Second World War > An overview

History of second world war
An overview. Second world War
The Second World War was the second at the global level led war of all major powers of the 20th Century and is the largest and most destructive conflict in human history dar. The war between the expanding Axis and the Allies was coined out, world affairs after the war about the politics and warfare, in most economic, technological, social and cultural contexts. The ideological differences and power interests of the allied victors purpose resulted in the Cold War , in which two blocks of countries under the respective leadership of establishing itself be superpowers USSR and USA were facing. 
The Second World War cost about 55-60 million people , with the Soviet Union and China lost tens of millions suffered. He was a strong ideology , often with racist shaped trains. This resulted in numerous war crimes and violent, mostly systematic assaults on prisoners of war or civilians . This applied particularly to those areas to which Germany under the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese controlled. Many of the local populations were considered inferior. With the Nazi goal of the habitat gain and blood and soil ideology was also inseparable from Adolf Hitler in January 1939 in the event of a war threatening to destroy the "Jewish race" Europe joined in, they finally managed systematically: the so-called Holocaust died six million Jews . About four million members of other ethnic groups , particularly Slavs , were victims of an ideological war of annihilation, the final phase in which many fell victim to German. 
Before, during and after the war, borders in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and other regions, partly drawn multiple times. The many individual changes caused by the Second World War by millions of uprooted in the form of emigration, war-related flight and expulsion of entire populations. That the civilian population in comparison to the First World War even more of the fighting directly affected, lay apart from the supply situation in the world to the rapid development of aerospace and defense industry , on the other hand, on the cheap end acceptance of civilian casualties from the terrorist - strategies in the context of the combatants often inserting new weapons for the first time. The damaging effects of large-scale bombing of whole cities in Europe and Asia some 1000 bombers was finally in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only achieved with a bomber. This demonstrated the United States before the war, the power of this new weapon of mass destruction . After the First World War almost all other war-participating countries in Europe, chemical weapons were used, used only Japan against China, this type of warfare. 
Several initially separated from each other theaters of war resulted in the Second World War, the precise beginning is so controversial. The first of these theaters of war created in Japan in 1937 with his second invasion of China in half a century. In Europe the war began in September 1939 with the attacks of the German Reich and the Soviet Union to Poland after a short time before the German-Soviet non-aggression pact for both countries the areas of interest for military expansion ( Polish campaign or Winter War in Finland had been disconnected). Britain and France had previously supported diplomatically and Poland also gave declarations of war from the German Reich, however, did not intervene effectively and were not directed against the USSR. At sea, however, there was a multi-annual Battle of the Atlantic . Since the winter of 1939-40 was not a peace treaty, the stalemate continued on land, the so-called " phony war "in more than half a year. 
In the spring of Germany came with the " company Weser Exercise "a British access to Norway before. In the subsequent campaign in the west France, was a few weeks beaten to the core of the British army was from Dunkirk to the island retreat, however. France collaborated in part after his surrender, but Britain defended himself in the Battle of Britain at sea successfully as well. The experiments Benito Mussolini , conquered in 1935 by Italian East Africa to expand in the Mediterranean also failed at the first attempt, so that in the spring of 1941, German troops in North Africa had to step in and shortly afterwards also in the Balkans . This delayed the German attack on the Soviet Union, then allied to several weeks, could not be captured Moscow before winter as planned. In December, Japanese caused the attack on the United States and the subsequent German declaration of war that the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease Act had supported economically already, now also militarily with the full force of the war engage in could. By the seat of war in the Pacific region received the separate conflict is a common global political dimension, the two-thirds of all Nations three quarters of the world's population and spanned. 
By the paging Italy (1943) retired from Mussolini power factor than the Hitler's suicide came shortly after the capitulation of the Wehrmacht , the war in Europe on 8 May 1945 ended. The year will end the fighting began on 2 September 1945 the surrender of Japan .