Roger Moorhouse reviews the new book by Keith Lowe for History Today:
It examines Europe in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War, when the guns stopped firing. Yet, as Lowe clearly demonstrates, the absence of war is not the same as an outbreak of peace.
Savage Continent is a grim catalogue of humanity at its lowest ebb. Necessarily pointillist, given its broad scope, it ranges across much of the European continent, portraying a world where civil society and the rule of law were yet to be re-established and where revenge, antisemitism, ethnic cleansing and heightened political sensibilities gave rise to a renewed wave of inter-communal and political violence.
According to Lowe’s account, those immediate postwar years had a thoroughly unedifying air. From the Yugoslav partisans cutting off the noses of their erstwhile opponents, to antisemitic pogroms in Poland, to the massacres of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, he shows a dystopian continent in which the all-pervasive dehumanisation of the war proved difficult to reverse, provoking a hangover of violence that would last, in some places, into the 1950s.
Alongside the now rather well-documented episodes of brutality from the period, such as the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe, or the expulsion of the German populations from the same region, Lowe does well to uncover some lesser-known examples of man’s postwar inhumanity to his fellow man. The story of the Lithuanian ‘Forest Brothers’, for instance, and their brave, futile resistance to the imposition of Soviet rule, is one that deserves to be much wider known and is outlined well. Similarly the ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians in postwar Poland is rightly placed alongside better-known events, such as the Kielce pogrom and the Vertreibung (expulsion) of the Germans.
I just started reading Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt, and he covers much of the same period of history as Lowe in the first part of his book. I’m moderately well-read on World War II, but the amount of violence and human misery in Europe for more than a decade after the war was “over” is indeed an under-covered and misunderstood aspect of that turbulent period.
Western European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and even western Germany) recovered faster in all senses because the Nazi occupiers did much less damage to the social structures in those countries. It’s rather eye-opening to find how few Nazi officials were needed to oversee the local governments in those countries: 800 in Norway, and only 1,500 in France (plus 6,000 military and civil police auxiliaries). Local governments continued to operate pretty much as they had before the war, under the control of a tiny group of German overseers. Economic demands meant the local industries were harnessed to the Nazi war effort (but largely kept under the control of their original owners).
Central and eastern European countries suffered far more disruption as the Nazi racial “logic” did not allow local governments the same relative lack of interference the western local governments got. Local industry was more frequently nationalized and run by German managers directly, not working through the original owners, and local labour was more readily drafted to work in Germany. And unlike in the west, the experiences of newly “liberated” countries in the east often started with a fresh purge of local governments, business owners, and middle class professionals.
What we’d now call “ethnic cleansing” was a frequent second act after the Soviet armies moved in: ethnic Germans were expelled, ethnic Slavs were moved into the cleared areas. Jews, Gypsies, and other groups that suffered terribly under the Nazis did not necessarily see much improvement under the Soviets. Former resistance fighters were hunted down and eliminated (except for those belonging to identified Communist movements … and not even that was guaranteed protection).
Under the circumstances, it may well be nothing short of a secular miracle that Europe recovered economically and socially so soon after the war and the post-war convulsions.
