20 million people is a large number so is 30 or 40 or 50 million people – double the population of Australia or roughly the population of Spain. So, 60 or 70 million is even more significant, especially when it is the total number of casualties killed in a single war.
This year marks the 80th anniversary since the end of World War II – the most devastating global conflict in human history. Officially, it lasted 6 years, although many lesser international conflicts preceded it and involved over 50 nations, most of which were aligned against the Nazi Third Reich and the Japanese Empire collectively known as the Axis Powers. It ended with the first (and hopefully last) ever use of nuclear weapons in war time. Most of us would find it difficult to conceive of a war of such magnitude since it has not occurred in our lifetime.
It was the seminal event of the last century not only in terms of casualties but also in its geographical extent. It was fought on land, on sea and in the air. The main theatres of war included: most of Europe including European Russia, North Africa, China, Southeast Asia, the Indonesian and Philippine Islands. The Atlantic Ocean saw many naval battles from the North Sea down to the Gulf of Mexico while in the Pacific Ocean major battles ranged from the Arctic Circle to Hawaii to the Coral Sea off the New Guinea coast.
Image of British Soldiers from Andrew’s family archive.
Australia was not spared. Northern Australia was bombed several times beginning with Darwin and extending to other sites in Western Australia and Queensland. Japanese midget submarines even attacked Sydney Harbour and inflicted casualties in 1942.
There were also less well-known conflicts in areas as far afield as: Syria, Madagascar, Iraq, Sri Lanka and even the Arctic Circle where the Japanese invaded US territory – the Aleutian Islands off the Alaskan coast. Other nations such as Iran were occupied by the allies due to strategic considerations, namely preventing oil supplies reaching the Axis Powers.
Of all the inhabited continents only, South America did not experience armed conflict or invasion on or near its territories. Although it achieved some dubious notoriety after the war when several Nazi war criminals fled there, some of whom like Adolph Eichmann were caught and returned to face justice; others like Joseph Mengler never were.
The majority of the casualties in this war were civilians. In Europe, many of these civilians were victims of the holocaust in the Nazi concentration camps, labour camps and killing centres. This included about six million Jews. Disturbingly, this is roughly half of the Nazis total victims; the others included ethnic minorities such as Romany gypsies, political dissidents, people with disabilities, prisoners of war, homosexuals and basically anyone perceived as threat to the regime.
Graphic black and white newsreels show a concentration camp where piles of emaciated dead bodies are being dumped by earth movers into a mass grave. Because there were so many corpses, they posed a significant health risk and had to be treated like lumps of garbage, stripped of their dignity, identity and cruelly murdered. (Is it any wonder that the public display of the Nazi swastika is officially banned in Germany to this day?)
The holocaust was only part of the savagery of this global conflict. It is disturbing in its proximity in time but also in culture. The holocaust did not occur in the distant past of the ancient world or the Middle Ages but in a civilised nation of the 20th century and a supposedly Christian country. It was a war driven by militarism, nationalism and above all the myth of racial supremacy.
While the Nazi regime promoted the alleged superiority of the Aryan race, the Japanese Empire advocated their own version of racial superiority: not only did they regard Europeans as unwanted exploiters of their Asian colonies. Furthermore, they regarded even their fellow Asians as inferior. Their atrocities towards the Chinese rivalled anything the Nazis undertook. While they did not have concentration camps as such, they did have prisoner of war camps where unrestrained cruelty was rampant. An infamous example is the Thai-Burma railway, not only for the high prisoner death toll but also for the survivors who resembled little more than living skeletons Another practice among the occupying Japanese euphemistically termed ‘comfort women’ forced female prisoners into prostitution. The experience of Australian nurse Vivian Bulwinkel as a prisoner of war is a case in point.
Image of British Soldier from Andrew’s family archive.
The tragedy of this world war is compounded by the leaders of the Axis powers. They had scant regard not only for their enemies but also their own people. Well before the beginning of 1945, it was clear that both the Third Reich and Japanese Empire would not win the war. Yet their militaristic leaders insisted on continuing the pointless conflict. Their decisions inflicted needless deaths not only on their military personnel but also on their own civilian populations. For example, had the Japanese surrendered when the allies demanded, they would have been spared the tens of thousands who died from the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The survivors are called ‘hibakusha’ and they have yet to receive an official apology from their own government for their suffering. Now in their eighties and nineties, it’s not surprising they are anti-nuclear and peace activists.
Aware of their immanent defeat both The Third Reich and Japanese Empire tried to destroy evidence of their atrocities – clear signs of their guilt. The Nazis sought to destroy official records of the Holocaust. More disturbing had the Japanese Emperor not officially ordered surrender there were plans to murder POWs and conceal the corpses.
Given the magnitude of their atrocities, new categories had to be invented to prosecute the surviving perpetrators at the subsequent war crimes trials. It was here that the terms ‘genocide’ and’ crimes against humanity’ entered the legal lexicon.
What relevance does this military history lesson have for contemporary Australia? Unfortunately, the prejudice espoused by Hitler and his acolytes did not die with him. There are those few in our society who brand themselves neo-Nazis. By subscribing to this creed, they openly promote white supremacy, xenophobia, antisemitism, sexism and all the ‘isms’ that the Third Reich was built on. By imitating its salutes, insignias, they parrot the emblems of a regime based on hate and division which led to the death of innocent millions.
Whether they are politically naive or wilfully ignorant of recent history, they are covertly or overtly condoning the atrocities of the holocaust. Would we let such people into any aspect of our government or legal system? How would we feel with anyone who condoned on ‘racial’ grounds the killing of innocent people even children? When a society condones such acts, it divests itself of basic humanity and descends into barbarism.
Details of the soldiers from the above images.
Racial supremacy implies racial subornation: social superiority presupposes social inferiority. The implications of this when taken to the extreme are frightening. In the past it led to the institutions such as apatite and, even earlier, to slavery. And over 80 years ago, it led to the most devastating war in human history.
As human beings we all belong to the same race: there is no ‘white race’, no ‘black race’ – these are all subcategories within the same race of humanity: homo sapiens. As members of the same human race, regardless of how different we look, we are all equal: no sub-category, no ethnicity, no religion, no nationality is ‘better’ or ‘superior’ to any other. To assert it is is to pave the way to condemn, victimise and ultimately exploit the other. Recent developments in technology further undermine the myth of racial supremacy; the study of the human genome reveals that very few of humanity are a ‘pure’ anything.
What would have happened if the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire came face to face? With both proclaiming their respective racial superiority and forbidding military surrender? It would hardly have been ‘happily ever after’!
Letters written to Andrew’s parents by soldiers thanking them for their assistance.
The tangible reminders of this catastrophic war are everywhere throughout the world. They range from huge war cemeteries to monuments of every description commemorating both the heroes and the victims. However, one memorial is unique more than any other in portraying the horror of that period: the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
In 1944 in an act of Nazi retaliation, the village was destroyed and all its inhabitants at the time were murdered, a total of 642 people including non-combatant men, women and children. The latter two groups, together with the elderly were herded into a church which was then set on fire. Those attempting to escape were machine gunned. The men were brought into barns and sheds shot in the legs to prevent their escape and then doused with petrol before they and the buildings they were in were set on fire.
At end of the war, it was decided not to rebuild the village but to leave it as a memorial to its victims. To this day it remains a desolate collection of ruined buildings along empty streets; a modern ghost town, deserted and eerily silent. Unlike the Memorial Church in Berlin and the Genbaku Dome of Hiroshima, this memorial is not a single structure but the remnants of small community of ordinary people living ordinary lives who suddenly became the victims of a brutal tyranny.
Equally significant as the physical reminders are the services and ceremonies held at the various monuments and war memorials. Commemorations such as Anzac Day and Remembrance Day are not glorifications of war (The Gallipoli campaign was, after all, a military disaster for the allies) but communal acts of mourning for the many millions of adults and children, civilians and military personnel who died resisting tyranny. They include: those who lie in unmarked graves and those who have none – who drowned at sea or were obliterated in explosions; those who perished in gas chambers and ovens (such as 15-year-old Anne Frank) and the survivors (such as army nurse Vivian Bulwinkel) as well as those still living like the Hibakusha in Japan.
Within another decade or so, all the surviving veterans of this conflict will be gone. Their passing will sever our living link with this tumultuous period. The atrocities of World War II are clearly something we would prefer to forget. However, the extent of these atrocities and their proximity to our time make forgetting a luxury we cannot afford. It is not possible to grieve for millions of people we never knew but we can acknowledge their fate as our fellow human beings – both those who survived and those who died resisting tyranny
As the old adage goes: ‘to ignore the mistakes of history is to risk repeating them’. This is one ‘mistake’ we cannot afford to repeat or forget.