Allies of World War II and Related Topics

The League of Nations assembly, held in Geneva, Switzerland, 1930

World War II

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Global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945.

Adolf Hitler at a German Nazi political rally in Nuremberg, August 1933

Benito Mussolini inspecting troops during the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935

The bombing of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, sparked fears abroad in Europe that the next war would be based on bombing of cities with very high civilian casualties.

Japanese Imperial Army soldiers during the Battle of Shanghai, 1937

Red Army artillery unit during the Battle of Lake Khasan, 1938

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured just before signing the Munich Agreement, 29 September 1938

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (right) and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, after signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939

Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht tearing down the border crossing into Poland, 1 September 1939

Soldiers of the Polish Army during the defence of Poland, September 1939

Finnish machine gun nest aimed at Soviet Red Army positions during the Winter War, February 1940

German advance into Belgium and Northern France, 10 May-4 June 1940, swept past the Maginot Line (shown in dark red)

London seen from St. Paul's Cathedral after the German Blitz, 29 December 1940

Soldiers of the British Commonwealth forces from the Australian Army's 9th Division during the Siege of Tobruk; North African Campaign, September 1941

German Panzer III of the Afrika Korps advancing across the North African desert, April-May 1941

European theatre of World War II animation map, 1939–1945 – Red: Western Allies and the Soviet Union after 1941; Green: Soviet Union before 1941; Blue: Axis powers

German soldiers during the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, 1941

Soviet civilians leaving destroyed houses after a German bombardment during the Battle of Leningrad, 10 December 1942

Japanese soldiers entering Hong Kong, 8 December 1941

The USS Arizona (BB-39) was a total loss in the Japanese surprise air attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Sunday 7 December 1941.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill seated at the Casablanca Conference, January 1943

Map of Japanese military advances through mid-1942

US Marines during the Guadalcanal Campaign, in the Pacific theatre, 1942

Red Army soldiers on the counterattack during the Battle of Stalingrad, February 1943

American 8th Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombing raid on the Focke-Wulf factory in Germany, 9 October 1943

U.S. Navy SBD-5 scout plane flying patrol over USS Washington (BB-56) and USS Lexington (CV-16) during the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, 1943

Red Army troops in a counter-offensive on German positions at the Battle of Kursk, July 1943

Ruins of the Benedictine monastery, during the Battle of Monte Cassino, Italian Campaign, May 1944

American troops approaching Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944

German SS soldiers from the Dirlewanger Brigade, tasked with suppressing the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation, August 1944

General Douglas MacArthur returns to the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte, 20 October 1944

Yalta Conference held in February 1945, with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin

Ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin, 3 June 1945.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

Ruins of Warsaw in 1945, after the deliberate destruction of the city by the occupying German forces

Defendants at the Nuremberg trials, where the Allied forces prosecuted prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity

Post-war border changes in Central Europe and creation of the Communist Eastern Bloc

David Ben-Gurion proclaiming the Israeli Declaration of Independence at the Independence Hall, 14 May 1948

Bodies of Chinese civilians killed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Nanking Massacre in December 1937

Schutzstaffel (SS) female camp guards removing prisoners' bodies from lorries and carrying them to a mass grave, inside the German Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 1945

Prisoner identity photograph taken by the German SS of a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz. Approximately 230,000 children were held prisoner and used in forced labour and Nazi medical experiments.

Polish civilians wearing blindfolds photographed just before their execution by German soldiers in Palmiry forest, 1940

Soviet partisans hanged by the German army. The Russian Academy of Sciences reported in 1995 civilian victims in the Soviet Union at German hands totalled 13.7 million dead, twenty percent of the 68 million persons in the occupied Soviet Union.

B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers on the Boeing assembly line in Wichita, Kansas, 1944

A V-2 rocket launched from a fixed site in Peenemünde, 21 June 1943

Nuclear Gadget being raised to the top of the detonation "shot tower", at Alamogordo Bombing Range; Trinity nuclear test, New Mexico, July 1945

It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers.

Axis powers

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Flags of Germany, Japan, and Italy draping the facade of the Embassy of Japan on the Tiergartenstraße in Berlin (September 1940)

Germany's Führer Adolf Hitler (right) beside Italy's Duce Benito Mussolini (left)

Japan's Prime Minister Hideki Tojo (center) with fellow government representatives of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. To the left of Tojo, from left to right: Ba Maw from Burma, Zhang Jinghui, Wang Jingwei from China. To the right of Tojo, from left to right, Wan Waithayakon from Thailand, José P. Laurel from the Philippines, and Subhas Chandra Bose from India

The signing of the Tripartite Pact by Germany, Japan, and Italy on 27 September 1940 in Berlin. Seated from left to right are the Japanese ambassador to Germany Saburō Kurusu, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano, and Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler, Führer and Reich Chancellor of the German People, 1933–1945

Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor of Austria, 1932–1934

Hideo Kodama, a wartime cabinet minister in the Empire of Japan

Japanese writer Shūmei Ōkawa, a key exponent of Japanese nationalism

Lt.Gen Hiroshi Ōshima, Japanese ambassador to Germany before and during World War II

German Führer Adolf Hitler along with General Walther von Brauchitsch, during the victory parade in Warsaw after the defeat of Poland, October 1939

German Heinkel He 111 bomber aircraft during the Battle of Britain

German vehicles advancing during the Second Battle of El Alamein in the North African campaign

German soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad in the Eastern Front campaign

German submarine U-118 under air attack in June 1943

The Duce Benito Mussolini in an official portrait

Italian soldiers in the North African Campaign in 1941

Italian Fiat M13/40 tanks in the North African Campaign in 1941

Italian battleships Vittorio Veneto and Littorio during the war

Italian Macchi C.200 fighter aircraft during the war

Every territory ever controlled by the Italian Empire at some point in time during World War II

IJN super-dreadnought battleships Yamashiro, Fusō, and battlecruiser Haruna, Tokyo Bay, 1930s

IJN Special Naval Landing Forces armed with the Type 11 Light Machine Gun during the Battle of Shanghai

Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter aircraft and other aircraft preparing for takeoff on the aircraft carrier Shōkaku on 7 December 1941, for the attack on Pearl Harbor

The Empire of Japan (darker red) and territories controlled by Japanese puppet states during the war (lighter red). Thailand (darkest red) cooperated with Japan. All are members of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

IJA paratroopers are landing during the Battle of Palembang, February 13, 1942.

IJN Yamato-class Battleships Yamato and Musashi moored in Truk Lagoon, in 1943

Japanese Military Attaché, Makoto Onodera, visiting Fjell Fortress in Norway, 1943. Behind him is Lieutenant Colonel Eberhard Freiherr von Zedlitz und Neukrich (C-in-C Luftwaffe Feldregiment 502.), and to the right is Fregattenkapitän doktor Robert Morath (Seekommandant in Bergen). Behind Onoderas hand (raised in salute) is General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst (C-in-C German military forces in Norway).

Japanese officers training young Indonesian recruits, circa 1945

Bulgarian soldiers in Vardar Macedonia during the Balkans campaign

Hungarian Toldi I tank as used during the 1941 Axis invasion of the Soviet Union

Hungarian soldiers in the Carpathian mountains in 1944

MÁVAG Héja fighter aircraft, derived from the Reggiane Re.2000, an Italian fighter design

Adolf Hitler meeting with NDH leader Ante Pavelić

Ion Antonescu and Adolf Hitler at the Führerbau in Munich (June 1941)

A formation of Romanian IAR 80 fighter aircraft

The Romanian Mareșal tank destroyer's design was likely used by the Germans to develop the Hetzer

Romanian soldiers on the outskirts of Stalingrad during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942

Finnish troops passing by the remains of a destroyed Soviet T-34 at the battle of Tali-Ihantala

Manchurian soldiers training in a military exercise

Manchurian pilots of the Manchukuo Air Force

Front row in order from left to right: Karl Wolff, Heinrich Himmler, Francisco Franco and Spain's Foreign Minister Serrano Súñer in Madrid, October 1940

Francisco Franco (centre) and Serrano Súñer (left) meeting with Mussolini (right) in Bordighera, Italy in 1941. At Bordighera, Franco and Mussolini discussed the creation of a Latin Bloc.

Phraya Phahon (far left), Thawan Thamrong (left), and Direk Jayanama (right) with Hideki Tōjō (center) in Tokyo 1942

German and Soviet soldiers during the official transfer of Brest to Soviet control in front of picture of Stalin, in the aftermath of the invasion and partition of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939

France during the war; Occupied and annexed zones by Germany in shades of red, Italian occupation zones in shades of yellow and striped blue, "Free zone" in blue.

Philippe Pétain (left) meeting with Hitler in October 1940

Personal flag of Philippe Pétain, Chief of State of Vichy France

An RAF officer investigates wrecked Iraqi artillery near Habbaniya.

RSI (Repubblica Sociale Italiana) soldiers, March 1944

Hitler declaring war on the United States on 11 December 1941

Italian pilots of a Savoia-Marchetti SM.75 long-range cargo aircraft meeting with Japanese officials upon arriving in East Asia in 1942.

German and Japanese direct spheres of influence at their greatest extents in Autumn 1942. Arrows show planned movements to an agreed demarcation line at 70° E, which was, however, never approximated.

The Axis powers, originally called the Rome–Berlin Axis, was a military coalition that initiated World War II and fought against the Allies.

Nazi Germany

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The German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a dictatorship.

Germany's territorial control at its greatest extent during World War II (late 1942):
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Adolf Hitler became Germany's head of state, with the title of Führer und Reichskanzler, in 1934.

While the traditional German states were not formally abolished (excluding Lübeck in 1937), their constitutional rights and sovereignty were eroded and ultimately ended. Prussia was already under federal administration when Hitler came to power, providing a model for the process.

Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

A Nazi propaganda poster proclaiming that Danzig is German

German soldiers march near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 14 June 1940

Death and destruction during the Battle of Stalingrad, October 1942

German refugees in Bedburg, near Kleve, 19 February 1945

Map of the Greater German Reich with administrative divisions set by the Nazi Party, 1944

Public execution of 54 Poles in Rożki, Masovian Voivodeship (near Radom), German-occupied Poland, 1942

Heinrich Himmler, Hitler and Viktor Lutze perform the Nazi salute at the Nuremberg Rally, September 1934

Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and Rudolf Hess during a military parade in 1933

Chart showing the pseudo-scientific racial divisions used in the racial policies of Nazi Germany

A meeting of the four jurists who imposed Nazi ideology on the legal system of Germany (left to right: Roland Freisler, Franz Schlegelberger, Otto Georg Thierack, and Curt Rothenberger)

A column of tanks and other armoured vehicles of the Panzerwaffe near Stalingrad, 1942

IG Farben synthetic oil plant under construction at Buna Werke (1941). This plant was part of the complex at Auschwitz concentration camp.

(from left) Hitler; Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front; Ferdinand Porsche, armaments manufacturer; and Hermann Göring, head of the Four Year Plan (1942)

Woman with Ostarbeiter badge at the IG Farben plant in Auschwitz

German loot stored at Schlosskirche Ellingen, Bavaria (April 1945)

Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, April 1933. The posters say "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!"

Poster from the Nazi Party's Office of Racial Policy: "60 000 RM is what this person with hereditary illness costs the community in his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too."

A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in the Buchenwald concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army, 1945

The Nazi salute in school (1934): children were indoctrinated at an early age.

Young women of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) practising gymnastics in 1941

Statues representing the ideal body were erected in the streets of Berlin for the 1936 Summer Olympics.

Prisoner barracks at Dachau Concentration Camp, where the Nazis established a dedicated clergy barracks for clerical opponents of the regime in 1940

General Erich Hoepner at the Volksgerichtshof in 1944

A Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 in Berlin, as books by Jewish and leftist authors are burned

Plans for Berlin called for the Volkshalle (People's Hall) and a triumphal arch to be built at either end of a wide boulevard.

Leni Riefenstahl (behind cameraman) at the 1936 Summer Olympics

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials

The Third Reich, which Hitler and the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, ended in May 1945 after just 12 years when the Allies defeated Germany, ending World War II in Europe.

Soviet Union

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Transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.

Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution

The Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.

Construction of the bridge through the Kolyma (part of the Road of Bones from Magadan to Jakutsk) by the workers of Dalstroy.

Five Marshals of the Soviet Union in 1935. Only two of them – Budyonny and Voroshilov – survived Great Purge. Blyukher, Yegorov and Tukhachevsky were executed.

The Battle of Stalingrad, considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II.

From left to right, the Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill confer in Tehran, 1943.

Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km2)

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961.

Nikolai Podgorny visiting Tampere, Finland on 16 October 1969

Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev and US President Jimmy Carter sign the SALT II arms limitation treaty in Vienna on 18 June 1979

Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President Ronald Reagan

The Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border.

T-80 tank on Red Square during the August Coup

Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War

Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh, 1993

Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (note that the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial)

Sukarno and Voroshilov in a state meeting on 1958.

1960s Cuba-Soviet friendship poster with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev

Soviet stamp 1974 for friendship between USSR and India as both nations shared strong ties, although India was a prominent member of Non-Aligned Movement

Gerald Ford, Andrei Gromyko, Leonid Brezhnev and Henry Kissinger speaking informally at the Vladivostok Summit in 1974

Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signing bilateral documents during Gorbachev's official visit to the United States in 1990

Military parade on the Red Square in Moscow, 7 November 1964

The Grand Kremlin Palace, the seat of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, 1982

Nationalist anti-government riots in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 1990

A medium-range SS-20 non-ICBM ballistic missile, the deployment of which in the late 1970s launched a new arms race in Europe in which NATO deployed Pershing II missiles in West Germany, among other things

From left to right: Yuri Gagarin, Pavel Popovich, Valentina Tereshkova and Nikita Khrushchev at the Lenin's Mausoleum in 1963

The DneproGES, one of many hydroelectric power stations in the Soviet Union

Workers of the Salihorsk potash plant, Belarus, 1968

Volzhsky Avtomobilny Zavod (VAZ) in 1969

Soviet stamp depicting the 30th anniversary of the International Atomic Energy Agency, published in 1987, a year following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster

Soviet stamp showing the orbit of Sputnik 1

Population of the Soviet Union (red) and the post-Soviet states (blue) from 1961 to 2009 as well as projection (dotted blue) from 2010 to 2100

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, visiting the Lviv confectionery, Ukrainian SSR, 1967

Young Pioneers at a Young Pioneer camp in Kazakh SSR

Svaneti man in Mestia, Georgian SSR, 1929

An early Soviet-era poster discouraging unsafe abortion practices

Cover of Bezbozhnik in 1929, magazine of the Society of the Godless. The first five-year plan of the Soviet Union is shown crushing the gods of the Abrahamic religions.

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow during its demolition in 1931

A paranja burning ceremony in the Uzbek SSR as part of Soviet Hujum policies

World War II military deaths in Europe by theater and by year. Nazi Germany suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front.

2001 stamp of Moldova shows Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space

People in Donetsk celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, 9 May 2018

Soviet singer-songwriter, poet and actor Vladimir Vysotsky in 1979

Valeri Kharlamov represented the Soviet Union at 11 Ice Hockey World Championships, winning eight gold medals, two silvers and one bronze

One of the many impacts of the approach to the environment in the USSR is the Aral Sea (see status in 1989 and 2014)

Landscape near Karabash, Chelyabinsk Oblast, an area that was previously covered with forests until acid rainfall from a nearby copper smelter killed all vegetation

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1941

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1970

The combined Soviet civilian and military casualty count—estimated to be around 27 million people—accounted for the majority of losses of Allied forces.

The Roaring Lion, a portrait by Yousuf Karsh at the Canadian Parliament, December 1941

Winston Churchill

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British statesman, soldier and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955.

Jennie Spencer Churchill with her two sons, Jack (left) and Winston (right) in 1889.

Churchill in the military dress uniform of the 4th Queen's Own Hussars at Aldershot in 1895.

Churchill in 1900 around the time of his first election to Parliament.

Churchill in 1904 when he "crossed the floor".

Churchill and German Kaiser Wilhelm II during a military manoeuvre near Breslau, Silesia, in 1906.

Churchill and his fiancée Clementine Hozier shortly before their marriage in 1908.

Churchill (second left) photographed at the Siege of Sidney Street.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill's London residency was Admiralty House (music room pictured).

Churchill commanding the 6th Battalion, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, 1916. His second-in-command, Archibald Sinclair, is seated on the left.

Churchill meets female workers at Georgetown's filling works near Glasgow in October 1918.

Churchill as Secretary of State for the Colonies during his visit to Mandatory Palestine, Tel Aviv, 1921.

Churchill with children Randolph and Diana in 1923.

Churchill on Budget Day with his wife Clementine and children Sarah and Randolph, 15 April 1929.

Churchill meeting with film star Charlie Chaplin in Los Angeles in 1929.

Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, the chief proponent of appeasement.

Churchill takes aim with a Sten sub-machine gun in June 1941. The man in the pin-striped suit and fedora to the right is his bodyguard, Walter H. Thompson.

Churchill walks through the ruins of Coventry Cathedral with J A Moseley, M H Haigh, A R Grindlay and others, 1941.

Churchill and Roosevelt seated on the quarterdeck of for a Sunday service during the Atlantic Conference, 10 August 1941

Huge portraits of Churchill and Stalin, Brisbane, Australia, 31 October 1941

Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference in 1943.

Churchill in the Roman amphitheatre of ancient Carthage to address 3,000 British and American troops, June 1943

Churchill is greeted by a crowd in Québec City, Canada, 1943

Churchill's crossing of the Rhine river in Germany, during Operation Plunder on 25 March 1945.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February 1945.

The destruction of Dresden, February 1945.

Churchill waving the Victory sign to the crowd in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945. Ernest Bevin stands to his right.

Churchill at the Potsdam Conference, July 1945.

Churchill with Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, 10 February 1953.

Churchill with Anthony Eden, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, 5 January 1952.

Churchill's grave at St Martin's Church, Bladon.

Allies (1995) by Lawrence Holofcener, a sculptural group depicting Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill in New Bond Street, London.

The statue of Churchill (1973) by Ivor Roberts-Jones in Parliament Square, London

The British Empire at its territorial peak in 1921.

Churchill formed a national government and oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945.

Adolf Hitler

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Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945.

The house in Leonding, Austria where Hitler spent his early adolescence (photo taken in July 2012)

The Alter Hof in Munich. Watercolour by Adolf Hitler, 1914

Hitler (far right, seated) with his army comrades of the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment16 (

Hitler's German Workers' Party (DAP) membership card

Defendants in the Beer Hall Putsch trial, 1 April 1924. From left to right: Heinz Pernet, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Kriebel, Erich Ludendorff, Hitler, Wilhelm Brückner, Ernst Röhm, and Robert Wagner.

Dust jacket of Mein Kampf (1926–28 edition)

Hitler and Nazi Party treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz at the dedication of the renovation of the Palais Barlow on Brienner Straße in Munich into the Brown House headquarters, December 1930

Hitler, at the window of the Reich Chancellery, receives an ovation on the evening of his inauguration as chancellor, 30 January 1933

Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg on the Day of Potsdam, 21 March 1933

In 1934, Hitler became Germany's head of state with the title of Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor of the Reich).

Ceremony honouring the dead (Totenehrung) on the terrace in front of the Hall of Honour (Ehrenhalle) at the Nazi party rally grounds, Nuremberg, September 1934

Benito Mussolini with Hitler on 25 October 1936, when the axis between Italy and Germany was declared.

Hitler and the Japanese foreign minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, at a meeting in Berlin in March 1941. In the background is Joachim von Ribbentrop.

October 1938: Hitler is driven through the crowd in Cheb (Eger), in the Sudetenland

Hitler reviews troops on the march during the campaign against Poland (September 1939).

Hitler visits Paris with architect Albert Speer (left) and sculptor Arno Breker (right), 23 June 1940

Boundaries of the Nazi planned Greater Germanic Reich

Hitler announcing the declaration of war against the United States to the Reichstag on 11 December 1941

The destroyed map room at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's eastern command post, after the 20 July plot

Hitler on 20 April 1945 in his last public appearance, in the Reich Chancellery garden, ten days before he and Eva Braun committed suicide

Front page of the US Armed Forces newspaper, Stars and Stripes, 2 May 1945, announcing Hitler's death

A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp (April 1945)

Hitler's order for Aktion T4, dated 1 September 1939

Hitler during a meeting at the headquarters of Army Group South in June 1942

Hitler in 1942 with his long-time lover Eva Braun.

Hitler shaking hands with Bishop Ludwig Müller in Germany in the 1930s

Outside the building in Braunau am Inn, Austria, where Hitler was born, is a memorial stone placed as a reminder of the horrors of World War II. The inscription translates as:

For peace, freedom
and democracy
never again fascism
millions of dead warn [us]

These gains were gradually reversed after 1941, and in 1945 the Allied armies defeated the German army.

Free France

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Political entity that claimed to be the legitimate government of France following the dissolution of the Third Republic.

See [[:File:Vichy france map.png#Summary|map legend]] for color descriptions;sky blue = colonies under the control of Free France after Operation Torch

Commemorative medal for voluntary service in Free France

Charles de Gaulle was an armoured division commander and a minister in the Reynaud government during the Battle of France.

In Occupied France during the war, reproductions of the 18 June appeal were distributed through underground means as pamphlets and plastered on walls as posters by supporters of the Résistance. This could be a dangerous activity.

Emile Fayolle, pilot of the Free French Air Force, during the Battle of Britain

The Free French naval jack and French naval honour jack.
The argent rhomboid field is defaced with a gules Lorraine cross, the emblem of the Free French.

The Free French memorial on Lyle Hill, Greenock, overlooks Gourock, Scotland.

A very modern commissioned in 1937, was potentially a quite substantial threat to British control of the sealanes were she to fall into Axis hands.

Submarine . With 22 ships sunk (12 of them German men-of-war) on 22 operational patrols, she achieved the highest kill number of the FNFL.

A Chadian soldier fighting for Free France

Insigna of the Free French Forces in the Far East (French Indochina), Langlade Mission

The fall of Damascus to the Allies, late June 1941. A car carrying Free French commanders General Georges Catroux and General Paul Louis Le Gentilhomme enters the city, escorted by French Circassian cavalry (Gardes Tcherkess).

The FFF's tenacious defence at Bir Hakeim prevented Rommel's attempted flanking manoeuvre at El Alamein from succeeding.

Free French Foreign Legionnaires "leap up from the desert to rush an enemy strong point", Bir Hacheim, 12 June 1942.

Operation Torch landings in Morocco and Algeria

Henri Giraud and de Gaulle during the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. Churchill and Roosevelt are in the background.

FAFL Normandie-Niemen Yak-3 preserved at the Paris Le Bourget museum

Picture of Jean Moulin and his iconic scarf. He was probably tortured to death by Klaus Barbie personally.

Charles de Gaulle speaks as president of interim government to the population of Cherbourg from the city hall's balcony on 20 August 1944

Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division (2e DB) parading down the Champs Elysées on 26 August 1944, the day after the Liberation of Paris

A plaque commemorating the Oath of Kufra in near the cathedral of Strasbourg

Allied Occupation Zones in Germany in 1946 after territorial annexations in the East

Led by French general Charles de Gaulle, Free France was established as a government-in-exile in London in June 1940 after the Fall of France during World War II and fought the Axis as an Allied nation with its Free French Forces (Forces françaises libres).

Vichy France

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Common name of the French State (État français) headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II.

The French State in 1942:
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France under German occupation (Germans occupied the southern zone starting in November 1942—Operation Case Anton). The yellow zone was under Italian administration.

Personal flag of Philippe Pétain, Chief of State of Vichy France (Chef de l'État Français)

Propaganda poster for the Vichy Regime's Révolution nationale program, 1942

French prisoners of war are marched off under German guard, 1940

Philippe Pétain meeting Hitler in October 1940

French colonial prisoner in German captivity, 1940

Pierre Laval with the head of German police units in France, SS-Gruppenführer Carl Oberg

Pierre Laval and Philippe Pétain in the Frank Capra documentary film Divide and Conquer (1943)

1943 1 Franc coin. Front: "French State". Back: "Work Family Homeland".

Memorial to the 1,297 French seamen who died during the British bombardment of their ships at Mers El Kebir

Henri Giraud and de Gaulle during the Casablanca Conference in January 1943

23 January 1943: German-Vichy French meeting in Marseilles. SS-Sturmbannführer Bernhard Griese, Marcel Lemoine (regional préfet), (Commander of Marseilles Sicherheitspolizei); laughing: René Bousquet (General Secretary of the French National Police created in 1941), creator of the GMRs; behind: Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (Commissioner for Jewish Affairs).

French Police registering new inmates at the Pithiviers camp

Poster above the entrance of an anti-semitic exhibition called "The Jew and France"

Two Jewish women in occupied Paris wearing yellow badges before the mass arrests

Commemorative plaque to the victims held in the Vel' d'Hiv after the 16–17 July 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris

Légion des Volontaires fighting with the Axis on the Eastern Front

Vichy French zinc and aluminium coins made during the war circulated in both the German–occupied zone and Vichy's unoccupied zone.

A recruitment poster for the Milice. The text says "Against Communism / French Militia / Secretary-General Joseph Darnand".

The Sigmaringen operation was based in the city's ancient castle.

Paris 1944: Women accused of collaboration with Nazis are paraded through the streets; they often had their hair cut off as a form of humiliation.

The Third French Republic had begun the war in September 1939 on the side of the Allies.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

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American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945.

Eleanor and Franklin with their first two children, 1908

Roosevelt supported Governor Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election.

Theodore Roosevelt was Franklin Roosevelt's distant cousin and an important influence on his career.

Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1913

Rare photograph of Roosevelt in a wheelchair, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, the daughter of caretakers at his Hyde Park estate. Photo taken by his cousin Margaret Suckley (February 1941).

Gov. Roosevelt with his predecessor Al Smith, 1930

Results of the 1930 gubernatorial election in New York

Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law, August 14, 1935

1936 re-election handbill for Roosevelt promoting his economic policy

Roosevelt with Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas and other dignitaries in Brazil, 1936

The Roosevelts with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, sailing from Washington, D.C., to Mount Vernon, Virginia, on the USS Potomac during the first U.S. visit of a reigning British monarch (June 9, 1939)

Foreign trips of Roosevelt during his presidency

Roosevelt and Winston Churchill aboard HMS Prince of Wales for 1941 Atlantic Charter meeting

Territory controlled by the Allies (blue and red) and the Axis Powers (black) in June 1942

The Allies (blue and red) and the Axis Powers (black) in December 1944

Official portrait of President Roosevelt by Frank O. Salisbury, c. 1947

In response, the US formally joined the Allies and entered the European theater of war.

Fascist Italy (1922–1943)

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Governed by the National Fascist Party from 1922 to 1943 with Benito Mussolini as prime minister.

All territory ever controlled by Fascist Italy:

Roman Catholic procession in Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome, 1931

Mussolini and Vatican delegation prior to signing the Lateran Treaty

Mussolini giving a speech at the Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, 1932.

Parade of Libyan colonial troops in Italian Cyrenaica

Depiction of Mussolini in Italian East Africa

Front page of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on 11 November 1938 proclaiming that the new racial laws have been passed

Italy was Nazi Germany's biggest ally for most of the regime's existence.

Adolf Hitler and Mussolini walking in front of saluting military during Hitler's visit to Venice, June 1934

However, after the German-Italian defeat in Africa, the successes of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, and the subsequent Allied landings in Sicily, King Victor Emmanuel III overthrew and arrested Mussolini, and the Fascist Party in areas (south of Rome) controlled by the Allied invaders was shut down.

A report on Allies of World War II

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