History is seldom tidy. Eras overlap and unfinished business from one period lingers into the next. World War II was a war like no other in the magnitude of its effects on the lives of people and the fates of nations. It was a combination of many conflicts, including ethnic and national hatreds that followed the collapse of four empires and the redrawing of borders at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. A number of historians have argued that World War II was a phase of one long war lasting from 1914 to 1945 or even until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—a global civil war, first between capitalism and communism, then between democracy and dictatorship.
World War II certainly brought the strands of world history together, with its global reach and its acceleration of the end of colonialism across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet despite sharing this international experience, and entering the same order built in its wake, every country involved created and clung to its own narrative of the great conflict.
Even the matter of when the war began is still debated. In the American telling, it started in earnest when the United States entered the conflict after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the German dictator Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States a few days later. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, insists that the war began in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union—ignoring the joint Soviet and Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, which marks the start of the war for most Europeans. Yet some trace its origin back further still. For China, it began in 1937, with the Sino-Japanese War, or even earlier with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931. Many on the left in Spain are convinced that it began in 1936 with General Francisco Franco’s overthrow of the republic, launching the Spanish Civil War.
These clashing worldviews remain a source of tension and instability in global politics. Putin cherry-picks from Russian history, combining homage to Soviet sacrifice in the “Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is known in Russia, with the reactionary ideas of exiled tsarist White Russians after their defeat by the communist Reds in the Russian Civil War of 1917–22. The latter include religious justifications for Russian supremacy over the entire Eurasian landmass—“from Vladivostok to Dublin,” as Putin’s ideologue Aleksandr Dugin has put it—and a deeply rooted hatred of liberal western Europe. Such ideas have also begun to circulate within U.S. President Donald Trump’s orbit.
Putin has rehabilitated the World War II–era Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who, as the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov has said, was directly responsible for even more millions of deaths than Hitler. The Russian president goes so far as to insist that the Soviet Union could have won the war against Nazi Germany on its own when even Stalin and other Soviet leaders privately acknowledged that the Soviet Union would not have survived without American aid. They also knew that the U.S.-British strategic bombing campaign against German cities forced the bulk of the German Luftwaffe back home from the eastern front, thus giving the Soviets air supremacy. Above all Putin refuses to acknowledge the horrors of the Stalinist era. As Mary Soames, daughter of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, recounted to me at a dinner in 2003, Churchill asked Stalin during an informal meeting in October 1944 what the Soviet leader regretted most in his life. Stalin took a moment to reflect before he quietly answered, “The killing of the kulaks”—the landowning peasants. This campaign peaked with the Holodomor in 1932–33, in which Stalin deliberately inflicted famine on Ukraine, killing more than three million people and instilling a hatred of Moscow among many survivors and their descendants.
World War II also produced an often uneasy balance between Europe and the United States. Hitler’s hegemonic ambitions forced the United Kingdom to abandon its self-appointed role of world policeman and turn to the Americans for aid. The British were genuinely proud of their part in the ultimate Allied victory, but they tried to hide the sting of their declining global influence by spouting the cliché that the United Kingdom had managed “to punch above its weight” in the war and by clinging to their “special relationship” with the United States. Churchill was dismayed by the prospect that U.S. troops might simply go home after the war in the Pacific ended in 1945. Although American attitudes continued to fluctuate between seeking an active global role and retreating into isolationism, the threat from Moscow ensured that Washington would remain deeply engaged in Europe until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Today, the first major continental war in Europe since World War II is in its fourth year, driven in part by Putin’s selective reading of Russian history, while deadly conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere threaten to spread further. The Trump administration, meanwhile, appears to be casting aside the United States’ global leadership in a confused tantrum. Eighty years ago, the end of World War II paved the way for a new international order based on respect for national sovereignty and borders. But now, a steep bill for American ambivalence, European complacency, and Russian revanchism may finally be coming due.
The sheer cruelty of World War II was seared into the memories of several generations. It was the first modern conflict in which far more civilians were killed than combatants. This could have been made possible only by an ideologically fueled dehumanization of the enemy—nationalism stirred to a fever pitch and racism promoted as a virtue on one side, and Leninist class warfare that endorsed exterminating all opposition on the other. (Tellingly, after the war, Soviet diplomats fought to prevent class warfare—which would have included the Soviet Union’s mass killing of aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and land-owning peasants—from being mentioned in the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention.)
In all, some 85 million people died in World War II, a figure that includes those who perished from famine and disease. Nazi Germany killed around six million Jews, among other people, in the Holocaust. Almost a fifth of the Polish population, also nearly six million people, was lost. The Chinese lost well over 20 million, more of whom perished from famine and disease than from fighting on the battlefield. Estimates of Soviet deaths range from 24 million to 26 million, many of them needless. Stalin was aware in 1945 that the total exceeded 20 million, but he owned up to just a third of that loss as he tried to conceal the extent of the horror he had unleashed on his people. The international relations scholar David Reynolds has noted that Stalin “settled for 7.5 million as a figure that sounded suitably heroic, but not criminally homicidal.”
World War II brought the strands of world history together.
It is not enough to remember the dead, many of whom were deliberately rendered nameless by their killers. For those who survived, the prisoners of war and the civilians imprisoned in camps, the conflict changed life in incalculable ways. Those resigned to their lots were often early victims. The most likely survivors were those with a burning determination to return to their families, to hold on to their beliefs, or to bear witness to unspeakable crimes.
Many other captured soldiers did not make it home. Those from the Soviet Red Army who had been forcibly recruited by the German military were rounded up while in German uniform in France and handed over to Soviet officers, who executed suspected leaders in the woods before transporting the rest back to the Soviet Union. There, the soldiers were sentenced to slave labor in the frozen north. Just days after Germany’s surrender, British forces in Austria ordered that more than 20,000 anti-Communist Yugoslav nationals in the area under their jurisdiction to be handed over to Communist Yugoslav authorities, who shot and then buried them in mass graves. British forces also handed over to Soviet authorities Cossacks who were Soviet citizens but had fought for Germany. The British government almost certainly knew that a harsh sentence awaited these soldiers but feared that letting them go would mean the Soviet authorities would hold onto British prisoners of war that the Red Army had liberated in Poland and eastern Germany. The Red Army also rounded up 600,000 Japanese soldiers in northern China and Manchuria; all of them were sent to labor camps in Siberia and worked to death.
For decades after the war, its memory lived on in those who had experienced it firsthand. The postwar order was shaped by generations whose aim was to prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring again. But for those who did not experience the conflict and look back from today, the casualty count of World War II may just be a figure—it is difficult to truly absorb the reality of tens of millions of deaths. Losing this direct connection to the past means losing the shared resolve that for 80 years has produced an unbroken, if highly imperfect, great-power peace.
The war left the world an entirely changed place. In the combatant nations, few lives were left untouched. Many women whose fiancés were killed in action never married or had children. Others found that returning men could not cope with the reality that women had taken over the running of everything, making the men feel redundant. The backlash was strongest in continental Europe. In Germany, men who had been imprisoned during the war heard for the first time of the mass rapes committed mainly by the Red Army. They felt humiliated that they had not been there to defend their women. Nor could they handle learning that the women had dealt with the trauma in the only way possible—by talking to each other about it. In France and other occupied countries, men who returned from prison camps and forced labor in Germany wondered how women without any means of support had managed to survive and began to suspect them of relationships with enemy soldiers or black marketeers. Not surprisingly, these responses produced a socially reactionary period that lasted through the 1940s and 1950s.
Intense political conflict persisted even after the end of hostilities. In August 1945, well after the fighting in the European theater had ended, the Soviet Union began to release ordinary Italian soldiers it had captured in the latter part of the Axis powers’ campaign to take Stalingrad. These soldiers were sent home without their officers, however, because the leader of the Italian Communist Party had appealed to Moscow to delay the return of higher-ranking prisoners who might publicly condemn the Soviet Union and hurt the party’s chances in upcoming elections. Communist groups gathered at railway stations in Italy to welcome the returning soldiers, who they expected to be more sympathetic to their cause. They were appalled to see the soldiers had scrawled the words abbasso comunismo—down with communism—on the train cars, and fights broke out at the stations. The communist press labeled the returnees who criticized the Soviet Union in any way as fascists.
The sheer cruelty of the war was seared into the memories of generations.
Borders were obliterated or redrawn during and after the war. Many people who had been displaced no longer knew their nationalities. Large populations, sometimes entire cities, were uprooted, evacuated, or killed by paramilitaries, secret police, and troops. In 1939, Poles from what suddenly became western Ukraine had been dumped in the deserted spaces of Kazakhstan or Siberia and left to starve. The Polish city of Lwow was occupied twice by the Soviets and once by the Nazis, who sent its Jews to death camps. After the war, Lwow was given a new Ukrainian name, Lviv. At the Yalta conference in February 1945, where British, Soviet, and U.S. leaders met to discuss the organization of postwar Europe, Stalin forced the Allied powers to accept that the whole of Poland was to be shifted to the west, receiving former German provinces on the western side while the Soviet Union absorbed Polish provinces to the east. To complete the execution of this plan, the Red Army carried out the largest systematic forced removal of a population in modern times, transplanting more than 13 million Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians.
As the discussions at Yalta continued at the Potsdam conference in August 1945, Stalin’s desire to expand Soviet territory became clear. He showed interest in assuming control of former Italian colonies in Africa and suggested the removal of Franco in Spain. “It must be very pleasant for you to be in Berlin now after all your country has suffered,” Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, remarked to Stalin during a break in the talks. Stalin eyed the ambassador without changing his expression. “Tsar Alexander went all the way to Paris,” he replied. The line was hardly a joke—the year before, the Soviet leadership had ordered plans to be drawn for an invasion of France and Italy and a seizure of the straits between Denmark and Norway. In 1945, Soviet General Sergei Shtemenko told Sergo Beria, whose father had been a feared Soviet secret police chief during the Stalin era, “It was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe fallen into chaos, while Britain and France would be paralyzed by their colonial problems.” This, Soviet leaders thought, created an opening. Only on learning that the United States was close to building the atom bomb were the plans abandoned—even if Moscow’s appetite for expansion was not.
World War II, of course, was also the dawn of the nuclear age. Many regarded the invention of the atom bomb with horror and considered the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a war crime. And yet the targeting of those two Japanese cities in August 1945 involved a weighty moral choice. Before the bombings accelerated the end of the war, Japanese generals wanted to fight on rather than accept the terms of surrender issued by the Allied powers in the July 1945 Potsdam Declaration. They were prepared to sacrifice millions of Japanese civilians by forcing them to resist an Allied invasion with only bamboo spears and explosives strapped to their bodies. By 1944, some 400,000 civilians a month were dying from famine in areas of East Asia, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia that were occupied by Japanese forces. The Allies also wanted to save the American, Australian, and British prisoners of war who were starving to death in Japanese camps—or being slaughtered by their captors on Tokyo’s orders. Thus, although the atomic bomb took more than 200,000 Japanese lives, that terrible weapon may have saved many more in an unsettling moral paradox.
For better or worse, World War II reset the trajectory of global politics. The defeat of Japan eventually paved the way for the rise of modern China. The collapse of the British, Dutch, and French empires in 1941–42 marked the end of imperial Europe, and the experience of the war spurred the movement toward European integration. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, meanwhile, were elevated to superpower status. World War II also produced the United Nations, whose key objectives were to safeguard the sovereignty of countries and to prohibit armed aggression and territorial conquest. The UN was very much U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s dream, and he was prepared to let Stalin have complete control over Poland to achieve it. Yet in February of this year, the United States turned its back on the UN’s founding principles, voting alongside Russia and refusing to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine.
World War II also led into the Cold War. Some historians say that this new conflict started in 1947 with the Clay-Robertson agreement, in which British and U.S. authorities decided to industrialize western Germany, provoking Stalin’s paranoia. That year certainly saw tensions intensify, with Stalin issuing an order in September for European communist parties to dig up their weapons in preparation for future war and setting the groundwork for the Soviet blockade of Berlin the next year. But the origins lay much further back, in June 1941. Stalin had been traumatized by Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi-led invasion of the Soviet Union, which began that month. He became determined to surround himself with satellite states across central and southern Europe so that no invader could take the Soviet Union by surprise again.
It is difficult to truly absorb the reality of tens of millions of deaths.
For centuries, Russia had been obsessed with dominating its neighbors to prevent encirclement. Stalin’s fixation was Poland. Putin has preserved this basic mentality—only for him, the country’s most vulnerable frontier is Ukraine, which he argues belongs to Russia. When Putin acted on that claim with the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he brought back a characteristic of the World War II era that has largely been absent in global politics since. Leaders, several of them empowered by the totalitarian systems they controlled, shaped the course of that vast conflict. From Churchill to Roosevelt to Stalin, their machinations reactivated the idea in the popular imagination of the “great man” driving the course of history. In recent years, political leaders have had comparatively less influence. The globalized economic system, for one thing, greatly restricts their freedom of action, and constant consideration of how a decision will play in the media makes many of them more cautious than bold. For decades, it seemed as though the characters of leaders would never again determine the course of events the way they did in World War II. Putin’s invasion has changed that, and Trump, taking Putin as a role model, has, too.
Today, as Russia prepares to celebrate Victory Day on May 9, Putin is determined to milk the story of his country’s “Great Patriotic War” for all it’s worth. He may well revert the name of the city of Volgograd to Stalingrad—it was changed in 1961 as part of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign—to highlight the Red Army’s eventual victory over the Axis invaders in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the great psychological turning point of the war. He may also sharpen the worst of his historical distortions, attempting to justify his continued war in Ukraine by claiming that the Ukrainians are “Nazis,” contradicting his own insistence before the invasion that Ukrainians were no different from Russians.
In truth, there is no one set of conclusions to draw from World War II. The war defies generalization and does not fit into easy categories. It contains countless stories of tragedy, corruption, hypocrisy, egomania, betrayal, impossible choices, and unbelievable sadism. But it also contains stories of self-sacrifice and compassion, in which people clung to a fundamental belief in humanity despite appalling conditions and overwhelming oppression. Their example will always be worth remembering and emulating, no matter how dark today’s conflicts become.
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