CHAPTER OUTLINE

I. Introduction

II. The Long Armistice and the Origins of World

War II

III. The Years of Axis Conquest, 1939–42

IV. World War II on the Home Front

V. The Global War

VI. Allied Victory in Europe, 1942–45

VII. The Holocaust, 1941–45

VIII. Conference Diplomacy and Peace in Europe in
1945

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CHAPTER 29

EUROPE IN AN AGE OF TOTAL WAR:

WORLD WAR II, 1939–45

E

urope had lived through a generation of enor-

mous suffering between 1914 and 1939, but the

worst was yet to come when the age of total

war culminated in the largest war in history. Be-

tween 1939 and 1945, World War II killed an estimated

forty million Europeans, most of them noncombatants;

the global total neared sixty million. The Soviet Union,

which had suffered millions of deaths in World War I,

the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and then in

Stalin’s terror of the 1930s, now endured an estimated

twenty-five million deaths. Simultaneously, in one of

the most horrifying chapters in human history, Nazi

Germany attempted the complete extermination of the

Jews of Europe; nearly eleven million people, including

six million Jews, died in German death camps. World

War II ended with enormous civilian casualties as a re-

sult of the aerial bombardment of major cities. The

most ominous bombing came in the events that ended

the war in Asia: the detonation of atomic bombs over

the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Chapter 29 covers the events of World War II be-

ginning with its origins in the Peace of Paris of 1919

and the European diplomatic crises of the 1930s. It

concludes with the diplomatic conferences at the end

of the war (no formal peace conference was held), the

world’s discovery of the Holocaust in Europe, and the

war crimes trials (the Nuremberg Trials) of 1945–46.

Most of the chapter is devoted to the events of the war

in Europe, from the German invasion of Poland in Sep-

tember 1939 to the unconditional surrender of Nazi

Germany in May 1945. World War II was a worldwide

war, however, so the chapter also surveys the course of

the war in Asia and the Pacific.

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