14. Genocide, War, and Europe’s Ruins
A chronological guide to genocide, occupation, total war, liberation, displacement, and the legal and political transformation of Europe between 1933 and the postwar era.
From Persecution to
The Second World War transformed Europe between 1939 and 1945 through military conquest, occupation, deliberate attacks on civilians, economic exploitation, and mass murder. Nazi rule made racial ideology into state policy. The was central to that system, but Nazi persecution and killing also targeted Roma, people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, and other groups.
The developed in stages. After Adolf Hitler became German chancellor on January 30, 1933, Nazi authorities used laws, propaganda, police power, and organized violence to exclude Jews from German society. The stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and people classified as “German” under Nazi racial definitions. During on November 9–10, 1938, Nazi officials and supporters destroyed synagogues, Jewish businesses, and homes while arresting and abusing thousands of Jews.
The invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, radicalized Nazi policy. German authorities forced Jews into ghettos, where overcrowding, starvation, disease, and forced labor killed hundreds of thousands. Mobile killing units and their auxiliaries carried out mass shootings behind the eastern front. From late 1941 onward, killing centers including Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau murdered Jews on an industrial scale.
This process required extensive participation by German ministries, police forces, railways, businesses, local officials, and collaborators. People identified victims, confiscated property, organized deportations, administered imprisonment, and exploited forced labor. Others hid Jews, forged documents, organized escapes, or joined rescue networks. The range of behavior included collaboration, resistance, rescue, bystanding, and changes in conduct over time.
Takeaway: developed through connected policies of exclusion, dispossession, segregation, deportation, exploitation, and murder, supported by institutions and individuals across occupied Europe.
Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance
German occupation reorganized political and social life across Europe. Occupation authorities controlled food distribution, transportation, employment, newspapers, schools, and policing. They imposed curfews and collective punishments, took hostages, requisitioned agricultural products, and recruited or deported workers. In eastern Europe, Nazi leaders treated land, food, labor, and populations as resources to be controlled and racially reordered.
Collaboration could result from ideological agreement, opportunism, fear, antisemitism, or hopes for national advantage. Governments such as Vichy France administered parts of their countries under German influence, and local police and officials in several occupied states assisted with arrests and deportations. Collaboration was not always consistent: the same government or individual could cooperate in one area and resist in another.
Resistance took many forms, including sabotage, intelligence gathering, attacks on German personnel, guerrilla warfare, escape, hiding, rescue, cultural preservation, documentation, and spiritual defiance. The French Resistance, Danish and Norwegian undergrounds, Yugoslav and Greek partisans, the Polish Home Army, and Soviet partisan units challenged occupation. In Germany, the White Rose student movement and the conspirators behind the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler opposed the regime.
Jewish resistance also included armed uprisings. The began on April 19, 1943, when imprisoned Jews organized military resistance against German deportation efforts. Revolts also occurred at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Auschwitz. Resistance was dangerous and morally complex because armed attacks could provoke reprisals against civilians, and underground groups could have conflicting political goals or use coercion themselves.
Takeaway: Occupied societies were not divided simply into resistance and collaboration; people made constrained, varied, and sometimes changing choices under systems of terror.
Civilians and the Experience of
World War II was a because entire societies and their resources were mobilized, while the distinction between battlefront and home front weakened. Civilians experienced bombing, invasion, occupation, deportation, hunger, disease, forced labor, sexual violence, and the loss of relatives. Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Stalingrad, and Berlin suffered extensive destruction. Strategic bombing targeted military production and transportation but also killed and displaced large civilian populations.
Daily life depended on location and social position. In occupied cities, people waited in food lines, used ration cards, exchanged goods on black markets, listened secretly to foreign radio broadcasts, and navigated curfews and identity checks. In ghettos, Jews faced deliberate starvation, disease, forced labor, and deportation. In Germany, foreign laborers and prisoners worked in factories, farms, mines, and construction under coercive conditions. On the eastern front, civilians faced mass shootings, village burnings, requisitions, and campaigns that treated whole populations as enemies.
Children and families were separated by deportation, evacuation, military service, imprisonment, or death. Diaries, letters, photographs, and oral histories show civilians making decisions about hiding, flight, cooperation, survival, and care for others under extraordinary pressure.
When examining a wartime diary, photograph, decree, or testimony, consider its purpose and audience, the effects of fear and censorship, the rules governing movement and food, what the source leaves out, and how it compares with other evidence. A government decree, private diary, survivor testimony, perpetrator document, and demographic record can reveal different aspects of the same event.
Takeaway: Civilian experiences were central to the war, and different kinds of evidence are needed to understand both official policy and lived experience.
Defeat, Liberation, and the End of the War in Europe
The Axis defeat resulted from the combined pressure of Allied military production, Soviet resistance and counteroffensives, British and American operations in the Mediterranean and western Europe, resistance movements, and the exhaustion of German resources. Important turning points included the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and the Soviet advance from the east.
As Allied forces entered German-controlled territory, they found concentration camps, forced-labor sites, mass graves, and evidence of systematic murder. Liberation did not mean immediate safety. Prisoners were weakened by starvation and disease, and many had survived death marches in which the SS forced camp prisoners to move westward as Allied armies approached. Soviet forces arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, while other camps were liberated later in the spring.
Germany signed an unconditional surrender at Reims on May 7, 1945, and the surrender was ratified in Berlin on May 8. The Allied powers occupied Germany and Austria in zones administered by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The Potsdam Conference, held from July 17 to August 2, 1945, addressed occupation, demilitarization, political reconstruction, reparations, and disagreements among the Allies.
The defeat of Nazi Germany ended the war in Europe but did not immediately end global conflict. Japan surrendered in September 1945 after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the dominant military and political powers, creating conditions for the Cold War.
Takeaway: Military victory ended Nazi rule in Europe, but liberation exposed the scale of the crimes and began a difficult process of occupation, reconstruction, and political realignment.
Europe’s Ruins and the Displaced
In 1945, Europe faced destroyed infrastructure, shortages of food and fuel, broken transportation networks, devastated housing, and governments struggling to restore public order. The war had displaced tens of millions of people, including concentration-camp survivors, forced laborers, prisoners of war, refugees, people fleeing advancing armies, and ethnic populations expelled from territories whose borders had changed.
The Allied authorities classified many uprooted people as . In May 1945, millions of were located in Germany and Austria. By the end of July 1945, more than seven million had been repatriated, but many could not safely or willingly return home. Jewish survivors often faced destroyed communities, continuing antisemitism, and renewed violence, including the Kielce pogrom in Poland in July 1946. Displaced-persons camps therefore became temporary homes rather than simple transit points.
Displacement challenged older assumptions about citizenship and belonging. Some people found that their homes were now in another country, while others could no longer rely on their governments for protection. The refugee crisis encouraged international institutions such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and helped create the framework that eventually produced the .
Postwar reconstruction therefore involved more than rebuilding buildings and economies. It also required defining who possessed rights, which state was responsible for protection, and how people without a secure state could find safety and a permanent home.
Takeaway: Europe’s postwar crisis was simultaneously material, political, and human: rebuilding required addressing displacement, citizenship, protection, and belonging.
Justice, Human Rights, and the Postwar Order
The war challenged the idea that national sovereignty shielded state officials from responsibility for crimes committed against civilians. At the , held from November 1945 to October 1946, leading Nazi officials were prosecuted for crimes against peace, war crimes, and . Subsequent trials prosecuted additional officials, doctors, judges, industrialists, and camp personnel.
The trials established the principle that individuals, including state officials, could be held criminally responsible for international crimes. They also raised unresolved questions: how should responsibility be assigned within a bureaucracy, could people be punished for obeying domestic laws, and what obligations did soldiers, civil servants, businesses, and ordinary citizens have when the state itself committed crimes? Denazification was uneven, and political priorities sometimes led governments to reintegrate former collaborators or officials rather than prosecute every possible case.
Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944 and argued that the destruction of national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups required a distinct legal category. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of . It defined through acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, and required states to prevent and punish it.
The postwar period also saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the expansion of international criminal law, and stronger emphasis on civilian protection. Yet the aftermath remained contradictory. Europe proclaimed “never again” while millions remained displaced, colonial empires denied political equality, antisemitism persisted, Roma and other survivors often received little recognition, and Soviet domination restricted political freedom across eastern Europe.
Takeaway: Postwar law created new principles of individual responsibility, human rights, refugee protection, and prevention, but institutions and states applied those principles unevenly.