Consequences of Adolf Hitler

The impact of Hitler's dictatorship has been felt on events in Europe and elsewhere ever since his death. In the short-term, Germany itself was physically and economically devastated, its sovereignty abolished, its territory filled with millions of refugees expelled from the lost provinces in the east. Stalin took the opportunity to rewrite the map of eastern and central Europe, moving the German border to the Oder-Neisse line. A Communist regime, the German Democratic Republic, was established in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. West Germany (the German Federal Republic) recovered its (de facto) sovereignty in 1949, but it was 20 years before the German economy was rebuilt, and 41 years before it was re-united.

For the Jewish people, Hitler's regime was the greatest calamity in their history since the fall of the Temple in AD 70. Of the world's 15 million Jews in 1939, more than a third were killed. Of the 3 million Jews in Poland, the heartland of European Jewish culture, barely 350,000 survived. Most of the remaining Jews in eastern and central Europe were destitute refugees, unable and/or unwilling to return to countries which they felt had betrayed them to the Nazis. This gave a powerful incentive to the Zionist movement to press for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This in turn led to the creation of Israel in 1948 and the Arab-Israeli conflicts that followed.

The peoples of eastern Europe found themselves under Soviet military occupation at the end of the war, and the Soviets rapidly installed subservient Communist regimes in all the countries they controlled. Some of the radical reforms these regimes carried out were initially popular, but it soon became clear that this came at the price of a total loss of national sovereignty. It was to be more than 40 years before the Russians retreated from their gains of 1945. The Communists emerged from the war sharing the vast prestige of the victorious Soviet armed forces, and for a while it looked as though they might take power in France, Italy and Greece.

Hitler, however, had killed more than 27 million Soviet citizens during the war, including some 11 million soldiers who fell in battle against Hitler's armies or died in POW camps. Millions of civilians also died from starvation, exposure, atrocities, and massacres, and a huge area of the Soviet Union from the suburbs of Moscow and the Volga River to the western border had been destroyed, depopulated, and reduced to rubble. The staggering mass death and destruction there badly damaged the Soviet economy, society, and national psyche. This confirmed the Soviet Union's already paranoid fear of the West, which led to the setting up of the Communist governments in eastern Europe; the Soviets hoped to use the satellite states there as a buffer zone against new invasions from the West, and to prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again. This resulted in a new bipolar world that was the setting for 45 years of struggle between the capitalist and Communist powers, the Cold War.

Britain and France were on the side of the victors, but they were exhausted and bankrupted by the war, and they never recovered their status as world powers. With Germany and Japan in ruins as well, the world was left with only two dominant powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Economic and political reality would soon force the dismantling of the European colonial empires, especially in Africa and Asia. The new states quickly found themselves unprepared for the realities of independence and faced the harsh reality of rapid population growth, social unrest, and political instability, all of which afflict many of these former colonies today.

The only positive outcome of the war was the destruction of Nazism and fascism as political and ideological forces, although modified forms of fascism lingered in Spain and Portugal under Franco and Salazar. The horrors of Nazism, when fully revealed by the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, also produced a radical re-assessment of the anti-Semitic attitudes which had been so prevalent in Europe. The process known as denazification meant that German society, in particular, was radically changed for the better in the postwar years. Other forms of pseudo-scientific racism, such as eugenics, were also discredited by the uses to which the Nazis put these doctrines. The founding of the United Nations on October 24 1945, and the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, were signs that at least some of the lessons of Hitler's career had been learned.