Quick questions on Impact of the war on civilians: HSC Modern History Peace and Conflict

The European war was the deadliest in modern history for civilians. Estimates of civilian deaths in the European theatre:

The German bombing of British cities (the Blitz) began on 7 September 1940 and continued in major form to May 1941. Coventry was severely bombed on 14 November 1940 (around 600 dead, the cathedral destroyed). London was hit on around 71 nights of major bombing. Total British civilian dead from bombing: around 43,000 (Blitz) and 9,000 (V-1 and V-2 attacks of 1944 to 1945).

Around 250 million Europeans came under German or Italian occupation between 1939 and 1944. Occupation regimes varied by Nazi racial valuation of the population:

Generalplan Ost (drafts from 1940; major version 1942) was the SS plan for the colonisation of Eastern Europe. It envisaged: - German settlement of around 10 million colonists in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and western Russia. - Forced expulsion or enslavement of around 30 million Slavs to western Siberia. - Elimination of European Jewry.

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question proceeded in stages: - Persecution and emigration, 1933 to 1939. - Ghettoisation in occupied Poland, October 1939 to 1942. The Warsaw Ghetto (sealed November 1940) held over 400,000 Jews at peak. - Einsatzgruppen mass shootings in the occupied USSR, June 1941 onwards.

Fritz Sauckel as Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment (from March 1942) coerced around 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and around 1.9 million POWs into work in Germany by 1944. The largest categories were Ostarbeiter (Soviet and Polish, around 2.8 million, the worst-treated), French (around 600,000), Italians after September 1943.

Resistance movements operated across occupied Europe with varying scale, ideology, and effectiveness:

Britain mobilised civilian society extensively. Conscription was extended in December 1941 to unmarried women aged 20 to 30 (then later to married women). The Women's Land Army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Wrens, and the WAAF brought women into uniform; around 8.7 million women were in some form of war service by 1943. Rationing was tight (food rationing from January 1940; clothes from June 1941).

Children experienced the war as bombing victims, evacuees, deportees, Holocaust victims, and Hitler Youth or Komsomol participants. Around 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. The British evacuation moved 1.5 million children to safer rural areas in 1939 (most returned within months when the bombing did not yet come). Soviet children were often raised by grandparents while parents worked; many were orphaned.

Saul Friedlander (Nazi Germany and the Jews, vols 1-2, 1997 to 2007) is the standard scholarly study of the Holocaust.

The Eastern Front absorbed the great majority of civilian deaths; integrating both is essential.

German bombing of Britain was ineffective at imposing strategic damage; Allied bombing of Germany was on a far larger scale and imposed real economic costs.

It is part of the institutional record of mass killing in the East alongside the Holocaust.

Einsatzgruppen began June 1941; Wannsee was 20 January 1942; the Reinhard camps operated 1942 to 1943; Auschwitz at industrial scale 1942 to 1944.