World History

Unit 6: World War in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 27: World War II

57. Thu, Apr 3, 2014

One reason why World War Two looms so large, of course, is the utterly appalling human scale. Wikipedia gives a range for the death toll at 50 to 70 million — or in other words, more than three Holocausts are the margin of error. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, gave us a phrase: "A thousand deaths are a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic." How do we comprehend it all?

If we go with the lower estimate, 50 million deaths, imagine that every sixth person in the United State were suddenly and violently killed. Or imagine that the entire population of South Africa were murdered. …No, still too vast a scale. Take the city you live in. Imagine every single person in it being killed, dying miserably and in pain. Now imagine it happening several times over, maybe a hundred times. I'm sorry for putting such bleak visions in your head, but I don't know how to bring it home any other way.

How did it happen? Step by step, usually — a massacre here, a battle there. The death camps were designed to slaughter people on an industrial scale, but the most deadly weapon the Nazis wielded was always hunger. The captured population of Soviet Russia suffered particularly harshly: Hitler needed the food of the region to feed his own country, and so he simply left everyone to starve. And then there were the bombings.

The Blitz, the bombing of London, was brutal, but to be honest the most devastating days of the war came during Allied air attacks on Axis cities. The atomic bombs were the fastest: they killed tens of thousands in an instant, and more over the course of a day or two. But the firebombing of Dresden wiped out 25,000 people overnight, and the similar fireboming of Tokyo killed 130,000, even more than the nuclear attacks.

• This discussion usually requires more background and nuance than you have here, but it's a classic question: should the atomic bombs have been dropped? What about Dresden?
• What allowed men like FDR and Churchill, let alone Hitler and Stalin, to approve the slaughter of millions of people?
• What allows anyone to kill anything?

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