Reading -- Final Victory and Consequences

Victory in Europe

The Allies bombed Germany heavily during the final months of World War II. From both the east and the
west the Allies launched bombing raids against major German cities. Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig were
greatly damaged. In February 1945, Allied bombers destroyed the historic German city of Dresden. These
bombing raids were intended to destroy Germany's ability to make weapons but also killed many civilians.
During the early months of 1945, the Allies pushed the Germans back. U.S. and British troops raced
toward the Rhine River to enter Germany from the west. The Allies needed to move fast. They wanted to
capture bridges across the Rhine before the Germans destroyed them. Some Allied leaders, particularly
Winston Churchill, had other worries. They wanted the noncommunist Allies to occupy as much of Germany as
possible. Churchill thought it was important to keep the territory out of Soviet hands.
By mid-March 1945, British and U.S. forces had crossed the Rhine and were advancing east toward Berlin.
Meanwhile, the Soviets pushed west toward the city. With his enemies closing in, Hitler retreated to his
underground bunker, or shelter, in Berlin. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide. Just days later, on May 7,
German authorities surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The next day—May 8, 1945—was declared V-E
(Victory in Europe) Day. It marked the official end of World War II in Europe. For Americans, the joy was
mixed with sorrow. Only weeks before, on April 12, President Roosevelt had died of a stroke. Vice President
Harry S Truman took over as the new president.

Victory in the Pacific

As Germany surrendered, the Allies also neared victory in the Pacific. However, Allied leaders feared that
the final invasion of Japan would result in great loss of life.
Since 1942 Allied scientists had been working on what became an alternative to invading Japan. The
scientists worked to develop an atomic bomb, a weapon that produced great destructive power by splitting
atoms. Known as the Manhattan Project, this huge effort to develop an atomic bomb employed more than
600,000 people. World-class scientists, worried that Germany would build an atomic bomb first, worked at a
top-secret facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Plants in Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
produced the radioactive materials needed to build the bomb. In the end, the project cost some $2 billion.
On July 16, 1945, scientists exploded the world's first atomic bomb in the desert near Alamogordo, New
Mexico. The bomb's destructive power went beyond all expectations. The explosion disintegrated the steel
tower that held the bomb. For 800 yards in all directions, the desert sand melted into glass.
President Truman called the atomic bomb "the most terrible thing ever discovered" but never doubted
whether it should be used. The invasion of Japan, Truman thought, would cost much more in human lives than
using the atomic bomb. When the Allies did not get an unconditional surrender from Japan, Truman gave the
order to use the bomb. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay flew over the Japanese city of
Hiroshima and dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare. One survivor recalled the destruction.

The Costs of the War

With Japan's surrender, World War II finally ended after nearly six years of destruction. Some 50 million
people had died—more than half of them civilians. Millions more were injured or left suffering from disease or
lack of food. China, Poland, and the Soviet Union were hit very hard. Both Germany and Japan lost many
people as well.
 In Europe, as in Asia, the war ruined national economies. Food production, industry, and transportation
networks were destroyed in many areas. Millions of people found themselves homeless, lacking even the basic
necessities of food, fuel, shelter, and water. From London to Warsaw to Leningrad, large cities lay in ruins.
Much of the world's great art and architecture was lost forever.
The war had not been fought on American soil. As a result, the United States escaped the physical
destruction that Europe and Asia suffered. Therefore, the U.S. economy emerged from the war more powerful
than ever. Much of the cost of the rebuilding efforts after the war would fall to the United States.

The Holocaust

One of the most horrifying aspects of World War II was the Holocaust—the attempt by Hitler and the
Nazis to murder the Jews of Europe. Soon after taking power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis had written new
laws for German Jews. They were stripped of their civil rights, jobs, and property. The Nazis encouraged
German Jews to leave the country. Many Jews who remained were imprisoned in concentration camps, such
as Dachau (DAH-kow) near Munich.
German expansion in Europe brought many more Jews under Hitler's control. Thousands of Jews lived in
France, the Low Countries, and eastern Europe. Millions more lived in Poland and the Soviet Union. Hitler and
other high-ranking Nazis thought it impractical to keep these Jews in concentration camps. The Nazis looked
instead for ways to eliminate the Jewish population.
In Poland the Germans uprooted Jews from their homes in the countryside and forced them into isolated
urban areas known as ghettos. However, some Jews resisted the Nazis. In the spring of 1943, a ghetto in the
Polish capital, Warsaw, became the site of a brave but unsuccessful uprising against the Nazis.
The Germans also used special killing squads that were known as Einsatzgruppen (YN-sahts-groo-puhn).
Their purpose was to round up and shoot Jews. For three days in 1941, German Einsatzgruppen machine-
gunned some 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children. This massacre took place at Babi Yar near the Soviet
city of Kiev. By the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen troops had killed some 600,000 Jews.
In January 1942, senior Nazi officials met in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. At the Wannsee
Conference these leaders agreed on a "final solution to the Jewish question." For the Nazis this "final solution"
was genocide—the deliberate murder of an entire people. The Nazis planned to kill the Jews in specially built
death camps across Europe. These camps were equipped with gas chambers designed to kill great numbers of
people. The camps also had special furnaces to burn the remains of the dead.
By mid-1942 the Nazis had begun to ship Jews from German-occupied Europe to the camps in Austria,
Germany, and Poland. People were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in railroad boxcars. Nazi officers sorted the
arriving Jews by age, sex, and health, often tearing families apart. Camp officers sent physically fit Jews to
work as slave laborers in camp factories. The Nazis sent many other prisoners directly to gas chambers for
immediate execution. These victims were most often women and children, the elderly, the sick, and the weak.
Moritz Vegh, age 13, was sent from his home in the former Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz, the most
notorious of all death camps.
The Nazis made Moritz and others work as slaves at Auschwitz for the rest of the war. When the Allies
liberated the concentration camps in April 1945, many of the survivors were too weak or sick to move.
As the Allies freed the camps, the full horror of the Holocaust became clear. Some 6 million Jews had been
killed or had died in the camps. This number equaled about two thirds of all Jews living in Europe before the
war. The Nazis had also sent hundreds of thousands of other people to be killed in the camps. Gypsies, Slavs,
political and religious radicals, and others were among the victims. The Holocaust is a chilling reminder of the
brutal and inhumane nature of Nazi beliefs and of the terrible cost of Nazi aggression.