"Worryingly, there is perhaps not much distance between the 1940s and the 2020s."

You are in London and you are saying that? During the Blitz by the Luftwaffe, at least 30,000 Londoners were killed by the bombing, and fifty thousand were seriously injured. Millions of building were destroyed or damaged, and hundreds of thousands were rendered homeless. Late in the war, the Germans launched thousands of jet and rocket vengeance weapons which fell indiscriminately on London, killing thousands more. But that was only a taste of what hit Berlin, with 125,000 civilians killed by the bombing and 6,500 acres of the city completely destroyed. After the war there was still food and commodities rationing in London until the 1950s, and in Berlin there was starvation and the Red Army was raping every woman they could get their hands on. Tens of millions of people all over the World were violently killed in WW II, and several of the the most advanced cities in the Eastern hemisphere got the crap bombed and shelled out of them. Look at those cities today, and it is ovious that there is plenty of distance between now and then. Berlin and London are both magnificent.