v. WW2: Aftermath
- Around 75 million people died in World War II, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians, many of whom died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation
- A denazification programme in Germany led to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials
- Germany lost a quarter of its pre-war (1937) territory
- Post-war division of the world was formalised by two international military alliances, the United States-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact
- In Asia, the United States led the occupation of Japan and administered Japan’s former islands in the Western Pacific, while the Soviets annexed South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands
- In China, nationalist and communist forces resumed the civil war in June 1946. Communist forces were victorious and established the People’s Republic of China on the mainland, while nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949
- The global economy suffered heavily from the war, although participating nations were affected differently.
- The United States emerged much richer than any other nation and it dominated the world economy
- Recovery began with the mid-1948 currency reform in Western Germany, and was sped up by the liberalisation of European economic policy that the Marshall Plan (1948–1951) both directly and indirectly caused
- The Soviet Union, despite enormous human and material losses, also experienced rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era