World War II

World War II (1939—1945) was the largest armed conflict in human history, claiming the lives of tens of millions of people and fundamentally reshaping the political map of the world. The war began not only with Nazi Germany’s attack on Poland on 1 September 1939, but with the joint aggression of Hitler and Stalin — for a week before the invasion, on 23 August 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, with its secret protocol dividing the spheres of influence in Europe. On 17 September the USSR entered Polish territory from the east.

The roots of the conflict reach back to the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which imposed crushing restrictions and reparations on Germany. The hyperinflation of the 1920s, the economic crisis, and national humiliation created the soil for Hitler’s rise to power; from 1935 he consistently violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles — with the tacit consent of Great Britain and France, which after the horrors of World War I had no wish for a new conflict.

A separate tragic chapter of the war was the mass violence against the civilian population, in particular against women in the occupied territories. By the estimates of the British historian Antony Beevor, the scale of this phenomenon when Soviet troops entered Germany reached millions of victims.

Finland found itself in a difficult position: after the USSR’s attack in 1939 it was forced to fight on Germany’s side, but only in order to recover its own territories, not for the sake of Nazi ideology.

Notably, only the leadership of Nazi Germany was condemned at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Hitler’s allies — Slovakia, Hungary, and other satellite states — did not answer before an international court for their participation in the war. This decision was dictated by the political circumstances of the postwar order rather than by legal logic.