Not surprisingly, the victors said yes. In an action unprecedented in history, they brought their subject foes before war crimes tribunals with international courts. Multitudes of horror stories were published before the world, particularly during the Nuremberg Trials, which began on November 20th, 1945. Many of the tales were unquestionably true. Others were fabricated, such as the Russian attempt to pass off the Katyn massacre of some 15,000 Polish officers on the Germans. Sadly, the procedures of justice at Nuremberg, and in many other war crimes trials, were far from just. The defense was not allowed to contest “facts” that everyone took for granted, which put them in a very awkward position, since the prosecution by and large determined what were the commonly known facts. There were rumors of torture of several prisoners, many of them subsequently to be proven true. In the end, many death and prison sentences were handed out, some of them later mitigated when the passions of war had cooled off.
The victims of the Soviet Union were the worst off at war’s end. Nearly all of eastern Europe lay under a tyranny worse than Hitler’s. Thousands of German troops were condemned to prison camps after the war, some never returning home, nearly all of them forced into slave labor for at least 5-10 years. Members of the SS, regardless of whether they were combat or occupation troops, were generally exterminated by the Soviets. Both sides sought to secure, by violence if necessary, the aid of German scientists, to build up their weapons’ programs, as the alliance of West and East began to crumble.
The Cold War, of course, resulted directly from the Second World War. Soviet and American rivalry soon blossomed, reaching fever pitch after the Soviets gained nuclear capability. The dark shadow of Communism hung over much of Europe, leaving those who still retained democratic government in fear, just as they had been before 1939. Poland, for whose sake the Allies had gone to war in 1939, was a Soviet satellite, as was eastern Germany. In the east, Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces would eventually defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s armies, who fled to Taiwan. Mao would institute perhaps the bloodiest regime in history on the Chinese mainland. Tyranny had been the order of the day for much of the world before the Second World War. After the war, it remained a grim fact, and fear was exacerbated by the presence of weapons capable of unthinkable destruction.
The idealistic Allied leaders had hoped to end war by creating a United Nations, stronger than the League of Nations born out of the First World War. Many tended to believe Germany was the cause of all wars, and that destruction of Prussian militancy and Nazi tyranny would end conflict in the world. Sad to say, they were wrong. The United Nations has proven itself corrupt and ineffective. There has not been another world war, and for that, we may be thankful. But small wars have been numerous, tyrannies abundant, and bloodshed plentiful. Hardly five years after battering Japan into surrender, American troops returned to the Far East for three years of bloody conflict on the peninsula of Korea. Wars small and great have raged across Africa, Asia, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Latin America, largely as the results of the Second World War.
The Second World War brought down three monstrous tyrannies. It helped to establish many more. Was the destruction worth it? We all must judge for ourselves, and leave the final judgment to God.
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