Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

by Keith Lowe

The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...

The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century’s most iconic moments.  It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours.  These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten.  Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. 

In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over.  Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed.  Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved.  Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe.  Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities.

Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s.  Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, War, European History, Politics, World History

480 pages, Hardcover

First published July 3, 2012

About the author

Keith Lowe is the author of numerous books, including two novels and the critically acclaimed history Inferno: The Fiery Devastation of Hamburg, 1943. He is widely recognized as an authority on the Second World War, and has often spoken on TV and radio, both in Britain and the United States. Most recently he was an historical consultant and one of the main speakers in the PBS documentary The Bombing of Germany which was also broadcast in Germany. His books have been translated into several languages, and he has also lectured in Britain, Canada and Germany. He lives in North London with his wife and two kids.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/keithlowe

Reviews

[Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Tale Unfolds

Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II is an important book. Yes, yes, I know; you’ve heard it all before, the special pleading on behalf of some new publication or other, but believe me, it is.

Actually, no, don’t believe me; don’t take my word for it; read it and find out for yourself. If you think that the Second World War in Europe ended abruptly in May, 1945; if you think that VE Day brought peace then you are in for a surprise. I was reminded of some words from the Book of Jeremiah;

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

Considering the important weighting I’m giving here it’s a book that I almost did not read. A few years ago I read Giles Macdonogh’s After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift. I rather assumed that Savage Continent was essentially covering the same territory, namely the post-war trauma of Germany. It does; it touches on the savage expulsion of millions of Germans from the eastern territories handed over to the Poles at Potsdam and Yalta, and from their former homes in the Czech Sudetenland. But Lowe deals with so much more, not just a traumatised people but a traumatised Continent; he deals with the traumas of places as far apart and as diverse as Estonia and Greece.

We are dealing here with political, social, economic and moral chaos; we are dealing with the abyss, the nadir of human civilization. We are dealing with starvation, lawlessness, disruption, homelessness, rootlessness, alienation, murder and rape on an unprecedented scale in all of history. We are dealing with racial wars and ethnic cleansing that did not end with the Nazis. We are dealing with an ugliness of unbelievable intensity.

In some places the hatred and violence that emerged in the war and immediate post-war period never really went away. The former Yugoslavia is a case in point, where ethnic and racial tensions engendered by the conflict were submerged for decades, only to break out once more with unrestrained ferocity in the 1990s, a reminder of how difficult it is to escape from the past.

It’s not all about statistics and numbers, not all about mass suffering; there are also some sobering personal anecdotes. There is the story of an eighteen-year-old Polish Jew by the name of Roman Halter. He had survived Auschwitz. It’s May 1945; the war is over; the danger is past; he is free, emaciated, but free. He began a long walk east, leaving from Dresden, hoping to find others of his family who had survived the Holocaust.

On the way he met a Russian soldier, whom he greeted as a comrade and a liberator. The friendly gesture was not returned. Instead the Russian ordered him to take his trousers down. Having ascertained that he was a Jew he put his revolver to Halter’s head and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired. The memory of this incident stayed with Halter for the rest of his life. Anti-Semitism had not died with Hitler.

The sad truth is, as Lowe shows, that hatred of the Jews actually increased after the war, leading to murderous pogroms in Hungary and Poland. It wasn’t the industrial scale, biology-based mass murder of the Nazis, but rather a return to more atavist and medieval forms of Jew-hatred. It was this, perhaps even more than the Holocaust, which led many Jews to conclude that they had no future in Europe.

There are other stories which, in their own way, are just as shocking, because they are less expected. There is the story of the Norwegian children, some three thousand of whom were born to women who had relationships with German soldiers during the occupation. Afterwards the assumption was that the women must have been mentally sub-normal and the soldiers they attracted also mentally sub-normal. For years afterwards the children born to these people were subject to levels of ostracism and discrimination that had a severe impact on their life chances. Compared with some of the other horror stories detailed in this book it amounts to little, though it tends to undermine one’s view of the seemingly limitless nature of Scandinavian tolerance.

There was so much in Lowe’s account of Stunde Null (wrongly given as Stunde nul) – Zero Hour – , as the German referred to the end of the war, that I had no knowledge of at all. I knew nothing of the vicious racial war between the Poles and the Ukrainians, pursued both during and after the war, with consequences even so far as today. I knew nothing about the struggles of the Forest Brotherhood, the freedom fighters in the Baltic States, who went on to resist the Soviet occupiers for years after the war, people who were still being killed as late as 1978.

The author’s whole account us tremendously illuminating, as the dust settled and the great post-war divisions between the communist east and the free west began to take shape. It’s as well to remember that for many in the east the story of oppression and occupation did not end in 1945; rather one tyranny simply took the place of another.

Communism has gone now. We have a Brave New Europe that has such free peoples in it. Ah, but that’s just the thing. Our Europe, the Europe of the European Community, is driven more by fear of the past than hope for the future. Recently we have had all sorts of dire warnings over what might happen if the euro collapses. Hence we have a bureaucratic, post-democratic New Order. It is the architects of this New Order, in their distrust of the people, who are paradoxically recreating forms of popular discontent that led to disaster in the first place.

So, yes, this is an important book, important if you want to understand the European present as well as the European past. It is cogent, well-written and well-argued account, if over-reliant at points on anecdotal evidence. The only thing that irritates me is the author’s tendency to drop into the first person singular. It is as if he is a tour guide taking us on a journey, a technique which for me is wholly out of place in a sober historical narrative. But if it is a journey we have come far. If you want to know how far, come and see; come and read.

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third in my series of great books on World War Two. First, Max Hastings in All Hell Let Loose gives the whole story, and brilliantly simplifies it too. He explains, and I’m convinced, that WW2 was essentially between Germany and the USSR, or between Hitler and Stalin if you wish. Everything else was a side show. He goes further – the result was never in doubt. If Hitler and Stalin were equally ruthless, Stalin always had more men at his disposal, and Russia always had its vast size and epic winters; it was never going to be defeated by Germany. Proving this was, as we know, ferociously, murderously, inhumanly difficult and accounted for most of the war dead. (Hastings goes further still – the second major theatre of war, USA vs Japan, was likewise never in doubt. Although the Japanese had run through Indo-China like a knife through butter their industrial strength was tiny compared to the USA, so within a couple of years they were bound to run out of material – ships, tanks, guns. Likewise, proving that foregone conclusion was deathly.)

So that was the big picture. The next two books gave the detail of two parts which I knew little or nothing about – Ian Kershaw’s The End gives a gruesomely detailed description of the final year of the war in Europe, the Gotterdammerung catastrophe of Germany itself, which, as you contemplate its massive, thorough ruination, puts you in mind of a nation-sized suicide-by-police some criminals prefer to prison.



Now, finally, Savage Continent gives a forensic portrait of the hideousness of the aftermath of this European lunacy. Popular historians have mostly steered clear of this period (1945-48) and understandably so – it presents a horrible vista of misery and viciousness, of physical destruction and moral collapse, and of where there was enough food to eat and enough men left standing who were not too busy raping the women who were still alive, of ethnic cleansing, untrammeled vengeance and further civil wars. It takes a historian with a very strong stomach to write in detail about this period. And us readers need to be able to distance ourselves emotionally from what we are reading here, otherwise we would never pick up a book like this. But readers of history are very familiar with that kind of mental discipline.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. (Edward Gibbon)

WORLD WAR TWO AND A HALF

World War Two ended at different times in different places – autumn 1943 in Italy, a year later for France, but in parts of eastern Europe, Greece and Poland, for instance, it morphed into local civil wars and continued into the 1950s. There was one over-arching conflict between the Allies and the Nazi regime. But parallel to that, weaving all the way through it, was a war between the left (the communists) and the right (the nationalists, for want of a better word). Then, separate to those two, but closely entwined, so it was often hard to see a difference, were many local wars between the ethnicities in a given area – Ukrainians versus Poles, Croats versus Serbs, Germans versus Poles, these wars went on and on, and only intensified after May 1945.
The way these were dealt with by the occupying Allied forces was lamentable. But Keith Lowe firmly says :

In a straight choice between Stalinist communism and the flawed mix of democracy and authoritarianism espoused by the West, the latter was undoubtedly the lesser of the two evils.



STATISTICS OF CHAOS IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

There’s a table on page 122 – DEATHS AMONGST PRISONERS OF WAR which records that the USA captured 3,097,000 prisoners, of whom 4537 died; and Britain captured 3,635,000 of whom 1254 died. There is a discussion of why more POWs died in American camps than in British. But this all becomes rather academic when, even before presenting the stats table, Keith Lowe says :

We must remember that these are conservative figures: even official historians concede that thousands of deaths probably went unrecorded.

And later, after more gruesome revenge stories :

The validity of accounts like this is impossible to verify, and it is quite likely that some aspects have been greatly exaggerated.

Underneath another stats table (THE JUDICIAL PUNISHMENT OF COLLABORATORS IN WESTERN EUROPE) he says

Despite the precise nature of some of the figures above, they should be considered estimates only, as many of the absolute numbers are disputed.

This entire book is strewn with statistical data, big numbers everywhere, and all are disputed, all may be wrong. But this does not stop the author. Acknowledging the immense difficulties, he ploughs on. He covers topic after topic – whole chapters on, for example, the fate of the “horizontal collaborators”, the women who had intimate relations with occupying German forces – maybe we should say the women who became sex slaves of one or more soldiers. They were hated and reviled, such is to be expected, however unfair.



The author then gives us seven pages about the attitudes to and experiences of the children of such unions, and how they were despised and ostracized, for decades. E.g., in Norway

Every year, right up until the start of the 1960s, these children and their guardians had to undergo the annual humiliation of applying to the local police for permission to remain in the country.

FINISHING THE JOB THE NAZIS STARTED

If you thought the Holocaust of European Jews ended when the camps were liberated Keith Lowe brings you bad news. Killings of Jews continued. Antisemitism was nearly universal in eastern Europe (although Poland easily won the contest for Most Antisemitic Post-War Country, which I found not surprising. Between 500 and 1500 Jews were murdered by Poles in the 12 months after May 1945.

Jews of all nationalities would discover that the end of German rule did not mean the end of persecution. Far from it. Despite all that the Jews had suffered, in many areas anti-Semitism would increase after the war. Violence against Jews would resurface everywhere – even in places that had never been occupied, such as Britain. In some parts of Europe this violence would be final and definitive : the task of permanently clearing their communities of Jews, which even the Nazis failed to do, would be finished off by local people…. By 1948 much of the region had become, even more than in Hitler’s time, Judenfrei

Where did this anti-Semitism come from? Lowe reports that in the vicious right-left nationalist-communist struggle which was now surfacing all over Europe, the nationalists characterized the Communist Party as Jewish; and the Communist counter-propaganda was to label the Jews as capitalists, hoarders and black marketeers.

So the Jews fled from Eastern Europe – how ironic that Germany, Austria and Italy were now safer than Poland, Ukraine or Yugoslavia! And Britain argued passionately that these fleeing Jews should NOT be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. The British Foreign Office said that would be admitting that the Nazis “were right in holding that there was no place for the Jews in Europe”.

There are so many issues described in this awesome book. Keith Lowe has fused together so much material and so many stories into something resembling coherence, and he deserves a big fat history book prize. There is nothing too difficult or too obscure or too detailed for him. His prose has almost no flair or flavor but it gets the job done with unflagging humanity. It’s devastating.

[Jill H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The war was over.....hooray and let's celebrate! Of course, that was not the case at all but historians often give short shrift to the horrors of the years in Europe immediately following WWII. The end of that conflagration only initiated the start of others......displaced persons, prisoners, war crimes, nationalism giving way to violence, continued "ethnic cleansing",the rise of Communism, etc. Governments were gone as well as economies and physical infrastructure. Europe was a hell on earth and the author delves deep into those problems in this excellent book. He points the finger when and where it is appropriate as he posits that some of the total breakdown of eastern Europe could have been prevented but for the bullying of the United States and Britain by the Soviet Union.

It is not enough to portray the war as a simple conflict between the Axis and the Allies over territory. Some of the worst atrocities had nothing to do with territory, but with race or nationality and some of the most vicious fighting was not between the Axis and the Allies at all but between local people who took the opportunity of the wider war to give vent to much older frustrations.

This is an eye-opening book, graphic, and disturbing but one that should be read by any fan of the history of WWII. It only got a little bit lower rating because it tended to drag just a bit toward the end....but that doesn't keep it from being a block buster! Highly recommended.

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Polish partisan (page 218, my book)
“The Ukrainians in turn took their revenge by destroying a village of 500 Poles and torturing and killing all who fell in their hands. We responded by destroying two of their larger villages... This was how the fighting escalated. Each time more people were killed, more houses burnt, more women raped. Men become desensitised very quickly and kill as if they know nothing else.”

Page 365
It was virtually impossible to emerge from the Second World War without enemies....virtually every person on the continent had suffered some kind of loss or injustice.

We often think of the Second World War in Europe as ending in May of 1945. We have plentiful images of happiness in the U.S. and England – but such was not the case on the continent.

The author points out that the six long years of war had virtually destroyed all things civilized. Chaos was the norm. Transportation was non-existent; cities lay in ruins, and civil society (police, government) had evaporated. There was a constant struggle for food and shelter. There were millions of slave labourers on the roads. Some wanted to go back to a “home” that no longer existed; others, particularly Russians and Poles, did not want to go “home”. In all cases “home” would be something vastly different than it was in 1939.

The overall feeling was of vengeance – to the German, to the collaborator, other ethnic groups, and even to the few remaining Jews left. Mob violence was the norm. The war unleashed all the hidden ethnic and geographical tensions – particularly in Yugoslavia – and Poland and Ukraine. Each group played the victim card. And all was much worse in Eastern Europe where Stalin encouraged ethnic cleansing, where his troops raped and pillaged on a massive scale. Stalin’s goal was not merely to defeat Nazi Germany, but to subjugate all the conquered territories with his own puppet regimes.

As the author mentions, for the millions of soldiers, of slave labourers, of resistance fighters – brutality had become a way of life and it did not abruptly end in May 1945. It went on until the early 1950’s – more so in Eastern Europe. We often think of the Marshall Plan as re-invigorating Western Europe but this was implemented starting in 1947 because of Europe’s overall predicament.

This is an excellent book that describes the gruesome conditions that existed in Europe in the post-war years. It is not a book of mere statistics, but of personal and harrowing examples – as in women and children forced to prostitute themselves to get cans of food from Allied soldiers, of soldiers sickened and saddened by the daily scenes of mob violence.
In a way, what it is positive is we can see how far Europe has progressed since the early 1950’s – and has re-established itself as a center of civilization.

To close off here is just one example of the residual effects of the war. There were hundred of thousands of women who had children from German soldiers. These children were discriminated and ostracized in all communities.

Page 178
One can only applaud the bravery of the French mother who confronted a school teacher who had called her daughter a “batard du Boche” with the words: “Madame, it was not my daughter who slept with the German, but me. When you want to insult someone, save it for me rather than taking it out on an innocent child.”

[Dem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Savage Continent-Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe is an excellent book and a ground breaking study of the years that followed the Second World War.
I have read a lot of books about the war and the concentrations camps and the violence and atrocities that took place in Europe at this time.
I had never actually read a book about the aftermath of the war although I had often wondered about this period in history.

The World War left Europe in chaos. Landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more that 35 million people killed. Across most of the continent the institutions that we now take for granted such as the police and the media, transport, national government were either absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates soared, economies collapsed and the European population hovered on the brink of starvation.

This book is divided into 4 sections dealing with The Legacy of War , Vengeance, Ethnic Cleansing and Civil War.

Most of us have the impression that the end of the War meant the end of the killing and suffering. But the truth is the killing and suffering went on and on. What followed the end of the war was as bad as much of what happened during it and continued for almost 10 years. And those responsible were not heartless Nazis; in many cases they were the good guys, the victorious Allies.
In the immediate aftermath, the cruelty, even savagery, of what was perpetrated not only on surviving German soldiers but on civilians and on collaborators in various countries which had been occupied was shocking. I was really shocked at how women in particular, suffered dreadfully in the aftermath of the war.

This is certainly a thougrouglhly researched book and Keith Lowe really paints the facts very Cleary and documents his sources at the end of the book. Lowe does not take sides in this painful story but tries to get the facts and the information to the reader in every chapter and I really think he succeded in his task.

This is not the easiest of reads but it is certainly an education and I learned so much that I found myself jotting notes down as I read this book.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning portrait of the continent-wide upheaval that followed World War II. The cover itself is vastly different from the American post-war images of cheering crowds and ticker tape parades.

The average European soldier, prisoner of war, or concentration camp survivor did not go home to a GI Bill, a booming economy, or even a welcome. Going home probably meant a new internment in a former death camp where supplies were short. Since most transportation was destroyed travel was by foot with little food, shelter or protection from bandits or partisans along the way. Most likely the home was destroyed, and the community with it.

Keith Howe brings a lot together. He presents statistics along with the human tragedies that define them. He arranges the work by problems (loss of infrastructure, need for revenge, famine, legal breakdown, the frequency and brutality of rape, ethnic hatred, famine, and moral destruction) and by country.

He shows World War II was many wars within one, and how the surrender of the big powers did not settle all the issues. Crowds, in the heat of liberation, meted out more punishment for the perpetrators of the war than the official system. In some counties, the perpetrators were useful to the victors and flourished. In some countries, the war heroes received more punishment for their newly out of fashion views than collaborators or fascists.

Women may have been the most heavily scapegoated for crimes of passion or prostitution. Many had their hair shorn for collaboration and were marched naked (while collaborators who sent others to their deaths skated free). If they had a child with a German father, the child faced discrimination or even expulsion. In the post-war chaos, many were raped, many at very young ages, many multiple times a day.

Putting an end to Hitler, did not put an end to the racism and nationalism. Lowe presents staggering statistics showing how countries closed ranks against "outsiders" as country after country expelled Germans, Jews or any other group it wanted rid of. The citizens took possession of land and goods before the expelled could actually pack.

The last chapters focus on how Russia took advantage of the chaos to implant its brand of communism in the eastern areas its army occupied at the war's end. Each nation was different, but had the brutal, dictatorial result was the same.

This is a stunning work. Lowe has produced not only a readable work but a reference work as well.

Highly recommended.

[Sonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

― “…the traditional view that the war came to an end when Germany finally surrendered in May 1945 is entirely misleading: in reality, their capitulation only brought an end to one aspect of the fighting.”
―Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

Victory in Europe was declared on May 8th, 1945, after nearly six years of bloody conflict. Germany was completely defeated. The toll of the Second World War in terms of both human and material resources was the heaviest that mankind had ever known. World War II caused the deaths of around 60 million soldiers and civilians and witnessed the horror of the first systematic genocide in modern history—the Holocaust. In addition, many cities, towns and villages across Europe were completely destroyed by aerial bombing and heavy artillery.

Most histories of World War II end shortly after Germany’s surrender. We tend to look back on the end of the war as a time of celebration. The war was over; most of the American fighting men would be on their way home to begin careers and start families, just as my father did. Europe would have to rebuild; but the conflict was finally over. We have all seen the pictures of sailors kissing girls in New York’s Times Square. But, as Lee Corso is fond of saying on ESPN’s College Game Day, “Not so fast!”

― “In wartime the worst atrocities do not generally occur in battle, but after the battle is over.”
―Keith Lowe, Savage Continent

As historian Keith Lowe points out, aerial bombing had flattened cities, resulting in the widespread destruction of homes, bridges, communications and railroads. There were also serious shortages of food, fuel, and all kinds of consumer products. When combined with all the deportations and expulsions, there were nearly 20 million displaced persons and refugees awaiting repatriation. There were also millions of German prisoners of war that had to be watched, managed and fed. Families had been torn apart.

― “The angry, resentful atmosphere that pervaded throughout Europe was the perfect environment for stirring up revolution.”
―Keith Lowe, Savage Continent

The unprecedented racial, religious and political persecutions and the mass deportations into labor or extermination camps had stirred up hatred among the peoples of Europe. The war had shaken the very spiritual and moral foundations of Western civilization.

― “The desire for vengeance was perhaps the inevitable response to some of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by man.”
―Keith Lowe, Savage Continent

As Lowe points out, there were no governments, no schools, no banks, and no shops. Law and order was virtually nonexistent because there was no police force or courts. Women and even girls often prostituted themselves for food. Killing became commonplace, as did rape.

― “During their wartime ordeal many forced laborers had been abused and dehumanized; they had had every aspect of their lives brutally regulated, sometimes for years. Having been denied any form of power for so long, at liberation the pendulum had swung the other way: for a brief time they were not only free, but allowed to act with utter impunity.”
―Keith Lowe, Savage Continent

Before I started this book, I wondered about the title; I thought it odd. But the author makes it clear that Europe was indeed a savage continent after the war. One reviewer called it a “cauldron of hate.” The years after the end of the war saw as much despair and hate as existed during the war. What the people of Europe witnessed was the moral collapse of a people.

Lowe divides his work into three broad areas: vengeance, ethnic cleansing, and civil wars. Vengeance seems to have been the most universal. It included the arrest of Nazis and their collaborators to the shaming of women who had become involved with German soldiers. American military officers even turned a blind eye to what took place. Civilians took advantage of the chaos to seek revenge for years of powerlessness and victimization.

What is so strange is that it took nearly seventy years for this story to be told. That makes Lowe’s history of immense importance. But I caution you that this is not an easy book to read. Virtually every page is filled with man’s inhumanity to man. While this is an important and even necessary work, it’s a numbing account that takes a toll on the reader. At least it did on me.

[Jakob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a revelation, as other reviewers have pointed out, for those of us whose view of history was that WWII led to the Cold War, and events in between didn't matter much because we knew what happened in the end. I at least learned that I knew nothing. Ignoring the forced cultural shifts and anarchy that occurred after WWII is to ignore the underpinnings of most of the Euro-centric conflicts that have occurred and are ongoing today.

Another milestone--I've never read a book that has given rise in to such disgust at the deplorable lows that humans can be brought to by years of mental anguish. Frequently reading this book gave way to raw emotion, but also speculation at how the political and cultural demonizations that occurred post-WWII are still visible in my own prejudices.

This book is the most important read for anybody interested not only WWII's aftermath, but in comprehending the undercurrents of many modern political movements--especially in Europe and America--and perhaps being able to see through the more "modern" forms of racism, prejudice, and lies that fill our airwaves and fuel our hatreds.

[Jonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eye opening, interesting primer on the travails of Europe in the post war period.

The book takes an overview of the social, economic, physical and moral breakdown from both East and West, from the crisis of displaced persons to the inability of the allies (especially, it seems, the Americans) to deal with the influx of PoWs - and even less so to actually process them; from the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Poland, Poles from the Ukraine...

Three most impressive bit of the writing is the way that Lowe shows how the events described led to the creation of national myths (those poor old Germans being treat so meanly by the nasty Poles, as mentioned) and then holds them up to the 'Cold War mirror', showing that nothing occurred in a vacuum, and placing them in proper context.

Given the amount of ground covered,it's a bit of a whistle stop but a well written one and worth a look as a start at looking at the issues of the immediate post war period.

[Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this a very difficult book to read, not because it was "harrowing" as some reviewers have described it - for me there was nothing new here, just lots of facts and information that filled out the bones a little more. I found this book difficult because it is so dry.
I believe this book is really aimed at an insular English-speaking audience for whom the Second World War (in Europe) ended in May 1945. Europeans, and serving soldiers at the time, will be well aware of the near-chaos and seeking of justice and vengeance that occurred at the end of military hostilities - they are the witnesses who speak to us through the pages.
Lowe divides what happened into a number of smaller topics and in so doing manages to create a distortion. Instead of seeing the events of the post-combat period as a whole we see a fragmented picture. Lowe somehow manages to put small, albeit unsavoury, incidents on isolated, individual stages and then almost equates them with the state-sponsored mass murders of the Nazi state. It is only after he has made his judgemental comments (and I found him very judgemental) that he tries to point out that maybe we need to place these events in some sort of context.
I am a fervent believer in the statement "as you sow so shall you reap". The Germans instigated a war of conquest and extermination in Eastern Europe that was very different to that in the West (and this contrast does emerge - even if it isn't highlighted enough). The Jews were merely at the top of the Nazi German kill list. In Poland ordinary men and women lived in daily fear for their lives. They regularly witnessed murders taking place (my uncle, as a young boy of fifteen was taking his father's cows out to pasture and knew to instinctively hide when he saw a German military truck appear on the road; as a result he was witness to the execution of dozens of his neighbours, initially by hanging and then by being burnt alive in a nearby barn). Slave labour is commonplace (my mother had the distinction of being taken into forced labour by the Soviets, and then by the Germans in 1941). Polish and Ukrainian labourers were murdered at the whim of the farmer who "owned" them. As you sow...
It is hardly surprising that at the end of the War these people sought justice and vengeance. They dished out just a small part of what they had received. Sometimes this seeking for justice would appear to be as brutal and evil as what had been done by the Germans... but there is a great difference between state-sponsored, racist violence and individual actions of revenge. There is a great difference between a pogrom in some small town that grows out of chaos and ignorance and the trainloads of victims being put on the assembly line of extermination. Somehow, Lowe manages to muddy these waters.
The defeat of Nazi Germany was merely one aspect of the War. Lowe too easily plays the racist card and talks about ethnic cleansing and forgets, once again, to put the events that occurred after the War into the context of what happened during the War, and what was encouraged by the Allies, until long after he has planted his seeds of doubt and condemnation. He informs us, too late, that the Germans exploited local animosity and encouraged internecine fighting (divide and conquer).
There will be many in Eastern Europe who know that the War didn't end but carried on as partisan groups clashed with the Soviet-sponsored government forces and one evil regime was replaced by another - there are many who would say it didn't end in Poland and Czechoslovakia until 1989, and in the Baltic States until 1991, just as there are many in the West who forget that Stalin and Hitler were allies in 1939. At least here, Lowe does a better job.
Occasionally Lowe asks the important question or states the important fact; in instigating a war of terror and bringing Europe almost to the edge of extinction who should really bear the blame for the chaos that ensued?
As you sow...

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most people think when WWII ended, it was over. No so. The terrifying aftermath lasted for many years and "Savage Continent" provides enough details to make us wonder why we like to go to Europe at all. The viciousness meted out to surviving Jews who had the audacity to return to their former homes seeking what had been taken from them is sad beyond measure. Hated before they were taken by the Nazis, hated when they returned. Hated now? The idea that Jews were safer in post-war Germany than in Poland and other eastern European countries is surprising and revealing. A very powerful read.

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Second World War was like a vast supertanker plowing through the waters of Europe: it had such huge 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."

When a truce is reached at the end of a war it is tempting to believe that all hostilities have ended but in this book, Keith Lowe proves that that is anything but true following the surrender of Germany, It is as if the "world" aspect of the war has ended but the regional and local wars continued or were ignited. Attempts to put the final touch on the hostilities were hardly benevolent, particularly in Eastern Europe. Vengence for the wrongs or perceived wrongs perpetrated by those victimized by the Nazis often resulted in atrocities and terrorism toward the Germans but that was only part of the equation.

Old animosities sprang to the surface resulting in civil wars and ethnic cleansing throughout much of Europe making peace an almost unattainable goal. Further, the struggle between the two superpowers to secure the allegiance of postwar Europe added fuel to the fire, particularly in the East where Stalin's methods were brutal and unrelenting. While the West was certainly not innocent in its attempts to remake the world, it was not nearly as brutal as the Soviet Union. Lowe proves how some of the conflicts in Europe, often present before the war, continued up to the recent past and how old tensions and a move to the right throughout most of Europe have once again risen. Many of us believed that with the end of the Cold War came the end of the war but as recent events seem to indicate, the world may be gearing up to another collosol battle and it is frightening to contemplate how that may end.

I highly recommend this scrupulously objective and exhaustively researched book. It demonstrates how important history is and how vital it is to learn its lessons.

[Bob Mobley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keith Lowe has written an interesting, revealing and disturbingly thoughtful book that examines a little known and rarely discussed reality of Europe in the aftermath of World War II. What I find interesting and thought-provoking, is the knowledge and increased awareness that reading "Savage Continent" has put before me from a political as well as cultural perspective. The frightening condition of the European nations, including Britain, at the end of WWII were disguised, hidden from view, or sanitized out of the news. Reading this history of the horrendous distruction of European fabric, culturally, economically, morally and physically, that was spread across all of Europe and the Soviet Union as a result of WWII, one begins to understand the depth of feelings and prejudicial attitudes that seem to be reappearing as a result of the current European economic crisis. I strongly recommend this book to someone who wants to understand why, just beneath the surface across Europe, lives and breathes the shadows of class warfare, cultural animosity, and tribalism. This book sets in sharp focus reasons why a unified Europe may be a long way off.

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

One could fill a fair-sized library with books about the Second World War, a historical event that has something for everyone: exciting battles, great wartoys, Nazis, Captain America, Mrs. Miniver, kamikazes, and the Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy. Books about the aftermath of the war remain scarce, as most people assume there was no real drama in the postwar period except, perhaps, for the superpower sparring that initiated the Cold War. Keith Lowe observes that, in Europe at least, this was far from the truth. SAVAGE CONTINENT reminds readers of something Eastern Europeans have known for many years: Europe remained a land of violence and misery until the early 1950s. Frenchmen ritually humiliated and sometimes killed collaborators; northern Italians slaughtered them by the hundreds. Allied soldiers routinely neglected and abused German POWs, resulting in the deaths of thousands of prisoners in Western custody – and over a million in Soviet custody. Poles and Czechs expelled and murdered ethnic Germans, victorious Yugoslav Partisans gunned down Chetnik prisoners, Greeks slew one another in a bloody civil war, and Baltic and Ukrainian "forest brothers" killed several thousand Soviet soldiers and civilians into the 1950s. Lowe's detailed and fast-paced account helps demonstrate that war breeds more violence, just as the American Civil War led to the political warfare of Reconstruction and World War One led (ultimately) to World War Two. In his conclusion, however, the author gives some small cause for hope, observing that the two countries who started the war, Germany and Poland, were able to reconcile their differences through diplomacy and education in the early 1970s. War isn't necessarily followed by peace, but it doesn't have to lead to more war, either.

[Jordi Sellarès · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feia molt, molt de temps que no gaudia tant, i m'esborronava a la vegada, amb un assaig històric. Magníficament escrit, tasca historiogràfica colossal, ens narra uns dels episodis més salvatges, cruents i, alhora, desconeguts, de la Història del nostre continent. La postguerra europea, lluny de triomfalismes, va ser una època de barbàrie, desgovern i descontrol, on la set de sang, la venjança i l'odi van campar per tots els països involucrats sense constriccions, sense que ningú, ni tan sols els guanyadors de la guerra, fes massa per aturar-ho, sinó tot el contrari.
Malgrat desprendre una ideologia clarament liberal, l'aportació de dades és incontestable. Tots els països, totes les ideologies, ètnies i nacions són culpables i alhora víctimes de barbàries vergonyants.

Una lectura apassionant sobre la maldat humana en un moment de la Història en el que tothom es pensava que el pitjor ja havia passat.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will give this one 3.5 stars. I think it's somewhat overrated.

I listened to this book on audible - term is starting again, and lots of driving...to work, kids, etc... and so I'm going to be listening to a lot more audiobooks.

This book, in fact, was well suited to audible, because it is long (quite long) on anecdote, and rather short (and superficial) on analysis.

Hence, 3-stars.

An intersting topic, though.

[Gwern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moved to gwern.net.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much of this book is extraordinarily horrifying, disturbing, and depressing. After describing the destruction of the second world war, mind-boggling in itself, we move on to the scarcity, the vengeance, and even the continuing conflict that went on after the war is conventionally seen to be over. (But Lowe argues that the defeat of Germany was only the ending of the main war--there were many civil wars that had been a part of the conflict, and locally were sometimes more important than the overarching conflict.)

And for long stretches, I wondered why write and why read this terrible history, which serves, quickly and devastatingly, to undermine any sense of the essential goodness of people. But Lowe answers that question terrifically himself. If memories of atrocities only served to stir up ethnic and national hatreds, he concludes, then indeed this history should not be written. But where competing histories can be evaluated, told alongside each other, and myths laid bare, this can actually help lessen such hatreds.

So for example he takes issue with attempts to suggest that the suffering of Germans in the wake of the war could possibly be considered equivalent in size and nature to the suffering of Jews during, and even after the war and the Holocaust. But at the same time, he does acknowledge the immense suffering that many Germans, both within Germany and outside, did in fact go through. And emphasizes that it is important to acknowledge faults on all sides, including even to some extent in the Americans' treatment of German prisoners of war, for example, bearing in mind the widely differing degrees of maltreatment, partly in order to understand what happened in context. For one thing, this serves to combat far-right claims that bring up atrocities out of context so as to suggest everyone suffered equally and all were to blame equally (or worse). And even our own myths of the "greatest generation" take a bit of a beating--without ever any suggestion that the Allies did not do better than the Soviets or the fascists.

Lowe's own sober, painstaking, complex and comprehensive efforts to put various conflicts and atrocities in context lend authority to his own assessment of the period. And although various images of unspeakable violence and cruelty on an unimaginable scale will stay with me, however I'd prefer to shake them, so, I hope, will his concluding hope that a complex history, in disposing of the excesses and dangers of nationalist mythmaking, can provide a way forward.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah yes, A very good attempt to describe the chaos of the continent following the war. I remember as a child in London in the late 40s going about with my father, who was Czech, being stopped by people in the street and him asking them, what language they spoke better than English... everyone it seemed was a DP.

What is difficult to grasp is the depth of the hatreds that still exist - it is as if the Nazis acted as a catalyst and opened this chest of horrors releasing a wave of hatred and destruction upon the whole continent. One thing is for certain nothing has been the same since.

Perhaps the conflict between the extremes of left and right was necessary to expose the emptiness of both, but it is extremely depressing to see the slide to the right that has overcome European politics in the last 30 years or so.

A powerful book that answers a lot of questions while posing even more.

Addenda. Just as powerful on a second read. Just as fresh as the first pass.

[Dimitar Angelov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Повечето истории на следвоенния период (с голямото изкл. на "След войната" от Тони Джъд) започват с няколко думи за Ялтенската и Потсдамската конференции през 1945 г. и бързо прескачат към доктрината Труман, плана Маршал, началото на Студената война и т. н. Незначително е вниманието, което се обръща на периода, започващ за някои държави като Италия от 1943 г., за "освободените" от Червената армия източноевропейски страни - 1944 г., а за Германия - април-май 1945 г. до зимата на 1946/7 г., в който картите на европейската политика далеч не изглеждат така ясно наредени, както след 1947 г. Това е време на разруха и хаос, на разплата на победеителите с победените, на локални граждански войни, на етнически прочиствания и изселвания и - да!, дори на масови убийства (малки и не толкова добре организирани като този на нацистите "Холокости", както ги нарича Кийт Лоу). Ако има писано за тези трудни за народната ни и континентална памет години, то в повечето случаи това е в отделни национални изследвания на езици, които повечето от нас не владеят.

Не зная за друго систематично сравнително изследване на европейската политика в този период от един автор в рамките на един том. Подобно начинание винаги крие рискове - много неща, неминуемо, остават пропуснати или само бегло загатнати. Самият Лоу признава, че обръща повече внимание на едни държави, отколкото на други; задълбава в едни проблеми, а други - само маркира. Така например в книгата има глава, посветена на смяната на режима в Румъния през 1944 г., а България се споменава само на няколко пъти, за да се покаже, че моделът, следван от Съветите при създаването на "приятелски" правителства в окупираните територии, в общи линии е идентичен.

Книгата е снабдена с богат научен апарат, което позволява проследяването на интересуващи ни въпроси в други книги и статии (интересно ми е например да проверя източника на Лоу за зверствата, извършвани от българските окупационни войски в Гърция - той цитира смразяваща история за игра на футбол от български войници с главата на заклан грък).

Както самият автор посочва, цитираните статистики и данни в книгата, ще срещнат съпротивата на едни и подкрепата на други. Поляците и днес отричат, че са изселвали и избивали украинци, а украинците - поляци. Изселени от загубените източни територии германци (по-скоро техни наследници) продължават да твърдят, че броят на избитите техни сънародници от Червената армия или поляци през 1944-45 г. е сравним, ако не и по-голям от този на систематично избитите от Вермахта и СС евреи и славяни. Държавите-победителки във войната все още трудно преглъщат истината, че след 1945 г. не приемат с отворени обятия завръщащите се от лагерите техни сънародници-евреи, а търсят начини (много сходни с тези на нацистите) да им намерят късче териория, за предпочитане извън Европа, където да ги отпратят. Лоу прави интересно заключение, че Хитлер би одобрил създаването на етнически хомогенни държави в Централна Европа след края на войната въз основа на принудителни изселвания.

Дори в микрокосмоса на българското общество се таи напрежение, готово да ескалира в насилие, когато заговорим за този период. Дейността на т. нар. "Народен съд" и постепенното установяване на диктатура по съветски модел ни разделя и днес. Кийт Лоу прави интересна равносметка, че на глава от населението в България са изпълнени най-много смъртни присъди срещу "врагове на народа", т.е. колаборационисти/фашисти (в държава, в която е нямало фашистко управление!). В други държави (напр. Белгия, Италия и др.) съдените и осъдените са в пъти повече, но у нас според изчисленията на британския историк процентно се стига до най-много реално изпълнени присъди. Повечето "колаборационисти" на Запад, а и не само, се разминават с по-леки присъди или биват амнистирани с времето.

Разкриването на истината за случилото се в заключителния етап на войната и непосредствено след нейния край е нелицеприятно и затова още дълго няма да виждаме обективни разкази за него. То не е удобно както за националните историци, които трябва да обяснят как съграждани се избиват помежду си, така и за тези изследователи, възхваляващи интеграцията и половинвековния европейски мир, на които пък се налага да признаят, че цената за този мир е платена с живота на избитите, изслените и накараните да замълчат в името на бъдещето европейци. Студената война идва донякъде дюшеш на следвоенните управници. На хоризоната вече има нови врагове, които изместват доскорошните такива и фокусират върху себе си общественото внимание.

Травмите от времето на войната обаче са дългосрочни и трудно могат да бъдат замазани, както пролича в бившата вече Югославия, както виждаме днес и в Украйна, а може би предстои да видим скоро и другаде. В Европа все още има достатъчно взривоопасни точки за една нова континентална война. Осъдени ли сме да повторим миналото и да се хванем отново за гушите? Според Кийт Лоу това зависи преди всичко от светоусещането ни и начина, по който разбираме миналото. Ако живеем с разбирането, че сме заобиколени от вътрешни и външни врагове, се самообричаме на "неизбежни" конфликти и насилие. Лоу завършва изследването си с цитат от "Задочните репортажи" на Георги Марков и размишления за възможността да излезем от спиралата на омразата и страха, които няма да преразказвам тук, а ще оставя на желаещите да отделят време на книгата да анализират сами.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great comprehensive view of an overlooked reality: the hellscape that was much of Europe immediately after the end of WWII, and for several years hence. It's an enormous canvas that Keith Lowe impressively covers in 400 pages. One truth that resonates is that one's view of this massive conflict tended to depend on one's nationality. Often this wasn't so much a result of untruths but simply what was emphasized. I know it was a number of years before I fully registered how much more the Russian people sacrificed than the other allied powers. Another helpful frame that he gives is that WWII had its central conflicts but that up close there were any number of more localized conflicts that often had nothing to do with the Germans. But I don't think what he aims to accomplish is any particular take on the war itself, but rather truths of human nature. As such this is an often grim, bleak book, but an enlightening one.

One of Lowe's essential themes is the state of moral collapse to be found throughout the continent. He describes a British officer's account of entering a building to find Italian women lined up facing a wall with tins of food beside them. The American and British soldiers there were offered sex for merely adding tins to the piles. The scene was so squalid that the officer says most of the soldiers lost any enthusiasm for it. Food, the lack of it, was the driver of what often seemed a complete eroding of dignity, pride, humanity. And this early scene is tame compared to much of what is described. The occurrence of rape on a massive scale is widely known, in particular (though not exclusively by any means) by the Red Army when they first breached Germany or territories controlled by Germany during the war. There are several truly sickening firsthand accounts of this, as well as discussion of the wider social implications--such as a policy of outright denial of this phenomenon in Germany and Hungary that lasted decades. Lowe also shows how the general moral degeneration rippled outward; he quotes an editorial in the Daily Express so alarmist about German teenagers and children left after the war that it essentially advocates either sterilization or extermination.

Another underplayed topic that Lowe covers is Jewish revenge after the war. This was never systematic or widespread but it did happen. When death camps were liberated, allied soldiers were often so shocked and disgusted by the reality that they began to execute German soldiers who had surrendered, and sometimes gave the surviving Jewish prisoners cart blanche to take whatever revenge they wished. There are accounts of American, British, and Russian forces who told surviving Jews they had 24 hours to do whatever they wanted, not only in the camps but nearby German towns or villages. Some took up this offer. And there were a few organized bands of Jews with the express purpose of avenging themselves on Germans, sometimes targeting war criminals and sometimes any Germans they came across. This phenomenon was fairly ephemeral, the allies soon saw the need for some sense of order, and many Jews soon decided to write off Europe as a whole and focus on escaping to Palestine. But it's a fascinating topic that is seldom explored. Most striking to me was mention of a book by one John Sack in the '90s on this subject that was so controversial that publishers in the U.S. and Europe reneged on publishing deals and the author, Jewish himself, was attacked as anti-semitic for daring to write it. I was curious enough to look up the book on Goodreads; the consensus seems to be that it is badly written but well documented, and there are only a handful of GR reviews, which indicates the resistance of publishers had quite an effect.

Although not a Holocaust book per se, Lowe can't fail to note that while the war had innumerable victims, the Jews have to be considered apart from the rest. They faced hatred from literally all sides. It's no wonder so many quit Europe for good. I have read comment threads on Goodreads where it is denied that there was a particularly virulent hatred of Jews in Poland, but this book indicates otherwise. After the war there were violent pogroms in Poland that invoked the age old slander of blood libel as an excuse, the most notorious in Kielce. As Lowe writes:

Many survivors who had gone back to Poland after the war now returned to Germany on the grounds that it was safer in the country that had originally persecuted them than it was at home. The stories they told dissuaded others from making the same journey. "The Poles are killing all the Jews returning from the camps."

There is a particularly chilling anecdote of a camp survivor, liberated by the Russian army, who later approaches a Russian soldier on a road with a friendly greeting, only to have the soldier call him a filthy Jew, rob him, then point a gun at his head and pull the trigger, which doesn't fire. The soldier then gets on his bicycle and leaves. The camp survivor says for the rest of his life he won't know if the gun was empty or if it jammed and the soldier meant to kill him. And here is one of the saddest testimonies in the book:

The eleven-year-old Celina Lieberman tried to keep her Jewish identity alive despite being hastily fostered out to a Christian couple in Ukraine in 1942. She used to apologize to God each night for accompanying her new parents to church, because she solemnly believed herself to be the last Jew alive.

The matter of retribution generally was inconsistent and arbitrary. One of the most common forms was the public humiliation of women who slept with German soldiers; several countries enacted spectacles of forcibly stripping them and shaving their heads in front of jeering crowds. As horrible as this is, especially given that this seems to have stemmed from wounded national pride more than actual evidence of collaboration, Lowe makes the point that it seemed to serve a purpose of easing tensions in many communities, and was one of the less violent forms of retribution. Still, the scapegoating misogyny of it is pretty awful. Children born from these assignations had it even worse. Norway seems to be the only country to have widely studied and reported on these children, and it isn't pretty. They were shunned by communities, often by their own parents, frequently mislabeled as mentally deficient and institutionalized, and grew up to have lives of less education, worse jobs, and greater psychological problems.

Political purges of collaborators were disappointingly weak and irresolute, particularly in Italy, which having had a 'legitimate' fascist government had little motivation to pursue war crimes. But an overriding factor in this was simply the other allied powers looking warily at Stalin's Russia and not wanting to do his Communist ambitions any favors. A fascinating contrast can be made between Romania and Greece. For advocates of International Communism, you can imagine a slide show in two parts: part 1, Romania: How to Do It, and part 2, Greece: How NOT to Do It. Romania post-war went from a fledgling democracy to a hardline Stalinist state in a lightning-fast six months. The methods were brutal and ruthless but involved much more threat of violence than actual violence. Immoral but accomplished without a bloodbath. Then there was Greece, about which I have to admit I was almost wholly ignorant of its wartime and post-war experience. The Greek partisans, most consequently the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its military wing the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS), were highly effective fighting the Germans, and mostly represented the Greek Communist Party. EAM were highly organized and had impressive accomplishments in land reform and food distribution during the war, which explains why this was a rare case in Europe where the Communists enjoyed genuine popularity. But EAM were also insanely ideologically rigid and almost invited the right wing backlash which inevitably came, plus they made a series of political blunders. I don't have space to detail it here, but Greece descended into civil war, the allies (mainly the British) sided against ELAM, and the Communists were crushed. Greece had 25 years of right wing rule including seven years of military dictatorship, and as Lowe notes, As late as the 1960s there were still hundreds of men and women in Greek prisons whose only crime was to have been members of the resistance groups that fought against the Germans.

There's much more I don't have space for. Sickening levels of hideous violence in mutual reprisals between Poles and Ukrainians. The fact that by one account, nearly half of the Croatians, Bosnians, and Slovenians who surrendered to Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia were murdered. But I want to briefly mention Lithuania, another nation whose wartime experience I knew nothing of. Lithuania's 'forest brothers' (also in lesser numbers in Latvia and Estonia) waged one of the more organized and effective guerilla campaigns against Russian domination, of course by sheer Russian numerical superiority was doomed to fail. But some of these partisans stayed in the forests for years--it took twelve years to defeat them--and a handful were only caught and arrested in the 1970s. One partisan was hidden in a woman's home for 30 years and died of natural causes in 1986.

Anyway this is an excellent corrective to the simplified classroom summary of The war was terrible, then it ended, the U.S. instituted the Marshall Plan, and all was fine again. Recommended.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Эпохальная экскурсия по Зоне - Европе в первые года после Второй мировой. Здесь много ключей к Пинчону, начиная с "За нулем": "The Germans call the months after the war Stunde nul (‘Zero Hour’) – the implication being that it was a time when the slate was wiped clean, and history allowed to start again." Насчет табулы-расы, конечно, неправда, но идея такая была.

Множество деталей, которые только подтверждают точность Пинчона в описании послевоенной Германии: тут и массовые марши ПЛ, и черные американские солдаты, возвращающиеся то ли из плена, то ли из увольнения, и озверевшие криминализованные дети, и массовые изнасилования немецких женщин марокканцами и суданцами (не только советскими солдатами, т.е.).

Понятно, что здесь мимоходом разоблачается советская и нынешняя скрепная ложь о советской армии-освободительнице, которая была, в общем, ничем не лучше немецкой армии-поработительницы. Буквально к каждому "пункту обвинения" применима такая фраза: "As always, the problem was far, far worse on the eastern front than it was in the west." Средневековые зверства советской армии описываются вполне всесторонне и документированно, а не стыдливо замалчиваются или преуменьшаются, как бывает обычно на уроках истории, где не читают Гроссмана, Копелева или Солженицына (про гитлеровцев я, понятно, не говорю, потому что это известно лучше - так вышло, что историю писали победители, как известно, но в итоге в выигрыше остаются побежденные). "The true horror, as usual, occurred not in the west but in the east."

И читать ее сейчас, конечно, очень своевременно, когда "россияне" систематически и методично уничтожают Украину оптом и в розницу. Бессмысленно. Воплощенное зло.  Правда, та сволочь, которая поддерживает войну (даже молчаливо), читать это все равно не будет - и по большинству не узнает, что делает война с обитаемым миром и как калечит даже обычного человека, потому что расчеловечены оказываются все, даже те, кто в белейших пальто. И еще неизвестно, в какой Европе нам жить предстоит, поскольку кремлевское умертвие и его свору вовремя не остановили. Зато в общем известно, как себя вести.

Но уроки скверной истории - это для обычных думающих людей, от которых, как правило, мало что зависит даже в отлаженных механизмах демократического управления ("лучше ничего не придумали", да). Сволочь, добившаяся власти, как правило, уже необучаема. А еще одна трогательная особенность всего этого текста в том, что Украину и Белоруссию наш исследователь числит в составе Европы, а вот Россию-то нет. И недаром: становится понятно, что нынешний бесславный поход орды - все-таки еще одно неразрешенное и отсроченное следствие Второй мировой войны (хотя самому автору война российско-фашистского режима с украинским народом и помститься не могла). Но вот о европейском победобесии он говорит отдельно (нет, это не рашистское изобретение).

И еще одно зияние я обнаружил: Даниэль Кон-Бендит у него почему-то называется "левым противником венгерского правительства", не больше и не меньше. На самом деле, у нет отношения к "венгерскому правительству" - похоже, он просто очень против режима Орбана, что, в общем, не фокус.

[Gisela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate the approach with which this is written: it accepts there are many other opinions and statements of ‘fact’, and tries to give a balanced view of what actually happened.
When I first opened this, I saw it as hard-work. It was not. I never at any time was searching for ‘where and when’. It reads easy and keeps you on track. A blessing: I’m not too scholarly and so often struggle.
We are, all too frequently, reminded of the happiness that was felt on VE Day and how all gave thanks to the end of the death and destruction.
I’d an awareness of the vengeance wielded against collaborators, but little else.
My family have talked of this, but only in a casual and trivialising manner. My great-grandfather was, apparently, most political in his day, as was my grandfather. There is so much in this about the awfulness of post-war Italy. I must choose my moment and ask why.
The surge in ethnic cleansing and anti-Semitic violence across Europe surprised me. After the years and years of a most bloody war, I would have guessed most would just want to find a little peace.
I accept, I do not condone, the violence dealt by soldiers, to soldiers, in the immediate aftermath, but to know civilians, women and children, were killed, raped, abused for years and years afterward is saddening.
For me, one of the most amazing insights is the talk of how civil war followed without a let up: ‘The Civil War’ in Greece raged for a further five years. ‘The Terror’ - Anti-Soviet Resistance. Partisans, in the Baltics, ‘The Forest Brothers’, and how they continued the fight against the Red Army into the 1950s.
The war in Europe did not end in 1945, as I had always believed, and the aftermath saw the death of thousands upon thousands.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had originally planned on reading this immediately after I finished the Antony Beevor book on WWII, but frankly by the time I finished that book I felt I needed a break from man's inhumanity to man. It turns out that that was a good call, because the months leading up to the end of the war in Europe through the following several years are filled with genocide, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, murder, mass deportations or mandatory expulsions, starvation, etc., in virtually every part of Europe to one extent or another. In many instances, it appears that the most important lesson learned from Nazi occupation was how to torture and kill as many of one's perceived enemies as possible, and as quickly as possible.

It's funny how Americans can romanticize so-called European cosmopolitanism and culture, when in reality their brand of nationalism is just tribalism on a grander scale, and the veneer of "civilization" is razor thin and easily shed. Another thought I had was how morality and ethics were luxuries for the well-fed but had no place in a world bleaker than anything Cormac McCarthy could envision, as they were also shed with alacrity when push came to shove.

While the subject matter is grim, it is also under-reported and should be more widely understood as part of the true and complete story of WWII. This book will certainly dispel some of the fanciful notions some of us have regarding the "Greatest Generation."

BTW, the writing is excellent.

[Olethros · Rating 4 out of 5]

-De lo que destruyó la guerra, azotando mitos y arrojando luz a hechos oscurecidos.-

Género. Ensayo.

Lo que nos cuenta. Trabajo histórico, especialmente centrado en el periodo entre 1944 y 1949, sobre diferentes eventos transcurridos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y varios años después de su finalización en distintas localizaciones del Viejo Continente que incluyen limpiezas étnicas, enfrentamientos civiles, venganzas, hambre y destrucción material, moral y social.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

World War II ravaged the European Continent and the Continent wasn't suddenly un-ravaged on May 8, 1945. Years of vengeful actions, civil wars, national tensions, ethnic expulsions, and forced assimilations ensued. Keith Lowe covers the history of the immediate aftermath of World War II through the beginning of the Cold War. An important and interesting history!

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an important corrective to a belief that I suspect many Americans hold subconsciously. Somehow, we hazily picture that after May 1945, with the war over, everyone went home and got on with the business of starting families, buying home appliances, driving cars with tailfins, and so forth. While this might be sort of true for some Americans, the war's aftermath carried on in Europe for years after 1945--a ravaged continent seething with chaos and conflict.

Glossing over a huge amount of detail, there are few themes that come through here very brightly. Most importantly, it was not going to be easy to close the barn door on the idea that ethnic groups should have discrete places to live. (The allies did not fundamentally disapprove of this, even if you or I might. Just hearken back to the Munich conference and decision to let Germany take part of Czechoslovakia, the topic of one of my recent reads.) The end of the war did not stop attempts to create ethnic states; in the short term there were continued massive movements and dispossessions of people. "Between 1945 and 1947 tens of millions of men, women and children were expelled from their countries in some of the biggest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen." (loc. 152) Members of smaller or multiethnic groups did not come out well in these arrangements, which were often handed down from on high in a willfully obtuse style similar to colonial mapmaking. Huge numbers of orphans and lost children were shuttled around based on their perceived ethnicity (a topic covered in more detail in The Lost Children).

Meanwhile, the population was nearly starving, "reduced to living, as one American columnist described it, ‘in medieval fashion surrounded by the broken-down machinery of the twentieth century’." (pg. 8). Mismanagement of food having been used as a weapon during the war to kill undesirable groups, in the war's aftermath survivors were forced to confront their own moral boundaries when attempting to obtain sustenance. The logistics were daunting. "Swarms of refugees, speaking twenty different languages, were obliged to negotiate a transport network that had been bombed, mined and neglected through six years of war. [...] That the various military governments and aid agencies were able to round up the majority of these people, feed them, clothe them, locate missing relatives and then repatriate most of them within the next six months is nothing short of a miracle." (pg. 32)

Camps did not end in 1945. Prisoner of war and displaced person camps persisted in various forms for years; some of them lacked any kind of shelter and were just open land "enclosed within a barbed-wire cordon" (pg. 114). Hundreds of thousands of Soviet war prisoners died, though different observers with different agendas can't come close to agreeing on how many.

Revenge is also a major theme here. Occupying forces sometimes thought that letting off a certain amount of steam was unavoidable, even beneficial in a way. The savagery of the war seemed to fundamentally change people's attitudes towards society and authority. "Indeed, many DPs had become so cynical that ‘nothing that is done even by helpful people is regarded as genuine or sincere’." (pg 105) Meanwhile, the violence of the war also gave cover to side conflicts that were based on ethnicity or ancient disputes rather than territory or politics; the defeat of Germany did not instantly end these. Finally, this book gave me a new perspective on how Communism--with its calls to unity and emphasis on pan-European Communist identity--served to temporarily tamp down conflicts and vendettas that erupted again in shockingly similar form after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If you are interested in World War II, you have doubtless read a great deal about the period before the war broke out. This immediate post-war period, which is more influential on our present day society and politics, is much less well-known--probably because it is messier and more controversial to us. This book is an acute and well-written account.

[Linda Raber · Rating 1 out of 5]

It would be difficult to find a history that promises more than "Savage Continent" and delivers less. Keith Lowe boasts that his book is the first to bring real statistical rigor to bear on the study of economic, social, political, and spiritual devastation of post-war Europe. He does no such thing. What he does bring to the table is a stilted and gravely serious academic tone.

Trivial anecdotal and obviously cherry-picked data are claimed to be authoritative for no other reason than the author says they are. Wild conclusions are drawn from breathtaking extrapolations of strangely selected sources.

I do not understand the outpouring of praise this book has garnered from very respectable critics, nor can I imagine "Savage Continent" receiving the prestigious awards it has.

I stopped after reading about one-third of this book figuring that I had better things to do with my short time on this planet.

[Brendan Hodge · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a narrative that WW2 is the good war: fought against literal Nazis, and followed up with a merciful treatment of the defeated, the which mercy prevented another war. Lowe's Savage Continent is a useful corrective to this view, showing the allies often allowed or even engaged in terrible behavior after the war, and that the peaceful Europe we all see now did not emerge quickly from the chaos and brutality of total war. At the same time, Lowe has no time for those who seek to make excuses for the Nazis or portray them as equal sufferers.

[K.M. Weiland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly insightful overview of the continuing horrors post-WWII that most of us tend to overlook. Difficult to read at times, but extremely important.