Hell in Europe

I haven't posted much here for awhile, partly because I have been reading this tome. It my be the hardest book I have ever read. It's long, dense, and full of horror. Chapter 8, “Hell on Earth,” begins with this description of World War Two which is close to a summary of the book. I'm left marveling at the awfulness and amazed that Europe has recovered so well. 

For millions of Europeans the Second World War, more even than the First, was the closest they came to hell on earth. The death toll alone—over 40 million just in Europe, more than four times as high as in the first World War—gives a sense of the horror. The losses defy the imagination. The Soviet Union's alone were more than 25 million. Germany's dead numbered around 7 million, Poland's 6 million. The bare figures convey nothing of the extremities of their suffering, or the misery inflicted on countless families. Nor do they give any impression of the geographical weighting of the immense casualties....

Unlike the First World War civilian deaths in the Second greatly outnumbered those of the fighting troops. This was, much more than the earlier great conflict, a war that enveloped whole societies. The high death rate among civilians was not least a consequence of the genocidal nature of the Second World War. For, unlike the war of 1914-18, genocide lay at the heart of the later great conflagration. This war brought an assault on humanity unprecedented in history. It was a descent into the abyss never previously encountered, the devastation of all the ideals of civilization that had arisen from the Enlightenment. It was a war of apocalyptic proportions, Europe's Armageddon.

I was inspired to read this book after consuming a lot of both prose and fiction about WWII. The book provided an overall context, but it's a hard to comprehend so much suffering. What else can I say?