For a war that affected nearly every country in the world, only a few nations seem to get mentioned when we talk about World War II. Germany, England, Russia, Japan, and the United States are sure to come up, but many more countries get left out. The other nations of the world were involved, though—and we forget that some of those places did a lot more than you might realize.

10 Australia Fired The First Allied Shot

On September 4, 1939, the morning after Great Britain declared war on Germany, a boat passed by a fort at Point Nepean. The fort’s personnel called for it identify itself, and when it refused, they became panicked that it might be a German ship, bringing the war to Australia. The fort launched a warning shot across the bow of the ship, sending what some consider to be the first Allied shot of World War II.

The shot itself isn’t that remarkable. The ship turned out to be Australian after all, so it wasn’t even against an enemy ship. The gun battery, however, is. By sheer coincidence, the very same battery also fired the first Allied shot of World War I.

The Australians would fire many more. By the end of the war, 27,000 Australian soldiers had given their lives.

9 Canada Built The Third-Largest Navy On Earth

At the beginning of World War II, Canada was not a major military force. Despite its large size, it had a population of only 11 million and was armed with a navy of only 15 ships and an air force of 235 pilots.

When Germany invaded Poland, though, the Canadians started getting ready. In ten days, Canada invested $20,000,000 into building up its armory—and they started building. They trained nearly 50,000 pilots and built 800,000 trucks, 471 naval ships, and 16,000 aircraft. And they sent 730,000 men off to fight.

They were the biggest contributors to the British air training plan and gained a worldwide reputation for their air force. Most amazingly of all, by the end of the war, Canada had the third-largest navy on the planet.

8 India Had the World’s Largest Volunteer Army

When India called on its people to fight, they signed up. An incredible 2.5 million Indian men volunteered to fight in World War II, forming the largest volunteer army in the world. Not every one of them ended up on the front lines. Some worked in factories or defended the country against air raids.

Those who did, though, made a massive difference. One group called The Fourteenth Army, a mixed force of British, Indian, and African soldiers, recaptured Burma. It was a turning point in the war, and by the end, 30 Indian soldiers had earned the Victoria Cross, the highest British medal of honor.

7 Malays Fought England’s Last Stand In Asia

In 1942, the Japanese advanced on Singapore, a major strategic point for the British army. England’s military base there was their access point to Asia, and without it, they would be at a major disadvantage. England’s last stand, though, wasn’t fought by British soldiers; it was fought by Malays. A man named Adnan Saidi and his unit held the ground at Opium Hill, determined to hold against the Japanese to the last man.

At one point, a troop with turbans on their heads dressed in British-Indian uniforms came toward them. At first, they seemed to be a relief army from India, but Saidi noticed something was off. These men marched in lines of four, while the British usually marched in lines of three. They were Japanese soldiers in disguise. Saidi’s men opened fire, and the assault was stopped.

After that, the Japanese got frustrated and launched an all-out attack. Still, Saidi and his men stayed and fought, shooting until the last bullet was fired—and fighting with bayonets after that.

All but one man died. The Japanese overran the place, and Britain lost its key base in Asia. But the Malays, at least, gave them a fight.

6 Switzerland Wasn’t Entirely Neutral

The Swiss didn’t just sit there and let World War II happen. Officially, they were neutral, but they still played a role. They didn’t want the war coming across their borders, and they defended their airspace.

At one point, this meant shooting down 11 German planes that entered Swiss airspace en route to France. The Germans were furious. They demanded an apology and threatened to retaliate. The Swiss, though, threw the blame right back at them and demanded that they stop flying over their land.

When the Allies started fighting back, Switzerland wasn’t always left alone. Some of the bombings meant for Germany landed on them, including a US bombing that killed 100 people. The Americans insisted that it was an accident, although the Swiss weren’t so sure.

By the end, the Americans had blasted Switzerland with enough of an onslaught that they had to pay more than $14 million in damages.

5 Kenya Fought Against Both Italy And Japan

Nearly 100,000 Kenyans signed up to fight in the King’s African Rifles. They were, by far, the biggest part of Britain’s African army, making up one-third of its soldiers, and they played a big role in the war in Africa. The Kenyans defended their land against an Italian invasion and helped the King’s African Rifles fight—and stop—the Italian invasion across East Africa. After that, they went on to Madagascar and Burma.

The Kenyans struggled with racism throughout the war. African soldiers were paid less than white ones and could never be promoted to a commanding rank. Still, they found some ways to take advantage of the stereotypes against them. One soldier told a writer that, to terrify Japanese soldiers, the Kenyans would pretend they were cannibals getting ready for a taste of Japanese.

4 Poland Broke Enigma First

Alan Turing gets all the credit, but he was actually the second person to crack Germany’s enigma code. The first was Marian Rejewski, a Polish cryptographer.

As early as 1932, Poland had started work to crack German’s complex enigma code. Working with documents stolen by French spies, a Polish team struggled to duplicate the enigma machine—and it worked. Rejewski managed to solve the cypher and made the first duplicates of the enigma machine.

Unfortunately, the Germans realized that their code had been cracked and increased the complexity tenfold. The Poles were stuck, and in 1939, realizing that an invasion was imminent, they sent all their work to England for the British to carry it on and braced for the worst.

That work made it to Alan Turing, who built on it to crack the more complex code, but he never would have done it without the work of Marian Rejewski.

3 Finland Held Off An Invasion Of One Million Russians

In 1939, Finland entered World War II. The Soviet Union had been trying to barter a trade, wanting control of several Finnish islands, but when Finland refused, they moved their troops in.

The Soviet army was massive. There were one million troops marching on Finland, leaving them outnumbered three to one. Finland called for help from Britain and France, but none came, so they had to fight the Soviets themselves.

Finland lost—but they dealt a major blow to the USSR in the process, killing 320,000 Soviet soldiers. Finland only suffered 70,000 casualties. The Finnish had to give up some of their land, but they shot a major hole in the Soviet army.

2 Almost Every Soldier From One Armenian Town Earned A Medal

In Armenia, a small mountain village called Chardakhlu played an incredible role in World War II. Of the 1,250 villagers who were enlisted to fight in the Soviet army, 853 were awarded medals, 12 went on to be generals, and seven became heroes of the Soviet Union.

Two men from the little town made it to the highest echelons of the Soviet army. Hamazasp Babadzhanian became the chief marshal of the armored troops of the Soviet, while Ivan Bagramyan became the marshal of the Soviet Union.

By the end of the war, the little town had some of the most decorated fighters in the country. Nearly every man came home with medals on his chest—or didn’t come home at all.

1 Russia Killed Eight Out Of Ten German Soldiers

Admittedly, Russia isn’t exactly an overlooked country in World War II. It’s well-known that Russia played a major role in the war, but most people don’t realize how massive that role was.

We’ve heard a lot of boasts about the United States turning the tides of the war, but the credit really should go to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was responsible for 80 percent of all German casualties. And the USSR came into the war late. If we start counting from 1941, the Soviets are responsible for 95 percent of all German casualties.

A lot of this happened during the Battle of Stalingrad, where Russian soldiers wiped out 20,000 German men each day. Russia’s army was more than big; it had its fair share of talent, too. Nine out of ten of World War II’s deadliest snipers were from the USSR.

The Soviet Union didn’t just play a role in the battle against the Germans—they completely devastated them.

Today, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a well-known part of history. But the hard reality nobody seems to talk about is that this wasn’t some unique, isolated event. Governments were rounding up citizens from enemy countries and locking them inside camps on every corner of the world.

This wasn’t something that just happened to Japanese people in the United States and Jews in Germany. Nearly every country that fought in the war locked up innocent civilians purely because of their ancestry. And some of the stories that don’t get told are even more horrifying than the ones you’ve heard.

10 Canadian Internment Camps Were Worse Than The American Ones

While Japanese Americans were being rounded up and forced into internment camps in the US, the exact same thing was happening north of the border. The 23,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in Canada were dragged off and locked up in camps that, in many ways, were even worse than the ones in the United States.^[1]

They were stripped of every possession they owned and told that their property would be held “in trust” until the end of the war. That, though, was an empty promise. Less than six months after they were locked away, all the property the government had taken from them was auctioned off without their consent.

Many of the camps were converted barns and chicken coops that had been crudely insulated with tar paper. The prisoners weren’t given beds—instead, they were forced to sleep on straw-filled sacks that were often infested with fleas.

The winter of 1942–1943 was one of the coldest ever recorded in British Columbia. Temperatures regularly dropped down below –40 degrees Celsius (–40°F). The internees had to shovel dirt and pack it against their thin walls just to keep from freezing to death.

The United States started allowing their interned Japanese civilians to return to their homes in 1944, but the Canadians didn’t. They kept their Japanese prisoners locked up until April 1949 before finally sending them home.

Even then, not everyone made it back. The government strongly encouraged their Japanese civilians they’d locked up to move to Japan and never come back. 4,000 of the interned Japanese were deported before a single one was set free.

9 The US Also Interned Italian, German, Taiwanese, And Korean Civilians

The Japanese weren’t the only people sent to internment camps in the United States. Under the order that sent the Japanese into the camps, Taiwanese and Korean civilians were considered Japanese.

11,500 German Americans and 2,700 Italian Americans (other sources claim between 1,900 and 10,000) were locked up for being immigrants from an enemy state, as well.^[2] Compared to Japanese Americans, this was a fairly small portion of their population, but the ways they were chosen were often absurd. Joe DiMaggio’s father, for example, was very nearly sent off to the camps even though he’d lived in the US for more than 40 years, purely because he hadn’t yet applied for US citizenship.

Hundreds of thousands more were put under strict restrictions. Over 600,000 Italian Americans who were spared from the camps were still put under a mandatory curfew, forbidding them to step outside of their homes between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM.

It all could have been a lot worse, though. A 1944 opinion poll showed that a good chunk of Americans supported turning the internment into an outright holocaust. A frightening 13 percent of the respondents said they were in favor of “killing off” every Japanese person in America—children included.

8 Jewish Refugees In Britain Were Interned And Deported

When Germany took Norway in 1940, paranoia started to consume Great Britain. Every person of German or Italian descent was labeled an “enemy alien” and locked up.

Most of those people were Jewish. Of the 80,000 enemy aliens in Britain, 55,000 were refugees who had fled to Britain to escape persecution by the Nazis.^[3] Those refugees were almost exclusively Jews—people who had barely escaped death in concentration camps, only to be locked in a different set of camps by the people who’d promised to protect them.

Families were torn apart. The prisoners, for the first year of captivity, were separated into male and female camps, pulling husbands and wives apart and refusing to let them be together.

An additional 7,000 were kicked out of the country altogether and sent off to camps in Canada and Australia. Not all of them survived the journey. One ship, en route to Canada, was attacked as a German vessel and destroyed. 714 people died.

7 Finland Starved 4,000 Prisoners To Death

In Finland, it was Russian civilians who were locked up in camps. When the Finnish army moved into East Karelia, they rounded up 24,000 Russian civilians who lived on the land and threw them into camps surrounded by barbed wire. The prisoners were barely fed, and before the war was over, 4,000 had died.^[4]

The families weren’t rounded up because they were any kind of threat; or, at the very least, that certainly wasn’t the main reason. They were meant to be bartering chips—Finland’s goal was to trade their civilian captives for prisoners of war. Others—the Jewish captives—could be used to win good faith with the Nazis. More than ten percent of the Jews in the camps were sent off to the Gestapo.

Death, though, soon consumed the camps. Malnourishment was the greatest killer. Starving bodies fell throughout the camps, with the worst deaths hitting in the middle of 1942. Over just a few months, 3,500 Russian prisoners starved to death.

6 The Japanese Starved And Murdered Interned Civilians

The Japanese government locked up even more civilians than the Americans did. Throughout the war, they interned more than 130,000 enemy aliens living in the colonies that they’d invaded.

These people weren’t soldiers—they were civilians living in Southeast Asian countries who just happened to be in the wrong place when the Japanese armies rolled in. In many places, though, the treatment was almost as bad as it was in the prisoner-of-war camps where they locked up enemy soldiers.

In the most of the camps, the people were fed so little that they nearly starved to death, and violent force was used on anyone who stepped out of line. One internee said that beatings from Japanese guards were as “regular as the striking of the clock.”

The worst camps, according to the survivors, were the ones with the fewest people. When there weren’t many witnesses around, Japanese guards would get brutal. The survivors of a camp in Nauru that only held seven prisoners said that, after an Allied bombing run, the guards beheaded two of the civilians in the camp just as a way to let off steam.^[5]

5 Seven Prisoners In A Japanese Internment Camp Were Publicly Tortured And Executed

The largest Japanese-run internment camp was in Hong Kong. It was called the Stanley Internment Camp, and it held 2,800 civilian prisoners inside.

Most of the people locked inside were British civilians who’d refused to flee Hong Kong when the Japanese armies rolled in. They were given nothing to eat but the scrapings of leftover food. A family of five would get little more than a bowl of rice and a bowl of stew to eat, and even that, according to an inmate, “frequently contained dust, mud, rat and cockroach excreta, cigarette ends and . . . dead rats.”^[6]

121 of the internees didn’t make it out alive. The most horrifying story of all, though, happened to seven men who tried to stage an escape. They got their hands on a radio set and used it to contact the outside world—and when they were caught, the payback was horrible.

The seven men were publicly tortured while the other inmates were forced to watch. When they couldn’t stand any more pain, the men were either shot or beheaded as a warning to the others never to try to escape.

4 Jewish Refugees Were Robbed And Beaten On The Way To Camps In Australia

Australia interned its Japanese, German, and Italian residents, as well. In total, they sent 7,000 of their own people into internment camps—but they took on another 8,000 from other countries, who were sent to be locked up inside their walls.

The most horrifying story to come from their camps is that of the Dunera : a British ship that was used to send thousands of Jewish refugees to the prison camps in Australia. It was a vessel designed to fit only 1,600 people, but 2,500 were crammed on board.^[7]

2,000 of those prisoners were Jewish refugees, some of whom had already seen the inside of the Nazi death camps and had fled to Britain hoping for salvation. Instead, they were locked up side by side with 451 genuine prisoners of war from Italy and Germany, putting them right next to the SS officers who had slaughtered their families.

The prisoners had to sleep in piles on the floor and were only allowed 30 minutes of fresh air a day. For the entire journey, they were so tightly compacted that it was a struggle not to step on other people’s bodies. Showers were out the question, and the air was so filthy that prisoners would take turns pressing their faces against an open hatch in the wall.

The whole trip took 57 days, and when it was done, they were thrown into prisons. When they got out of the boat, though, they found out that everything they’d brought with them was gone. The guards had gone through their luggage, taking everything that was worth money for themselves. The rest—like medicine and prayer books—were thrown into the sea.

3 Peru Deported Japanese Residents To American Internment Camps

2,200 of the Japanese prisoners in American internment camps had never lived in the United States before. They were from Peru: civilian prisoners rounded up, deported, and sent off to foreign camps, purely because their parents were Japanese.^[8]

The prisoners were sent at the request of the US government. US authorities wanted more civilian prisoners they could use as bargaining chips in negotiations with Japan. So, they got Peru to send them as many Japanese Peruvian civilians as they could.

Peru was only too eager to oblige. The anti-Japanese sentiment there was vicious—in May 1940, a massive riot that broke out in the country ended with 600 Japanese-owned houses, schools, and businesses being burned to the ground.

800 of the civilians deported to the US wound up being sent to Japan in exchange for American prisoners of war. They were often separated from their families and forced to live in a place that, regardless of their ancestry, was a completely foreign country to them.

Hardly any of them made it back home. When the war ended, Peru refused to allow the Japanese citizens they’d deported to step back into the country. Another 1,000 were shipped off to Japan after the war, while the luckiest few who were sent away were forced to make the United States their new homes.

2 Native Alaskans Were Interned And Died At Horrifying Rates

Not everyone in the internment camps was from an enemy country. 881 Native Americans living in Alaska were locked up for three and a half years, even though they were as American as anyone could possibly be.^[9]

The government didn’t suspect them of treason. Instead, they locked them up in the camps for what they said was their own safety. Alaska, they believed, was about to become a war zone, and so they moved them into camps—most of which were still right in the path of war.

They didn’t protect anybody, though. The conditions were so horrible in these camps that the Native Alaskans died at a horrifying rate. Their camps were dilapidated, abandoned buildings; one was a converted gold mine, while another was an old cannery. Disease was rampant, with nearly every person in the camps infected.

By the end of the three and a half years that the Alaskans spent in these camps, one in ten prisoners had died. Most went out in slow, painful deaths, starving, freezing, or plagued by disease.

1 Norway Labeled Its Own Citizens As ‘German Whores’ And Locked Them Up

When the war came to an end, some countries started focusing their wrath on their own citizens. In Norway, in 1945, 5,000 women were branded tyskertoes, meaning “German whores,” and locked up without trial inside internment camps.^[10]

Some of these women had taken German lovers while the Nazis occupied Norway, but many more hadn’t done anything of the sort. Women who had done any type of work for the Germans whatsoever were locked up, even if they’d just worked as cleaners or seamstresses.

The government justified it as a way of protecting them—which wasn’t a totally unfair claim. Mobs would often drag these women out into the streets and shave off their hair, with newspapers and rallies cheering them on.

That didn’t just happen in Norway. In France, women would be stripped, beaten, and paraded down the streets if anyone thought they’d supported the Germans in any way. More often than not, their heads would be shaved, and they’d have swastikas painted on their faces.

The men, though, got off almost completely scot-free. In Norway, there were 28 men who had married German women during the war. They suffered no consequences at all—but every woman who had taken a German husband during World War II was deported from the country, deprived of her citizenship, and branded a traitor for life.

Monsters like Adolf Hitler and Dr. Joseph Mengele may have robbed their victims of any justice, but when WWII came to an end, plenty of other Nazis met their fate at the end of a hangman’s noose.

Years after the war concluded, Nazis were hunted down and brought to justice, and that trend continues and will continue until they’re found or die of old age.

Some of the better-known Nazis captured after the war are well-known, including Adolph Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Josef Schwamberger.

While they aren’t as well known as others, these ten were found in the nooks and crannies to face justice decades after their war crimes were committed and are presented in no particular order, as they’re all monsters.

10 Jews Who Fought In Hitler’s Nazi Army

10 Jakiw Palij

Four years after the war, Jakiw Palij emigrated to the United States, claiming he worked on his father’s farm during the war. Of course, that was a lie, and instead of working as a farmhand, Palij worked as an armed guard at the Trawniki concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Trawniki camp was a forced-labor concentration camp that held Jewish prisoners, but it was more than that. The camp was also one of the locations the Schutzstaffel (SS) trained to hunt down and kill Polish Jews. As for Palij, it took a long time, but he was finally outed by a senior historian from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In 2003, a federal judge stripped Palij of his American citizenship, and the following year, he was ordered deported. Despite the order, no country was willing to receive the Nazi war criminal. Then, in 2018, Germany finally relented and accepted Palij — he was 94-years-old at the time.

In 2019, Palij passed away, and while he was stripped of his American citizenship and finally deported, he was never charged for any crimes related to his involvement in the Holocaust. Regardless, he was outed, which served to properly vilify the man for nearly two decades before his death.

9 Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan

Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was an SS Helferin, working as a female camp guard at the Majdanek and Ravensbrück concentration camps. She was dubbed the “Stomping Mare” and was known to be a cruel and monstrous woman.

She hanged and whipped women to death and would throw children by their hair onto trucks as they were carted off to gas chambers. She earned her nickname after she stomped an older woman to death with her boots.

She was chased across the pond by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who managed to track her down. Her path to the States began in Vienna before she headed to Canada, and finally, Queens. Wiesenthal and his associates finally found her playing housewife under the name “Hermine Ryan.” In 1973, she became the first Nazi extradited from the US to Germany.

She was tried in Düsseldorf, beginning in 1975, and her trial took more than five years. She was found guilty and was given a life sentence, which began in 1981. After she lost a leg to diabetes in 1996, she was released from prison. She passed away three years after her release.

8 Mykolaiovych “John” Demjanjuk

Mykolaiovych “John” Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian member of the Red Army who served as a Trawniki man (recruited POW) for the Nazis. He worked as a camp guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg.

After the war, he emigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in the 1950s. He worked at a Ford automotive plant in Ohio, but in the 1980s, he was misidentified as a notoriously cruel guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” He was tried and convicted, but in 1993, the Israeli Supreme Cours overturned the conviction.

His legal troubles didn’t end there, though, as it was known that he was a concentration camp guard even if he wasn’t who the world thought he was. As a result, his citizenship was revoked in 2002, and Germany extradited him in 2009, claiming he was an accessory to more than 27,900 counts of murder.

That was the number of people killed under his “guard” at Sobibor. In 2011, he was convicted, which set a new precedent for convicting guards/collaborators where no direct evidence of their involvement in murder was available. He was given a five-year sentence but died the following year.

7 Fyodor Fedorenki

Fedor Federenko was mobilized into the Soviet Army shortly before the Germans advanced into Soviet territory. He was captured and taken to Chelm, Poland. He was recruited into an auxiliary police unit, serving Nazi Germany, and was taken to the Treblinka extermination camp for training.

While there, Fedorenki was promoted to a position of authority over 200 men. Their job was to shave, strip, beat, and gas prisoners brought to the camp. He later trained as a marksman and executioner who took part in the “cleaning out” of the Warsaw Ghetto, though he claimed he was issued a rifle but never fired it.

After the War, Fedorenki escaped to the United States, where he was suspected of being a Nazi war criminal. Regardless, he was given citizenship and retired to Miami in 1973. Five years later, he was arrested, denaturalized, and by 1984, he was the first Nazi war criminal deported from the United States to the Soviet Union.

Following a nine-day hearing, he was found guilty of treason and having taken part in mass executions. He was sentenced to death and was executed for his crimes in 1987 — 42 years after the war ended.

6 Karl Linnas

Karl Linna was the Commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Tartu in Estonia. During his time in that position, he shot men, women, and children while he oversaw the camp’s operations. When the Soviets pushed the Germans out of Estonia, Linnas fought alongside the German army and was wounded.

He remained in various displaced persons camps in Germany before making his way to the United States in 1951. Between ‘51 and 1979, Linna worked as a land surveyor in Greenlawn, New York. While living in the States, the USSR worked tirelessly to bring him to justice. In 1962, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in absentia by a Soviet court.

In 1981, the Federal District Court in Westbury, NY stripped him of his citizenship and ordered his deportation. He fought this for years, but the Supreme Court refused to hear his final appeal, and in 1987, Linnas was flown to the USSR.

Unfortunately, he never stood trial. He was in the Soviet Union for three months before he died in a prison hospital while awaiting trial. Had his trial taken place, there’s little doubt he would have been found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed.

5 Arthur Rudolph

Arthur Rudolph was brought to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip. That operation brought German scientists to the U.S. to help develop the American space program and other rocketry-related technology. In that respect, Rudolph helped develop the Pershing missile and Saturn V rocket.

Scientists brought to the States under Operation Paperclip were generally forgiven for their actions during the war, but Rudolph is a special case. In 1943, he began production of the V-2 at the Mittelwerk facility. He was in charge of production, which relied on forced labor via the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.

It has been estimated that as many as 20,000 prisoners died building the rockets — information that the U.S. Government buried until 1982. When this came to light, he signed a confession/agreement with the OSI to renounce his U.S. citizenship and leave the country.

Ultimately, Rudolph wasn’t prosecuted for his crimes and was granted citizenship in West Germany. He was stripped of his NASA Distinguished Service Medal, and when he visited Canada, he was expelled from the country. He died from heart failure in 1996 while living in Germany.

4 Valerian Trifa

Leading up to WWII, Valerian Trifa was a member of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist group that helped provoke the Legionnaires’ Rebellion of 1941. A staunch anti-semite, Trifa worked hard to instigate violent riots against Bucharest’s Jewish community and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Jews.

He spent most of the war as a detainee of the Nazis with privileged status, and when the war ended, he emigrated to the United States. He rose to prominence to lead the Romanian-American Orthodox community against the Orthodox Church in Communist Romania.

His crimes leading up to the war remained unknown unti l 1975, when the U.S. Department of Justice began an inquiry against Trifa. He was stripped of his American citizenship before being allowed to move to Portugal.

By ‘84, Portugal declared Trifa an “undesirable” due to his ties with Fascism. The country forced him to leave, offering him three months to make that happen. He fought deportation for several years through the courts. In 1972, while the process was still underway, Trifa died of a heart attack.

3 Friedrich Karl Berger

During the Winter of 1945, Friedrich Karl Berger served as a Nazi guard at the Meppen sub-concentration camp. During that time, he guarded the prisoners as they were forced to work in “atrocious” conditions, working many “to the point of exhaustion and death.”

When Allied forces approached the camp, the Nazis abandoned it, and Berger helped move prisoners to the Neuengamme main camp. This process resulted in the deaths of some 70 prisoners under his watch. When the war ended, Berger made his way to the United States in 1959, where he remained until 2020.

When his case was brought to light, Berger admitted to working as a guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp system but said he never witnessed any killings or prisoner abuse. While German prosecutors dropped their case against him for lack of evidence, he was nonetheless deported from the United States in November 2020.

Berger, who was 95-years-old at the time of his deportation, expressed astonishment at what was happening to him. “After 75 years, this is ridiculous. I cannot believe it. You’re forcing me out of my home.” Despite his protests, the U.S. no longer wanted an admitted Nazi concentration camp guard residing within its borders.

2 Laszlo Csatáry

Laszlo Csatáry worked as the Commander of the Royal Hungarian Police in the city of Kassa. In 1944, he organized the deportation of 15,700 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was also accused of using his authority and position to brutalize his city’s people while also using prisoners in forced labor camps.

His crimes were well known to Kassa’s people, and in 1948, he was convicted in absentia for war crimes by a Czechoslovakian court. The following year, he fled to Canada, claiming to be a Yugoslavian national.

He set himself up in Montreal, where he became an art dealer, and by 1955, he became a Canadian citizen. He enjoyed that privilege right up until 1997 when Canada revoked his citizenship for lying on his application. He was permitted to leave the country but wasn’t charged for his crimes.

Csatáry ended up in Budapest, where his identity was revealed in 2011. After this, Slovakia was ready to prosecute him for the deportation of nearly 16,000 people to Auschwitz. Ultimately, he died in custody while awaiting trial, having “eluded justice and punishment” to the end.

1 Hans Lipschis

Hans Lipschis was a Waffen-SS member who spent most of the war working at the Auschwitz concentration camp. When the war ended, he found his way to Chicago, where he remained until 1983. He was deported for “lying about his Nazi past” and eventually settled in Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center placed him fourth on its most-wanted list, but he eluded capture for an incredibly long time. He wasn’t captured until 2013, when he was 93-years-old. Lipschis admitted to being stationed at the camp, but he claimed he worked as a cook, not a guard.

When he was arrested, there was more than enough evidence, linking him to the camp from 1941 to 1945. Unfortunately, there was no direct evidence implicating him in taking part in any murders. The German government sought to bring charges against him in the same manner John Demjanjuk was convicted for accessory to murder.

Unfortunately, due to his age and poor health, he was ruled unfit to stand trial for his crimes. He had dementia, so the court never opened the trial. Despite being caught, he avoided justice and passed away in 2016 at the age of 96.

10 Famous People Who Were Nazi Sympathizers

Aerial bombardments; labor shortages; and insufficient food, materials, and natural resources were only some of the hardships that men, women, and children faced on the home front during World War II. The devastation of The Great War meant that everyone must do their part, regardless of sex, age, or location.

Back home, ordinary citizens rose to the occasion, their heroic sacrifices and labor on behalf of the Allied nations’ fighters helping their military men and women win the long, hard-fought war against the Axis powers. Without a doubt, the valiant, patriotic contributions of such workers as Land Girls, Lumber Jills, and Factory Girls helped the Allies to win the war.

Unfortunately, there were also undesirable changes on—and to—the home front. Without a doubt, World War II changed the home front, sometimes temporarily, other times permanently, for both good and ill.

While it would take a library to fully document all these changes in detail, this list of ten ways WWII changed the home front provides a glimpse into some of the major transformations that resulted from this devastating global conflict.

10 Aerial Bombardment

The aerial bombardment campaign that the German air force, or Luftwaffe, conducted against the United Kingdom and other countries began at the outset of World War II in 1939 and continued until the end of the global conflict in 1945. For these six years, the Luftwaffe more or less continuously bombed London, dropping both heavy explosives and incendiary devices night after night.

The seemingly endless onslaught was directed at many other British towns as well, including some of the most beautiful cities in England, the Luftwaffe adding rocket attacks to their arsenal during the last two years of the war. The potential number of victims was massive. London itself was home to eight million, but this number swelled to ten million when the population was counted as including the city’s greater metropolitan area.

An observer described the sight of “hundreds of” incoming Luftwaffe bombers as a swarm that was “amazing, impressive, [and] riveting,” filling the sky above and resembling “bees around their queen.”

The city’s East End docks and Central, West, and South London came under successive bombardments, followed by aerial assaults on the suburbs. Neither people, their homes, nor the city’s most beloved architectural masterpieces were spared, including Buckingham Palace, which was struck sixteen times, and the Palace of Westminster, which endured fourteen such attacks during the Blitz of 1940-1941. London’s historic churches and cathedrals were bombed, too, sustaining serious damages. The Luftwaffe also carried out extensive air attacks on rural targets.^[1]

9 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Association

Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported the continuation of Major League Baseball after the United States entered World War II in 1941, there was a problem. The players were trading their baseball uniforms for those of their country’s fighting forces. In 1943, chewing gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs, came to the rescue, founding the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Association.

Wrigley considered the all-women’s league a temporary wartime measure, certain that it would disband when the conflict ended. Instead, the all-women’s league continued drawing crowds, with more than 900,000 fans attending the 1948 season. The league didn’t disband until 1954, ending a twelve-year run that featured over 500 players and later inspired the 1992 all-star movie A League of Their Own, starring Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, and Madonna, among others.^[2]

8 Blackouts

Blackouts were simple but effective defenses against aerial bombardment, preventing the pilots of enemy aircraft from discerning targets due to seeing vehicles’ headlights, streetlights, residential lighting, or, as an archived website’s article adds, even “the red glow of a cigarette.”

In England, lights were banned—period. This resulted in an entire city or coastline being plunged into darkness. Prior to the war, Britain’s Air Ministry had predicted that the UK would be subjected to “sudden air attacks,” resulting in many casualties and massive “destruction from enemy night bombers.” Without ground lights, however, the pilots of such aircraft would find both navigation and target acquisition difficult. And the nation’s Air Raid Patrol called on every citizen to help ensure blackout regulations were properly enforced.

Driving at night without the benefit of headlights proved “confusing, frightening, and dangerous.” Accidents increased, as did drownings when drivers drove off bridges. In one case, after a passenger, mistaking an unscheduled stop for his arrival at a station, stepped off a train, he fell eighty feet into a viaduct, ending up in the hospital.

Another downside to blackouts was an increase in crime as pickpockets and thieves took advantage of the darkness, although the increase was not as drastic as some believed, since criminals feared that, should they break into a house, they might come face to face with the resident.

In the United States and other countries, similar blackout restrictions were enforced until, in April 1945, these measures were finally rescinded for good.^[3]

7 Bomb Shelters

In Britain, underground bomb shelters offered protection against aerial bombardment. For example, an Anderson shelter (named in honor of Home Secretary Sir John Anderson) was essentially a corrugated iron shed, measuring 6ft 6in x 4ft 6in (2m x 1.4m). The government ordered a total of 2,500,000 of them. Although only 100,000 were sold, each of them was effective in protecting up to as many as six adults, and many families survived in their Anderson shelters while their homes were flattened.

Although they protected the people inside, these shelters weren’t comfortable—or comforting, for that matter. Cramped underground spaces, they were not soundproof, a fact that tended to amplify the terrible din of an air raid: the “whistle of falling bombs, the canon fire of RAF fighters, and the thunderous booming of British guns.” In addition, public shelters, some constructed in parks, were made available.

Larger public shelters could pose dangers to those who sought refuge in them. During a mass exodus from the streets into an Underground station shelter, when a woman tripped on the stairs, 173 people were killed, and more than 60 were injured in the crush that followed.^[4]

6 Censorship

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacked Pearl Harbor. Twelve days later, President Roosevelt created the Office of Censorship, authorizing the editing or suppression of “any message entering or leaving the United States by mail, cable, or radio.” The government’s domestic censorship policy remained in effect until the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945. Government censorship also occurred in other countries, including Canada, under its War Information Board directives and guidance.

Although some censorship appears to have been petty and arbitrary, other censored material was significant, such as news concerning the development of the atomic bomb. According to the Office of Censorship’s director, Byron Price, the news media voluntarily agreed to stifle themselves for the good of the country. However, in the words of the Lawrence, Kansas, Daily Journal-World, Price admitted that “there were some [minor] leaks,” the director believing that they were probably “not deliberate.” In all, Price was satisfied that “the long work on the atomic bomb was the best-kept single secret of the war.”^[5]

5 Propaganda

During World War II, propaganda took many forms, including those in films, on posters, and even, oddly enough, in comic books. As Paul S. Hirsh points out in Pulp Fiction: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, comic books, which are visually oriented, easy to read, and exciting, if unsophisticated, were widely read among both soldiers and civilians.

For this reason, among others, such publications attracted the attention of the Writers War Board as a potent means of delivering propaganda. Providing propaganda favorable to the war effort was regarded as a win-win situation by comic book companies, too, whose executives could demonstrate their patriotic credentials while gaining millions of new readers.

One such heroic soldier was DC Comics’ Sgt. Rock, who was described as carrying on the tradition of serving his country by enlisting at the rank of private in the early days of World War II. He then occupied the “same mythical space for enlisted men” as that of Marvel Comics’ Captain America, who epitomized the “officer who could protect you during the war.”

Indeed, on the March 1941 cover of Captain America Comics, the hero in the red-white-and-blue costume is shown punching Adolf Hitler. As Marvel’s editor Stan Lee himself pointed out, just before World War II began, “many of our super heroes, especially Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner, were already fighting Hitler and the Nazis.”^[6]

4 Factory Girls and Military Auxiliaries and Reservists

In addition to his being a misanthropic madman, Hitler was also quite sexist. As the National World War II Museum website points out, the Führer believed that women’s proper places were the home and the maternity ward: “The role of German women,” he said, “was to be good wives and mothers and to have more babies for the Third Reich.”

On the home front, American women took over the factory jobs that the nation’s men had done prior to joining the military. Not only did women continue to maintain their homes and rear their children, but they also took on jobs in defense plants and volunteered for war-related organizations. Some of them even served aboard trolleys as “conducterettes.”

Nor did these roles define the limits of women’s capabilities. According to Stephen Ambrose, author of D Day, they also “managed the finances and learned to fix the car.” In addition, they served in the auxiliaries or reserves of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, performing the jobs of clerks, truck drivers, aircraft mechanics, lab technicians, parachute riggers, radio operators, photography analysts, military pilots, test pilots, and training assistants.

Although they did not perform combat roles, they did serve as nurses near the front lines, and 16 were killed by direct enemy fire, while 68 were captured as POWs in the Philippines. General Dwight D. Eisenhower attributed the Allies’ success against the Axis powers in part to the valiant efforts of American women, without whose assistance, he suggested, the war might well have had a different outcome.^[7]

7 Land Girls

As John Christopher and Campbell McCutcheon point out in The Second World War in Photographs 1939, with so many men gone to war, the UK was short on farm labor. A call for volunteers, whose numbers would later be bolstered by “conscripts,” resulted in a corps of 80,000 “Land Girls,” as the substitute workers were popularly known.

Although initially, they were not universally appreciated, their hard work won over their detractors. The women proved themselves adept at driving tractors, thatching, sharpening “wooden stakes for fencing, and packing sugar beet into a silo.”^[8]

2 Lumber Jills

One of the ways in which women in the UK aided the war effort was to serve as substitutes for lumberjacks who’d enlisted in the military. Known informally as “Lumber Jills,” these members of the Women’s Timber Corps, established in 1942 as a branch of the Land Army, felled and measured trees, loaded lumber aboard trucks, and drove vehicles. Their effort was crucial in helping to supply timber to wartime industries.

Although their hours were a bit shorter than those of the Land Girls, the workdays were plenty long enough, lasting from 7:00 am to 4:30 pm. Their shorter hours, as compared to those of Land Girls, made some think Lumber Jills had it easier than Land Girls. Still, the fact that Lumber Jills had to pass a stricter medical examination than Land Girls did suggests otherwise, as does an interview with Lumber Jill Joy Smith.

In February 1943, Smith entered the Women’s Timber Corps at age eighteen. During her training at Culford Camp, she lived in a Litton hut and learned to “wield an ax” and a crosscut saw, to operate a buzz saw, to fell trees and cut them into four-foot lengths, and to load the cut section onto “lorries.” After training, she and the other Lumber Jills were deployed to various parts of the UK—where they were housed with local families—to perform logging operations.^[9]

1 Japanese Internment Camps

Probably the most horrendous change that occurred to the home front as a result of World War II was the establishment of Japanese internment camps in the United States, Canada, and Australia. President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, signed in February 1942, authorized the removal of individuals from military areas “as deemed necessary or desirable,” notes Rachel A. Bailey, author of The Japanese Internment Camps. The meaning of military areas was vague, which might have helped the entire West Coast to be defined as one.

Bailey gives a harrowing, first-person account of how her own family was forced to vacate their residence. Her mother had expected such an occasion to occur, Bailey writes, and had sold the family’s belongings, including books, toys, linens, and even their “dog, for next to nothing.”

When the notice to vacate arrived, the family was put on a bus and taken to the Owens Valley Reception Station (later Manzanar) and permitted to bring with them only that which they could carry, usually only duffel bags stuffed with their belongings. The family was identified by the number attached to their bags. The center at which they would be held consisted of 36 blocks, each containing 14 barracks, surrounded by desolate desert.

Their cramped apartment was equipped with “a lone light bulb” hanging from the ceiling and “eight army cots with mattresses stuffed with straw and blankets.” There was no private bathroom, only communal toilets in a separate barracks. The families took their meals in the camp’s mess hall.

A map depicting the layout of the camp to which Bailey and her family were sent shows a hospital, an orphanage, a department store, a Catholic church, a music hall, a Buddhist church, an outdoor theater, a fire station, a judo dojo, a Protestant church, an auditorium, a police station, a sentry house, a town hall, a post office, staff housing, camp facility buildings, garages, picnic grounds and, at intervals along all four walls enclosing the camp, guard towers, all compacted into an area about a mile wide by a mile-and-a-half long (1.6 kilometers by 2.4 kilometers).

Besides California’s Owens Valley, or Manzanar, and Tule Lake, there were nine other camps scattered over various other states.

Under the authority of the War Measures Act, the Canadian government, beginning in 1942, “detained and dispossessed more than 90 percent of Japanese Canadians” for the duration of World War II, seizing and selling the detainees’ homes and businesses to pay for their detention. Detainees were allowed only the belongings they could carry and were detained in camps in various locations across the country or, in some cases, allowed to work on sugar beet farms, where they would be able to “keep their families intact.” Conditions were grim, characterized by overcrowding, a lack of electricity, and running water.

On May 9, 1941, the Australian War Cabinet decreed that, should the country be drawn into the war, “all Japanese males over 16” who lived in Australia or Australian territories “would be interned.” And when hostilities occurred in December, very few first- or second-generation Japanese escaped internment in Australia’s Wartime Internment Camps, including “even elderly people in nursing homes.”^[10]

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.

In movies, war is often depicted in a very straightforward and well-regimented way, at least in terms of how it’s planned and implemented. Things get terrifying and intense on the field of battle, but behind the scenes it seems like there’s a well oiled machine driving the force. 

In reality, war is remarkably unpredictable, and nothing is set in stone. Being craftier than your enemy means thinking outside the box a lot, and that has led to some incredible and nearly unbelievable innovations, like these ones from the Second World War.

10. Kaiten-Class Suicide Torpedoes 

The first successful torpedo test dates back to 1866 and ever since, torpedoes have been a staple of naval warfare. They have grown smarter and more powerful over the years as technology has evolved but the basic idea of an underwater missile is still pretty much the same. 

During WWII, the Japanese developed the Kaiten-Class torpedo, which was decidedly different from a typical torpedo in one very significant one – they were manually guided. 

Essentially a very small submarine that was piloted by one person, they meant death for that pilot because, well, obviously. The poor sailor was stuck inside a torpedo. Like the more famous kamikaze pilots who sacrificed their lives in the skies, kaiten torpedo pilots would be sealed in the tube and then, as they approached a target, would surface to make adjustments in direction as needed.

They could arm their warheads and make a pass at an enemy vessel. If successful, the pilot blew himself up with the enemy. If not, they could make a second attempt. If that run also failed, they could initiate a self destruct that would kill them as well. Early prototypes had an escape option, but later versions did not. Death was the only outcome. 

9. Retteungsbojen Rescue Buoys

We’ve all probably seen a WWII film featuring a dogfight in which a plane gets shot down and then, moments later, a parachute opens and the pilot slowly drifts to the ground. In most films, the action continues and we rarely follow up on what happened there. But in real life, if that pilot was shot down over the water, they might have had a shot at finding a Retteungsboje buoy.

Part of the German war effort, the Retteungsbojen were emergency rescue buoys located on the English Channel. If a German pilot was shot down and survived, they could try to make their way to one of the 50 or so buoys that the Luftwaffe had anchored there.

Essentially a life raft anchored in the Channel, pilots could enter the buoy and find a small living space of about 43 square feet inside complete with food, water, blankets and dry clothes. There were even games and a cooking area. There was room for four men per buoy, and a radio transmitter would allow for them to call in a rescue.  

The English had similar rescue buoys that offered similar amenities to Allies awaiting rescue. 

8. Colorblind Camo Spotters

Natural camouflage has probably existed for as long as hunting has. Animals use it, after all, and humans likely learned that hiding was more advantageous than standing out in the open sometimes. But military camo only dates back to 1914, meaning that by the time WWII came around it was widespread but still fairly unique to most people who were participating in the war. Finding a way to overcome it required some innovative thinking. 

People who are colorblind, as it happens, are remarkably adept at spotting camouflage. Because they were more inclined to focus on outlines and patterns that distinguish between things rather than color, they were used during the war to help spot German positions from spy planes. It’s even been speculated that color blindness isn’t necessarily a failing but an evolutionary advantage for hunters from a time when needing to be able to spot both predators and prey out in the world was a key to survival. 

7. Earthquake Bombs 

Every bomb is meant to cause some kind of damage and the bigger they are, the more destructive they tend to be. The Tallboy was meant to be the most destructive bomb in the British arsenal and not for what it did above ground, rather below. It was designed to be an earthquake bomb, a weapon that would literally trigger an earthquake and destroy everything around it. 

Initial plans required the bomb to weigh 20,000 pounds, which was heavier than any other bomb and no plane could even carry it. It would also need to be dropped from 40,000 feet which, again, no plane could do. The designer tweaked his methods and came back with a slightly more reasonable 12,000-pound bomb that needed to be dropped from 18,000 feet.

The bombs were used to destroy underground targets like railway tunnels, submarine pens, and weapons manufacturing plants. The British dropped 854 of them during the war including one that was discovered in 2020 which exploded as it was being lifted out of the Baltic Sea in Poland where it had been dropped on a German ship during a 1945 raid. 

6. Black Widow Silk

If you had to think of a way to make war more terrifying, what would you include? If you suggested spiders, maybe the infamous black widow spider, you’re in luck. They actually made a significant contribution to WWII that most of us never read about in history.

Even if you’ve never used a gun, you have no doubt seen the crosshairs of a gun sight in pictures or movies. And while it may look like the cross hairs are just lines drawn on a scope, they are not. Those gun sights were made with black widow spider silk cross hairs.

Back in 1943, a number of spiders were employed by the US military and were producing up to 180 feet of thread every week that was then used in scope production. They chose the black widow because, despite its dangerous reputation, it’s also a very slow spider and therefore easier to handle. Plus, they’re not nearly as deadly as people think, though you’d still do well to avoid a bite. 

The spider thread was an ideal material because it’s about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair, but extremely strong and hard to break. Its elasticity ensured that stretching it for use in crosshair production worked like a charm. The army actually farmed the job of silk harvesting out and it became a side hustle for some people long before anyone used that term. 

5. Remote Controlled Tanks

Remote control machines of war are something we’re well aware of in the modern world with the proliferation of drones more than anything else. But unmanned machines are not as new as you might think and the Soviets actually had unmanned tanks as far back as the 1930s.

The Soviets were inspired by a French design from 1915 that was a kind of un-piloted tank that could carry a 200 kilograms, or 441-pound payload of explosives to a target. In the early ’30s, the Soviets rolled out their first Teletanks, made from an upgraded T-18 tank that could be radio controlled though it proved to be agonizingly slow with a top speed of under three miles per hour. It could go forward, backward, left and right. But it proved a foundation for later models that could go faster and do more.

In battle, another tank controlled the Teletank from behind. But the remote controlled tank would be very heavily armed and capable of using weapons like flamethrowers, smoke grenades and even deploying time bombs.

4. Aniseed Ball Candy Mine Timers

The concept of a time bomb is pretty simple. You have an explosive charge that is triggered by a timer set to go off after a certain amount of time has passed. The limpet mine was such a device and its construction was the stuff of legend. After all, who needs an electronic timing device when a piece of candy will do?

The idea behind the mines was to make them easily attachable to the hull of an enemy ship by a diver in the water. They needed to go off after a reliable amount of time had passed that would let the diver escape. And it needed to be safe to use in water.

The idea of a spring mounted trigger was developed, and a water soluble pellet would be used to hold the spring back. It turned out that aniseed balls were hard enough to hold the spring but also dissolved like clockwork in just over 30 minutes. 

3. The New Guinea Glider Rescue Mission

Rescue missions are often sensitive and precarious at the best of times. When a plane crashed in New Guinea in 1945, the effort to rescue the survivors had to go to some uncharted places, literally and metaphorically, to get them back.

At that time, most of New Guinea had been unexplored by anyone from the outside. The native population lived a very primitive and isolated existence by Western standards and there was literally no access to the unexplored jungles from outside.

Three survivors made their way to a clearing where rescue planes were able to spot them, but so were the natives. Believing the locals to be cannibals, the crash survivors were in a dangerous spot. Until they met the local tribe leader, smiled at one another and, despite a clear language barrier, became friends.

Paratroopers and a documentary filmmaker parachuted in, all while there was still no way to escape, and it was decided gliders would be the best and only solution to the problem. Planes would drop small gliders that the survivors could strap themselves to and then hook to other planes that were making low passes, pulling them all to safety. And, amazingly, it worked.

2. Jetpacks

Few things signify the future quite as easily as a jetpack. They had been staples of sci fi for years, notably in tales like the Rocketeer and even Iron Man is essentially using jet packs to fly. A personal flight unit that doesn’t require a big machine or wings has an alluring quality to it, of science mastering nature. But it has also proved far more elusive in reality. Managing fuel, propulsion, lift, navigation, there are just a lot of factors that have made jetpacks mostly impractical until very recently. Or so it seemed.

Turns out, Nazis had jetpacks. Or one jetpack, anyway. Known as the Himmelstürmer, it used a pulse jet engine and it was designed to allow Nazi soldiers to get over enemy defenses like mine fields or fences. A soldier could jump a distance of 180 feet at a 50 foot altitude. It was never meant for sustained flight, however.

The device was never put into practical use on the battlefield because the war had ended by that time. 

1. Stench Warfare

Not all weapons are designed to kill and sometimes a non-lethal weapon can clear the enemy even more effectively than a lethal one. That’s part of the thinking behind psychological warfare, using tools to break the enemy’s spirit and, in one case, make them run in a desperate panic to escape the worst smell ever.

In 1943, chemists were enlisted to develop something later dubbed “Who, Me?” It would be a stink so vile that it could clear buildings and make people sick. But ideally it would shatter the morale of the enemy by making them rancid smelling filth mongers, shunned by their non-smelly peers and causing terrible embarrassment. Based on those clues alone it’s fairly clear the point was to make a weapon that would convince people an enemy had lost bowel control and was carrying the stink with them. But the reality was even worse.

The team came up with a compound featuring smells of “vomit, rancid butter, urine, rotten eggs, foot odor, and excrement.” Alas, the war ended before it was ever deployed in the battlefield so we’ll never know how effective it may have been.