How was WW2 brought to an end? Chapter 17, Section 4,5. How was WW2 brought to an end?

After the war, Adolf Hitler was planning to make Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians slave labor, and allow Germans to settle their lands. During the war, 7 million workers were forced to labor for the Nazis in their own countries on farms, in industries, and in military camps. This inspired resistance.

Hitler believed that Aryan people were the creators of human cultural development, while Jews were responsible for the loss in WW1 and the Great Depression. The SS was given responsibility for what the Nazis called their Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The Final Solution was genocide of the Jewish people.

Genocide: the deliberate mass murder or physical extinction of a particular racial, political, or cultural group.

The Germans killed approximately 6 million Jews, more than 3 million of them in the death camps. 90 percent of the Jewish populations of Poland, the Baltic countries, and Germany were killed. Overall, the Holocaust was responsible for the death of nearly two out of every three European Jews.

Japan needed its new possessions in Asia to meet its growing need for raw materials, such as tin and oil, and as markets for its manufactured goods. Japanese leaders included them in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Allied forces under U. S. general Dwight D Allied forces under U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower landed on the Normandy beaches in history's greatest naval invasion, facing tough opposition. The Allies liberated the concentration camps and death camps. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, two days after Italian partisans, or resistance fighters, shot Mussolini.

Hitler relied on instruments of terror to maintain control Hitler relied on instruments of terror to maintain control. The SS was an important force for maintaining order. They came to control not only the secret police forces that Heinrich Himmler had set up but also the criminal police, concentration camps, execution squads, and death camps.

Harry S. Truman (who took over when Roosevelt died in office) had to decide whether to drop the newly-developed Atomic Bomb on Japan to end the war in the Pacific.. The first bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 190,000. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

After WW 2, Stalin wanted to establish pro-Soviet governments along the Soviet Union’s borders, in order to form a buffer against Western aggression. Winston Churchill declared that "an iron curtain" had "descended across the continent," dividing Europe into two hostile camps. Stalin saw this as a call to war on the USSR.

Cold War: the period of political tension following World War II and ending with the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s.