23 facts about World War II that are nothing short of disturbing

Warning: This post contains murder, extreme violence and rape.

As someone who always gets a lot of fulfillment from learning more about history, it’s rare that I see a discussion of history from which I didn’t take a moment to learn more. So, when I saw this post on the popular Ask Reddit forum in which user Cool-Chipmunk-7559 asked, “What’s a WWII fact or story you know?” I wanted to see what people had to say in response. The answers were worried, upset and sick. Because it’s so important to keep these stories alive, I thought I’d share. So, here are some of the scary things that happened during World War II:

1. “The Holocaust and the extermination camps, of course.”

—u/FlyAirLari

2. “The Battle of Stalingrad was a black hole of death. On both sides combined, there were about 10,000 casualties per day. That’s an entire city, every day, for 200 days.”

—u/pangolinparty999

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3. “During the Frankfurt trials, against the concentration camp authorities, witness statements were recorded. I once heard how a woman covered her ears so as not to hear the screams of children thrown into a fiery cremation oven when they lacked weapons to kill them. From then on, I will remember her voice and words for sure that will be placed in a new place for the fire every time of my life.”

—u/gsteen4711

4. “What always freaked me out was how entire cities in Europe would disappear overnight in an evacuation or retreat. One day it’s a normal community, the next day it’s deserted and silent. Something about that emptiness feels very strange.”

—u/KingInternational801

“17,000 villages and settlements between Germany and Russia lost during the war. Destroyed, burned and gone.”

—u/majoraloysius

5. “People are still dying from WWII unexploded ordnance.”

—u/almost sweet

6. “People survived for days on sunken ships after Pearl Harbor.”

—u/HayTX

7. “I had a holocaust survivor who came to tell us school kids about what happened in the camp when he was a kid. He and his friends would chase each other for fun, jumping over the corpses of those who had starved to death from the night before. That stayed with me.”

—u/actuallyacatmow

8. “The Nazis wanted to exterminate the entire Jewish race. Literally make them extinct on the planet. In my opinion, it couldn’t be more horrible than that.”

—u/TerribleBid8416

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9. “What stuck in my mind was when my grandmother told me how incredibly sad it was when all the disabled people disappeared. Some managed to hide their children, but she still remembered a child with Down syndrome from her childhood, who was obviously very sweet – and one day he just passed away, and his mother couldn’t stop crying.”

—u/Wanttoknow7802

10. “The Nazis differed (with some notable exceptions) between concentration camps and extermination camps. Extermination camps were mostly the work of Action Reinhardt, the liquidation of Jewish settlements in occupied Poland; these facilities operated from 1942-1943.”

“The reason they stopped operating was not because of resource constraints or wartime misfortunes for Germany. They stopped because they had accomplished their task: the ghettos were empty; they had no more people to kill. The ‘rest’ (ie Hungarian Jews) were sent to Auschwitz, which operated as an exceptional partition camp.

Often the Holocaust is presented on a macro level and rightly so, as a failed attempt to exterminate Ashkenazi Jews, but IMO is concerned to realize that in specific areas, especially the extermination camps that is widely known. did ‘Successful’ because they ran away from people to kill.

—u/Throwaway5432154322

—u/NonStarGalaxy

12. “Probably the bombing of Dresden. The use of incendiary bombs caused fire and extreme heat in the city. I remember seeing/reading somewhere that people were covered in bomb shelters, but the heat basically melted the people there into an oily pool of goo. I’ve seen other pictures where there are ashen remains of people with their heads/heads visible from such shelters.”

—u/PickleDiego

13. “The average lifespan of a Red Army soldier arriving at Stalingrad was 24 hours. However, that number is misleading, as it includes commands and soldiers in fortified, backward positions. The average lifespan of a Red Army soldier who actually arrived at Stalingrad to fight was less than 24 hours.”

—u/ir_blues

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14. “Manhattan Project scientists could not rule out the possibility that an atomic bomb could burn up the entire atmosphere.”

—in/Keljulvan

15. “Good people, people like you or me, can do terrible things under the right circumstances.”

Author Unknown / Commons.wikimedia.org, via Bettmann / Getty Images

—u/Ok_Ball_1371

“I went to Auschwitz a few months ago. A life-changing experience.

One of the main points my tour guide emphasized was that the SS officers, Rudolf Höss, the prisoners, the guards, they were all like us. Exactly the same species. Anyone can be an SS officer given the right circumstances.

But, anyone could be Oskar Schindler, or Father Maximilian Kolbe. We all have the choice to do wonderful and courageous things like them.”

—u/TJeffersonsBlackKid

16. “The Dirlewanger Brigade. I couldn’t get to that wiki article.”

—u/Lost_Equal1395

“I’ve heard people say that the Japanese were actually very evil because of Unit 713 and Nanking. These people haven’t heard of Dirlewanger.”

—u/Lost_Equal1395

“The Nazis committed their own version of Unit 731, with Josef Mengele and the like. The Nazis also committed a mini-Nanjing massacre throughout the Soviet Union. I would say that the Japanese and the Nazis were equally monstrous.”

—u/Vinny_Lam

17. “The Ustashes scared the crap out of me. They were Croatians who sided with the Nazis and committed such heinous atrocities that even the visiting German Nazi top brass had to tell them to calm down.”

—u/0ldgregg

“Excellent answer. The Ustaše were beyond evil. They used crosscut saws to cut up their victims, and their concentration camp guards had a policy of not using guns when dispatching their victims; they had to use machetes or daggers, and sometimes forced people to fight to the death. I don’t understand how that could be in their humanity.”

—in/koalamurderbear

“Yes, they invented a new type of knife, the ‘srbosjek.’

The translation literally means ‘Serb cutters’, but they killed Jews and Roma.

—in/TehnoMuda

18. Allegedly, “there are still gold and paintings stolen from Jews in Swiss banks.”

—u/jaceinthebox

19. “There is still a sunken Liberty ship with about 1,000 tons of TNT in the mouth of the River Thames in England. The mast is still visible.”

—u/castler_666

20. “My grandfather’s family and extended family didn’t come to America before WWII started. The small town where most of his family lived was right next to the railroad that eventually led to Auschwitz. If the Nazis transporting Jews along that route saw a synagogue, they’d get off the train and leave the town for murder and rape and murder.

“I remember the day he sat down and told the whole family that he had lost almost all of our family lineage to the Nazis. Our family, at least on his side, were Greek/Russian Orthodox religious people. Their town had no war involvement, so no casualties were recorded. They ranged in age from infants to the elderly.”

—u/settebella

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—u/Livid-Application155

—u/Necro_Badger

23. And finally: “Honestly, the scariest thing is remembering how real people lived through it—like, entire cities wiped out overnight…I get chills just thinking about it.”

—u/SweetOpheliaaa

All of this is a lot to take in. If you have something to share, feel free to comment below. Or, if you prefer, you can write in the anonymous form below.

Please note: Some comments have been edited for length and/or clarity.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual abuse, you can call National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which directs the caller to their nearest sexual abuse service provider. You can also search for your local center here.

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