The Second World War (1939-1945)
Senior 6 · History (Languages)
The Second World War (1939-1945)
Lesson 3 of 5
20 min
In May 1945, a few days after Germany surrendered, a Polish family waits at a table in Hamburg while a British soldier writes down their details. They are "displaced persons": people the war had torn from their homes, many of them brought to Germany as forced labourers. Millions stood in queues like this one across Europe and Asia. Who should go home, and to which country, when borders and governments had changed? That question is one of the war's effects.
Definition
Displaced person: someone forced to leave home by war or persecution and unable to return.
Holocaust: the systematic, state-organised murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and others were also murdered in huge numbers.
Superpower: a state with the military, economic and political strength to act everywhere in the world. After 1945 there were two: the United States and the Soviet Union.
Trust territory: a former mandate placed under United Nations supervision after 1946, with the stated goal of leading it towards self-government or independence.
| Field | Effects |
|---|---|
| Human | An estimated 60 to 75 million deaths, including deaths from famine and disease, most of them civilians. The Holocaust destroyed about six million Jewish lives. Tens of millions of people were displaced. |
| Political | Europe's great powers were exhausted; the United States and the Soviet Union became superpowers. Germany and Japan were occupied; Germany was divided into four zones and, in 1949, into two states. Eastern Europe came under Soviet control. The United Nations was founded in 1945. |
| Justice and rights | War-crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. The UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (9 December 1948) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 1948). |
| Economic | Cities, railways and factories destroyed across Europe and Asia; the American Marshall Plan (from 1948) funded western European recovery; the IMF and the World Bank were created at Bretton Woods (1944). |
| Science and society | The nuclear age; advances in radar, jet engines, computing and the mass production of penicillin; women's wartime work. |
| Colonies | Britain, France and Belgium came out weakened; African and Asian soldiers returned with new ideas; the Atlantic Charter (1941) spoke of the right of all peoples to choose their own government. Decolonisation followed, beginning in Asia. |
Rwanda saw no fighting, but the war reached it. Drought in 1943 combined with colonial demands for food and labour for the Allied war effort to produce the Ruzagayura famine (October 1943 to December 1944), in which between 36,000 and 50,000 people in Ruanda-Urundi died and several hundred thousand emigrated, mostly to the Belgian Congo and Uganda. King Mutara III Rudahigwa sent aid to the affected region. After the war, in 1946, Ruanda-Urundi became a United Nations trust territory under Belgium. UN visiting missions and reports gave Rwandans a new international stage on which to raise the question of independence.
History Matters, "Who decided how Germany would be divided after WW2?" (short animated documentary, about 4 minutes). Watch for the decisions taken at Yalta and Potsdam, and note how they planted the seeds of the Cold War.
Warning
Mandate is not trust territory. Ruanda-Urundi was a League of Nations mandate from 1922 and a United Nations trust territory from 1946. Use the right term for the right period.
Tip
Effects that became causes. Several effects of this war are the starting points of later units: the UN (lesson 4), the Cold War (lesson 5), African nationalism (unit 5) and the Genocide Convention (unit 6). Linking them shows the examiner you see history as connected.
Important
Discuss. The world promised "never again" in 1948 when it adopted the Genocide Convention. What would it take for such a promise to be kept? Return to this question in unit 6.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the table and the exercises.
