Frankfurt-am-Main 1946

What is Europe now? It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding-ground of pestilence and hate.

--W. Churchill, May

1947

Kerch, Crimea (Grief), 1942 photo by Dmitri Baltermans

The siege of Leningrad, 1941-1944

Allied Bombing of Dresden, February 1945

Rotterdam after May 1940

Coventry England after November 1940

Warsaw, September 1944

A handful of Europe’s 8 million DPs, 1945

D-Day, June 6, 1944

Liberation of Paris, August 1944

Photo by Henri-Cartier Bresson

The “Big Three” at Yalta, February 1945

Soviet flag over the Reich Chancellory, Berlin May 2, 1945

Tito (Joseph Broz) and the Communist Partisans of Yugoslavia

Corpses of Mussolini, his mistress and other fascists hanging from gas station near Milan--April 1945

French “Horizontal Collaborators,” 1944

Prisoner of concentration camp recognizes the Gestapo informant who denounced her as prisoners are released from the Dessau concentration camp, 1945.

photo by Henri Cartier Bresson

Judgment at Nuremburg: The International Military Tribunal tries 24 Nazi War Criminals, 1945-46

"It is absolutely wrong to project our own harmless soul with its deep feelings, our kindheartedness, our idealism, upon alien peoples. [...]

One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal and friendly to members of our blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us.

Whether the other races live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture [...]

I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.

Heinrich HimmlerSpeech to SS Troops

Poznan, PolandOctober 4, 1943

It is one of those things which is easy to say. 'The Jewish race is to be exterminated,' says every party member. 'That's clear, it's part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we'll do it.'

And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it.

Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet - apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if - with the bombing raids, the burdens and the depravations of war - we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers. We would now probably have reached the 1916/17 stage when Jews were still in the national body.

We have taken from them what wealth they had. [...]

We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.

Altogether, however, we can say, that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it."

Theodore Herzl and The Jewish State, 1896

The Creation of Israel 1948

The Potsdam Conference, July 1945

Soviet Kiev Camera

German Contax Camera

Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

August 6 and 9, 1945 Werner Bischof/Magnum Photos Hiroshima Survivor 1951

The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with this primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done, but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both our countries. To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the aftertime.

[...]

It is my duty, however, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Winston ChurchillWestminister CollegeFulton , Missourri March 5, 1946

Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan 1948

Military Spending and the Cold War