The Second World War killed somewhere between 70 and 85 million people, about 3 percent of the world's population, and most of the dead were civilians, not soldiers. Tens of millions more were uprooted. Its end left the victors determined to build institutions that might prevent another such catastrophe, and left much of the world facing a new division.
New institutions
Even before the fighting stopped, Allied planners met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 and created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with currencies pegged to the US dollar and the dollar tied to gold. They hoped stable money and open trade would prevent a return to the economic warfare of the 1930s. In June 1945 delegates of 50 nations meeting in San Francisco signed the Charter of the United Nations. Its founders tried to avoid the League's mistakes: the United States, which had never joined the League, now hosted the new body, and the great powers were given special responsibility for keeping the peace. Trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo held leaders personally to account, and in 1948 the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights placed human dignity in international law. The Geneva Conventions were rewritten in 1949, adding a fourth convention to protect civilians in war and under occupation, a direct response to what occupied peoples had suffered.
People on the move
Allied armies found millions of displaced persons: former forced laborers, prisoners of war and camp survivors far from home. Then borders moved. Poland was shifted west, losing eastern lands to the Soviet Union and gaining German territory, and between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from Eastern Europe, with hundreds of thousands dying along the way. The Allies at Potsdam had approved the transfers on condition that they be orderly and humane, which they often were not. Many Jewish survivors who returned home found their houses taken and their communities gone. In July 1946 a pogrom in Kielce, Poland, killed 42 Jews, and many survivors left for Palestine, where the state of Israel was founded in 1948.
Empires and a divided world
The war fatally weakened Europe's empires. Japan's conquests had shattered the image of European invincibility, and Britain and France came out exhausted. On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan announced its surrender, Indonesian nationalists declared independence from the Dutch; in September Ho Chi Minh proclaimed an independent Vietnam, and India and Pakistan became independent in 1947. Meanwhile the wartime alliance broke apart. The Soviet Union kept control of Eastern Europe, Germany was split, and the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers. Germany and Austria were divided into four occupation zones, where millions of Germans were screened for Nazi pasts, though most former party members were soon back at work. In China the civil war between Nationalists and Communists resumed and ended in Communist victory in 1949, and Korea, freed from Japanese rule, was divided between Soviet and American zones.
Rebuilding and remembering
Former enemies became partners. In 1950 the French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed pooling French and German coal and steel, and the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 set out to bind France and Germany so tightly that war between them could not be fought. It was the seed of today's European Union. Japan's postwar constitution of 1947, drafted under American occupation, renounces war as a sovereign right in its Article 9. Each nation built its own memory. West Germany, slowly and against resistance, made facing its crimes a public duty through compensation, school lessons and memorials. Japan's reckoning has been more contested, with disputes over textbooks and over the Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted war criminals are among those honored. In Russia the Great Patriotic War became a founding story that often leaves out the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Katyn. Survivors' voices changed memory everywhere. Diaries such as Anne Frank's, published in 1947, and later recorded testimonies put individual faces on numbers too large to grasp, and they remain the way many young people first meet this history.
Worked example: one city, four regimes
Take the city now called Lviv in Ukraine. In 1939 it was Lwow, a Polish city with large Jewish and Ukrainian communities. The Soviets annexed it in 1939, the Germans seized it in 1941 and murdered almost all of its more than 100,000 Jews, and the Soviets returned in 1944. Most of its Poles were then moved west, many to Wroclaw, a city that had been German Breslau until its German population was expelled. A single street could pass through Polish, Soviet, German and Soviet rule, and lose most of its residents, in six years. Tracing one place this way shows what statistics hide. The postwar order was built on enormous human loss, which is why its makers wrote rights for individuals into law, and why those promises still matter.