2025/07/14 by Maartje Abbenhuis · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
paper · doi:10.1093/dh/dhaf051
openalex publication_date 2025/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars is an ambitious book that enumerates civilian suffering across the era of the world wars. It is engagingly written, accessible, and holds the reader’s interest as it traverses this world of war, narrating the horrors inflicted both “accidentally” and “deliberately” on civilians. What Ó Gráda does particularly well is to question and obtain greater accuracy in representing the statistics of this civilian suffering. The book’s main contribution to the historiography, then, is in underlining just how phenomenally destructive this age of total war was. Alongside the liberal use of confronting photographs, the enduring impression left by the book is the overwhelming human cost of modern warfare. Hidden Victims is largely set up as a “what happened” history of the impact of these wars on civilians, whether it resulted in their deaths or their long-term suffering. It is a history of trauma that does not shy away from confronting the violence it documents, be it famine, aerial bombardment, sexual violation, displacement, or another form of atrocity. It documents these atrocities thematically, focusing each chapter on a key form of violence. Most of the chapters address a wide array of events relating to the theme, although a couple (like the chapter on the Holocaust) prioritize a particular event. It presents its findings not so much as a synthesis but as a report, which mobilizes an array of secondary sources and historical studies. Depending on the chapter’s theme, Ó Gráda readily jumps across the globe with his examples, often presenting each under its own section heading.