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For China, World War II began in 1937 against Japan, and it was fucking horrible, with about 20 million Chinese deaths. The rest of the world considers the official start of the war to be September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. It was also fucking horrible. On a per-capita basis, more Polish people died than in any other independent country involved in the war.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 1, 1939--
The United States lost 0.32% of her population in WWII, and Canada lost 0.38%. Britain lost slightly less than 1%. The Soviet Union, which did the majority of the dying, and killing, in defeating the fucking Nazis, lost 13.7% of her population. The two hardest-hit member nations of the USSR were Ukraine (16.3%) and Belarus, with a whopping quarter of its population killed.
A lot of people forget about poor Poland, which saw 17% of its population die during the war. Of the six million who died, only 250,000 were military and the rest were civilians. More than half of those civilians who died were Jewish. In all, Germany systematically murdered over 90% of Poland’s Jewish population during the six years of occupation.
With Germany taking west Poland, then the Soviet Union invading east Poland a couple of weeks later, the country was fucked. Poland never officially surrendered, but despite brave resistance it was all over for them in little more than a month. Two days after the invasion began, Britain and France honored their agreement with Poland to protect its borders by declaring war on Germany, and the European theatre of the war was off and running.
For countries like Canada and the U.S. that saw no invasion of their home territories, their casualties were almost exclusively military. It was the countries that had armies marching across their own lands and bombers flying through their skies that incurred massive civilian deaths.
Strategic bombing during the war lacked the accuracy to focus on military targets. Rather, there was a campaign of destroying cities from the air and killing millions of civilians in order to hamper a nation’s war efforts. One of my favorite history professors sarcastically defined such “collateral damage” as “We killed some people we didn’t intend to kill, but on the other hand, we killed a lot of them.”
But what happened in many occupied nations during the war went far beyond collateral damage. It was hate-fueled atrocity after atrocity. It was genocide born out of a sense of superiority, seeing fellow humans as less than.
It was criminal, and few perpetrators were ever punished.
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I don’t know much about Belarus apart from the current dicktator being up Putin’s arse. Why so many deaths? Genocide, collateral damage or conscripts sent to die against the Nazi machine, or all of the above?