Consequences of Nazism

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Nazism and the acts of Nazi Germany affected many countries, communities, and people before, during and after World War II. Nazi Germany's attempt to exterminate several groups viewed as subhuman by Nazi ideology was eventually stopped by the combined efforts of the wartime Allies headed by the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

Jewish people

"Whoever wears this sign is an enemy of our people" – Parole der Woche, 1 July 1942
Main articles: History of the Jews during World War II, The Holocaust, Holocaust victims, and Responsibility for the Holocaust

Of the world's 18 million Jews in 1939, more than a third were murdered in the Holocaust.[1][2] Of the three million Jews in Poland, the heartland of European Jewish culture, fewer than 60,000 survived. Most of the remaining Jews in Eastern and Central Europe became refugees, unable or unwilling to return to countries that became Soviet puppet states or countries that had betrayed them to the Nazis.

Poland

85% of buildings in Warsaw were destroyed by German troops
.

The Nazis intended to destroy the Polish nation completely. In 1941, the Nazi leadership decided that Poland was to be fully cleared of ethnic Poles within 10 to 20 years and settled by German colonists to further their policy of Lebensraum.[3] From the beginning of the occupation, Germany's policy was to plunder and exploit Polish territory, turning it into a giant concentration camp for Poles who were to be exterminated as "Untermenschen".[3] The policy of plunder and exploitation inflicted material losses to Polish industry, agriculture, infrastructure and cultural landmarks, with the cost of the destruction by Germans alone estimated at €525 billion or $640 billion.[4] Remaining Polish industry was mostly destroyed, or transported to Russia by Soviet forces after the war.

The official Polish government report of war losses prepared in 1947 reported 6,028,000 war victims out of a population of 27,007,000 ethnic Poles and Jews alone. For political reasons, the report excluded the losses to the Soviet Union and the losses among Polish citizens of Ukrainian and Belarusian origin.

Poland's eastern border was significantly moved westwards to the

Kidnapping of Polish children by Germany also took place, in which children who were believed to hold German blood were taken away; around 20,000[7] Polish children were taken away from their parents. Out of the abducted only 10–15% returned home.[8] Polish elites were decimated and over half of the Polish intelligentsia were murdered. Some professions lost 20–50% of their members, for example 58% of Polish lawyers, 38% of medical doctors and 28% of university workers were exterminated by the Nazis. The Polish capital Warsaw was razed by German forces and most of its old and newly acquired cities lay in ruins (e.g. Wrocław) or lost to the Soviet Union (e.g. Lwów). In addition Poland became a Soviet satellite state
, remaining under a Soviet-controlled communist government until 1989. Russian troops did not withdraw from Poland until 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

See also

Central Europe

As a consequence of the war and Soviet occupation, Central European countries found themselves under the "Soviet sphere of influence" (as agreed upon at the Yalta Conference). Immediately following the war, Soviet style socialist governments were established in all of these countries and any forms of western style democracy that existed before the war were abolished. As a result of the Warsaw Pact not participating in the Marshall Plan, as well as industrial infrastructure being taken by the Soviets, economic recovery was slowed significantly.

Soviet Union

Main article: Eastern Front (World War II)

About 26 million Soviet citizens perished as a result of the

Soviet Jews killed by the German invaders.[11] The mass destruction and mass murder was one of the reasons why the Soviet Union installed satellite states in Central Europe; as the government hoped to use the countries as a buffer zone against any new invasions from the West. This helped break down the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted until 1989, two years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in 1991. Soviet culture in the 1950s was defined by results of the Great Patriotic War.

Close to 60% of the European war dead were from the Soviet Union. Military losses of 10.6 million include 7.6 million killed or missing in action and 2.6 million

forced labor; and 5.5 million famine and disease deaths. Additional famine deaths which totaled 1 million during 1946–47 are not included here. These losses are for the entire territory of the USSR including territories annexed in 1939–40.[12]

To the north, the Germans reached

Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in August 1941. The city was surrounded on 8 September, beginning a 900-day siege
during which about 1.2 million citizens perished.

Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans, more than 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war.[13] On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the USSR.[14] The interpretation of this Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets regardless of their wishes.[15] Millions of Soviet POWs and forced laborers transported to Germany are believed to have been treated as traitors, cowards and deserters on their return to the USSR (see Order No. 270).[16][17] Statistical data from Soviet archives, that became available after Perestroika, attest that the overall increase of the Gulag population was minimal during 1945–46[18] and only 272,867 of repatriated Soviet POWs and civilians (out of 4,199,488) were imprisoned.[19]

Belarus

slaves (Ostarbeiter
).

Some recent estimates raise the number of Belarusians who perished in War to "3 million 650 thousand people, unlike the former 2.2 million. In other words, not every fourth inhabitant but about 40% of the pre-war Belarusian population perished (considering the present-day borders of Belarus)."[21] This compares to 15% of Poland's post war borders and 19% of Ukrainian population in post war border and comparing to 2% of Czechoslovakian population that perished in post war borders.

Ukraine

Estimates of population losses in Ukraine range from 7 million to 11 million. More than 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages were destroyed.[22]

See also

Yugoslavia

Due to their strong opposition to Nazism, Serbs were considered enemies of Nazi Germany. Alongside Jews, Serbs were killed and expelled from wartime Yugoslavia.

It is estimated that 1,700,000 people were killed during

extermination camps for anti-fascists, communists, Serbs, Muslims, Romanies and Jews, one of the most infamous extermination camps was the Jasenovac concentration camp. A large number of men, women and children, mostly Serbs
, were murdered in these camps.

Western Europe

Britain and France, two of the victors, were exhausted and bankrupted by the war, and Britain lost its superpower status.[23] With Germany and Japan in ruins as well, the world was left with two dominant powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Economic and political reality in Western Europe would soon force the dismantling of the European colonial empires, especially in Africa and Asia.

One of the most important political consequences of the Nazi experience in Western Europe was the establishment of new political alliances which eventually became the

NATO to counterbalance the Soviets' Warsaw Pact
and until communist rule in Eastern Europe ended in the late 1980s.

The Communists emerged from the war sharing the vast prestige of the victorious Soviet armed forces, and for a while it looked as though they might take power in France, Italy and Greece. The West quickly acted to prevent this from happening, hence the Cold War.

Greece

Further information: The Holocaust in Greece

In Greece, the

Sephardi community of Thessaloniki, which had earned the city the sobriquet "Mother of Israel" and had first settled there in the early 16th century at the invitation of the then-ruling Ottoman Empire
. In total, at least 81% (ca. 60,000) of Greece's total pre-war Jewish population was murdered.

The bitterest and longest-lasting legacy of the German occupation was the social upheaval it wrought. The old political elites were sidelined, and the

Resistance against the Axis brought to the fore the leftist National Liberation Front (EAM), arguably the country's first true mass-movement, where the Communists played a central role. In an effort to oppose its growing influence, the Germans encouraged the pre-war conservative establishment to confront it, and allowed the creation of armed units. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, in the last year of the occupation, conditions in Greece often approximated a civil war between EAM and other powers. The rift would become permanent in December 1944, when EAM and the British-backed government clashed in Athens, and again in a fully fledged civil war from 1946 to 1949
.

Germany

Lost territories and postwar occupation zones in Germany

More than 8 million Germans, including almost 2 million civilians, died during World War II (see World War II casualties). After the end of the war in Europe additional casualties were incurred during the Allied occupation and also during the population expulsions that followed.

After the war, the German people were often viewed with contempt because they were blamed by other Europeans for Nazi crimes. Germans visiting abroad, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, attracted insults from locals, and from foreigners who may have lost their families or friends in the atrocities. Today in Europe and worldwide (particularly in countries that fought against the Axis), Germans may be scorned by elderly people who were alive to experience the atrocities committed by Nazi Germans during World War II. This resulted in a feeling of controversy for many Germans, causing numerous discussions and rows among scholars and politicians in Post-War West Germany (for example, the "Historikerstreit" [historians' argument] in the 1980s) and after Reunification. Here, the discussion was mainly about the role that the unified Germany should play in the world and in Europe. Bernard Schlink's novel The Reader concerns how post-war Germans dealt with the issue.

Following World War II, the Allies embarked on a program of denazification, but as the Cold War intensified these efforts were curtailed in the west.

Germany itself and the German economy were devastated, with great parts of most major cities destroyed by the bombings of the Allied forces,

Oder-Neisse line and effectively reducing Germany in size by roughly 25% (see also Potsdam Conference). The remaining parts of Germany were divided among the Allies and occupied by British (the north-west), French (the south-west), American (the south) and Soviet
(the east) troops.

The expulsions of Germans from the lost areas in the east (see also

Estimates of number of deaths in connection with expulsion range from under 500,000 to 3 million.[citation needed
]

After a short time, the Allies broke over ideological problems (Communism versus Capitalism), and thus both sides established their own spheres of influence, creating a previously non-existent division in Germany between East and West (although the division largely followed the borders of states which had existed in Germany before Bismarck's unification less than 100 years before).

A constitution for

German Democratic Republic
.

Grundgesetz
(Basic Law). The document was not called a Constitution officially, as at this point, it was still hoped that the two German states would be reunited in the near future.

The first free elections in West Germany were held in 1949, which were won by the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU, conservatives) by a slight margin. Konrad Adenauer, a member of the CDU, was the first Bundeskanzler (Chancellor) of West Germany.

Both German states introduced, in 1948, their own money, colloquially called West-Mark and Ost-Mark (Western

Mark
and Eastern Mark).

Foreign troops still remain in Germany today, for example

Bush Administration in the United States in 2004 stated intentions to withdraw most of the remaining American troops out of Germany in the coming years. During the years 1950–2000 more than 10,000,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Germany.[24]

The West German economy was by the mid-1950s rebuilt thanks to the abandonment in mid-1947 of some of the last vestiges of the

Marshall, the Truman administration realized that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it previously had been dependent.[25]
In July 1947, President
JCS 1067, which had directed the U.S. forces of occupation in Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." It was replaced by JCS 1779, which instead stressed that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."[26]

The dismantling of factories in the western zones, for further transport to the Soviet Union as reparations, was in time halted as frictions grew between East and West. Limits were placed on permitted levels of German production in order to prevent resurgence of German militarism, part of which included severely restricting German steel production and affected the rest of the German economy very negatively (see "

Saar area, containing much of Germany's remaining coal deposits, handed over by the U. S. to French economic administration as a protectorate in 1947 and did not politically return to Germany until January 1957, with economic reintegration occurring a few years later. Upper Silesia, Germany's second largest center of mining and industry, had been handed over to Poland at the Potsdam Conference
.

The Allies confiscated intellectual property of great value, all German patents, both in Germany and abroad, and used them to strengthen their own industrial competitiveness by licensing them to Allied companies.

billion.[29][30][31] During the more than two years that this policy was in place, no industrial research in Germany could take place, as any results would have been automatically available to overseas competitors who were encouraged by the occupation authorities to access all records and facilities. Meanwhile, thousands of the best German researchers were being put to work in the Soviet Union and in the U.S. (see also Operation Paperclip
)

For several years following the surrender German nutritional levels were very low, resulting in very high mortality rates. Throughout all of 1945 the U.S. forces of occupation ensured that no international aid reached ethnic Germans.

State Department forbade it.[32] The German food situation reached its worst during the very cold winter of 1946–1947 when German calorie intake ranged from 1,000 to 1,500 calories per day, a situation made worse by severe lack of fuel for heating.[32] Meanwhile, the Allies were well fed, average adult calorie intake was; U.S. 3200–3300; UK 2900; U.S. Army 4000.[32] German infant mortality rate was twice that of other nations in Western Europe until the close of 1948.[32]

As agreed by the Allies at the

low countries. By December 1945 it was estimated by French authorities that 2,000 German prisoners were being killed or maimed each month in accidents.[33] In Norway the last available casualty record, from 29 August 1945, shows that by that time a total of 275 German soldiers died while clearing mines, while 392 had been maimed.[34] Death rates for the German civilians doing forced labor in the Soviet Union ranged between 19% and 39%, depending on category. (see also Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union
).

German Democratic Republic). Naimark concludes "The social psychology of women and men in the soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until – one could argue – the present."[35]

The post-war hostility shown to the German people is exemplified in the fate of the War children, sired by German soldiers with women from the local population in nations such as Norway where the children and their mothers after the war had to endure many years of abuse. In the case of Denmark the hostility felt towards all things German also showed itself in the treatment of German refugees during the years 1945 to 1949. During 1945 alone 7000 German children under the age of 5 died as a result of being denied sufficient food and denied medical attention by Danish doctors who were afraid that rendering aid to the children of the former enemy would be seen as an unpatriotic act. Many children died of easily treatable ailments. As a consequence "more German refugees died in Danish camps, "than Danes did during the entire war.""[36][37][38][39]

During the Cold War, it was difficult for West Germans to visit East German relatives and friends and impossible vice versa. For East Germans, especially after the building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 and until Hungary opened up its border to the West in the late 1980s, thus allowing hundreds of thousands of vacationing East Germans to flee into Western Europe, it was only possible to get to West Germany by illegally fleeing across heavily fortified and guarded border areas.

44 years after the end of World War II, the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989. The East and West parts of Germany were reunited on 3 October 1990.

Economic and social divisions between East and West Germany continue to play a major role in politics and society in Germany at present. It is likely the contrast between the generally well-off and economically diverse West and the weaker, heavy-industry reliant East will continue at least into the foreseeable future.

See also

World politics

The war led to the discrediting and dissolution of the League of Nations and it also led to the founding of the United Nations (UN) on 24 October 1945. Like its predecessor, the UN was established in order to help prevent the outbreak of another world wars and contain or stop smaller conflicts. The principles which are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations are a testament to the world's attitudes after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Geopolitically, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the two new dominant rivaling superpowers. Consequently, two blocks around the US and the USSR formed. The rivalry caused the Cold War and led to several proxy conflicts. Briefly, before its final decline as a superpower, Great Britain also counted to the "Big Three", a term used to refer to the world's major global powers (the US, USSR and Britain at the time).

International law

Nuremberg Trials. Defendants in the dock. The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring (at the left edge on the first row of benches), considered to be the most important surviving official in Nazi Germany after Hitler's death.

The effect the Nazis had on present-day international law was substantial. The

Nazi war crimes trials, also created an unwritten rule stating that government officials who "follow orders" from leaders in committing crimes against humanity cannot use such a motive to excuse their crimes. It also had an effect through the Fourth Geneva Convention (Art 33) in making collective punishments a war crime.[41]

Racism

After the world viewed the Nazi death camps, many Western people began to outwardly oppose ideas of racial superiority. Liberal anti-racism became a staple of many Western governments, with openly racist publications looked down upon. The move towards tolerance of different cultures in Western societies has continued to develop until the present day. Since the collapse of Nazi Germany, Western populations have been wary of racial political parties and they have actively discouraged white ethnocentrism, fearing the recurrence of a catastrophe which would be similar to the purges which were carried out in Germany by the Nazis. On the other hand, it can be argued that the conception of multiculturalism has gained importance as one of the pillars of contemporary Western society because of the same reaction. The actions of the Nazis caused an increase in anti-German sentiment.

Military

German military doctrine under the Nazi regime, characterized with some controversy as

crimes against peace) as they innovated techniques of war. Axis reverses beginning with Allied routs of overextended German forces in El Alamein and Stalingrad
resulted from British and Soviet forces adopting Nazi field strategies, and as the United States became a participant in the war it adopted much the same techniques of aerial attack upon Nazi Germany, if with greater force than the Luftwaffe could ever inflict.

As Nazi Germany faced severe defeat after the

V-2
rocket, although too late and too ineffectively to turn the war to its advantage. The German military machine was developing jet aircraft as fighters and bombers and long-range missiles, but far too late (they were only in the design and test stages) to change the outcome of the war. The victorious Allies would incorporate the early innovations of jet technology and long-distance rocket-based missiles into their armed forces, but only after the end of World War II after getting them beyond the developmental stages of design and testing.

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ "History of the Holocaust – An Introduction". Jewish Virtual Library. 19 April 1943. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  2. ^ Luke Harding in Moscow (5 June 2007). "Pipeline workers find mass grave of Jews killed by Nazis". The Guardian. UK. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  3. ^
    Volker R. Berghahn
    "Germans and Poles 1871–1945" in "Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identities and Cultural Differences", Rodopi 1999
  4. ^ Poles Vote to Seek War Reparations, Deutsche Welle, 11 September 2004
  5. ^ Concise statistical year-book of Poland, Polish Ministry of Information. London June 1941 P.9 & 10
  6. ^ The Expulsion of Germans from Poland, Revisited Archived 12 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine, H-Net Review
  7. ^ A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Google Print, p.260
  8. ^ Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947, Google Print, p.22
  9. ^ "Leaders mourn Soviet wartime dead". BBC News. 9 May 2005. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  10. OCLC 54860366
    .
  11. ^ Zvi Gitelman, History, Memory and Politics: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
  12. ^ "Europe-Asia Studies: Soviet deaths in the Great Patriotic War: a note - World War II". 5 December 2004. Archived from the original on 5 December 2004. Retrieved 1 January 2020.
  13. ^ "Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II". HistoryNet.com. Archived from the original on 30 March 2008. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  14. ^ The United States and Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens, 1944–47 by Mark Elliott Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Jun., 1973), pp. 253–275
  15. ^ "Forced Repatriation to the Soviet Union: The Secret Betrayal". Hillsdale College. Archived from the original on 7 February 2012. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  16. ^ "The warlords: Joseph Stalin". Channel 4. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  17. ^ Remembrance (Zeithain Memorial Grove) Archived 13 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  18. ^ Getty, Rittersporn, Zemskov. "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years". Archived from the original on 11 June 2008.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  19. ^ "Репатриация перемещённых советских граждан // Виктор Земсков". Scepsis.ru. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  20. ^ "Khatyn WWII Memorial in Belarus". The Virtual Guide to Belarus. 22 March 1943. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  21. ^ "Partisan Resistance in Belarus during World War II". The Virtual Guide to Belarus. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  22. ^ "Ukraine :: World War II and its aftermath". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
  23. ^ "BBC - History - British History in depth: Britain, the Commonwealth and the End of Empire".
  24. ^ Tim Kane, PhD., Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950–2003 Archived 28 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine, The Heritage Foundation 27 October 2004
  25. ^ a b Ray Salvatore Jennings "The Road Ahead: Lessons in Nation Building from Japan, Germany, and Afghanistan for Postwar Iraq Archived 14 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine May 2003, Peaceworks No. 49 pg.15
  26. ^ "Pas de Pagaille!". Time. 28 July 1947.
  27. ^ Amos Yoder, "The Ruhr Authority and the German Problem", The Review of Politics, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Jul., 1955), pp. 345–358
  28. ^ C. Lester Walker "Secrets By The Thousands". Harper's Magazine. October 1946.
  29. ^ Norman M. Naimark The Russians in Germany pg. 206. (Naimark refers to Gimbels book)
  30. ^ The $10 billion compares to the U.S. annual GDP of $258 billion in 1948.
  31. ^ The $10 billion compares to the total Marshall plan expenditure (1948–1952) of $13 billion, of which Germany received $1.4 billion (partly as loans).
  32. ^
    ISBN 0-88033-995-0
    . subsection by Richard Dominic Wiggers, "The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II"
  33. ^ S. P. MacKenzie "The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II" The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 66, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 487–520.
  34. ^ Jonas Tjersland, Tyske soldater brukt som mineryddere, VG Nett, 8 April 2006
  35. ISBN 0-674-78405-7
    pp. 132,133
  36. Copenhagen Post
    , 15 April 2005
  37. ^ Manfred Ertel, Denmark's Myths Shattered: A Legacy of Dead German Children, Der Spiegel, 16 May 2005
  38. ^ Andrew Osborn, Documentary forces Danes to confront past, The Observer, 9 February 2003
  39. ^ Danish Study Says German Children Abused, Deutsche Welle, 10 April 2005
  40. ^ "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, New York, 9 December 1948". Archived from the original on 16 November 2012. Retrieved 7 December 2012.
  41. ^ "International Humanitarian Law - Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention". Retrieved 7 December 2012.
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