At long last we have a thorough, continent-wide treatment of the chaos that was Europe in the aftermath of WW2. The Germans may have surrendered in the first week of May 1945, but the violence and inhumanity of people and nations lasted for months and, in some locales, years. It is hard to envision, but there were no governments, police, schools, universities, banks, currencies, telephones, post offices, private property, trains, cars, buses, gas, electricity, food or water. There was utter devastation and then, starvation, vengeance on a massive scale, ethnic cleansing, on-going anti-semitism, pogroms, massacres and civil war. A writer for the New York Times called it "the new Dark Continent".
The descent into anarchy began with personal vengeance. Those freed in their camps killed their guards, those held in slave labor murdered local Germans, and the Poles and Czechs took particularly violent actions against the Germans still in their midst. The author states that the peoples of eastern Europe did to the Germans what the Germans had done to them. In all countries, collaborators were sought out and summarily executed. The Resistance and the Partisans who led the revenge against the the traitors were actually exempted from any responsibility by laws passed ex post facto allowing their actions. Frustrated by twenty years of fascism and years of German occupation, northern Italy saw 15,000-20,000 revenge killings in 1945-46. Centuries of anti-semitism led to either indifference to the Jews who tried to go home or actual massacres in Poland and Hungary.
Allied-approved ethnic cleansing led to the massive dislocation of millions, which the author analogized to the disruptions occasioned by the collapse of the Roman Empire. The decision had been made by the Big Three to move Poland west. Thus, Poland took over land from Germany and the USSR, specifically the Ukraine, took over eastern Poland. Although most had fled prior to the arrival of the Red Army, there had been eleven million Germans in what became Poland. The Poles sent millions of German packing and the Ukrainians did the same to the Poles. There was little oversight and non-stop violence. Throughout Europe, nations pursued racial policies to make Poland all Polish, Czechoslovakia all Czech, Hungary all Hungarian etc. Millions of Germans were returned to the Reich; in many instances they were descendants of immigrants from earlier centuries. There were over four million deportees in the British and Russian Sectors and three and a half million in the American. Eastern Europe became ethnically cleansed with homogenous populations.
The final source of conflict was between the communists and their opponents. In southwest France, where the Resistance liberated a large section of the country, many were murdered, not because they were collaborators, but because they were opposed to the Reds. The Croats fled to Austria to escape the Serbs, were returned to Yugoslavia, and 70,000 were summarily executed. The incredibly vicious Greek Civil War soon followed, leaving the country free, but devastated. The problems in Greece led to the creation of the Truman Doctrine, followed soon thereafter by the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan helped Western Europe finally get back on its feet, but confirmed the split with Stalin.
Communism did not come peaceably or easily in the east. As many as 400,000 Ukrainian partisans were still fighting the Soviets in 1950. In the Baltic states, the ongoing resistance formed the legends that maintained the will of ethnic Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians throughout the Soviet era.
History is never past and lives on in the national myths of every country in Europe today. The occupied nations view their now almost universal resistance and courage through rose-colored glasses. The Russians are wistful for 'The Great Patriotic War', the British have made the war a national industry and in America, we honor 'The Greatest Generation'.
During a Baltic trip in 2005, I saw firsthand the passion and anger still felt by many. In Tallin, Estonia, a twenty-something tour guide spoke vehemently about what the Russians had done to the city and it's people when they fought the retreating Germans. He didn't mention what the Germans did during their occupation and retreat. The next day at a Romanov Palace, a young Russian woman was brought to tears describing the Germans' depredations and destruction of the famed Amber Room. Hopefully the passage of time will move theses emotions further into the past and not resurrect them.
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