For those less privileged, daily life was far less benign. Deference was still deeply ingrained in European society. The humbler classes dressed differently, ate differently, and spoke differently; they even walked and stood differently. They certainly had different homes, often lacking a bathroom or an indoor lavatory. Unemployment was still widespread. In Britain, in the Tyneside town of Jarrow, starting point of the 1936 protest march to Westminster, almost 70 percent of the work force was out of a job. Those in work still faced long hours; dirty, noisy, and dangerous conditions; and monotonous, repetitive assembly-line tasks. Some of the workers were women, but, despite their “liberation” during World War I, many had returned to domesticity, which to some seemed drudgery. Young people had yet to acquire the affluence that later gave them such independence and self-assurance as an economic and cultural group.
Beneath the placid surface, moreover, there were undercurrents of unease. On the right, especially in France and Germany, there was still much fear of bolshevism. Some, for this reason, saw merits in Mussolini, while a few were attracted by Hitler. On the left, conversely, many admired the U.S.S.R.—although some, such as the French writer André Gide, changed their minds when they had seen it. But left, right, and centre in most of the democracies had one thing in common, though they differed radically about how to deal with it. What they shared was a growing fear of war. Having fought and won, with American help, “the war to end war,” were they now to face the same peril all over again?
This fear became acute toward the end of the decade, as Hitler’s ambitions grew more and more plain. But underlying it was a broader, deeper, and less specific disquiet, especially in continental Europe.
In 1918 the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler published Der Untergang des Abendlandes, translated in 1926–28 as The Decline of the West. In 1920 the French geographer Albert Demangeon produced The Decline of Europe. In 1927 Julien Benda published his classic study The Great Betrayal, and in 1930 José Ortega y Gasset produced The Revolt of the Masses. All these works—and many others—evoked what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called, in the title of a book published in 1928, The Crisis of Civilisation. That same year, coincidentally, saw René Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World. Similar concerns were voiced in Britain almost a decade later, when the French-born Roman Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc published The Crisis of Our Civilization.
Many such writers were pessimistic. Paul Valéry, in Glimpses of the Modern World (1931), warned Europeans against abandoning intellectual discipline and embracing chauvinism, fanaticism, and war. Thomas Mann, in Warning Europe (1938), asked: “Has European humanism become incapable of resurrection?” “For the moment,” wrote Carl J. Burckhardt, “it…seems that the world will be destroyed before one of the great nations of Europe gives up its demand for supremacy.”
At Munich in September 1938 the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart Édouard Daladier bought time with “appeasement”—betraying Czechoslovakia and handing the Sudetenland to Hitler. Millions cheered the empty pledge they brought back with them: “Peace for our time.” Within 11 months Hitler had invaded Poland and World War II had begun. The blast of World War II
World War II was the most destructive war in history. Estimates of those killed vary from 35 million to 60 million. The total for Europe alone was 15 million to 20 million—more than twice as many as in World War I. At least 6 million Jewish men, women, and children, and millions of others, died in Hitler’s extermination camps. Nor were the Germans themselves spared. By 1945, in a population of some 70 million, there were 7 million more German women than men.
One after another, most of the countries in continental Europe had been invaded and occupied: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the U.S.S.R. and then, when the tide turned, Italy and Germany. Many countries had been fought over twice.
The resulting devastation had turned much of Europe into a moonscape: cities laid waste or consumed by firestorms, the countryside charred and blackened, roads pitted with shell holes or bomb craters, railways out of action, bridges destroyed or truncated, harbours filled with sunken, listing ships. “Berlin,” said General Lucius D. Clay, the deputy military governor in the U.S. zone of postwar Germany, “was like a city of the dead.”
Between 1939 and 1945, moreover, at least 60 million European civilians had been uprooted from their homes; 27 million had left their own countries or been driven out by force. Four and a half million had been deported by the Nazis for forced labour; many thousands more had been sent to Siberia by the Russians. When the war ended, 2.5 million Poles and Czechs were transferred to the U.S.S.R., and more than 12 million Germans fled or were expelled from eastern Europe. At one period in 1945, 40,000 refugees a week poured into northwestern Germany.
Death, destruction, and mass displacements—all had demonstrated how fragile and vulnerable Europe’s proud nations had become. In most earlier conflicts the state’s defenses had been its frontiers or its front line: its armies had been a carapace protecting the civilians within. Now, even more than in World War I, this was no longer so. Air raids, rockets, mass conscription, blitzkrieg invasion, commando raids, parachute drops, Resistance sabotage, and guerrilla warfare had put everyone, as the phrase went, “in the front line.” More accurately, national frontiers had shown how flimsy they were, and the “front line” metaphor had lost its force. Even the distinction between civilians and soldiers had become blurred. Civilians had fought in Resistance circuits—and been shot, sometimes as hostages, and when the Allies or the Axis practiced area bombing, civilians were the main victims. The most extreme instances were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. They not only ignored the civilian-military distinction; they utterly transformed the nature of war.
Hitler’s death camps, likewise, made World War II unique. The appalling product of spurious science, evil fanaticism, blind bureaucratic obedience, sadistic perversion, and pedantic callousness, they left an unhealing wound. They reminded humanity of the depths to which human beings can sink and of the vital need to expunge racism of all kinds—including the reflex, understandable at the time, of regarding the Germans as solely capable of committing Nazi-type crimes.
The Nürnberg trials were a further unique feature of World War II (although war trials were written into the treaties following World War I). By arraigning and punishing major surviving Nazi leaders, they undoubtedly supplied a salutary form of catharsis, if nothing else. They proved beyond a doubt the wickedness of Hitler’s regime; at one point, when films of the death camps were shown, they actually sickened and shamed the defendants. In some eyes, however, the trials were tainted. Although scrupulously conducted, they smacked slightly of show trials, with the victorious Allies playing both prosecutor and judge. Given the purges of millions under Stalin, the participation of Soviet judges seemed especially hypocritical. The charges included not only war crimes, of which many of the accused were manifestly guilty, but also “waging aggressive war”—a novel addition to the statute book. Finally, a number of war criminals certainly slipped through the Nürnberg net. The overall intention, however, was surely honourable: to establish once and for all that international affairs were not immune from ethical considerations and that international law—unlike the League of Nations—was growing teeth.