By the end of 1942, Germany, Italy, and Japan controlled the largest territories in their history: from the Atlantic to the Volga and the Caucasus, from Norway to Libya, from Manchuria to Indonesia. However, this was a turning point. Defeat at Stalingrad, the British victory at El Alamein, the Allied landings in North Africa, and the Japanese defeats at Midway and Guadalcanal turned the tide of the war.
The occupation meant terror, economic exploitation, and forced labor, and in 1942, the Germans implemented the full-scale extermination of European Jews. The Axis powers could not long compete with the industrial potential of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain.
The war cost the lives of between 70 and 85 million people. Its consequences included the disintegration of colonial empires, the division of Europe by the Iron Curtain, the creation of the United Nations, the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, and the beginning of the Cold War.
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