21st century conflicts were shaped by World War II

WASHINGTON, June 9 (UPI) -- President Barack Obama celebrated the 65th anniversary of D-Day this weekend. D-Day marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. Within three months, its conquests of France and Poland had been reversed by the Anglo-American armies driving from the west and the Soviet Red Army from the east.

The victory at the end of World War II that resulted from these vast battles was the crucible that created the template of the modern world. And it ended exactly the opposite way its prime mover expected it to.

When Adolf Hitler went to war against Poland, he did not dream the way the world would change. But then, nobody did.

The Nazi armies crossed into Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Two days later, Britain and then France reluctantly declared war on Hitler's Third Reich.

The global conflict that followed has come to be called "the good war," but it cost the lives of an estimated 50 million people. Some analysts put the total killed directly or indirectly by the war, history's bloodiest conflict to date, as high as 80 million. Winston Churchill preferred to call it "the unnecessary war."

Out of that seething cauldron poured the modern world. It was a world that in almost all respects was the very opposite of the one Hitler thought he was creating when he launched his tanks east that fateful day.

The Nazi leader thought he was creating a racist German Empire that would last 1,000 years. Less than six years after he began the war, he shot himself as his once proud imperial capital Berlin burned around him -- flattened night and day by Allied air raids and the artillery of the victorious Soviet Red Army.

Hitler thought he had a divine mission to crush communism and enslave the Slav peoples. Instead, the outcome of the war left the Soviet Union the mightiest conventional military power on Earth and one of the two superpowers that would decide the destinies of the globe for the next half-century.

Hitler sought to annihilate the Jewish people in his so-called Final Solution. At least 6 million innocent victims perished under the most nightmarish conditions in what Jews called "The Holocaust." But out of that bloodbath, the survivors established a militarily strong state of Israel that became embroiled with its neighbors in a series of conflicts. The one with the Palestinians remains acute even into this 21st century. Obama addressed both the Holocaust and the Palestinian issues in his speech at Cairo University last Thursday.

To Hitler, the very idea that the colonized peoples of Africa and South Asia could manage their own affairs would have seemed ludicrous. But only a few years after his Third Reich crashed to destruction, the exhausted nations of Western Europe responded to what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan called "a wind of change" and withdrew -- sometimes bowing to necessity, often irresponsibly precipitously, sometimes only after bitter guerrilla wars -- from their vast empires.

Hitler would also have loathed the changes that transformed Germany itself, though the German people themselves welcomed their transformation. The arrogant, militant conquering power of 1939 rose rapidly from the ashes of its defeat in 1945 -- the time Germans themselves called "Year Zero." But it revived as a peaceful, stable and prosperous Federal Republic.

--

Part 2: The new Germany and the new Europe