When did the Nazis lose? What was the most important battle? The unanswered questions about World War II

As we approach the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II — on August 15, 1945, with Japan’s unconditional surrender following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — those who fought in it are slowly disappearing. The era of eyewitnesses is about to end. On July 21, Jake Larson, one of the last veterans of the Omaha Beach landings of June 6, 1944, died at the age of 102. Larson had become a TikTok star, recounting his experiences during the invasion of Europe, reflecting how interest in the bloodiest conflict in history has never stopped growing.

Researchers continue to study every corner of the war that, between 1939 and 1945, caused between 60 and 70 million deaths, wiped entire cities off the map, and during which the Nazis carried out the crime of crimes, the Holocaust, the industrial extermination of six million Jews, often with the complicity of part of the population of the occupied countries. Historian Antony Beevor defined it as “the greatest man-made disaster.” Eighty years later, many debates remain open, and researchers continue to search for answers.

The 65-year-old French historian Olivier Wieviorka, a professor at the École Normale Supérieure, has just published The Total History of the Second World War (Crítica, translated for the Spanish version by David León Gómez), 1,000 pages summarizing a conflict that changed the makeup of the planet amid suffering that is difficult to measure and impossible to conceive. As Beevor and Max Hastings did before him, narrating the six most tragic and challenging years of the 20th century in a single book in an entertaining and clear manner is a true military feat.

In this conversation, which took place via videoconference in mid-July, Professor Wieviorka addressed some questions that remain open in the academic debate and also advanced some of his theses, which challenge well-established ideas about the conflict.

One of the questions still open is when the Allies won the war, or rather, when the Axis powers lost it. “We can say that, since the blitzkrieg failed against Moscow in December 1941, Hitler lost the war,” Wieviorka explains. “Germany lacked the capacity to sustain a long war. In the case of Japan, things can be more nuanced. If Japan hadn’t attacked the U.S. and had limited its ambitions to a reasonable perimeter it could have achieved its objectives. From the moment it attacks the U.S. and imposes no limits on its Asian expansion, it simultaneously faces a first-rate industrial and military power and, on the other, has an enormous territory to administer and protect, with very extensive supply lines, and it can’t sustain that. We can say that the hubris of Germany and Japan was their downfall because their objectives were not coordinated with their means.”

It is also unclear which was the most important battle of World War II and why some, such as the Normandy landings of 1944, are consistently remembered, while others, such as the tank battle of Kursk in July and August 1943, have failed to enter the popular imagination. “In a battle, there are military events; in that sense, Kursk is more important than Stalingrad. But there are not only military consequences; there is also everything that shocks the imagination and allows one to identify with its protagonists. From that point of view, Stalingrad is a battle in which people are at the center; everything depended on individuals. The Russians defended Stalingrad house by house, street by street; there were individual acts of courage, like the snipers. Abominable things also happened, like the children the Nazis forced to fetch water in the Volga and whom the Russians cold-bloodedly killed. There are peaks of heroism and peaks of horror. Regarding the Normandy landings, there is a whole dramaturgy of the battle: will the bad weather continue? Will the Germans take the bait that the landing would be in the Pas-de-Calais? It is also popular because it is a happier story; there aren’t thousands of dead on the beaches, the losses are less significant, and it signaled the beginning of the liberation of France. In the big battles, there is dramaturgy that interests public opinion, and battles without dramaturgy that have not reached the imagination."

Another topic that continues to spark controversy 80 years after the end of the conflict is the involvement of people in Nazi-occupied countries in the Holocaust. In some cases, as in Poland under an ultra-conservative government, a law was passed threatening historians with prison sentences for arguing against incontrovertible documentary evidence: that some citizens denounced and killed Jews during the conflict, as occurred in many other countries, from the Netherlands to the Baltic States and France. “Without the collaboration of a certain number of individuals and regimes, the extermination of European Jewry would have occurred, but it would not have reached the same scale. When mobilizations occurred, driven by the state apparatus and supported by the population, as in Denmark, or spontaneously, as occurred in France and Italy, the death toll was lower. The extent of the extermination is explained by the complicity of the peoples or governments allied with the Third Reich.”

Wieviorka devotes a chapter of his book to the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, and is very clear that the narrative forged during the postwar period, that only the SS committed atrocities, had a solid political motive behind it — not all Germans who had fought to rebuild peace in Europe could be considered enemies — but it didn’t correspond to reality. “It was easier for Germans to accept this idea, that the evil was committed by the SS. That myth was shattered in 1994 with an exposé on the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The Germans realized that it wasn’t the clean army they had thought, but that it had participated in war crimes, even crimes against humanity.”

He also maintains another theory that may seem quite shocking: the vast majority of soldiers did not see combat. “We imagine the Second World War like in the movies, and in movies there must be action, so we think it was constant combat. But the combatants were relatively limited. These were modern armies, in which logistics and support are of enormous importance compared to the combatants. Even today, on the Ukrainian front, only a portion of the combatants fight; the rest carry ammunition, food, and medicine. In modern warfare, there are fewer combatants than, for example, in the American Civil War, where 97% of the soldiers fought. The other element is that in combat operations, only a portion fights, because the rest are support and relief troops, who don’t always fight.”

The Total History of the Second World War is a complex and, at the same time, easy-to-read book because its narrative is not only chronological but also thematic. It is full of death and destruction, of human beings capable of the best and the worst, and it touches on every possible aspect. It argues, for example, that the Nazi racism that produced the Holocaust is unparalleled in history, but explains that we also cannot forget that racism was institutionalized in other countries, for example in the United States, where Black soldiers barely fought so they could not claim their rights upon returning home. “The smoke from the Auschwitz crematoria has not protected us against the crimes to come,” he writes lucidly at the end of an essay published during the war in Ukraine, but before the extermination in Gaza. The last line of the book is a quote from Primo Levi, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor: “If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative.” Just because the questions remain open doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tirelessly search for answers.

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