My grandfather was born in the 1920s and lived in Berlin, Germany, throughout World War II. The Second World War was a historical conflict that practically involved every part of the world between 1939 and 1945. It was one of the most influential and significant events in the 20th century. My grandfather narrated this story of what they experienced during the fight. The invasion of Poland by Adolf Hitler in 1939 drove France and Great Britain to declare war on Germany hence marking the onset of the violence. The incident took six years to end, claiming many lives of people and more destroyed land and property across the globe compared to any other war. It ended when Japan formally surrendered defeat, and U.S General Douglas MacArthur accepted.
When Hitler achieved power, the king smashed the democratic institutions of the nation and transformed Germany into a war state to conquer Europe. Hitler fueled the war to benefit the race of Aryans. More than 50 nations were involved in the fight, with more than 100 million soldiers deployed (Raudsepp & Zadora, 2019). Hitler was obsessed with having a superior race known as Aryan in his country. Mr. Adolf thought that this would be a chance to expand the state’s generation of pure Aryans. Nazi forces executed 11 million people they deemed undesirable or inferior during the conflict (Raudsepp & Zadora, 2019). Nazi party is the organization that returned wounded in World War 1 through forgery. Hitler believed that these persons were unworthy of life in their country. They included enslaved people, the Jewish community, Jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals.
World War II had an impact on my grandfather’s community. There was rationing of various commodities in the country, including food and clothing, in august 1939 and October of the same year, respectively. Consumer goods became expensive due to low supply, and German diets became monotonous since they could only consume potatoes, bread, and preserves. Germanies experienced meat shortages because they could no longer import from the United States of America. The limiting of food entitlements depended on special categories of people, including pregnant women, children, and heavy workers involved in the fight. Jews could receive low amounts of sustenance than Aryans. It was freezing during the winter of 1939-1940 due to coal shortages.
Area bombing led to the destruction of many homes and many deaths across the area. Within the first three years of the fight, 61 cities and a population of 25 million in the country had been attacked and destroyed (Raudsepp & Zadora, 2019). The war outbreak yielded German refugees from the western regions bordering France. Although many returned when fighting with Francians failed to begin. Area bombing made the cities flat because they were burnt down, thus displacing the people who lived there. The Soviet army, through Poland and the eastern part of Germany, forced the civilian population to flee westwards, avoiding the brutality of Russian soldiers.
My grandfather became a soldier through volunteering during this time. According to research by Raudsepp & Zadora, (2019) there was a creation of employment since 13.7 million German men served as soldiers during the war. Such allowed women to enter the workforce in large numbers, just as it happened during World War I. Several of them started working in factories and as medics. Transportation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners and civilians by Nazis from eastern Europe, where the war was concentrated, to other parts of the country to keep the fight going created jobs.
Hitler died in 1945 through suicide, leaving the country in an economic crisis that involved rationing, area bombing, refugees, and employment. The predicament affected the country and the individuals who lived there. However, Germany rose again and became a powerful nation economically in a miraculous way, according to researchers. The country began to improve its standards of living slowly. Within five years, the levels of output that the effects of the war had shuttered had returned to where they were before the war outbreak (Edele, 2020). The economic crisis was resolved by exporting local products, increasing food production, reducing the unemployment rate, and reducing the black market helped raise its economy again. World war II affected the future of all nations across the globe. Today’s world experiences the outcomes of the fight influenced by the political leader Adolf Hitler. Nazi party, before Hitler joined, had held racist, nationalist, and antisemitic views. Hitler’s and the Nazi’s party idea of eliminating other racial groups and remaining with the Aryan race impacts the worldview (Buscemi, 2022). Hitler believed that the German race was superior to the rest.
My grandfather’s perspective regarding this fight is that, currently, different parts of the world experience racial discrimination, and every ethnic group believes it is superior to others. Hitler’s plan to extinct Jews from the earth set out to weaken other communities and take over the land. Hitler trusted that Jewish people were destructive to the Aryan society; therefore, they did not deserve any place in Germany. Disabled persons, homosexuals, and other minorities were also to be eliminated since Hitler believed they did not fit the idea of the Aryan race. The war outbreak united the world, resulting in the formation of the United Nations Organization. The older man is still alive, and he believes that violence is not a tool to resolve racial problems. Still, through peaceful negotiation, the world can achieve amicable long-lasting solutions.
References
Buscemi, F. (2022). The Aryan Race of Animals: The role played by color in the visual semiotics of Nazi propaganda. The American Journal of Semiotics. Web.
Edele, M. (2020). Who won the Second World War and why should you care? Reassessing Stalin’s War 75 years after victory. Journal of Strategic Studies, 43(6-7), 1039-1062. Web.
Raudsepp, M., & Zadora, A. (2019). The sensitive scars of the second world war in teaching European history. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 27(1), 87-110. Web.