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[edit] Casualties, civilian impact, and atrocities
- See also: World War II casualties, War crimes during World War II, Consequences of German Nazism, and Population transfer in the Soviet Union
Estimates for the total casualties of the war vary, but most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians.[1][2][3] Many civilians died as a result of disease, starvation, massacres, genocide. Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 85% were on the Allied side (mostly Soviet and Chinese) and 15% on the Axis side. One estimate is that 12 million civilians died in Holocaust camps, 1.5 million by bombs, 7 million in Europe from other causes, and 7.5 million in China from other causes.[4] Figures on the amount of total casualties varies to a wide extent because the majority of deaths were not documented.
[edit] Concentration camps and slave work
The Holocaust was the killing of approximately six million European Jews, as well as another 6 million others who were deemed "unworthy of life" (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Roma) as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist government in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.
In addition to the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag, or labor camps, led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war (POW) and even Soviet citizens themselves who had been or were thought to be supporters of the Nazis. Sixty percent (1,238,000 ref. Krivosheev) of Soviet POWs died during the war. Vadim Erlikman puts it at 2.6 million Soviet POWs that died in German Captivity.[6] Richard Overy gives the number of 5.7 million Soviet POW and out of those 57% died or were killed.[7]
Japanese POW camps also had high death rates, many were used as labour camp. According to the findings of the Tokyo tribunal, the death rate of occidental prisonners was 27.1%, seven times that of POW's under the Germans and Italians [8] The death rate of Chinese was much larger as, according to the directive ratified on 5 August 1937 by Hirohito, the constraints of international law were removed on those prisoners [9]. Thus, if 37,583 prisoners from the UK and 28,500 from Netherlands were released after the surrender of Japan, the number for the Chinese was only 56. [10]
According to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Kôa-in for slave labor in Manchukuo and north China.[11] According to Mitsuyoshi Himeta, at least 2.7 million died during the Sankō Sakusen operation implemented in Heipei and Shantung by General Yasuji Okamura.
On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the internment of thousands of Japanese, Italians, German Americans, and some emigrants from Hawaii who fled after the bombing of Pearl Harbor for the duration of the war. 150,000 Japanese-Americans were interned by the U.S. and Canadian governments, as well as nearly 11,000 German and Italian residents of the U.S.
[edit] Chemical and bacteriological weapons
Despite the international treaties and a resolution adopted by the League of Nations on 14 May 1938 condemning the use of toxic gas by Japan, the Imperial Japanese Army frequently used chemical weapons. Because of fears of retaliation, however, those weapons were never used against Westerners but only against other Asians judged "inferior" by the imperial propaganda. According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, the authorization for the use of chemical weapons was given by specific orders (rinsanmei) issued by Hirohito himself. For example, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions during the invasion of Wuhan, from August to October 1938.
The biological weapons were experimented on human beings by many units incorporated in the Japanese army, such as the infamous Unit 731, integrated by Imperial decree in the Kwantung army in 1936. Those weapons were mainly used in China and, according to some Japanese veterans, against Mongolians and Soviet soldiers in 1939 during the Nomonhan incident.[12] According to documents found in the Australian national archives in 2004 by Yoshimi and Yuki Tanaka, cyanide gas was tested on Australian and Dutch prisoners in November 1944 in the Kai islands. [13]
[edit] Bombings
Massive aerial bombing by both Axis and Allied air forces took the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians. For the first and so far only time, nuclear weapons were used in combat: two atomic bombs released by the United States over Japan devastated Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki.
[edit] War trials
From 1945 to 1951, German and Japanese officials and personnel were prosecuted for war crimes. The most senior German officials were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, and many Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial and other war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region.
