How My World View Changed After the Study of World War II
by: Brian M.

Before going through this unit on World War II, I really didn’t know very much about the war. I knew that Adolf Hitler had been the leader of the Nazi Party, and that he had started the Holocaust. I knew that the U.S. had dropped the atom bombs on Japan, too. However, I didn’t know that the war had been so huge and had such a high death toll. My world view at the time was that World War II was just a big war in which the Holocaust happened and the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. I also didn’t know what wars were like, how they affect individual people, or how bad the fighting was. I didn’t realize what major effects the war had on the whole world. At first, I didn’t realize how many insignificant disagreements or arguments could lead to a war.

I hope that World War II would be a lesson to other power-hungry people in the world, teaching them not to mistreat other people and start another war. In interviewing a veteran and reading other veterans’ stories, I have learned what war is like, and how the people who fought in the war felt about it. I also learned that war affects other people aside from the soldiers who fought. For example, many things were rationed in the U.S., including rubber and food. When I learned how the Germans treated the Jews, and what they did to them, I hope that nothing like that ever happens again. Especially when you consider that even now, there is fighting going on all over the world, and something like that could happen all over again. I hope people will see the error in The Nazis’ ways and will realize that what they did to the Jews shouldn’t happen to anyone, and no one deserves it.