23 Facts About World War II That Are Nothing Short Of Haunting

Warning: This article contains references to murder, intense violence, and rape.

As someone who has always gained a lot of fulfillment from learning more about history, I rarely see history discussed without taking the time to learn more. So when I saw this post on the popular Ask Reddit forum, where user Cool-Chipmunk-7559 asked, “What is the scariest WWII fact or story you know?” I wanted to see how people responded to it. The answers are sobering, disturbing and morbid. Because it’s so important to keep these stories alive, I thought I’d share. So, here are some of the most horrific 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. Combined, both sides suffered an average of about 10,000 casualties per day. That was the equivalent of an entire town’s casualties for 200 days.”

—u/pangolinparty999

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3. “Witness testimonies were recorded at the trial against concentration camp officials in Frankfurt. I once heard a woman describe how she covered her ears so as not to hear the screams of the children being thrown into the burning crematorium when there was no ammunition to kill them first. From then on, I remembered her voice and her words every time I put a new piece of wood in the fireplace. I will certainly do so for the rest of my life.”

—u/gsteen4711

4. “What always scares me is that during evacuations or retreats, entire towns in Europe can disappear overnight. It’s like one day it’s a normal community and the next day it’s abandoned and silent. There’s something so eerie about that emptiness.”

—u/KingInternational801

“About 17,000 villages and hamlets between Germany and Russia were lost in the war. Destroyed, burned, and simply lost.”

—u/majoraloysius

5. “People are still dying from unexploded ordnance from World War II.”

-u/almost sweet

6. “After Pearl Harbor, people survived the shipwreck for several days.”

—u/HayTX

7. “I had a Holocaust survivor who came and told us schoolchildren about his experiences as a child in a refugee camp. He and his friends would chase each other for fun, jumping over the bodies of the dead who had starved the night before. That always stuck with me.”

—u/actually acatmow

8. “The Nazis wanted to exterminate the entire Jewish race. Literally wipe them out of the face of the earth. In my opinion, there is nothing more horrific than that.”

—u/terriblebid8416

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9. “What always comes to my mind is my grandmother telling me how incredibly sad it is when all disabled people disappear. Some people manage to hide their children, but she still remembers a child with Down syndrome as a child who was obviously very sweet – and one day he was gone and his mother couldn’t stop crying.”

—u/want to know 7802

10. “There are differences (with some notable exceptions) between Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps. Extermination camps were primarily a function of Aktion Reinhard, the liquidation of Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland; these facilities operated from 1942 to 1943.”

“The reason they ceased operations was not because of German resource constraints or wartime misfortunes. They ceased operations because they had accomplished their mission: the ghettos were empty; they had no more people to kill. The ‘leftovers’ (such as the Jews in Hungary) were sent to Auschwitz, which operated as part extermination facility, part concentration/slave labor camp.”

Often the Holocaust is portrayed on a macro level as a failed attempt to exterminate Ashkenazi Jews, but what is chilling, IMO, is that in specific areas, particularly in the well-known extermination camps, the Holocaust actually did ‘Successful’ because they had no one left to murder. “

-u/Throwaway5432154322

—u/NonStarGalaxy

12. “Probably the bombing of Dresden. The use of incendiary bombs led to urban fires and extreme temperatures. I remember seeing/reading somewhere that people were hiding in bomb shelters, but the heat caused the people there to basically melt into greasy goo. I’ve seen other photos of the ash remains of people from such shelters that looked like their heads/brains had popped out from the heat.”

—u/PickleDiego

13. “The average life expectancy of a Red Army soldier who came to Stalingrad was about 24 hours. However, this figure is misleading because it includes soldiers in command posts and in backward positions in the fortifications. The average life expectancy of a Red Army soldier who came to Stalingrad to actually fight was much less than 24 hours.”

—u/ir_blues

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14. “Manhattan Project scientists could not rule out the possibility that detonating a nuclear bomb would incinerate the entire atmosphere.”

—u/Kyle Jurwan

15. “Good people, people like you and me, can do very terrible things under the right conditions.”

Author Unknown/Via commons.wikimedia.org, Bettmann/Getty Images

—u/Ok_Ball_1371

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

One of the main points that my tour guide emphasized was that the SS officers, Rudolf Hoss, the prisoners, the guards, they were all just like us. Exactly the same species. Given the right circumstances, anyone could become an SS officer.

And, anyone can be Oskar Schindler or Father Maximilian Kolbe. We can all choose to do amazing and brave things like them. “

—u/TJeffersonsBlackKid

16. “The Dirlewanger Brigade. I didn’t go too far on that Wiki article.”

—u/Lost_Equal1395

“I’ve heard people say that the Japanese are actually more evil because of Unit 713 and Nanjing. These people haven’t heard of Dierwanger.”

—u/Lost_Equal1395

“The Nazis committed their own version of Unit 731, with people like Joseph Mengele. The Nazis also committed mini-Nanking massacres all over the Soviet Union. I would say the Japanese were equally terrible as the Nazis.”

—u/Vinny_Lam

17. “The Ustashas scared me to death. They were Croats, they were on the side of the Nazis, and they committed such disgusting atrocities that even the visiting top German Nazis had to tell them to calm down.”

—u/0ldgregg

“Great answer. The Ustashas were evil to the extreme. They beheaded their victims with cross-cut saws, and they had a policy that required concentration camp guards not to use firearms when executing their victims; they had to use blunt or stabbing weapons, and sometimes made people fight to the death. I don’t understand how people’s humanity can be so abysmal.”

—u/koalamurderbear

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

The translation literally means ‘Serbian cutters’, but of course they killed Jews and Roma. “

—u/TehnoMuda

18. Allegedly, “Swiss banks still contain gold and paintings stolen from Jews.”

—u/jaceinthebox

19. “There is also a sunken Liberty Ship in the Thames Estuary, England, carrying approximately 1,000 tons of TNT. The mast is still visible.”

—u/castler_666

20. “My great-grandfather’s family and extended family didn’t come to America like he did before World War II started. The town that most of his family came from was along the railroad that eventually led to Auschwitz. If the Nazis who were transporting Jews along that route saw a synagogue on that route, they would get out and rape and murder and then set the town on fire and leave everyone dead.”

“I remember one day he sat down and told the family that he had lost almost his entire family lineage to a Nazi attack. Our family, at least his side, were Greek/Russian Orthodox. There was no war in their town, so the loss of life was not recorded or documented until long after the war was over. These innocent people were slaughtered like animals, and no justice was served to them. They ranged in age from infants to senior citizens.”

-u/setbela

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—u/Livid-Application155

—u/Necro_Badger

twenty three. Finally: “Honestly, the scariest thing is remembering how real people went through that – like an entire city was destroyed overnight… gives me chills just thinking about it.”

—u/SweetOpheliiaaa

These are all worth absorbing. If you have anything to share, feel free to comment below. Or, if you prefer, you can fill out the anonymous form below.

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

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call National Sexual Assault Hotline Dial 1-800-656-HOPE, which will direct callers to the nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.

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