The Second World War was, like the First World War, long regarded as in a class of its own in terms of death, destruction, and cruelty. It was accompanied by genocidal measures on a vast scale against the political infrastructure and population of the Soviet Union, against the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war (of whom 3.3 million lost their lives in captivity), and against the Jews in Europe, of whom over 5 million were murdered. The commanders of Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos (mobile killing squads) encountered little difficulty with German military authorities; frequently they may have been surprised at the amount of cooperation they received.

Since the Second World War, the world has become more accustomed to mass killing on a comparable scale in countries in Africa and Southeast Asia and in the Persian Gulf region. From time to time one hears mentioned the mass murder of the Armenians in 1915, and the Stalinist mass murder of (some 14 million) Ukrainian farmers is beginning to be acknowledged even by the Soviet government. It becomes increasingly difficult to brush off these events as irrelevant to Western civilization; we can no longer try to isolate them by chronological encapsulation or by assigning responsibility to “national character” or to impersonal “forces.”