Dates and Belligerents
For a start, there’s disagreement on when the war started and two common dates for when it finished. In terms of Europe, Russia generally holds that the 'Great Patriotic War' began on June 22nd 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, while Western Europe uses September 1st 1939, the German invasion of Poland. Both use the date of Germany's unconditional surrender as the end (at least in Europe), but the Western Allies accepted the surrender on May 8th and the Russian May 9th 1945.
Despite featuring Nazi Germany, the media's most famous 'baddies', the opposing alliances aren't clear either thanks to some fluid politics. The bulk of the European war was fought by the fascist 'Axis' of Germany and Italy against the uneasy alliance of France, the British Empire, the United States and Communist Russia with numerous small contributors on both sides. However, Russia began the war by seizing and suppressing Poland in allegiance with Germany in 1939 - albeit having first tried to find support against Germany from the western nations – until Germany invaded Russia in 1941, while an Italy freed from fascist rulers joined the Allies in 1943. All across Europe over fifty million combatants fought, with over ten million causalities and equal that number of civilian deaths.
The Causes of World War Two
The immediate trigger for war was the Nazi invasion of Poland, a conquest too far for the allied nations who had seen Austrian and Czech lands subsumed into the Reich already. The driving force was unquestionably Hitler, who wanted war and racial domination. But argument rages about the wider background, the political, cultural and economic climate which allowed Hitler into power to begin with.
Many start in 1918 with the end of World War One and the Treaty of Versailles, whose 'war guilt' and rampant anti-German clauses has led some to say another war was inevitable, or even that world wars one and two are part of the same conflict, albeit with a large ceasefire in the middle. Hitler certainly played on German beliefs that they had been betrayed and treated unfairly at the war's end. The Allied Occupation of Germany which ended World War Two prevented a repeat.
Studies of the 'causes' often examine the creation and fall of the Weimer Republic (Germany’s fragile inter-war democracy), the world depression which began in 1929, the latent racism of European culture, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, the intransigence of Britain and France in the face of growing central European militarism and the successful application of German might in the Spanish Civil War. These factors are usually tied together to present a picture which, at its simplest, involves desperate citizens turning from weak democracies to martial dictatorships which played on their basest fears and appeared able to solve their problems.
The War
The Second World War in Europe was fought on three main fronts: East, West and Italian. The most decisive and bloody was the East, where Axis troops reached Stalingrad in the south and almost Moscow in the north before being pushed all the way back to Berlin by a Soviet army of over twenty million combatants. The Western Front was temporarily dominated by Germany after their swift conquest of France in 1940, but on June 6th 1944 it was reopened by successful allied landings in Normandy. The Italian front, often called the 'forgotten front' saw Allied troops fight their way up the peninsular, allowing a non-fascist Italy to join the Allies. European troops also fought in North Africa, Asia and Australasia.
Unlike many previous conflicts, the World War Two was also a battle of racial and individual survival. Nazi Germany was actively trying to enslave the Slavic groups and exterminate Jews, Gypsies and the physically or mentally handicapped, leading to the development death camps which murdered twelve million people, the most infamous being Auschwiz-Birkenau. At the same time the Soviet Gulag system imprisoned millions, while the ideology/cruelty of Communist high command, which considered people as just another national resource to be spent, led to millions of civilian deaths. The Soviets, just like the Nazis, also purged the Polish population of 'enemies'.
