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From an award-winning historian, a panoramic account of Europe after the depravity of World War II



In 1945, Europe lay in ruins. Some fifty million people were dead, and millions more languished in physical and moral defeat. The devastation of World War II was unprecedented in character as well as in scale. Unlike the First World War, the second blurred the line between civilian and combatant, inflicting unspeakable horrors on people from all walks of life. A continent that had previously been considered the very measure of civilization had turned into its barbaric opposite.



Reconstruction, then, was a matter of turning Europe's imperialist "civilizing mission" inward. In this magisterial work, Oxford historian Paul Betts describes how this effort found expression in relief work, the prosecution of crimes against humanity, a resurgence of the Catholic Church, renewed global engagement, and numerous efforts to salvage and preserve damaged cultural...