Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

On May 8th, 1945, World War II in Europe formally ended when the Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of Germany. In popular myth, especially among those too young to have lived through the war and its aftermath, the defeat of Italy and Germany ushered in, at least in Western Europe not occupied by Soviet troops, a period of rebuilding and rapid economic growth, spurred by the Marshall Plan. The French refer to the three decades from 1945 to 1975 as Les Trente Glorieuses. But that isn't what actually happened, as this book documents in detail. Few books cover the immediate aftermath of the war, or concentrate exclusively upon that chaotic period. The author has gone to great lengths to explore little-known conflicts and sort out conflicting accounts of what happened still disputed today by descendants of those involved.The devastation wreaked upon cities where the conflict raged was extreme. In Germany, Berlin, Hanover, Duisburg, Dortmund, and Cologne lost more than half their habitable buildings, with the figure rising to 70% in the latter city. From Stalingrad to Warsaw to Caen in France, destruction was general with survivors living in the rubble. The transportation infrastructure was almost completely obliterated, along with services such as water, gas, electricity, and sanitation. The industrial plant was wiped out, and along with it the hope of employment. This was the state of affairs in May 1945, and the Marshall Plan did not begin to deliver assistance to Western Europe until three years later, in April 1948. Those three years were grim, and compounded by score-settling, revenge, political instability, and multitudes of displaced people returning to areas with no infrastructure to support them.And this was in Western Europe. As is the case with just about everything regarding World War II in Europe, the further east you go, the worse things get. In the Soviet Union, 70,000 villages were destroyed, along with 32,000 factories. The redrawing of borders, particularly those of Poland and Germany, set the stage for a paroxysm of ethnic cleansing and mass migration as Poles were expelled from territory now incorporated into the Soviet Union and Germans from the western part of Poland. Reprisals against those accused of collaboration with the enemy were widespread, with murder not uncommon. Thirst for revenge extended to the innocent, including children fathered by soldiers of occupying armies.The end of the War did not mean an end to the wars. As the author writes, “The Second World War was therefore not only a traditional conflict for territory: it was simultaneously a war of race, and a war of ideology, and was interlaced with half a dozen civil wars fought for purely local reasons.” Defeat of Germany did nothing to bring these other conflicts to an end. Guerrilla wars continued in the Baltic states annexed by the Soviet Union as partisans resisted the invader. An all-out civil war between communists and anti-communists erupted in Greece and was ended only through British and American aid to the anti-communists. Communist agitation escalated to violence in Italy and France. And country after country in Eastern Europe came under Soviet domination as puppet regimes were installed through coups, subversion, or rigged elections.When reading a detailed history of a period most historians ignore, one finds oneself exclaiming over and over, “I didn't know that!”, and that is certainly the case here. This was a dark period, and no group seemed immune from regrettable acts, including Jews liberated from Nazi death camps and slave labourers freed as the Allies advanced: both sometimes took their revenge upon German civilians. As the author demonstrates, the aftermath of this period still simmers beneath the surface among the people involved—it has become part of the identity of ethnic groups which will outlive any person who actually remembers the events of the immediate postwar period.In addition to providing an enlightening look at this neglected period, the events in the years following 1945 have much to teach us about those playing out today around the globe. We are seeing long-simmering ethnic and religious strife boil into open conflict as soon as the system is perturbed enough to knock the lid off the kettle. Borders drawn by politicians mean little when people's identity is defined by ancestry or faith, and memories are very long, measured sometimes in centuries. Even after a cataclysmic conflict which levels cities and reduces populations to near-medieval levels of subsistence, many people do not long for peace but instead seek revenge. Economic growth and prosperity can, indeed, change the attitude of societies and allow for alliances among former enemies (imagine how odd the phrase “Paris-Berlin axis”, heard today in discussions of the European Union, would have sounded in 1946), but the results of a protracted conflict can prevent the emergence of the very prosperity which might allow consigning it to the past.

You don’t need to read a history book to know that post-war Europe was something akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Keith Lowe’s succinct book, The Savage Continent, however, does more than just detail the continent’s post-war bleakness; in articulating a few fine points, Lowe, transformed how I view the war itself and the Europe we see today.But first, the destruction. Sure, there were no post-apocalyptic cannibals roaming around mainland Europe in the fall 1945, but at times this world doesn’t seem far off. A few facts bring this point to life; World War 2 killed nearly 40 million people, approximately 7% of Europe’s pre-war population (11); it left millions homeless, with nearly 20 million Germans alone without shelter and the Polish capital of Warsaw with only 2 working streetlights (8); it seemingly wiped out the demographic of men ages 17-40; it destroyed infrastructure, leaving walking as the only reliable method of travel on the continent (10); and perhaps worst of all, it unleashed a tide of vengeance carrying death, destruction, and political upheaval into the post-war years.Lowe describes this post-war Europe as filled with “a cultural of casual sadism” where “Nazism [had] intoxicated a number of individuals to the point where they believe[d] that violence [was] always legitimate” (46). Some of this vengeance manifested itself in sad and bizarre ways; Lowe describes how “looting fever” (99) seized some cities where men would steal doorknobs from department stores despite the fact that nearly all doors had been blown off during the war. And some of the vengeance made m grimace; it’s thought that almost 2 million German women were raped in the aftermath of the war (55). With civil authorities weak, mob justice was a common tool used on collaborators and innocent political opponents alike.However, as compelling as the numbers and stories that Lowe provides are, it’s viewing this horror in the context of its immediate past (the war itself) and distant future (Europe today) that give Keith Lowe’s book incredible power and meaning.To me, three points stand out, and that I hope to remember.First, Europe went from being one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth to a series of mono-cultural states. There are countless examples of this. Start with the fact that nearly the entire remaining Jewish population of Europe left the continent following the war. Pre-war Poland had the largest Jewish population of any nation on earth; post-war Poland, had very few. In addition to the well-documented Holocaust, post-war Europe saw huge land swaps and with each land swap, multi-cultural states were homogenized. Stalin took huge chunks of land from Poland (giving them Eastern Germany in return); Eastern Poland was given to Ukraine, Brest to Belarus, Vilnius to Lithuania. And with each land swap, diverse communities were forced to move to their “home” territory. Huge populations (an estimated 12 million people) of Volksdeutsche – German communities spread throughout Eastern Europe – were sent home in the wake of the war. There was a practical goal to this homogenization: to prevent future conflict. After all, post-war Europe saw brutal ethnic conflicts flare up between Ukraians and Poles, Serbs and Croats, Hungarians and Slovaks. A more homogenous Europe was thought to be a safer Europe. But Lowe is correct in pointing out the sad irony that post-war Europe accomplished some of the “racial purity” that Hitler hoped for: “Gone were the old imperial melting pots where Jews, Germans, Magyars, Slavs, and dozens of other races and nationalities intermarried, squabbled and rubbed along together as best they could” (248).Second, the Second World War, like perhaps all wars, led to the creation of national myths of good versus evil, creation versus destruction, that belie the nuance and moral subjectivity of the war. While Lowe makes it clear that the atrocities that Allied forces committed during the war were “nothing like the scale of the Nazi war crimes”, he notes that “it is equally important to acknowledge that they did occur and that they were barbarous enough” (126). This is a note in history oft-forgotten. One I never really considered. The Poles were tough on German POWs and civilians alike, putting Germans in brutal labor camps built on the sites of former concentration camps. Brits and Americans alike agreed that Germans must pay for the war in labor. In Czechoslovakia, German civilians were told to wear armbands with “N” (Czech for “German”) on them and their rights were severely limited. Perhaps most bizarre of all is Lowe’s chapter on “horizontal collaborators”—women who slept with German soldiers. Lowe writes, “the number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering. In Norway, as many as 10% of women aged between 15 and 30 had German boyfriends during the war” (164). From the vantage point of nearly 70 years, it’s easy to view the war as a fight between good and evil. But Lowe brings to life a world of destruction where huge tracts of Europe collaborated, and perhaps even worse, civilians acquiesced and sought normalcy in a German-ruled Europe. Myths of national unity are nothing more than that: myths.Just as brilliantly, Lowe succinctly jumps from one country to the next to illustrate separate points. He jumps to Romania to show how the threat of Soviet troops brought autocratic communists to power. He discusses Greece to show how British, and later, American, support galvanized anti-democratic forces to defeat communists in a bloody civil war. He looks at the depths of ethnic conflict by going to Yugoslavia and showing how the Ustasha Croats purged Serb minorities and then, in turn, were purged in Tito’s post-war regime.Lastly, World War II was much more than just a war of Axis versus Allies. There were many wars and many separate struggles within World War II. Many of these conflicts dated back before the start of the war and many stretched on long after the war. Lowe provides one excellent example of how Italian communists fought 3 separate wars in parallel; a national war (against Nazi Germany), a civil war (against Italian fascists and collaborators), and a class war (against the bourgeoisie). More often than you might expect, made enemies of their friends and friends of their enemies.Lowe presents a World War Two that was more than one conflict with moral ambiguities that fueled the chaos of and vengeance of post-war Europe. It’s this history that shaped the Europe we see today.

This is an outstanding book, that should be mandatory reading for anyone who claims to know what happened during WW2.The "popular" perception of WW2 in Europe is a picture painted by the Allies after the war, to both justify their actions during the war and to further their political aims. The grossly simplistic picture of "the good Allies beating the nasty Germans, who committed the Holocaust" ignores the reality of a sea of small scale forgotten ethnic, political and civil wars, which, in my opinion, resulted in regional horrors that matched the Holocaust, but are now largely forgotten. This book is well researched, almost comprehensive and both an entertaining and thoroughly informative read. It also provides the student of WW2 with some understanding of the rationale for the Germans behaviour toward the various indigenous populations in the occupied countries.My only major regret is that the author chose to "omit the horrors perpetrated against the German civil population by the Soviet forces, because this is well documented elsewhere" - this was a massive and unfortunate omission. To discover those events, and to gain a small understanding of why the German forces fought so desperately against the Soviets in 1945, you need to read Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany by Thomas Goodrich.

To my eyes, images of the end of WW2 are predominantly those of smiling,ecstatic crowds in the streets of London or Paris, celebrating the end of the conflict. Well, this book is about things I never knew or knew very little about. It is a harrowing, distressing, compulsive account of the hatred, violence, resentment and vengeance that swept the whole of Europe for months and even years after hostilities officially ended.I knew about the plight of millions of displaced people, the treatment of German prisoners of war, the suffering of women and children, the return of surviving Jews,etc...But what about more examples of lawlessness and chaos like the repulsive civil war in Greece, the insidious communist takeover of Eastern Europe, the shocking ethnic cleansing in Poland and Czechoslovakia , the rampant, persistent antisemitism, a little everywhere,...Every chapter in this book is intensely disturbing and shocking . And now I think of 2015 : the constant threat posed by Putin's Russia, the offensive attitude of many East Europeans towards Syrian and Afghan refugees, the smouldering hatred between Croats, Muslims and Serbs , the Far Left in power in a Greece where the extreme Right is also all powerful and I ask myself : what have we learnt ? What is the purpose of knowing about past History ? Should this war that ended nearly 70 years ago be " regarded as little more than Ancient History " ? Should it be remembered ? It should not be allowed to poison the present, says Keith Lowe.This is without any doubt one of the most powerful and impressive History books that I have ever read. Mr Lowe is a genius.

I enjoyed this book. Some of the other reviewers thought Keith Lowe used some artistic licence when writing this and I can imagine he did but it opens your eyes to the fact WW2 never finished on VE Day as most people think. Most people believe that the war finished and everyone packed up and went home and all was good again with the world. Keith Lowe does a good job of making his way around Europe telling the stories that most people know nothing about.A good book will make you read more into the subject and I found myself buying more books about the aftermath of the war and finding out more horrific stories that today I am astounded that most people know nothing about.I never knew of any film documentaries or books or even web pages that dealt with this subject until I read this book and I find it unbelievable that this subject is not spoke about in schools when learning about WW2. Deaths after the war are more than most other wars yet this subject is anonymous.From other sources I have read or watched, most of what Keith Lowe writes is spot on. The fact I went on to find out and understand more is worth the 5 stars.

A tremendous eye-opener for those who imagine it was all over on VE day. More years of grief, and all within living memory. Spain is conspicuously absent, however, though there were savage reprisals and partisans there all through the 1940s. UNRRA and Red Cross get several pages early on in the book, but no mention of the Quaker organisations (Friends' ambulance Service and Friends' Relief Service) which did great service in liberated camps and amongst DPs.Some assertions clash with other sources: Lowe says that food was short in Germany all through the war, others that they were doing very well on plundered countries until the Russians pushed back; Lowe says that the Dutch hunger winter was circumstantial, others that the Nazis inflicted it in retaliation for the national rail strike; the destruction of Gestapo HQ in Copenhagen on 10.3.45 was not 'luck' but targeted with precision by the RAF.

Bloody AftermathFor those of us who remember the Second World War ending in 1945, this book by Keith Lowe will shake you to the bones. It took me a month to finish this harrowing history, mostly because it was so depressing.The truth is the war ended in the 1950's. Killing continued, ethnic cleansing erupted, Communism spread tyranny, mass migration of millions of people (especially 11 million Germans) - all were the rule in Europe in the supposed post- war environment till much later. Particularly harrowing is the history of the Jews in this post war period. It is impossible to understand why Israel exists without understanding how the Holocaust continued after German defeat, especially in light of the behaviour of the Poles and the pathetic reaction of the Allies to the Jewish plight.Lowe is thorough and reaches into the history with skill. He unearths great examples, and puts the shape of the events in perspective. He writes well, but not exceptionally well, like Beevor, Montefiore or other top flight new historians of the war. So he loses a star for style but not content. Perhaps his lack of narrative skill also slowed my completion of this sizeable book.I learned a great deal from this book - and that is something I don't usually say - and recommend it without reservation