Wannsee meeting coordinates deportation and mass murder

Operation Barbarossa began as a war of annihilation, not simply a military campaign. German plans tied conquest to racial hierarchy, mass starvation, enslavement, and the murder of Jews and Soviet...

Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, invoking peoples’ right to choose their government. Churchill insisted it did not apply to Britain’s empire, while anticolonial leaders read its...

Japanese forces attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. The attack took place in Hawai‘i, a U.S. territory whose Native Hawaiian sovereignty had...

Within hours of Pearl Harbor, Japan attacked British Malaya and Hong Kong, the U.S. Philippines, and other sites across the Pacific. Its rhetoric of Asian liberation from Western colonialism won...

British colonial Hong Kong surrendered to Japan on Christmas Day after a short, brutal campaign. Japanese occupation brought executions, imprisonment, forced labor, shortages, and currency controls....

After a rapid campaign down the Malay Peninsula, British-led forces surrendered Singapore. The defeat shattered the myth of European military superiority and intensified Japanese occupation across the...

President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military exclusion zones that enabled the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. More than 120,000 people of Japanese...

Dutch forces in Java surrendered to Japan, ending Dutch colonial rule there and beginning a harsh occupation. Japanese authorities mobilized Indonesian labor, extracted rice and other resources, and...

After months of siege, Filipino and U.S. forces on Bataan surrendered to Japan. Thousands of prisoners were forced on a march under extreme heat, hunger, illness, and abuse; many died. Filipino...

The first 29 Navajo recruits arrived for Marine training in May 1942, building a secure communications system from their language. The military depended on Indigenous linguistic knowledge even as...