(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ This century’s most destructive event, World War II, began 60 years ago, on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler’s personal leadership, invaded Poland.

Martin Gilbert, the British historian, writes that when the war ended 2,174 days later with the Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, more than 46 million soldiers and civilians had died, many of unknown causes and unremembered.

The wartime killing, whether in battle or behind the lines, never slowed or stopped. New victims died around the clock, around the world, at the staggering rate of 21,000 men, women and children every day _ about 881 an hour, nearly 15 a minute, one person every four seconds.

Because the United States was not a battleground in World War II and was never bombed, our casualties were almost exclusively military personnel who were killed overseas. American war dead, including non-battlefield losses, were about 408,000. In comparison, more than 620,000 Federal and Confederate soldiers were killed during the Civil War.

Each time I visit Poland, I am reminded that World War II started there with the German blitzkrieg, and I first heard those horrific statistics during a conference on the Holocaust at Jagiellonian University in Kracow.

At that meeting a prominent Roman Catholic historian who had lost many of his family during the German occupation of Poland, scornfully declared: “America got off easy … her casualties only amounted to about 19 days of total wartime deaths.” His provocative statement set off a bitter argument about America’s role in World War II, and although details of that debate remain fuzzy, I have never forgotten the human side of the casualty figures.

With years of historical research now available, it is clear Nazi Germany linked its war effort with the physical annihilation of the Jewish people. Tragically, the chaotic winds of World War II provided the Nazis with a convenient cover to carry out the mass murder of 6 million Jews.

Germany fought two wars at the same time.

The first was the military battle waged against the West and the Soviet Union for the usual prizes of land, empire and physical resources. However, the second war _ and I believe the more important one for the Nazis _ was not traditional in nature but ideological.

The second war’s primary goal was to physically rid planet Earth of every Jew and every vestige of Judaism. Incredibly, the Nazis almost achieved total success in both wars. German victory, as every Allied soldier and every Jew knows, was a very near thing.

Killing Jews in Poland started early in September 1939. A week after the invasion, Hitler told German Army commander, Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch, there must be no Army “interference” in the murderous SS campaign against Jews. On Sept. 13, one SS Death’s Head unit, the Brandenburg Division, began what it termed “cleansing and security measures” against the defenseless Polish Jews. The chilling SS phrase of six decades ago is still with us as we prepare to enter a new century.

Sept. 14 was Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and German planes heavily bombed Warsaw, the Polish capital. One eye witness reported that Nalewki, the city’s Jewish quarter, was specifically singled out for attack because the synagogues were filled with holy day worshippers. The results were “bloody,” and represented the beginning of the Jewish people’s long agony that culminated in death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.

On Sept. 27, the Polish government in Warsaw surrendered, and as its radio station went off the air it defiantly played Frederic Chopin’s patriotic “Polonaise.” But the victors did not want to “enter a city … filled with the sick … wounded and the dead.” Because the so-called rules of war were not followed by the Germans, hundreds of wounded Polish soldiers and civilians were left to die.

When the Germans finally entered Warsaw and other cities, Gilbert writes: “… probably more than 10,000 Polish teachers, doctors, priests, landowners, businessmen, and local officials were rounded up and killed.” He adds that in one western Polish diocese, “two-thirds of the 690 priests had been arrested, of whom 214 were shot.”

Although 60 years have passed since those terrible days when World War II and the Holocaust began, it sometimes seems that little has been settled. How else to explain Buford Furrow’s recent boast to the FBI that his life’s work is “to kill Jews.” Hitler would have been so proud of the Los Angeles shooter.

DEA END RUDIN