Natural Language processing for getting qualitative info?

Yes, Natural Language Processing methods can do what you ask for.

Yes, Natural Language Processing methods can do what you ask for: To find out which are the "nouns" in a text is called POS-Tagging. Identifying the syntactical strucure of sentences is called parsing. Depending on your parsing method and how strict the syntax of the language is you might want to look into semantic role labeling aswell to find subjects/objects in a sentence.

Classifying the polarity (positive/negative) of a statement is called sentiment analysis. The Python NLTK provides some tools you can get started with, but sentiment analysis is an active research area and a task where a lot of other NLP-methods have to work together, so it is certainly not the easiest field to get started with in NLP. Anyways, a survey of the academic research in the field can be found in Pang & Lee (2008).

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.