To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949

Written by British historian Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back examines Europe from 1914 to 1949, an era in which the continent descended into barbarism after nearly a century of self-proclaimed civilization.

Kershaw organizes his account around four interlocking elements of crisis that drove Europe toward self-destruction: an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism, bitter demands for territorial revision, acute class conflict sharpened by the Bolshevik Revolution, and a protracted crisis of capitalism. None had been a primary cause of the First World War, but the new virulence of each was a crucial outcome of that conflict, and their lethal interaction spawned the extraordinary violence culminating in the Second World War. Central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe suffered worst, while western Europe generally fared better. Germany is singled out as the country where all four elements existed in their most extreme form.

Kershaw begins by dismantling the nostalgic image of a pre-war "Golden Age." While Europe shared in a globally interwoven capitalist economy stabilized by the gold standard, a monetary system tying currencies' values to gold, a darker reality lay beneath the surface. Social change was rapid but wildly uneven. Political power remained concentrated in hereditary monarchies, even as rising working-class parties were perceived as a fundamental threat. Populist nationalist movements sought to mobilize the masses through aggressive rhetoric, antisemitism acquired pseudo-scientific racial dimensions, and eugenics attracted supporters across the political spectrum. Considerable violence was exported through imperialism, from Belgian atrocities in the Congo to the systematic killing of the Herero and Nama peoples in German South-West Africa.

The book rejects the notion that Europe stumbled accidentally into war in 1914, assigning primary responsibility to Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, with Germany's role deemed most crucial. Kershaw traces the critical sequence from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June through Germany's unconditional "blank cheque" to Austria-Hungary, Austria's deliberately impossible ultimatum to Serbia, and Russia's secret mobilization. As military imperatives overtook diplomacy, fear drove each power's readiness to act: fear of encirclement, of Russian ascendancy, of loss of face.

Kershaw characterizes the war as industrialized mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale. He surveys the military catastrophes: the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany's strategy to defeat France quickly before turning east, leading to trench stalemate; the Armenian massacres of 1915; the battles of Verdun and the Somme; and the failed German submarine campaign that brought America into the conflict. The Bolshevik Revolution transformed European politics. The war's toll was staggering: nearly 9 million military dead and close to 6 million civilian dead.

The post-war settlement created new nation-states from the ruins of four collapsed empires but left behind what Kershaw calls a flimsy house of cards. At Versailles, the Big Four, US President Woodrow Wilson, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando, faced insuperable problems satisfying competing territorial demands. They established the League of Nations, an international collective-security body, but the settlement generated deep resentment, especially in Germany, where territorial losses, demilitarization, the "war guilt clause," and massive reparations fueled grievances without permanently crippling the country. Democracy became the governing model everywhere outside the Soviet Union but took firm root only in western and northern Europe. Fascism broke through in Italy because of a crisis of state legitimacy, the war's traumatic impact, and the support of ruling elites, while democracy survived in Germany because the army leadership supported the state during the 1923 crisis.

A brief recovery in the mid-1920s rested on fragile foundations: American short-term loans and an unstable gold standard. The Treaty of Locarno in 1925 and Germany's admission to the League of Nations offered hope, aided by the diplomacy of German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, but eastern Europe remained dangerously exposed. Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin, who emerged as Soviet leader after Lenin's death in 1924, consolidated total control. He launched the first Five-Year Plan, a state program for rapid industrialization, followed by forced collectivization of agriculture that produced a devastating famine killing an estimated 3.3 million in Ukraine alone. Cultural modernism flourished, especially in Weimar Germany, but a pronounced cultural pessimism created fertile ground for fascist exploitation.

The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 shattered the recovery. Kershaw documents the human catastrophe through vivid examples, including Britain's hated "Means Test," an intrusive assessment of household resources for relief eligibility, and mass homelessness in Berlin. Germany's crisis was not merely economic but a complete collapse of confidence in the state. As support for democracy shriveled, the Nazi Party filled the vacuum with its promise of national renewal, attracting voters across social classes. Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, following machinations by conservative elites who hoped to control him, led to total dictatorship within six months.

Kershaw traces the crumbling international order as the League of Nations was fatally weakened by its failure over Japan's occupation of Manchuria and Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. Hitler's provocations met only protests, and the Rome-Berlin Axis, a political alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany formed in November 1936, signaled the consolidation of aggressive dictatorships. Kershaw distinguishes three dynamic dictatorships: Stalin's regime of pervasive terror, Mussolini's weaker Fascist state, and Hitler's Germany as the most radical, where racial cleansing and territorial expansion sustained a relentless ideological dynamic. The Spanish Civil War, though a terrible national tragedy, proved largely separate from the developments leading toward a wider European conflagration.

The final pre-war chapters trace the slide from the 1938 Anschluss, Germany's annexation of Austria, through the Munich Agreement, which ceded Czechoslovak territory to Germany in a failed attempt to prevent war, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression agreement dividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Across Europe, the mood differed starkly from 1914: resigned readiness rather than enthusiasm.

Kershaw's account of the Second World War emphasizes its genocidal character, with civilian deaths outnumbering military casualties for the first time. He traces the military campaigns through three phases while focusing on the unprecedented inhumanity: the racial war in Poland and the Soviet Union, the evolution of the Holocaust from mass shootings to industrialized extermination at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the varied experiences of occupied populations from Denmark to Greece. Over 40 million people died in Europe alone, with the Soviet Union losing more than 25 million.

A thematic chapter examines long-term transitions beneath the catastrophic surface: rising life expectancy, wartime technological innovation, the compromised positions of the Christian Churches, the polarization of intellectuals, and the advance of American-dominated mass entertainment.

The concluding chapters trace Europe's emergence from devastation: the brutal expulsions of at least 12 million ethnic Germans from central and eastern Europe, impracticable attempts at denazification, and political reawakening featuring the rise of Christian Democracy, a Christian-inspired conservative democratic movement, in the West and the crushing of pluralist politics in the East. The Iron Curtain, the political division between Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and the democratic West, descended through stages including the Marshall Plan, America's program of economic aid for European reconstruction, the Berlin blockade, and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Western military alliance, in April 1949. Kershaw argues that the Second World War, in stark contrast to the First, paved the way for Europe's rebirth by sweeping away the crisis elements that had plagued the continent for three decades. He identifies five foundations for this transformation: the end of German great-power ambitions, the purging of war criminals, the stabilizing division of Europe, economic growth boosted by reformed capitalism, and the threat of nuclear warfare. Out of the ashes, a new, divided Europe took shape, with possibilities for cooperation that would have seemed unimaginable during the decades of self-destruction.