[Music] In France, women had their heads shaved or people were chased in the streets because they had actually or supposedly collaborated with the Germans.

During the Nazi occupation, women had German boyfriends in the German army, had various leazison, Germans, sometimes because it was the only way to eat, sometimes because it was an adventure, sometimes to be free of an oppressive family.

There were all kinds of reasons, but it added to the sense of humiliation that people felt about being occupied by the enemy.

The joy brought by the liberation quickly fades away.

Returning deportes, political conflicts, rationing, Europe faces a vertigenous question.

How does one rebuild a devastated continent? The struggle is just beginning.

Who’s going to pay for that and what does it cost? Imagine if your house had been destroyed in in combat and you still live there or not.

What is your life going to be? Have you lost people to the war from your family? And how is that going to affect you? The areas which have been fought through Normandy and France, the destruction there has been appalling.

Whether one looks at uh the Netherlands, the starvation of the hunger winter in Italy, the starvation there, Yugoslavia, almost all of Europe had suffered appallingly in that particular way.

Many people wondered whether Europe or their town, whatever it happened to be, could ever come back and could ever be the same again.

The defeated are confronted with unprecedented devastation.

[Music] The Reich has been annihilated.

German society is crushed.

[Music] Public transportation no longer existed or hardly at all.

Most of the houses had been destroyed.

The situation was catastrophic.

It was estimated that 38 million houses in Germany were damaged or destroyed during the war.

[Music] [Music] On August 2nd, a few kilometers away from Berlin, the Potum Conference is coming to an end.

Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill sit next to the new American president.

Harry Truman has replaced Franklin Roosevelt, who died during the war less than four months earlier.

The pot stem conference was the most important one after the end of World War II.

This is when the Cold War actually began, even though it only broke out two years later.

The Allies are dividing the territory among themselves.

In the West, the British and the Americans each occupy a zone.

France also claims a share as a victor.

In the east, the USSR controls a large part of the country.

The city of Berlin is divided into four sections as well.

But for Stalin, Germany is merely the western link of a chain that crosses the entire eastern part of the continent.

During the spring of 1945, all of central and eastern Europe were under the diplomatic and military domination of the Red Army, which occupied all the countries in the area.

Little by little, these countries fell under the political control of the communists.

When the Western Allies freed these European countries, including Western Germany, the system they implemented wasn’t anything new.

Private property was preserved, and people’s lifestyles remained the same.

The only requirements were to comply to the demilitarization, to implement democratic governance, and to prevent and forbid Nazi protests and propaganda.

On the Soviet side, however, as soon as their troops entered Europe, they had a completely different goal.

They meant to establish regimes similar to the Soviet system.

And so they laid down socialist politics, essentially seizing private property and thus establishing a totally different socioeconomical order.

On August 6th, 1945, at 8:16 a.

m.

, the first atomic bomb in history explodes in the heart of the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

It devastates everything in its path.

The immediate loss of life in the terrible heat.

people burned to death, people incinerated, people esphyxiated.

Of course, the radiation sickness that’s going to follow, but a lot of the deaths were from the collapse of structures.

It’s just so devastating.

The Americans explain or even justify the use of the bomb by claiming it helped save lives.

They plead that the human toll of victory if they had used conventional weapons against Japan would have amounted to several hundred,000 soldiers.

At least 70,000 people are killed that day, a number to which we must add the gravely wounded and the tens of thousands of victims who died in the following weeks.

[Music] However, this bomb doesn’t suffice to bring Japan to its knees.

The commanders of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Navy refuse absolutely any idea of unconditional surrender.

But even with the American offer of keeping the emperor, which was a key element in any question of what post-war Japan would be like, was not enough to satisfy the diehard military commanders.

And this was when the decision was finally taken to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki 3 days later.

And that point the emperor had also received details of the devastation of Hashima.

He knew that there was no option.

I think that the shock of those nuclear explosions was what finally persuaded the emperor to order the surrender.

[Music] [Music] On September 2nd, 1945, the entire world is watching Tokyo Bay.

On the bridge of the USS Missouri, the American battleship, a delegation representing the Japanese Empire, comes to acknowledge defeat.

General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Allies in the Southwest Pacific, addresses the world.

We are gathered here, representatives of the major waring powers to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.

[Music] World War II is now officially over.

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] It has claimed the lives of over 50 million people, civilians for the most part.

The end of the atrocities is a relief.

But this relief comes with a new feeling.

Since the month of August, something has permanently changed.

The idea of one bomb being able to destroy a whole major city was really unknown in human history up to this point in time.

Everything changed.

The nuclear age had begun.

And we begun to see that human beings could create weapons so terrible that they could basically eliminate their own existence.

The echoes of the slaughters still resonate in the collective mind.

The American soldiers come home.

But in what condition? A display of emotion is all right.

I’m not doing this deliberately.

Please believe.

I I do believe it.

Years of warfare have completely reshuffled the cards.

During the conflicts, women started holding new positions.

Most men were either locked up or fighting on various fronts.

This meant that for the first time, women were taking jobs that normally had been reserved for men in industry and other parts of the economy.

In America, as well as in Europe, the shock wave following World War II hits every household.

Women stopped just being housewives and became responsible for keeping things going.

And that of course enhanced the status of women which they were not really all that keen to give up after the war.

[Music] However, gender equality is still a very distant prospect.

In 1945 and in the subsequent period, there was a terrible anti-limax for women because the men would return.

They would be given back their jobs.

But above all, the men had felt that they’d lost control of their families in a way that they were no longer sort of the center.

And there was therefore a tremendous amount of repression.

But in 1945, societal issues are far from being the priority of the Allied leaders.

Those who defeated Nazism are now concerned about the political future of the world.

On October 24th, 1945, the UN charter officially goes into effect.

Signed four months earlier during the San Francisco conference, the document establishes the creation of a brand new institution, the United Nations.

51 countries representing about 80% of the world’s population demonstrate a great deal of ambition about the future of the world.

The idea is we can never have a war like this again and that maybe the United Nations we can begin to quell conflict around the planet and maybe we can do that if the superpowers will work together sufficiently to do so.

Men of goodwill from around the world including the Americans were reluctantly brought into world wars twice in 1917 and 1941.

They learned their lesson, namely that it was impossible for them not to get involved in global affairs.

And so they decided to lead an international system even in peaceful times, hoping to avoid conflicts of this magnitude going forward.

Through this dream of a new world order, the Americans basically wanted to promote their own values.

Therefore, this new world order would be ruled by law and security.

If we do not want to die together in war, we must learn to live together in peace.

For the USSR, it was extremely important not only to participate in this organization, but also to create a security council with the right to vote and the power of veto that would only be reserved for the allies.

to the Soviet Union.

The UN and the Security Council represented a unique opportunity for the great powers of which the USSR was now a part.

It was their chance to divide the world through negotiations in the spirit of this is yours, this is ours.

It was very clear to Stalin that it was in his best interest to divide the world into spheres of influence.

The threat of the Cold War is already looming, but the victors of 1945 are still joining forces.

I’m opening the line.

On November 20th, a historical trial begins in the courthouse of Nuremberg.

In the city where anti-semitic laws had been declared and where Nazis had organized huge rallies, the prosecutors from the Allied countries read the criminal charges.

A reading that takes 5 hours in the name of the Union of Soviet Social.

The idea of having trials was interestingly enough encouraged more by the Soviets than it was by the Americans.

The Soviets partly because the Soviets were used to show trials and they like to use trials for political ends.

in the name of the French Republic de Montton.

That was not of course what the British and the Americans and the French wanted.

What they wanted was to as part of this exercise of restoring the world order was to make a point of the rule of law.

And the rule of law meant that you had to give the leaders of your former enemies a fair trial, not just put them up against the wall, shoot them delivers his summation.

This trial must form a milestone in the history of civilization.

Not only marking that right shall in the end triumph over evil, but also that ordinary people of the world are now determined that the individual must transcend the state.

The Nuremberg trials during which 22 people were prosecuted, 12 of whom were sentenced to death, some to long prison sentences while others were acquitted, were considered favorably by the experts who saw this as an important victory for justice.

[Music] To most Germans, it was an understandable reaction from the Americans and their allies.

Yet, our task is finished.

Now it is for you in the silence of your deliberations to listen to innocent blood crying for justice.

It also for the first time made the defense that I was simply following orders inadmissible.

If the orders are immoral, you do not obey them.

It cannot be an argument anymore.

And the Nerburgg uh trials really laid down that principle.

So it was again a way to build a better world that would make future wars harder.

Meanwhile, in December 1945, the United States and Europe celebrate Christmas and dream of a better future.

The year 1945 was enormously consequential.

It led to the destruction of two of the most monstrous empires in human history.

Nazi Germany and militaristic Imperial Japan.

[Music] On the victor side, a new world emerges, opposing the United States to the Soviet Union.

The European nations are unable to hide their decline.

In India, the British Empire is about to collapse.

The colonies demand their freedom.

[Music] In Indochina as well as Africa, France will soon return to war.

The clash of decolonization is looming.

1945 is a quintessentially modern year in that sense that it lays the foundation for what is our world today.

At the end of 1945, a new world is just emerging.

A world filled with promises and riddled with new threats.

Heat.

Heat.

[Music]

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