Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt 2005

  Post War History of Europe by Tony Judt 2005

Europe became a union as nothing else would work. The separation of east and west was a contest between Communism and 'capitalism'

The post war history of Europe lasted a long time and ended with the end of the Cold War. Austria was considered Hitler's first victim and so this authorized Vienna to exorcise its past. The post war western Europe capitalist prosperity underpinned the welfare state and social peace.Vienna after 50 years of quiescence as well as the rest of Europe re-entered history.

1945was considered Stunde  nul or Zero hour by Germans. 

In WW1 Serbia lost half it male population between ages of 18 to 55 and resolved nothing. New countries that emerged from collapsed empires in 1918 were poor, unstable and insecure with no restoration of international  stability and equilibrium. Internal conflicts accompanied the collapse of European economy. The 30s were for Auden "low dishonest decade" Spain's Civil War. Stefan Sweig and Walter Benjamin took their own lives. The loss in European Civilization was implied in the works of Carl Kraus and Franz Kafka. Jean Renoir film "The Grand Illusion."

In the east was the peace of the prison yard under the Red Army .

East Europe Needed some sort of radical transformation. Communism may have been the wrong solution but it was responding to a dilemma that was real enough.

Western Europe had not liberated itself from Fascism alone could not keep Communism at bay.

European sea bourn empires had vanished back to the Europeana nuclei. Americanization of Europe of the 50s 60s is often exaggerated.

 Germany today like the rest of Europe is more conscious of 20C history than at any time in the past 50 years. WW2 was followed by civil wars and a social revolution, occupation eroded the legitimacy of local leaders.

Poland ,Baltic states Greece and Yugoslavia were occupied 3 times in 5 years.  with the Jews and Germans removed you had a very different social landscape.  

Under the Germans the Poles had a parallel underground of newspapers, schools and welfare and carried on outside the law at great personal risk.

Throughout German occupied areas everyone was afraid of everyone. Where Jews were stripped of business and property it was divided amongst Nazis, collaborators and friends. Returning survivors could not claim their property so many others were complicit in the Nazi genocide with wholesale de facto nationalization.  

Property seized from Sudeten German constituted a quarter of  Czechoslovakia's national wealth, their economy before 1937 had out performed Austria.

In liberated western Europe there was little German owned property for redistribution,

In 1941 Norway was occupied buy just 806 Nazi administrators while the German France only had 1500 to ensure compliance of 35 million population.  Contrast that to Yugoslavia where entire German divisions were needed just to contain the armed partisans.  In west Europe unless they were Jews or communist the population was left alone.  When the war ended Germany was in a state of total, social and economic collapse. 

It was Hitler as much as Stalin that drove a wedge into the continent.  Exiled governments in the west returned and were legitimate but in the east, they had all been swept away by the Nazi's transformative violence with an unrecoverable past.

Countries were occupied and then liberated by another occupier.  Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland or Ukraine had large numbers of real partisans. The Soviets did not like praise for  the partisan either anti Nazi or anti Communist.  Collaborator were those seen to work or sleep with the occupier and charged of treason.

In France you had a cycle of score settling with extra judicial killing of 1500 people. The Vichy reprisals surprised nobody. Many had not worked for the Nazis but for the Vichy regime. In northern Italy Emilia, Romagna and Lombardy 15000 were killed in the last few months of the war.  Belgium 265 and Netherland under 100 executed. There is some truth that women gave sexual services in exchange for food,  Jean Paul Satre described collaboration as submission. 

At this stage the first victims were minorities Jews were killed in Poland. In France and Prague returning victims had to fight squatters in their homes. 

In the East European States direction  of the economy did not start in 1945.  In   Liberation 

the Catholic church got of very lightly  in view of Pius XII warm relation with Fascists, and blind eye to Nazi crimes. General Lucius Clay was the US military commander. He found that amongst those associated with the Nazi's were the best qualified. Nazi teachers were removed, libraries were restocked and news print was only assigned to editors with genuine anti Nazi credentials 

Besides the well known Nuremberg trials, US French and British military courts tried lower down Nazis but most got off.   The Soviet went a lot further  by 1948 520000 civil servants were fired and "pro- communist replaced them.

1941-1942 60% of Switzerland's munitions industry,50% of their optical industry 40% engineering output was produced for Germany remuneration in gold. It was the Swiss authorities who asked that German passports indicate whether the holders were Jews. This stopped the Wehrmacht from invading the Swiss.

Swedish cooperation with the Nazis allowed Wehrmacht troops to start Operation Barbarossa.

1945 At  Volkswagen 91% of machinery survived the bombing.  The war time industries that Germany had invested in so heavily would lay their boom for the fifties.

One reason for food shortage in Europe was that they could no longer turn to eastern Europe's food granaries.

1947 Severe winter that froze canals and paralyzed rail networks and was followed by floods.