navy was a small fleet of destroyers, submarines and smaller support vessels.

German plans, Commanders and German Armies

German units invade Poland from three directions:

• A main attack over the western Polish border. This was to be carried out by Army Group South commanded by General Gerd von Rundstedt, attacking from German Silesia and from the Moravian and Slovak border: General Johannes Blaskowitz's 8th Army was to drive eastward against Lodz, General Wilhelm List's 14th Army was to push on toward Krakow and to turn the Poles' Carpathian flank; and General Walter von Reichenau's 10th Army, in the centre with Army Group South's armour, was to deliver the decisive blow with a northeastward thrust into the heart of Poland.


• A second route of attack from northern Prussia. General Fedor von Bock commanded Army Group North, comprising General Georg von Küchler's 3rd Army, which was to strike southward from East Prussia, and General Günther von Kluge's 4th Army, which was to attack eastward across the base of the Polish Corridor.





• A tertiary attack by part of Army Group South's allied Slovak units from Slovakia.

From within Poland, the German minority would assist by engaging in diversion and sabotage operations through Selbstschutz units (paramilitary organisations created by ethnic Germans) prepared before the war.

All three assaults were to converge on Warsaw, while the main Polish army was to be encircled and destroyed west of the Vistula. Fall Weiss (a German strategic plan for the Invasion of Poland) as initiated on 1 September 1939, and was the first operation of the Second World War in Europe.

German attack progression

By 3 September when Günther von Kluge in the north had reached the Vistula river, Georg von Küchler was approaching the Narew River and Walther von Reichenau's armour was already beyond the Warta river. Two days later, his left wing was well to the rear of Lodz and his right wing at the town of Kielce and by 8 September one of his armoured corps was on the outskirts of Warsaw, having advanced 225 kilometres (140 miles) in the first week of war.

Light divisions on Reichenau's right were on the Vistula between Warsaw and the town of Sandomierz by 9 September while List, in the south, was on the river San above and below the town of Przemyśl. At the same time, Guderian led his 3rd Army tanks across the Narew, attacking the line of the Bug River, already encircling Warsaw.

All the German armies made progress in fulfilling their parts of the Fall Weiss plan. The Polish armies were splitting up into uncoordinated fragments, some of which were retreating while others were launching disjointed attacks on the nearest German columns.

 

  POLAND OCCUPATION DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939 – 1945)

The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War (1939 – 1945) began with invasion of Poland in September 1939, and formally concluded with the defeat of Nazism by the Four Powers in May 1945.

Throughout the entire course of foreign occupation the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR).

Before Operation Barbarossa, code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in summer-autumn of 1941, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union coordinated their Poland-related policies, most visibly in the four Gestapo-NKVD Conferences, where the occupants discussed plans for dealing with the Polish resistance movement and future destruction of Poland.

After a few years of fighting, the Red Army was able to repel the invaders: drive the Nazi forces out of the USSR and across Poland from the rest of Eastern and Central Europe.

About 6 million Polish citizens died between 1939 and 1945 as a result of the occupation, half of whom were Polish Jews.

I - OCCUPATION, ANNEXATION AND ADMINISTRATION

Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany

Under the terms of two decrees by Hitler, with Stalin's agreement (8 and 12 October 1939), large areas of western Poland were annexed by Germany.

Creation of General Government

The remaining block of territory was placed under a German administration called the General, with its capital at Kraków.

Hans Frank was appointed Governor-General of this occupied area on 26 October 1939. Frank oversaw the segregation of the Jews into ghettos in the largest cities, particularly Warsaw, and the use of Polish civilians as forced and compulsory labour in German war industries.

In April 1940 Frank made the morbid announcement that Kraków should become racially "cleanest" of all cities under his rule.

Significant border changes were made after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, and again in late 1944 and 1945, when the Soviet Union regained control of those lands and moved further west, eventually taking over all Polish territories.

Soviet administration zone

On the basis of a secret clause of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR), the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, capturing the eastern regions of Poland (Kresy), with Galicia and Volhynia, facing little Polish opposition.

By the end of the Polish Defensive War against the two invaders, the Soviet Union had taken over 52.1% of the territory of Poland. All territory invaded by the Red Army was annexed to the Soviet Union, with the exception of Vilnius area, which was transferred to sovereign Lithuania. A small strip of land that was part of Hungary before 1914 was also given to Slovakia.

II - POLAND UNDER NAZI GERMAN OCCUPATION

From the beginning, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany was intended as fulfillment of the plan described by Adolf Hitler in his 1926 book "Mein Kampf".

The aim of this plan was to turn Eastern Europe into part of greater Germany, the so-called German Lebensraum ("living space"). On August 22, 1939, on the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, men, women, and children of Polish descent or language".

In contrast to the Nazi policy of genocide targeting all of Poland's 3.3 million Jewish men, women, and children for elimination, Nazi plans for the Polish Catholic majority focused on the elimination or suppression of political, religious, and intellectual leaders.

From 1939–1941, the Germans deported en masse about 1,600,000 Poles, including 400,000 Jews. About 700,000 Poles were sent to Germany for forced labor, many to die there. And the most infamous German death camps had been located in Poland.

Overall, during German occupation, 1939–1945, the Germans murdered 5,470,000–5,670,000 Poles, including nearly 3,000,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust (mostly during Operation Reinhard).

Altogether, 2,500,000 Poles were subjected to expulsions, while 7.3% of the Polish population served as slave labor.

Among the victims were two million ethnic Poles with the remaining 500,000 mainly from ethnic minorities living in Poland. The majority of those killed by Nazi Germany were civilians. The remainder perished at the Soviet hands.

"Generalplan Ost" and expulsion of Poles

"Generalplan Ost", essentially a grand plan for ethnic cleansing, was divided into two parts, the Kleine Planung ("Small Plan"), which covered actions which were to be taken during the war, and the Grosse Planung ("Big Plan"), which covered actions to be undertaken after the war was won. The plan envisaged differing percentages of the various conquered nations undergoing Germanization, expulsion into the depths of Russia, and other gruesome fates, the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would take on an irrevocably German character.

In 10 years' time, the plan called for the extermination, expulsion, enslavement or Germanization of most or all Poles and East Slavs still living behind the front line.

By 1952, only about 3–4 million Poles were supposed to be left residing in the former Poland, and then only to serve as slaves for German settlers. They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist.

Operation Tannenberg

Operation Tannenberg (German: Unternehmen Tannenberg) was the codename for one of the extermination actions directed at the Polish people in September-October 1939.

Conscription lists, prepared by Germans before the war, identified more than 61,000 members of the Polish elite: activists, intelligentsia, scholars, actors, former officers, and others, who were to be interned or shot.

In August 1939 about 2,000 activists of Polish minority organisations in Germany were arrested and murdered. By September 1, 1939, and ended in October, resulting in at least 20,000 deaths in 760 mass executions by Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary groups formed by Heinrich Himmler) special task units with some help from regular Wehrmacht (armed forces) units. In addition, a special formation was created from the German minority living in Poland called Selbstschutz, whose members had trained in Germany before the war in diversion and guerilla fighting. The formation was responsible for many massacres and due to its bad reputation was dissolved by Nazi authorities after the September Campaign.

Germanization and expulsion of Poles

In the territories which were annexed to Nazi Germany, the Nazis' goal was to achieve complete Germanization which would assimilate the territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich.

Nazis applied this policy most rigorously in western incorporated territories—the so-called Wartheland. There, the Germans closed even elementary schools where Polish was the language of instruction. They renamed streets and cities, and also seized tens of thousands of Polish enterprises, from large industrial firms to small shops, without payment to the owners.

The Germanization of the annexed lands also included an ambitious program to resettle Germans from the Baltic and other regions on farms and other homes formerly occupied by Poles and Jews. Only those Poles selected for Germanization were permitted to remain, and if they resisted Germanization, they were to be sent to concentration camps.

In October 1939, the SS began to expel Poles and Jews from the Wartheland and the Polish Corridor and transport them to the General Government.

Between 1940 and 1943, the SS carried out massive expulsions in the General Government. Families were torn apart as able-bodied teens and adults were taken for forced labor and elderly, young, and disabled persons were moved to other localities. Tens of thousands were also imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps.

The Nazis also kept an eye out for Polish children who possessed Aryan racial characteristics. Promising children were separated from their parents and sent to Łódź for further examination. If they passed the battery of racial, physical and psychological tests, they were sent on to Germany for "Germanization".

As many children chosen for Germanization were given German names, forbidden to speak Polish, and reeducated in SS or other Nazi institutions. Few ever saw their parents again. Many more children were rejected as unsuitable for Germanization after failing to measure up to racial scientists' criteria for establishing "Aryan" ancestry. These children were shipped to orphanages or to Auschwitz, where they were killed, most often by intercardiac injections of phenol.

German People's List (Deutsche Volksliste – DVL)

The German People's List (Deutsche Volksliste - DVL) classified Polish citizens into four categories:

• Category I - Persons of German descent who had engaged themselves in favour of the Reich before 1939;


• Category II - Persons of German descent who had remained passive;


• Category III - Indigenous persons considered by the Nazis as partly Polonized (mainly Silesians and Kashubs); refusal to join this list often lead to deportation to a concentration camp;


• Category IV - Persons of Polish nationality considered "racially valuable", but who resisted Germanization.
  

After registration in the List, individuals from Groups 1 and 2 automatically became German citizens.

Those from Group 3 acquired German citizenship subject to revocation.

Those from Group 4 received German citizenship through naturalization proceedings; resistance to Germanization constituted treason because "German blood must not be utilized in the interest of a foreign nation," and such people were sent to concentration camps.

Persons ineligible for the List were classified as stateless, and all Poles from the occupied territory, that is from the Government General of Poland, as distinct from the incorporated territory, were classified as non-protected.

Concentration camps

Camps such as Auschwitz in Poland and Buchenwald in central Germany became administrative centres of huge networks of forced-labour camps. One of the most infamous of these camps was Auschwitz III, or Monowitz, which supplied forced labourers to a synthetic rubber plant owned by IG Farben, a chemical industry conglomerate. Prisoners in all the concentration camps were literally worked to death.

Auschwitz (Oświęcim) became the main concentration camp for Poles after the arrival there on 14 June 1940, of 728 men transported from an overcrowded prison at Tarnów. By March 1941, 10,900 prisoners were registered at the camp, most of them Poles. In September 1941, 200 ill prisoners, most of them Poles, along with 650 Soviet prisoners of war, were killed in the first gassing experiments at Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942, Auschwitz's prisoner population became much more diverse, as Jews and other "enemies of the state" from all over German-occupied Europe were deported to the camp.

The Polish scholar Franciszek Piper, the chief historian of Auschwitz, has estimated that 140,000–150,000 Poles were brought to that camp between 1940 and 1945, and that 70,000–75,000 died there as victims of executions, of cruel medical experiments, and of starvation and disease. Some 100,000 Poles were deported to Majdanek, and tens of thousands of them died there. An estimated 20,000 Poles died at Sachsenhausen, 20,000 at Gross-Rosen, 30,000 at Mauthausen, 17,000 at Neuengamme, 10,000 at Dachau, and 17,000 at Ravensbrueck. In addition, tens of thousands were executed or died in other camps and prisons.

Polish resistance movement

In response to the German occupation, Poles organized the largest underground movement in Europe with more than 300 widely supported political and military groups and subgroups. Despite military defeat, the Polish government itself never surrendered. In 1940, the Polish government in Exile was established in London.

The Polish resistance movement fought against the occupation by Nazi Germany. Resistance began almost at once, although there is little terrain in Poland suitable for guerrilla operations.

Officers of the regular Polish army formed an underground armed force, the "Home Army" (Armia Krajowa—AK).

The Home Army (in Polish Armia Krajowa or AK), loyal to the Polish government in exile in London and a military arm of the Polish Secret State, was formed from a number of smaller groups in 1942. From 1943 the AK was in competition with the People's Army (Polish Armia Ludowa or AL), backed by the Soviet Union and controlled by the Polish Workers' Party (Polish Polska Partia Robotnicza or PPR). By 1944 the AK had some 380,000 men, although few arms: the AL was much smaller, numbering around 30,000. By the summer of 1944 Polish underground forces numbered more than 300,000. The Polish partisan groups (Leśni) killed about 150,000 Axis during the occupation.

Resistance groups inside Poland set up underground courts for trying collaborators and others deemed to be traitors to Poland. The resistance groups also set up clandestine schools in response to the Germans' closing of many educational institutions.

When the arrival of the Soviet army seemed imminent, the AK launched an uprising in Warsaw against the German army on 1 August 1944. After 63 days of bitter fighting, the Germans quashed the insurrection. The Polish resistance received little or no assistance from the Soviet army.

The Soviet army had reached a point within a few hundred meters across the Vistula River from the city on 16 September, but failed to make further headway in the course of the Uprising, leading to accusations that they had deliberately stopped their advance because Joseph Stalin did not want the Uprising to succeed. The reasoning behind the allegation was that Stalin preferred to have the Polish resistance suppressed by the Nazis so as to weaken any forces that might resist Soviet domination after the war.

Nearly 250,000 Poles, most of them civilians, lost their lives in the Warsaw Uprising.

The Germans deported hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to concentration camps. Many others were transported to the Reich for forced labor. Acting on Hitler's orders, German forces reduced the city to rubble, greatly extending the destruction begun during their suppression of the earlier armed uprising by Jewish fighters resisting deportation from the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943.

Impact on the Polish population

The Polish civilian population suffered under German occupation in several ways. Large numbers were expelled from areas intended for German colonisation, and forced to resettle in the General-Government area. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Germany for forced labour in industry and agriculture, where many thousands died. Poles were also conscripted for labour in Poland, and were held in labour camps all over the country, again with a high death rate. There was a general shortage of food, fuel for heating and medical supplies, and there was a high death rate among the Polish population as a result.

Some three million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war, over two million of whom were ethnic Poles (the remainder being mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians). The vast majority of those killed were civilians, mostly killed by the actions of Nazi Germany.

About one fifth of Polish citizens lost their lives in the war, most of the civilians targeted by various deliberate actions.

III - POLAND UNDER SOVIET OCCUPATION

The Soviet Union never officially declared war on Poland, and had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion.

After signing the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, Polish areas occupied by Nazi Germany were either directly annexed to the Third Reich, or became part of the so-called General Government. Soviet Union, after rigged Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, annexed eastern Poland either to Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, or Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The first victims of the new order were approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the USSR during and after the invasion of Poland. As the Soviet Union had not signed international conventions on rules of war, the Polish prisoners were denied legal status.

In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Many of them, captured, interrogated and shot on 22 September, were executed already during the 1939 campaign. The number of Poles who died due to Soviet repressions in the period 1939-1941 is estimated at least 150,000.

In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported a total of more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations from the Soviet territories, while in Poland the Nazis and their collaborators murdered ethnic poles who opposed German rule.

The Poles and the Soviets re-established diplomatic relations in 1941, following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement; but the Soviets broke them off again in 1943 after the Polish government demanded an independent examination of the recently discovered Katyn burial pits. The Soviets then lobbied the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska in Moscow.

The Polish government in exile operated in exile between 1939 and 1990, maintaining that it was the only legal and legitimate representative of the Polish nation. In 1990, the last president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski handed the insignia to Lech Wałęsa, signifying continuity between the Second and Third republics.

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Germany On Stamps: German Occupations at WWII

WORLD WAR II

Causes

The main causes of World War II were nationalistic tensions, unresolved issues, and resentments resulting from the World War I and the interwar period in Europe, plus the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The culmination of events that led to the outbreak of war are generally understood to be the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany and Soviet Russia and the 1937 invasion of the Republic of China by the Empire of Japan.

These military aggressions were the result of decisions made by the authoritarian ruling Nazi elite in Germany and by the leadership of the Kwantung Army in Japan. World War II started after these aggressive actions were met with an official declaration of war and/or armed resistance.

World War I

Many people view World War II as a continuation of World War I. Some believe that the Versailles Treaty, drafted at the conclusion of the World War I, failed to set up the parameters which may have prevented the Second.

World War I lacked a decisive conclusion. Allied troops had not entered Germany in large numbers and its people anticipated a treaty along the lines of the Fourteen Points. The Fourteen Points was a speech given by U. S. President Wilson to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918. The address was intended to assure the country that the Great War was being fought for a moral cause and for post-war peace in Europe. The speech was delivered 10 months before the Armistice with Germany and became the basis for the terms of the German surrender, as negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles had little to do with the Fourteen Points and was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.

This meant the German people argued that had the 'traitors' not gone and surrendered to the Allies, Germany could have gone on to win the war, however unlikely the reality. The Fourteen Points were largely abandoned in favour of punishing Germany for its alleged "war guilt", an ineffective compromise that left Germany smaller, weaker and embittered, but capable of rebounding and seeking revenge.

Large groups of nationalistic minorities still remained trapped in other nations. For example, Yugoslavia (originally the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) had 5 major ethnic groups (the Serbs, Croats, Macedons, Montenegrins, and the Slovenes), and it was created after the war.

The Germans had a difficult time accepting defeat. At the end of the war, the navy was in a state of mutiny, and the army was retreating (but not routing) in the face of an enemy with more men and material. Despite this reality, some people (including Hitler), advanced the idea that the army would somehow have triumphed if not for the German Revolution of 1918–1919 at home. This "Stab in the Back" theory was used to convince the people that a second world war would be winnable.

Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic governed Germany from 1919 to 1933. The republic was named after the city of Weimar, where a national assembly convened to produce a new constitution after the German Empire was abolished following the nation's defeat in World War I. It was a liberal democracy in the style of France and the United States.

The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed Nazi coup d'état which occurred in the evening of Thursday, November 8 to the early afternoon of Friday, November 9, 1923. Adolf Hitler, using the popular World War I General Erich Ludendorff, unsuccessfully tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic.

The Great Depression

Fallout from the collapse of the United States economy following the 1929 Stock Market Crash reverberated throughout the world. European countries were hit hard by the Great Depression, which led to high rates of unemployment, poverty, civil unrest, and an overall feeling of despair.

The Great Depression resulted in a 25% unemployment rate in the United States and a 33% unemployment rate in Germany. The lure of a steady job and adequate food led many people to support dictatorships like those established by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and other totalitarians.

The Great Depression affected Germany tremendously, second only to the United States. Severe unemployment led a surge in Nazi Party membership, which had been losing favor. This contributed directly to the rise of Hitler in Germany. After World War I, many American banks invested their money in rebuilding Europe. However, the 1929 crash caused a shortage in capital.

Rise of Fascism in Italy

From October 27 to October 29, 1922, Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, or PNF) staged a coup d'état and seized political power in the Kingdom of Italy.

Nazi Dictatorship

Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933. The arson of the parliament building on February 27 (which some have claimed the Nazis had instigated) was used as an excuse for the cancellation of civil and political liberties, enacted by the aged President Paul von Hindenburg and the rightist coalition cabinet led by Hitler.

After new elections, a Nazi-led majority abolished parliamentarism, the Weimar constitution, and practically the parliament itself through the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, whereby the Nazis' planned Gleichschaltung ("bringing into line") of Germany was made formally legal, giving the Nazis totalitarian control over German society. In the "Night of the Long Knives", Hitler's men murdered his main political rivals. After Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, the authority of the presidency fell into the hands of Adolf Hitler. Without much resistance from the army leadership, the Soldiers' Oath was modified into an oath of obedience to Adolf Hitler personally.

In violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the spirit of the Locarno Pact, Germany remilitarized the Rhineland on Saturday, March 7, 1936. The occupation was done with very little military force; the troops entered on bicycles and could easily have been stopped had it not been for the appeasement mentality. France could not act because of political instability at the time. In addition, since the remilitarization occurred on a weekend, the British Government could not find out or discuss actions to be taken until the following Monday. As a result of this, the governments were inclined to see the remilitarization as a "fait accompli".

Italian Invasion of Ethiopia

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini attempted to expand the Italian Empire in Africa by invading the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia). The Kingdom of Italy invaded on 3 October 1935, without a formal declaration of war. The League of Nations declared Italy the aggressor but failed to impose effective sanctions. The Suez Canal was left open which allowed Italian ships to continue to Abyssinia.

By the end of 1935, Mussolini approved the use of mustard gas. On 31 March 1936, the Italians won the last major battle of the war, the Battle of Maychew. Italy annexed the Ethiopia on 7 May and merged Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somaliland into a single colony known as Italian East Africa.

On 30 June 1936, the Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie, exiled, gave a stirring speech before the League of Nations denouncing Italy's actions and criticizing the world community for standing by. He warned that "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow". As a result of the League's condemnation of Italy, Mussolini declared the country's withdrawal from the organization.

Spanish Civil War

Germany and Italy lent support to the Nationalist insurrection led by General Francisco Franco in Spain. The Soviet Union supported the existing government, the Spanish Republic. Both sides used this war as an opportunity to test improved weapons and tactics. The Bombing of Guernica was a horrific attack on civilians which foreshadowed events that would occur throughout Europe.

Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937 when Japan attacked deep into China from its foothold in Manchukuo.

The invasion was launched by the bombing of many cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing and Guangzhou. The latest, which began on 22 and 23 September 1937, called forth widespread protests culminating in a resolution by the Far Eastern Advisory Committee of the League of Nations.

The Imperial Japanese Army captured the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, and committed war crimes in the Nanjing massacre.

Anschluss

The Anschluss was the occupation and annexation of Austria into the German Third Reich on 12 March 1938. There had been several years of pressure by supporters from both Austria and Germany (by both Nazis and non-Nazis) for the "Heim ins Reich" (Back to Reich) movement. Earlier, Nazi Germany had provided support for the Austrian National Socialist Party (Austrian Nazi Party) in its bid to seize power from Austria's Austrofascist leadership.

Devoted to remaining independent but under considerable pressure from both German and Austrian Nazis, Austria's Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg tried to hold a referendum for a vote on the issue. Although Schuschnigg expected Austria to vote in favour of maintaining autonomy, a well-planned coup d'état by the Austrian Nazi Party of Austria's state institutions in Vienna took place on 11 March, prior to the referendum, which they cancelled.

They transferred power to Germany, and Wehrmacht (Defence Force) troops entered Austria to enforce the Anschluss. The Nazis held a plebiscite within the following month, asking the people to ratify the fait accompli. They claimed to have received 99.73% of the vote in favour.

Although the Allies were committed to upholding the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and St. Germain, which specifically prohibited the union of Austria and Germany, their reaction was only verbal and moderate.

No military confrontation took place and even the strongest voices against the annexation, particularly Fascist Italy, France and the United Kingdom (the "Stresa Front" was a reaction from the victorious countries of World War I to the apparent willingness to promote Hitler's rearmament of Germany, ignoring the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles) remained at peace.

Munich Agreement

The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.

The so-called Sudetenland was a predominantly German-speaking region along the borders of Czechoslovakia with Germany.

The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without the presence of Czechoslovakia. Today, it is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement toward Nazi Germany.

The agreement was signed in the early hours of 30 September 1938 (but dated 29 September). The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of the Sudetenland in the face of territorial demands made by Adolf Hitler. The agreement was signed by Nazi Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The Sudetenland was of immense strategic importance to Czechoslovakia, as most of its border defences were situated there, and many of its banks were located there as well.

Because the state of Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference, Czechs and Slovaks call the Munich Agreement the Munich Dictate. Today the document is typically referred to simply as the Munich Pact.

German occupation and Slovak independence

In March 1939, breaking the Munich Agreement, German troops invaded Prague, and with the Slovaks declaring independence, the country of Czechoslovakia disappeared. The entire ordeal was the last show of the French and British policy of appeasement.

Italian invasion of Albania

After German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Italy saw itself becoming a second-rate member of the Axis. Rome delivered Tirana an ultimatum on March 25, 1939, demanding that it accede to Italy's occupation of Albania. King Zog refused to accept money in exchange for countenancing a full Italian takeover and colonization of Albania. On April 7, 1939, Mussolini's troops invaded Albania. Albania was occupied after a 3 days campaign with minimal resistance offered by the Albanian forces.

Soviet–Japanese Border War

In 1939, the Japanese attacked west from Manchuria into the Mongolian People's Republic, following the earlier Battle of Lake Khasan in 1938. They were decisively beaten by Soviet units under General Georgy Zhukov. Following this battle, the Soviet Union and Japan were at peace until 1945. Japan looked south to expand its empire, leading to conflict with the United States over the Philippines and control of shipping lanes to the Dutch East Indies. The Soviet Union focused on her western border, but leaving 1 million to 1.5 million troops to guard the frontier with Japan.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Nominally, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union. It was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

In 1939, neither Germany nor the Soviet Union was ready to go to war with each other. The Soviet Union had lost territory to Poland in 1920. Although officially labelled a "non-aggression treaty", the pact included a secret protocol, in which the independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania were divided into spheres of interest of the parties. The secret protocol explicitly assumed "territorial and political rearrangements" in the areas of these countries.

Subsequently all the mentioned countries were invaded, occupied, or forced to cede part of their territory by either the Soviet Union, Germany, or both.

Invasion of Poland

Tensions had existed between Poland and Germany for some time in regards to the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor, and there is some debate over a claim that Poland had, in 1933, tried to get France to join it in preventive attack after Nazis won in Germany. This had been settled in 1934 by a non-aggression pact but in spring of 1939, tensions rose again. Hitler used the issue of the status city as pretext for attacking Poland, while explaining during a high level meeting of German military officials in May 1933 that his real goal is obtaining Lebensraum for Germany, isolating Poles from their Allies in the West and afterwards attacking Poland, thus avoiding the repeat of Czech situation.

Shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been signed, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France had previously warned that they would honour their alliances to Poland and issued an ultimatum to Germany: withdraw or war would be declared. Germany declined, and what became World War II was declared by the British and French, without entering the war effectively. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17.

Final diplomatic strategy

In 1940, a trip to Italy was made by British amateur diplomat James Lonsdale-Bryans. The trip, which was arranged with the support of Lord Halifax, was to meet with German ambassador Ulrich von Hassell. Lonsdale-Bryans proposed a deal whereby Germany would be given a free hand in Europe, while the British Empire would control the rest of the world. It is unclear to what extent this proposal enjoyed the official backing of the British Foreign Office. Halifax himself had met with Hitler in 1937.

Invasion of the Soviet Union

Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Hitler believed that the Soviet Union could be defeated in a fast-paced and relentless assault that capitalized on the Soviet Union's ill-prepared state, and hoped that success there would bring Britain to the negotiation table, ending the war altogether. Hitler further wanted to pre-empt an attack by the Soviet Union, and in doing so catch the Soviets off-guard.

Attack on Pearl Harbour

The Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, hoping to destroy the United States Pacific Fleet at anchor. Even though the Japanese knew that the U.S. had the potential to build more ships, they hoped that they would feed reinforcements in piecemeal and thus the Japanese Navy would be able to defeat them in detail. This nearly happened during the Battle of Wake Island shortly after.

Japan's attack on the US, resulted in an immediate declaration of a state of war between the two nations. Although the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy did not mandate declaration of war if a signatory initiated an attack, Hitler chose to declare that the Pact required that Germany follow Japan's declaration of war. Germany and Italy did not have to declare war on the USA in order to fulfil their treaty obligations, but eagerly did so.

Within days, Germany declared war on the United States, effectively ending isolationist sentiment in the U.S. which had so far prevented it from entering the war.

THE WORLD WAR II

World War II, or the Second World War (often abbreviated as WWII or WW2), was a global conflict that was underway by 1939 and ended in 1945. It involved most of the world's nations, including all of the great powers, eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, with more than 100 million military personnel mobilized.

In a state of "total war", the major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by significant events involving the mass death of civilians, including the Holocaust and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, it is the deadliest conflict in human history, resulting in 50 million to over 70 million fatalities.

I – THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II

Although Japan was already at war with China in 1937, the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and most of the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth.

Germany set out to establish a large empire in Europe. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or subdued much of continental Europe; amid Nazi-Soviet agreements, the nominally neutral Soviet Union fully or partially occupied and annexed territories of its six European neighbours, including Poland.

Britain and the Commonwealth remained the only major force continuing the fight against the Axis in North Africa and in extensive naval warfare. In June 1941, the European Axis launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, giving a start to the largest land theatre of war in history, which, from that moment on, tied down the major part of the Axis military power.

In December 1941, Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia, attacked the United States and European possessions in the Pacific Ocean quickly conquering much of the region.

The Axis advance was stopped in 1942 after the defeat of Japan in a series of naval battles and after defeats of European Axis troops in North Africa and, decisively, at Stalingrad.

In 1943, with a series of German defeats in Eastern Europe, the Allied invasion of Fascist Italy, and American victories in the Pacific, the Axis lost the initiative and undertook strategic retreat on all fronts.

In 1944, the Western Allies invaded France, while the Soviet Union regained all territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. The war in Europe ended with the capture of Berlin by Soviet and Polish troops and the subsequent German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.

The Japanese Navy was defeated by the United States, and invasion of the Japanese Archipelago ("HomeIslands") became imminent. The war in Asia ended on 15 August 1945 when Japan agreed to surrender.

The war ended with the total victory of the Allies over the Axis in 1945. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world. The United Nations (UN) organisation was established to foster international cooperation and prevent future conflicts.

The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers started to decline, while the decolonisation of Asia and Africa began. Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to stabilise post-war relations.

II – WORLD WAR'S II PARTICIPANTS

The participants in World War II were those nations who either participated directly in or were affected by any of the theatres or events of World War II. World War II was primarily fought between two large military alliances.

• The Axis powers also known as the Axis alliance, Axis nations, Axis countries, or just the Axis, was a group of countries led by Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy (until its defeat) and the Empire of Japan, who fought World War II against the Allies. They were considered the aggressors of the conflict.
  
  It began in 1936 with treaties of friendship between Germany and Italy and between Germany and Japan. The "Rome-Berlin Axis" became a full military alliance in 1939 under the Pact of Steel, and the Tripartite Pact of 1940 fully integrated the military aims of Germany, Italy, and Japan. At their zenith in the midst of World War II, the Axis powers ruled empires that dominated large parts of Europe, Africa, East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, but the war ended with their total defeat and dissolution.
  
  Like the Allies, membership of the Axis was fluid, and other nations entered and later left the Axis during the course of the war.
  

• The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War (1939–1945). Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states. The Allies became involved in World War II either because they had already been invaded, were directly threatened with invasion by the Axis or because they were concerned that the Axis powers would come to control the world.
  
  The anti-German coalition at the start of the war (September 1, 1939) consisted of France, Poland, the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth nations, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Union of South Africa (the latter's troops largely fought under Commonwealth command despite being a sovereign nation since 1931).
  
  
  
  After 1941, the leaders of the British Commonwealth, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United States of America, known as the "Big Three", held leadership of the allied powers. China, at that time, was also a major Ally.
  
  Other Allies included Belgium, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Greece, India (as part of the British Empire), Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway and Yugoslavia.
  
  During December 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt devised the name "United Nations" for the Allies. He referred to the Big Three and China as a "trusteeship of the powerful", and then later the "Four Policemen".
  
  The Declaration by United Nations on 1 January 1942 was the basis of the modern United Nations (UN).
  
  
  At the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, proposed that the foreign ministers of China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States "should draft the peace treaties and boundary settlements of Europe", which led to the creation of the Council of Foreign Ministers.
  

III - THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENTS DURING WWII

• Anti-Semitism – In part, the Nazi party gained popularity by disseminating anti-Jewish propaganda. Millions bought Hitler's book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which called for the removal of Jews from Germany.
  
  With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the party ordered anti-Jewish boycotts, staged book burnings, and enacted anti-Jewish legislation. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws defined Jews by blood and ordered the total separation of "Aryans" and "non-Aryans." On November 9, 1938, the Nazis destroyed synagogues and the shop windows of Jewish-owned stores throughout Germany and Austria ("Kristallnacht", in English "Crystal Night").
  

• The Holocaust – The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were "Life unworthy of life". During the era of the Holocaust, the Nazis also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the handicapped, and some of the Slavic people (Poles, Russians, and others).
  
  
  
  In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. By 1945, close to two out of every three European Jews had been killed as part of the "Final Solution", the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.
  

• Germany Invasion of Poland – When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, France and Britain declared war on Germany. After conquering Poland, Germany attacked France. France fell in June 1940, and soon the Nazis overran most of the rest of Europe and North Africa. Only Britain, led by Winston Churchill, was not defeated.

• 
  Battle of Midway – Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, Japanese armies rolled over Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the East Indies. The war in the Pacific was fought on land, at sea, and in the air. The turning point in the war in the Pacific came in June, 1942 at the Battle of Midway. In a four day battle fought between aircraft based on giant aircraft carriers, the U.S. destroyed hundreds of Japanese planes and regained control of the Pacific. The Japanese continued to fight on, however, even after the war in Europe ended.
  

• Stalingrad (Now Volvograd) – On June 22, 1941, four million troops poured over the Russian border. Within one month, over two and half million Russians had been killed, wounded or captured. The Germans made tremendous advances into Russia – into portions of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad.
  
  And then winter hit. The Germans were caught in summer uniforms, and it was a bitter, cold winter that year.
  
  Stalin, using sheer force of numbers, threw another two million soldiers at the Germans.
  

• D-Day – On D-Day, June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower led U.S. and Allied troops in an invasion of Normandy, France. The armies fought their way through France and Belgium and into Germany while Russian troops fought from the east. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered.
  

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki – The Japanese fought on even after the war in Europe ended. Truman decided to use the newly developed atomic bomb to end the war quickly and prevent more U.S. casualties. The Super fortress bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, killing about 78,000 people and injuring 100,000 more. On August 9, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, killing another 40,000 people.
  

IV - THE END OF WORLD WAR II

On April 27, 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Milan, Mussolini was captured by Italian Partisans. He was trying to flee Italy to Switzerland and was travelling with a German anti-air battalion. On April 28, Mussolini and several of the other Fascists captured with him were taken to Dongo and executed by squad shooting. Their bodies were taken to Milan where they were hung upside down in a oil station for public viewing and confirmation of his death.

Hitler, learning of Mussolini's death, realised that the end had finally come. He remained in Berlin, the last Nazi held city and the crumbling Nazi Empire's capital, even as the city was encircled and trapped by the Soviets and the Battle of Berlin raged.

On April 30, Adolf Hitler, with his wife of one day, Eva Braun, committed suicide in his bunker to avoid capture by Soviet troops. In his last will and testament, Hitler appointed Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as the new German leader. But Germany lasted only 7 days longer under the "Flensburg government" of Dönitz. He surrendered unconditionally to the Americans, British, and Soviets on May 8, 1945 ("VE Day").

In late July and August 1945 the Potsdam Conference finally disbanded, "denazified" and demilitarized the former Nazi German state and reversed all German annexations and occupied territories.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE WORLD WAR II

The World War II had far-reaching implications for most of the world. Many millions of lives had been lost as a result of the war. Germany was divided into four quadrants, which were controlled by the Allied Powers — the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union.

The war can be identified to varying degrees as the catalyst for many continental, national and local phenomena, such as the redrawing of European borders, the birth of the United Kingdom's welfare state, the communist revolution in China and Eastern Europe, the creation of Israel, and the division of Germany and Korea and later of Vietnam. In addition, many organizations have roots in the Second World War; for example, the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund. Technologies, such as nuclear fission, the electronic computer and the jet engine, also appeared during this period.

A multipolar world was replaced by a bipolar one dominated by the two most powerful victors, the United States and Soviet Union, which became known as the superpowers.

I – EUROPE IN RUINS

At the end of the war, millions of refugees were homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and most of the European industrial infrastructure was destroyed.

Border revisions and population transfers

As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large populations suddenly found themselves in hostile territory.

The main beneficiary of these revisions was the Soviet Union, which expanded its borders at the expense of Germany, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Japan. The Soviet Union also acquired the three independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had declared their neutrality before the outbreak of World War II. The Baltic States were occupied and annexed early in the war in agreement with the Nazis via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then re-conquered in 1944.

A minor temporary beneficiary was France, which in 1947 annexed the German state of Saar as a nominally independent protectorate under French economic control. Poland was compensated for its losses to the Soviet Union by most of Germany east. In total, Germany lost roughly a quarter of its territory.

Numerous Germans were expelled, mostly from the ceded German territories and from the Sudetenland. Many died, and historians debate to this day the death rate. Several hundreds of thousands of Poles, and Japanese were also expelled. 

Reparations

The eastern victors demanded payment of war reparations from the defeated nations, and in the Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Union's enemies—Hungary, Finland and Romania—were required to pay $300,000,000 each to the Soviet Union.

Italy was required to pay $360,000,000, shared chiefly between Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

The much larger reparations from occupied Germany to Russia were to be paid not by goods or money but by the transfer of capital goods, such as dismantled manufacturing plants.

A separate Reparations to the western victors consisted mainly of free coal deliveries as well as of machinery and dismantled factories, of which the majority went to France, with some going to Britain.

Germany and Italy also paid in the form of POW(prisoner of war)-provided forced labour; 100,000 in Britain and 700,000 in France. The U.S settled for appropriating German patents as well as all German company assets in the U.S. The "intellectual reparations", such as patents and blueprints, taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to $10 billion, equivalent of around $100 billion in 2006 terms. The program of also acquiring German scientists and technicians for the U.S. was also used to deny the expertise of German scientists to the Soviet Union.

The U.S. eventually stopped the shipment of dismantled factories from the U.S. zone of occupation east because of increasing friction with Russia, part of which was caused by Russian refusal to provide the western occupation zones with surplus food from the eastern occupation zone which had been the breadbasket of Germany. Western allied dismantling of industry in the Saar area and Ruhr area was virtually completed by 1950.

Plans for Germany

The initial plans proposed by the United States were harsh. The Morgenthau Plan of 1944 called for stripping Germany of the industrial resources required for war. The main industrial areas of the Ruhr and Silesia were to be removed from Germany, as were Germany's main sources of coal and iron, namely Saar and the German speaking parts of Alsace-Lorraine, which were to be once again under French occupation.

While the Morgenthau Plan was never implemented in its original form, it did end up greatly influencing events. Most notable was this influence seen through its toned-down offshoots. Examples of these are the Potsdam Conference, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Directive 1067, and the industrial plans for Germany.

In occupied Germany, the Morgenthau plan lived on in the U.S. occupation directive JCS 1067 and in the Allied "industrial disarmament" plans, designed to reduce German economic might and to destroy Germany's capability to wage war by complete or partial de-industrialization and restrictions imposed on utilization of remaining production population. The first industrial plan for Germany, signed in 1946, required the destruction of 1,500 manufacturing plants. The purpose of this was to lower German heavy industry output to roughly 50% of its 1938 level.

These policies were however to some degree counteracted by the military governor of the U.S. zone in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, who did his best to use whatever loopholes the directives allowed for, particularly for actions that would reduce "unrest" and "famine". This slowed down the rate factories were being destroyed and increased the food rations to 1,500 calories per day (half the normal UK rations).

The problems brought on by these types of policies became apparent to many after a year of occupation. Germany had long been the industrial giant of Europe, and its poverty held back the general European recovery. The continued scarcity in Germany also led to considerable expenses for the occupying powers, which were obligated to try to make up the most important shortfalls.

The Western powers' worst fear was that the poverty and hunger would drive the Germans to communism.

After lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Generals Clay and George Marshall, the Truman administration finally realized that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously had been dependent.

In July 1947, President Truman rescinded on "national security grounds" the punitive JCS 1067, which had directed the U.S. forces of occupation in Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany".

Marshall Plan

In view of the continued poverty and famine in Europe, and with the onset of the Cold War that made it important to bring as much of Germany as possible into the western camp, it became apparent that a change of policy was required.

The most notable example of this change was a plan established by United States Secretary of State George Marshall, the "European Recovery Program", better known as the Marshall Plan, which called for the U.S. Congress to allocate billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Europe. Also as part of the effort to rebuild global capitalism and spur post-war reconstruction, the Bretton Woods system was put into effect after the war.

For western Germany, the psychological impact of the Marshall Plan was large. In monetary terms, Germany received only half of what Britain received; in addition, Germany was eventually forced to repay the majority of the money. But it meant that the occupation policy was officially changed, and thus the West German people finally could start rebuilding their new nation. The East German population was not included, and their attempt to revolt against the Russians a few years later was quickly put down.

In the Netherlands the Bakker-Schut Plan to demand a huge monetary compensation and even to annex a part of Germany that would have doubled the country's size was dropped. But many Germans living in the Netherlands were declared 'hostile subjects' and put into a concentration camp in an operation called Black Tulip. A total of 3,691 Germans were ultimately deported.

Closely related was the Monnet Plan of French bureaucrat Jean Monnet that proposed giving France control over the German coal areas of the Ruhr and Saar and using these resources to bring France to 150% of pre-war industrial production.

II - END OF EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM

The destruction of Europe and the destruction of a significant portion of the United Kingdom's cities (via aerial bombing) would also ruin the reputation of the imperial nations in the eyes of their colonies. Coupled with the enormous expense incurred in the war, an empire was perceived to be an unnecessarily expensive possession. Thus this would provoke the rapid decolonization process that would see the empires of the United Kingdom and others swept away.

These tendencies helped India and Pakistan become independent from the British Empire in August 1947. Soon Malaysia and other South East Asian colonies also became independent. The Netherlands lost Dutch East Indies, and France lost Indochina. In just a few decades, most Asian and African colonies were independent.

III - SUPERPOWERS

The immense destruction wrought over the course of the war caused a sharp decline in the influence of the great powers. After the war, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States both became formidable forces. The U.S. suffered very little during the war and because of military and industrial exports became a formidable manufacturing power.

This led to a period of wealth and prosperity for the U.S. in the fields of industry, agriculture and technology.

While the homeland of the United States was untouched by the war, quite the opposite was true in the Soviet Union. At the height of the Axis advance in 1941, the Wehrmacht got within 20 kilometres (12.5 mi) of Moscow. Although the Germans were pushed back from Moscow by Soviet winter counter thrusts in early 1942, the Wehrmacht's Operation Blue in summer 1942 pushed Russian forces northeast of the Black Sea to Stalingrad and southeast of the Black Sea to the approaches to Grozny at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains.

Therefore the Germans controlled all of Soviet territory west of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad, from the Baltic Sea to the Caucasus. During the initial German invasion, Operation Barbarossa, the use of scorched earth tactics by both sides left the western portion of the Soviet Union almost totally destroyed. Agricultural land was burned, livestock exterminated, infrastructure dismantled or destroyed and entire towns flattened. All of this land was part of more battles as the Red Army swept west in 1943-1944. Although the Soviets were able to salvage some heavy industry and ship it to safer areas around the Ural Mountains, much of the USSR's pre-war industry fell into the hands of the Germans.

The Soviet Union also suffered unprecedented casualties. From 1941 to 1945 the Red Army lost over 10 million killed and more than 18 million wounded. Civilian losses were also immense; most estimates range from 14 to 17 million civilians killed. Most civilians in the occupied lands in the western USSR were either shot or left to starve or freeze to death by the Germans. Additionally, the majority of Holocaust victims, as well as the perpetration of the Holocaust, was from the Eastern Front. The total deaths resulting from the war amounted to roughly fourteen per cent of the USSR's and sixteen per cent of Poland's total pre-war population. By comparison, the United States lost about 0.3% of its total pre-war population.

Because of the immense loss of life and the destruction of land and industrial capacity, the USSR was at an economic and (because of the American use of atomic weapons on Japan) strategic disadvantage relative to the United States. The USSR was, however, in a better economic and strategic position than any other continental European power. By the end of the war in 1945 the Red Army was very large, battle-tested and occupied all of Eastern and Central Europe as well as what was to become East Germany. In areas they occupied, the Red Army installed governments they felt would be friendly towards the USSR. Given the tremendous suffering of the Soviet people during the war, Soviet leadership wanted a "buffer zone" of friendly governments between Russia and Western European nations.

IV - POLITICAL EFFECTS

European Union

The European Union grew out of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was founded in 1951 by the six founding members: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (the Benelux countries) and West Germany, France and Italy. Its purpose was to pool the steel and coal resources of the member states, and to support the economies of the participating countries. As a side effect, the ECSC helped defuse tensions between countries which had recently been enemies in the war. In time this economic merger grew, adding members and broadening in scope, to become the European Economic Community, and later the European Union.

United Nations

Because the League of Nations had failed to actively prevent the war, in 1945 a new international alliance was considered and then created, the United Nations (UN). The UN also was responsible for the initial recognition of the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, in part as a response to the Holocaust.

The UN operates within the parameters of the United Nations Charter, and the reason for the UN's formation is outlined in the Preamble to the United Nations Charter. Unlike its predecessor, the United Nations has taken a more active role in the world, such as fighting diseases and providing humanitarian aid to nations in distress. The UN also served as the diplomatic front line during the Cold War. The biggest advantage the United Nations has over the League of Nations is the presence of world superpowers such as the United States and Russia, for the League had little actual international power because of the absence of these nations.

Cold War

The end of World War II is seen by many as marking the end of the United Kingdom's position as a global superpower and the catalyst for the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the dominant powers in the world. Friction had been building up between the two before the end of the war, and with the collapse of Nazi Germany relations spiralled downward.

In the areas occupied by Western Allied troops, pre-war governments were re-established or new democratic governments were created; in the areas occupied by Soviet troops, including the territories of former Allies such as Poland, communist states were created. These became satellites of the Soviet Union.

Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation. The American, British and French zones were grouped a few years later into West Germany and the Soviet zone became East Germany. Austria was once again separated from Germany and it, too, was divided into four zones of occupation, which eventually reunited and became the republic of Austria. The partitions were initially informal, but as the relationship between the victors deteriorated, the military lines of demarcation became the de facto country boundaries. The Cold War had begun, and soon two blocs emerged: NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

The partitioning of Europe and Germany and Berlin persisted until the crumbling of the Eastern Bloc in 1989/1990. The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989.

Social Effects

One of the social effects which affected almost all participants to a certain degree was the increased participation of women in the workforce (where they took the place of many men during the war years), though this was somewhat reduced in the decades following the war, as changing society forced many to return to home and family.

The advancing Red Army had left a massive trail of raped women and girls of all ages behind them. Between several tens of thousands to more than 2,000,000 were victims of rape, often repeatedly. This continued for several years. As a result of this trauma East German women's attitude towards sex was affected for a long time, and it caused social problems between men and women. Russian authorities dispute the event.

The German soldiers left many war children behind in nations such as France and Denmark, which were occupied for an extended period. After the war, the children and their mothers often suffered recriminations. The situation was worst in Norway, where the "Tyskerunger"(German-kids) suffered greatly. However, today that factor is not present in Norway.

Military Effects

In the military sphere, World War II marked the coming of age of airpower. Advanced aircraft and guided missiles (developed late in the war) made the battleship, once the queen of the world's oceans, and fixed fortifications such as coastal artillery obsolete. While the pendulum continues to swing in this never-ending competition, air powers are now a full partner in any military action.

The war was the high-water mark for mass armies. While huge conscript armies were seen again (during the Korean War and in several African conflicts), after this victory the major powers relied upon small highly-trained and well-equipped militaries.

Perhaps most important of all, World War II ushered in the nuclear era, with the dropping of the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Trials for War Crimes

After the war, many high-ranking Germans were hanged for war crimes, as well as the mass murder of the Jews in the Holocaust committed mainly on the area of General Government, in the Nuremberg trials. Similarly Japanese leaders were prosecuted in the Tokyo War Crime Trial. Although the deliberate targeting of civilians was already defined as a war crime and it had been used extensively by both sides, most notably in Poland, Britain, Germany and Japan, those responsible were never tried for it. In other countries, notably in Finland, the Allies demanded the political leadership to be prosecuted in "war-responsibility trials".

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