The deadliest conflict in human history -- killing between 70 and 85 million people across six years of fighting -- producing the Holocaust, the nuclear age, the Cold War, decolonization, and the international order that still governs global politics.
The Second World War killed more people than any other event in human history. Most of them were civilians. It ended with the atomic bombing of two cities and the revelation of industrial genocide. Everything that followed -- the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, the State of Israel, the European Union -- is downstream of six years of catastrophic violence. Understanding the Second World War means understanding not just a historical event but the origin of the world we live in.