World war II

World War II Aftermath In an effort to maintain international peace,the Allies formed the United Nations, which officially came into existence on 24 October 1945,and adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, as a common standard of achievement for all member nations. The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had begun to deteriorate even before the war was over,and the powers each quickly established their own spheres of influence.In Europe, the continent was essentially divided between Western and Soviet spheres by the Iron Curtain which ran through and partitioned Allied occupied Germany and occupied Austria. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries it occupied as Soviet Socialist Republics that were originally effectively ceded to it by Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, such as Eastern Poland,the three Baltic countries,part of eastern Finland and northeastern Romania. Other states that the Soviets occupied at the end of the war were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary,[235] the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,the People's Republic of Romania, the People's Republic of Albania,and later East Germany from the Soviet zone of German occupation. In Asia, the United States occupied Japan and administrated Japan's former islands in the Western Pacific, while the Soviets annexed Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands; the former Japanese-governed Korea was divided and occupied between the two powers. Mounting tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union soon evolved into the formation of the American-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliances and the start of the Cold War between them. Soon after the end of World War II, conflict flared again in many parts of the world. In China, nationalist and communist forces quickly resumed their civil war. Communist forces were eventually victorious and established the People's Republic of China on the mainland, while nationalist forces ended up retreating to Taiwan. In Greece, civil war broke out between Anglo-American supported royalist forces and communist forces, with the royalist forces victorious. Soon after these conflicts ended, North Korea invaded South Korea,which was backed by the United Nations,while North Korea was backed by the Soviet Union and China. The war resulted in essentially a stalemate and ceasefire, after which North Korean leader Kim Il Sung created a highly centralised and brutal dictatorship, according himself unlimited power and generating a formidable cult of personality. Following the end of the war, a rapid period of decolonization also took place within the holdings of the various European colonial powers.These primarily occurred due to shifts in ideology, the economic exhaustion from the war and increased demand by indigenous people for self-determination. For the most part, these transitions happened relatively peacefully, though notable exceptions occurred in countries such as Indochina, Madagascar, Indonesia and Algeria.In many regions, divisions, usually for ethnic or religious reasons, occurred following European withdrawal.This was seen prominently in the Mandate of Palestine, leading to the creation of Israel, and in India, resulting in the creation of the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. Economic recovery following the war was varied in differing parts of the world, though in general it was quite positive. In Europe, West Germany recovered quickly and doubled production from its pre-war levels by the 1950s.Italy came out of the war in poor economic condition,but by 1950s, the Italian economy was marked by stability and high growth.The United Kingdom was in a state of economic ruin after the war,and continued to experience relative economic decline for decades to follow. France rebounded quickly, and enjoyed rapid economic growth and modernisation.The Soviet Union also experienced a rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era.In Asia, Japan experienced incredibly rapid economic growth, becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world by the 1980s. China, following the conclusion of its civil war, was essentially a bankrupt nation.By 1953, economic restoration seemed fairly successful as production had resumed pre-war levels.This growth rate mostly persisted, though it was briefly interrupted by the disastrous Great Leap Forward economic experiment. At the end of the war, the United States produced roughly half of the world's industrial output; by the early 1970s though, this dominance had lessened significantly. Casualties and war crimes Estimates for the total casualties of the war vary, due to the fact that many deaths went unrecorded. Most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians.Many civilians died because of disease, starvation, massacres, bombing and deliberate genocide. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, almost half of all World War II deaths. Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 85 percent were on the Allied side (mostly Soviet and Chinese) and 15 percent were on the Axis side. One estimate is that 12 million civilians died in Nazi concentration camps,1.5 million by bombs, 7 million in Europe from other causes, and 7.5 million in China from other causes. Many of these deaths were a result of genocidal actions committed in Axis-occupied territories and other war crimes committed by German as well as Japanese forces. The most notorious of German atrocities was The Holocaust, the systematic genocide of Jews in territories controlled by Germany and its allies. The Nazis also targeted other groups, including the Roma (targeted in the Porajmos), Slavs, and gay men, exterminating an estimated five million additional people.The targets of the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustaše regime were mostly Serbs The most well-known Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which several hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered.[265] The Japanese military murdered from nearly 3 million to over 10 million civilians, mostly Chinese.Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported 2.7 million casualties occurred during the Sankō Sakusen. General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung. The Axis forces employed limited biological and chemical weapons. The Italians used mustard gas during their conquest of Abyssinia,[268] while the Japanese Imperial Army used a variety of such weapons during their invasion and occupation of China (see Unit 731)and in early conflicts against the Soviets.Both the Germans and Japanese tested such weapons against civilians and,in some cases,on prisoners of war. While many of the Axis's acts were brought to trial in the world's first international tribunals,incidents caused by the Allies were not. Examples of such Allied actions include population transfer in the Soviet Union, the Soviet forced labour camps (Gulag),Japanese American internment in the United States, the Operation Keelhaul,expulsion of Germans after World War II, mass rape of German women by Soviet Red Army, the Soviet massacre of Polish citizens and the mass-bombing of civilian areas in enemy territory, including Tokyo and most notably at Dresden.Large numbers of famine deaths can also be partially attributed to the war,such as the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Vietnamese famine of 1944–1945. Concentration camps and slave work The Nazis were responsible for The Holocaust, the killing of approximately six million Jews (overwhelmingly Ashkenazim), as well as two million ethnic Poles and four million others who were deemed "unworthy of life" (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet POWS, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Romani) as part of a programme of deliberate extermination. About 12 million, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced labourers. In addition to Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags (labour camps) led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war (POWs) and even Soviet citizens who had been or were thought to be supporters of the Nazis.Sixty percent of Soviet POWs of the Germans died during the war.Richard Overy gives the number of 5.7 million Soviet POWs. Of those, 57 percent died or were killed, a total of 3.6 million.[282] Some of the survivors were treated as traitors upon their return to the USSR (see Order No. 270). Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many of which were used as labour camps, also had high death rates. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found the death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1 percent (for American POWs, 37 percent),seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians.The death rate among Chinese POWs was much larger; a directive ratified on 5 August 1937 by Hirohito declared that the Chinese were no longer protected under international law.[285] While 37,583 prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from the Netherlands, and 14,473 from United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number for the Chinese was only 56. According to historian Zhifen Ju, at least five million Chinese civilians from northern China and Manchukuo were enslaved between 1935 and 1941 by the East Asia Development Board, or Kōain, for work in mines and war industries. After 1942, the number reached 10 million.The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha (Japanese: "manual laborers"), were forced to work by the Japanese military.About 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia,and only 52,000 were repatriated to Java. On 19 February 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, interning thousands of Japanese, Italians, German Americans, and some emigrants from Hawaii who fled after the bombing of Pearl Harbor for the duration of the war. The U.S. and Canadian governments interned 150,000 Japanese-Americans,as well as nearly 11,000 German and Italian residents of the U.S.Allied use of involuntary labor occurred mainly in the East, such as in Poland,but more than a million were also put to work in the West. In Hungary's case, Hungarians were forced to work for the Soviet Union until 1955.