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Victory. 3312686. In the cities of the victorious allies, thousands flooded the streets to celebrate victory and the end of the war. 2695975. 3162521. 50433081. 51259647 . 3312686. 3312667. A returning sailor kisses a complete stranger in the celebration of VE Day in New York City. .
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Victory 3312686
In the cities of the victorious allies, thousands flooded the streets to celebrate victory and the end of the war. 2695975 3162521
50433081 51259647
A returning sailor kisses a complete stranger in the celebration of VE Day in New York City. 50433084
Apparently, grabbing a quick kiss from a strange girl wasn’t so uncommon. 97267099
One woman tries to even the score. 50625880
However, not everyone on the winning side felt like a winner: "Above the muzzle of our window & from all the other cells of the Lubyanka [Prison] we too, former prisoners of war & former front line soldiers, watched the Moscow Heavens, patterned with fireworks & crisscrossed by the beams of search lights. That victory was not for us."-- Alex Solzhenitsyn on victory celebrations seen from his prison cell 3310163
A young wife (left) and German mother joyously greet their husband and son as they return safely from the son. Millions of other wives and mothers weren’t so lucky. 50803376 50803376
Two Germans return from a Russian POW camp on one pair of legs. 50693958
American soldiers make first contact with allied Russian soldiers (including women who fought in combat) in an historic meeting at the Elbe River. In fact, it happened so fast, that it had to be restaged several days later so higher ranking officers could be present and make it look official. 2638694 52675181
However, beneath the façade of camaraderie all was not well between the erstwhile allies. Soon new rivalries would emerge and with them a new kind of war, the Cold War between former allies who now found their common enemy gone. 52128277
Holocaust 2001405
It was the perfect fusion of obsessive hatred with the modern state and technology.
Not all those killed in World War II were soldiers or incidental civilians caught in military operations. Much of the killing was deliberately and methodically carried out against helpless civilians, including women and children. The most infamous such operation was the Holocaust. The Holocaust, in the narrower interpretation of the word, refers to the organized state program for the mass extermination of the Jews. Nazi efforts intensified as the war progressed, ultimately claiming 6,000,000 out of 10,000,000 European Jews. Given more time, they might very well have completed the job. 2658713 2658713
As early as the publication of MeinKampf(1924) Hitler laid out how he was going to exterminate the Jews. Unfortunately, many or most people failed to take him at his full word, figuring he would institute harsh policies, but nothing on the scale of the Holocaust. However, almost from the moment he became chancellor in 1933, Hitler instituted ever more cruel policies against the Jews, from boycotts of their businesses through the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938), all the while rounding up larger numbers for his concentration camps.* *The term concentration camp seems to have originated with the Boer War in South Africa, when British forces would round up and concentrate the Boer civilian population in overcrowded unsanitary camps to prevent them from offering aid to Boer forces roaming the countryside. 82139236
However, plans for organized mass exterminations didn’t form until the invasion of Russia (1941), which put millions of new potential victims under Nazi rule. Initial efforts of mass executions by firing squads proved inefficient, so a more efficient industrial organization was created, referred euphemistically by Nazis as the Final Solution or Solving the Eastern Question. 53313247
The first stage was rounding up Jews, many of whom had already been isolated and concentrated in ghettos in Poland. SS officials (who carried out the Holocaust under the command of Heinrich Himmler) crammed them into railroad boxcars, where the occupants suffered from heat (or cold), and lack of ventilation, food, water, and sanitary facilities. Any who died en route were deemed too weak to be useful anyway, thus conserving poison gas to use on others. 56460826
Arriving at the camps, family members were separated from one another by gender, including separating the children from their parents). As they were processed, a Nazi official would send them either to the right (for forced labor) or left (for extermination). 56460387
The labor camps were a slower death sentence, as inmates were worked to exhaustion during excessively long shifts while being given little food to sustain them. The prevailing attitude was that their deaths just eliminated more Jews while opening space for new laborers. 89237115
For those sent to execution, the most common method was asphyxiation in the gas chambers. Inmates might be told they were just taking showers, although rumors had filtered out about the real purpose of these “showers”. Hydrogen cyanide pellets were released, which, when coming into contact with the air would vaporize into poison gas and filter down to the inmates below. Often, panic would ensue, with the victims clawing over one another trying to get to the door, which of course was locked. 2641681
The next stage in the process was disposing of the huge numbers of corpses in as efficient and sanitary way as possible. For this, inmates hosed down the bodies of their comrades in the gas chamber and carried them to the camp ovens or crematoria, where they were burned. In addition to the easy disposal of bodies, this also destroyed much of the evidence of what had been done. 51919570
The death camps were run with a businesslike efficiency that may have helped Nazi officials emotionally detach themselves from their horrible tasks. Those denying the existence or extent of the Holocaust ignore the Nazis’ almost obsessive policy of keeping intricate records of proceedings. Besides the names of millions of victims (such as those on the chart to the left), we even have receipts for shipments of the hydrogen cyanide pellets (AKA Zyklon-B) used to produce the poison gas in the gas chambers, and such things as the rubber gaskets used to seal the windows looking in on them to make sure everyone was dead. 89236993
Liberated victims of Buchenwald. The author and future Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, is the seventh prisoner from the left on the second row from the bottom next to the post. 2659764
A Buchenwald victim 79660636
One of the Buchenwald ovens with the charred remains of its victim still inside. 50701159
Wedding rings taken from inmates of Buchenwald to be melted down to gold bars. 2667609
Caps for teeth and dentures taken from inmates of Buchenwald to be melted down to gold bars. 3089217
Tattooed skin taken from inmates of Buchenwald to be made into purses and lampshades for the camp commandant’s wife. 92926092
Security was so tight at the camps that there were apparently no escapes until two Czech Jews got out in 1944. Victims of a camp’s electric fence were left where they died as a warning to other prisoners not to try to escape. The Nazis were so adamant about keeping specific proceedings in the death camps secret that, when a Nazi colonel’s wife was mistakenly sent to Auschwitz, they executed her even though the mistake had been caught in time, fearing that she would tell the outside world what she had seen there. 52832696
When American soldiers came upon and liberated Hitler’s camps, they were totally uninformed and unprepared for they saw. Tragically, many GIs, wanting desperately to help, gave the prisoners more food than their bodies, still in low metabolism starvation mode, could take. As a result, many Jewish inmates’ bodies went into shock from overeating and died. Overall, 40% of those freed from the camps didn’t survive the first few weeks of their freedom. 50597266
Edward R. Murrow’s account of Buchenwald after its liberation is about as poignant description of such a scene as was written then. “There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were plowing…” 2664205
“…[I] asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description….” …”As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it….” 51347511
“….In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only 6 years old. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die…” Below left: Auschwitz; right: Buchenwald Auschwitz 2658734 50597191
“…We went to the hospital [pictured below]. It was full. The doctor told me that 200 had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said: “tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.” He pulled back the blanket from a man's feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move….” Belsen Survivors of the Hanover-Anhelm camp (above) & Ebensee concentration camp (right) 2424244
“….I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge....showed me the daily ration. One piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every 24 hours. He had a chart on the wall. Very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each 10 men who died. He had to account for the rations and he added: ‘We're very efficient here….’” 79660637
