After the end of World War II, many cities in Europe and Asia lay in ruins, borders changed, someone was buried, and someone returned home, and everywhere they began to build a new life. Before the outbreak of war, in the late 1930s, the population of the Earth was 2 billion. In less than ten years, it fell by 4 percent - the war took about 80 million lives. The allies captured Germany, Japan and reclaimed most of their territories. Everything possible was done to destroy once and for all the military-industrial complex of the Axis countries: factories were destroyed, and leaders were convicted of crimes and overthrown. In Europe and Asia, there were military courts, according to whose decisions many were executed or were imprisoned. Millions of Germans and Japanese have been evicted from their homelands. UN decisions led to many difficulties in the future, such as the division of Germany and Korea, the Korean War in 1950. The plan for the division of Palestine, drawn up by the UN, allowed the formation of an independent Israeli state, but at the same time laid the foundation for the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. The growing tension between the West and the Eastern bloc led by the USSR and the increase in the nuclear power of states made the threat of World War III quite real. World War II became the main event of the twentieth century, changing the world in such a way that even after so many years we still feel its consequences.
1. General of the Wehrmacht Anton Dostler of the firing pole in Aversa, Italy, December 1, 1945. The former commander of the 75th Army Corps was sentenced to death by an American military commission for shooting 15 unarmed American prisoners of war in La Spezia, Italy, on March 26, 1944. (AP Photo)
2. Soviet soldiers with the battle banners of the Wehrmacht during the Victory Parade in Moscow, June 24, 1945. (Yevgeny Khaldei / Waralbum.ru)
3. Emaciated and emaciated, but overjoyed at the news of liberation from Japanese captivity, two allied soldiers collect a few things before leaving the Aomorim camp near Yokohama, September 11, 1945. (AP Photo)
4. Return of the victorious soldiers, Moscow, railway station, 1945.
5. Photo of Hiroshima one year after the nuclear explosion. Restoration work is underway, but the city is still in ruins, July 20, 1946. Recovery rates are slow: materials and equipment are in short supply. (AP Photo / Charles P. Gorry)
6. Japanese on the ruins of his home in Yokohama. (NARA)
7. Soviet photojournalist Yevgeny Khaldey (center) in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate, May 1945. (Waralbum.ru)
P-47 Thunderbolt of 12th US Air Force Squadron flies over Hitler's destroyed home in Berchtesgaden, Austria, May 26, 1945. Large and small craters are visible near the buildings. (AP Photo)
9. Hermann Goering, former Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, second only to Hitler, pictured in the archives of the Central Registry of War Criminals in Paris, November 5, 1945. Goering surrendered to US forces in Bavaria on May 9, 1945, and was taken to Nuremberg for trial for military performances. (AP Photo)
10. Courtroom in Nuremberg, 1946. There is a meeting on charges of war crimes against 24 political leaders of Nazi Germany. Center right - Hermann Goering in a gray jacket, headphones and dark glasses. Next to him are Rudolf Hess, Assistant to the Fuehrer, Joachim Ribbentrop, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the General Staff (face blurred), and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, senior SS survivor. Goering, Ribbentrop, Keitel and Kaltenbrunner were sentenced to be hanged. Goering committed suicide the night before his execution. Hess was sentenced to life in prison and worked at Spandau Prison in Berlin until his death in 1987. (AP Photo / STF)
11. Many experimental German aircraft were exhibited in Hyde Park, London on September 14, 1945, during Thanksgiving Week. Among others, jet planes could be seen there. Photo: Heinkel He-162 Volksjäger with a jet engine. (AP Photo)
12. A year after landing in Normandy, German prisoners set up a cemetery for American soldiers in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France, near the Omaha landing site, May 28, 1945. (AP Photo / Peter J. Carroll)
13. Germans from the Sudetenland go to the station in Liberec, former Czechoslovakia, to return to Germany, July 1946. After the end of the war, millions of Germans were evicted from the territories annexed by Germany and from the territories ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union. According to various estimates, they numbered from 12 to 14 million, and from 500,000 to 2 million died in exile. (AP Photo / CTK)
14. Yinpe Teravama, a survivor of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima, shows burn scars, June 1947. (AP Photo)
15. Defective buses are used by the Japanese to make up for the lack of living space in Tokyo, October 2, 1946. Homeless Japanese are turning iron skeletons into homes for their families. (AP Photo / Charles Gorry)
16. An American soldier and a Japanese girl in Hibiya Park, Tokyo, January 21, 1946. (AP Photo / Charles Gorry)
17. London in April 1945. Ruined buildings are visible around St. Paul's Cathedral. (AP Photo)
18. General Charles de Gaulle (center) greets children, two months after the surrender of Germany, July 1945, Laurent, France. Laurent was a German submarine base, and between 14 and 17 February 1943, more than 500 fragmentation bombs and about 60,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on the city. 90% of buildings in the city were destroyed. (AFP / Getty Images)
19. Transport ship "General VP Richardson" at the pier in New York, June 7, 1945. Veterans of the European and African campaigns return home. (AP Photo / Tony Camerano)
20. A snapshot of the 1948 mass development area in the suburbs of New York. Many similar areas were built for soldiers returning from the war. (AP Photo / Levittown Public Library, File)
21. A TV set at just $ 100 - Possibly the first mainstream TV for an affordable price. Rose Claire Leonard looks at a 5 "x 7" screen during a presentation in a New York store on August 24, 1945. Although television was invented before the outbreak of World War II, it was the war that prevented its widespread adoption. Shortly after the end of the war, televisions went on sale, and by 1948, regular broadcasting began. (AP Photo / Ed Ford)
22. An American soldier examines a solid gold statuette in the cache of Hermann Goering, found by the 7th Army in a cave near Schonau am Königssee, Germany, May 25, 1945. This cache, one of only two found to date, also contained priceless paintings from all over Europe. (AP Photo / Jim Pringle)
23. On the territory of Europe, some churches were destroyed, but some survived. Munchengladbach Cathedral miraculously survived the war, but still requires restoration, November 20, 1945. (AP Photo)
24. Colonel Byrd, Commandant of Camp Belsen, on May 21, 1945 ordered the burning of the last structure on its territory. In memory of the victims, the British flag was raised, and after a rifle salute with a flamethrower, the last building on the territory of the concentration camp was set on fire. Together with him, they burned the flag of Nazi Germany and a portrait of Hitler. (AP Photo / British Official Photo)
25. German women lead their children to school on the streets of Aachen, Germany, June 6, 1945. The first school was opened after the war by the American military government. (AP Photo / Peter J. Carroll)
26. Hall of the Far Eastern military court in Tokyo, April 1947. On May 3, 1946, the Allies began a trial of 28 Japanese political and military leaders on war crimes charges. Seven were sentenced to be hanged and the rest to imprisonment. (AP Photo)
27. Soviet soldiers in North Korea in October 1945. Japan's 35-year rule over Korea ended after the end of World War II. The allies decided to establish an interim government until elections can be held in the country and their own power is established. Soviet forces occupied the northern part of the peninsula, while the Americans occupied the southern part. The planned elections did not take place, and a communist regime was established in North Korea, and a pro-Western regime in South Korea. Their confrontation led to the 1950 -1953 war, which ended with an armistice, but today the two states are actually at war. (Waralbum.ru)
28. Communist leader Kim Il Sung talks to collective farmers in Kinshanli, Kangso County, south of Pyongyang, October 1945. (Korean Central News Agency / Korea News Service via AP Images)
29. Soldiers of the 8th Chinese Army during an exercise in Yanan, a central city in a large region in northern China, March 26, 1946. In the photo there are soldiers from the "Night Tiger" battalion. The Chinese Communist Party has waged war against the Kuomintang, the ruling nationalist party, since 1927. The Japanese invasion during World War II forced both sides to end their enmity and direct all their forces to fight an external enemy. Although from time to time there were still clashes. After the end of World War II and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Manchuria, a full-scale civil war broke out in China in June 1946. The Kuomintang lost, millions of supporters fled to Taiwan, and the leader of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong, established the PRC in 1949. (AP Photo)
30. This 1946 photo shows the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first multipurpose computer, a 30-ton machine, located at the University of Pennsylvania. Development began in secret in 1943, and ENIAC was originally created to calculate firing tables for the US Army ballistic laboratory. The completion of the creation of the computer was announced on February 14, 1946. In the same year, the inventors gave a series of lectures on the benefits of computers at the University of Pennsylvania, known as the Moore School Lectures. (AP Photo)
31. Tests of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, July 25, 1946, codenamed "Baker". A 40-kiloton bomb was detonated at a depth of 27 meters, 5 kilometers from the atoll. The purpose of the tests was to determine the effect of a nuclear explosion on warships. 73 decommissioned and American and captured Japanese ships, including the battleship Nagato, were collected for testing. (NARA)
32. Northrop Flying Wing XB-35 bomber, 1946. This aircraft was an experimental model of a heavy bomber, but soon after the war, the project was canceled due to technical complexity. (AP Photo)
33. The Japanese throw ammunition into the sea, September 21, 1945. During the post-war presence of the Americans, the Japanese military industry ceased to exist as such. (U. S. Army)
34. German workers in chemical protection suits defuse toxic bombs at a chemical weapons depot in Gerogen, Germany, July 28, 1946. Decontamination of 65,000 tons of toxic munitions was carried out in two ways: they were burned or simply dumped into the North Sea. (AP Photo)
35. Americans broadcast 74-year-old Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling in Landsberg, Germany, May 28, 1946. He was convicted of using 1,200 concentration camp prisoners as test subjects in experiments with malaria. Thirty died directly from vaccinations, from 300 to 400 later died from complications of the disease. Schilling has been conducting his experiments since 1942, all the test subjects were forced to participate in them. (AP Photo / Robert Clover)
36. Cemetery in Belsen, Germany, March 28, 1946. Buried here are 13,000 people who died after being liberated from the Belsen concentration camp. (AP Photo)
37. Jews from the Buchenwald concentration camp on the deck of the ship "Mataroa" in the port of Haifa, July 15, 1945. This territory was subsequently ceded to Israel. During World War II, millions of Jews fled from Germany and neighboring countries, many tried to get into the British part of Palestine, but Great Britain in 1939 restricted the entry of Jews, and arrivals were delayed. In 1947, Great Britain announced that it was leaving the territory, and the UN approved a plan to partition Palestine, thus creating two states: Palestine and Israel. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence and was immediately attacked by neighboring Arab countries. This is how the Arab-Israeli conflict began, which continues to this day. (Zoltan Kluger / GPO via Getty Images)
38. Polish war orphans in a Catholic orphanage in Lublin, September 11, 1946. Here they are taken care of by the Polish Red Cross. Most of the clothing, medicines and vitamins were provided by the American Red Cross. (AP Photo)
39. The Empress of Japan visits a Catholic war orphanage in Tokyo, April 13, 1946. The Empress examined the grounds of the orphanage and visited the chapel. (AP Photo)
40. New houses appear on the ruins of Hiroshima, March 11, 1946. These buildings are part of the Japanese government's program to rebuild the country. In the background on the left are the remains of buildings destroyed by the first ever atomic bombing. (AP Photo / Charles P. Gorry
41. A watch in one of the Japanese factories prepares for shipment to the Allied countries, June 25, 1946. 34 factories produced 123,000 watches in April 1946 alone. (AP Photo / Charles Gorry)
42. General George Patton at the parade in downtown Los Angeles, California, June 9, 1945. Patton soon returned to Germany, where he justified the appointment of former Nazi leaders to administrative posts in Bavaria. After being removed from his post as commander of the 3rd Army, he returned to the United States and died in December from injuries sustained in a car accident. On the left is Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph of the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima. (AP Photo)
43. German women clear the Tauentzienstrasse in Berlin from the rubble of the Kaiser Wilhelm cathedral. The almost complete absence of healthy men meant that all the work of clearing the rubble was done mainly by women, who were called "Truemmerfrauen", that is, "stone women". Signs on the pillar on the left indicate the border between the British and American sectors along this street. (AP Photo)
44. Meeting on the Republican square of Berlin in front of the Rechistag, September 9, 1948. About a quarter of a million anti-communists protested against the Soviet regime. At the time, the USSR was blocking the Allies' access to the western parts of Berlin. In response, Britain and the United States deployed an air bridge to supply the blockaded city. As a result of this crisis, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany were created in 1949. The demonstration, captured in the photo, ended with gunfire, two German citizens were killed. (AP-Photo)
45. In March 1974, 29 years after the end of World War II, Japanese Army intelligence officer and officer Hiro Onoda surrendered on the island of Lubang, Philippines. After being relieved of duty by his commander, he surrendered a samurai sword, a rifle with 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. Onoda was sent to Lubang in 1944 with the task of joining the reconnaissance group operating on the island and waging a guerrilla war against the Americans. The allies captured the island, three of Onoda's comrades were killed in battle, and the four surviving members of the group fled into the jungle and raided from there. Several times leaflets and letters from relatives were thrown to them, but they did not believe the "propaganda". In 1950, one of Onoda's comrades surrendered. By 1972, two more soldiers had been killed in clashes with Filipino patrols, leaving Onoda alone. In 1974, Onoda came across the Japanese naturalist Norio Suzuki, from whom he learned about the end of the war and through whom Onoda found his commander and ordered him to surrender. Over the years, the guerrilla group killed 30 Filipinos and wounded about a hundred, but President Marcos pardoned Onoda, and he returned to Japan. (AP Photo)
