What do you think?
Rate this book
Inside Europe
John Gunther's brilliant study of personalities and politics in contemporary Europe has already, in the few years since its first appearance, achieved the status of a classic.
It is a portrait gallery of European dictators and statesmen of the 1930's and early '40's, their rivals and associates and underlings. But it is also much more than that. For the men personify policies, are shown tackling the vital problems of a war-scarred continent; and the book as a whole becomes a complete, fast-moving close-up of Europe of the period.
It is a big book, running now to some 265,000 words. It bulges with inside, backstage facts, dictators' secrets; for Gunther is a consummate reporter who knows the European capitals like the back of his hand, has an unerring nose for news even in the most unlikely places, and goes after the human as well as the political items.
The present edition contains a bibliography of the changes that have been made in the various editions.
It is a portrait gallery of European dictators and statesmen of the 1930's and early '40's, their rivals and associates and underlings. But it is also much more than that. For the men personify policies, are shown tackling the vital problems of a war-scarred continent; and the book as a whole becomes a complete, fast-moving close-up of Europe of the period.
It is a big book, running now to some 265,000 words. It bulges with inside, backstage facts, dictators' secrets; for Gunther is a consummate reporter who knows the European capitals like the back of his hand, has an unerring nose for news even in the most unlikely places, and goes after the human as well as the political items.
The present edition contains a bibliography of the changes that have been made in the various editions.
606 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1933
About the author
John Gunther
94 books616 followersJohn Gunther was one of the best known and most admired journalists of his day, and his series of "Inside" books, starting with Inside Europe in 1936, were immensely popular profiles of the major world powers. One critic noted that it was Gunther's special gift to "unite the best qualities of the newspaperman and the historian." It was a gift that readers responded to enthusiastically. The "Inside" books sold 3,500,000 copies over a period of thirty years.
While publicly a bon vivant and modest celebrity, Gunther in his private life suffered disappointment and tragedy. He and Frances Fineman, whom he married in 1927, had a daughter who died four months after her birth in 1929. The Gunthers divorced in 1944. In 1947, their beloved son Johnny died after a long, heartbreaking fight with brain cancer. Gunther wrote his classic memoir Death Be Not Proud, published in 1949, to commemorate the courage and spirit of this extraordinary boy. Gunther remarried in 1948, and he and his second wife, Jane Perry Vandercook, adopted a son.
While publicly a bon vivant and modest celebrity, Gunther in his private life suffered disappointment and tragedy. He and Frances Fineman, whom he married in 1927, had a daughter who died four months after her birth in 1929. The Gunthers divorced in 1944. In 1947, their beloved son Johnny died after a long, heartbreaking fight with brain cancer. Gunther wrote his classic memoir Death Be Not Proud, published in 1949, to commemorate the courage and spirit of this extraordinary boy. Gunther remarried in 1948, and he and his second wife, Jane Perry Vandercook, adopted a son.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 17, 2026
A fever had gripped Europe. The old world of funny-looking aristocrats, befuddled Balkan monarchs, and gray-suited foreign ministers was dead. The new world took the form of fascism and communism. The horror of war seemed to many like a mercy killing of a sick society. John Gunther, reporter extraordinaire, came to the Old World in 1935 to make sense of it all for an American audience. His account is not simply of historical interest. We can take it for an autopsy of how a civilization dies, and what values need preserving postmortem. Europe in the mid-Thirties provides a sobering example. Was another world war on the horizon? Was fascism truly the wave of the future, in Europe and possibly America? Who could stop Hitler? Baldwin in Britain? Stalin in Russia? Why had the League of Nations failed so miserably? Was it all America's fault? Gunther thought the answers to these questions lay in examining the way personality influenced history. Only Hitler could have unleashed the Furor Teutonicus of the new Reich. It took Stalin to make socialism work in the Soviet Union. Mussolini resonated with the Italians because "Latinity" is based on emotion, not facts. The ruling classes of England had to balance anti-Communism with their fear of German domination of the continent. This near total focus on personality gave Gunther both tremendous insight into the state of Europe, he notes, for instance, that Mussolini would never trust Hitler, and produced fatuous simplicity, such as "The Dollfuss dictatorship in Austria might not have happened except that a Socialist member of parliament went to the bathroom during a crucial vote". Come again? The reader must keep in mind the merits and faults of Gunther's approach to politics.
Gunther thought he was looking down the mouth of a volcano when he reported on Europe in 1935, but he hadn't seen anything yet. That year, Mussolini was Hitler's enemy, King George V held steady the reins of government in Britain, Hitler had reintroduced conscription in Germany, the unspeakable Pierre Laval was Prime Minister of France, republican Spain was governed by the leftist Popular Front, Austria was still an independent country, and the Soviet Union had completed the first Five-Year Plan to industrialize its economy. By 1936, that world had all been swept away. Mussolini, following his victory in Abyssinia, moved into the arms of Hitler, George V had died and his son Edward VIII abdicated, Spain had erupted into civil war following an army uprising led by Franco, Hitler had remilitarized the Rhineland, Laval had exited, and France was ruled by the Socialist-Communist Popular Front of Leon Blum; in Austria Chancellor Schussnig, abandoned by Mussolini, faced calls from his people for Anschluss, or union with Nazi Germany, and Stalin plotted the elimination of his enemies in the Great Terror. The one stable nation in this tsunami was Turkey, thanks to that "drunken, gambling, madman, colossus", Kemal Ataturk and his radical reforms. These revolutions make the 194o wartime Edition of Gunther's book indispensable, but his analysis of the leading personalities and problems of interwar Europe had remained steady. On these I shall concentrate in this review.
Gunther judges the mood of Europe in 1935 to contain equal parts cynicism and pipe-dreaming. The reason behind that was the twin blows of the Great War and the Great Depression, which curiously received little notice in these pages. Britain had lost a million men in the trenches, France and Germany two million apiece, and the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires had been blown away. Gunther notes en passim that British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden lost two brothers in the war, and in Hungary, Admiral Horthy was regent over a non-existent kingdom. In such a bleak landscape, politics itself had become a dirty word. The old ruling classes had lost touch with reality, while upstarts such as Hitler and Mussolini offered humiliated peoples the recovery of both good economic times and national greatness. The Balkan monarchs of Romania, Albania, Greece, and Bulgaria were museum pieces; fantastic creatures lost in the twentieth century. Democracy was on the defensive everywhere, save in Scandinavia, meriting only two paragraphs from Gunther, and the "boring" new nation of Czechoslovakia, safe under President Benes; an ironic judgment in light of that country's disappearance in 1939. Gunther is not cynical himself; it's just that aside from old Thomas Masaryk, whom he graces with one chapter, he sees no moral or political Goliaths in Europe to match Gandhi, Nehru or Franklin Roosevelt. No wonder INSIDE EUROPE is book ended by Hitler and Stalin. European Prime Ministers, Presidents and Kings were petty men standing on their hind legs looking for unworthy graves.
INSIDE EUROPE begins with a portrait of Hitler that has become familiar through modern biographies and films, but was quite novel at the time. In this, Gunther shines for us. Hitler was a non-person. He had no friends, no sense of kinship---his sister Paula and half-sister Angelika meant nothing to him---no hobbies, and no interest in women except to breed cannon fodder for his armies. He was an intellectual cypher, too. "The Versailles Peace Treaty is the most important document in his life. Has Hitler ever read it? It is highly unlikely". He cared nothing for books or art, "but is highly musical". Anti-Semitism was the lodestar of his political program. "Has Hitler ever met a Jew? Probably not". Gunther likewise paints Hitler as a weakling of the body. "At age 46, he is not in first-rate physical health. He has put on weight since becoming Chancellor, and his vocal chords are strained from years of soap-boxing". Nor was Hitler the hard man and tough-guy he pretended to be. "Because he is a teetotaler and vegetarian many speak of Hitler's 'asceticism', but asceticism is not the right word. He is no anchorite. There is very little of the austere in Hitler". This savage indictment has been confirmed by Third Reich memoirists like Speer and Hitler biographers, but fails to answer satisfactorily how a nebbish like that ever came to command a modern nation. After several chapters on Hitler's cronies- Goebbels, Goering, Streicher, Hess, Ley- who form an assortment of drug addicts, cripples, drunkards, and the mentally-challenged, Gunther bids adieu to this mental asylum that threatens all of Europe with destruction.
If Germany were a madman bent on burning down Europe, what of her historic antagonist, France? A leper colony is what Gunther finds in Paris. Prime Ministers come and go at such a pace that Gunther can't keep up; newspapers are scandal sheets bought and paid for by rival politicians and foreign governments---Mussolini was known to finance some---and the police are in the pocket of criminals, as evinced in the Stavisky affair, when cops killed the very drug dealer and pimp who paid them off. French politics ran the gamut from Communists and Socialists such as Blum, to the fascists of Action Francais and le Croix de Feu. One of Gunther's techniques for prying open the secrets of a nation he was surveying was to ask, "Who runs this place?". He asks us to forget heads of state and investigate who gives the orders. In France, that was the Bank of France, founded by Napoleon to stabilize the currency and in the Thirties in the hands of the "200 families" of landowners and finance captains. By setting financial policy they decided which governments rose and fell, making for an interesting comparison with the U.S. Federal Reserve today. Gunther is sure France is sound despite such shenanigans since the average Frenchman was "a hardheaded realist" and would fight if the Germans came again. Besides, the French Army and Air Force were the largest in the world, and France had secured defense pacts with Britain, Belgium, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He seems not to have considered that political infighting had sapped the will to fight among both soldiers and civilians, and that the Russians and the Czechs would only honor their commitments if France was ready to invade Germany in case of another war. Here lay the seeds of the disaster of 1940, when Germany conquered France in forty days.
Since fascism was a genuine prospect across Europe, Gunther had to examine the pater familias, Benito Mussolini, who had been in power in Italy since 1922. Like many of his generation, Gunther was dazzled and beguiled by Mussolini the man, if not the statesman. His Duce is, "built like a spring...normal in appetites and at fifty-two in strong health thanks to a strict diet...he loves speed, exercise, motorcars, energy and force". The greatest possible contrast to Hitler, Mussolini is "an intellectual, the very best read of European statesmen, who enjoys his interviews and loves to pick the brains of his interlocutors". He is no lone sociopath but "has a deep family sense; his daughter Edda adores him". He "was fond of women in his youth, but these days pays little attention to them". The things he hates most are "Hitler, cats, and old age". Who wouldn't want to live under fascism with such a Renaissance man in charge? Unlike Hitler, he demonstrates great physical courage, proclaiming, "If I lead, follow; if I fall, avenge me; if I betray, kill me". His faults are that he is prone to jealousy, is deeply superstitious, and trusts no one outside his family. The troubles of Italy stem from pervasive corruption, Gunther thinks, which the Duce can do little about, and the fact that his subordinates, Ciano, Balbo, Grandi, Stracchi, and Graziano, are all second-stringers living in the shadows of a Behemoth. At times, Gunther's gullibility is risible.
Gunther surveyed Italy just when the campaign to conquer Abyssinia had gotten underway. He is astute enough to divine that foreign affairs are Mussolini's weak point, for Italy lacks the industrial base to become a truly imperialist power and rival to Germany, France, and Britain. Almost all her oil, steel, nickel, chromium, and iron ore had to be imported. Italy's human resources left her extremely vulnerable in war. The vast majority of the work forces was engaged in agriculture, and over a third of Italian men and a majority of women were illiterate. None of this prevented Mussolini from playing empire-builder, and everywhere he ventured came failure. His troops took a year to conquer Abyssinia, but that victory led to, admittedly, mild sanctions by the League of Nations, Britain, and France, turning Mussolini into a pariah. His brutal suppression of the native revolt in Libya made it impossible for the Duce to be accepted by Arabs as the defending "Sword of Islam", a title he gave himself. He moved troops to the Brenner Pass on the Austrian border in 1934, momentarily blocking Hitler's plans for annexation, but by 1936 Mussolini acquiesced to the Axis Pact with Germany to divide Europe, or so he thought. Small wonder Europeans started calling him a "sawdust Caesar".
Why didn't the major European powers, France and Britain, confront the Axis dictators? France was rotten front within, Gunther showed, leaving only England, with its global empire, stretching from Guiana to Singapore. At home, the empire was solid. In his best chapter, "England: the Ruling Classes", Gunther elaborates on what holds the country together, citing the Bank of England, Church of England, the village pub, country homes, where the elites meet, the monarchy, Fleet Street, letters to THE TIMES, and the BBC, among other social and economic glues that integrate the population in a society that is more class divided and class conscious than any on the continent. Britain can afford to host so many political parties and factions, including the British Communist Party and Mosley's British Union of Fascists, both laughably small, because the ruling classes, what would later be called "the establishment" have no fear of revolt or displacement. This begs the question of why Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the ruling Conservatives did not stop Hitler and his Italian Pinocchio. In regards to Italy the establishment feared punishing Mussolini too harshly might topple him, unleashing a Communist revolution. Hitler was not a threat while he coveted only Central and Eastern Europe. The establishment was not flaccid like that of France, but it was scared, not so much of Hitler as of another slaughter on the Somme. Baldwin's rearmament program, forced upon him by leading conservatives like Churchill, who merits hardly a word from Gunther, was spineless, receiving no rebuke from Hitler. The empire, through devolution of power to the Dominions and the India Bill of 1932, seemed on its way toward a peaceful transition into a Commonwealth, with the "sober, mature" George V for a figurehead and his young son Edward, Prince of Wales,"rather pink in politics", waiting in the wings. What could possibly go wrong?
Monarchy is always good for a laugh, provided the monarch knew he's useless. Mediterranean Europe was still run by kings in 1935, with one deposed in Spain. This was a Europe still trapped in the Middle Ages. The Second Spanish Republic (1931-1936), analyzed by Gunther through its leading personalities, picked up where the exiled King Alfonso XIII left off, inheriting his problems without coming up with any solutions. Spain suffered from mass starvation, a peasantry deprived of land, labor unrest from the mining areas of the Basque country to the powerful Anarchist trade union in Barcelona, a Catholic Church with the mentality of the Inquisition, and an unreliable army used to break strikes. Gunther is unusually perceptive in observing that Spain was already in a state of undeclared civil war, with political parties ranging from Trotskyist to monarchist, and by 1936 it would become official. To the east, Balkan Europe featured states waiting to be born. Versailles had created patchwork states at war with each other and their national minorities. Rejecting a Hapsburg restoration under the royal pretender, Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, to whom Gunther devotes a semi-affectionate chapter, Hungary had a regent without king, and thirsted for Transylvania. Regent Horthy and his Prime Minister Gomboes, after unleashing pogroms on Hungary's Jews, fancied creating their own authoritarian state. Romania was ruled by the ridiculous King Carol II and the palace clique of his mistress, Magda Lupescu, Gunther notes that what many Romanians objected to was not that she was the royal courtesan, but that she was Jewish, and sought to hang on to the province of Bessarabia, seized from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, and the threat of the fascist Iron Guard. Bulgaria, ruled by Boris III, later to die mysteriously in 1944 while visiting Hitler, strove to emerge from the shadow of the Ottoman Empire and the stigma of having backed Germany in the world war. Gunther: "This poor country always picks the losing side in wars". In Albania the bandit chief King Zog, sponsored by Mussolini and Ciano, looked for ways to assert his independence. Greece, as had been the custom since the nineteenth-century, sizzled from the tension between the Germanic monarchy and the republican faction. Yugoslavia was on the brink of civil war, per custom, between Serbs and Croats, with the misfortune of being ruled by the boy king Peter and his pro-German regent, Prince Paul. Out of this Balkan cauldron would emerge the German puppet states of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Southeast Europe.
Two giants round out Gunther's Baedeker of European politics, Ataturk and Stalin. Kemal Ataturk's years of greatness lay behind him, the battlefield victories at Gallipoli, war with Greece following the Ottoman surrender, the coup that toppled the Sultan and Caliph, the spectacular reforms of his Turkish republic, subduing mosque to state, adopting the Roman alphabet, enfranchising women, literacy drive, forming a parliament, and these days he hung out with cronies at his private villa, leaving the task of governing to lesser mortals. Yet, no key political decision could be made without his consent. Hatred of Britain for siding with Greece lay at the center of his foreign policy, and keeping the Bosporous out of foreign hands. In an era when dictators were expansionist, Ataturk contracted Turkey's borders and made peace with Russia, Italy, and Germany. He wished for no territory, and that is how he brought Turkey peace.
Stalin, Gunther thinks, is the most powerful man in the world, for he heads not only the largest country on earth but the Communist International, feared from Bavaria to Brazil. Despite, or because of, his cult of personality, few knew the private Stalin and his sources of power. He was stolid, patient, a virtue Trotsky lacked, and methodical. "He made the Revolution and socialism work". He needed peace to complete this mission. Stalin was no thug elevated to power but the ultimate bureaucrat, micro-managing the USSR down to advising on which textbooks schools should adopt and writing editorials published in PRAVDA; a million miles away from lazy bones Hitler. His entourage were all dedicated and self-less Communists, and Gunther notes drily that having been in prison was an honor for them. Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin's chief assistant, was tasked with the heaviest duties, particularly the sanguinary collectivization of agriculture in in the Ukraine. Unlike his friend and fellow correspondent Walter Duranty, Gunther highlights this inferno. Gunther does not forget the crimes of Stalin, but his portrait is balanced and sober. Stalin was a lion who devoured all.
W.H. Auden called the Thirties "the Age of Anxiety". Gunther captures that in his painting of a world beset by economic crisis, political chaos, and possibly the death of a civilization. This age contained political giants, few and far between, and pygmies, who came a dime a dozen in all European capitals save Moscow and Ankara. Over all these creatures rose the figure of Hitler. If war came, Germany would start it because Hitler willed it so. Was there no one left who stood for democracy and plain human dignity? Gunther was a humanist who stared into the moral vacuum of Europe and reported in gripping, if at times imprecise, detail, what he saw. That is the chief virtue that recommends this book.
Gunther thought he was looking down the mouth of a volcano when he reported on Europe in 1935, but he hadn't seen anything yet. That year, Mussolini was Hitler's enemy, King George V held steady the reins of government in Britain, Hitler had reintroduced conscription in Germany, the unspeakable Pierre Laval was Prime Minister of France, republican Spain was governed by the leftist Popular Front, Austria was still an independent country, and the Soviet Union had completed the first Five-Year Plan to industrialize its economy. By 1936, that world had all been swept away. Mussolini, following his victory in Abyssinia, moved into the arms of Hitler, George V had died and his son Edward VIII abdicated, Spain had erupted into civil war following an army uprising led by Franco, Hitler had remilitarized the Rhineland, Laval had exited, and France was ruled by the Socialist-Communist Popular Front of Leon Blum; in Austria Chancellor Schussnig, abandoned by Mussolini, faced calls from his people for Anschluss, or union with Nazi Germany, and Stalin plotted the elimination of his enemies in the Great Terror. The one stable nation in this tsunami was Turkey, thanks to that "drunken, gambling, madman, colossus", Kemal Ataturk and his radical reforms. These revolutions make the 194o wartime Edition of Gunther's book indispensable, but his analysis of the leading personalities and problems of interwar Europe had remained steady. On these I shall concentrate in this review.
Gunther judges the mood of Europe in 1935 to contain equal parts cynicism and pipe-dreaming. The reason behind that was the twin blows of the Great War and the Great Depression, which curiously received little notice in these pages. Britain had lost a million men in the trenches, France and Germany two million apiece, and the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires had been blown away. Gunther notes en passim that British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden lost two brothers in the war, and in Hungary, Admiral Horthy was regent over a non-existent kingdom. In such a bleak landscape, politics itself had become a dirty word. The old ruling classes had lost touch with reality, while upstarts such as Hitler and Mussolini offered humiliated peoples the recovery of both good economic times and national greatness. The Balkan monarchs of Romania, Albania, Greece, and Bulgaria were museum pieces; fantastic creatures lost in the twentieth century. Democracy was on the defensive everywhere, save in Scandinavia, meriting only two paragraphs from Gunther, and the "boring" new nation of Czechoslovakia, safe under President Benes; an ironic judgment in light of that country's disappearance in 1939. Gunther is not cynical himself; it's just that aside from old Thomas Masaryk, whom he graces with one chapter, he sees no moral or political Goliaths in Europe to match Gandhi, Nehru or Franklin Roosevelt. No wonder INSIDE EUROPE is book ended by Hitler and Stalin. European Prime Ministers, Presidents and Kings were petty men standing on their hind legs looking for unworthy graves.
INSIDE EUROPE begins with a portrait of Hitler that has become familiar through modern biographies and films, but was quite novel at the time. In this, Gunther shines for us. Hitler was a non-person. He had no friends, no sense of kinship---his sister Paula and half-sister Angelika meant nothing to him---no hobbies, and no interest in women except to breed cannon fodder for his armies. He was an intellectual cypher, too. "The Versailles Peace Treaty is the most important document in his life. Has Hitler ever read it? It is highly unlikely". He cared nothing for books or art, "but is highly musical". Anti-Semitism was the lodestar of his political program. "Has Hitler ever met a Jew? Probably not". Gunther likewise paints Hitler as a weakling of the body. "At age 46, he is not in first-rate physical health. He has put on weight since becoming Chancellor, and his vocal chords are strained from years of soap-boxing". Nor was Hitler the hard man and tough-guy he pretended to be. "Because he is a teetotaler and vegetarian many speak of Hitler's 'asceticism', but asceticism is not the right word. He is no anchorite. There is very little of the austere in Hitler". This savage indictment has been confirmed by Third Reich memoirists like Speer and Hitler biographers, but fails to answer satisfactorily how a nebbish like that ever came to command a modern nation. After several chapters on Hitler's cronies- Goebbels, Goering, Streicher, Hess, Ley- who form an assortment of drug addicts, cripples, drunkards, and the mentally-challenged, Gunther bids adieu to this mental asylum that threatens all of Europe with destruction.
If Germany were a madman bent on burning down Europe, what of her historic antagonist, France? A leper colony is what Gunther finds in Paris. Prime Ministers come and go at such a pace that Gunther can't keep up; newspapers are scandal sheets bought and paid for by rival politicians and foreign governments---Mussolini was known to finance some---and the police are in the pocket of criminals, as evinced in the Stavisky affair, when cops killed the very drug dealer and pimp who paid them off. French politics ran the gamut from Communists and Socialists such as Blum, to the fascists of Action Francais and le Croix de Feu. One of Gunther's techniques for prying open the secrets of a nation he was surveying was to ask, "Who runs this place?". He asks us to forget heads of state and investigate who gives the orders. In France, that was the Bank of France, founded by Napoleon to stabilize the currency and in the Thirties in the hands of the "200 families" of landowners and finance captains. By setting financial policy they decided which governments rose and fell, making for an interesting comparison with the U.S. Federal Reserve today. Gunther is sure France is sound despite such shenanigans since the average Frenchman was "a hardheaded realist" and would fight if the Germans came again. Besides, the French Army and Air Force were the largest in the world, and France had secured defense pacts with Britain, Belgium, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He seems not to have considered that political infighting had sapped the will to fight among both soldiers and civilians, and that the Russians and the Czechs would only honor their commitments if France was ready to invade Germany in case of another war. Here lay the seeds of the disaster of 1940, when Germany conquered France in forty days.
Since fascism was a genuine prospect across Europe, Gunther had to examine the pater familias, Benito Mussolini, who had been in power in Italy since 1922. Like many of his generation, Gunther was dazzled and beguiled by Mussolini the man, if not the statesman. His Duce is, "built like a spring...normal in appetites and at fifty-two in strong health thanks to a strict diet...he loves speed, exercise, motorcars, energy and force". The greatest possible contrast to Hitler, Mussolini is "an intellectual, the very best read of European statesmen, who enjoys his interviews and loves to pick the brains of his interlocutors". He is no lone sociopath but "has a deep family sense; his daughter Edda adores him". He "was fond of women in his youth, but these days pays little attention to them". The things he hates most are "Hitler, cats, and old age". Who wouldn't want to live under fascism with such a Renaissance man in charge? Unlike Hitler, he demonstrates great physical courage, proclaiming, "If I lead, follow; if I fall, avenge me; if I betray, kill me". His faults are that he is prone to jealousy, is deeply superstitious, and trusts no one outside his family. The troubles of Italy stem from pervasive corruption, Gunther thinks, which the Duce can do little about, and the fact that his subordinates, Ciano, Balbo, Grandi, Stracchi, and Graziano, are all second-stringers living in the shadows of a Behemoth. At times, Gunther's gullibility is risible.
Gunther surveyed Italy just when the campaign to conquer Abyssinia had gotten underway. He is astute enough to divine that foreign affairs are Mussolini's weak point, for Italy lacks the industrial base to become a truly imperialist power and rival to Germany, France, and Britain. Almost all her oil, steel, nickel, chromium, and iron ore had to be imported. Italy's human resources left her extremely vulnerable in war. The vast majority of the work forces was engaged in agriculture, and over a third of Italian men and a majority of women were illiterate. None of this prevented Mussolini from playing empire-builder, and everywhere he ventured came failure. His troops took a year to conquer Abyssinia, but that victory led to, admittedly, mild sanctions by the League of Nations, Britain, and France, turning Mussolini into a pariah. His brutal suppression of the native revolt in Libya made it impossible for the Duce to be accepted by Arabs as the defending "Sword of Islam", a title he gave himself. He moved troops to the Brenner Pass on the Austrian border in 1934, momentarily blocking Hitler's plans for annexation, but by 1936 Mussolini acquiesced to the Axis Pact with Germany to divide Europe, or so he thought. Small wonder Europeans started calling him a "sawdust Caesar".
Why didn't the major European powers, France and Britain, confront the Axis dictators? France was rotten front within, Gunther showed, leaving only England, with its global empire, stretching from Guiana to Singapore. At home, the empire was solid. In his best chapter, "England: the Ruling Classes", Gunther elaborates on what holds the country together, citing the Bank of England, Church of England, the village pub, country homes, where the elites meet, the monarchy, Fleet Street, letters to THE TIMES, and the BBC, among other social and economic glues that integrate the population in a society that is more class divided and class conscious than any on the continent. Britain can afford to host so many political parties and factions, including the British Communist Party and Mosley's British Union of Fascists, both laughably small, because the ruling classes, what would later be called "the establishment" have no fear of revolt or displacement. This begs the question of why Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the ruling Conservatives did not stop Hitler and his Italian Pinocchio. In regards to Italy the establishment feared punishing Mussolini too harshly might topple him, unleashing a Communist revolution. Hitler was not a threat while he coveted only Central and Eastern Europe. The establishment was not flaccid like that of France, but it was scared, not so much of Hitler as of another slaughter on the Somme. Baldwin's rearmament program, forced upon him by leading conservatives like Churchill, who merits hardly a word from Gunther, was spineless, receiving no rebuke from Hitler. The empire, through devolution of power to the Dominions and the India Bill of 1932, seemed on its way toward a peaceful transition into a Commonwealth, with the "sober, mature" George V for a figurehead and his young son Edward, Prince of Wales,"rather pink in politics", waiting in the wings. What could possibly go wrong?
Monarchy is always good for a laugh, provided the monarch knew he's useless. Mediterranean Europe was still run by kings in 1935, with one deposed in Spain. This was a Europe still trapped in the Middle Ages. The Second Spanish Republic (1931-1936), analyzed by Gunther through its leading personalities, picked up where the exiled King Alfonso XIII left off, inheriting his problems without coming up with any solutions. Spain suffered from mass starvation, a peasantry deprived of land, labor unrest from the mining areas of the Basque country to the powerful Anarchist trade union in Barcelona, a Catholic Church with the mentality of the Inquisition, and an unreliable army used to break strikes. Gunther is unusually perceptive in observing that Spain was already in a state of undeclared civil war, with political parties ranging from Trotskyist to monarchist, and by 1936 it would become official. To the east, Balkan Europe featured states waiting to be born. Versailles had created patchwork states at war with each other and their national minorities. Rejecting a Hapsburg restoration under the royal pretender, Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, to whom Gunther devotes a semi-affectionate chapter, Hungary had a regent without king, and thirsted for Transylvania. Regent Horthy and his Prime Minister Gomboes, after unleashing pogroms on Hungary's Jews, fancied creating their own authoritarian state. Romania was ruled by the ridiculous King Carol II and the palace clique of his mistress, Magda Lupescu, Gunther notes that what many Romanians objected to was not that she was the royal courtesan, but that she was Jewish, and sought to hang on to the province of Bessarabia, seized from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, and the threat of the fascist Iron Guard. Bulgaria, ruled by Boris III, later to die mysteriously in 1944 while visiting Hitler, strove to emerge from the shadow of the Ottoman Empire and the stigma of having backed Germany in the world war. Gunther: "This poor country always picks the losing side in wars". In Albania the bandit chief King Zog, sponsored by Mussolini and Ciano, looked for ways to assert his independence. Greece, as had been the custom since the nineteenth-century, sizzled from the tension between the Germanic monarchy and the republican faction. Yugoslavia was on the brink of civil war, per custom, between Serbs and Croats, with the misfortune of being ruled by the boy king Peter and his pro-German regent, Prince Paul. Out of this Balkan cauldron would emerge the German puppet states of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Southeast Europe.
Two giants round out Gunther's Baedeker of European politics, Ataturk and Stalin. Kemal Ataturk's years of greatness lay behind him, the battlefield victories at Gallipoli, war with Greece following the Ottoman surrender, the coup that toppled the Sultan and Caliph, the spectacular reforms of his Turkish republic, subduing mosque to state, adopting the Roman alphabet, enfranchising women, literacy drive, forming a parliament, and these days he hung out with cronies at his private villa, leaving the task of governing to lesser mortals. Yet, no key political decision could be made without his consent. Hatred of Britain for siding with Greece lay at the center of his foreign policy, and keeping the Bosporous out of foreign hands. In an era when dictators were expansionist, Ataturk contracted Turkey's borders and made peace with Russia, Italy, and Germany. He wished for no territory, and that is how he brought Turkey peace.
Stalin, Gunther thinks, is the most powerful man in the world, for he heads not only the largest country on earth but the Communist International, feared from Bavaria to Brazil. Despite, or because of, his cult of personality, few knew the private Stalin and his sources of power. He was stolid, patient, a virtue Trotsky lacked, and methodical. "He made the Revolution and socialism work". He needed peace to complete this mission. Stalin was no thug elevated to power but the ultimate bureaucrat, micro-managing the USSR down to advising on which textbooks schools should adopt and writing editorials published in PRAVDA; a million miles away from lazy bones Hitler. His entourage were all dedicated and self-less Communists, and Gunther notes drily that having been in prison was an honor for them. Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin's chief assistant, was tasked with the heaviest duties, particularly the sanguinary collectivization of agriculture in in the Ukraine. Unlike his friend and fellow correspondent Walter Duranty, Gunther highlights this inferno. Gunther does not forget the crimes of Stalin, but his portrait is balanced and sober. Stalin was a lion who devoured all.
W.H. Auden called the Thirties "the Age of Anxiety". Gunther captures that in his painting of a world beset by economic crisis, political chaos, and possibly the death of a civilization. This age contained political giants, few and far between, and pygmies, who came a dime a dozen in all European capitals save Moscow and Ankara. Over all these creatures rose the figure of Hitler. If war came, Germany would start it because Hitler willed it so. Was there no one left who stood for democracy and plain human dignity? Gunther was a humanist who stared into the moral vacuum of Europe and reported in gripping, if at times imprecise, detail, what he saw. That is the chief virtue that recommends this book.
December 30, 2017
One of the best, most succinct books I've ever read on any topic. Written leading up to (and in a brief forward immediately after) the outbreak of WWII, John Gunther manages to go throughout Europe and give brief sketches of the persons and political issues at play. Some, like Hitler and Nazi Germany, get chapters upon chapters devoted to them, while others, like Salazar in Portugal, get a couple paragraphs. But it's all done extremely well, meaning that Gunther's choice of emphasis is good for both narrative and educational purposes. It is an interesting look at the factors and personalities as play leading up to war and how contemporary individuals perceived them, and gives as "balanced" a viewpoint as is possible. Still, as it was written at the time, there are a lot of contextual gaps that hindsight provides us, such as the full extent of what Nazi antisemitism would lead to, the bloody insanity of Stalin's Great Purge and the Gulag system, among other subjects which I am not informed enough to critique. Still, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better overview of WWII's origins giving such a balanced look into both major and minor players and events.
December 2, 2024
This was the first of John Gunther's celebrated "Inside" books. The edition that I read, while being a first, is not the very first edition that he wrote. This one was published in 1938, but due to the rapidly changing events going on in Europe at this time, it was updated from the original version that Gunther wrote just a couple of years before. While of course much of this is dated, I still find it valuable because it gives an impression of people and events seen and interpreted as they were at that time, just before WWII started. The negative here is that there is much that was going on that was not known to Gunther at the time. The positive though is that his reporting and judgments are not biased by anything that came later on. Plus, Gunther is a very engaging writer with a sense of humor.
PROLOGUE
This was extensive, and owing to Adolf Hitler's increasing lust for territory and power. Gunther wrote this addition in October 1938, in the midst of the crisis over Czechoslovakia, around the time that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler in Germany, erroneously declaring "peace in our time". Even at this point in time, it was clear to Gunther that Hitler was not going to be appeased, by Chamberlain or anyone else, and that his demands for the lands and peoples of neighboring countries would continue to grow. Gunther, while not outright saying that war was inevitable, thought that it was highly likely. He felt that Hitler would at some point take it too far, resulting in hostilities between France and Great Britain, which is exactly what happened not quite a year later when Hitler invaded Poland.
HITLER
Gunther pens a chapter on Hitler and his legal rise to power in Germany. Gunther saw then what is evident today - the vast stupidity of many German leaders of that time who allowed Hitler to seize power, either by looking the other way or not being sufficiently concerned about it, thinking that Hitler was such a fanatic to be more of a harmless joke than anything else. How wrong they were. Gunther also writes about Hitler's top goons such as Goebbels and Himmler, and about Nazism in general and how corrosive it was being to German society. Seven years before Hitler shot himself, on page 202 Gunther writes: "Hitler, the story goes, keeps a small revolver in his desk drawer. Suicide would be understandable with Hitler if his regime collapsed."
FRANCE
What a mess these few chapters were - not from Gunther's writing, but from the overall portrait that emerged about the French political system. The French were stuck in a series of falling governments and with a rotating cast of ineffectual Prime Ministers, some serving multiple short stints in office. Regardless of who was in office at a given time, whether Pierre Laval or Edouard Daladier or whoever, they were largely unable to accomplish much of anything. The main issues were corruption, especially in the munitions industry with companies profiting off of the rearmament measures that were being taken, and economic issues and management of the Banque of France. Gunther was correct when he wrote that the French were (rightly) worried about the increasing strength of Germany. Yet, France just could not get its act together, and they largely piddled around while Hitler continued to build up his defenses. I finished these chapters thinking "Wow you fools screwed around with dumb stuff like petty corruption trials, when you had a lunatic next door getting stronger everyday, and you knew he was crazy and you knew he was going to be a problem, yet still you could not get it together."
SPAIN
This chapter focuses on the Civil War that was still ongoing at that time. Francisco Franco and the rightists were attempting (and later did succeed) to overthrow the state government. Franco was not fascists to begin with, but he needed help from both Germany and Italy with materiel and arms, so he latched onto the fascist mantra in a successful effort to gain their support. Without Hitler and Benito Mussolini backing him, it seems quite doubtful that Franco would have succeeded in his coup efforts. Also a factor here: both France and Great Britain dithered, not sure whether to intervene on the side of the real government and thereby risk angering Hitler and Mussolini, or just allowing events to play out as they did.
One side note here: Portugal does not get its own chapter, and only gets about a single page of attention from Gunther. I know that it is a relatively small country, but I thought it was deserving of far more than one page. I suspect that this is one country that, for whatever reason, Gunther was either just not that interested in or not that familiar with.
MUSSOLINI
Gunther spends a lot of time on the Italian dictator. From what he could gather, Mussolini seemed to have a somewhat difficult childhood, and as a young man also had some legal trouble in Switzerland. He was a fascist before Hitler came to power, and Mussolini just had to be the one in charge. The King allowed him to take power in 1922 and nobody really stood up to him. Gunther correctly notes that he had a rivalry with Hitler, and was increasingly becoming frustrated at having to play second banana to Hitler in the fascist world as the latter's power grew.
Gunther also includes a chapter on the Abyssinian War and explains the reasoning behind Mussolini's decision to go to war. Italy, a densely-populated country, was running out of land for its growing population. It also was not self-supporting in that it mostly relied on imports for foodstuffs. But the biggest reason was Mussolini's ego; he wanted a colony and Abyssinia provided that since he could take it over, and despite some sanctions from the British, make it stick.
GREAT BRITAIN
Gunther spends a few chapters on this island nation, starting by talking about the dominance of the ruling classes which resulted in a highly caste society. Wealth was concentrated to power, and it was a good-old-boys club, with people going to certain schools like Eton have out-sized influence on British society. Some of the people in charge were also mildly pro-German; some were like this out of hatred for France, others because British foreign policy largely operated around a "balance of power" strategy where Britain attempted to keep all of the countries on the continent at roughly equal strength so as to preserve British dominance over all of them, or at least to the point where none of them were strong enough on their own to challenge Britain.
There is a chapter on the abdication of King Edward VIII, with Gunther depicting then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin as being one of the biggest influencers in that direction. Was it Baldwin's fault? Gunther made it seem so, to an extent. Baldwin was uppity and generally kept his feelings to himself, until he attacked out of the blue. Gunther thinks that he influenced other powerful men in Britain to force the King to abdicate or give up his intention to marry Wallis Simpson. Honestly the whole thing now seems so dumb, yet it did happen. Yet Gunther seemed to sort of like Baldwin, while disliking to an extent his successor Chamberlain. I think the latter had mostly to do with Chamberlain's well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempts to appease Hitler. As for Winston Churchill, Gunther is yet again prophetic when he writes on page 289: "...but most people agree that in a great upheaval he would emerge as Britain's national leader."
SIMON DE VALERA
Next up is an interesting chapter on Irish leader Simon De Valera. Gunther mostly confines himself to De Valera's biography, and does not focus as much on The Troubles. De Valera is one of the leaders that Gunther was able to interview personally, and the anecdotes and background that he provides about this personal interview were interesting.
AUSTRIA
Gunther spends a few chapters writing about Austria and the upheaval that was then going on there. He details the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, who was the Chancellor. Gunther lived in Vienna at the time and had first-hand experiences of that day that really brought the events to life. While Gunther did not witness the assassination, he was able to report on it in detail (some of them a bit gory). There was a battle going on Austria at that time between the Socialists and the rest of the the country - until the Nazis moved in and disrupted things even further.
HUNGARY
What I came away with from this chapter were a few things: that a bunch of Royal houses were constantly fighting for control of the country; that it was a big exporter of grain but the Treaty of Versailles really hobbled Hungary because it lost 68.5% of its land. Think about that! Two-thirds of the country was arbitrarily taken away from it. No wonder it was struggling.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
This chapter was primarily taken up with Gunther providing biographies of both Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes. Masaryk was very old and had essentially founded the country a few decades earlier. By the time Gunther published this edition, he had passed away. Gunther had managed to interview him before he died, and like with De Valera, provided interesting details about the actual interview. Benes was the Foreign Minister who worked diligently on mutual assistance pacts with both France and the USSR. Like most of the rest of Europe at this time, the country was greatly worried about Hitler and his intentions, and rightly so as Hitler shortly thereafter gobbled up Czechoslovakia.
RUMANIA
King Carol comes across as a jerk here, and rules as a dictator along with his mistress, Madame Lupescu. Rumania was enemies with Hungary and had an internal problem with the Iron Guard, which was a sort of revolution attempted by young men who were perilously close to behaving as Fascists.
YUGOSLAVIA
King Alexander had recently been assassinated, leaving the throne to his 14 year-old son Peter. Gunther talks about the ancient conflicts between the Serbs (who were Balkan, Greek Orthodox, and anti-European in outlook) and the Croats (30% of the population, Roman Catholic, and European in outlook).
BALKAN KINGS
This is a brief chapter that covers King Zog in Albania, Boris III or Bulgaria, and General Metaxas in Greece. Zog was rich and liked to play his country off between Italy and Yugoslavia. Bulgaria also lost a lost of land as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Metaxas had recently taken dictatorial control in Greece.
TURKEY
Kamal Ataturk was the dictator there at the time, and would make arbitrary changes such as introducing phonetic spelling just because he wanted to. Gunther said that Ataturk lived alone and was somewhat of a recluse.
POLAND
Josef Pilsudski dominated this chapter, along with Gunther stating that Poland's lack of stable borders really weakened its position as a viable country. Poland was in a no-win geographical position of being wedged in between two heavyweights who wanted it (Germany and the USSR). And of course, given what happened to it less than a year after Gunther wrote this, he was once again prescient in his analysis.
NEUTRALS
A nice chapter followed on several countries: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and Switzerland. The first three got along well together and were quite similar in viewpoint. None of them wanted to get involved with the boiling cauldron in the rest of Europe. They were, however, re-arming due to the menace of Hitler. Belgium was relieved of its duty to come to the aid of France were it to be attacked, but both France and Great Britain were pledged to its defense should it be attacked.
LEAGUE OF NATIONS
Gunther follows with an interesting chapter of the League of Nations, the unhappy predecessor to today's United Nations. While offering up justifiable criticisms of the League, Gunther notes on page 447: "The trouble was that the powers overstepped themselves, and created - as we have seen - new minorities by grabbing what didn't belong to them. But it should be pointed out that some frontier lines, like that between Hungary and Rumania, can never be drawn without leaving some miserable folk on the wrong side of the border. Another point should be kept in mind. If Germany had won the War, the Treaty of Versailles might not have been nearly so nice a one."
SOVIET UNION/STALIN
Gunther finishes with several chapters on the USSR in general and Stalin in particular. I thought these were the weakest chapters of the book, as Gunther seemed to think that Stalin was much less ruthless than history has shown him to be. To be sure, Gunther did point out the famines and the trials, but he also had some praise for Stalin as well. I will be interested to read his much later book that was just about Russia, and written after WWII, to see what his opinion was then.
PROLOGUE
This was extensive, and owing to Adolf Hitler's increasing lust for territory and power. Gunther wrote this addition in October 1938, in the midst of the crisis over Czechoslovakia, around the time that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler in Germany, erroneously declaring "peace in our time". Even at this point in time, it was clear to Gunther that Hitler was not going to be appeased, by Chamberlain or anyone else, and that his demands for the lands and peoples of neighboring countries would continue to grow. Gunther, while not outright saying that war was inevitable, thought that it was highly likely. He felt that Hitler would at some point take it too far, resulting in hostilities between France and Great Britain, which is exactly what happened not quite a year later when Hitler invaded Poland.
HITLER
Gunther pens a chapter on Hitler and his legal rise to power in Germany. Gunther saw then what is evident today - the vast stupidity of many German leaders of that time who allowed Hitler to seize power, either by looking the other way or not being sufficiently concerned about it, thinking that Hitler was such a fanatic to be more of a harmless joke than anything else. How wrong they were. Gunther also writes about Hitler's top goons such as Goebbels and Himmler, and about Nazism in general and how corrosive it was being to German society. Seven years before Hitler shot himself, on page 202 Gunther writes: "Hitler, the story goes, keeps a small revolver in his desk drawer. Suicide would be understandable with Hitler if his regime collapsed."
FRANCE
What a mess these few chapters were - not from Gunther's writing, but from the overall portrait that emerged about the French political system. The French were stuck in a series of falling governments and with a rotating cast of ineffectual Prime Ministers, some serving multiple short stints in office. Regardless of who was in office at a given time, whether Pierre Laval or Edouard Daladier or whoever, they were largely unable to accomplish much of anything. The main issues were corruption, especially in the munitions industry with companies profiting off of the rearmament measures that were being taken, and economic issues and management of the Banque of France. Gunther was correct when he wrote that the French were (rightly) worried about the increasing strength of Germany. Yet, France just could not get its act together, and they largely piddled around while Hitler continued to build up his defenses. I finished these chapters thinking "Wow you fools screwed around with dumb stuff like petty corruption trials, when you had a lunatic next door getting stronger everyday, and you knew he was crazy and you knew he was going to be a problem, yet still you could not get it together."
SPAIN
This chapter focuses on the Civil War that was still ongoing at that time. Francisco Franco and the rightists were attempting (and later did succeed) to overthrow the state government. Franco was not fascists to begin with, but he needed help from both Germany and Italy with materiel and arms, so he latched onto the fascist mantra in a successful effort to gain their support. Without Hitler and Benito Mussolini backing him, it seems quite doubtful that Franco would have succeeded in his coup efforts. Also a factor here: both France and Great Britain dithered, not sure whether to intervene on the side of the real government and thereby risk angering Hitler and Mussolini, or just allowing events to play out as they did.
One side note here: Portugal does not get its own chapter, and only gets about a single page of attention from Gunther. I know that it is a relatively small country, but I thought it was deserving of far more than one page. I suspect that this is one country that, for whatever reason, Gunther was either just not that interested in or not that familiar with.
MUSSOLINI
Gunther spends a lot of time on the Italian dictator. From what he could gather, Mussolini seemed to have a somewhat difficult childhood, and as a young man also had some legal trouble in Switzerland. He was a fascist before Hitler came to power, and Mussolini just had to be the one in charge. The King allowed him to take power in 1922 and nobody really stood up to him. Gunther correctly notes that he had a rivalry with Hitler, and was increasingly becoming frustrated at having to play second banana to Hitler in the fascist world as the latter's power grew.
Gunther also includes a chapter on the Abyssinian War and explains the reasoning behind Mussolini's decision to go to war. Italy, a densely-populated country, was running out of land for its growing population. It also was not self-supporting in that it mostly relied on imports for foodstuffs. But the biggest reason was Mussolini's ego; he wanted a colony and Abyssinia provided that since he could take it over, and despite some sanctions from the British, make it stick.
GREAT BRITAIN
Gunther spends a few chapters on this island nation, starting by talking about the dominance of the ruling classes which resulted in a highly caste society. Wealth was concentrated to power, and it was a good-old-boys club, with people going to certain schools like Eton have out-sized influence on British society. Some of the people in charge were also mildly pro-German; some were like this out of hatred for France, others because British foreign policy largely operated around a "balance of power" strategy where Britain attempted to keep all of the countries on the continent at roughly equal strength so as to preserve British dominance over all of them, or at least to the point where none of them were strong enough on their own to challenge Britain.
There is a chapter on the abdication of King Edward VIII, with Gunther depicting then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin as being one of the biggest influencers in that direction. Was it Baldwin's fault? Gunther made it seem so, to an extent. Baldwin was uppity and generally kept his feelings to himself, until he attacked out of the blue. Gunther thinks that he influenced other powerful men in Britain to force the King to abdicate or give up his intention to marry Wallis Simpson. Honestly the whole thing now seems so dumb, yet it did happen. Yet Gunther seemed to sort of like Baldwin, while disliking to an extent his successor Chamberlain. I think the latter had mostly to do with Chamberlain's well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempts to appease Hitler. As for Winston Churchill, Gunther is yet again prophetic when he writes on page 289: "...but most people agree that in a great upheaval he would emerge as Britain's national leader."
SIMON DE VALERA
Next up is an interesting chapter on Irish leader Simon De Valera. Gunther mostly confines himself to De Valera's biography, and does not focus as much on The Troubles. De Valera is one of the leaders that Gunther was able to interview personally, and the anecdotes and background that he provides about this personal interview were interesting.
AUSTRIA
Gunther spends a few chapters writing about Austria and the upheaval that was then going on there. He details the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, who was the Chancellor. Gunther lived in Vienna at the time and had first-hand experiences of that day that really brought the events to life. While Gunther did not witness the assassination, he was able to report on it in detail (some of them a bit gory). There was a battle going on Austria at that time between the Socialists and the rest of the the country - until the Nazis moved in and disrupted things even further.
HUNGARY
What I came away with from this chapter were a few things: that a bunch of Royal houses were constantly fighting for control of the country; that it was a big exporter of grain but the Treaty of Versailles really hobbled Hungary because it lost 68.5% of its land. Think about that! Two-thirds of the country was arbitrarily taken away from it. No wonder it was struggling.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
This chapter was primarily taken up with Gunther providing biographies of both Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes. Masaryk was very old and had essentially founded the country a few decades earlier. By the time Gunther published this edition, he had passed away. Gunther had managed to interview him before he died, and like with De Valera, provided interesting details about the actual interview. Benes was the Foreign Minister who worked diligently on mutual assistance pacts with both France and the USSR. Like most of the rest of Europe at this time, the country was greatly worried about Hitler and his intentions, and rightly so as Hitler shortly thereafter gobbled up Czechoslovakia.
RUMANIA
King Carol comes across as a jerk here, and rules as a dictator along with his mistress, Madame Lupescu. Rumania was enemies with Hungary and had an internal problem with the Iron Guard, which was a sort of revolution attempted by young men who were perilously close to behaving as Fascists.
YUGOSLAVIA
King Alexander had recently been assassinated, leaving the throne to his 14 year-old son Peter. Gunther talks about the ancient conflicts between the Serbs (who were Balkan, Greek Orthodox, and anti-European in outlook) and the Croats (30% of the population, Roman Catholic, and European in outlook).
BALKAN KINGS
This is a brief chapter that covers King Zog in Albania, Boris III or Bulgaria, and General Metaxas in Greece. Zog was rich and liked to play his country off between Italy and Yugoslavia. Bulgaria also lost a lost of land as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Metaxas had recently taken dictatorial control in Greece.
TURKEY
Kamal Ataturk was the dictator there at the time, and would make arbitrary changes such as introducing phonetic spelling just because he wanted to. Gunther said that Ataturk lived alone and was somewhat of a recluse.
POLAND
Josef Pilsudski dominated this chapter, along with Gunther stating that Poland's lack of stable borders really weakened its position as a viable country. Poland was in a no-win geographical position of being wedged in between two heavyweights who wanted it (Germany and the USSR). And of course, given what happened to it less than a year after Gunther wrote this, he was once again prescient in his analysis.
NEUTRALS
A nice chapter followed on several countries: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and Switzerland. The first three got along well together and were quite similar in viewpoint. None of them wanted to get involved with the boiling cauldron in the rest of Europe. They were, however, re-arming due to the menace of Hitler. Belgium was relieved of its duty to come to the aid of France were it to be attacked, but both France and Great Britain were pledged to its defense should it be attacked.
LEAGUE OF NATIONS
Gunther follows with an interesting chapter of the League of Nations, the unhappy predecessor to today's United Nations. While offering up justifiable criticisms of the League, Gunther notes on page 447: "The trouble was that the powers overstepped themselves, and created - as we have seen - new minorities by grabbing what didn't belong to them. But it should be pointed out that some frontier lines, like that between Hungary and Rumania, can never be drawn without leaving some miserable folk on the wrong side of the border. Another point should be kept in mind. If Germany had won the War, the Treaty of Versailles might not have been nearly so nice a one."
SOVIET UNION/STALIN
Gunther finishes with several chapters on the USSR in general and Stalin in particular. I thought these were the weakest chapters of the book, as Gunther seemed to think that Stalin was much less ruthless than history has shown him to be. To be sure, Gunther did point out the famines and the trials, but he also had some praise for Stalin as well. I will be interested to read his much later book that was just about Russia, and written after WWII, to see what his opinion was then.
March 15, 2017
John Gunther was a journalist that always seemed to always be at the right place at the right time in the mid 20th century and this is the book that started it all.
The book was first published in the mid 30s with a few updated editions, including this one written shortly after the war began. In the introduction to the latter edition he describes flying over Eastern Europe, looking down at the peaceful towns and the forests. It was extremely eerie reading the descriptions in light of knowing what was about to happen down there.
The entire book is a valuable perspective of a Europe about to be destroyed. When he says "Inside Europe," he does means "Inside Europe." This doesn't just France, Britain, and Germany. He goes on about Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey and other oft neglected regions, not just through cursory blurbs but often in more than satisfactory detail. He even discusses the League of Nations, an idealistic set of internationalists reminding me not much of the UN, but actually more of the EU. I kept wondering where he found the time to do all the research, at times I felt like I was reading a book by a professor and not a journalist.
It is not only encyclopedic but well written. His engaging style is half the reason to read this. It's a great place to begin if you're interested in this period and if you want to learn more there is even an impressive bibliography at the end which I also highly recommend.
The book was first published in the mid 30s with a few updated editions, including this one written shortly after the war began. In the introduction to the latter edition he describes flying over Eastern Europe, looking down at the peaceful towns and the forests. It was extremely eerie reading the descriptions in light of knowing what was about to happen down there.
The entire book is a valuable perspective of a Europe about to be destroyed. When he says "Inside Europe," he does means "Inside Europe." This doesn't just France, Britain, and Germany. He goes on about Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey and other oft neglected regions, not just through cursory blurbs but often in more than satisfactory detail. He even discusses the League of Nations, an idealistic set of internationalists reminding me not much of the UN, but actually more of the EU. I kept wondering where he found the time to do all the research, at times I felt like I was reading a book by a professor and not a journalist.
It is not only encyclopedic but well written. His engaging style is half the reason to read this. It's a great place to begin if you're interested in this period and if you want to learn more there is even an impressive bibliography at the end which I also highly recommend.
May 17, 2021
This book was 100% totally fascinating. John Gunther was one of the most prominent political journalists of his generation, and this is his tour around the different countries of Europe. It was written in the 1930s and new editions were continually put out as the political situation deteriorated towards war. I read the 1938 edition, which came out just after the Munich Agreement--you hardly ever get a sense of what people were thinking in the year between then and WWII.
Beyond the interesting timing, Gunther was really thorough in exploring the internal and foreign politics of all the different countries in Europe, describing who all the power players were in each country and how their systems changed over the 20s and 30s. Because of how the War turned out we tend to think of the Allies and Axis as immutable alliances, so it was interesting to read about how Italy and Germany were pretty antagonistic well into the 1930s, and the US actually had fairly good relations with Italy. I also hardly knew anything about how Austria turned to fascism, for instance, or the internal politics of the Balkan countries (or even the UK or France during this time). And Gunther was a great writer, and built his analysis off of interviews with an astonishing range of people, including Hitler's aunts and uncles. Highly recommended for anyone interested in WWII or European history!
Beyond the interesting timing, Gunther was really thorough in exploring the internal and foreign politics of all the different countries in Europe, describing who all the power players were in each country and how their systems changed over the 20s and 30s. Because of how the War turned out we tend to think of the Allies and Axis as immutable alliances, so it was interesting to read about how Italy and Germany were pretty antagonistic well into the 1930s, and the US actually had fairly good relations with Italy. I also hardly knew anything about how Austria turned to fascism, for instance, or the internal politics of the Balkan countries (or even the UK or France during this time). And Gunther was a great writer, and built his analysis off of interviews with an astonishing range of people, including Hitler's aunts and uncles. Highly recommended for anyone interested in WWII or European history!
June 24, 2011
This was one of my favorite books growing up. I enjoyed the author's point of view. He was knowledgeable about the places he wrote about, and was not afraid to predict, even when it turned out faulty. He has an old world charm that I find refreshing.
October 15, 2013
Gives incredibly short shrift to many countries (the ones you'd expect--the Scandinavian nations, the Low Countries, the Baltics, the Balkans), but the "inside dope" provided on the major powers and their interior politics remains fascinating even today.
March 19, 2016
Fascinating contemporary look at Europe in the mid-1930s with detailed portraits of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.
December 5, 2024
I stumbled upon this book as a footnote on Mussolini’s Wikipedia page. There was an excerpt detailing the Duce’s penchant for large rooms and high ceilings - specifically his office at 60 feet x 40 x 40. I followed the lead, found the book online and flipped to the Mussolini section and read: Mussolini is built like a steel spring, Stalin is a rock of sleepy granite and hitler a blob of ectoplasm… I knew I’d found my next book.
The remarkable thing about the edition I read (published November 1938) is that they of course have no idea what’s around the corner. As such, all the catalysts that we’d intuitively associate with thebuilding blocks of ww2 are either totally rationalised (Rhineland and Anschluss - can’t hold the Germans responsible forever!) or thrown in relief against all the other turbulence of the time (dolfuss, the league’s weakness, rearmament). Churchill is even seen to have too impetuous and unstable a character for the top job… within a year, he’s in the top job!
This was a great read. He writes at the pace of an above average jog and that’s how you essentially traverse the continent. What an extraordinary life Gunther must have lived - and this might be as close as we get to getting a glimpse of it.
The remarkable thing about the edition I read (published November 1938) is that they of course have no idea what’s around the corner. As such, all the catalysts that we’d intuitively associate with thebuilding blocks of ww2 are either totally rationalised (Rhineland and Anschluss - can’t hold the Germans responsible forever!) or thrown in relief against all the other turbulence of the time (dolfuss, the league’s weakness, rearmament). Churchill is even seen to have too impetuous and unstable a character for the top job… within a year, he’s in the top job!
This was a great read. He writes at the pace of an above average jog and that’s how you essentially traverse the continent. What an extraordinary life Gunther must have lived - and this might be as close as we get to getting a glimpse of it.
June 6, 2023
Anything and everything you ever wanted to know about Europe in the 1930s, in the run up to World War II. Superbly recounted by one of the leading foreign correspondents of the day (see the brilliant "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial by Deborah Cohen).
If you ever doubted the veracity of the famous Karl Marx quote, that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, consider the opening words of Chapter 1: "Adolf Hitler, irrational, contradictory, complex, is an unpredictable character; therein lies his power and his menace. To millions of honest Germans he is sublime, a figure of adoration; he fills them with love, fear, and nationalist ecstasy. To many other Germans he is meager and ridiculous - a charlatan, a lucky hysteric, and a lying demagogue." Sound familiar?
If you ever doubted the veracity of the famous Karl Marx quote, that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, consider the opening words of Chapter 1: "Adolf Hitler, irrational, contradictory, complex, is an unpredictable character; therein lies his power and his menace. To millions of honest Germans he is sublime, a figure of adoration; he fills them with love, fear, and nationalist ecstasy. To many other Germans he is meager and ridiculous - a charlatan, a lucky hysteric, and a lying demagogue." Sound familiar?
October 5, 2020
Brilliant.
August 9, 2025
Een beeld van de Europese politiek uit 1936. Griezelig actueel.
May 6, 2026
Hard work in places but such an interesting take on Europe and the main players in WW2 before we knew about the atrocities and what fascism and communism really meant.
Read
February 28, 2008940.5
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews