Paul Johnson

Who are the losers now?

The second world war was the most destructive conflict in human history, but the victors have fared worse than the vanquished, says Paul Johnson

issue 24 March 2012

Keith Lowe’s horrifying book is a survey of the physical and moral breakdown of Europe in the closing months of the second world war and its immediate aftermath. It is a complex story and he tells it, on the whole, very well. Though the first world war took the lives of more uniformed young men, in the useless slaughter of the Flanders trenches, many more people, chiefly civilians, died in 1939-45.

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