The World War II Book Quotes

“The League failed to stop a militarist Japan invading Manchuria in 1931 and Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia four years later.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“security forces, tightening discipline among the Brownshirts and creating the Schutzstaffel (SS) as a small, personal bodyguard, which by 1930 was 3,000 strong and led by violent anti-Semite Heinrich Himmler.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“A US soldier hands out candy to a group of children in London’s East End. With food strictly rationed in Britain, treats from the GIs were welcomed.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“German SS troops round up members of the Jewish resistance during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Women helped organize the revolt and fought alongside the men.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 was the largest act of Jewish resistance in Nazi Europe. When the ghetto was established in 1940, more than 400,000 Jews were crammed into an area barely more than 1.3 sq miles (3.4 sq km), with more than seven people on average in each available room.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“White Rose resistance core members Hans Scholl (left) and his sister Sophie. Along with Christoph Probst, they were guillotined for their nonviolent anti-Nazi resistance in 1943.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“An extensive campaign of sabotage was carried out by the Polish Home Army between January 1, 1941, and June 30, 1944, against transportation and infrastructure, seeking to disrupt and weaken the Nazi occupation.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“American soldiers hand out candy to children in the port town of Agropoli. Three years of wartime privations had left little support for the fascist regime among Italian civilians.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“After the failed German spoiler attack on March 6, Axis forces retreated to the Mareth Line. On March 19, Allied forces launched a frontal attack on the Mareth Line and a secondary attack around the German right flank.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Undercover agents working for the Allies’ SOE and OSS were issued with special equipment, such as this radio disguised as a briefcase, for sending humint from occupied territory.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“US troops from the Central Task Force land near Oran, Algeria. Supporting naval fire was initially withheld in the hope of French support, but forces loyal to Vichy soon mounted a defense.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“A comparison between Axis and Allied forces in the Second Battle of El Alamein shows that Rommel’s Panzer Armee Afrika was heavily outnumbered in every department.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Soviet men and women at Kovel station in Ukraine, awaiting transportation to work as forced labor in Germany. Almost 5 million citizens of the USSR were drafted in this way.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Despite the war, German consumption of domestically produced goods and services (based here on 1938 levels as 100 percent) declined only gradually until 1944. Imports from captured territory, looted resources, and forced labor kept domestic consumption relatively high.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Percentage of POWs dying in captivity during World War II. Survival rates for POWs captured by the Japanese or the Soviets were lower, as a result of the failure of those nations to sign up to the Geneva Convention. Germany used the USSR’s refusal to sign the convention as justification for the mistreatment of captured Soviet troops.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“From June 1942, the Axis powers advanced on the Caucasus, a region rich in resources that Hitler hoped would help fuel the German war effort in Europe. Their invasion of Stalingrad proved to be a costly diversion from this strategic aim.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Haggard Auschwitz survivors—a few in the striped uniform of inmates— peer through barbed wire as Soviet forces arrive at the camp in 1945.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“While Jews suffered by far the highest death toll, they were not the only communities targeted in the Holocaust. In the Nazi bid to create its pure Aryan state, millions deemed racially inferior—not just Jews but also Slavic people, including Poles, other central and eastern Europeans, or anyone with “Asiatic” features—were deported from occupied territory to concentration and forced labor camps, or murdered. Nazis killed up to 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II. More than 200,000 Roma and Sinti peoples were murdered or died from disease and starvation in a genocide they called Porajmos (“the Devouring”). Many more were forced to labor or subjected to sterilization and medical experimentation. Others targeted included the gay community, disabled people, and religious minorities. The Nazis imprisoned more than 50,000 gay men, and sent up to 15,000 to concentration camps, where most perished. Many gay men remained in prison after the war, as the Allies refused to repeal the German penal code outlawing homosexuality. The Nazis also murdered around 250,000 disabled people in euthanasia programs. Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the religious groups persecuted; more than 8,000 were sent to camps and around 1,500 killed. Tens of thousands of people were complicit in the Holocaust, but just 199 Nazis were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Of those, 161 were convicted, 37 of whom were sentenced to death.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“The Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews, including more than a million children.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Children are rounded up on their way to Chelmno concentration camp in 1942. Among those murdered there were 593 Jewish children, aged under 12, from the Polish town of Bełchatów.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“1941, Jews were systematically killed at five death camps—Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Belzec, while a sixth, Auschwitz-Birkenau, equipped with gas chambers and attached to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, opened in March 1942.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Through a combination of mass shootings, burnings, beatings, and gassing, around a million Jews would be murdered by Einsatzgruppen. The Wannsee Conference signaled the shift to a more organized, industrial genocide, with mass deportations of Jews to remote camps where they would be gassed, either in special vans or in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“In 1941, at some point still not determined by historians, Hitler decided on what the Nazis referred to as the Final Solution—the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of all European Jews. On January 20, 1942, at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, SS general Reinhard Heydrich and 14 other high-ranking SS officers and German officials met to discuss how to apply the Final Solution to the 9.5 million Jews across Occupied Europe.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“A Jew from Vinnitsa, Ukraine, is shot by a member of an Einsatzgruppen killing squad in 1941. On the back of the photo, probably taken by a Nazi soldier, was written “Last Jew in Vinnitsa.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Hundreds of thousands more Jews suffered as the Nazis occupied Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece in 1940–1941.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“The systematic slaughter of European Jews by the Nazis is now commonly known as the Holocaust; the Nazis themselves called it the Endlösung (“Final Solution”). The Final Solution was implemented from late 1941, although Jewish organizations date the start of the Holocaust to 1933, when Hitler came to power. Nazi ideology saw the Jews as an alien strain, “polluting” the pure Aryan bloodline, and they proposed a series of “solutions” to solve what they called the Judenfrage (“Jewish Question”). These solutions became worse as Nazi Germany conquered more territory, bringing ever more Jews under their control.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“British women and children prepare to evacuate Singapore—then a British colony—by boat prior to the Japanese invasion in early 1942.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“By December 1941, Japan had already invaded Indochina and parts of China. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan launched a series of amphibious and airborne attacks to extend its control over southeast Asia.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Citizens flee in Rangoon, Burma, as Japanese war planes approach in December 1941. Many civilians and troops fled northwest toward the Indian border to escape the conflict.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book

“Ice forms on a signal projector on the cruiser HMS Sheffield while escorting an Arctic convoy to Russia. Occasionally, bad weather forced merchant ships to turn back.”
― D.K. Publishing, The World War II Book