Military history: WW II began 70 years ago today

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany, along with Soviet Red Army and Slovak forces, invaded Poland, leading to the beginning of World War II.

Poland's allies, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, declared war on Germany two days later, with France, Canada and South Africa following suit.

The invasion began a week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty of non-aggression between Nazi Germany and the USSR, also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Contrary to some myths, Poland did not surrender easily or quickly. By some historians estimates, the Germans lost the equivalent of an armored division and a fourth of its air force.
The Poles suffered greatly, losing not only troops to war and war crimes, but an estimated 200,000 civilians in the Germans' "total war."

The invasion also set the stage for the Holocaust with the establishment of Nazi death camps, notably at Auschwitz, where an estimated 3 million Jews were murdered. The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw was walled in by the Nazis in 1940, and was the scene of an armed Jewish resistance movement in 1943 that ended with German retaliation that left more than 56,000 dead and the destruction of the ghetto, ending with the demolition of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw in May 1943.

Although Poland as completely overrun within a month, the Polish government never surrendered. Polish military forces fled to Hungary and Romania and regrouped as Polish fighting units under British and French forces, while the largest resistance movement in Europe began to form in Poland.

Meanwhile, also on this day in history, in 1969 a 27-year old Libyan Army captain named Muammar al-Qaddafi lead a successful military coup to oust King Idris I and take over the Libyan government.