The Myth of a Second Thirty Years War (Winter, ENRS)

Historian Jay Winter's article for the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (published 16 April 2025), rejecting the "Second Thirty Years War" reading of 1914 to 1945 as one continuous conflict. Winter traces the phrase to Winston Churchill's January 1945 House of Commons remark that the period was "one story of a 30 years war" and to Charles de Gaulle's July 1946 Bar-le-Duc speech, and argues the two wars differ fundamentally: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 created conflicts absent from the pre-1917 war, Nazi Germany's extermination apparatus had no equivalent in 1914 to 1918, military technology (aerial bombardment, chemical and atomic weapons) changed radically between them, and Nazi racial ideology and Bolshevik revolutionary theory shared nothing with the imperial worldviews of 1914. Winter explicitly rejects historian Ernst Nolte's use of the "Thirty Years War" framing to minimize the distinctiveness of Nazi crimes.