- Lowe, Keith.
Savage Continent.
New York: Picador, [2012] 2013.
ISBN 978-1-250-03356-7.
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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.
August 2014 