Aftermath of World War II

This effort primarily began as an attempt to avoid another war between Germany and France through economic cooperation and integration, and a common market for important natural resources.

In the spring of 1945, after the final defeat of Germany, the Labour Party withdrew from the wartime coalition government, to oust Winston Churchill, forcing a general election.

However, the loan was made primarily to support British overseas expenditure in the immediate post-war years and not to implement the Labour government's policies for domestic welfare reforms and the nationalisation of key industries.

To help rebuild the country, the Soviet government obtained limited credits from Britain and Sweden; it refused assistance offered by the United States under the Marshall Plan.

Close to one-quarter of pre-war (1937) Nazi Germany was de facto annexed by the Allies; roughly 10 million Germans were either expelled from this territory or not permitted to return to it if they had fled during the war.

Germany paid reparations to the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union, mainly in the form of dismantled factories, forced labour, and coal.

[18] Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years, the U.S. and Britain pursued an "intellectual reparations" programme to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany.

[20] After lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Generals Lucius D. Clay and George Marshall, the Truman administration accepted that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously been dependent.

[21] In July 1947, President Truman rescinded on "national security grounds"[22] the directive that had ordered the U.S. occupation forces to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany."

However, after making approaches to the Allies in the autumn of 1945 it was allowed to investigate the camps in the UK and French occupation zones of Germany, as well as to provide relief to the prisoners held there.

[24] The German people as a whole, especially its youth, were traumatized psychologically by the previous decade of Nazi rule, with major cities and infrastructure destroyed by Allied bombardments.

Following the war, the Allies rescinded Japanese Empire pre-war annexations such as Manchuria, and Korea became militarily occupied by the United States in the south and by the Soviet Union in the north.

In April 1948 the Johnston Committee Report recommended that the economy of Japan should be reconstructed due to the high cost to US taxpayers of continuous emergency aid.

The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, argued for a weaker interpretation of the Charter to permit the Soviet Union to continue to control the Baltic states.

[63] Supporting Lilly's lower figure is the "crucial difference" that for World War II military rapes "it was the commanding officer, not the victim, who brought charges".

[68] In the first few weeks of the American military occupation of Japan, rape and other violent crime was widespread in naval ports like Yokohama and Yokosuka but declined shortly afterward.

[70][page needed] Historians Eiji Takemae and Robert Ricketts state that "When U.S. paratroopers landed in Sapporo, an orgy of looting, sexual violence, and drunken brawling ensued.

Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes: Soon after the U.S. marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers.

Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.

[81][82] On 5 March 1946, in his "Sinews of Peace" (Iron Curtain) speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill said "a shadow" had fallen over Europe.

[88] The U.S. launched a massive programme of military and economic aid to Greece and to neighbouring Turkey, arising from a fear that the Soviet Union stood on the verge of breaking through the NATO defence line to the oil-rich Middle East.

The Cold War also saw the creation of propaganda and espionage organisations such as Radio Free Europe, the Information Research Department, the Gehlen Organization, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Special Activities Division, and the Ministry for State Security, as well as the radicalization and proliferation of numerous far-left and far-right terrorist organizations in Western European countries (Italy, France, West Germany, Belgium, Francoist Spain, and the Netherlands),[90][91][92][93] with spillovers in Northern and Southeastern Europe.

The communist-controlled common front Viet Minh (supported by the Allies) was formed among the Vietnamese in the colony in 1941 to fight for the independence of Vietnam, against both the Japanese and prewar French powers.

[113] In late 1945, three German rocket-scientist groups arrived in the U.S. for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as "War Department Special Employees".

[122] The major reason for the operation was the Soviet fear of being condemned for noncompliance with Allied Control Council agreements on the liquidation of German military installations.

[124] As a general consequence of the war and in an effort to maintain international peace,[125] the Allies formed the United Nations (UN), which officially came into existence on 24 October 1945.

In Europe, West Germany, after having continued to decline economically during the first years of the Allied occupation, later experienced a remarkable recovery, and had by the end of the 1950s doubled production from its pre-war levels.

[139] Although China's growth rate mostly persisted, it was severely disrupted by the economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward, due to the resulting famine that caused the deaths of 15 to 55 million people.

[142] Konrad Adenauer's State Secretary Hans Globke had played a major role in drafting antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws in Nazi Germany.

The exact locations of the dumping are not known due to poor record keeping, but it is estimated that 1 million metric tons of chemical weapons remain on the ocean floor where they are rusting and pose the risk of leaks.