The world today

‘This war,’ Hitler told the Reichstag in 1942, ‘is one of those elemental conflicts which usher in a new millennium and which shake the world.’ He was right, of course. Far from a Thousand-Year Reich, Germany today is a pacific, liberal democracy, as is Italy. Poland and Russia are independent Slavic states. France is restored and plays a leading role in Europe. The Jewish people have their own democratic state. The United States, which Hitler loathed, is the greatest world power and has had an black president. China is a powerful independent state and Japan a neutral, anti-militarist democracy. The British Empire has gone, but its Commonwealth is thriving across the continents.

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The realization of Hitler’s hopes for a ‘Pan-European Economic Area’ does not conform to his scheme for a giant life support system for the Aryan race, which never won its Lebensraum after all. Hitler’s war was indeed therefore ‘one of those elemental conflicts which usher in a new millennium’, but it was precisely the opposite kind of millennium to the one he had in mind.

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The war from a human perspective

The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years. One cannot look across the long, seemingly endless rows of headstones marking the military cemeteries throughout Europe and the Pacific or the great memorials and earthen mounds memorializing the dead of Eastern Europe without a sense of the terrible cost of World War II.

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At the Commonwealth Beach Head Cemetery just north of Anzio in Italy lie some of the men who fell in that campaign. The bereaved families were permitted to add personal messages to the tombstones. The gravestone of Private J. R. G. Gains of the Buffs, who was killed aged thirty, says: ‘Beautiful memories, a darling husband and daddy worthy of Everlasting Love, His wife and Baby Rita’. Even two-thirds of a century later, it is still impossible not to feel sad that baby Rita Gains had to grow up without her father. Only by multiplying this tragedy by 50,000,000, can one even begin to grasp the sheer extent of the personal impact of the Second World War.

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