Victory

1. Victory

4. All across Europe, victory brought celebrations & hope for peace & security.

5. A returning sailors kisses a complete stranger in the celebration of VE Day in New York City.

7. "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 from prison cell

8. An Austrian mother is overwhelmed with joy when her son returns safely from the war. Millions of other mothers weren’t so lucky.

9. However, beneath the façade of camaraderie all was not well between the erstwhile allies. Soon new rivalries would emerge & w/them a new kind of war, the Cold War between former allies who now found their common enemy gone.

10. Compared to Europe, America’s economy was booming. With its territory virtually untouched by the war, the US had 60% of the world’s (remaining) industrial capacity. Welch, West Virginia Chicago, Illinois

11. However, the US had its problems too: poverty remaining from the Depression and before, several million returning GIs needing work and housing, and the transition back to a consumer economy with no apparent markets to fuel it.

12. Symbolic of this was disagreement over date of VE day. The Western allies had forgotten a pre-arranged copy of the surrender terms they had agreed on with Stalin. Therefore, a makeshift version was signed on 5/7/45. This led to a Soviet protest and a re-signing of the surrender the next day, thus creating 2 VE days: May 7 & 8, 1945.

13. Aftermath (1945) ~6 min

14. The agonies of the concentration camps are reflected in this inmate’s face. He did not survive his liberation

16. Wedding rings taken by the Nazis from concentration camp victims

17. A Russian woman swoons at the sight of loved ones massacred by the Nazis.

18. An Italian war orphan keeps watch over her little sister huddled in a GI’s cast-off overcoat.

19. Two German soldiers return to Berlin on one pair of legs.

20. However, peace alone could not solve problems created by 6 years of war. Soon hope turned into despair as mass starvation, wholesale displacement of nations & outright slaughter of helpless civilians continued. Left: Germans & DPs (displaced persons) loot shops in a German city.

21. Retribution

22. There were also angry recriminations against those who had collaborated with the Germans. Left: A French woman, her head shaved as a sign of collaborating with the enemy, carries her child by a German officer through the streets of Chartres to the taunts of her neighbors. Below: Shaving the head of another French fraternizer.

25. A former concentration inmate identifies an SS officer as a guard at his camp.

26. "a continent half grave yard & half junk yard.”

27. The ruins of the Kaiser Kirche in Berlin stand as a silent testament to the war in the midst of modern buildings built since 1945.

28. Few cities escaped damage from street fighting, shelling, bombing, or Russian & German scorched earth policies. Coblenz Dresden Aachen

29. Berlin was virtually destroyed, causing some to estimate it would take. 15 years to clear its rubble 95% of center leveled, 75% of houses in rest of city Churches, offices, shops, hospitals, factories were in comparable shape Wheeled transportation was virtually destroyed, leaving no ambulances, only stretchers & carts There was very little fuel, electricity, or communications, & thus no working industries There were 3000 breaks in water mains, leaving virtually no clean water or sanitary facilities There was hardly any police & fire protection, and the rats ruled the streets at night. The dead lay unburied for months, creating a horrible stench People lived in basements & dugouts of rubble in stone age like existence. Some had no shelter at all.

30. "Wherever we looked we saw desolation. The streets were piled high w/debris which left in many places only a narrow one way passage between high mounds of rubble, & frequent detours had to be made where bridges & viaducts had been destroyed. The Germans seemed weak, cowed, & furtive & not yet recovered from the shock of the battle of Berlin. It was like a city of the dead."

32. A Polish girl looks over the devastation that once was Warsaw before two failed uprisings and a deliberate Nazi policy of destruction before evacuation left the city in ruins.

33. Pre-fab huts built for GI’s were the only decent shelters in the midst of the ruins of Hamburg, Germany.

34. Dresden, Germany before and after the war. The seemingly needless and horrific firebombing raid in February 1945 triggered a firestorm, something usually associated with nuclear bombs. It would become the subject of the novel, Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut who survived the attack as a prisoner of war.

35. Massive fire bombing also wreaked near nuclear levels of destruction on Tokyo in 1945.

36. The remains of Hiroshima bear witness to the even greater destructive power of nuclear weapons.

37. Survivors of Hiroshima flee the ruins of what used to be their city.

38. Americans inspect the remains of a bus destroyed in the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

39. Wiener Neustadt, near Vienna had only 18 houses & 860 of its previous population of 45,000 left.

40. Much of Europe’s art & architecture were ruined. Massive amounts of art had also been plundered by the Nazis and needed to be returned to their rightful owners. Below left: a painting by Manet recovered in a mine shaft. Below right: the Veit Stoss Altar, taken by the Nazis, is packed up & returned to Poland

41. Europe was described as "a continent half grave yard & half junk yard.” Below left: Nuremberg Below right: Munich’s train station

42. The psychological shock from so much destruction caused many to question whether a decent civilization could be rebuilt. Left: allied soldiers move through a bombed out German city. Below: a cartoon celebrating VE Day and the retreat of the forces of evil. But could they be kept from coming back?

43. The Human cost

44. Recent estimates put the number of dead in the Second World War at 72 million, twice the previously estimated total. Forty-seven million civilians died, 20 million from the results of famine and disease. An estimated 25 million soldiers died, 4 million of them in POW camps.

45. West allies' losses relatively small. Less than 1% of Fr., Britain, U.S., Canada & Italy - total for them all approx. 1.5 mill. E. Eur by contrast suffered horribly in abs. numbers & percentages. USSR lost approx. 27,000,000 (approx. 10% of pop.);Poland ~5.5 mill= 20% popul.; Yugoslavia lost 10%

46. Ger. lost 3 million soldiers & around 2 million civilians from forced emigration from Slavic lands Two-thirds of German men born in 1918 didn’t survive WWII. Some towns were left totally devoid of adult men. After the war, Treptow, a suburb of Berlin had 1105 women age 19-21, but only 181 men that age.

47. In addition, the specter of famine & pestilence" loomed over "the lunar landscape of craters & rubble”. Below: Herbert Hoover, who also oversaw famine relief after World War I, watches Polish children eat what many well be their only meal of the day.

48. Farmland was ruined by flooding & scorched earth policies. Damage to roads and bridges left each area isolated, so even unscathed farmland was useless. Lack of equipment & fertilizer led to lower crop yields and widespread hunger. To make matters worse, farmers wouldn’t trade the food they had for worthless cash.

49. In addition to shortages of labor, farm machinery, fertilizer, seed & livestock, a drought in 1945 reduced Europe’s agricultural production to 50% below normal. This led to strict rationing, many people receiving under 900 calories a day. Left: a German family’s meal consisting almost totally of potatoes. Below: People line up for their rations of bread.

50. In Holland, people were allotted less calories in a week than they should have had in a day