The Second World War

The Second World War was a continuation of the First, and marked theend of a long episode of a Thirty Years War of the twentieth century. In this extension of conflict, Hitler was simply a more extreme version of the radical and destructive populist army command of von Hindenburg and Ludendorff in Imperial Germany. German war aims from 1914 had aimed at extensive annexations and a Mitteleuropa dominated by Germany; in the Second World War the demands were much more extensive. The First World War, which had begun as a confrontation of the Great Powers, became in the end also a war of ideas, in which Wilsonian internationalism fought and destroyed autocracy and militarism; and the Second World War too ended with a clash of universal principles and human rights against the brutal view that might was right.