Yes. Ancestor worship is probably more properly the first religion than animism.
The concept of the afterlife began around 3100 BC. In a land just beyond the Mesopotamian world, an unusual custom had begun called a retainer sacrifice. Royal family and court members that belonged to a particular pharaoh were willingly sacrificed and buried around his tomb to continue serving him in the afterlife as a god.
This is where the idea of humanized gods or demigod begins but thats another subject entirely. About a thousand years later in the First Intermediate Period of Egypt, the Coffin Texts appeared which were spells written on coffins as a kind of backdoor hack for commoners to gain entrance to the afterlife. The tradition went viral and the afterlife was no longer the sole domain for royalty.
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.