Total War and Industrial Murder: What 1939 to 1945 Did to the West's Self-Image

The idea

This unit holds the two facts the anchor says the West could not absorb, and it holds them together on purpose. The first is total war generalized to the planet. A war of aggression by one man's obsession took sixty million lives, most of them civilians, because the technology that had won the last war's stalemate, tanks and bombers, now reached every city, and because the state that fought it hardest, the Soviet Union, fought it with twenty-five million dead and factories moved a thousand miles. It ended with a weapon that could extinguish life. The second is industrial murder. A nation at Europe's center, with its universities and its railways, used timetables and contracted gas chambers to kill six million Jews, two-thirds of Europe's, plus millions of Romani, homosexuals, prisoners and Slavs, and it did so with regular soldiers, policemen and clerks, and it did so faster as it was losing, until the war ended it. The anchor's conclusion is that the distinction between civilization and barbarism, drawn since the Greeks, was undermined by the civilized. Three things followed that unit eighteen inherits. The victors had already divided Germany and Europe at Yalta and Potsdam before the peace, and the division held for forty-five years. The United Nations was founded on the ruins of the League with a council that could act. And the West, rethinking itself, would spend the next half-century answering a question this unit only asks: whether the science, the state and the nation it had built could be trusted with themselves.