3) D2_H3 De mens(heid) als slachtoffer (cursus)

D2-H3: The Humanity as 'Sacrifice'

I. Introduction

• World War I and World War II are named for the countries that fought each other worldwide and the high death toll they claimed.
  • Approximately 20 million and 60 million victims, respectively.
• A unique aspect of World War II is the high number of civilian casualties.
• World War I was a typical military conflict with primarily unintended civilian casualties as 'collateral damage'.
• During World War II, the number of civilian casualties (62%) far exceeded the military casualties (38%) due to numerous targeted atrocities against the civilian population.
• This suffering led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

II. Research Questions

• Main Question: Why did World War II have so many civilian casualties?
• Sub-questions:
  • What atrocities were committed against the civilian population?
  • How did Nazi Germany organize the genocide of the Jews?

III. Source study

• Skills and Insights:
  • Interpreting facts and symbolism (propaganda posters).
  • Distinguishing between main and side issues.
  • Applying analysis, synthesis, and typologies to diverse source material.

1. What atrocities were committed against the civilian population?

• The atrocities during the Spanish Civil War stirred public opinion in the 1930s but seemed only a prelude to those during World War II.
• The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica is an example and was immortalized in Picasso's painting Guernica.

BRON 1: The bombing of Guernica and Pablo Picasso

a) Analysis of the message and visual elements of the painting Guernica

• Source: BBC-News, Guernica: What inspired Pablo Picasso's masterpiece?, 2017

b) Genesis context of the painting Guernica.

• Between 1936 and 1939, a civil war raged in Spain between Nationalists and Republicans.
  • The Nationalists were led by General Franco and supported by Mussolini and Hitler.
  • During Franco's conquest of northern Spain, Guernica, located in Spanish Basque Country, was bombed by German and Italian aircraft on April 26, 1937.
  • Estimates of the number of deaths range from 120 to over 2000.
  • On April 1, 1939, the Spanish Civil War ended. Spain was now a dictatorship under Franco.
• Pablo Picasso was asked by the Spanish Republican government to create a work for the World Exhibition held in Paris in 1937.
  • When he read about the bombing of Guernica, he decided to take that event as his subject.
  • Source: K. Metz, Picasso’s Guernica, on Historiek.net, 2019.

c) Photo gallery: from bombardment to painting

• The ruins of Guernica after the air raid.
• Newspaper headline: the bombing was an international front page.

Discuss and Reflect:

• How does Picasso try to make the suffering of war as palpable as possible, and what visual elements does he use to reinforce this?
• Picasso has always refused to give personal explanations of the symbolism in the painting. Do you agree with the interpretation of the documentary makers, or do you see other possible interpretations?
• The painting was perceived as very striking in the 1930s. Would this still make the same impression in the 21st century? Why or why not?

BRON 2: Crimes against humanity according to the Belgian Penal Code.

• Art. 136ter.
• In accordance with the Statute of the International Criminal Court, a crime against humanity means one of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population and with knowledge of that attack:
  1. Murder;
  2. Extermination;
  3. Enslavement;
  4. Forced deportation or transfer of population;
  5. Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
  6. Torture;
  7. Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or other forms of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
  8. Persecution of any group or identifiable collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, or sexist grounds or other criteria recognized as universally unacceptable under international law;
  9. Enforced disappearances of persons;
  10. Apartheid;
  11. Other inhuman acts of a similar nature that intentionally cause serious suffering or serious physical injury or damage to mental or physical health.
• Source: Belgian Penal Code (June 8, 1867)

Task:

• Mark the keywords of the crimes against humanity recognized by the Belgian Penal Code and study them well or list them here.

• Study the following documentation on various atrocities committed during World War II. Search for additional information about the events and name the crime against humanity each time:

BRON 3: Photo gallery: documented atrocities during WWII

a) Nanjing Massacre (1937-38)

b) The Bromberger Blutsonntag (1939)

c) Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre (1945)

d) The bombing of Dresden (1945)

e) The atomic bombing of Hiroshima (1945)

Task:

• Place the appropriate crimes against humanity with each event.

Doordeker

• What criteria would you use to distinguish between the crime of 'murder' and that of 'extermination' in civilian casualties?

2. How did Nazi Germany organize the genocide of the Jews?

• The atrocity against humanity that received the most attention after the war was the genocide of the Jews, also known as 'Judeocide', 'Holocaust', or 'Shoah'.
  • The phenomenon of genocide itself is not historically unique.
  • The Judeocide is seen as the darkest page in Western history because it is by far the largest genocide in modern history, with 6 million innocent Jewish victims as a result.
  • Two elements make the Judeocide remarkable:
    • The intense irrational hatred of Jews cultivated by the Nazi regime.
    • The bureaucracy, camp system, and industrial character of the genocide itself.

(1) The irrational intensity of the hatred of Jews among the Nazis

• Aligned with an old tradition of hatred of Jews or anti-Semitism in Europe, which became remarkably popular in the early 20th century, even outside Germany.

BRON 4: Origin of anti-Semitism during the interbellum

• 'Anti-Semitism' was the new term for an old phenomenon that manifested itself everywhere on the continent: hatred of Jews.
• The traditional Christian animosity towards 'the murderers of Christ', which had existed for centuries, remained strong and was promoted by the Christian clergy, both Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.
• Another deep-rooted element of that hatred had to do with centuries-old economic and social rancor, which had been reinforced by the fact that Jews had recently been given more freedoms to participate in business and cultural life.
  • That soon led to Jews being blamed for every economic setback.
• By the end of the nineteenth century, the old, often vile hatred of the Jews had been reinforced with a new, even more malicious element.
  • Now there was also a new, potentially deadly racial doctrine that offered a pseudo-scientific, biological justification for hatred and persecution.
  • Older forms of discrimination, although serious enough, had at least left room for the (sometimes forced) conversion of Jews to Christianity.
  • However, biological anti-Semitism ruled that out. According to this view, Jews were scientifically, racially, 'by their blood', different.
  • A Jew could no more become a Frenchman or a German than a cat could become a dog. Such a doctrine led not only to discrimination but to total exclusion.
  • One step further was the possibility of total destruction.
• The dark side of Europe's 'golden age' of civilization and progress also appeared in embryonic form in another way of thinking: 'eugenics' and the closely related 'social Darwinism'.
  • That originated in the work of London's Sir Francis Galton, who used the theory of evolution of his uncle, Charles Darwin, to argue that abilities were also hereditary and that the human race could thus be improved by genetic manipulation.
  • Eugenics aroused interest in other European countries, including the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and Germany, but also in the US before World War I.
  • It was seen as a 'progressive science'.
• In a personal letter from 1908, more than thirty years before the Nazis started their euthanasia practices, the esteemed English novelist D.H. Lawrence even approvingly considered the construction of a large 'room of death' in which, to the sounds of soft music, 'all the sick, lame and mutilated' could be carefully laid to rest.
• From: I. Kershaw, The Descent into Hell: Europe 1914-1949, 2015.

Task:

• Give and discuss the four explanations the author gives for the intensity and popularity of hatred of the Jews in Europe during the interbellum [Pay attention to the listing words: e.g., first, then, etc.]

• The irrational aspect points to the fact that the hatred of Jews was based on generally unfounded (conspiracy) theories.

BRON 5: Anti-Semitism in Nazism

a) Hitler on the Jews in Mein Kampf

• It is a race, without a country: they are everywhere, they live scattered as a race among other races, as a state among other states, they do not live there 'normally', but always as a parasite in the body of other peoples.
• The goal of the Jew in this deviant struggle is: lowering the racial level of the higher peoples, their 'Entnationalisierung' and then controlling the resulting racial mash by exterminating the national intelligentsia and replacing it with members of his own people.
• Thus, the Jew strives for world domination.
• In Europe, the Jew sees democracies as their means of power. Behind the scenes, they have been dictating politics since the end of the war.
• With the rise of democracy, the aristocratic principle of nature has immediately disappeared: now the special 'Persönlichkeit' can no longer take the fate of the people into his hands as the greatest leader.
• Instead of him, the majority of stupidity, incompetence, and cowardice now reigns. Thus, democracy, which only the Jew can praise because it is as vile and untrue as himself, poisons all of life; that is, it breaks down.
• If the Jew triumphs over the peoples of this world thanks to his Marxist creed, then his crown will be the wreath on the grave of humanity.
• Source: A; Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925

b) Anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda

Inscriptions

• 'Der ewige Jude' ('The Eternal Jew')
• 'Hinter de Feindmächten: der Jude' ('behind the enemy: the Jew')
• Title: 'Lustige Blätter'
• Episode: July 1943
• Caption: 'einer friẞt den anderen, der Jude friẞt sie alle' ('One eats the other, the Jew eats them all')

Task:

• Summarize the (conspiracy) theories from Hitler's Mein Kampf and Nazi propaganda.
• What makes Hitler's conspiracy theories and Nazi propaganda unbelievable? Reflect critically.
• What was Hitler trying to achieve with his conspiracy theory, do you think?

The Ten Stages of Genocide

• It is often difficult to understand that societies are capable of committing a large-scale genocide that requires more than (hatred of Jews).
• Nevertheless, experts point out that every society is susceptible to genocide if a preparation process is followed.
• Read the following theory of The Ten Stages of Genocide by genocide expert Gregory Stanton:

1. CLASSIFICATION: All cultures have categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality: German and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi. Bipolar societies that lack mixed categories, such as Rwanda and Burundi, are the most likely to have genocide. (…)
2. SYMBOLIZATION: We give names or other symbols to the classifications. We name people “Jews” or “Gypsies,” or distinguish them by colors or dress; and apply the symbols to members of groups. (…)
3. DISCRIMINATION: A dominant group uses law, custom, and political power to deny the rights of other groups. The powerless group may not be accorded full civil rights, voting rights, or even citizenship. (…)
4. DEHUMANIZATION: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases. (…) At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. (…)
5. ORGANIZATION: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, often using militias to provide deniability of state responsibility. (…)
6. POLARIZATION: Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda. Motivations for targeting a group are indoctrinated through mass media. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction. (…)
7. PREPARATION: Plans are made for genocidal killings. National or perpetrator group leaders plan the “Final Solution” to the Jewish, Armenian, Tutsi or other targeted group “question.” They often use euphemisms to cloak their intentions, such as referring to their goals as “ethnic cleansing,” “purification,” or “counter-terrorism.” (…)
8. PERSECUTION: Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. In state-sponsored genocide, members of victim groups may be forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is often expropriated. Sometimes they are even segregated into ghettos, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved.
9. EXTERMINATION begins, and quickly becomes the mass killing legally called “genocide.” It is “extermination” to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. When it is sponsored by the state, the armed forces often work with militias to do the killing. (…)
10. DENIAL is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes and often blame what happened on the victims. (…)

• Source: G. H. Stanton, The Ten Stages of Genocide, 2016

Task:

• For each step, mark the keyword, memorize, and summarize in your own words what the step entails.
• Then apply the step-by-step plan to the chronology about the Judeocide below.

BRON 7: The Holocaust year by year

Holocaust timeline

• 1935 Anti-Semitism as law
  • In September, policy escalated. The Nuremberg Laws reduced Jews to second-class citizens because of their 'impure' blood. Defined by the religion of their grandparents rather than by their own beliefs, Jews were viewed as having impure blood lines. The new laws were taught in schools, cementing anti-Semitism in German culture. Most Germans kept quiet, often benefiting when Jews lost jobs and businesses. Persecution of other minorities also escalated: the police were given new powers to arrest homosexuals and compulsory abortions were administered to women considered to be 'hereditarily ill'.
• 1936 The Third Reich on show
  • Hitler's anti-Semitic rhetoric had turned many Germans against the Jews. But a different propaganda strategy was needed for a global audience. The Summer Olympics in Berlin gave the Nazis a platform to project a crafted image to the world. Despite calls for boycotts, the games were a success. Anti-Jewish notices were removed and German spectators cheered black athlete Jesse Owens to four gold medals. Visitors saw a tolerant Reich. However, three days after the games ended, the head of the Olympic Village, Wolfgang Fürstner, killed himself as he would soon be dismissed due to his Jewish ancestry under the Nuremberg Laws.
• 1937 Escalation of anti-Jewish propaganda.
  • As the world's eyes were on the battle between Fascism and Communism in Spain, the Nazis stepped up their erosion of civil rights in Germany. Concentration camps began to incarcerate 'habitual criminals' in addition to political prisoners. Goebbels stepped up anti-Semitic propaganda with a traveling exhibition which cast Jews as the enemy. Nearly half a million people attended. Some guessed worse would come. Winston Churchill criticized British relations with Germany, warning of 'great evils of racial and religious intolerance', though many colleagues complained of his 'harping on' about Jews.
• 1938 Jewish persecution intensifies
  • In March, Germany invaded Austria and by September parts of Czechoslovakia too, drawing new territories under the regime of Nazi persecution. In November, attacks erupted against Jewish businesses. At least 91 Jews died and 267 synagogues were destroyed in a centrally coordinated plot passed off as spontaneous violence across Germany. Thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps and were only released if they agreed to leave the Nazi territory. Many Jews decided to flee, though options were limited. Britain agreed to house Jewish children, eventually taking in 10,000 minors, but refused to change its policy for Jewish adults.
• 1939 The world at war
  • Until this point, Nazi strategy had concentrated on getting Jews to leave the Reich but when war broke out in September a different plan emerged. By the end of September, the SS had started to develop plans to deport Jews to newly invaded Poland: the first steps towards the systematic murder that would follow. In Poland itself, thousands of Poles and Jews were rounded up and shot, early indications of the systematic murder that would follow. Alongside this, Hitler approved a new program of euthanasia to exterminate the handicapped and mentally ill.
• 1940 Nazi persecution across Europe
  • German forces marched across Europe. Of the occupied countries, some capitulated and implemented Nazi policy immediately. Others held off for longer. For the first time, camps were created specifically for Jews. Their conditions were far worse than other camps. The implicit intention was that the inmates would die there. Increasing numbers of Jews in Poland were relocated in ghettos. Non-Jewish Poles were also deported from their farms and villages to make room for 'pure' ethnic Germans to populate the new territory.
• 1941 The 'Final Solution' agreed
  • The Nazi policy on Jews moved from expulsion to containment to commanders being ordered to systematically murder the Jews of Europe. Methods of mass murder evolved at local levels as well as being decreed from Nazi high command. Killing squads rounded up and shot entire Jewish communities. Over two days in Kiev, 33,771 Jews were shot. The murder of Jews rapidly escalated, in part because local Nazi leaders didn't have enough room to place them in the ghettos. By the end of the year, plans to implement the systematic slaughter of Jews by using gas in mobile trucks and gas chambers were well underway.
• 1942 Mass murder.
  • More Jews were murdered in 1942 than in any other year of the Holocaust, the majority in the newly created extermination camps. Of the 430,000 sent to the first death camp at Bełżec in Poland, there were only two survivors. 700,000 were killed at Treblinka in just five months. In July, Himmler ordered that all Jews in key areas of Poland, except for those needed for essential labor, were to be killed by the end of the year. Most were. Despite Allied intelligence receiving detailed reports of the mass murders in Europe, the public reaction in Britain was largely a mixture of apathy and disbelief.
• 1943 Jewish rebellions
  • Germany was now losing the war. Vital resources were still plowed into implementing the 'Final Solution' - the extermination of all Jews in Europe. Uprisings broke out in some extermination camps. The few remaining Jews kept alive to dispose of bodies and sort possessions realized the number of transportees was reducing and they would be next. Civilian uprisings occurred across Poland as mainly young Jews, whose families had already been murdered, began to resist Nazi oppression. With reports of rebellion and mass murder in the British press, the situation in the camps could no longer be ignored.
• Source: The Holocaust year by year, by BBC in collaboration with Holocaust Educational Trust (HET)

Task:

Fill in the following schedule: summarize the relevant event(s) per year and put a cross at the appropriate step(s) of a genocide.

Doordeker

• Look at the extent to which you have found all the steps back and reflect critically: does Stanton's theory help to better understand the run-up to the Judeocide, or are there limitations? Take a position and argue.
• Which step do you think is crucial in the road to genocide? When would you pull the 'alarm bell' as a genocide watcher? Discuss.

(2) The second exceptional element of the Judeocide

• The bureaucracy, camp system, and industrial-scale murder. This explains why they reached the high number of six million deaths.
• We must not forget that these are (many) individual people, each with their own life story.

BRON 8: Bureaucracy, camp system, and industrial character of the Judeocide

a) Map and photos: the camp system

Source: Facing History and Ourselves

Examples of 'killing sites' in Ukraine (1942)

• A mass execution near Kiev.
• A German soldier murders a mother and her child in Ivangorod.

Examples of the camp system:

• The Dossin Barracks: a transit camp in Mechelen, Belgium.
• The Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, after liberation.

b) Commemoration of the murdered students of our school

• Stumbling stones (stolpersteine) are placed at the main entrance of the school in memory of the seven Jewish students of the Koninklijk Atheneum Oostende who were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
• Their names are:
  • Regina Szpiro, 17 years old (photo)
  • Henriette Szpiro, 15 years old
  • Isidoor Szpiro, 12 years old
  • Albert Schindler, 17 years old
  • Herman Schindler, 16 years old
  • Joachim Speier-Hollstein, 16 years old

c) The creation of 'Jewish Registers' (e.g., Ostend)

• In an ordinance (October 28, 1940), the German occupier demanded that all Belgian cities and municipalities create a 'Jewish Register', a list of data from all Jews on the territory.
• The city archives of Ostend were largely destroyed by the German bombing of 1940 on the town hall and its library, which caused delays.
• The first registers from Ostend were handed over in (from January 11, 1941), a total of approximately 110 Jews.

d) Identity cards with 'JOOD-JUIF' stamp and the 'Jewish Star'

• After the identification of the person as Jewish, a 'JOOD-JUIF' stamp was placed on the identity card, and wearing a 'Jewish Star' became mandatory (from May 27, 1942).

e) Mandatory relocation to ghettos and confiscation of Jewish possessions

• In an ordinance (08/29/1941), the German occupier ordered a curfew between 8 PM and 7 AM for all Jews and that they could only settle in specific streets or neighborhoods (ghettos) in Antwerp, Brussels, Charleroi, and Liège to facilitate the arrest.
• All Jewish possessions were confiscated by the occupier (04/22/1942), and there was an explicit order to all Jews in the coastal areas that they had to move (10/1942).
• The Spiro family ended up in Brussels and lived with the Pels family. Régina Spiro wrote about her Brussels 'adventures' in a letter to her Ostend school friend Victoire or 'Vikje', including a nightly break-in.

f) The Wannsee Conference: 'Endlösung der Judenfrage' (01/20/1942)

• During a conference in a villa on the Wannsee near Berlin, about fifteen senior officials of the Nazi regime met to find a 'final solution' to the 'Jewish question'.
• The final report reads as follows:
  • “Under strict supervision, the Jews will be deployed for labor service in the East during the implementation of the Endlösung […] to build roads. Undoubtedly, a large proportion of them will disappear through natural elimination. Any remaining group […] will have to be addressed accordingly.”
• Adolf Eichmann, the secretary of the Wannsee Conference, later admitted at his trial that he was diplomatic in his report:
  • “These gentlemen stood or sat together and openly discussed the theme, very different from the language I had to use in the report. During the conversation, they did not mince words at all […]. They spoke about methods of murder, about liquidation, about extermination.”

g) Deportation via transit camps (e.g., Dossin Barracks in Mechelen)

• The German occupier in Belgium ordered the mandatory employment of Jews in Germany (March 11, 1942) and later the 'evacuation' to 'the East'(June 11, 1942), being the deportation to extermination camps in Poland.
• The Dossin Barracks in Mechelen became the central collection point and transit camp of Belgium, from where approximately 25,000 Jews were deported with train convoys.
• The Spiro family left there with 'transport XXII' (on September 20, 1943) in a group of approximately 1500 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau (arrival September 22, 1943).

h) Extermination in extermination camps (e.g., Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland)

• Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest extermination camp where 1.3 million people were murdered, mainly Jews.
• Immediately after the arrival of 'transport XXII', about 550 men were selected for forced labor. The remaining men, women, and children were murdered in the gas chambers.
• This is also the presumed fate of Régina Spiro and her sisters and brother because none of them survived the deportation.

i) Testimony of De Rudolf Höss

• Camp commander of Auschwitz, during the Nuremberg Trials (1945):
  • “I was in charge in Auschwitz from May 1, 1940, to December 1, 1944, and I estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed there by gassing and burning; at least 1.5 million died of hunger and disease […]. Approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed by us in Auschwitz alone in the summer of 1944 […]. The Jews destined for destruction were taken to the crematorium. In the dressing room, they were told that they had come here to bathe and be deloused […]. First, the women and children came in, then the men. The door was then quickly screwed shut, and the gas was immediately brought into the gas chamber through an air shaft through the roof. Through the peephole in the door, one could see that about 1/3 were immediately dead.”

Task:

• Clarify the following elements as characteristics of the Judeocide.
  • Bureaucracy:
  • Camp system:
  • Industrial character:

I. Knowledge

To know…

Concepts

• Crimes against humanity
• Judeocide
• Camp system

Events (dates)

• Bombing of Guernica (1937)
• Nanjing Massacre (1937)
• The Bromberger Blutsonntag (1939)
• Bombing of Dresden (1945)
• Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre (1945)
• Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945)

1. Atrocities Against the Civilian Population

• The high number of civilian casualties during World War II can be explained by a deliberate tactic of the fighting parties: by making civilian casualties, they wanted to disrupt the society, state, and war economy of the opposing party and psychologically discourage them from persevering in the fight.
• The earliest traces of this tactic can be found in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) where two parties faced each other: the left-Republican government of socialists and communists versus right-nationalist paramilitary rebels supported by royal- and church-minded conservatives led by General Francisco Franco.
  • The left-wing Republicans received the support of the Soviet Union and Mexico, while General Franco was supported by Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and neighboring Portugal.
  • The German support was also military and was characterized by innovative and bloody tactics, such as the infamous bombing of German aircraft with anti-personnel and incendiary bombs on the Spanish town of Guernica (1937).
  • The bombing took place during the weekly market and aimed to sow terror by making as many civilian casualties as possible.
  • The international press condemned this 'barbaric' act, but the event proved to be only a harbinger of the coming atrocities during World War II.
• Just as in Guernica, the Germans deliberately bombed civilian targets and cities during their advance through Belgium, Luxembourg, and France (1940).
  • The goal was to start a flow of refugees that could possibly delay an Allied counterattack.
• As revenge for the subsequent British bombing of Berlin (1940), the Luftwaffe carried out massive bombings of London (1940-41) and other English cities.
  • Hitler hoped to terrorize and demoralize the British population, but it proved to have the opposite effect:
    • British government propaganda used the fear among the British for this German 'barbarism' to fuel hatred and nationalism and to convince them that only the final victory could bring peace.
• Nevertheless, the Allies used the same tactic when they massively bombed German cities at the end of the war to damage the war economy and demoralize the German population.
  • A good example is the Allied bombing of Dresden (1945), where incendiary bombs were deliberately chosen to destroy the entire city, including civilians.
• Ultimately, the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) is a macabre culmination of that tactic: in a matter of seconds, two entire cities were reduced to ashes, including 250,000 civilians!
• Ground armies also did not shy away from murdering entire