Summary of Section 4
• The postwar trials of German and Japanese officials at Nuremberg and Tokyo were part of a larger effort to reshape the societies of these two nations in preparation for reintegration as democratic powers in the postwar world.
• Critics of the postwar trials highlight them as examples of victor’s justice.
• World War II helped lay the foundations for the Cold War in Europe due to the division of Germany into a democratic west and a Communist east.
• Soviet actions in Eastern Europe further strained relations between the Soviets and the West.
• The introduction of atomic power heightened the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.
• World War II played a significant role in ending European colonial power throughout the world, most notably in India, Indochina
Conclusion
Victory did eventually come—in Europe in May 1945, in Asia three months later—but it came at a tremendous cost. Aerial bombing—targeted against both military-industrial targets and civilian morale—reduced great cities to rubble, from London to Berlin to Tokyo. Atrocious acts of barbarism—war crimes, even— were committed by soldiers on all sides. Nightmarish new instruments of death—gas chambers, unmanned rockets, atomic bombs—were invented and deployed for use against human beings.
World War II was, quite simply, the most deadly and destructive conflict in human history.
Despite the destruction, death, and devastation, the war helped usher in a new world order, one in which Hitler’s Third Reich in Europe was no more, and some of history’s most heinous crimes had been exposed and resisted. In the United States, wartime mobilization pulled the American economy out of depression, employing millions. American women and blacks experienced some freedoms unattainable in pre-war society. And on the world stage, the United States earned a new, powerful and coveted role.
World War II also marked the beginning of the end of world imperialism as nationalist movements began to triumph over weakened colonial empires. One by one, in the decades following the war, colonized peoples all over the world would gain their independence. In these ways, as historian Jay Winter has argued, 1945 marked the moment when the world broke from its past and moved toward a new era.