Germany at war 1939-1945
Germany at War 1939–1945
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. For the first two years the German military performed with devastating effectiveness, overrunning Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, the Low Countries and Yugoslavia in rapid succession. But the initial popular reaction to war in Germany was notably different from August 1914: there was no jubilation, only subdued acceptance. Germans had lived through one catastrophic war and feared another.
Changing Fortunes: Blitzkrieg to Barbarossa
The early victories generated genuine pride and consolidated Hitler’s authority. But the decision to invade the Soviet Union changed everything. Operation Barbarossa was launched on 22 June 1941, opening a front of extraordinary scale and brutality. Initial advances covered hundreds of miles, and German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow. But Soviet resistance stiffened, supply lines over-extended, and the Russian winter halted the advance.
The turning point came at Stalingrad. A German army besieging the city on the Volga was encircled by a Soviet counterattack in November 1942. After months of catastrophic urban fighting, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943 and the last German troops gave in on 2 February. About 91,000 men went into captivity from an original force of over 300,000. It was the worst German military defeat of the war and the moment at which the tide irreversibly turned. After Stalingrad, the German army retreated continuously until May 1945.
The Wannsee Conference took place on 20 January 1942, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich. Senior Nazi officials coordinated the implementation of the “Final Solution” — the systematic murder of Europe’s Jewish population. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
The Holocaust
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-organised murder of approximately six million Jewish people — two-thirds of European Jewry. This figure, established by the USHMM and confirmed by Yad Vashem and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, is the scholarly consensus. The murder was carried out in multiple ways: Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) shot an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Jews in mass executions across the occupied Soviet Union in 1941–42; and the death camps of occupied Poland — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno and Majdanek — used gas chambers to murder hundreds of thousands at a time.
The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich with Adolf Eichmann as secretary, co-ordinated the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The conference minutes (the Wannsee Protocol) document the involvement of multiple Reich ministries, demonstrating that the Holocaust was not the work of a small group but required the participation of large parts of the German state apparatus.
Resistance intensified as the war turned against Germany. The White Rose was a student resistance group at Munich University. Between 1942 and early 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl and their associates distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi crimes and calling for resistance. In February 1943, following Stalingrad, they scattered leaflets inside the university. A caretaker reported them to the Gestapo; Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested, tried by the People’s Court, and executed on 22 February 1943 — just days after their arrest.
The July Plot of 20 July 1944 was the most serious attempt to kill Hitler. Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase bomb under a table in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters. The bomb exploded, killing four people, but Hitler survived with minor injuries. The conspirators had hoped a successful assassination would enable a negotiated peace; instead, the Gestapo launched a massive purge. More than 7,000 people were subsequently arrested and nearly 5,000 executed, including von Stauffenberg himself (shot the same night) and many senior officers.
The Home Front and the Bombing of German Cities
The war had a profound impact on German civilians. Allied strategic bombing intensified from 1942, targeting industrial cities, ports and, controversially, city centres. The bombing of Dresden on 13–15 February 1945 killed approximately 22,700 to 25,000 civilians according to a 2010 historical commission — a figure lower than early Allied claims of 35,000 but higher than some post-war revisionist estimates. Dresden had genuine military significance as a transport hub, though the ethics of the raid remain debated.
By 1944 Nazi Germany was experiencing severe food shortages, labour shortages (addressed partly by the use of millions of forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners), and a steady deterioration of civilian morale. SD reports documented widespread private defeatism even among people who dared not express it openly. The regime responded with intensified terror: death sentences for “defeatism” became common.
Three wartime resisters: Hans and Sophie Scholl (White Rose, executed 22 Feb 1943 after distributing anti-Nazi leaflets); Claus von Stauffenberg (July Plot bomb attack 20 Jul 1944, executed same night); Dietrich Bonhoeffer (anti-Nazi theologian, executed Flossenbürg 9 Apr 1945).
By April 1945 Soviet forces had encircled Berlin. Hitler, in his underground bunker, refused to surrender and ordered the defence of the capital to the last. On 30 April 1945 he took his own life. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945 — Stunde Null (Zero Hour) in German historical memory. The country was in ruins: bombed, divided into four Allied occupation zones, its infrastructure shattered, millions of its people displaced.
The scale of destruction is difficult to comprehend. Approximately 6 million Jewish people had been murdered. An estimated 220,000 to 500,000 Roma had been killed (USHMM). Around 3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity. Germany itself lost approximately 5 to 7 million military and civilian dead. The regime built on racial ideology had ended by destroying the nation it claimed to serve.