Life After Life

During World War I (1914-1918), called the Great War at the time, the United Kingdom joined the Allied Powers in fighting the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.

The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist on June 28, 1914, triggered tensions that had long been brewing among European nations. Germany, ruled by Kaiser Wilhelm II, backed Austria-Hungary in their declaration of war, while Serbia called upon Russia and its allies, including Great Britain, France, and Belgium. Some of the bloodiest fighting took place along the Western Front, located in France and Belgium, as the opposing sides attacked each other from trenches, a war of attrition that claimed millions of lives with very little gain on either side. At sea, engagements like the Battle of Jutland in 1916 proved the British navy superior to the Germans.

The composition of the Allied Powers changed in 1917, when Russia bowed out of the war due to an internal revolution as Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the czar, Russia’s absolute monarch, and installed communist rule. In the same year, President Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. Facing internal revolts and economic collapse, the Central Powers reached an armistice with the Allies in November 1918. In all, the Great War claimed an estimated 16 million lives, both soldiers and civilians. Further devastation swept the globe when the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 killed another 20-50 million people.

New technology introduced in the Great War included machine guns, tanks, aerial combat, and chemical weapons, including mustard gas, which can damage the eyes, skin, and lungs. The term “shell shock” evolved to describe the symptoms experienced by those traumatized by battle or bombardment, now better understood as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, redrew the map of Europe in the hope of avoiding future wars on such a scale. However, the treaty left Germany with a heavy debt of war reparations, leading to decades of poverty and economic turmoil that found an outlet in the rise of nationalist ideals.

Adolf Hitler was born on the Austrian border and fought for Germany in WWI, where he was wounded twice. After the war, he became involved in the German Worker’s Party, which he shaped into the National Socialist (Nazi) party. The Nazi party adopted the swastika as its symbol as well as Hitler’s ideology of racial superiority, which included virulent antisemitism. Hitler organized the Hitler Youth and the SS, a paramilitary personally loyal to him. When he was named chancellor in 1933, Hitler became the virtual dictator of Germany, eventually naming his new government the Third Reich and declaring himself the Führer, or supreme leader. His new laws excluded Jews from citizenship, and deportations began to transport Jewish people, along with others deemed “undesirable,” to concentration camps where millions were killed.

Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 prompted Britain and France to declare war, beginning World War II. His strategy of Blitzkrieg, literally, “lightning war,” quickly claimed the Netherlands, Belgium, and part of France, forcing the Allies to evacuate their troops at Dunkirk to avoid surrender. Hitler then attempted to subdue Britain with a series of aerial raids known as the Blitz, a steady rain of bombs on London that lasted from September 1940 to May 1941.

Though other cities were targeted, including ports, transportation hubs, and industrial centers, London sustained the worst damage. Citizens followed blackout measures to limit light exposure at night so they would not become targets of German pilots. Food and other items were rationed as supply chains were disrupted. Government groups like the office of Air Raid Precautions distributed shelters, while volunteer units sprang up to offer aid to victims, from fire and rescue to canteens providing food.

The British Royal Air Force responded with their fighter planes, at the cost of enormous casualties. Eventually, the Allies took the raids to German soil, heavily bombing German cities including Berlin, Munich, and Dresden. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Russians joined the Allies in fighting the Axis powers, which included Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Several assassination attempts were made on Hitler’s life, but none succeeded. In the end, with Allied forces advancing across Axis territories after the Normandy invasion of June 1944, and the Soviet army advancing after successes in battle in January and February 1945, Hitler holed up in a bunker in Berlin and died by suicide on April 30, 1945, Braun with him. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. On May 8, 1945, the Allies celebrated Victory in Europe (VE) day. The US dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, forcing Japan to surrender on September 2, 1945, marking the end of World War II.

In total, the death toll of World War II was an estimated 60-80 million soldiers and civilians; at least 20 million died in the Soviet Union alone, while Hitler’s Holocaust murdered over 6 million Jews. The devastation led to British and US support, in later decades, for the creation of the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland on land taken from Palestine through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and resulted in ongoing tensions in the region.