The biblical connotations were often applied in regards to international politics during the first and second world wars. Religious affiliations as always were espoused by nearly all sides and often played well into their political or diplomatic situations at the time.

Nazi Germany during the second world war for many of the common soldiers was a war against Bolshevism, which since it's emergence in the first world war was viewed as an inevitable, powerful and existential threat to the western world and Christianity. On every enlisted German soldier for all their armed forces was the words "Gott mitt uns" on their belt buckles as the words God with us always held an intensely connected part of Prussian traditional and heraldry.

Many in Germany during the second world war fought as hard as they did as increasingly propaganda reflected that the victory of Soviet Communism would be the end of Christianity in Germany. The mysticism of the National Socialist elite and the outright paganism of others are unique situations but as a mean the religious center of Germany remained Christianity, and Hitler worked with the Protestant and occasionally the Catholic churches in National Socialist Germany to assure the Christians did not oppose Nazism on the basis where people would oppose him religiously on a widespread basis during the war in Germany.

But politics of the apocalypse did intensely define the end days of the Third Reich, the mass suicide of so many Nazi stalwarts was intensely connected with the belief there was no world following National Socialism's eradication. And this was a feeling accentuated by the policies of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

Apocalyptic context took on non Christian terms in the end of the Nazi regime as well, Götterdämmerung or the Twilight of the Gods held an intense connotation for the Nazi Regime as the imminent end and was rooted in Hitler's personal affinity for Richard Wagner and the encapsulation of many Nazis in Norse Paganism. An excerpt from the Newspaper Das Reich encapsulated the sentiment Goebbels was distributing among the German people: "If the German people lay down their arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind an iron curtain mass butcheries of people would begin." To the Nazis and many Germans, the end was the end of their society and civilization.

Albert Speer wrote in his diary that the last performance of the Berlin Philharmonic before the end of the war was the final scene of Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen of which Götterdämmerung was the penultimate piece. This final scene that was preformed was Brünnhilde's Immolation which in an essence captured the apocalyptic sentiments of the end for Germany.

Apocalyptic connotations were not exclusive during these times to the world wars however, the end of the First World War was a uniquely stark period to which the beginning of the apocalypse as written in the bible could also be occurring. The political unrest and suffering that followed the end of the great war was almost as bad as when it was raging, the Spanish flu was chasing across Europe taking nearly as many lives as the war did. The Russian civil war was now being raged with the forces of "Godless atheism" on the rise all over Europe. Germany descended into anarchy and as the Americans withdrew European societies, even the victorious Allies had to confront the cost of the conflict.

The return for many to a weakening economy, tremendous social unrest, communist revolutions and the deposing of institutions in power and place since before Napoleon in many instances lead to wild uncertainty of the worlds direction, and for many it was not a leap to see the world beginning to unravel.

One work that captured this uncertainty was from W. B. Yeats, an Irish poet who used imagery of the Second Coming and the Apocalypse to write of occurrences across the world and his native Ireland. Where the British government had just begun debating the dispatching of the black and tans; and the Irish War of independence was just beginning. Here is that poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The answer to that question put forth is therefore unequivocally yes. The world wars were periods of tremendous change, unrest and suffering. For many the deaths of so many people and the destruction of so many things had to give and some grand event must be afoot. Of course the world did not end with these conflicts, but as poems like The Second Coming show there was most certainly an apocalyptic feel to what happened and what followed.

Childs, Peter (2007). Modernism. The New Critical Idiom (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 39.

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich, The Macmillan Company. 1970

Haughey, Jim (2002). The First World War in Irish Poetry. Bucknell University Press. p. 161.

Thacker, Toby (2010) [2009]. Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.