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World War II

✨ 1939–1945, Global

World War II was a global conflict fought from 1939 to 1945. In Europe, it began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, leading Britain and France to declare war. Germany occupied much of Western Europe. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, opening a vast Eastern Front.

In December, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. The Allies gradually gained the advantage. Major turning points included the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. Germany surrendered in May 1945. The war was also marked by mass persecution and systematic murder.

Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews in the Holocaust, while millions of other civilians and prisoners of war also died through killings, starvation, forced labor and disease. Japan’s expansion in Asia was accompanied by severe violence against civilians and prisoners. After Germany’s defeat, the war continued in the Pacific.

The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, while the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan. Japan formally surrendered on 2 September 1945. The conflict caused tens of millions of deaths and devastated large parts of Europe and Asia. It also contributed to the creation of the United Nations.

💡 Did you know?

Code machines. To send orders without the enemy understanding, machines like 'Enigma' were used. To break these codes, geniuses like Alan Turing invented gigantic machines that are the ancestors of our current computers. Without them, the war would have lasted much longer!

Anne Frank's diary. Anne Frank was a young girl who had to hide for two years to escape the war. She wrote her whole story in a small notebook. Today, her diary is one of the most read books in the world because it tells with emotion what it is like to dream of peace when everything is going wrong.

The ghost army. Did you know that to trick enemy planes, the Allies made tanks and planes... inflatables! From very high up, they looked like a real army ready to attack. It was a huge ruse to make adversaries believe they were going to attack in one place, while they were going somewhere else.