The Second World War in 100 Facts

by Clive Pearson

  Three of the accused were acquitted but most received death sentences to be carried out by hanging. Dönitz, the navy chief and Hitler’s successor, was imprisoned for ten years while Speer was sent to prison for twenty. Rudolf Hess, the Nazi leader’s rather deranged deputy (until 1940 when he flew solo to Scotland in a bid to get peace with Britain), got life imprisonment. Goering managed to outwit the hangman by getting an American GI he had befriended to sneak a cyanide capsule into his cell.

  Of course, there were a myriad of other trials for lesser players but who nevertheless had committed horrific crimes. Interestingly, missing from the Nuremberg proceedings were the top-ranking German generals, including Manstein, who were complicit in the rounding-up and execution of Jews and communists on the Eastern front but who were never held to account. Their memoirs later tended to skate over certain inconvenient details. Indeed very few held to a chivalric code to which we imagine they belonged.

  Goebbels once opined that the Nazi leadership would one day go down in history as the greatest statesmen or the greatest criminals. The latter is the case.

  100. THERE WERE SOME WINNERS … AND SOME LOSERS

  As peace extended over the world in 1945 it was clear to any onlooker who the victors and who the vanquished were. However, most of those who were seemingly victorious had suffered horrendously in a war of unparalleled destruction. Furthermore, some countries found themselves exchanging one foreign dictatorship for another one even though they were on the winning side.

  Germany was clearly defeated. Unlike the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, when Germany escaped general occupation the three Allied powers and France took over the entire country. The German Reich was divided into four sectors with the Soviet Union taking the eastern part and the USA, Britain and France dividing up the western zone between them. Berlin was also divided up likewise. Japan, too, underwent general occupation, directed by the Americans under the jurisdiction of General Douglas MacArthur. President Truman deliberately excluded Russia as he was fearful of the extension of Soviet power.

  America was clearly the greatest victor. She had not suffered occupation or bombing and had emerged as the world’s first superpower. In addition, she was the possessor of the world’s first nuclear weapons. Under the Marshall Plan she would use her wealth to restore a battered and prostrate Europe. Both West Germany and Japan would make remarkably rapid recoveries as a result of American largesse.

  The Soviet Union, too, was a clear victor. She extended her frontiers westward and seized the Island of Sakhalin from Japan in the East. In addition to this, her troops occupied all of Eastern Europe and reached as far west as central Germany. But, of course the war had been devastating for the Soviet people, with many of their cities utterly destroyed and 27 million dead. The countries of Eastern Europe including the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria now fell under the cloak of communist dictatorship and would stay so until 1989. Only Greece escaped this fate.

  With hostility between the Western Allies and the Russia growing into a Cold War, Germany became permanently divided into East and West Germany until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  Britain was officially a winner, but was also a loser. She had gone to war to maintain her great power status but at the war’s end she was clearly diminished and very soon had to suffer the dismemberment of her once mighty empire as the demands for independence mushroomed. France, too, was nominally a victor but would ultimately have to give up on her imperial pretensions. Ironically, the countries of Europe had gone to war to expand or maintain their empires, but it was their colonies that would finally emerge as winners. This is only just as they did make a massive contribution to Allied victory.

  Perhaps the greatest legacy of the post-war settlement has been the lasting peace that has settled upon Europe and Japan from whence the terrible war originated.

  Let us fervently hope it remains so!