Germany during the Second World War 1939–1945

The war transformed every aspect of German society. Initial victories produced euphoria; from 1942 onwards, military defeats, mass bombing, food shortages, and growing knowledge of Nazi atrocities created strain. Yet active resistance remained marginal, and the regime held together until 1945.

Phases of the war effort

1939–1941: Blitzkrieg victories. Germany conquered Poland (Sept 1939), Denmark and Norway (April 1940), the Low Countries and France (May–June 1940), Yugoslavia and Greece (April 1941). Hitler's popularity peaked. Rationing was light; consumer goods were still available; few young men had yet died.

1941–1942: Operation Barbarossa. Invasion of the USSR began 22 June 1941. Initial advances stalled outside Moscow in winter. The war became a long, brutal conflict on the Eastern Front.

1942–1943: Total war. Stalingrad (Aug 1942–Feb 1943) — 91,000 German soldiers surrendered; the rest dead. Goebbels's 18 February 1943 speech demanded Total War. Women were called into factories; non-essential businesses closed; rationing tightened.

1943–1945: Defeat. Allied strategic bombing destroyed cities (Hamburg July 1943, Dresden Feb 1945). Soviet forces drove west; the Western Allies landed in Normandy June 1944. Hitler shot himself 30 April 1945; unconditional surrender 7 May 1945.

The Final Solution

The murder of European Jewry — the Holocaust — was conceived and carried out during the war:

• 1939–41: Polish Jews forced into ghettos (Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow). Mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen squads behind the Eastern Front.
• 20 January 1942: Wannsee Conference. Senior Nazis under Heydrich coordinated the Final Solution — death camps for industrial-scale murder.
• 1942–45: Extermination camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, and the camp/factory complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau killed approximately 6 million Jews. Roma, Soviet POWs, gay men, disabled Germans were also murdered.

Knowledge of the camps was widespread among the SS, but ordinary Germans claimed (often falsely) not to know the details. After the war, the Allies forced civilians from nearby towns to view the camps — providing the photographic evidence that defines the Holocaust today.

Total war on the home front

• Rationing. Tight from 1939; bread, meat, fat, eggs all limited. By 1945, official rations covered only basics.
• Conscripted labour. Foreign workers brought from occupied countries — millions of forced labourers in German factories.
• Air-raid shelters. Cities built bunkers; civilians spent thousands of hours underground.
• Bombing. ~600,000 German civilians killed in Allied air raids. Cities reduced to rubble: Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin.
• Refugees. From late 1944, millions fled the Soviet advance — terrible cold, looting, mass rape.
• Hitler Youth in combat. Children as young as 12 deployed in the Volkssturm (people's militia) in 1944–45.

Growing opposition

The brutal reality of war and growing knowledge of atrocities sparked late opposition:

• The White Rose (Munich, 1942–43) — students Hans and Sophie Scholl with Professor Huber distributed leaflets calling for resistance. Arrested and executed Feb 1943.
• Edelweiss Pirates — youth gangs in Cologne who hid deserters and attacked Nazi officials.
• Kreisau Circle — aristocrats and Christians planning post-Nazi government.
• The July Plot, 20 July 1944. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a briefcase bomb at Hitler's Wolfsschanze HQ. Hitler survived. Roughly 5,000 people executed in retribution, including Field Marshal Rommel (forced to commit suicide), Admiral Canaris, Pastor Bonhoeffer.

Why so little resistance?

• Effective police state — Gestapo, denunciation, terror.
• Total war mobilisation — civilians worked or died.
• Nazi propaganda — Goebbels's control of media kept morale alive even in 1944–45.
• Patriotism — many Germans felt loyalty even when they hated the regime.
• Fear of Soviet revenge — drove civilians to fight on rather than surrender to the Red Army.

How effective was the regime?

By any normal measure 1944–45 should have produced collapse: cities flattened, armies routed, food running out. Instead the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm fought to the last weeks. The combination of terror (SS shooting deserters), total propaganda, and fear of Soviet vengeance held the regime together until Hitler's suicide.

Long-term legacy

• 7–9 million German military and civilian dead.
• Cities destroyed; 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from eastern Europe.
• Germany divided into four occupation zones, leading to the FRG and GDR in 1949.
• Nuremberg Trials (1945–46) prosecuted senior Nazis; the term "crimes against humanity" entered international law.

A top-grade answer recognises that the war years brought both the regime's greatest crimes — the Holocaust — and its eventual destruction.