The impact of the war on civilians 1939 to 1945, including aerial bombing of cities, occupation policies and resistance, the Holocaust, displacement and forced labour, and the experience of women and children on the home front

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to describe and analyse the impact of the European war on civilians from September 1939 to May 1945 across the major categories: aerial bombing, occupation and collaboration, the Holocaust, forced labour and displacement, resistance, and home fronts. Strong answers integrate Eastern and Western experiences and acknowledge the asymmetric scale of Eastern civilian suffering. Friedlander, Mazower, Lowe, Snyder, and Overy supply the modern historiographical frame.

The answer

Total civilian deaths

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

The figures are conventional estimates and remain debated.

Strategic bombing

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).

The Allied bombing of Germany escalated through the war:

• The Battle of the Ruhr (March to July 1943).
• The bombing of Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah, 24 July to 3 August 1943): the firestorm of 27 to 28 July killed around 37,000 civilians and destroyed half the city.
• The Berlin bombing (November 1943 to March 1944): around 6,000 dead.
• The Dresden bombing (13 to 15 February 1945): around 25,000 dead, the city's wooden centre devastated by firestorm. The bombing of Dresden remains the most contested instance of Allied area bombing.

US Strategic Bombing Survey (1945 to 1946) estimated around 600,000 German civilian dead from bombing. The morality and effectiveness of the offensive have been debated since. Richard Overy (The Bombing War, 2013) is the major recent synthesis: bombing imposed significant economic and morale costs but did not by itself break German production until late 1944.

Occupation regimes

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

• Vichy France: officially independent but autonomous under Marshal Petain at Vichy from June 1940 to November 1942, then under direct German occupation. Collaboration was extensive (the Milice from 1943; deportation of around 76,000 Jews, of whom around 25 per cent were French citizens).
• Norway, the Netherlands: Reichskommissariate under Reichskommissare (Terboven, Seyss-Inquart). Collaborationist parties (Quisling's NS in Norway, Mussert's NSB in the Netherlands).
• Denmark: a "model protectorate" with limited German interference until August 1943.
• Belgium and northern France: military administration.
• Poland: the General Government under Hans Frank from October 1939; no recognition of Polish state. The Warthegau and Danzig-West Prussia were incorporated into the Reich.
• Occupied USSR: Reichskommissariate Ostland (Baltic plus Belorussia) and Ukraine; brutal exploitation with no indigenous governance recognised.

Nazi colonial planning in the East

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.
• Germanisation of around 14 million selected Slavs.

The Hunger Plan (Herbert Backe, May 1941) envisaged starving around 30 million Soviet civilians to redirect food to the Wehrmacht and the Reich. Implementation was uneven; the policy nonetheless caused mass death. Around 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German custody, mainly of starvation, in 1941 to 1942.

The Holocaust

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. Babi Yar (Kiev, 29 to 30 September 1941, around 33,000 dead). Around 1.5 million Jews were shot in 1941 to 1942.
• The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) coordinated the Final Solution under Heydrich.
• The Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, 1942 to 1943) killed around 1.7 million Jews, almost all from the General Government.
• Auschwitz-Birkenau operated as a combined labour and extermination camp through 1944. Around 1.1 million were murdered there, around 90 per cent of them Jews. The Hungarian deportation (May to July 1944) killed around 437,000 Hungarian Jews in eight weeks.

Total Holocaust deaths: around six million Jews. Saul Friedlander's two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007) is the standard scholarly account.

The Sinti and Roma genocide (Porajmos) killed around 220,000 to 500,000. Around 200,000 disabled people were murdered in the T4 programme (October 1939 to August 1941) and its decentralised continuation. Around 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German custody. Polish Catholic deaths from occupation and reprisals reached around 1.8 million.

Forced labour and displacement

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.

In addition, from late 1942 the SS supplied around 700,000 concentration-camp prisoners to private and state industry, including IG Farben at Auschwitz, Krupp, Daimler-Benz, and the underground V-2 factory at Mittelbau-Dora.

The end of the war produced one of the largest forced migrations in history. Around 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet territories) between 1944 and 1948 under the Potsdam Agreement. Around 500,000 to 600,000 are estimated to have died in the expulsions. Around 60 million Europeans were displaced persons by May 1945.

Keith Lowe (Savage Continent, 2012) is the standard study of the postwar displacement and revenge violence.

Resistance

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

• France: the Maquis (rural), urban networks, the Combat, Liberation, and Franc-Tireur movements; coordinated by Jean Moulin from 1942 under de Gaulle's authority.
• Yugoslavia: Tito's Partisans (Communist) and Mihailovic's Chetniks (royalist). The Partisans liberated much of Yugoslavia by 1945.
• Poland: the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) under London authority; the largest single resistance army in occupied Europe. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April to May 1943) and the Warsaw Uprising (1 August to 2 October 1944) were the most prominent operations.
• Soviet Union: partisan movements in Belorussia and Ukraine, tied operationally to the Red Army by 1943.
• Greece: ELAS (Communist) and EDES (republican); civil war by 1944.
• Italy from September 1943: partisan movement of around 250,000 by 1945; executed Mussolini on 28 April 1945.

Resistance imposed real intelligence, sabotage, and political costs on the occupiers. Reprisals were brutal: Lidice (June 1942, around 340 dead after Heydrich's assassination), Oradour-sur-Glane (June 1944, around 642 dead), Marzabotto (September 1944, around 770 dead).

Home fronts

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). The evacuation of children from cities (Operation Pied Piper, from 1 September 1939) moved 1.5 million.

Germany mobilised more reluctantly. Nazi ideology resisted women's labour conscription; only in 1943 did Goebbels' "total war" speech (Sportpalast, 18 February 1943) authorise the broader use of women. Food rationing began in August 1939; meat rationing tightened from 1942. Foreign labour and concentration-camp labour partly replaced German men called up. Civilian morale declined sharply after Stalingrad (1943) and under Allied bombing (1943 to 1945).

The Soviet Union mobilised the most totally. Industries were evacuated east of the Urals (around 1,500 factories moved between July and November 1941). Civilians enrolled into labour brigades; women served as combat soldiers (including the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, the "Night Witches"). Civilian rationing was severe; Leningrad (siege September 1941 to January 1944) killed around 800,000 from starvation.

Children

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. Lebensborn-related kidnapping took around 200,000 children from occupied Eastern Europe for "Germanisation."

Timeline of civilian impact

Historiography

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

Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands, 2010) integrates Nazi and Soviet mass killing in the "bloodlands" of Eastern Europe.

Mark Mazower (Hitler's Empire, 2008) is the major study of the occupation regimes.

Richard Overy (The Bombing War, 2013) is the major recent synthesis on the air war's effects.

Keith Lowe (Inferno, 2007; Savage Continent, 2012) integrates the Hamburg bombing and the postwar displacement.

Antony Beevor (Berlin, 2002; The Second World War, 2012) is the major operational and human standard.

How to read a source on this topic

Sources on the civilian experience commonly include photographs of the Blitz, of Dresden after bombing, of the Warsaw Ghetto, of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, partisan and resistance memoirs, and government propaganda (Ministry of Information, Reich Ministry of Propaganda). Three reading habits.

First, weigh propaganda against documented mortality. Wartime British propaganda projected stoic Blitz resilience; the official histories acknowledge significant panic, looting, and mental breakdown.

Second, set the scale comparatively. Total British civilian dead (around 60,000) is around 0.4 per cent of Soviet civilian deaths (around 17 million). Soviet and Polish suffering was qualitatively different in scale and kind.

Third, treat the Holocaust as a category of its own. The murder of six million European Jews was not collateral civilian damage; it was the systematic ideological project of the regime. The Wannsee Conference, the Reinhard camps, and Auschwitz are the institutional record.

Common exam traps

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

Treating bombing as a symmetric phenomenon. 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.

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

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

In one sentence

The European war between 1939 and 1945 killed around 27 million civilians, the great majority on the Eastern Front, including around six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust (Einsatzgruppen 1941 to 1942, Reinhard camps 1942 to 1943, Auschwitz to 1944), through aerial bombing (Blitz, Hamburg, Dresden), occupation policies (Generalplan Ost, the Hunger Plan, the General Government), around 7.6 million foreign forced labourers in Germany, the displacement of around 60 million by May 1945, and the experience of home fronts (British evacuation, German rationing, Soviet evacuation east of the Urals) that mobilised civilian society more totally than any previous conflict in history.