Post-war+Years

The Nazis were responsible for The Holocaust, the killing of approximately six million Jews (overwhelmingly Ashkenazim), as well as two million ethnic poles and four million others who were deemed unworthy of life (including the disabled and mentally ill Soviet POW's, homosexuals , F reemasons, J ehovah's witnesses, and the Roma) as part of a program of deliberate extermination. About 12 million, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced laborers.

At the end of the first world war it had been possible to contemplate going back to business as usual. However, 1945 was different, so different that it has been called Year Zero. The capacity for destruction had been so much greater than in the earlier war that much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. And this time civilians had been the target as much as the military. The figures are hard to grasp: as many as 60 million dead, 25 million of them Soviet. A new word, genocide, entered the language to deal with the murder of 6 million of Europe's Jews by the Nazis.

While much of what Roosevelt hoped for did not come about, it was surely a step forward for international relations that such institutions were created and largely accepted and, equally important, that they were underpinned by notions of a common humanity possessing the same universal rights. The idea that there were universal standards to be upheld was present, no matter how imperfectly, in the war crimes trials, and was later reinforced by the establishment of the United Nations itself in 1945, the International Court of Justice in 1946 and Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.