The Second World War was easily the most devastating war in history. Some official records place the total number of dead close to 60 million, though the real toll may be far higher. Not everyone died in combat, either – more than 45 million of them were civilians, as everyday folk around the world bore the brunt of a war that would come to be known for the exceptional scale and degree of its brutality.
10. Chichijima Incident
Instances of cannibalism showed up throughout the war, especially on the Eastern front, where the fighting took a particularly grisly form. Most of them were driven by necessity, like during the Siege of Leningrad, where thousands of people took to consuming human flesh due to starvation and extreme cold.
In some rare, horrifying cases, however, cannibalism was also practiced just for the sport of it. One particularly infamous case was the Chichijima incident, when eight American airmen were captured, tortured, murdered with bamboo sticks. Four of the men were then eaten by Japanese officers. According to their testimonies during post-war trials, the meat was cooked with soy sauce and vegetables – one officer even believed that it’s good for the stomach. In one fascinating twist, there was actually a ninth airman who managed to avoid capture: a 20-year-old pilot named George H.W. Bush.
According to later records and witness testimonies, this wasn’t an isolated incident. The Chichijama incident was only one of the many cases of cannibalism perpetrated by imperial Japanese forces across the Pacific theater, often against POWs and occupied civilian populations.
9. Gardelegen Massacre
While Nazi atrocities continued throughout the war, some of the worst massacres took place during its final phases. As the Red Army and western allied troops pressed into Germany, large-scale efforts were undertaken to hide the evidence of the crimes, either by killing the thousands of prisoners still living in concentration camps, or forcing them on long death marches to camps located closer to Berlin.
Gardelegen was one such camp some 90 miles west of Berlin, where over 4,000 prisoners had arrived from different parts of Germany. On April 13, 1945, more than 1,000 of them were taken to a barn, barricaded inside, and set on fire with gasoline and flamethrowers. Almost all of the victims – a majority of them Poles – were burned alive or shot to death, save for six survivors rescued by advancing Allied forces barely two days after the massacre.
8. Kaunas Pogroms
The anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas, Lithuania began almost as soon as Germany crossed into the USSR on June 22, 1941, beginning a horrifying chapter of the Holocaust that’s now largely forgotten. Unlike the industrialized, almost-indifferent methods used in German extermination camps, the violence in Lithuania and other eastern territories was much more personal, often meted out in the form of beatings with blunt weapons and violent public executions.
The most infamous incident was the Liet?kis Garage massacre beginning on June 27, where around 60 Jewish men were beaten to death with metal crowbars by local Lithuanian nationalists. According to an eyewitness report by a German photographer, the main perpetrator was a man nicknamed the Death Dealer, as the crowd – made of German soldiers and local Lithuanians – cheered and clapped through the whole thing.
7. Bengal Famine
The Bengal famine of 1943 was one of the biggest catastrophes of the war, killing more than 3 million people in the Indian state due to widespread starvation and disease. Many factors contributed to it, especially the wartime events of 1942. As the British strongholds of Singapore and Myanmar fell into Japanese hands, food exports from there came to a halt, combined with crop infections and natural disasters that reduced the overall yield.
Some later studies, however, suggest that it wasn’t a lack of supplies that caused the famine, as the 1943 yield was still enough to feed the entire local population of Bengal. Food supplies were rather actively moved out of the province to support the war effort in the Middle East, or hoarded in special wartime stores, creating shortages and inflation for the local population. Fearing a Japanese invasion, the provincial government confiscated huge quantities of rice and thousands of fishing boats across Bengal, crippling the food transport system of the region.
6. 1941 Odessa Massacre
The Ukrainian city of Odessa was occupied by Nazi-backed Romanian forces on October 16, 1941, after more than two months of fierce fighting against Soviet forces. On October 22, one of the occupied buildings blew up due to a remote-controlled mine, possibly planted by Red Army soldiers before the occupation. The blast killed 67 people, including the Romanian military commandant and a number of Romanian and German officers.
In retaliation, Romanian soldiers and SS death squad members – allied with local ethnic German groups – went on a rampage against the local Jewish population, beginning a dark chapter of the Holocaust that’s now hardly talked about. More than 30,000 Jewish citizens of Odessa were rounded up in barracks, jails, and makeshift camps and murdered on October 22 and 23. Many of them were locked in warehouses and burned alive – according to witness accounts, the smell of burned bodies stayed in the air for days.
The 1941 massacre of Odessa was only one of the many crimes committed by Romanian forces on the eastern front. Close to 410,000 people were killed in Odessa and the surrounding Transnistria region throughout the war, often by forced starvation, exhaustion, and extreme cold.
5. Warsaw
The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, when members of the Polish resistance Home Army mounted a coordinated offensive against the occupying Axis forces across Warsaw. In response, Hitler issued the Order for Warsaw on the same day, directing his forces in Poland to completely destroy the city and exterminate its population.
What followed was utter and complete destruction of one of the most thriving cities in Europe before the war, as every single building in the city was sytematically razed to the ground by Nazi squads. Despite some successes in the beginning, the uprising was eventually crushed. Many Warsaw residents were burned alive in the ensuing massacres, and many others were lined up and shot with machine guns.
The violence took a particularly ugly form in the district of Ochota, where the collaborationist Russian National Liberation Army (or RONA) – made up of captured Russian soldiers and ex prisoners – systematically killed anyone they could find. Many women were raped and then burned alive in public, as the violence claimed the lives of at least 10,000 people.
4. Siege Of Leningrad
When German and Finnish forces laid siege to the Russian city of Leningrad – now St Petersburg – on September 8, 1941, they expected little resistance. It was still the beginning phase of the Axis advance into the Russian heartland, as Red Army forces were retreating with heavy losses across the entire front. A quick takeover of the city – then one of the jewels of the Bolshevik empire – would do well to enhance troop morale, as well as provide Axis forces with a strategic point to launch further attacks.
Little did they know, though, that it would turn out to be the most grueling and drawn-out battle they’d ever fight. It was the longest and perhaps the most destructive blockade of a civilian population in history, lasting for a total of 872 days. The city was continuously bombarded by Germany artillery and Luftwaffe bombing runs, often using incendiary ammunition that set parts of the city ablaze.
As the biting winter of 1941-42 set in, starvation had turned into an epidemic, as the city lost more than 100,000 people per month due to a severe shortage of food supplies. More than 2,000 people were booked for cannibalism by the local police, though the actual number was likely far higher.
Leningrad was finally liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1944. By the time it was over, the city’s population was reduced from 2.5 million to 800,000, making it one of the deadliest sieges in history.
3. Fall Of Singapore
The British stronghold of Singapore fell into Japanese hands on February 15, 1942, which remains the largest surrender of British forces in history. For the next two weeks or so, imperial Japanese forces went on a systematic campaign to eradicate the city’s Chinese population and other people deemed undesirable to the Japanese war effort.
Anywhere between 5,000 to 50,000 people were massacred during the purge, now remembered as Sook Ching – translated to ‘purge through cleansing’ – among the Chinese community in Singapore. The anti-Chinese attitudes among Japanese soldiers were fuelled by the grueling front in China, as around 10-20 percent of the local Chinese population was killed by machine guns, beheading, bayonets, bombings, and other violent methods during the massacre.
2. Firebombing Of Hamburg
On July 24, 1943 at around 1am, British and American bombers began a terrifying bombing run against the second largest German city at the time – Hamburg. Armed with high explosives and a slew of newly-perfected incendiary bombs, the operation – codenamed Operation Gomorrah – marked a horrifying turning point in the war. It was the first of many Allied operations directed at civilian centers and other non-military targets in German and Japanese cities – a strategy that would be repeated on a larger scale in Dresden, Tokyo, and ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The raids went on for more than a week, subjecting the residents of Hamburg to a kind of horror no one had ever experienced until that time. The worst of it came on July 27, when the bombs created a massive firestorm that burned thousands of people alive in a matter of hours. Street temperatures went as high as 1,400 Fahrenheit with wind speeds of over 170 miles an hour, setting fire to around 16,000 buildings that were home to more than 450,000 people. The British pilots flying above even reported turbulence and a strong stench of burning flesh due to the storm. At least 37,000 people were killed by the time it was over, as over 9,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Hamburg in a matter of a few days.
1. Aktion T4
The German government passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933, making sterilization mandatory for anyone with diseases considered genetic at the time. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 360,000 people with conditions like schizophrenia, epilepsy, and even alcoholism, were sterilized in camps converted from prisons, hospitals, schools, and other buildings across Germany.
It was only the beginning of a long and horrifying process to remove what the Nazis considered undesirable afflictions in the German gene pool, ultimately resulting in the T4 program. Implemented immediately after the onset of the war in 1939, it was a mass euthanasia program carried out at six facilities in Germany and Austria, using techniques that would be later replicated on a much larger scale during the Holocaust. At first, the T4 only included infants and toddlers, though it was expanded to adults with disabilities and mental illnesses soon after. While the program was officially discontinued in 1941, killings continued throughout the war years, claiming the lives of close to 250,000 people by the end of it.