Abstract
Reviewed by: Martijn Lak, Leiden University, Netherlands
American journalists visiting Europe in the wake of the Second World War were of the impression that the Old Continent would never recover from the devastation and suffering it had endured between 1939 and1945. As the New York Times claimed in March 1945: ‘Europe is in a condition which no American can hope to understand. It is The New Dark Continent’. In reality, Europe would, especially from an economic point of view, recuperate swiftly; by the early 1950s, most Western European countries boasted industrial production that surpassed the pre-war levels by a considerable margin. Once Germany was allowed to retake its place as the economic heart of the region and rapidly improved economically, its neighbours in the West followed suit. In Eastern Europe, however, things looked quite different. With the Iron Curtain slowly but surely descending, the Soviet Union extended its influence over the region, which, partially as a consequence of that, would fall (far) behind Western Europe, only to recover slowly after the end of the Cold War.
That Western Europe recovered so soon after the Second World War to reach a level of prosperity most regions in the world can only dream of, is miraculous. As Keith Lowe writes in his masterful Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, many observers, politicians and historians portray the post-war period as a time when Europe rose like a phoenix from the ashes of destruction. This, Lowe states, is painting far too rosy a picture of post-war history. In fact, the war did not end at the same moment across the continent. In some countries fighting continued until the early 1950s, whereas in the south of Italy and on Sicily, hostilities had already ended by the autumn of 1943. The essential truth was that the further one travelled to the east, ‘the worst the devastation became’ (6). It is a core element of Lowe’s fascinating study: in the east almost everything was worse than in the West, not only the physical destruction, but also the expulsion of millions of Germans and the treatment of German POWs: ‘The true horror occurred, as usual, not in the west but in the east’ (116).
That is not to say that things were not disastrous the closer one came to the English Channel. Many German cities lay in ruins, as Lowe has described so chillingly in his earlier work Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943. In the West, for example, tens of thousands of German prisoners of war died in the camps of the Western Allies. There was a lack of hygiene, food and shelter. And yet, of the respectively 3,635,000 and 3,097,000 German prisoners held by the British and Americans, ‘only’ <0.1 and 0.1 per cent, respectively, died. That is remarkable considering the fact that these men were often ill, wounded, weak and ill-fed. In the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia on the other hand, 35.8 and 41.2 per cent of the German POWs died (122), and most of them as a result of deliberate intent, in the same way as the Nazis had dealt with their Russian POWs, who died in even greater numbers.
Across Europe, there were innumerable instances of violence, revanche, murder, torture, humiliation and suffering. Women were raped by the hundreds of thousands, both during the final months of the war and immediately after, especially by Red Army soldiers. Women who had slept with German soldiers – so-called ‘horizontal collaborators’, as the French liked to call them – were universally regarded as traitors. Their punishment all over Western Europe was the same, and men were eager to be photographed with girls who had been humiliated, shaved and covered with tar. Lowe follows recent research here, which quite correctly states the eagerness of these men had to do with their emasculation: ‘These men, who had already shown themselves impotent against the military might of Germany, now found themselves communally cuckolded by their own womenfolk’ (164). After the end of the war, they were now in a position to regain their manhood by humiliating girls that had fraternized with Germans.
Lowe paints a horrifying picture of the Continent after the formal end of hostilities. It is a gruesome picture of torture, humiliation, murder, death and suffering. Sometimes you just want to put down the book out of sheer loathing of the events so thoroughly described by Lowe, but his writing style and thorough research prevent this. This is a story that had to be told, and Lowe is to be applauded for doing so. His book is full of intriguing and evocative lines, such as: ‘The Second World War was like a vast supertanker ploughing through the waters of Europe: it had such a momentum that, while the engines might have been reversed in May 1945, its turbulent course was not finally brought to a halt until several years later’ (367).
Throughout his book, Lowe most of the time shows a thorough knowledge of his topic and the existing literature, although Richard Bessel’s Germany 1945: From War to Peace is missing in the literature list. Moreover, on pages 35–6, where the author describes the situation in the occupied Netherlands, his analysis is off the mark. It was not the case, as Lowe writes, that ‘almost from the moment the Germans arrived in May 1940 they had begun to requisition everything’ and ‘that entire factories were dismantled and shipped into Germany’ (35). In fact, as recent studies, for example by Klemann and Kudryashov, have shown, in the first two years of the war the Dutch economy was booming, and industrial production would at the lowest drop to 80 per cent of its 1938 level. The picture of general destruction, then, is wide of the mark. Apart from that, Lowe has written a fascinating book that is not to be missed by those writing about the immediate post-war Europe.
Lowe also writes about a topic that is largely unknown in the English-speaking world: the forced expulsion of millions of Germans in the last months of the Second World War and the years after. It is a theme that is in line with the rest of his book, and it is even more thoroughly analysed by R. M. Douglas in Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. Like Lowe’s study, Douglas’s book is every bit as gruesome, especially when he describes what happened to the women and children, who were far in the majority among those expelled. Moreover, in the American and especially British capitals there was quite some enthusiasm for expelling the Germans from Eastern Europe. By the mid-1940s, for example, for the Left in Great Britain, population transfers were increasingly being regarded as a means of accomplishing not just social but socialist engineering: ‘They could be a vital tool in breaking the power of entrenched capitalist interests and paving the way for a once-for-all transition to a planned economy that might take decades to accomplish by other means’ (30). This is not to say, however, that a consensus was reached in the democracies about the necessity of mass population transfers.
In Eastern Europe, though, in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia that had endured so much hardship during the Nazi occupation, especially compared to countries in Western Europe, there was no doubt or hesitation about forcibly expelling the Germans and so-called Volksdeutsche, although the latter did by no means always feel or see themselves as Germans. In the process, between 12 and 14 million of them were expelled, and, as mentioned previously, the majority of these were women and children. Many of them ended up in camps, some of which, like Auschwitz, had been used to murder Jews and other people.
What is striking is not so much that these horrifying places were used to intern large numbers of expellees, but that the guards and administrators did everything to establish a regime for the local German civilian population ‘modelled as precisely as possible on their own recent experiences at the Nazis’ hands’ (132). The scenes Douglas portrays of the mass sexual humiliation – both of men and women – torture, murder and deprivation make your stomach turn, literally. As he adds almost casually: ‘Regulations exempting the young, the old, pregnant women, or the disabled were routinely ignored: as was true of the expellee population in general, the majority of inmates in many camps were women and children’ (137). The latter did not receive any special treatment: ‘There is little evidence to suggest that the authorities exerted themselves to shield children from the harsher aspects of camp life’ (236).
The author correctly states that despite all the horrors of these camps, they cannot be put on the same level as what happened in the Nazi camps; although hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 1.5–2 million expellees died, there was no systematic programme of mass murder: ‘the great majority survived their incarceration’ (156). Douglas has a tough nut to crack with those who are, even today, historians included unfortunately, prepared to defend the expulsions as justified by their results. Douglas convincingly states why he will have none of this and also has a lot of justifiable criticism of the Western Allies: ‘One of the most disturbing aspects of the expulsions is how little those Britons and Americans directly involved in their oversight were disturbed by them’ (369).
Douglas has written an impressive study on a topic largely neglected in the English-speaking world. His descriptions are gruesome and deeply disturbing, but this story had to be told, especially to English readers (in Germany, for example, a great deal has been published on the so-called Heimatvertriebenen). He shows great mastery of the sources and knowledge of the literature, although it is remarkable that Matthew Frank’s Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (2008) is not mentioned in the literature. That being said, when the books of Douglas and Lowe (and perhaps Tony Judt’s Postwar) are combined, a thorough and, in many respects, new, multi-sided and far more nuanced picture emerges of Europe in the immediate post-war years.