The years since 1933 that Hitler had spent rearming Germany had not been militarily paralleled by the Allies (the European countries, the United States, and Russia) so that the outbreak of World War II found Germany vastly superior in military strength. This enabled German forces to rapidly overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France within a short space of time in 1939 and 1940, so that within less than a year, most of Europe was occupied by Germany. The German troops were highly mobile and mechanized, strictly disciplined, and motivated by theories of national and racial superiority. Britain's island status enabled it to withstand German threats, and although it suffered considerable devastation as a result of German bombardments, its people rallied, manufacturing arms and defending its shores and skies.
Not content with being master of most of Europe, Hitler then launched an attack against Russia in June, 1941 despite the non-aggression pact that Hitler had signed with Stalin in 1939. For over five years, Europe was a virtual slave empire under the Nazis. The people of Europe worked long, hard hours in farms and factories, receiving little more than subsistence rations in return, and millions of people were taken to Germany to work there. In occupied countries, any resistance was crushed ruthlessly; hostages were executed in retaliation for the killing of a single Nazi soldier, listening to British broadcasts, or possessing anti-Nazi literature were all made punishable by death. Harboring Jews was punishable either by death or by being sent to a concentration camp.
The Nazis were as efficient in setting up the machinery of death as they were in manufacturing arms. Over the years, they perfected a system of obtaining lists of all the Jewish inhabitants of a particular place and making them all wear a distinguishing mark in the form of a yellow star, herding them into "ghettoes" and then loading them into crowded cattle cars and dispatching them by train to concentration camps. There, they were either worked until they died, starved to death, or gassed. All through the war, the long trains of Jewish prisoners rolled through Europe, taking their human cargo to be killed. Even at the end of the war, when Germany's defeat was obvious to everyone, the death trains continued to cross Europe, and the gas chambers continued to operate. Later, Jews were marched, or transported, from concentration camps outside Germany to other camps farther inland, many dying on these forced marches. The Nazis made sure that these Jews would be dead before the Allies could rescue them.
