In the First World War, civilians were attacked in new ways and also suffered the effects of war in terms of rationing and deprivation. However, the large casualty figures were made up mainly of the men of the armed forces. In World War Two these proportions changed profoundly. Whereas in the First World War, civilians counted for only one-twentieth of the war dead, in the Second World War  they counted for up to two-thirds of the deaths. This shift was because of the power of the new weaponry – the bombers, for example – and also because the new mobility of war brought the fighting to far greater numbers of people than had been the case in World War I.

Map showing the main extermination and concentration camps in German-occupied Europe by 1942, Rogers and Thomas, 20th Century Wars, Pearson, pg 118

There was an ideological and racial aspect to World War II that meant that certain sections of populations were deliberately targeted, with the intent that they should be deported or even eliminated entirely. In Europe, this was particularly evident on the Eastern Front following the German invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union. Hitler believed that certain races – in particular Jews but also Slavs – were Untermenschen or subhuman. The space that was necessary for the Greater German Reich also meant that the existing populations in Poland and the USSR had to be destroyed or displaced. In one of the plans for German settlement drawn up by the Reich, it was estimated that ‘the unwanted population would be closer to fifty or even fifty-seven million, assuming that 15 percent of Poles, 25 percent of Ruthanians and 35 percent of Ukrainians would need to be retained as agricultural labourers, the rest being deported to Siberia. The Russian population would wither away through the use of contraception, abortion and sterilization. The Jews would be exterminated’ (Niall Ferguson, War of the World, 2006).

Many Poles and Russians were deported to the factories and mines of the Third Reich, where the work there ensured almost certain death for most of them. For the Jews, special SS squads called Einsatzgruppen accompanied the German Army as it invaded Poland and the USSR, and had the dedicated job to kill all Jews, communist officials and resisters they encountered. By the end of July 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered around 63,000 men, women and children, 90 per cent of whom were Jews. Groups other than Jews were also at risk, such as the Gypsies and mental patients.

The method of killing such large numbers of people was, however, very time-consuming and costly – mass groups of people were generally herded into remote locations and shot. The Nazis came up with a new method to deliver their ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’ – the transportation of Jews from across Europe to concentration and extermination camps, where they could be eliminated either by poison gas or through overwork and starvation. The extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone could kill 10,000 people a day.

The Soviet government also deported whole populations. It assumed that the minority peoples in the west were disloyal to the Soviet Union and thus the Germans on the Volga and the Tartars in the Crimea were deported. Estonians, Lithuanians and Poles were all dispersed to Siberia or other parts of the USSR.

A combination of lethal factors meant that the death tolls in Eastern Europe and the USSR during the war were terribly high. At least 20 million died in the Soviet Union (some estimates put the number much higher) and more than half of these were civilian deaths. Poland suffered the greatest proportional loss of life, with six million deaths out of a population of 30 million. Three million of these were Jews and only 150,000 of these casualty figures represent deaths in military action. Overall an estimated one million Gypsies and six million Jewish civilians were killed by the Nazis in their racial extermination programme.
The Japanese also had ambitions linked to racial superiority. ‘The Chinese people’, wrote General Sakai Ryu, the Chief of Staff of the Japanese forces in North China in 1937, ‘are bacteria infesting world civilization.’ Such attitudes were commonplace, hence the genocidal Japanese treatment of the Chinese in ‘the rape of Nanjing’. Such brutality continued during the takeover of South-East Asia following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Between 5,000 and 50,000 Chinese were massacred in Singapore in a series of ‘purification-by-elimination’ operations. Overall, 10 million Chinese died at the hands of the Japanese. Filipinos, Indonesians and Malays were also used as slave workers, resulting in thousands of deaths. Allied prisoners of war also suffered terribly from physical overwork, malnutrition and abuse.

German and Japanese civilians who found themselves living in Britain and America also suffered. It was assumed that their first loyalties would be to their country of origin. Thus Germans and Austrians in Britain were rounded up and put in internment camps. In America, more than 100,000 Japanese were relocated into camps, many losing their property or being forced to sell at very low prices. In 1988, the US Congress agreed on an apology for this policy and gave $20,000 compensation to all surviving internees.

In Britain, military conscription was introduced from the beginning of the conflict (unlike in World War I), but it was carefully controlled to ensure that key workers were left in the important industries, such as coal mining. Industrial conscription was also introduced for women, and thus women played an even bigger role in British industry, agriculture and administration in World War II than in World War I.

In Germany, there was little change to the economy at the beginning of the war, as the early victories did not put much strain on the home front. When Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, tried to organize the deployment of human resources more effectively from 1942 onwards, he found little support. The regional and police authorities were reluctant to accept national schemes that affected their regions, and having women in the workplace went against Hitler’s idea that women should focus on Kinder, Kirche, Küche (‘Children, Church, Kitchen’). Hitler also insisted that consumer goods production remain a priority, and so workers in non-essential industries could not be transferred.

The labour force was substantially increased, however,  by workers from the countries that they had occupied. These workers were forcibly brought to Germany; by September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany and this constituted 21% of Germany’s work force.

In the Soviet Union, the already centralized nature of the state allowed civilians to be mobilized effectively from the beginning. Coercion also played a key role. Workers were forced to move to those areas of the Soviet Union in which they were most needed, hours of work increased, and crash training programmes were developed to make up for the shortage of skilled labour. Slacking or absenteeism could be punished by labour camps or death.

Women made up most of the workforce, but also volunteered to serve in the armed forces. They joined the Red Army or the Red Air Force; the latter had three regiments (two bomber and one fighter) consisting entirely of women. They also played a vital role in the Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations, and in civil defence and fire-watching operations.

Richard Overy calls the civilians of Russia the ‘real heroes’ of the Soviet Union’s economic revival after the Nazi invasion, due to the appalling conditions in which many of them worked, suffering under long hours, poor nutrition and political scrutiny.

In America, women also played a key role in war industries, doing semi-skilled jobs such as crane operators, tool makers, shell loaders, aircraft makers and lumberjacks. An estimated 350,000 women also joined uniformed groups such as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve and the Navy Nurse Corps.

(See case study below for more discussion on the role of women in America)

As in Germany, the Japanese government was reluctant to use women in the workforce, preferring to use conscript students rather than women. Though more than two and a half million extra women did enter the workforce between 1940 and 1945, a much larger number did not.