Paradoxes and lessons of World War II

He replied: «I totally understand your reaction, but you are wrong. It was the French Jews themselves who insisted, after the war, that the memorials to their dead had to contain the same terms used for the rest of French ». This was because they never forgave the Vichy regime that French citizenship had taken away.

Another disturbing paradox revealed by World War II is that the armies of democracies could kill more civilians even than the armies of dictatorships. His high controls, aware of press pressure and public opinion in their countries of origin to minimize the casualties in their ranks, They resorted to intensive use of explosives of great power, both projectiles and bombs, to kill the enemy at a great distance and thus avoid the death of their own troops. The British and the Americans, for example, killed so many French civilians during World War II as British died from the German bombers and missiles V.

At the time, the Iigm It was a path full of misunderstandingswhich have often been repeated later. In the case of allies, their leaders were victims of the classic confirmation bias and continued using democratic reasoning processes. For example, when on July 20, 1944, a group of German officers attempted against Hitler, allied leaders considered that the war had ended. They understood that any army that tried to kill their leader was on the verge of disintegration. But what they did not see, surprisingly, is that, When Hitler survive to the explosion, The Nazis, the SS and the Gestapo would force the Germans to fight until the end.

Ironically, arriving at the spring of 1944, Hitler directed the war in such a manic and irrational way that the British decided that it would be a great mistake to kill him. They were more likely to win with him in charge. Thus, Operation Foxley, the special operations management plan to kill Hitler, was canceled. For more inri, Stalin’s paranoid came to him that, by killing Hitlerthe allies would agree with the German successor regime and that would allow to concentrate all the force of the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union. Thus, he also ordered the cancellation of General Sudoplatov’s plan to kill Hitler.

The dictators rarely worried when sacrificing the lives of their own soldiers or perpetrating massacres. The extreme cruelty From World War II it is underlined by the fact that, for the first time in the history of modern conflicts, many more civilians died than combatants. This can only be explained in terms of ideologically fed dehumanization. By him febrile nationalism exacerbated and the racism raised to the virtue condition, on the one hand, and the Leninist class struggle focused on the extermination of all opposition, on the other. To anyone’s surprise, the Soviet Union struggled in the United Nations committees during the postwar period to prevent the armed class struggle (the mass murder of aristocrats, bourgeois and kulaks) was included in the international definition of genocide.

Iigm was an intense political conflict. In August 1945, the Soviet Union began to release ordinary Italian soldiers captured in the Eastern Front during the end of the Stalingrad campaign. They were allowed to return home, but not their officers. The gCommunist rupos They waved red flags, gathering in the platforms to receive the Italian soldiers who returned home.

But for their dismay, the soldiers had painted ‘Abbasso communism’ in their cars, in response to the ill -treatment received in the Soviet Union. In the stations there were clashes. The communist press quickly described as “fascist” everyone who criticized the conditions in the Soviet fields or who did not consider the Soviet Union as the paradise of the workers.

Throughout Europe and the East, the “displaced” tried to return to their homes, usually in devastated communities. As Timothy Snyder has demonstrated, the region that most suffered the oppression of Hitler and Stalin was the intermediate Central European border. About 14 million civilians died there between 1930 and 1945. At least half due to deliberate famine: first the Stalinist Holodomor in Ukraine and then Hitler’s hunger plan.

The borders were destroyed or redrawed. At the Yalta conference, Stalin forced the allies to accept the displacement of all Poland to the west. The Poles would occupy the ancient German provinces of Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania, while the Soviet Union seized East and Kaliningrado Poland. The Red Army carried out the greatest ethnic cleaning of modern times. More than 13 million Germans, Poles and Ukrainians were displaced. The city of Breslau became Wrocław, mostly inhabited by Poles deported since the new Western Ukraine.

For better or worse, the IIGM modeled the world in which we live. With the defeat of Japan, the way for the rise of modern China, full of resentment for the grievances suffered, was raided. Sealed the fate of the British, French and Dutch empires. At the same time, it supposed The elevation to the United States superpower status and the Soviet Union. It promoted the movement towards the European Union. It also gave rise to United Nations, inspired by belief in the possibility of a better world. And the UN, despite its defects, hypocrisy and weakness, has provided at least one forum for a kind of international morality.

Now, in the midst of an alarming global instability, it is understandable that people contemplate World War II as an admonitory story, a story that You can alert us from danger signs And perhaps offer us indicators to a more peaceful future. Others will say that we have learned very little from the greatest tragedy of humanity and that we go blindly towards another global conflict.

Perhaps the most important lesson in World War II is moral. Even immersed in the most horrific circumstances, There were those who never abandoned the fundamental belief in humanity. His example deserves to treasure, while we deal with the worrying challenges and conflicts of the current world.