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A Soviet Union poster: "Soldier save me from slavery!"

A German paper drive for the war effort.

Europe and Middle East, 1939 to 1942

Germany Invades the Soviet Union

Before Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin's military advisors had suggested partial mobilization, but Stalin, working with an analogy about the origins of World War I, would have none of it. He did not want to any mobilization of Soviet forces to provoke Germany.

The Soviet Union's defenses were inadequate and, from June 22, 1941, the Germans ripped into Soviet territory rapidly. Within the first week the Germans reached the city of Minsk, two hundred kilometers from the frontier. Stalin was shaken and depressed. He is reported to have felt responsible for the failure at the front. He left his office and withdrew to his country dacha. Stalin was always concerned about his own standing rather than welfare of others, and he must have feared that the successful Germans would bring about his own end. A few days later, his fellow Politburo members arrived, and he suspected that they had come to announce his removal. It was the second time that members of the Politburo could have rid themselves of Stalin, the previous being in 1933, just after Stalin's wife had committed suicide. But Stalin's Politburo colleagues, including Molotov, saw Stalin as their leader. "Why have you come?" asked Stalin. His colleagues announced their proposal to set up a "Supreme Defense Council" with Stalin as chairman. Stalin agreed and pulled himself together.

The Germans invaded the Soviet Union with three million men and less than a superiority in number of tanks. And joining the Germans in the invasion was a total of 500,000 troops from Finland, Romania, Hungary, including one division from Spain. The Germans were better trained than the Soviet forces, better organized and better led. The Germans used 2,700 aircraft, and in the first day week they destroyed over 4000 Soviet planes, many on the ground on the first day.

News of the invasion was greeted with emotion by anti-communists across Europe, in various nations, including some occupied by the Germans. Pope Pius II, who was adamant in his opposition to Communism and opposed also to Hitler's National Socialists, was moved by the awesome event to speak in a broadcast of the "...magnanimous acts of valor which now defend the foundations of Christian culture.”

Soviet Forces Fall Back

Everywhere the Soviet forces were falling back. As the Germans rolled into Belarus and the Ukraine they were greeted by crowds of cheering people and offerings of flowers and bread. On August 5, the Germans reached Smolensk, more than 320 kilometers (125 miles) east of Minsk and half way between Minsk and Moscow. Almost 300,000 Soviet soldiers were captured. [note]

Soviet forces were burning crops, destroying houses, filling in wells, leaving as little as possible for the advancing Germans. In the hasty retreat, the Soviet police murdered prisoners in camps, including many who were Polish, rather than trouble themselves with a more refined withdrawal.

Back at his post and believing in his native abilities, Stalin considered negotiating with the Germans. The Germans were uninterested, and this was to remain a secret kept from the Soviet people during and after the war.

Stalin intervened in military decisions and quickly made matters worse for the Soviet armies. He resorted to his habit of attempting to instill discipline through terror. On August 16, 1941, his order number 270 directed Soviet officers and political workers who fell into German hands were to be considered traitors and their families subject to arrest. The families of enlisted men taken prisoner were to be deprived of state assistance - in other words, rations. Possessing a radio - over which one could hear German propaganda - became a capital offense. In the place of radios, the government broadcast programs over loud speakers in factories and at street corners. Collaborators were to be executed rather than imprisoned and tried in a court of law.

Meanwhile patriotic Russians looked to Stalin for leadership. He was their hero and often referred to as a genius. And Stalin was appealing to that which he believed would inspire the most support against the Germans - not to Marxism-Leninism, of course. It was not time for ideology. Stalin appealed to nationalism. He lifted restrictions on religion, allowing the Orthodox Church to play its traditional role in calling for the defense of Mother Russia's faith.  On Stalin's order the Communist publication, the Atheist was turned into a journal supporting religion.

As the Germans continued their rapid advance, Stalin was sending rapidly gathered, ill-trained and ill-equipped troops to the front. Many had no rifles and were expected to pick up the rifles of fallen soldiers before them. In these months of fighting in 1941, the Soviet Union was to lose four million dead and captured - averaging around 21,000 soldiers per day - human beings with faces, emotions and families. [note]  Cutting this figure in half to around 10,500 a day is equivalent to the U.S. losses in the entire Vietnam War every three days. [note]

The Volga Germans

The loyalty of national minorities had become suspect, including the Volga Germans. These were German speaking people whose ancestors had come to the Volga River area in 1760. There their forefathers had created efficient farms out of wasteland, their success making them targets of resentment by neighboring Russians. The Volga Germans had multiplied, and after the Bolshevik Revolution, a German Volga Republic was one of ten republics in the Russian federation - a republic that was 67 percent German, 20% Russian and 12% Ukrainian. In 1941, most Germans in the Volga area considered themselves loyal to the Soviet Union, but their German roots made them targets of hostility and suspicions of disloyalty. In August, Stalin's regime dropped parachutists dressed as German soldiers among the Volga Germans and asked to be hidden until German troops arrived. Villagers who complied were exterminated. On August 28, the German Volga Republic was abolished, and the order went out for mass deportations of all Volga Germans. Six hundred thousand of them were packed into cattle cars for resettlement to western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. Another 348,000 of German descent were also sent eastward in the same fashion, all of them unceremoniously dumped in wastelands and left to fend for themselves without benefit of tools or government equipment. And thousands died of starvation.

Hitler's Strategies

Hitler had said that all he had to do was to kick in the Soviet Union's door and the whole rotten structure would fall down. He had believed that his tanks and mechanized transport would allow him speed that Napoleon had lacked, that his armies would be able to end Soviet resistance within six or seven weeks. Hitler had thought that he knew the Soviet Union, but he had not. His general, Franz Halder, wrote in his diary on August 11 that it was "becoming ever clearer that he underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military." [note]

Hitler had been dreaming big. Looking beyond the continent, he had looked forward to the world being divided into four blocs. One bloc he had seen as the United States and Latin America. Another he had seen as the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations. The third had been that of Japan dominating East Asia, and the fourth had been Germany dominating the European continent. He had planned on creating space for Germans in what had been Poland, and he had laid plans to turn the Ukraine into what he called a Garden of Eden populated by Germans. He analogized his expansion eastward with the American frontier - having read about the heroic expansion of Germanic America expanding against the American Indians. He compared the Slavic peoples with American Indians.

Hitler's plan included extermination of Bolshevism and wiping Moscow and Leningrad from the face of earth. Rather than turn the Slavic peoples he was invading into allies, all of Europe's Slavic peoples were to be a subservient racial minority, with only the simplest of education, enough to be able to read traffic signs and other simple instructions and simple awareness such as knowing the name of the capital of Germany. And for Europe he had planned on the extermination of what he called the Jewish race. The Jews and their cultural influence he saw as his main enemy. Bolshevism he saw as a Jewish phenomenon. [See the Final Solution]

It would have been better for Hitler if he had concentrated on taking control of the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal rather than try to invade the Soviet Union. With this would have cut Britain's route to the East, including to India and Australia and perhaps allowed Germany, Italy and his other European allies to link up with Japan. Hitler had a lot of support in the Arab world, who looked forward to Hitler ridding the area of the British, but he kept his commitment to the Mediterranean area at a minimum, believing that North Africa should be his ally Italy's "living space." And in the Middle East was also his French ally - the pro-German regime at Vichy in central France. The British and their friends, however, drove the French out of Syria and Lebanon the same month that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

Hitler a late start in the invasion of the Soviet Union, having postponed it a couple of months in order to rescue the Italians in their failed efforts east, across the Adriatic Sea. In his attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler sent his forces in three directions, northeast toward Leningrad, east toward Moscow, and southeast into the Ukraine. In mid-July, Hitler slowed his drive toward Moscow by ordering tanks in that drive to turn south to help the drive in the Ukraine. Moscow was the hub or the Soviet rail system, and taking it would have helped the Germans, but Hitler wanted to keep his the armies on the flanks moving with the armies in the middle. He must have thought that taking Moscow would be easy enough later.

In the Ukraine, Soviet forces were holding out around Kiev. Stalin gave orders of no retreat. The Germans surrounded and captured 600,000 Soviet troops there - the greatest number of prisoners taken ever.

A special force of Germans were rounding up Jews and exterminating Jews in every town that was overrun. On September 28 and 29, 1941, at Babi Yar, just outside of Kiev, the Germans gathered 33,771 Jews and tossed them into pits.

In September the German advance was slowed by rain. And in October it was slowed by an unusually early winter, with freezing temperatures and a heavy snow. The German advance came to a halt on the outskirts of Moscow in early December. Moscow was being defended by only 90,000 troops, but unknown to the Germans, Soviet forces in reserve were building for a counter offensive, made possible by the Soviet Union's considerable population - more than 170 million, compared to 86 million for Germany and Austria. Stalin decided to stay in Moscow, and civilians attempting to flee eastward from Moscow were shot by Soviet soldiers or police.

According to what had been Hitler's plans, the Germans were supposed to have won the war by now, but the  Germans were in an indefensible position and without winter clothing or equipment. Hitler's generals begged him for permission to withdraw to better positions, but Hitler refused. Disgusted by Hitler's attempt at military strategy, the Army's commander-in-chief, Brauchitsch, and three other generals, Rundstedt, Bock, and Leeb, resigned.

Stalin and Roosevelt through 1942

In October 1941, Stalin was negotiating with agents for the Roosevelt administration, primarily W. Averell Harriman. To his colleagues Stalin spoke of Great Britain and the United States as evil capitalist powers, but he was willing to get what he could from anybody he could. He was desperate enough to ask the U.S. for troops as well as supplies. U.S. soldiers fighting on Soviet soil was not to be, but a lend lease agreement was signed, which started the flow to the Soviet Union of light trucks, light tanks, jeeps, chemicals including explosives, aluminum, communications wire, C-rations (canned food for soldiers) and clothing. Stalin was especially interested in the light trucks (which would not collapse bridges). It was, he said, a war of motors. With him when the agreement was made was his ambassador, Litvinov, who was joyous and exclaimed "Now we shall win the war!" [note]  Scores of ships carrying supplies began leaving United States ports monthly, crossing the Atlantic and reaching the Russian port of Murmansk, and some of the supplies reached the Soviet Union through Iran.

The greatest element in defeating the Germans would be the Soviet people. Not only were they dying in record numbers, they had been dismantling their  factories and transporting them behind the Ural Mountains, out of range of German aircraft and the German advance. As many as 1,360 factories were dismantled, including one of the world's largest steel mills. With the factories went their workers , who reassembled the plants rapidly and began producing the goods necessary to fight the war, including ammunition, Katyushka rocket launchers and T-34 tanks. And Soviet soldiers were making their sacrifice.

Franklin Roosevelt and the Americans Respond

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been in accord with public opinion in 1939 when Stalin made his pact with Germany, and again in 1940 when the Soviet Union had invaded Finland. He described the Soviet government as a dictatorship, said he disliked the regimentation of Communism, that he "abhorred the indiscriminate killings of thousands of innocent victims" and the turning away from religion. Then in 1941, with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, sympathy for the Russians in the United States increased, and so to did Roosevelt's attitude toward the Soviet Union - not unlike Winston Churchill, Britain's prime minister, who said to his private secretary that if Hitler had invaded Hell "I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." [note]

Churchill and the British people welcomed the Soviet Union as an ally, and they felt relief from Hitler's focus away from Britain and onto Russia. And before war was declared between the United States and Germany, Americans also modified their attitude. For many Americans Communism was not the issue. These people were of the opinion that it was not for Hitler to destroy Communism in the Soviet Union, that it was for the people of the Soviet Union to do so if they wished. By now many Americans saw Hitler as a ruthless dictator bent on making war. Even the tough-minded American Legion at its annual convention in Milwaukee in September 1941, voted in favor of assistance to the Russians, amid shouts of "to hell with Hitler." [note]

In late 1941, many Americans believed that Germany would win against the Soviet Union. U.S. strategists, feared that if Hitler gained the wheat and the Ukraine and all of the oil and metals of the Soviet Union, along with mastery of all of Eastern Europe, that what was now America's enemy might be invincible. Roosevelt spoke of the defense of the Soviet Union as "vital to the defense of the United States." The United States was sending Russia all it could spare, and this had the support of a good majority of the American people.

The Tide Turns

Soviet armies began a winter counteroffensive in December, 1941. In places in the coming three months they pushed the Germans back 150 miles - almost to Smolensk. The front bogged down in the mud that came with the winter thaw.  During the summer the German offensive resumed, but the Germans were weakened now. They had suffered too many losses for offensives all along the Soviet front, and they focused on a drive into the Caucasus, for the sake of oil, with Baku as the ultimate destination - Hitler's economists having told him that without oil from that region Germany could not continue the war. By the end of August the Germans were near Grozny. And in September they captured the Soviet navy base at Novorossiisk.

On the way to Baku, Hitler decided to capture the city named after Stalin, Stalingrad, on the west side of the Volga River. Rather than taking control of the Volga River north of Stalingrad, cutting the river traffic that was supplying the city, Hitler chose a frontal assault. He refused arguments from General Halder to forget about the city. Hitler had decided that 'the city of Stalin" had to be taken at all costs. In August, 1942, the great battle for Stalingrad began, and the drive toward Baku stopped.

On November 19, 1942, the Soviet Union counterattacked and surrounded the Romanians and Germans in Stalingrad. On December 27 a German force attempting to break through to the surrounded troops was brought to a standstill. Other German troops in the Caucasus regions escaped westward. The troops in Stalingrad were without winter clothing, and short of food and ammunition, but Hitler ordered them to stay. Annihilation, he believed, was better than retreat.

North Africa

In late October 1942, the British launched a counteroffensive westward in Egypt, around 100 miles west of Alexandria, at El Alamein, stopping the drive led by Erwin Rommel toward the Suez Canal.  This was followed on November 8 by U.S. and British landings around Casablanca and Algiers in French controlled North Africa. Stalin was unhappy because he wanted a landing somewhere in France - which Roosevelt had promised would happen that year. Hitler was relieved because he had feared a landing closer to home.

The success of the Americans and British in North Africa included a deal with Admiral Darlan, who had been on the side of the pro-German government at Vichy. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the anti-German "Free French" was outraged. Hitler responded to the Allied invasion by moving troops into what had been the unoccupied area of France, which included Mediterranean coastline. The regime at Vichy accepted this while declaring that it would defend itself against the Allies on its North African territory. French forces had fought with determination against the Allies as they had landed. With Darlan's defection some went over to the side of the Allies, while others continued to resist the invasion, another Allied landing taking place near Tunis in mid-November.

War and Fantasies in 1943

In January, 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca and decided that they would demand unconditional surrender from Germany. On January 31, those Germans and Romanians at Stalingrad who had not frozen to death were finally overrun, and they surrendered. The Soviet Union had lost a million men fighting for Stalingrad, and now they began driving the Germans back.

With the Soviet Union's success around Stalingrad, hope in the United States for a Soviet victory increased, as did fear of Stalin. Some Americans still believed that Stalin and Communism were odious. They believed in supporting the Soviet Union against Hitler but with strings attached. This was the view of Roosevelt's ambassador to the Soviet Union since April, 1942: William Standley. Standley was displeased with what he saw of Stalin, who was saying nothing to the people of the Soviet Union aide coming from the United States. Standley wanted aide tied to agreements and complained that the Roosevelt administration should stop acting like Santa Claus.

In February, 1943, William C. Bullitt - Roosevelt's friend and his former ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-36) - met Roosevelt for three hours at the White House and argued for concessions from Stalin in exchange for support for the Soviet Union. Bullitt described Stalin as a dangerous dictator and an ideologue bent on spreading communist  revolution. Roosevelt argued with him, saying that he had "a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man." He said that his chief advisor, Harry Hopkins, had described Stalin as not wanting "anything but security for his country," and Roosevelt added:

I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.

To Bullitt's objections, Roosevelt said:

 Bill ... it's my responsibility and not yours; and I'm going to play my hunch. [note]

Stalin, meanwhile, was building in Moscow a friendly alternative to the Polish government in exile in London - an alternative the Russians would call the "Union of Polish Patriots." On April 13 had come the announcement by radio from Germany of a discovery of thousands of bodies of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, then occupied by the Germans, and the Germans called for observers from the west. Stalin responded to the suggestion that his people had done the killings as "infamous Fascist slander," and he described the London Poles as not only hostile to Russia but under Nazi influence. Roosevelt was shown an intelligence report that blamed the massacre on the Russians, but he refused to believe it. Churchill tried to smooth over the matter, announcing that it was no time for quarrels among the Allies. "We have got to beat Hitler," he said, and he assured the Soviet ambassador in London that he would oppose any investigation by the International Red Cross or any other body in any territory under German authority.

On April 25, Stalin broke diplomatic relations with the exiled Polish government in London. To Roosevelt's envoy, Joseph Davies, who arrived in Moscow on May 19, Stalin said that the Polish government in London had betrayed the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union needed regimes on its western border that were friendly toward the Soviet Union and that  he "wanted all European peoples to have the kind of government that they themselves chose, free from coercion." [note]  Davies did not pursue the subject by asking for specifics about his plans for occupied countries. But he told Stalin that the Soviet image in the United States would improve if the Comintern were disbanded and if there was more evidence of religious freedom. The Comintern that year was disbanded, and Roosevelt replaced his anti-Stalin ambassador to the Soviet Union, Standley, with W. Averell Harriman - who was no admirer of Stalin but by now had a history of working well with the Russians.

Trouble in the Ukraine

Hitler had rejected suggestions that Germany befriend an independent, pro-German Ukraine. And now most Ukrainians hated the Germans. In 1943, the Ukraine was filled with partisans - bands of armed men and women - some of them fighting for Soviet rule, some of them fighting against both Soviet rule and the Germans, and all of them taking would they could from rural folk in order to survive. The German army was striking back at the partisans, seeing all Ukrainians as the enemy and inflicting collective punishment  - against men, women and children. In 1941 German soldiers had seen themselves as saviors of Western Civilization against an inferior people - the Slavs. Now they believed that killing Ukrainians civilians was just another aspect of war.

Toward a Memorable Demise

In 1943, Hitler took up the line that Germany had just begun to fight. Remembering the hardship that Germany had suffered during World War I and the unrest that had resulted, he had been conducting the war in an atmosphere of business and life as usual for Germans on the home front. Now, goods for consumers would be curtailed. Germany would move to full wartime production. Dr. Goebbels called upon the German people to sacrifice for the sake of future generations.

The German view on women was that they should be housewives, and this was also Hitler's view. Few German women worked in industry. There was no German version of America's Rosie the Riveter. A woman with a Ph.D. in chemistry could not find a job as a chemist or in teaching. Nor were there German women in the military. Hitler had a boyish view that women should be nurses and give affection to males. German women served the military only in nursing and served the nation by having children. Women's role was to increase in industrial work only toward the end of the war, with the depletion of male workers and more desperation.

In the place of women working in industry while men were in the military, Germany was using workers from other nations. The German government began drafting Frenchmen to work in German industry, which did much to increase hostility toward Germany in France. Among the French, grassroots resistance organizations developed, which were hostile to both Germany and to those French people who had befriended the Germans.

Germany was also using slave labor, the labor of Jews and others, with capitalists operating as capitalism usually does: within the context of prevailing social values. It was okay, they believed, to use slave labor because the slaves were unworthy people - a rationale for slavery dating back to antiquity.

Meanwhile, Hitler had discovered that separating "Aryans" from Jews was not as easy as he had imagined. Centuries of assimilation and intermarriage created many who were deemed one-quarter or one-half Jewish and called Mischlinge.  Some of them were among the highest ranking of military officers. As many as 150,000 Mischlinge were given reprieves in the form of a special document that allowed them to serve in the armed forces. [note]

After Germany's defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler began having difficulty accepting realities. He maintained his self-confidence, but this was out of proportion to his abilities. And he was given to rages, including rage at his generals, whom he unjustly denounced to their faces, calling them idiots, cowards and liars. Facing an enemy that was stronger than expected, and getting stronger, Hitler's generals advised that against the Russians they should  withdraw to defensive positions, to a straighter, shorter line, to allow Germany to consolidate its strength in the territory it had gained and to let the Russians wear themselves out in offensives. But Hitler would not have it.

Hitler's armies were too spread out, trying to defeat the Soviet Union, occupying numerous other European nations and trying to hold the line against the United States and Great Britain. In manpower Germany was at a disadvantage, not only because of the Soviet Union's 170 million people but also the 66 million of Great Britain, Canada and Australia, a volunteer army of 2.5 million in India, and the 150 million that populated the United States - offset by only 73 million in Japan. The populations of Romania and Hungary were only a little help, but in manufacturing and war material Germany was at a disadvantage. In 1943, Germany and the Soviet Union were about equal in manufacturing, but U.S. output was about 2.5 times that of Germany. The U.S. that year produced 85,898 aircraft, the Soviet Union 34,900, the British 26,263 and Germany only 24,807. And the Germans were producing fewer tanks than the Soviet Union, and fewer tanks than the Americans. [note]

By mid-May, 1943, all of North Africa was controlled by the Allies. On July 10 the Allies landed in Sicily, against Italian and German troops. In Italy, military failures weakened fascist unity and inspired political change. In late July, rather than  unconditional surrender, Italy's king had Mussolini arrested. Italy's old war hero, General Pietro Badoglio, who had led Italy's forces in Libya in the twenties and then in Ethiopia, was called upon to form a new government. In late August his representatives met British and America envoys in Portugal, and on September 3, Italy surrendered.

The U.S. and British invaded Italy at Salerno, struggling against Germany's forces there. Italy joined the war against Germany, and the Germans advanced into areas that had been occupied by the Italians:in Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia and some islands in the Aegean. From Greece, Germany took hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers to do forced labor - from which many were never to return. By October 1, the Allies were moving into Naples, the Germans taking revenge against their erstwhile allies by wrecking museums there.

Soviet troops in 1943 continued to drive the Germans back. In November they retook the capital of the Ukraine: Kiev. And in the Pacific the Americans had turned the tide of war in their favor. By now Hitler was tired of the war. He thought it would be nice to go to the theater regularly again and to visit the Artists' Club. He cursed Churchill, blaming him for the war and calling him a damned drunkard. Hitler saw the possibility of defeat and no possibility of a negotiated settlement. But the suffering of the German people did not matter to him so much as a glorious end. Hitler spoke of the attraction of demise by a "magnificent pyre." The ever-faithful Dr. Goebbels pushed the theme of the German people going down in a heroic and glorious ending that would made the biggest of marks in human history and stir the hearts of people forever after. The Allies in their bombing were contributing to Hitler's passion for destruction. Hitler exulted in it. To him the Allies were exposing their principles as hypocrisy.

Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran

In late November, 1943, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt for three days at the Soviet Embassy in Iran's capital, Teheran (northern Iran dominated then by the Soviet Union and southeastern Iran by the British. With the Red Army not yet having crossed into neighboring Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or Finland, this would be the last good opportunity to negotiate the occupations of territory other than one's own or how the war would end.

In a spirit of cooperation and friendship, Roosevelt spoke to Stalin about giving the Soviet Union merchant ships after the war to help the Soviet Union get back on its feet. These ships, built for the war, were bound to be more numerous than the U.S. would need after the end of the war, and Stalin pointed out that giving these ships to the Soviet Union would facilitate trade between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Churchill tried to draw Stalin out on Poland. Stalin replied that it was not necessary or desirable to discuss the Polish question then and there, but he did say that the Soviet Union favored maintaining its present border with Poland (the old Curzon Line - the line it had moved to in 1939) and moving Poland's western frontier to Germany's Oder River.

About any plans that he  might have concerning the spread of communist revolution, Stalin smiled and said, "We won't worry about that. We have found it is not so easy to set up a Communist society."

What most interested Roosevelt was Stalin's agreement for the creation of the United Nations - an extension of the Allied alliance after the war. This was discussed, and Roosevelt and Stalin discussed colonialism, leaving Churchill as the odd man out. Roosevelt and Churchill had been in conflict over this issue, the British having been unwilling to join the U.S. on declarations of trusteeships or any statement endorsements of national independence. At Tehran, Stalin grumbled about the French and said that the Allies were not shedding blood so that the French could return to Indochina. Roosevelt said that he agreed 100 percent. A United Nations trusteeship was suggested for Indochina with independence to come in twenty or thirty years. Then the subject of India came up, and an annoyed Churchill put an end to that discussion.

At Teheran, Roosevelt was trying to remove Stalin's fear and suspicion of the United States. To this end he told Stalin that U.S. troops would remain in Europe only two years after the war ended. He made a show of distance between himself and Churchill in order to convince Stalin that the capitalist West was not ganging up against him. Roosevelt appealed to Stalin by telling him that Germany had to be ruthlessly punished. Stalin had expressed his suspicion of unconditional surrender, but unconditional surrender appeared to be the accepted agreement in settling with Germany.

The conference at Teheran concluded with an expression of determination "that our nations shall work together in war and in the peace that will follow." It was agreed that Germany would be defeated before Japan, that the landing on the coast of France - Operation Overlord - would take place in June, 1944. And Stalin committed the Soviet Union to joining the war against Japan after Germany surrendered.

There was no commitment from Stalin on the nature of governments in countries to be occupied by the Soviet army. What U.S. strategists feared was not Soviet actions in occupied countries but the Soviet Union stopping at its 1941 border.

Britain and the United States Bomb Germany

No matter how noble the cause, every human endeavor, especially those involving great numbers of people, involves acts of exaggeration.  There was in World War II under-reaction to the conflict, which in the U.S. elicited the question "Don't you know there is a war on?" And there was over-reaction. Nation's at war are excited, and during World War II this excitement lent itself to some moves that were extreme and unproductive.

Early in the war, British strategists, Churchill included, looked to bombing by the Royal Air Force to help defeat Germany. Britain's bombing of Germany had begun during the blitz in 1940, and in that year and through 1941 these attacks helped British morale. Destroying German industry by bombing, Churchill believed, was the shortest route to victory. And it was hoped that the bombing would destroy the morale of the German people. Churchill and other strategists saw bombing as nasty business, but war itself, they reasoned, was nasty and a desperate business. And with Germany having engaged in bombing, the gloves, as the British saw it, were off.

Roosevelt, meanwhile, had put aside his call in September 1939 against bombing cities - what he then called "inhumane barbarism." In August 1941 he told his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that the German people had to have it "driven home to them" that they have been "engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization."  His formula for this lesson was bombing towns across Germany. "The terror of Aerial bombardment," he said, would "crack" their morale. [note]

In the first two years of the war, British bombing was terribly inaccurate, and it was made worse when the British bombed at night - which they did in order to reduce their loss of pilots and bombers. The result was the killing of many civilians.

In early 1942, Britain had its first success against enemy war production.  This was the bombing of the Renault auto plant in Paris, which was producing trucks for the Germans. The trucks lost to the Germans was calculated at 2,272.  With the bombing, 367 French civilians died, and the factory was back in production within a few weeks, sooner than the British had anticipated.

In late March, 1942, 234 British planes struck with incendiaries at Lübeck, a city with a lot of wooden buildings. In this attack some factories were destroyed and 312 people killed and many other buildings destroyed. British bombers could not effectively attack Germany's major industrial area, the Ruhr, in 1942 because it was too heavily defended, but they found other targets. In late May, 1046 British bombers attacked Germany's fourth largest city, Cologne. The British lost 41 bombers, destroyed 36 factories, damaged or destroyed 13,000 homes and killed around 500 people.

In 1943 the British were able to bomb the Ruhr. In mid-year this was followed by a campaign against Hamburg, which had shipyards that built one-third of Germany's submarines, and it had a number of other war manufacturing plants. The British also targeted Hamburg's residential areas. On the night of July 24-25, British bombing killed 1,500 people. During the day, on July 26, U.S. airplanes bombed the area, causing a lot of damage to Hamburg's industries, with the American airforce suffering heavy losses. British bombers, numbering 722, returned that night. The weather was hot and dry. Many little fires united into one huge fire, creating the world's first bombing firestorm. The firestorm uprooted trees and howled through the city's street with hurricane force. And at least 40,000 Germans died.

While the British were making their less accurate nighttime air raids and hitting civilians, the U.S. was bombing only during the day, and U.S. bombing policy against Germany remained strictly precision bombing against industrial and military targets. The U.S. had the best bomb sights and their accuracy was getting better with time, from 20 percent within a 1000 feet of the target at the beginning of the bombing campaigns, to a high of 40 percent later in the war. The main targets of U.S. bombers was against fighter airplane construction, submarine construction, the oil industry, transportation, electrical power and ball bearing production. The commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, General Carl Spatz, believed that this would be enough to lower German morale. He was opposed to the kind of "area bombing," that the British had been using - what he described as terror bombing. And he was supported in this by the supreme commander of the Allies in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower.

After Hamburg, the British bombed Peenemünde in Germany in an attempt to destroy rocketry development there. Then, on November 22, 1943, the bombing of Berlin began, the British losing 294 airmen in that bombing campaign. Four thousand Berliners died. Britain's Bomber Command believed that destroying Berlin would knock Germany out of the war. Its leader, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, believed that the campaign would cost Britain from 400 to 500 aircraft and its crews but that the bombing would eliminate the need for the Allies to make a cross-channel landing.

General Omar Bradley and other U.S. ground commanders had hoped that air bombardment might defeat the Germans as early as winter. From November 1943 to March 1944, sixteen raids were made on Berlin and nineteen raids on other cities, and over Germany the British in this period lost 1,047 bombers. A lot of damage was done to Berlin, but there was no firestorm, its streets being wide and acting as firebreaks, and the weather was cold.

The Last Full Year of War - 1944

In early January the Soviet army crossed its border into Poland. The Polish government-in-exile in London ordered its underground army in Poland to cooperate fully with the Soviet army, and it asked for a discussion with the Soviet Union on all outstanding questions. The Soviet Union rejected such discussions. And it rejected discussions through U.S. or British intermediaries, because, it said, conditions had "not yet ripened to a point where such good offices could be utilized to advantage."

People under extreme pressure sometimes do not want to accept more unpleasant realities, and in January Hitler was engaging in this kind of irrationality. Hitler dismissed intelligence figures on the size of Soviet forces given him by one of his best generals, Guderian. Hitler said that whomever complied the figures should be put into a lunatic asylum. General Guderian retorted that since he agreed with them completely that he had better be sent there as well.

In early April, Soviet forces began their offensive against the Germans in the Crimea. A Soviet Special Commission, meanwhile, pronounced the Nazis guilty of the killings at Katyn. In May 1944 Roosevelt delegated a U.S. investigation of that matter to Captain George Earl - a family friend, a former Governor of Pennsylvania; and his emissary to the Balkans. Earl's investigation concluded that it had been the Soviet Union that committed the atrocities, but Roosevelt refused to accept the results and labeled unfavorable evidence as German propaganda. Earl was on the verge of having his findings published. Roosevelt ordered him to keep his report secret, and he sent Earl on assignment for the rest of war to American Samoa.

By now, the Germans had left the Caucasus region. There were nationalities Stalin thought had been too friendly with the Germans. Rather than focusing on those individuals who could be convicted on evidence that they had committed treason, Stalin's response was collective. Whole societies were labeled as reactionary nationalities and deported: Kamyks, Chechens, the Ingushi, Karachai, Balkars, and also Tatars from the Crimea. The majority of the men from these areas were away, serving in the military, many of them at the front. Stalin's police - the NKVD - led some 119,000 soldiers in rounding up old men, women and children, putting them into box cars and trucks diverted from the war effort. Soldiers of these minorities at the front were also rounded up. And the minorities were dumped in Siberia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kirgizstan. In his anti-Stalin speech in 1956, Nikita S. Khrushchev (a Ukrainian) described the deportations and said that Stalin would have deported the Ukrainians too, but there were too many of them.

The Allied invasion at Normandy began on June 6, while Soviet troops were moving into Romania and Hungary, and while the British and Americans were liberating Rome. In the air over Normandy the Allies had command, and in the first week of the invasion the Allies established a 60-mile-wide beachhead and drove 20 miles inland. Allied casualties were about 15,000 out of some 150,000 engaged. The British captured Caen on July 9. And the Americans broke out of their beachhead positions on July 25.

The Soviet Union began its summer offensive, code-named Bagration, in June. In five weeks the Soviet army drove almost 500 miles and destroyed thirty German divisions. In early July, the largest armored engagement of all time took place. The Soviet Union had around 1,300,000 men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery pieces and 2,400 aircraft against a German force of around 2,700 tanks and assault guns, 1,800 aircraft and 800,000 men. The Germans lost between 50,000 and 57,000 men.

As the Americans were driving toward Paris, the German resistance against Soviet troops in Poland stiffened. In early August the Soviets were stopped just short of Warsaw. Encouraged by Soviet broadcasts and eager to strike against the Germans, Poland's Underground Army rose against the Germans occupying Warsaw. These were not Stalin's people, and he must have looked upon them without favor. He would not have wanted them acquiring any credit in defeating the Germans. Into October the Soviet army did not advance into the city while the Germans were crushing the uprising. And Hitler retaliated against the rising by ordering Warsaw to be systematically destroyed.

Allied forces had moved into Paris on August 25. On August 31, the Soviet army entered Romania's capital city, Bucharest. In September, the Soviet army entered Bulgaria unopposed. In October Soviet forces reached the capital of Yugoslavia, Belgrade. And in early November they reached the suburbs of Hungary's capital: Budapest.

On October 5, the British invaded Greece, as German troops were leaving. The communist led anti-fascist "liberation" army, the EAM-ELAS, rejected Britain imposing itself on their country. The British tried to unite the EAM-ELAS and the more conservative Greek Democrataic National Army, but the EAM-ELAS to disband. A civil war arose, with the EAM-ELAS taking control of Greece except the capital, Athens, where British troops held sway and angry people expressed their desire for national independence by filling the streets and chanting, "Roosevelt, Roosevelt."

With success in warfare and unparalleled sacrifices, the Soviet Union was at a point of challenge to exercise restraint and forbearance against its enemy, the Germans. In entering German territory the policy was, instead, retribution in the form of plunder and rape. One officer, Lev Kopelev, protested this policy. He was rebuked by his commanding officer, Colonel Zabashtansky, who denounced Kopelev's humanitarianism as weakness. Zabashtansky spoke of the need to hate and to take a terrible revenge on the Germans, including children, so that the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the Germans would remember. The Soviet soldier needed an incentive to go on fighting said Zabashtansky, by which he meant that Soviet troops should be free to take from the Germans what goods and women were available and not to worry about shooting any irate Germans in the process. If German women and children are killed, well, that is war. Humanitarianism, he said, was for after the war, when one could theorize about how things should be.

Kennan in Moscow

In 1944, George Kennan returned as a diplomat to the U.S. embassy in Moscow. He was moved by the sight of the suffering of the Russian people, and he was disturbed by the hatred that had been whipped up against the Germans. He saw German prisoners of war, many of them boys, marched through the streets of Moscow, pushed from the rear, stumbling, some falling from exhaustion. They were part of the 2.38 million Germans taken prisoner between 1941 and 1945, many of them to be worked to death. The Germans had penned up multitudes of captured Soviet soldiers and let them starve to death. Now it was the Soviet Union's turn to obliterate their prisoners - some of them Hungarians, Romanians.

Kennan was disturbed by what he saw of the Soviet government. He found the Soviet regime tough as ever on ideological non-conformity. He found himself and others representing the Allies, treated guardedly and with suspicion.

Stalin's regime still considered the West a threat. Stalin was afraid of his people finding how much better foreigners lived and being infected with foreign ideas - as Russian officers had been influenced by the French during the Napoleonic War, just before they tried to overthrow Alexander I. The Communist Party in the Soviet Union had a new slogan. "The war on fascism ends, the war on capitalism begins."

Kennan's boss at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, was as pessimistic about Stalin as Kennan, and he was upset over Stalin's position on Poland. Harriman foresaw a handpicked government in Poland with nothing approaching democratic choice.

Kennan favored complaining to Washington and making "it plain to our public" that Russia "was unwilling to submit her future actions to the judgment of international society." Kennan wanted to "disillusion our people" and force them to abandon some of their "splendid hopes."

Germany

The war for Germany was already as good as lost. The German soldier was sacrificing himself for nothing. But soldiers were still duty-minded, as they had been trained as boys in the Hitler Youth. Tell my mother I died like a soldier, a youthful German in uniform who was not killed immediately might tell a friend as his life drained away.

The common people of Germany continued to look to Hitler with hope. They tended to blame people around Hitler, and they blamed the military, much as common people had always seen their king as having his people in his heart while he did not know the suffering that his underlings were causing. Rather than disgust and bitterness aimed at Hitler, common Germans aimed their disgust and bitterness at enemy bomber pilots.

Allied bombing against Germany's oil supply was now crippling Germany's air force, and it was slowing Germany's production of explosives and rubber. But overall, German production was rising. The Germans were dispersing their industry and putting damaged plants back in operation sooner than the Americans had expected. The Allied attempt to curtail ball bearing production proved futile, while the chance of an airman surviving his tour of duty was about 34 percent.

A few persons with some grasp of reality were always around, even among the higher ranking people. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was along them. So too was Lieutenant Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg. With no means of ridding Hitler by legal means and some men of power and influence seeing Hitler as a terrible menace, an assassination attempt was nearly inevitable.

Rommel was among the plotters, and when Stauffenberg almost assassinated Hitler by a bomb in July 1944, the German people wondered why the plot had not been discovered before it was carried out.

In August, when Romania removed itself from the war and signed an armistice with the Soviet Union, the German people were shocked at what they perceived to be Romania's betrayal. By now Paris had been taken by the Allies, and some Germans had begun hoping for a miracle to save them from defeat.

Talk of victory declined among the Germans, and some Germans began hoping for a quick negotiated peace. Those families with sons and brothers engaged in combat continued to follow military events closely, and Germans in front of the advancing Russians were afraid, but others were giving up. The morality cherished by the churches was breaking down, as people felt that their world was falling apart and as families were suffering from prolonged separations.

With the arrival of September, the Allied bombing finally began to cripple Germany's economy. Weapons production was in steep decline. Germany's fuel was in such short supply that horse drawn transport was being used to transport goods from railheads to supply depots. Germany's railways would soon be barely functioning. Locomotives lacked coal, and railways were not adequately distributing coal power for the coming winter.

In October, Hungary's regent, Miklós Horthy, decided to take Hungary out of the war. Hitler had been disgusted with Hungary's weak support and believed that this had been caused by Jewish cultural influences. Hitler sent troops to occupy Hungary, and there they began rounding up Jews and sending over 700,000 Hungarian Jews to the death camp at Auschwitz.

The Germans were firing rockets at Britain, and they had the first jet fighter planes, but the rockets were ineffective, and pilots of the jet aircraft were overwhelmed by a great number of American P-51 fighters piloted by better trained pilots - the training of German pilots having been curtailed because of a lack of fuel.

Hitler had a plan for a counter offensive on his western front. He was under the illusion that he could strike a hard enough blow against the Americans that they would want to withdraw from the war, and he believed he could drive the British to another evacuation like the one at Dunkirk in 1940. His new offensive had been planned for the end of July. Then it had been postponed to November. The Germans finally struck on December 16, with 30 rebuilt divisions that Hitler believed would have made little difference on the Eastern Front. The attack became known as the Battle of the Bulge. It lifted the morale of the German nation - Hitler's illusions being contagious.  But by January the counter-offensive was halted. The Germans had lost another 80,000 killed, wounded or missing. The Americans had suffered 70,000 similar losses. And each side had lost about 700 tanks.

The Yalta Conference

In February 1945, the Soviet Union's Red Army was in control of much of East Europe. Russia was 200 miles from Berlin. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Crimean town of Yalta, in a former palace of the tsars. Stalin remained commited to continuing friendship with Britain and the United States - against any possibility of a resurgent Germany.

At Yalta the most contentious issue was Poland. Stalin agreed that in place of the Soviet sponsored government, established at Lublin, a "provisional government of national unity" would be created that included leaders from the Polish government in exile in London. Stalin agreed that "free and unfettered elections based on universal suffrage and the secret ballot" would take place in Poland as soon as possible.

Looking beyond Poland, the "Big Three" agreed that in all the countries occupied by the Allies the "last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism" would be destroyed. They agreed that the occupied countries would be allowed "to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems" and that that they would be able to create "democratic institutions of their own choice."

The "Big Three" confirmed their support for Germany's unconditional surrender and agreed that Germany would be divided into zones of occupation - zones to be overseen by an administration consisting of representatives of the three powers - and that France would administer one of the zones.

Stalin was interested in reparations from Germany. Churchill and Roosevelt less so, remembering the mistaken reparations against Germany after World War I. It was agreed that the amount of damages that Germany would pay, largely to the Soviet Union, would be decided after Germany's final defeat (leaving Russia to take what it could before then).

On the issue of colonies, a conservative approach was agreed to. Churchill spoke against trusteeships. He was assured that trusteeships would apply only to the old League of Nations Mandates, to territories detached from the enemy, and to colonies that the colonial powers themselves might agree to. Not having won against British opposition, Roosevelt had given up his opposition to France getting its colony back in Indochina. It was not hard for him, believing as he did that colonized people needed to be prepared for independence. And his military had been opposed to trusteeships, foreseeing what they believed would be their need to occupy some islands in the Pacific.

The "Big Three" agreed that the founding meeting of the United Nations would take place in San Francisco in April and that they should consult with each other regularly and with the United Nations.

They confirmed their agreement that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan within two or three months after Germany's surrender. Stalin claimed that he needed some reason to explain to the Soviet people why, after all they had sacrificed, they were going to war against Japan. And as its reward it was agreed that the Soviet Union was to receive the Kurile Islands, the southern part of Sakhalin Island, a lease of the naval base at Port Arthur and a joint Soviet-Chinese operation of the railway in Manchuria to give the Soviet Union land access to Port Arthur.

Stalin demanded that at the end of the war all Soviet citizens be repatriated to the Soviet Union whether they wanted to or not, and Churchill and Roosevelt agreed, unknowingly condemning many dissidents and old Russian exiles to death. It was widely believed that only traitors would not want to return to the Soviet Union, and this was a time of righteous opposition to treasonous collaboration with "the fascist enemy."

During a dinner and many toasts, Stalin spoke for continued good relations, but he wanted to prepare Britain and the U.S. for realities ahead and he cautioned everyone that after the war would come a difficult time when they would become divided by "diverse interests."

The Final Three Months

Before the conference at Yalta, the British had hoped to bomb Dresden.  Dresden was the hub of various railways but of little importance in war production. The main purpose of the bombing was to demonstrate to the Russians that the British were doing their part in the war. Bad weather had canceled the attack, and, although part of the  original purpose of the attack had passed, Dresden remained on the books for its railway hub as a target, while refugees fleeing from the Russians were filling the city. On February 13, 1945, the British attacked, and on the 15th they were joined by the Americans. Some bombs from U.S. planes fell into residential areas unintentionally. Some escort fighter planes strafed the banks of the Elbe River, killing civilians. Another firestorm was created, and people died in the tens of thousands, perhaps close to 100,000 if not more.

The difficulties that Stalin had spoken of arrived in March. Roosevelt complained of the Soviet Union's slowness in releasing American prisoners-of-war liberated by the Russians and of the Russians not allowing these men visitors. Also upsetting was the arrest of 16 Polish Underground Army leaders in Poland, whom the Russians had promised safe conduct. And Ambassador Harriman reported to Washington that advancing Soviet troops were robbing people and committing wholesale atrocities against civilians, especially women.

Stalin believed that the British and Americans might be working on a separate treaty with the Germans that would end fighting on the Italian front but leave the Russians fighting on their front. On April 3, Stalin publicly attacked Roosevelt, accusing him of treachery or lying or being the dupe of his advisors. Roosevelt was shocked but suppressed his anger and hoped that it might be a misunderstanding that would pass.

With the approval of Washington, Eisenhower was attacking toward the southeast, foregoing any opportunity to reach Berlin before the Russians. He was leaving to the Russians what he knew had been agreed to as their zone in Germany and was heading for what would be the American zone. Eisenhower had been annoyed by British criticism, including Churchill's, of his broad-front strategy. The British having preferred a reinforced breakthrough straight to Berlin and capturing Berlin before the Russians could. But that was an argument earlier in the year, before the Allied crossing of the Rhine in early March.

Now it was early April, 1945, and Soviet forces were just outside Berlin and about to launch their final offensive. On April 12, while trying to rest in Warm Springs Georgia, Roosevelt died, at the age of sixty-two. He had been working long hours and aging quickly, as presidents sometimes do. He had been less than accurate in his assessment of some issues but he had worked himself to death in the service not of his own grandeur but for the well-being of his country.

News of Roosevelt's death was another straw that a drowning Hitler and Dr. Goebbels grabbed onto. They believed that Roosevelt's death would somehow make a difference - as had the death of the Russian empress, Elizabeth, in 1762, which had saved Frederick the Great. Dr. Goebbels spoke of divine intervention. He inspired Hitler with his congratulations, telling Hitler that a turning point had been "written in the stars." Horoscopes, Goebbels declared, had predicted the outbreak of war in 1939 and Germany's subsequent victories and reversals.

In Russia, Stalin had to watch a great outpouring of grief over Roosevelt's death expressed by the Russian masses.

Stalin and Milovan Djilas

Stalin, meanwhile, had been expressing his opinions to his Yugoslav comrades -  the Communist leader Tito and his second in command, Milovan Djilas - opinions that Djilas would eventually make public. Stalin was upset by of a comment by Djilas critical of Soviet troops entering Yugoslavia. "The Red Army is not ideal," said Stalin. "The important thing is that it fights Germans and it is fighting them well." Stalin asked Djilas what was "so awful" about a Soviet soldier "having fun with a woman, after such horrors." [note]

To Djilas, Stalin spoke of Britain and the United States imposing their social system in the areas that their army occupied and of the Soviet Union imposing its social system in the areas its armies occupied. Stalin was pessimistic. He said that the Soviet Union would recover from the war in fifteen or twenty years and that then there would be another war between the Soviet Union and the anti-Communist forces in the West. Of the Germans he said, "Give them twelve to fifteen years and they'll be on their feet again." And this, he told his Slavic comrades, is why the unity of the Slavs is important. "If the Slavs keep united and maintain solidarity," he said, "no one in the future will be able to move a finger against them. Not even a finger!" [note]

The War Ends

Between early February and mid-April, 1945, the Allies bombed Berlin eighty-three times. Berliners were living without water or electricity and little food. The bombs were accomplishing little strategically, but making rubble bounce and killing more civilians. In mid-April, Hitler, drawing mistakenly for history as many do, was applying a statement of Fredrick the Great's to his condition. He was organizing a force for a strike against the Russians, believing as Frederick the Great's statement that "whoever throws his last battalion into the struggle wins."

The Russians overrunning Berlin proved Hitler's analogy wrong. Hitler refused the suggestion that he withdraw to his mountaintop retreat at Berchtesgaden. Meeting his end at Berchtesgaden was not as dramatic as having his end in the roar of war in Berlin. On April 29 the Russians were overrunning Berlin. Hitler's fantasies were protecting him from taking full measure of the downside of his gambles on aggression. He still had the Jews to blame. He did not mind that the German people, whom he thought he served, should die with him. He shot himself, taking his dog, Blondi, and his mistress, Eva Braun, with him. Dr. Goebbels also committed suicide, killing all his dogs and taking with him in death his children and his wife. Soon Hitler's lower jaw was detached from his skull for the purpose of identifying his teeth.

On May 2, German forces in northern Italy and southern Austria surrendered. In northern Germany, German units rushed westward to surrender to the British, angering the Russians, who were deprived thereby of retribution and compensation in the form of prisoner-labor - slave labor - for the Russian homeland. Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower was still trying to get along with the Russians and informed them that all German troops would be handed over to the Red Army, which pleased the Russians.

The Germans signed a document of surrender on May 8. German military men dead or missing were listed as 2,850,000 (one in every 25 of its 1940 population). More than a half million Germans civilians had died. Germany's cities were in ruin, much of the buildings of more than 131 towns and cities had been turned to rubble. Its railway and road bridges were destroyed and its economy devastated. And many Germans were near starvation.

Wikipedia figures list Poland as having Poland lost around 5,000,000 people (18.51 percent of its population). Yugoslavia lost 1,027,000 (6.67 percent of its population). The Soviet Union lost 23,600,000 people (about one person for every 13.44 percent). Leaving Wikipedia figures, six million Jews are reported as having died, more than a majority of the Jews that had been living in Europe. The air war against Germany cost Britain 55,000 airmen, dead or missing. The United States Eight Air Corps in Europe lost 43,742 of its airmen. British Commonwealth soldiers and the United States still had a war to fight in the Pacific. In the whole of World War II, according to Wikipedia, the United States suffered 450,400 deaths (0.32 percent of its population).

Hitler's National Socialist Party comrade, Julius Streicher, editor and publisher, is reputed to have said that a nation that does not respect the purity of its race cannot survive. Streicher's leader, Adolf Hitler, had fought hard to protect the "purity" of German blood. Now, the German nation that Streicher valued was in ruin. Some had claimed that Hitler's Germany, the Third Reich, would last a thousand years. It lasted twelve. The Germany that is more liberal, tolerant and lax toward purity has so far, by 2004, lasted 55 years.

Comparing Roosevelt and Hitler

In the thirties, Roosevelt had been the happy warrior, frequently smiling, while Hitler rarely smiled in public or in private gatherings. Roosevelt was born into a family of wealth, believing in democracy and international comity, while Hitler had struggled for his place in society, disliked democracy and believed in national aggrandizement at the expense of others.

Roosevelt had never been in combat or the military. Hitler was a combat veteran who felt wronged by his country's failure to achieve victory in World War I, and he wanted to make amends for that failure.

Hitler wanted to impose his will on the Russians. Roosevelt looked forward to Russia liberalizing itself.

Hitler was for the grandeur of the state - the Fatherland. Roosevelt believed in politics for people.

Roosevelt believed in a nation of laws. Hitler believed that he was the law.

Hitler had been more of a mystic than Roosevelt and believed in the power of will - despite circumstances. He blamed defeat not on his mistakes but a lack of will by the Germans and spoke of their not deserving his leadership. At his end he ordered a grand destruction of vital structures - orders not carried out.

When Roosevelt died the world mourned. Hitler killed himself and had his body destroyed to save himself from hostile mobs.

Hitler had wanted to be highly regarded by history - as many did his hero Frederick the Great. Instead he would be admired by only a few who have not understood what a fool he was - except that he had more sense than Roosevelt regarding cigarettes.

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Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

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