The European theatre of World War II, lasting from September 1939 to May 1945, was one of two main theatres of combat during World War II, the other being the Pacific War. The combat in Europe resulted in at least 39 million deaths, and a dramatic change in the balance of power on the continent. The Allied powers, including (for most of the war) the United Kingdom, United States, Soviet Union, and France, fought the Axis powers, including the fascist states of Nazi Germany and Italy, on multiple fronts: Western, Eastern, Scandinavian, and Mediterranean. Germany, meanwhile, enacted the Holocaust, a genocide of six million Jews, within its vast occupied territories across Europe.
In 1938, German dictator Adolf Hitler had his country annex Austria and part of Czechoslovakia; this was motivated in part by the Nazi Party's racist ideology, which held that Germany needed to gain "living space" for its so-called "Aryan race" to survive. The country was supported by Italy, led by dictator Benito Mussolini. World War II began with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Poland's allies, France and the U.K., declared war on Germany days later, but were unwilling to engage in active combat. The Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, soon invaded eastern Poland, having signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Poland was subsequently partitioned into Soviet and German occupied territories.
In 1940, Germany invaded Norway, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and Italy invaded Greece. Germany also began the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, two aerial bombardments of the U.K. The British prime minister was Winston Churchill. In 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, and began invading the Soviet Union, which brought the Soviets into the Allied war effort. Later that year, Germany declared war on the U.S., who also joined the Allies. The U.S. president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1942 and 1943, the Soviets halted the German invasion of their country at the Battle of Stalingrad, while the Allies bombed German industrial facilities. In 1943, the Allied powers began invading Italy, leading to the end of Mussolini's regime. Germans and Italians loyal to the Axis continued fighting the Allies.
In 1944, the Allies liberated Rome, then began invading German-occupied Western Europe, starting with Normandy in northern France. Meanwhile, the Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive in Eastern Europe. Both campaigns were successful. The concentration camps used in the Holocaust were liberated, and the Soviets surrounded the German capital Berlin. In April 1945, Mussolini was hanged, Roosevelt died of poor health and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman, and Hitler died by suicide in response to the encirclement of Berlin. Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May—now celebrated as 'Victory in Europe Day'—although fighting continued in other parts of Europe until 25 May. On 5 June, Germany signed the Berlin Declaration, proclaiming its unconditional surrender to the Allies.
The Allies then turned their attention to finishing the Pacific War against the Axis power of Japan. After World War II ended, the Allies occupied much of Europe. They restored countries' pre-war governments, or established new ones, and funded much of Europe's economic recovery. German military leaders were prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials. Western Europe became a bloc of capitalist governments, while Eastern Europe became communist, marking the beginning of the Cold War among the former Allied nations.
The European theatre of World War II, lasting from September 1939 to May 1945, was one of two main theatres of combat during World War II, the other being the Pacific War. The combat in Europe resulted in at least 39 million deaths, and a dramatic change in the balance of power on the continent. The Allied powers, including (for most of the war) the United Kingdom, United States, Soviet Union, and France, fought the Axis powers, including the fascist states of Nazi Germany and Italy, on multiple fronts: Western, Eastern, Scandinavian, and Mediterranean. Germany, meanwhile, enacted the Holocaust, a genocide of six million Jews, within its vast occupied territories across Europe.
In 1938, German dictator Adolf Hitler had his country annex Austria and part of Czechoslovakia; this was motivated in part by the Nazi Party's racist ideology, which held that Germany needed to gain "living space" for its so-called "Aryan race" to survive. The country was supported by Italy, led by dictator Benito Mussolini. World War II began with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Poland's allies, France and the U.K., declared war on Germany days later, but were unwilling to engage in active combat. The Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, soon invaded eastern Poland, having signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Poland was subsequently partitioned into Soviet and German occupied territories.
In 1940, Germany invaded Norway, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and Italy invaded Greece. Germany also began the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, two aerial bombardments of the U.K. The British prime minister was Winston Churchill. In 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, and began invading the Soviet Union, which brought the Soviets into the Allied war effort. Later that year, Germany declared war on the U.S., who also joined the Allies. The U.S. president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1942 and 1943, the Soviets halted the German invasion of their country at the Battle of Stalingrad, while the Allies bombed German industrial facilities. In 1943, the Allied powers began invading Italy, leading to the end of Mussolini's regime. Germans and Italians loyal to the Axis continued fighting the Allies.
In 1944, the Allies liberated Rome, then began invading German-occupied Western Europe, starting with Normandy in northern France. Meanwhile, the Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive in Eastern Europe. Both campaigns were successful. The concentration camps used in the Holocaust were liberated, and the Soviets surrounded the German capital Berlin. In April 1945, Mussolini was hanged, Roosevelt died of poor health and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman, and Hitler died by suicide in response to the encirclement of Berlin. Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May—now celebrated as 'Victory in Europe Day'—although fighting continued in other parts of Europe until 25 May. On 5 June, Germany signed the Berlin Declaration, proclaiming its unconditional surrender to the Allies.
The Allies then turned their attention to finishing the Pacific War against the Axis power of Japan. After World War II ended, the Allies occupied much of Europe. They restored countries' pre-war governments, or established new ones, and funded much of Europe's economic recovery. German military leaders were prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials. Western Europe became a bloc of capitalist governments, while Eastern Europe became communist, marking the beginning of the Cold War among the former Allied nations.
Background
Axis powers
Germany was defeated in World War I, and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles placed punitive conditions on the country after finding Germany and the other Central Powersguilty for starting the war. These punishments included the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the temporary loss of the Saarland, military limitations, and reparation payments to the Allied powers. The Rhineland region of Germany was also made a demilitarised zone. Germany would also join the League of Nations, an international governmental body devoted to peacekeeping. Historians are divided on whether or not the treaty was harsh or actually "very restrained" compared to other peace treaties at the time. Many Germans back then blamed their country's post-war economic collapse on the treaty's conditions and these resentments contributed to the political instability, which made it possible for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party to come to power. This was worsened by the worldwide Great Depression, which began in 1929.
Hitler became the chancellor and fuhrer of Germany in 1933. In February 1933, the German Reichstag building caught on fire in an arson attack, giving Hitler the opportunity to blame the fire on his political opponents, especially communists. In response, the government passed the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State, which "abolished freedom of speech, assembly, privacy and the press; legalized phone tapping and interception of correspondence; and suspended the autonomy of federated states, like Bavaria". Communist politicians were arrested, leaving the Nazi Party free to do what they wanted. Hitler made Germany an absolute dictatorship, and he withdrew from the League of Nations. In 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered the purge of leaders within the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary organisation, believing them to have gotten too powerful.
From 1919 to 1921, Italian fascist Benito Mussolini grew a base of supporters who wanted him to deal with Italy's political and economic crises, which involved civil conflict over the growth of socialism in the country. Many of Mussolini's supporters became known as blackshirts, who would form a paramilitary that terrorised the Italian countryside in a campaign against socialism. In 1922, during a controversial general strike by a weakened trade unionist movement, Mussolini and his followers seized power in Rome and installed him as the Prime Minister of Italy to run the country alongside the pre-existing monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel III. Similar to Germany, Mussolini turned the country into a one-party fascist state which outlawed free speech, the free press, trade unions, and targeted socialists, Catholics, and liberals with a network of secret police and spies. Italy became sympathetic to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Italy, Germany, and Imperial Japan — led by Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo — increasingly allied with each other, and during World War II they would be known as the Axis powers. Italy and Japan needed allies, as Italy was involved in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (the Italian invasion of the Ethiopian Empire) from 1935 to 1937, and Japan started the Second Sino-Japanese War (Japan's expanded invasion of the Republic of China) in 1937, the latter of which was subsumed by World War II and ended in 1945.
In 1936, Italy and Germany made a pact of mutual assurance, the Rome-Berlin Axis agreement. Also that year, Japan and Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact to counter the perceived threat of communism from the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin; Italy joined the pact in 1937. Italy and Germany signed the Pact of Steel in 1939, formalising the Rome-Berlin axis. Other smaller powers joined the Axis throughout World War II. The Axis' main opponents would be the Allies, a name reused from the Allies who were the main opponent of the Central Powers in World War I.
Under the Nazi Party, Germany developed a hierarchy which considered the pseudoscientific "Aryan race" — white ethnic Germans or those closest genetically to them – as the most superior race, and Jews and Slavs at or near the bottom. A major part of Nazi Germany's racial policy was the concept of lebensraum, or "living space": increasing the amount of land in Europe where members of the Aryan race could live. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum writes:
The Nazis also adopted the social Darwinist take on Darwinian evolutionary theory regarding the "survival of the fittest." For the Nazis, survival of a race depended upon its ability to reproduce and multiply, its accumulation of land to support and feed that expanding population, and its vigilance in maintaining the purity of its gene pool, thus preserving the unique "racial" characteristics with which "nature" had equipped it for success in the struggle to survive. Since each "race" sought to expand, and since the space on the earth was finite, the struggle for survival resulted "naturally" in violent conquest and military confrontation. Hence, war—even constant war—was a part of nature, a part of the human condition.
This formed a key motivation of Germany's expansion in Europe in the mid-to-late 1930s. In 1934, Germany signed a non-aggression pact with Poland, but this would not last as Poland was considered a part of the lebensraum; Nazi mythology considered eastern Europe to be lost German land. In 1933, Germany began building concentration camps to hold their political enemies and those they considered "degenerates", such as people on the lower end of their racial hierarchy, the Nazi Party's political enemies (like socialists, social democrats, and communists), Poles, Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, disabled people, and LGBTQ people. They were brought from many places across lower continental Europe to the camps using the extensive railway network which crossed the continent. The mass killing of the camps' prisoners, which started as soon as they were built, expanded in 1941, which is usually when the start date of the Holocaust is given. In 1938, during the Kristallnachtpogroms, 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps.
In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered nuclear fission, or the release of large amounts of energy when an atom's nucleus splits into smaller nuclei. German scientists of the Uranverein (uranium club) then began a project to develop the atomic bomb, a bomb using nuclear fission that could destroy entire cities. This was supposed to be secret, but scientists fleeing Nazi Germany to avoid persecution made word of the program in other Western countries. In 1939, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt was warned of the program by one of these fleeing scientists, Albert Einstein.
German expansion and the partition of Czechoslovakia
The UK and France responded to Germany's aggressive expansion through appeasement, "maintain[ing] peace in Europe by making limited concessions to German demands", which was seen as reasonable by the British and French populaces because the Treaty of Versailles was thought of as indeed too restrictive, and they did not want to go to war with Germany. In 1935, Germany revoked the Treaty of Versailles' limitations on its military, and remilitizared the Rhineland in 1936. On 13 March 1938, Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss.
Hitler then threatened to go to war with Czechoslovakia, and in response, on 30 September 1938, Hitler, Mussolini, UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and French premier Edouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement, which gave Germany the Sudetenland, a Czech region near its border with Germany which had long been ethnically German. Chamberlain returned to England and proclaimed that the UK had achieved "Peace for our time". At the same time, Hungary annexed a part of southern Slovakia and Poland annexed the Tešin District of Czech Silesia. On 15 March 1939, Germany occupied the remaining western half of Czechoslovakia, the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Later that month, part of Slovakia became the independent fascist and Catholic state of the Slovak Republic under dictator and Catholic priest Jozef Tiso. The republic was controlled by the Slovak People's Party, who made the country a client state of Germany and allowed Germany to occupy it. At the same time, the eastern part of Slovakia, the Subcarpathian Rus, was annexed by Hungary. The latter two annexations formally ended the country of Czechoslovakia, which had existed since 1918.
By early 1939, Hitler had plans of invading Poland, despite Poland having assurances from the UK and France that those countries would intervene if Poland was attacked. Germany revoked its non-aggression pact with Poland on 28 April. To ensure Germany would not face resistance from the Soviet Union during an invasion, the two countries signed an agreement to neutrality named the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact after secret negotiations from 23 to 24 August. Hitler gave the orders to invade on 26 August, certain that the UK and the Soviet Union would not retaliate. However, on the 25th, the UK and Poland publicly signed a formal treaty of military assurance, causing Hitler to delay the war for a few days. On 31 August, he gave the order to invade the next day.
Beginning of the war in Europe (1939–1940)
Invasion of Poland (1939)
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, falsely claiming that Poland was trying to encircle and partition Germany and that ethnic Germans were being persecuted there. Germany had staged an attack on one of their own radio stations the previous night and blamed it on the Poles. 1.5 million soldiers of the German military, the Wehrmacht, took part in the invasion, and had overwhelming military superiority to Poland's 1 million soldiers. The invasion was led by generals Fedor von Bock, Franz Halder, Georg von Küchler, Gerd von Rundstedt, Günther von Kluge, Johannes Blaskowitz, Walther von Brauchitsch, Walther von Reichenau, and Wilhelm List. Poland fought on a large front, both on the German border and with their flanks in the German territory of East Prussia in the north and German-occupied Slovakia in the south. Poland did not move their troops eastward to more defensive positions because their western half had their most vital industrial regions.
The Wehrmacht used "Blitzkrieg attacks", surprise attacks with "massive, concentrated forces of fast-moving [armoured] units supported by overwhelming air power". Their air force, the Luftwaffe, specifically operated as support for the Army. They quickly destroyed vital Polish infrastructure including the railways, essentially taking out the Polish Air Force before it could be used. In 1939, they surpassed the three current Allied powers in their individual numbers of infantry and armoured divisions (the Wehrmacht's armoured divisions are also known as panzer divisions). Germany also had more machine guns, mortars, antitank guns, and howitzers per division than the Allies, while having about an equal number of tanks and military aircraft to the three of them combined.