Lieutenant Wilhelm Dege's story has been previously untold outside Germany, but he is thought to be the last ever German soldier to succumb to allied forces.
Just after 2 p.m. on August 18, 1945, U.S. Army Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione bled to death in the clear, bright sky above Tokyo.
Dege and his men could not stand that. He decided to surrender. At midnight on September 3, 1945, six years to the day after Britain had gone to war with Germany, Dr. Dege had the dubious honor of being the commander of the last German unit to surrender to the Allies.
The very last German troops of the Second World War to call it quits turned themselves in to a band of Norwegian seal hunters on the remote Bear Island in the Barents Sea on Sept. 4, 1945 – nearly four months after VE Day!
Russians also point to the fact that Soviet forces killed more German soldiers than their Western counterparts, accounting for 76 percent of Germany's military dead.
The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians. This represents the most military deaths of any nation by a large margin. Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.
Axis powers. The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
This is because most of the German soldiers who fought in the war were conscripts, and many of them were killed or captured. Today, the German government estimates that there are fewer than 100,000 surviving World War II veterans in the country.
After Germany's surrender in May 1945, millions of German soldiers remained prisoners of war. In France, their internment lasted a particularly long time. But, for some former soldiers, it was a path to rehabilitation.
On September 2, 1945, Japanese representatives signed the official Instrument of Surrender, prepared by the War Department and approved by President Harry S. Truman. It set out in eight short paragraphs the complete capitulation of Japan.
Marcos accepted the soldier's surrender and formally pardoned him. For Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the war was finally over. He was the second to last Japanese soldier to surrender. The last man standing, Private Teruo Nakamura, would finally hand himself in on the 18th of December 1974.
In June 1951, a pair of German soldiers from the Wehrmacht were reportedly found alive after being trapped inside a military bunker at Babie Doły for six years. They were the only survivor from a group of six who had been inside an underground storehouse when the entrance was dynamited by the retreating German Army.
Due to warring ideologies, tussles between the Soviet Union and its allies, and the legacy of the First World War, Germany actually surrendered twice. As an Allied victory looked more and more certain in 1944 and 1945, the United States, U.S.S.R.
General Buckner was a fighting general and he died in the fighting. His three stars mark the highest ranking military officer to be killed in combat during World War II.
The people listed below are, or were, the last surviving members of notable groups of World War II veterans, as identified by reliable sources. About 70 million people fought in World War II between 1939 and 1945 and, as of 2022, there are still approximately 167,000 living veterans in the United States alone.
Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction.
In the winter of 1942/43, Hitler sacrificed twenty-two divisions through his command to hold out at Stalingrad. More than 100,000 German soldiers fell, froze, or starved to death even before the surrender of the Sixth Army. Over 90,000 men ended up in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps—only around 6,000 of them survived.
The Soviet government kept roughly 1.5 million German POWs in forced-labor camps after the end of World War II through 1956. The POWs constituted the largest and longest held group of prisoners for any victor nation.
The number of living Australian Second World War veterans has halved since 2019. According to a study by family search website Ancestry and YouGov, 7800 remain.
A few thousand D-Day veterans may be still alive; the youngest are in their late 90s. A few dozen are in Normandy for the 79th anniversary.
Tens of thousands of Axis prisoners of war including Germans were put to work in the United States in farms, mills and canneries. These prisoners were paid $0.80 per day for their labor (equivalent to $14 in 2022 dollars).
War crimes trials, in which Japanese guards were tried for acts of brutality, were held throughout south-east Asia. In Australian trials, 922 men were tried and 641 were found guilty. Of 148 sentenced to death, 137 were actually executed.
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Tom Uren described how a young Aboriginal soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days.