The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End

According to the history books, World War I ended in November of 1918. While that may have been true for the United States and many of its Allied partners, it was definitively not true for the war's losing nations (the "vanquished"). In defeat, these countries found themselves transformed domestically, with competing power blocs that would engage in years of violent civil wars and border conflicts. Robert Gerwarth's book The Vanquished is a gripping and unsettling account of these various conflicts that together would become as deadly as the war itself, especially from about 1918-1923. The book is dry at times — and many of the conflicts are described in isolated fashion without placement in any larger context — but Gerwarth has done a lot of original research showing that the Great War never really ended before World War II began.