To Hell and Back

The peace built at Versailles in 1919 is where Kershaw locates much of the trouble to come. The settlement was neither generous enough to reconcile Germany nor harsh enough to cripple it permanently — the worst of both. Germany was saddled with reparations, stripped of territory, and forced to accept sole blame for the war, while remaining, potentially, the strongest economy on the continent. The resentment this bred was not marginal. It became a shared national grievance that the right would mine for the next two decades.

The 1920s offered a brief, deceptive calm. Economies partly recovered, the Dawes Plan restructured German debt, and for a few years it seemed the continent might stabilize. But the recovery rested on American loans, and when Wall Street crashed in 1929 the money drained away overnight. The Depression that followed was the hinge of the whole era. Unemployment in Germany passed six million. Trade collapsed. The economic order that had underpinned the fragile peace simply came apart, and with it went faith in the liberal democracies that presided over the ruin.

The second war was worse than the first in a way that was not only a matter of scale. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, it began a conflict that would, unlike 1914-18, deliberately target civilians as a matter of policy. Kershaw is unsparing here. The Eastern Front in particular became a war of annihilation, where occupation meant starvation, enslavement, and mass murder for the populations caught underneath it. The distinction between soldier and civilian, already eroding, effectively vanished.

At the center of it was the Holocaust. Kershaw, who knew Nazi Germany better than almost anyone, does not treat the genocide as a side-effect of the war but as one of its purposes. Roughly six million Jews were murdered in a bureaucratically organized campaign that drew on the oldest of his four pressures — ethnic and racial hatred — and gave it the full industrial machinery of a modern state. Camps, railways, census records, and ordinary administrative routine were bent toward killing. This, more than anything, is what Kershaw means by hell: not chaos, but the organized, systematic application of a civilization's capacities to extermination.

Here is the question the book is built to answer: why did the end of the first war lead to the second, while the end of the second war led to decades of stability? Kershaw's answer is not that Europeans learned their lesson, or discovered a nobler nature. It is structural. The four pressures that had driven the descent — aggressive ethnic nationalism, demands to redraw borders, class conflict, and an unstable capitalism — were, for the first time, either removed or contained after 1945. The hell ended because its specific machinery was finally dismantled.

Each pressure was neutralized in a particular way, and the ways were often grim. The border question was answered by force: the Cold War froze Europe's frontiers in place, and the vast, violent expulsions of populations left ethnically more homogeneous states behind, removing the minorities that revanchists had exploited. Germany, the engine of two wars, was divided and occupied, no longer free to pursue the territorial ambitions that had wrecked the continent twice. The thing that could not be solved diplomatically after 1918 was, after 1945, simply held down.

By 1949, with the Federal Republic established in the west and the Cold War division hardened, the outline of the Europe that would hold for forty years was in place.