It is usual to end a series like this with a number, so here it is, and then we will put it down.
Somewhere between sixty and eighty million people died in this war. The range is that wide because whole countries lost their records, and because deaths from famine and disease caused by the war are counted differently by different historians.
The majority were civilians. That was new. In the previous war, most of the dead had been soldiers.
The Soviet Union lost around twenty-seven million people. China's losses are usually put between fifteen and twenty million. Poland lost roughly a sixth of its entire population.
Numbers that size stop meaning anything, which is the problem with them. So this episode is not about the number. It is about what people did the following week.
In November nineteen forty five, in a courtroom in Nuremberg, something happened that had never happened before.
Senior figures of a defeated government were put on trial, by an international court, according to rules written down in advance, with defence lawyers, and with evidence that had to be proved.
That was not the obvious thing to do. Churchill's own initial preference had been to identify the leading figures and shoot them, and a good many people thought a trial was a pointless formality.
The trial established two ideas that had not existed in law before, and both of them are still doing work today.
The first was the crime against humanity: the principle that some things a government does to people, including its own people, are crimes that any country may prosecute, and that a government cannot make them lawful by passing a law.
The second was that following orders is not a defence. A person remains responsible for what they personally do, however far up the chain the instruction came from. Every soldier in every army since has been taught some version of that, and it exists because of that courtroom.
The next few years produced a burst of writing things down that has no real parallel before or since.
The United Nations was founded in nineteen forty five, in San Francisco, with fifty-one countries. It was the second attempt, and everybody knew it, because the League of Nations had failed and its failure was part of what had led to all this. This time the great powers were kept inside it rather than allowed to walk out, which is also why it is often slow and frustrating, and that is a deliberate trade.
In nineteen forty eight came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, and it is short and worth reading. It says, in effect, that there are things that are owed to a person simply for being one, and it lists them.
The same year produced the Genocide Convention, and the word genocide itself, which had been coined in nineteen forty four by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who had been trying since the nineteen thirties to get a law written for a crime that had no name. Most of his family were killed while he was arguing for it.
And in nineteen forty nine the Geneva Conventions were rewritten, mostly to cover civilians, because the previous versions had been about soldiers and the war had just demonstrated the gap.
The most interesting idea of all came from a French official named Jean Monnet and a foreign minister named Robert Schuman, and it was almost mechanical in its cleverness.
France and Germany had fought three major wars in seventy years. The usual approach after such a thing is to weaken the loser so that it cannot do it again, and that had been tried in nineteen nineteen and had helped produce nineteen thirty nine.
So they tried the opposite. In nineteen fifty one, six countries pooled control of their coal and steel industries under a single authority.
Coal and steel are what you make weapons out of. The point was not friendship. The point was that if the raw materials of war are jointly run, then going to war with your neighbour becomes not immoral but impossible to organise, and the whole thing was designed by people who had watched it happen twice.
That arrangement grew into what is now the European Union. Whatever anybody thinks of it today, it began as a device to make a particular war logistically impractical, and on that specific measure it has worked for seventy years.
There is a pattern in a great many countries after nineteen forty five, and it is easy to miss because it looks like domestic politics rather than war.
Populations that had been asked to give everything spent the war deciding what they wanted in exchange, and then voted for it.
In Britain the key document was written in the middle of the war, in nineteen forty two, by William Beveridge. It identified five things it called giants: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, which is a remarkable thing for a government report, and people queued for it.
It produced, over the following years, a national health service free at the point of use, and a system of pensions and benefits, and the raising of the school leaving age.
Elsewhere the shape differed and the direction was the same. And in the colonies of the European empires, several million men had fought for countries that governed them without asking, and came home and said so. India became independent in nineteen forty seven, and most of the rest followed within twenty years.
It is worth finishing with the people in these forty episodes, because the world afterwards treated them very unevenly.
Alan Turing, whose work is generally reckoned to have shortened the war by around two years, was prosecuted in nineteen fifty two for being a gay man, which was then a crime. He lost his security clearance, was subjected to hormone treatment, and died in nineteen fifty four at forty one. Britain apologised in two thousand and nine and pardoned him in twenty thirteen, and put him on a banknote, none of which was any use to him.
The plotters and the codebreakers went home and said they had been clerks, and most of them kept saying it for thirty years.
Ho Feng-Shan and Chiune Sugihara both lost their careers and neither of them told anybody why, and both were found out only because somebody went looking decades later.
Nicholas Winton put a scrapbook in the attic. Karl Eliasberg rebuilt an orchestra from the fifteen musicians who were still alive and the players called back from the front line, conducted it once, and then went back to ordinary work. The women of the 588th were told their aircraft were too slow for the victory parade.
Almost none of the people in this series were thanked at the time, and a startling number of them were actively punished. That is not a nice pattern and it is a real one, and it is worth knowing before you decide what being on the right side gets you.
The people who remember this are nearly gone. Somebody who was eighteen in nineteen forty five was born in nineteen twenty seven. A child evacuated on the first train in episode one was around ninety-five when this was written. Within a few years there will be nobody left who was there, and it will pass from memory into history, which is a different and colder thing.
That is the actual reason for telling these stories, and it is worth being plain about it. Not because the past is exciting. Because the arrangements everybody now lives inside, the courts and the conventions and the institutions and the rule about orders, were not natural and were not inevitable. They were written by exhausted people in a hurry, in the middle of the wreckage, and they can be unwritten.
And the smaller thing this series keeps returning to is this. Almost nobody in these forty episodes was in charge of anything. A consul with a rubber stamp. A woman at a piano. A stockbroker with a list. Two privates watching a radar screen. A weather man with an opinion nobody wanted. The decisive act was almost always somebody ordinary deciding what to do in the ten minutes in front of them.
Here is the last question, and it is the one all the others have been circling. Every person in this series who did something worth remembering did it without knowing how the story ended. They could not see the last page any more than you can see yours. So the question is not what you would have done back then, when you already know who won. It is what you are going to do on an ordinary morning, about something small, when nobody is watching and there is no way to be sure.
Good night.