Aftermath of World War II

Population displacement

As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large populations suddenly found themselves in hostile territory. The Soviet Union took over areas formerly controlled by Germany, Finland, Poland and Japan. Poland lost the Kresy region (about half of its pre-war territory) and received most of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line, including the industrial regions of Silesia. The German state of the Saar was temporarily a protectorate of France but later returned to German administration. As set forth at Potsdam, approximately 12 million people were expelled from Germany, including 7 million from Germany proper, and three million from the Sudetenland.

During the war, the United States government interned approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Canada interned approximately 22,000 Japanese Canadians, 14,000 of whom were born in Canada. After the war, some internees chose to return to Japan, while most remained in North America.

Poland

The Soviet Union expelled at least 2 million Poles from the east of the new border approximating the Curzon Line. This estimate is uncertain as neither the Polish Communist government nor the Soviet government kept track of the number of expelled people. The number of Polish citizens inhabiting Polish borderlands (Kresy region) was about 13 million before World War II broke out according to official Polish statistics. Polish citizens killed in the war that originated from the Polish borderlands territory (killed by either the German Nazi regime or the Soviet regime, or expelled to distant parts of Siberia) were accounted as Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian casualties of war in official Soviet historiography. This fact imposes additional difficulties in making the correct estimation of the number of Polish citizens forcibly transferred after the war. The border change also reversed the results of the 1919–1920 Polish–Soviet War. Former Polish cities such as Lwów came under the control of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Additionally, the Soviet Union transferred more than two million people within their borders; these included Germans, Finns, Crimean Tatars and Chechens.

Rape during occupation and liberation

In Europe

As Soviet troops marched across the Balkans, they committed rapes and robberies in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The population of Bulgaria was largely spared of this treatment, possibly due to a sense of ethnic kinship or to the leadership of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin. The population of Germany was treated significantly worse. Rape and murder of German civilians was as bad as, and sometimes worse than, Nazi propaganda had anticipated. Political officers encouraged Soviet troops to seek revenge and terrorise the German population. On "the basis of Hochrechnungen (projections or estimations), [...] 1.9 million German women altogether were raped at the end of the war by Red Army soldiers." About one-third of all German women in Berlin were raped by Soviet forces, and a substantial minority were raped multiple times. In Berlin, contemporary hospital records indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 women were raped by Soviet troops. About 10,000 of these women died, mostly by suicide. Over 4.5 million Germans fled towards the West. The Soviets initially had no rules against their troops "fraternising" with German women, but by 1947 they started to isolate their troops from the German population in an attempt to stop rape and robbery by the troops. Not all Soviet soldiers participated in these activities.

Foreign reports of Soviet brutality were denounced as false. Rape, robbery, and murder were blamed on German bandits impersonating Soviet soldiers. Some justified Soviet brutality towards German civilians based on previous brutality of German troops toward Russian civilians. Until the reunification of Germany, East German histories virtually ignored the actions of Soviet troops, and Russian histories still tend to do so. Reports of mass rapes by Soviet troops were often dismissed as anti-Communist propaganda or the normal byproduct of war.

Rapes also occurred under other Allied forces in Europe, though the majority were committed by Soviet troops. In a letter to the editor of Time published in September 1945, a U.S. Army sergeant wrote, "Our own Army and the British Army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping....This offensive attitude among our troops is not at all general, but the percentage is large enough to have given our Army a pretty black name, and we too are considered an army of rapists." Robert Lilly's analysis of military records led him to conclude about 14,000 rapes occurred in Britain, France, and Germany at the hands of U.S. soldiers between 1942 and 1945. Lilly assumed that only 5% of rapes by American soldiers were reported, making 17,000 GI rapes a possibility, while analysts estimate that 50% of (ordinary peacetime) rapes are reported. 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." According to German historian Miriam Gebhardt, as many as 190,000 women were raped by U.S. soldiers in Germany.

German soldiers left many war children behind in nations such as France and Denmark, which were occupied for an extended period. After the war, the children and their mothers often suffered recriminations. In Norway, the "Tyskerunger" (German-kids) suffered greatly.

During the Italian campaign, the Goumiers, French Moroccan colonial troops attached to the French Expeditionary Forces, have been accused of committing rape and murder against the Italian peasant communities, mostly targeting civilian women and girls, as well as a few men and boys. In Italy the victims of these acts were described as Marocchinate meaning literally "Moroccaned" (or people who have been subjected to acts committed by Moroccans). According to Italian victims associations, a total of more than 7,000 civilians, including children, were raped by Goumiers.

In Japan

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. There were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture. Historian Toshiyuki Tanaka relates that in Yokohama, the capital of the prefecture, there were 119 known rapes in September 1945.

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. Gang rapes and other sex atrocities were not infrequent" and some of the rape victims committed suicide.

General Robert L. Eichelberger, the commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, recorded that in the one instance when the Japanese formed a self-help vigilante guard to protect women from off-duty GIs, the Eighth Army ordered armored vehicles in the battle array into the streets and arrested the leaders, and the leaders received long prison terms.

According to Takemae and Ricketts, members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) were also involved in rapes:

A former prostitute recalled that as soon as Australian troops arrived in Kure in early 1946, they "dragged young women into their jeeps, took them to the mountain, and then raped them. I heard them screaming for help nearly every night". Such behavior was commonplace, but news of criminal activity by Occupation forces was quickly suppressed.

Rape committed by U.S. soldiers occupying Okinawa was also a notable phenomenon. 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. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. 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.

According to Toshiyuki Tanaka, 76 cases of rape or rape-murder were reported during the first five years of the American occupation of Okinawa. However, he claims this is probably not the true figure, as most cases were unreported.

Comfort women for Japanese soldiers

During World War II, the Japanese military established brothels filled with "comfort women," a euphemism for the 200,000 girls and women who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers. In Confucian nations like Korea and China, where premarital sex is considered shameful, the subject of the "comfort women" was ignored for decades after 1945 as the victims were considered pariahs. Dutch comfort women brought a successful case before the Batavia Military Tribunal in 1948.

Post-war tensions

Europe

The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate even before the war was over, when Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill exchanged a heated correspondence over whether the Polish government-in-exile, backed by Roosevelt and Churchill, or the Provisional Government, backed by Stalin, should be recognised. Stalin won.

Many allied leaders felt that war between the United States and the Soviet Union was likely. On 19 May 1945, the United States Under-Secretary of State Joseph Grew went so far as to say that it was inevitable.

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. He described Stalin as having dropped an "Iron Curtain" between East and West. Stalin responded by charging that co-existence between communist countries and the West was impossible. In mid-1948 the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on the Western zone of occupation in Berlin.

Due to the rising tension in Europe and concerns over further Soviet expansion, American planners came up with a contingency plan code-named Operation Dropshot in 1949. It considered possible nuclear and conventional war with the Soviet Union and its allies to counter a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eastern Asia that they anticipated would begin around 1957. In response, the United States. would saturate the Soviet Union with atomic and high-explosive bombs, and then invade and occupy the country. In later years, to reduce military expenditures while countering Soviet conventional strength, American President Dwight Eisenhower would adopt a strategy of massive retaliation, relying on the threat of a U.S. nuclear strike to prevent non-nuclear incursions by the Soviet Union in Europe and elsewhere. The approach entailed a major buildup of U.S. nuclear forces and a corresponding reduction in America's non-nuclear ground and naval strength. The Soviet Union viewed these developments as "atomic blackmail."

In Greece, civil war broke out in 1946 between Anglo-American-supported royalist forces and communist-led forces, with the royalist forces emerging as the victors. 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. On 12 March 1947, to gain Congressional support for the aid, President Truman described the aid as promoting democracy in defence of the "Free World," a principle that became known as the Truman Doctrine.

The United States sought to promote an economically strong and politically united Western Europe to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union. This was done openly using tools such as the European Recovery Program, which encouraged European economic integration. The International Authority for the Ruhr, designed to keep German industry down and controlled, evolved into the European Coal and Steel Community (ECOSOC), a founding pillar of the European Union. The United States also worked covertly to promote European integration, for example using the American Committee on United Europe to funnel funds to European federalist movements. To ensure that Western Europe could withstand the Soviet military threat, the Western European Union was founded in 1948 and NATO in 1949. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, famously stated the organisation's goal was, "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." However without the manpower and industrial output of West Germany, no conventional defence of Western Europe had any hope of succeeding. To remedy this, in 1950 the United States sought to promote the European Defence Community, which would have included a rearmed West Germany. The attempt was dashed when the French Parliament rejected it. On 9 May 1955, West Germany was instead admitted to NATO; the immediate result was the creation of the Warsaw Pact five days later.

The Cold War also saw the creation of propaganda and espionage organisations such as Radio Free Europe, the Information Research Department, Gehlen Organization, Central Intelligence Agency, 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 Netherlands), with spillovers in Northern and Southeastern Europe.

Asia

In Asia, the surrender of Japanese forces was complicated by the split between East and West as well as by the movement toward national self-determination in European colonial territories.

India

Decisions to decolonize British India led to an agreement to partition the country along religious lines into two independent dominions: India and Pakistan. The partition resulted in communal violence and massive displacements of the population. It is often described as the largest mass human migration and one of the largest refugee crises in history.

China

As agreed to at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Soviet forces invaded Manchuria which led to the collapse of the Manchukuo and expulsion of all Japanese settlers from the puppet state. The Soviet Union dismantled the industrial base in Manchuria that the Japanese had built up and it subsequently became a base for the Communist Chinese forces due to the area being under Soviet occupation.

Following the end of the war, the Kuomintang (KMT) party (led by generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) and the Communist Chinese forces resumed fighting each other, which they had temporarily suspended in order to fight Japan. The fight against the Japanese occupiers had strengthened popular support among the Chinese people for the Communist forces while it weakened the KMT, which depleted its strength fighting them. Full-scale war between the KMT and CCF broke out in June 1946. Despite United States' support for the Kuomintang, Communist forces ultimately prevailed and they established the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. The KMT forces retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949 where they established the Republic of China (ROC).

With the Communist victory in the civil war, the Soviet Union gave up its claim to military bases in China that were given to it by its Western Allies at the end of World War II.

While large scale hostilities largely ceased by 1950, intermittent clashes occurred between the two from 1950 to 1979. Taiwan unilaterally declared the civil war over in 1991, but no formal peace treaty or truce has been signed and the PRC continues to officially see Taiwan as a breakaway province that rightfully belongs to it.

The outbreak of the Korean War a few months after the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War and continued U.S. support for the KMT were the main reasons that prevented the PRC from invading Taiwan.

Korea

At the Yalta Conference, the Allies agreed that an undivided post-war Korea would be placed under 4-power multinational trusteeship. After Japan's surrender, this agreement was modified to a joint Soviet-American occupation of Korea. The agreement was that Korea would be divided and occupied by the Soviets from the north and the Americans from the south.

Korea, formerly under Japanese rule, and which had been partially occupied by the Red Army following the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan, was divided at the 38th parallel on the orders of the U.S. Department of War. A United States military government in southern Korea was established in the capital city of Seoul. The US military commander, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, enlisted many former Japanese administrative officials to serve in this government. North of the military line, the Soviets administered the disarming and demobilisation of repatriated Korean nationalist guerrillas who had fought on the side of Chinese nationalists against the Japanese in Manchuria during World War II. Simultaneously, the Soviets enabled a build-up of heavy armaments to pro-communist forces in the north. The military line became a political line in 1948, when separate republics emerged on both sides of the 38th parallel, each republic claiming to be the legitimate government of Korea. It culminated in the north invading the south, start of the Korean War two years later.

Malaya

Labour and civil unrest broke out in the British colony of Malaya in 1946. A state of emergency was declared by the colonial authorities in 1948 with the outbreak of acts of terrorism. The situation deteriorated into a full-scale anti-colonial insurgency, or Anti-British National Liberation War as the insurgents referred to it, led by the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military wing of the Malayan Communist Party. The Malayan Emergency would endure for the next twelve years, ending in 1960. In 1967, communist leader Chin Peng reopened hostilities, culminating in a second emergency that lasted until 1989.

French Indochina

Events after World War II in French Indochina, which consisted of the territories of modern-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, set the stage for Indochina wars.

By 1941 during World War II, Japan gained full military access across Indochina and established a fragile dual colonial rule that maintained French administration while facilitating Japanese preparations for Southeast Asian operations. The communist-controlled Viet Minh Front was formed in 1941 to fight against both Japanese and French forces. Because the French colonial authorities began holding secret talks with Free France, the Japanese carried out a coup d’état on 9 March 1945. When Japan surrendered in August, this created a power vacuum, and the Viet Minh seized power during the August Revolution, declaring the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. However, the Allies (including the Soviet Union) all agreed that the area belonged to the French.

From 1945 onward, the Vietnamese were locked in civil conflicts over the destiny of their post-colonial state after the ousting of the French and the surrender of Japan. Meanwhile, Nationalist Chinese forces moved in from the north and British from the south (as the French were unable to do so immediately themselves) and then handed power to the French, a process completed by March 1946. Attempts to integrate the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with French rule failed and the Viet Minh launched their rebellion against the French rule starting the First Indochina War that same year (the Viet Minh organized common fronts to fight the French in Laos and Cambodia).

The war ended in 1954 with the French withdrawal and the partition of Vietnam, which was intended to be temporary until elections could be held. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam controlled the North, while the State of Vietnam held the South. Ngo Dinh Diem, backed by the United States in his refusal to hold elections, which he claimed would be unfair due to communist rigging, established the Republic of Vietnam. Communist insurgents in the South formed the NLF under the direct guidance of North Vietnam to fight against the South Vietnamese government, a conflict that ultimately ended with North Vietnam conquering the South in April 1975.

Dutch East Indies (Indonesia)

Japan invaded and occupied the Dutch East Indies during the war and replaced the colonial government with a new administration. Although the top positions were held by Japanese officers, the internment of all Dutch citizens meant that Indonesians filled many leadership and administrative positions. Following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Indonesian nationalist leaders such as Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesia as independent. A four-and-a-half-year struggle followed as the Dutch tried to re-establish their rule in colony, using a significant portion of their Marshall Plan aid to this end. The Dutch were aided by British forces for the first phase of the conflict until the United Kingdom withdrew. The British also initially used 35,000 Japanese Surrendered Personnel to support their military operations in Indonesia. Although Dutch forces re-occupied most of Indonesia, an Indonesian guerrilla campaign supported by the majority of Indonesians ensured, and ultimately international opinion favoured independence. In December 1949, the Netherlands formally recognised Indonesian sovereignty.

Wartime criminals recruited as Cold War assets

Covert operations and espionage

British covert operations in the Baltic States, which began in 1944 against the Nazis, escalated following the war. In Operation Jungle, the Secret Intelligence Service (known as MI6) recruited and trained Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians for the clandestine work in the Baltic states between 1948 and 1955. Leaders of the operation included Alfons Rebane, Stasys Žymantas, and Rūdolfs Silarājs. The agents were transported under the cover of the "British Baltic Fishery Protection Service." They launched from British-occupied Germany, using a converted World War II E-boat captained and crewed by former members of the wartime German navy. British intelligence also trained and infiltrated anti-communist agents into Soviet Union from across the Finnish border, with orders to assassinate Soviet officials. In the end, counter-intelligence supplied to the KGB by Kim Philby allowed the KGB to penetrate and ultimately gain control of MI6's entire intelligence network in the Baltic states.

Vietnam and the Middle East would later damage the reputation gained by the U.S. during its successes in Europe.

The KGB believed that the Third World rather than Europe was the arena in which it could win the Cold War. Moscow would in later years fuel an arms buildup in Africa. In later years, African countries used as proxies in the Cold War would often become "failed states" of their own.

In 2014, the New York Times reported that "In the decades after World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government's ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show." According to Timothy Naftali, "The CIA's central concern [in recruiting former Nazi collaborators] was not so much the extent of the criminal's guilt as the likelihood that the agent's criminal past could remain a secret."

Recruitment of former enemy scientists

When the divisions of postwar Europe began to emerge, the war crimes programmes and denazification policies of Britain and the United States were relaxed in favour of recruiting German scientists, especially nuclear and long-range rocket scientists. Many of these, prior to their capture, had worked on developing the German V-2 long-range rocket at the Baltic coast German Army Research Center Peenemünde. Western Allied occupation force officers in Germany were ordered to refuse to cooperate with the Soviets in sharing captured wartime secret weapons, the recovery for which, specifically in regards to advanced German aviation technology and personnel, the British had sent the Fedden Mission into Germany to contact its aviation technology centers and key personnel, paralleled by the United States with its own Operation Lusty aviation technology personnel and knowledge recovery program.

In Operation Paperclip, beginning in 1945, the United States imported 1,600 German scientists and technicians as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the US and the UK, including about $10 billion (US$165 billion in 2025 dollars) in patents and industrial processes. In late 1945, three German rocket-scientist groups arrived in the United States for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as "War Department Special Employees."

The wartime activities of some Operation Paperclip scientists would later be investigated. Arthur Rudolph left the United States in 1984 in order to not be prosecuted. Similarly, Georg Rickhey, who came to the United States under Operation Paperclip in 1946, was returned to Germany to stand trial at the Mittelbau-Dora war crimes trial in 1947. Following his acquittal, he returned to the United States in 1948 and eventually became a U.S. citizen.

The Soviets began Operation Osoaviakhim in 1946. NKVD and Soviet army units effectively deported thousands of military-related technical specialists from the Soviet occupation zone of post-war Germany to the Soviet Union. The Soviets used 92 trains to transport the specialists and their families, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people. Much related equipment was also moved, the aim being to virtually transplant research and production centres, such as the relocated V-2 rocket centre at Mittelwerk Nordhausen, from Germany to the Soviet Union. Among the people moved were Helmut Gröttrup and about two hundred scientists and technicians from Mittelwerk. Personnel were also taken from AEG, BMW's Stassfurt jet propulsion group, IG Farben's Leuna chemical works, Junkers, Schott AG, Siebel, Telefunken, and Carl Zeiss AG.

The operation was commanded by NKVD deputy Colonel General Serov, outside the control of the local Soviet Military Administration. 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. Some Western observers thought Operation Osoaviakhim was a retaliation for the failure of the Socialist Unity Party in elections, though Osoaviakhim was clearly planned before that.

Demise of the League of Nations and the founding of the United Nations

As a general consequence of the war and in an effort to maintain international peace, the Allies formed the United Nations, which officially came into existence on 24 October 1945. The United Nations replaced the defunct League of Nations as an intergovernmental organization. The League was formally dissolved on 20 April 1946, but had in practice ceased to function in 1939, being unable to stop the outbreak of World War II. The UN inherited some of the bodies of the League, such as the International Labour Organization.

League of Nations mandates, mostly territories that had changed hands in World War I, became United Nations trust territories. South West Africa, an exception, was still governed under terms of the original mandate. As the successor body to the League, the United Nations still assumed a supervisory role over the territory. The Free City of Danzig, a semi-autonomous city-state that was partly overseen by the League, became part of Poland.

The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, "as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations." The Soviet Union abstained from voting on adoption of the declaration. The U.S. did not ratify the social and economic rights sections.

The five major Allied powers were given permanent membership in the UN Security Council. The permanent members can veto any Security Council resolution, the only UN decisions that are binding according to international law. The five powers at the time of founding were: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Soviet Union, and Republic of China. The Republic of China lost the Chinese Civil War and retreated to the island of Taiwan by 1950 but continued to be a permanent member of the Council even though the de facto state in control of mainland China was the People's Republic of China (PRC). This was changed in 1971 when the PRC was given the permanent membership previously held by the Republic of China. Russia inherited the permanent membership of the Soviet Union in 1991 after the dissolution of that state.

Unresolved conflicts

Japanese holdouts persisted on various islands in the Pacific Theatre until at least 1974. Although all hostilities are now resolved, a peace treaty has never been signed between Japan and Russia due to the Kuril Islands dispute.

Economic aftermath

By the end of the war, the European economy had collapsed with some 70% of its industrial infrastructure destroyed. The property damage in the Soviet Union consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, and 31,850 industrial establishments. The strength of the economic recovery following the war varied throughout the world, though in general, it was quite robust, particularly in the United States.

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. Italy came out of the war in poor economic condition, but by the 1950s, the Italian economy was marked by stability and high growth. France rebounded quickly and enjoyed rapid economic growth and modernisation under the Monnet Plan. The United Kingdom, by contrast, was in a state of economic ruin after the war and continued to experience relative economic decline for decades to follow.

The Soviet Union also experienced a rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era. Japan experienced rapid economic growth, becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world by the 1980s. China, following the conclusion of its civil war, was essentially bankrupt. By 1953, economic restoration seemed fairly successful as production had resumed pre-war levels. 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.

At the end of the war, the United States produced roughly half of the world's industrial output. The United States, of course, had been spared industrial and civilian devastation. Further, much of its pre-war industry had been converted to wartime usage. As a result, with its industrial and civilian base in much better shape than most of the world, the United States embarked on an economic expansion unseen in human history. U.S. gross domestic product increased from $228 billion in 1945 to just under $1.7 trillion in 1975.

Denazification

In 1951 several laws were passed, ending the denazification. As a result, many people with a former Nazi past ended up again in the political apparatus of West Germany. West German President Walter Scheel and Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger were both former members of the Nazi Party. In 1957, 77% of the West German Ministry of Justice's senior officials were former Nazi Party members. Konrad Adenauer's State Secretary Hans Globke had played a major role in drafting antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws in Nazi Germany.

The historical consensus is that West Germany's efforts at denazification proved wanting.

Apologies

In 2019, the then Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has apologized, in Wieluń in Poland, on behalf of Germany, for the “German tyranny” in World War II over Poland.

Unexploded ordnance

Unexploded ordnance continues to pose a danger in the present day. In 2017, 50 thousand people were evacuated from Hanover so World War II era bombs could be defused. As of 2023, it is still thought that thousands of unexploded bombs remain from World War II.

Environment

When World War II ended, scientists did not have procedures for safe disposal of chemical arsenals. At the direction of the UK, US and Russia, chemical weapons were loaded onto ships by the metric ton and dumped into the sea. 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. Sulfur mustard exposure has been reported in some parts of coastal Italy and sulfur mustard bombs have been found as far as Delaware, likely brought in with the shellfish cargo.