World War Two was the most destructive global conflict in history. It began when Nazi Germany unleashed ferocious attacks across Europe - but it spread to the Soviet Union, China, Japan and the United States.
Cities were destroyed by air raids, the atom bomb was dropped on Japan and six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Over 50 million soldiers and civilians died.
Victory in Europe Day (8th May 1945) was one that remained in the memory of all who witnessed it. It meant an end to nearly six years of a war which had destroyed homes, families, and cities; and had brought huge suffering and privations to the populations of entire countries.
But it was not the end of the conflict, nor was it an end to the impact the war had on people. The war against Japan did not end until August 1945, and the political, social and economic repercussions of the Second World War were felt long after Germany and Japan had surrendered.
January the 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Since 2005, the UN have marked the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on the 27th January 1945, where member states honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazism.
British forces then liberated Bergen-Belsen on the 15th April 1945. Upon liberation, British forces discovered thousands of bodies unburied around the camp and some 60,000 starving and mortally ill people packed together without food, water or basic sanitation.
The consequences of WW2 would be felt across nations, societies and communities. The most destructive war in history, WW2 was a massive driver of not only social but also technological, political and economic change.
After World War Two, the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany, was founded as a second German state, alongside the Federal Republic of Germany, which was more commonly known as West Germany.
This partition reflected the victorious US, French and UK forces in the West, who during WW2 had joined forces with the Soviet Union in the East. While West Germany lived under Capitalism, East Germany took a different approach with Communism.
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. The Berlin Wall became the physical structure to define the ‘Cold War’ period of post-World War Two Europe.
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