To Hell & Back: Europe 1914 – 1949

Ian Kershaw, “To Hell & Back: Europe 1914 – 1949 (Volume 1)”, Penguin History of Europe, 2015, 522 pp.

British historian Ian Kershaw is a much honored writer and professor of European history.   He is perhaps best known as a scholar of Hitler and Germany between the wars. The two volumes of his biography of the Führer have won wide praise, as have his studies of the power structures and internal functioning of Germany under Hitler’s command. 

In this current work, of which this is just volume 1, he examines Europe’s near self-destruction in the first half of the twentieth century -- the era of the two world wars.  This book explores how the dangerous forces emanating from WWI, when joined by world-wide depression, eventually led to scarcely imaginable depths of inhumanity, genocide, and destruction during WWII with the death rate four times that of WWI.   

My Notes:

Pg. 1:  Europe’s twentieth century was a century of war.  Two world wars followed by over forty years of ‘cold war’ – itself the direct product of WWII – defined the age.  During the twentieth century Europe went to hell and back.  The continent, which for nearly one hundred years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had prided itself on being the apogee of civilization, fell between 1914 and 1945 into the pit of barbarism.  A second volume to be published later will explore the era after 1950. 

Pg. 2:  The author presents four reasons for this pre-1950 catastrophic period: (1) an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism; (2) bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism; (3) acute class conflict – now given concrete focus through the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and (4) a protracted crisis of capitalism (which many at the time thought was terminal, hence the attraction of Fascism and Communism).

Pg. 78:  The Russian Tsarist police manufactured a forged document called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, purporting to show a Jewish conspiracy aimed at world power.  Its circulation sharply increased after 1917 (helped along by financing by the naive anti-Semite Henry Ford). 

Pg. 85:  By the autumn of 1918 the legitimacy of the state system in Imperial Germany had all but collapsed.  On October 29 mutineering sailors at Kiel defied the German naval leadership’s absurd orders for the fleet to put to sea to engage the British navy in a last great showdown battle.  This would have invited a senseless sacrifice for nothing but the honor of the German navy.  The sailors were having none of it.  The mutiny rapidly spread and set the spark to full scale revolution.  The generals made plain to the Kaiser that he had to go.  On November 10, Kaiser Wilhelm II left for exile in Holland (where he would remain until his death in 1941).

Pg. 112:  The extreme terror of the Bolshevik revolutionary project is often attributed to Stalin.  However, the essential characteristic of Bolshevik rule had emerged during Lenin’s lifetime.  What followed Lenin’s death in 1924 was a continuation and logical consequence, not an aberration.

Pg. 206: In 1932, before Hitler, Germany drafted proposals for voluntary sterilization of those suffering from hereditary defects.  Hitler’s government promptly went further in 1933 introducing compulsory sterilization for an extensive range of hereditary illnesses, serious physical deformities and chronic alcoholism, which over the following years would produce around 400,000 victims.  (Lethal chambers to exterminate the mentally ill in Germany would have to wait a further six years.)  Germany was not alone, all the Scandinavian states passed laws in 1934 to introduce compulsory sterilization.  In the U.S. by the eve of WWII some 42,000 citizens in thirty American states had been sterilized.

Pg. 260:  All dictatorships shared a number of features – the elimination (or severe restriction) of pluralist forms of political representation, limits on (or abolition of) personal freedoms, control over the mass media, the termination (or strict limitation) of any judicial independence, and heavy-handed repression of political dissidents through extended police powers. 

Pg. 346:  WWII had a death toll of over 40 million just in Europe, more than four times as high as in WWI.  The Soviet Union lost more than 25 million; Germany’s dead numbered around 7 million; Poland 6 million.  Total allied deaths were just over 14 million. 

Pg. 382:  The sinking of the French fleet at Mers el-Kevir in Algeria on 3 July 1940, on Churchill’s orders (to prevent it being made available to the Germans) and with the loss of life of 1,297 French sailors, did little to win support for the Allied cause in France or its colonies.

Pg. 410:  Despite two world wars, numerous civil conflicts, politically induced major famines, economic depression and large-scale ethnic cleansing, Europe’s population continued to grow substantially during the first half of the twentieth century, going from 500 million in 1913 to almost 600 million in 1950.

Pg. 449:  The Marxist tenets of classless equality, internationalism and abolition of the chains of capitalism were enormously appealing to intellectual idealists.