9.5: Human Costs of the War

The Holocaust

We have already seen the application of fascist ideology in murderous atrocities against “inferior people”  by the Italians in Ethiopia and the Japanese in China. Nazi anti-Semitism had revealed its violent aspects in Kristallnacht in 1938 but was even more viciously applied once German armies began conquering Eastern Europe. Ten percent of Poland’s pre-war population was Jewish, about 3 million people, who had been subjected to discrimination by the authoritarian Polish government in the 1930s. However, under German occupation, Jews were forced into overcrowded ghettos in certain Polish cities.  The areas captured by the Wehrmacht in the western Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa added millions of Jews to Nazi-occupied Europe.  While Hitler and his government had briefly considered sending Jews to far-off exile outside of Europe, ultimately the Führer decided that their physical elimination was necessary…a “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem.”  Mass shootings by specialized troops called Einsatzgruppen accompanied the invasion of the Soviet Union.  In October 1941, outside of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Jewish men were forced to dig mass pits in the Babi Yar ravine into which they and their families were herded naked and shot by Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian collaborators. Babi Yar was among the largest mass shootings of the war.

During Operation Barbarossa, the Germans also captured millions of Soviet troops, who they herded into prisoner-of-war camps, were over 2,000,000 died of disease or starvation. Non-Russians in these camps, Balts and Ukrainians, were given the option to join special guard units and collaborate with the Germans.  As the mass shootings took their psychological toll on German soldiers and guardsmen, these non-Germans were called upon to murder Jewish civilians and patrol the ghettos and concentration camps. Even before the war began, “mercy killing” had become a Nazi policy in German psychiatric and mental institutions, where those with physical and mental disabilities were denied care and murdered.  Shortly after defeating Poland, Hitler ordered the elimination of all “defectives”. The staffs of these hospitals experimented with mass killing through carbon monoxide being pumped into buses and discovered a new use for a rodent repellent called “Zyklon B.” These methods were soon applied at specially built extermination camps in the Eastern Europe, the first opening in early 1942.  Jews were packed into railroad cattle-cars and taken to these camps, where they were told that they were going to “showers,” but instead were sealed in and gassed. “Work Jews” were assigned to cremate the remains, until they too were exterminated.

With the establishment of the extermination camps, the Germans began “relocating” Jews from France and other occupied areas in Western Europe by rail to the East.  In every  country of occupied Europe, some Jews were saved by their Christian neighbors, hidden in attics, barns, churches, and monasteries until the end of the war.  But even then, they were not always safe. The German-Jewish Frank family had moved to the Netherlands to escape the Nazi regime in late 1933.  They had hoped that Holland would be a safe haven in a new European war since it had remained neutral in World War I. However, the Germans occupied the country along with Belgium and France in 1940, and by 1942, were sending Dutch Jews in transports to the East. The Frank family was able to hide in an annex with others, supplied with food and news of the war by a group of Dutch friends active in the underground resistance. However, they were discovered by German authorities in August 1944, and sent off to the camps.  Young Anne Frank had kept a diary during their two years in hiding, and her father, who was the only member of the family to survive the war, published it in 1947. Although Anne Frank’s diary has become one of the most important accounts of the Holocaust, the Germans themselves were good at keeping records of their actions against Jews and others. New details emerge frequently of the extent and reach of the Holocaust, concentration camps, and slave labor. Despite the efforts of some to deny the historical existence of the Holocaust, there is no doubt it took place. The physical and written evidence is undeniable, but the sheer weight of this reality leads many to believe in wild conspiracy theories rather than face what this world-defining event means about, not the Germans, but humanity itself…how can we do this to one another. 

However, during the war itself, it was difficult for the Allies to believe rumors and reports they were receiving of atrocities, mass executions, and death camps in Nazi-occupied Europe.  Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and a transit camp in order to witness how the Jews were treated. He saw teenage Hitler Youth members walking into the ghetto to casually murder a Jew or two and Jewish families destined for extermination packed into rail cars.  It was difficult for Roosevelt, Churchill, and others to believe his report, given in-person in Washington and London.  When Karski described what he had seen to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jewish-American, Frankfurter replied, “I know you are telling the truth, but I don’t believe you”; expressing the world’s incredulity that Christian Germany, one of the most technologically advanced and highly educated countries of the world, could perpetrate such atrocities.

Uncovering the Unthinkable

As the Allies pushed into Germany and Poland, they uncovered the full extent of Hitler’s genocidal policies. The Allies liberated elaborate camp systems set up for the imprisonment, forced labor, and extermination of the Jews and other “undesirables” including Roma (“gypsies”), political prisoners, outspoken pastors, members of the resistance, individuals from the LGBT community, and pacifists.  Allied officers often forced German civilians to visit the camps in their towns and regions to witness the consequences of Nazi and fascist extremist ideology.  Since then, Germany has been forced to come to terms with this history, and most Germans have tried to confront their past honestly. This effort has been unusual: not only have the Turks, Japanese, and others not addressed their actions, but white treatment of non-white populations has also often been passed over. Europeans intentionally mass murdering other Europeans was unacceptable. The atrocities of Europeans against colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, and the American West seemed more acceptable, and were rarely addressed, due to a legacy of institutionalized racism.  

The attempted elimination of the entire Jewish population in Europe has had other geopolitical effects. The Holocaust seemed to prove the Zionist thesis correct, that the Jews would never be safe unless they established their own homeland. This was achieved in Israel three years after the war ended in Europe; but not, as we shall see, without long-term consequences for the Palestinian Arabs and the rest of the Middle East. News of the death of six million Jews was especially difficult for Jewish-Americans, who struggled with the realization that they were now the largest surviving remnant of an ancient people after their relatives and loved ones were murdered in Hitler’s camps. Previously Jewish life had been centered in Poland and the Ukraine; now it was in the United States and Israel.

The Most Terrible Weapon

As the Allies celebrated V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, Americans redirected their full attention to the still-raging Pacific War. In 1944 and 1945, the Japanese military continued to fight tenaciously while suffering defeat after defeat. Few battles were as one-sided as the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, a Japanese counterattack that the Americans called the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot for the number of planes and vessels that they sank.  At Iwo Jima, an eight-square-mile island of volcanic rock upon which the Americans wanted to build an airfield from which to attack the main islands of Japan, seventeen thousand Japanese soldiers held the island against seventy thousand Marines for over a month. At the cost of nearly the entire Japanese force, they inflicted almost thirty thousand casualties before the island was lost in early 1945.​

​By that time, American heavy bombers were in range of the Japanese homeland, and began targeting industrial facilities. To spare bomber crews from dangerous daylight raids and to achieve maximum effect against Japanese morale, the USAAF began night raids, dropping incendiary weapons that created massive firestorms consuming the wood-and-paper houses of the residential neighborhoods. Over sixty Japanese cities were fire-bombed, with the most disastrous attack on Tokyo, where one hundred thousand civilians died in a single attack in March 1945.

In June 1945, after eighty days of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties, the Americans captured the island of Okinawa. Okinawa was a viable base from which to launch a full invasion of the Japanese homeland and end the war. Estimates varied but given the tenacity of Japanese soldiers fighting on islands far from their home, some officials expected that an invasion of the Japanese mainland could cost half a million American casualties and kill millions of Japanese civilians. Terrorizing the Japanese into surrender was a much more appealing option to Americans who had already suffered deaths in the hundreds of thousands. Historians debate the many motivations that drove the Americans to use atomic weapons against Japan, and many American officials criticized the decision at the time. Government leaders and military officials cited the casualty estimates of an invasion to justify their use.​ Early in the war, fearing that German scientists might develop an atomic bomb, the German-Hungarian-American physicist Leó Szilárd had written a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, which Albert Einstein signed, warning of a nuclear-armed Hitler. After some debate, other American physicists acknowledged the possibility. The U.S. government responded in 1942 with the Manhattan Project, a hugely expensive, secretive, ambitious program to create a single weapon capable of leveling an entire city. Three years later, the Americans successfully detonated the world’s first nuclear device, Trinity, in New Mexico in July 1945 while Allied leaders were meeting in Potsdam. Truman had delayed the beginning of the conference until the test was complete. This way, the President would know what kind of bargaining chips he would be bringing to the postwar planning session. With a successful explosion, America no longer needed Soviet partnership in subduing Japan….and therefore no longer needed to share in the governing of Japanese territory after the war. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb was designed, later recalled that the event reminded him of a line from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Two more bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, were quickly built and detonated over two Japanese cities in August. The Hiroshima bomb was dropped at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, killing 100,000 civilians instantly, and thousands more later from radiation poisoning. On August 9, the second bomb, Fat Man, was scheduled to be dropped on the castle town of Kokura. But the town was obscured by clouds, so the mission proceeded to the secondary target, Nagasaki, an important port city on the southern island, Kyushu, with a population of a quarter-million people. The Fat Man bomb detonated over the Mitsubishi munitions factory and the city arsenal, killing an additional 80,000.​ ​In addition to the American atom bomb attacks, on August 9th, Soviet forces invaded Manchuria and overthrew the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. The following day Japanese cabinet ministers agreed to the Allied terms for surrender. Emperor Hirohito endorsed their decision on August 15 and announced the surrender of Japan. On September 2, aboard the battleship USS Missouri, delegates from the Japanese government formally signed their surrender. World War II was finally over.​

Review Questions

• Why did the United States drop atom bombs in Japan?
• What was the "Final Solution"?