Our study ended with Europe's descent into the catastrophe of the Second World War. The swift surrender between 1939 and 1940 of many democratic states to the German Wehrmacht, and in June of 1941 the onset of the titanic struggle between the totalitarian empires of Hitler and Stalin, closed a period of one hundred years of progress toward more civilian police rule in Europe and better police collaboration among its various nations. With the exception of Great Britain, all the European countries served by liberal police systems had shown themselves too weak to resist Hitler's furious assaults. They were liberated because of the endurance of the Soviet Union – the one continental power Germany failed to subvert with fifth columns – and by overseas intervention from America and the Commonwealth nations of the British Empire.

True, in 1945 the Western Allies restored the liberal foundations of modern police administration in their occupation zones of Germany and Austria. But many of the social conventions and cultural habits on which modern police power had relied in the preceding century were now gone. For example, class war: Who in Western Europe still talked of “working-class solidarity” or “bourgeois respectability?” Or else national patriotism: Who continued to believe in “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”? Ten years after the war the English writer, Rebecca West, discovered that military bravery as a virtue had become “dowdy, ” whereas betraying state secrets in the public eye had unaccountably acquired an aura of sophistication – a shamelessness Dreyfus would not have understood and Redl never admitted to.