World War II (1939–1945)

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Slide 125

Recovery began with the mid-1948 currency reform in Western Germany, and was sped up by the liberalization of European economic policy that the Marshall plan (1948–1951) both directly and indirectly caused.

The post 1948 West German recovery has been called the German economic miracle.Also the Italian and French economies rebounded.

By contrast, the United Kingdom was in a state of economic ruin, and although it received a quarter of the total Marshall Plan assistance, more than any other European country,continued relative economic decline for decades.

The Soviet Union, despite enormous human and material losses, also experienced rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era.

Japan experienced incredibly rapid economic growth, becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world by the 1980s.China returned to its pre-war industrial production by 1952.

Slide 126

Impact Casualties and war crimes Main articles: World War II casualties and War crimes during World War II

World War II deaths

Slide 127

Estimates for the total casualties of the war vary, because many deaths went unrecorded. Most suggest that some 75 million people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians. Many civilians died because of disease, starvation, massacres, bombing and deliberate genocide.

The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths. The largest portion of military dead were ethnic Russians (5,756,000), followed by ethnic Ukrainians (1,377,400).

One of every four Soviet citizens was killed or wounded in that war. Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.

Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 85 percent—mostly Soviet and Chinese—were on the Allied side and 15 percent on the Axis side. Many of these deaths were caused by war crimes committed by German and Japanese forces in occupied territories.

An estimated 11 to 17 million civilians died as a direct or indirect result of Nazi ideological policies, including the systematic genocide of around six million Jews during The Holocaust along with a further five million Roma, homosexuals as well as Slavs and other ethnic and minority groups.

Slide 128

Chinese civilians to be buried alive by Japanese soldiers.

Roughly 7.5 million civilians died in China under Japanese occupation.Hundreds of thousands (varying estimates) of ethnic Serbs, along with gypsies and Jews, were murdered by the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustaše in Yugoslavia, with retribution-related killings of Croatian civilians just after the war ended.