The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (71 page)

The urban warfare chewed up German manpower with such ferocity that the rural flanks of its Stalingrad line were being held by Italian and Romanian allies. The Russians launched two big pincers against these flanks in November, smashing them and snipping off a pocket that trapped 275,000 men in the devastated city. This pocket was starved, pounded, and assaulted over the next few months until finally, in February 1943, the pitiful remnants surrendered. Most were so haggard, frostbitten, and malnourished that they didn’t even survive the trip to Soviet POW camps. Fewer still survived those.

Possibly 750,000 soldiers and 140,000 civilians died in the Battle of Stalingrad, making it the second bloodiest battle in human history.
¹¹
Yes, it was only the second. History’s bloodiest battle was the simultaneous battle for Leningrad, in which some 1.5 million soldiers and civilians died.
¹²
In September 1941, after the Germans had advanced to the suburbs of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), their Finnish allies closed the circle from behind and isolated the Soviet Union’s second largest city. Because the Soviet high command had made little effort to evacuate the city’s population, 3 million civilians were trapped with no hope of resupply. Unlike the battle for Stalingrad, there are no tactical oscillations to describe. The Soviet army dug in and held on for nine hundred days under the worst punishment Germany could offer.

Cut off from outside help, the people of Leningrad stretched their rations as thin as possible, then ate their animals, then ate grass, belts, and bark, then each other, and finally just starved by the hundreds of thousands.
¹³
During winter, the Soviets built a road across the frozen surface of Lake Lagoda to get supplies into the city and civilians out, but it was vulnerable to air attack, and it sank into the lake at the first thaw. Although the official death toll of civilians is set at 632,000, more than 1 million Leningraders may have disappeared in the siege.
¹⁴
Eventually the Red Army cleared a narrow overland corridor into the city, but this roadway was still within easy range of German artillery and aircraft. It wasn’t until January 1944, when battles elsewhere dragged the front lines back toward Germany, that the siege safely ended.

Pacific War

After France fell, the Japanese tried to grab their orphaned colonies in Indochina. The Americans were trying to stay out of the war, but they kept tightening the economic screws to make Japan back off. First the Americans banned Japanese shipping from the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal, followed by an oil and steel embargo that threatened to cripple the Japanese war machine. The only solution that planners in Tokyo could see would be to seize the oil-rich East Indies from Britain and the Netherlands, both of which were busy fighting the Nazis. In 1941 Japan moved troops, planes, and warships into French Indochina.

By now it was obvious to everyone that Japan was setting up to strike across the archipelagoes of Southeast Asia, but when the attack finally came in December, the Japanese surprised everyone and reached halfway across the Pacific to smack the American fleet with a crippling air attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In the several months that followed, Japanese fleets and troops scooped up the resource-rich archipelagoes that had originally been held by the Dutch, British, and Americans.

To everyone’s surprise, the 85,000-man British garrison at Singapore (mostly Indians under British officers) surrendered almost immediately—the largest defeat in British history. This was followed by several lawless months in which the Japanese massacred perhaps 25,000 Chinese inhabitants of the city.

Also a surprise, the 125,000-man American garrison in the Philippines (mostly native Filipinos) held on longer than anyone expected. In the end, they too surrendered—the largest defeat in American history. Enraged by the delay, the Japanese herded their prisoners up the Bataan Peninsula without water or rest, shooting, bayoneting, or clubbing to death any who stumbled. Thousands died.

Having established control of the East Indies, the Japanese needed to install a defensive perimeter among the small islands of the central Pacific and drive the last of the Americans out; however, by intercepting and decoding Japanese radio transmissions, the Americans learned the target and timetable of the Japanese offensive against Midway Island. Scout planes and radar confirmed the approach of the Japanese fleet, which the Americans attacked on the open ocean with wave after wave of carrier-based aircraft. The Japanese retaliated in kind, but luck and planning were with the Americans, who sank four enemy aircraft carriers—more than the Japanese could easily replace. The momentum of the Pacific war shifted to the Americans.

Europe in the Balance

After the British had been chased entirely off the continent of Europe, they had no easy way to maintain an active role in the war and were forced onto the defensive. Hitler tried to break British stubbornness with a submarine blockade and relentless air raids. In the Battle of Britain, German aircraft attacked England directly for several months in 1940, eventually killing 60,000 civilians without gaining uncontested control of the sky or shifting the military balance in any way. German U-boats hunted along the shipping lanes around Britain to cut the island off from vital supplies. As in the First World War, the German blockade caused friction with the theoretically neutral Americans, leading to open but undeclared naval warfare between the two powers. Finally, in December 1941, a few days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler formally declared war on the United States. Eventually, British code-breakers figured out how to track German U-boats, and British and American aircraft based on the islands of the North Atlantic provided effective cover for convoys along much of the route.

For a few years, the British could only nibble at the edges of fascist Europe. The British easily blocked the Italian attempts to seize Egypt and Greece, but German forces arrived to stiffen the Italians and push the British back again. In Greece, this ended matters in favor of the Axis, but in Egypt, the British defense eventually firmed up and stopped the enemy offensive. Then the counterattacks began. Eventually, the British and Americans cleared North Africa and attacked into Italy. This knocked the Italians out of the war, but German forces dug in halfway down the peninsula and proved difficult to budge.

By 1943 the Russian front had developed a predictable pattern. The Russians attacked in winter, and the Germans attacked in summer. For the summer of 1943, the German high command planned Operation Citadel to crush the Kursk salient between two powerful tank offensives and grind the local Soviet army group out of existence. The July battle was the largest armored battle in history, but the German thrusts slowed, then stopped, then fell back in the face of a counteroffensive. For the first time in two years of war, the Russians won a battle without snow. This three-week battle had killed 325,000 soldiers all told, but significantly, the Russians had lost only three and a half times as many as the Germans.
¹⁵
This was a sixfold improvement over the first year of the war, when twenty times as many Soviets died as Germans.
¹⁶

Holocaust

As with all empire builders, the Nazis exploited the cheap manpower of conquered enemies. By 1944, eight million foreigners, mostly civilians, had been brought to Germany as slave labor.
*
Another two million were working under German command in the territories. They were assigned jobs as farmers, factory hands, and domestic servants. Foreign workers supplied a quarter of the labor in the chemical industry and a third in the armaments industry.
¹⁷

However, Hitler had bigger plans for the Third Reich. To purify his new European empire, he classified anyone who didn’t fit into conventional society as subhuman and scheduled them for extermination. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, and mental patients were jailed, gassed, shot, and castrated by the tens of thousands.

Jews were at the top of the list of Hitler’s targets. On top of the traditional European mistrust of the Jews as an alien religion and the paranoid suspicion that Jews were controlling society with their banks and media empires, the Nazis added a pseudoscientific fear of genetic pollution by the Jews living among them. Upon taking control of Germany, Hitler restricted the civil liberties of Jews. They were forbidden from one profession after another and banned from the company of decent folk. On the night of November 9–10, 1938 (Kristallnacht or the “Night of Broken Glass”), mobs went out to beat Jews and loot their property. By the time the war began, two-thirds of the Jews in Germany and Austria had seen which way history was heading and fled to other countries.
¹⁸

The conquest of Europe, however, brought millions more Jews under Hitler’s control. Not only was this more Jews than could be simply expelled, but also it was proving to be more than could be easily massacred. In January 1942, much of the Nazi middle management gathered in a villa at Wannsee outside Berlin to plan the Final Solution to the Jewish problem.

Whenever the Germans conquered new territory, they immediately registered all Jews. Some would be shot on the spot, but most were herded together into local ghettos. Smaller ghettos were eventually wiped out or consolidated into larger ghettos, and the largest anywhere was the Warsaw ghetto. Walled off from the rest of the city, Jews might be let out to work, but otherwise, they were kept quarantined. Disease and malnutrition cut the population drastically, but even that wasn’t fast enough, so the Germans began shipping them off to concentration camps to be used as slave labor.
¹⁹

The Nazis realized that simply shooting the Jews was inefficient. It tied up troops and trucks and wasted ammunition. A spray of machine-gun fire into a line of Jews left too many wounded who had to be dispatched with pistol shots to the head. Burial added more work to the process, and the noise alerted the neighborhood to what was happening.

Cyanide gas was the answer. It took awhile for the Nazis to iron out the difficulties, but eventually it all came together in death camps scattered around Poland. With cover stories about resettlement in the East, the Jews were collected at train stations in the ghettos and shipped out in boxcars. Upon arriving at the death camps, they were quickly sorted by age, sex, and labor potential.

Jews who weren’t needed for hard labor were stripped of their belongings and sent to the showers. Instead of water, crystals of Zyklon-B, the trade name for hydrogen cyanide, would be dumped through vents in the roof, vaporizing into poisonous gas. After a frantic several minutes of screaming and scrambling, the victims would fall silent. The gas would be pumped out, and the corpses would be carted off to high-capacity crematoria.

From mid-1942 to mid-1943, in just over a year, 600,000 people were killed at Belzec—and Belzec ranked only third in capacity. The largest camp, Auschwitz, was open for three years, during which 1.1 million people were killed. In the single year that Treblinka was in operation, 800,000 were killed. A third of a million were killed at Chelmno and a quarter million at Sobibor. The system was so efficient that Treblinka operated with fewer than 150 camp personnel, supplemented by inmate labor that could be liquidated when the job was done. By the end of 1943, most of the Jews under German control were dead, and all of the death camps but Auschwitz were shut down.
²⁰

Some German allies (Croatia, Romania) were perfectly happy to cooperate with the Final Solution and established their own concentration camps, while others (Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Italy) tried to stay out of it. Regardless, most Axis countries registered native Jews, limited their participation in public life, and willingly deported alien Jews back to countries under Hitler’s control. For the Italian and Hungarian Jews, the reluctance of their governments to murder them was only a temporary reprieve. As the war turned against Germany, both these countries tried to pull out of the Axis, but German troops swooped in and deposed the wavering governments. Hundreds of thousands of local Jews were then crated up, shipped off, and gassed with stunning efficiency.
²¹

The Roma people, or Gypsies, were another rootless minority reviled and targeted by the Nazis. Long slandered as thieves and sorcerers, the Gypsies were hunted down and exterminated as thoroughly as the Jews. The most common estimate is that 250,000 Roma died, but no one really knows. It may have been more than 1 million.
²²

Asian Mainland

Meanwhile, in order to cut the supply route between the Nationalist forces in China and the outside world, the Japanese conquered Burma from the British, but they soon found that the overland transportation lines in this part of the world ran unhelpfully north to south, from the interior to the coast, while the shipping lanes ran perilously around the Malay Peninsula, where Allied submarines lurked. With their army now fighting its way westward toward India, the Japanese needed to connect their staging ground in Thailand directly with the Burmese front. They rounded up native labor to cut a railroad through the jungles, over the mountains and across rugged river valleys, against the geologic grain of the country. Fifty to a hundred thousand Burmese civilians and 16,000 Allied POWs were worked to death in this project.
²³