World War II Death Count Keeps Climbing

LEGALLY SPEAKING, IT was the conference that met in Paris in November 1990, attended by representatives of a reunited Germany and a then fragile Soviet Union, that ended World War II. As to when the war began, the Americans were clearly latecomers to the conflict, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Within days, Hitler had declared war on the United States, which represented for the Fuhrer the hub of the cosmopolitan, Jewish-inspired threat to Aryan civilization that the Nazis had a mission to smash. So the United States, under attack, belatedly joined a world war: one that the other superpower, the Soviet Union, itself under attack, had belatedly joined six months previously. And meanwhile, back in 1940-1941, it had been the Greeks who had borne the brunt of German aggression; and before them, the French and other northern European countries in 1940; and before them, the Poles. It was in defense of Poland that Britain and France declared war in September 1939.