In this week of the course, you will be studying about World War Two. In 1939 war broke out again in Europe, less than twenty years after the First World War had ended. Within the span of just two years, the war had truly become a world war with fighting taking place in Europe, North Africa, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Far East. All told it has been estimated that somewhere between fifty and sixty million people lost their lives in the Second World War. War broke out in Europe in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. Later that month the Soviet Union also invaded Poland, and then in June of 1941 Germany invaded Russia. When Japan attacked the United States Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the wartime lineup was largely complete with the U.S. allied with England, France and Russia against Germany and Japan. The war was filled with horrors. One of the horrors was the scale of the involvement of civilians in the war and unprecedented extent of civilian casualties. Another of the horrors was the conditions in which soldiers fought and died on the Russian Front. And another horror was the Genocide that took place during the war. Hitler and the Nazi party decided to rid Germany and Europe of what the Nazis considered to be undesirables, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others. The Nazi party set out to do this in an efficient and productive manner. The result was the absolutely impossible to comprehend fact that the Nazis systematically exterminated over six million Jews and others.