Tony Judt: Postwar

At 933 pages, Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005; paperback, 2006, Penguin Press) is a big book on a huge subject. He does a masterful job of pulling together the main political, economic, and cultural threads, starting with the devastation of WWII and the postwar reconstruction -- literally, of course, but also structurally through the cold war division and the emergence of a distinct and ultimately unifying European identity. A marvelous synthesis, the starting point for thinking about post-WWII Europe.

I could have quoted much more than the quite-a-bit I do quote below. The most striking things for me were the immediate postwar period. From the vantage point of subsequent recovery, we tend to gloss over the extent of the devastation and the bitterness of recriminations. In particular, the "greatest generation" myth has left us thinking that the US did something brilliant in the postwar rebuilding of Germany and Japan, whereas the facts here and in John Dower's Embracing Defeat suggest we were just damn lucky. Such myths then inspire our neo-interventionists to think we can apply that same genius to places like Afghanistan and Iraq -- in fact, we never had much of a knack for telling others how to live, and to shift from the most left to the most right administrations in US history disposed of the good will that made our luck possible.

So I've tended to pick quotes thinking of now rather than attempting to cover the book evenly -- a task impossible with any breadth at all.

From the introduction (p. 6):

In the West the prospect of radical change was smoothed away, not least thanks to american aid (and pressure). The appeal of the popular-front agenda -- and of Communism -- faded: both were prescriptions for hard times and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard. And so, in the decades that followed, the uncertainties of the immediate post-war years were forgotten. But the possibility that things might take a different turn -- indeed, the likelihood that they would take a different turn -- had seemed very real in 1945; it was to head off a return to the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) that western Europe took the new path with which we are now familiar. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.

This becomes easier to grasp when we recall that authorities in the Soviet bloc were in essence engaged in the same project. They, too, were above all concerned to install a barrier against political backsliding -- though in countries under Communist rule this was to be secured not so much by social progress as through the application of physical force. Recent history was re-written -- and citizens were encouraged to forget it -- in accordance with the assertion that a Communist-led social revolution had definitively erased not just the shortcomings of the past but also the conditions that had made them possible. As we shall see, this claim was also a myth; at best a half-truth.

Some of what WWII wrought (pp. 18-19):

The overall death toll is staggering (the figures given here do not include Japanese, US or other non-European dead). It dwarfs the mortality figure for the Great War of 1914-18, obscene as those were. No other conflict in recorded history killed so many people in so short a time. But what is most striking of all is the number of non-combatant civilians among the dead: at least 19 million, or more than half. The numbers of civilian dead exceeded military losses in the USSR, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. Only the in the UK and Germany did military losses significantly outnumber civilian ones.

Estimates of civilian losses on the territory of the Soviet Union vary greatly, though the likeliest figure is in excess of 16 million people (roughly double the number of Soviet military losses, of whom 78,000 fell in the battle for Berlin alone). Civilian deaths on the territory of pre-war Poland approached 5 million; in Yugoslavia 1.4 million; in Greece 430,000; in France 350,000; in Hungary 270,000; in the Netherlands 204,000; in Romania 200,000. Among these, and especially prominent in the Polish, Dutch and Hungarian figures, were some 5.7 million Jews, to whom should be added 221,000 gypsies (Roma).

The causes of death among civilians included mass extermination, in death camps and killing fields from Odessa to the Baltic; disease, malnutrition and starvation (induced and otherwise); the shooting and burning of hostages -- by the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and partisans of all kinds; reprisals against civilians; the effects of bombing, shelling and infantry battles in fields and cities, on the eastern Front throughout the war and in the West from the Normandy landings of June 1944 until the defeat of Hitler the following May; the deliberate strafing of refugee columns and the working to death of slave labourers in war industries and prison camps.

The greatest military losses were incurred by the Soviet Union, which is thought to have lost 8.6 million men and women under arms; Germany, with 4 million casualties; Italy, which lost 400,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen; and Romania, some 300,000 of whose military were killed, mostly fighting with the Axis armies on the Russian front. In proportion to their populations, however, the Austrians, Hungarians, Albanians and Yugoslavs suffered the greatest military losses. Taking all deaths -- civilian and military alike -- into account, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR and Greece were the worst affected. Poland lost about one in five of her pre-war population, including a far higher percentage of the educated population, deliberately targeted for destruction by the Nazis. Yugoslavia lost one person in eight of the country's pre-war population, the USSR one in 11, Greece one in 14. To point up the contrast, Germany suffered a rate of loss of 1/15; France 1/77; Britain 1/125.

The Soviet losses in particular include prisoners of war. The Germans captured some 5.5 million Soviet soldiers in the course of the war, three quarters of them in the first seven months following the attack on the USSR in June 1941. Of these, 3.3 million died from starvation, exposure and mistreatment in German camps -- more Russians died in German prisoner-of-war camps in the years 1941-45 than in all of World War One. Of the 750,000 Soviet soldiers captured when the Germans took Kiev in September 1941, just 22,000 lived to see Germany defeated. The Soviets in their turn took 3.5 million prisoners of war (German, Austrian, Romanian and Hungarian for the most part); most of them returned home after the war.

A long quote on populations movements during and after WWII (pp. 22-26):

The problem of feeding, housing, clothing and caring for Europe's battered civilians (and the millions of imprisoned soldiers of the former Axis powers) was complicated and magnified by the unique scale of the refugee crisis. This was something new in the European experience. All wars dislocate the lives of non-combatants; by destroying their land and their homes, by disrupting communications, by enlisting and killing husbands, fathers, sons. But in World War Two it was state policies rather than armed conflict that did the worst damage.

Stalin had continued his pre-war practice of transferring whole peoples across the Soviet empire. Well over a million people were deported east from Soviet-occupied Poland and the western Ukraine and Baltic lands between 1939-41. In the same years the Nazis too expelled 750,000 Polish peasants eastwards from western Poland, offering the vacated land to Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans from occupied eastern Europe who were invited to 'come home' to the newly-expanded Reich. This offer attracted some 120,000 Baltic Germans, a further 136,000 from Soviet-occupied Poland, 200,000 from Romania and others besides -- all of whom would in their turn be expelled a few years later. Hitler's policy of racial transfers and genocide in Germany's conquered eastern lands must thus be understood in direct relation to the Nazis' project of returning to the Reich (and settling in the newly cleared property of their victims) all the far-flung settlements of Germans dating back to medieval times. The Germans removed Slavs, exterminated Jews and imported slave workers from west and east alike.

Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43. With the retreat of the Axis armies, the process was reversed. Newly-resettled Germans joined millions of established German communities throughout eastern Europe in headlong flight from the Red Army. Those who made it safely into Germany were joined there by a pullulating throng of other displaced persons. [ . . . ]

From the east came Balts, Poles, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Hungarians, Romanians and others: some were just fleeing the horrors of war, others escaping West to avoid being caught under Communist rule. A New York Times reporter described a column of 24,000 Cossack soldiers and families moving through southern Austria, 'no different in any major detail from what an artist might have painted in the Napoleonic wars'.

From the Balkans came not just ethnic Germans but more than 100,000 Croats from the fallen wartime fascist regime of Ante Pavelic, fleeing the wrath of Tito's partisans. In Germany and Austria, in addition to the millions of Wehrmacht soldiers held by the Allies and newly released Allied soldiers from German p-o-w camps, there were many non-Germans who had fought against the Allies alongside the Germans or under German command: the Russian, Ukrainian and other soldiers of General Andrei Vlasov's anti-Soviet army; volunteers for the Waffen SS from Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France; and auxiliary German fighters, concentration camp staff and others liberally recruited in Latvia, Ukraine, Croatia and elsewhere. All had good reason to seek refuge from Soviet retribution.

Then there were the newly-released men and women who had been recruited by the Nazis to work in Germanyu. Brought into German farms and factories from all across the continent, they numbered many millions, spread across Germany proper and its annexed territories, constituting the largest single group of Nazi-displaced persons in 1945. Involuntary economic migration was thus the primary social experience of World War Two for many European civilians, including 280,000 Italians forcibly removed to Germany by their former ally after Italy's capitulation to the Allies in September 1943. [ . . . ]

Another group of displaced persons, the survivors of the concentration camps, felt rather differently. Their 'crimes' had been various -- political or religious opposition to Nazism or Fascism, armed resistance, collective punishment for attacks on Wehrmacht soldiers or installations, minor transgressions of Occupation regulations, real or invented criminal activities, falling foul of Nazi racial laws. They survived camps which by the end were piled high with dead bodies and where diseases of every kind were endemic: dysentery, TB, dipththeria, typhoid, typhus, broncho-pneumonia, gastro-enteritis, gangrene and much else. But even these survivors were better off than the Jews, since they had not been systematically and collectively scheduled for extermination.

Few Jews remained. Of those who were liberated 4 out of 10 died within a few weeks of arrival of Allied armies -- their condition was beyond the experience of Western medicine. But the surviving Jews, like most of Europe's other homeless millions, found their way into Germany. Germany was where the Allied agencies and camps were to be situated -- and anyway, eastern Europe was still not safe for Jews. After a series of post-war pogroms in Poland many of the surviving Jews left for good: 63,387 Jews arrived in Germany from Poland just between July and September 1946.

What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer. In part this was the outcome of 'voluntary' ethnic separation: Jewish survivors leaving a Poland where they were unsafe and unwanted, for example, or Italians departing the Istrian peninsula rather than live under Yugoslav rule. Many ethnic minorities who had collaborated with occupying forces (Italians in Yugoslavia, Hungarians in Hungarian-occupied northern Transylvania now returned to Romanian rule, Ukrainians in the western Soviet Union, etc.) fled with the retreating Wehrmacht to avoid retribution from the local majority or the advancing Red Army, and never returned. Their departure may not have been legally mandated or enforced by local authorities, but they had little option.

Elsewhere, however, official policy was at work well before the war ended. The Germans of course began this, with the removal and genocide of the Jews, and the mass expulsions of Poles and other Slav nations. Under German aegis between 1939 and 1943 Romanians and Hungarians shunted back and forth across new frontier lines in disputed Transylvania. The Soviet authorities in their turn engineered a series of forced population exchanges between Ukraine and Poland; one million Poles fled or were expelled from their homes in what was now western Ukraine, while half a million Ukrainians left Poland for the Soviet Union between October 1944 and June 1946. In the course of a few months what had once been an intermixed region of different faiths, languages and communities became two distinct, mono-ethnic territories.

Bulgaria transferred 160,000 Turks to Turkey; Czechoslovakia, under a February 1946 agreement with Hungary, exchanged the 120,000 Slovaks living in Hungary for an equivalent number of Hungarians from communities north of the Danube, in Slovakia. Other transfers of this kind took place between Poland and Lithuania and between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union; 400,000 people from southern Yugoslavia were moved to land in the north to take the place of 600,000 departed Germans and Italians. Here as elsewhere, the populations concerned were not consulted. But the largest affected group was the Germans.

The Germans of eastern Europe would probably have fled west in any case: by 1945 they were not wanted in the countries where their families had been settled for many hundreds of years. Between a genuine popular desire to punish local Germans for the ravages of war and occupation, and the exploitation of this mood by post-war governments, the German-speaking communities of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic region and the western Soviet Union were doomed and they knew it.

In any event, they were given no choice. As early as 1942 the British had private acceded to Czech requests for a post-war removal of the Sudeten German population, and the Russians and Americans fell into line the following year. On May 19th 1945, President Edouard Benes of Czechoslovakia decreed that 'we have decided to eliminate the German problem in our republic once and for all'. Germans (as well as Hungarians and other 'traitors') were to have their property placed under state control. In June 1945 their land was expropriated and on August 2nd of that year they lost their Czechoslovak citizenship. Nearly three million Germans, most of them from the Czech Sudetenland, were then expelled into Germany in the course of the following eighteen months. Approximately 267,000 died in the course of the expulsions. Whereas Germans had comprised 29 percent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia in 1930, by the census of 1950 they were just 1.8 percent.

From Hungary, a further 623,000 Germans were expelled, from Romania 786,000, from Yugoslavia about half a million and from Poland 1.3 million. But by far the greatest number of German refugees came from the former eastern lands of Germany itself: Silesia, East Prussia, eastern Pomerania and eastern Brandenburg. At the Potsdam meeting of the US, Britain and the USSR (July 17th-August 2nd 1945) it was agreed, in the words of Article XIII of the subsequent agreement, that the three governments 'recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken.' In part this merely recognized what had already taken place, but it also represented a formal acknowledgement of the implications of shifting Poland's frontiers westwards. Some seven million Germans would now find themselves in Poland, and the Polish authorities (and the occupying Soviet forces) wanted them removed -- in part so that Poles and others who lost land in the eastern regions now absorbed into the USSR could in their turn be resettled in the new lands to the west.

This is the context within which the Israel's transfers occurred: the exile of 700,000 Palestinians in 1947-49, and the subsequent immigration of Jews from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; one can also add India-Pakistan, which occurred at the same time, and Turkey-Greece from around 1920. There are reasons why Palestine should have been handled differently, but it's also arguable that the UN approval of partition implicitly mandated transfer. Britain had proposed, and the Zionist authorities had accepted, partition with forced transfer in 1937, before the Palestinian revolt forced some backpeddling. The forced transfers in Europe set the rule and made clear the assumptions that the Zionists would apply in 1948. On the other hand, the UN wasn't explicit, and started to back down almost as soon as Palestinian Arab leaders rejected partition -- Israel likes to point out that the UN approved Israel's founding in 1947, but not that Israel rebuffed every effort the UN made to negotiate a mutually acceptable settlement -- most dramatically when the UN negotiator was assassinated -- and that Israel has never honored UN resolutions calling for the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in peace.

Given the persistence of the nationalism, anti-semitism, and the general atmosphere of such transfers, it's easy to understand why Jews in Palestine felt entitled to their piece of the action, especially once they were strong enough to make it happen. On the other hand, Palestine was most clearly the responsibility of the UN, and the UN was created specifically to move the world past ideologies like nationalism that had led to world war. Palestine turned out to be the first big test of whether the UN could steer the world in a different direction; as such, it was the first case where the UN failed, reverting to politics as usual.

More on population transfer (p. 27):

At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. [Footnote: With the significant exception of Greeks and Turks, following the Lausanne Treaty of 1923.] After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moed instead. There was a feeling among Western policymakers that the League of Nations, and the minority clauses in the Versailes Treaties, had failed and that it would be a mistake even to try to resurrect them. For this reason they acquiesced readily enough in the population transfers. If the surviving minorities of central and eastern Europe could not be afforded effective international protection, then it was as well that they be dispatched to more accommodating locations. The term 'ethnic cleansing' did not yet exist, but the reality surely did -- and it was far from arousing wholesale disapproval or embarrassment.

The exception, as so often, was Poland. The geographical re-arrangement of Poland -- losing 69,000 square miles of its eastern borderlands to the Soviet Union and being compensated with 40,000 square miles of rather better land from German territories east of the Oder-Neisse rivers -- was dramatic and consequential for Poles, Ukrainians and Germans in the affected lands. But in the circumstances of 1945 it was unusual, and should rather be understood as part of the general territorial adjustment that Stalin imposed all along the western rim of his empire: recovering Bessarabia from Romania, seizing the Bukovina and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia from Romania and Czechoslovakia respectively, absorbing the Baltic states into the Soviet Union and retaining the Karelian peninsula, seized from Finland during the war.

West of the new Soviet frontiers there was little change. Bulgaria recovered a sliver of land from Romania in the Dobrudja region; the Czechoslovaks obtained from Hungary (a defeated Axis power and thus unable to object) three villages on the right bank of the Danube opposite Bratislava; Tito was able to hold on to part of the formerly Italian territory around Trieste and in Venezia Giulia that his forces occupied at the end of the war. Otherwise land seized by force between 1938 and 1945 was returned and the status quo ante restored.

With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever before.

On Jews in Europe (pp. 31-32):

The problem of the Jews was distinctive. At first the Western authorities treated Jewish DPs like any other, coralling them in camps in Germany alongside many of their former persecutors. But in August 1945 President Truman announced that separate facilities should be provided for all Jewish DPs in the American Zone of Germany: in the words of a report the President had commissioned to look into the problem, the previously integrated camps and centers were 'a distinctly unrealistic approach to the problem. Refusal to recognize the Jews as such has the effect . . . of closing one's eyes to their former and more barbaric persecution.' By the end of September 1945, all Jews in the US Zone were being cared for separately.

There had never been any question of returning Jews to the east -- no-one in the Soviet Union, Poland or anywhere else evinced the slightest interest in having them back. Nor were Jews particularly welcome in the west, especially if educated or qualified in non-manual professions. And so they remained, ironically enough, in Germany. The difficulty of 'placing' the Jews of Europe was only solved by the creation of the state of Israel: between 1948 and 1951 332,000 European Jews left for Israel, either from IRO centers in Germany or else directly from Romania, Poland, and elsewhere, in the case of those still left in those countries. A further 165,000 eventually left for France, Britain, Australia and North or South America.

The war in Greece, extending in to longer-term left-right struggle (p. 35):

Further south, Greece -- like Yugoslavia -- experienced World War Two as a cycle of invasion, occupation, resistance, reprisals and civil war, culminating in five weeks of clashes in Athens between Communists and the royalist-backing British forces in December 1944, after which an armistice was agreed upon in February 1945. Fighting broke out again in 1946, however, and lasted three more years, ending with the rout of the Communists from their strongholds in the mountainous north. While there is no doubt that the Greek resistance to the Italians and the Germans was more effective than the better known resistance movements in France or Italy -- in 1943-44 alone it killed or wounded over 6,000 German soldiers -- the harm it brought to the Greeks themselves was greater still by far. The KKE (Communist) guerillas and the Athens-based and western-backed government of the king terrorized villages, destroyed communications and divided the country for decades to come. By the time the fighting was over, in September 1949, 10 percent of the population was homeless. The Greek civil war lacked many of the ethnic complexities of the fighting in Yugoslavia and Ukraine, but in human terms it was costlier still.

On Nazi war crimes trials (p. 54):

It is thus hard to know how far the trials of Nazis contributed to the political and moral re-education of Germany and the Germans. They were certainly resented by many as 'victors' justice', and that is just what they were. But they were also real trials of real criminals for demonstrably criminal behaviour and they set a vital precedent for international jurisprudence in decades to come. The trials and investigations of the years 1945-48 (when the UN War Crimes Commission was disbanded) put an extraordinary amount of documentation and testimony on record (notably concerning the German project to exterminate Europe's Jews) at the very moment when Germans and others were most disposed to forget as fast as they could. They made clear that crimes committed by individuals for ideological or state purposes were nonetheless the responsibility of individuals and punishable under law. Following orders was not a defense.

On denazification programs (p. 56):

The real problem with any consistent programme aimed at rooting out Nazism from German life was that it was simply not practicable in the circumstances of 1945. In the words of General Lucius Clay, the American Military Commander, 'our major administrative problem was to find reasonably competent Germans who had not been affiliated or associated in some way with the Nazi regime . . . All too often, it seems that the only men with the qualifications . . . are the career civil servants . . . a great proportion of whom were more than nominal participants (by our definition) in the activities of the Nazi Party.'

Clay did not exaggerate. On May 8th 1945, when the war in Europe ended, there were 8 million Nazis in Germany. In Bonn, 102 out of 112 doctors were or had been Party members. In the shattered city of Cologne, of the 21 specialists in the city waterworks office -- whose skills were vital for the reconstruction of water and sewage systems and in the prevention of disease -- 18 had been Nazis. Civil administration, public health, urban reconstruction and private enterprise in post-war Germany would inevitably be undertaken by men like this, albeit under Allied supervision. There could be no question of simply expunging them from German affairs.

More (p. 57):

Germans in the 1940s had little sense of the way the rest of the world saw them. They had no grasp of what they and their leaders had done and were more preoccupied with their own post-war difficulties -- food shortages, housing shortages and the like -- than the sufferings of their victims across occupied Europe. Indeed they were more likely to see themselves in the role of victim and thus regarded trials and other confrontations with Nazi crimes as the victorious Allies' revenge on a defunct regime. With certain honorable exceptions, Germany's post-war political and religious authorities offered scant contradiction to this view, and the country's natural leaders -- in the liberal professions, the judiciary, the civil service -- were the most compromised of all.

And more (p. 58):

Opinion poll data from the immediate post-war years confirm the limited impact of Allied efforts. In October 1946, when the Nuremberg Trial ended, only 6 percent of Germans were willing to admit that they thought it had been 'unfair', but four years later one in three took this view. That they felt this way should come as no surprise, since throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that 'Nazism was a good idea, badly applied'. In November 1946, 37 per cent of Germans questioned in a survey of the American zone took the view that 'the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans'.

In the same poll of November 1946, one German in three agreed with the proposition that 'Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race'. This is not especially surprising, given that respondents had just emerged from twelve years under an authoritarian government committed to this view. What does surprise is a poll taken six years later in which a slightly higher percentage of West Germans -- 37 percent -- affirmed that it was better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory. But then in that same year (1952) 25 percent of West Germans admitted to having a 'good opinion' of Hitler.

Eventually, the lessons of denazification did sink in, but it was more with the postwar generation than with those who supported Hitler at the time. And the reason probably had much less to do with what the denazification programme had to say than with the fact that the postwar era allowed Germany to rebuild and prosper where the Nazis had ultimately brought only defeat and despair. When Germany was ruined and starving, denazification was further punishment; in a prosperous Germany, Nazism became useless and unfashionable baggage.

The US patterned the Iraq debaathification program after the mythical German success. It failed for numerous reasons, especially because life got harder for most Iraqis in post-Saddam Iraq.

On the origins of the welfare state (p. 72):

But the 'welfare state' -- social planning -- was more than just a prophylactic against political upheaval. Our present discomfort with notions of race, eugenics, 'degeneration' and the like obscures the important part these played in European public thinking during the first half of the twentieth century: it wasn't only the Nazis who took such matters seriously. By 1945 two generations of European doctors, anthropologists, public health officials and political commentators had contributed to widespread debates and polemics about 'race health', population growth, environmental and occupational well-being and the public policies through which these might be improved and secured. There was a broad consensus that the physical and moral condition of the citizenry was a matter of common interest and therefore part of the responsibility of the state.

As a consequence, rudimentary welfare provisions of one kind or another were already widespread before 1945, although their quality and reach varied widely. Germany was typically the most advanced country, having already instituted pension, accident and medical insurance schemes under Bismarck, between 1883 and 1889. But other countries began to catch up in the years immediately before and after World War One. Embryonic national insurance and pension schemes were introduced in Britain by Asquith's Liberal governments in the first decade of the century; and both Britain and France established ministries of health immediately following the end of the Great War, in 1919 and 1920 respectively.

On punishing Germany (pp. 105-106):

So far as Germany was concerned -- and 85 percent of the American war effort had gone on the war against Germany -- the initial American intent was quite severe. A directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, JCS 1067, was presented to President Truman on April 26th 1945, two weeks after Roosevelt's death. Reflecting the views of, among others, Henry Morgenthau, the US Secretary of the Treasury, it recommended that:

'It should be brought home to the Germans that Germany's ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance has destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation'. Or, as Morgenthau himself put it, 'It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation.'

The point, in short, was to avoid one of the major mistakes of the Versailles Treaty, as it seemed in retrospect to the policy makers of 1945: the failure to bring home to Germans the extent of their sins and the nemesis visited upon them. The logic of this initial American approach to the German question was thus demilitarization, denazification, deindustrialization -- to strip Germany of her military and economic resources and re-educate the population. This policy was duly applied, at least in part: the Wehrmacht was formally dissolved (on August 20th 1946); denazification programs were set in place in the US-occupied zone especially, as we saw in Chapter Two; and strict limits were placed upon German industrial capacity and output, with steel-making particularly severely restricted under the March 1946 'Plan for the Level of the Post-War (German) Economy'.

But from the outset the 'Morgenthau strategy' was vigorously criticized within the US Administration itself. What good would be served by reducing (American-controlled) Germany to a virtually pre-industrial condition? Most of pre-war Germany's best agricultural land was now under Soviet control or else had been transferred to Poland. Meanwhile western Germany was awash in refugees who had access neither to land nor food. Restrictions on urban or industrial output might keep Germany prostrate but they wouldn't feed it or rebuild it. That burden, a very considerable one, would fall on the victorious occupiers. Sooner or later they would need to offload this responsibility onto Germans themselves, at which point the latter would have to be allowed to rebuild their economy.

To these considerations, American critics of the initial US 'hard' line added a further consideration. It was all very well forcibly bringing Germans to a consciousness of their own defeat, but unless they were given some prospect of a better future the outcome might be the same as before: a resentful, humiliated nation vulnerable to demagogy from Right or Left. As former President Herbert Hoover expressed it to Truman himself, in 1946, 'You can have vengeance, or peace, but you can't have both.' If, in American treatment of Germany, the balance of advantage swung increasingly to 'peace' this was largely due to the darkening prospect for US Soviet relations.

In retrospect, we like to think that enlightened, constructive occupation was just the American way -- proof that we always knew better than the vindictive Versailles settlement that ended the First and effectively started the Second World War. As this quote shows, that outcome was not inevitable, and was largely a pragmatic response to the cold war, and even more simply by our desire not to foot the costs of occupation. Moreover, a big part of why this worked was that the Soviets acted out the "bad cop" role so convincingly that our "good cop" appeared tolerable. (This was especially true with Japan, who surrendered quickly enough after the Soviet Union declared war to avoid being partitioned like Germany. Korea was not so lucky.)

The cold war arms race as economic stimulus (pp. 151-152):

The scale of Western rearmament was dramatic indeed. The US defense budget rose from $15.5 billion in August 1950 to $70 billion by December of the following year, following President Truman's declaration of a National Emergency. By 1952-53 defense expenditure consumed 17.8 percent of the US GNP, compared with just 4.7 percent in 1949. In response to Washington's request, America's allies in NATO also increased their defense spending: after falling steadily since 1946, British defense costs rose to nearly 10 percent of GNP in 1951-52, growing even faster than in the hectic rearmament of the immediate pre-war years. France, too, increased defense spending to comparable levels. In every NATO member state, defense spending increased to a post-war peak in the years 1951-53.

The economic impact of this sudden leap in military investment was equally unprecedented. Germany especially was flooded with orders for machinery, tools, vehicles, and other products that the Federal Republic was uniquely well-placed to supply, all the more so because the West Germans were forbidden to manufacture arms and could thus concentrate on everything else. West German steel output alone, 2.5 million tonnes in 1946 and 9 million tonnes in 1949, grew to nearly 15 million tonnes by 1953. The dollar deficit with Europe and the rest of the world fell by 65 percent in the course of a single year, as the United States spent huge sums overseas on arms, equipment stockpiles, military emplacements and troops.

The same thing happened with Japan as a result of the Korean War. This all created the illusion that war was good for business, which in turn gave neither side much incentive for toning the conflict down. This was especially true in the West, where memory of the Great Depression was still strong, and even diehard capitalists came to see military spending as acceptable Keynesianism.

Stalin and the Jews (pp. 182-183):

The first victims were the Jewish leaders of the wartime Anti-Fascist Committee itself. Solomon Mikhoels, its prime mover and a major figure in Russia's Yiddish Teatre, was murdered on January 12th 1948. The arrival in Moscow of Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir on September 11th 1948 was the occasion for spontaneous outbursts of Jewish enthusiasm, with street demonstrations on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kipput and chants of 'Next Year in Jerusalem' outside the Israeli legation. This would have been provocative and unacceptable to Stalin at any time. But he was rapidly losing his enthusiasm for the new State of Israel: whatever its vaguely socialist proclivities it clearly had no intention of becoming a Soviet ally in the region: worse, the Jewish state was demonstrating alarmingly pro-American sensibilities at a sensitive moment. The Berlin blockade had just begun and the Soviet split with Tito was entering its acute phase.

Western intellectual affection for communism (pp. 216-217):

But there was more to intellectual Russophilia than this. It is important to recall what was happening just a few miles to the east. Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of 'goulash Communism' or 'Socialism with a human face', but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935-39 and 1944-56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Soviet Communism at its most theatrically macabre, that men and women beyond Stalin's grasp were most seduced by the man and his cult. It was the absurdly large gap separating rhetoric from reality that made it so irresistible to men and women of goodwill in search of a Cause. [ . . . ]

But even so, in th early years of the Cold War there were many in Western Europe who might have been more openly critical of Stalin, of the Soviet Union and of their local Communists had they not been inhibited by the fear of giving aid and comfort to their political opponents. This, too, was a legacy of 'anti-Fascism', the insistence that there were 'no enemies on the Left' (a rule to which Stalin himself, it must be said, paid little attention).

It seems simpler to me to say that these periods of blind support for Stalin correspond most closely with periods of rising right-wing aggression. Since the right focused its attacks on the Soviet Union, it seemed natural and necessary to come to its defense. Most people practice politics according to their local needs. Only when the local political context is neutral can one afford to be objective about somewhere else.

On religion in the near postwar period; that this reversed later on suggests a poverty-prosperity dynamic (pp. 227-228):

If anything, the war had set things in reverse. The modernizing fervor of the 1920s and even the 1930s had drained away, leaving behind an older order of life. In Italy, as in much of rural Europe, children still entered the job market upon completing (or more likely not completing) their primary education; in 1951 only one Italian child in nine attended school past the age of thirteen.

Religion, especially the Catholic religion, basked in a brief Indian summer of restored authority. In Spain the Catholic hierarchy had both the means and the political backing to re-launch the Counter-Reformation: in a 1953 concordat, Franco granted the Church not merely exemption from taxation and all state interference, but al so a right to request censorship of any writing or speech to which it objected. In return the ecclesiastical hierarchy maintained and enforced the conservative conflation of religion with national identity. [ . . . ]

To this was added a new cult of the dead -- the 'martyrs' of the victorious side in the recent Civil War. At the thousands of memorial sites dedicated to victims of anti-clerical Republicanism, the Spanish Church organized countless ceremonies and memorials. a judicious mix of religion, civic authority and victory commemoration reinforced the spiritual and mnemonic monopoly of the clerical hierarchy. Because Franco needed Catholicism even more than the Church needed him -- how else maintain Spain's tenuous post-war links to the international community and the 'West'? -- he gave it, in effect, unrestricted scope to re-create in modern Spain the 'Crusading' spirit of the ancien régime.

On the end of the colonial era, starting with the 1956 Suez war, when the US forced Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw after attacking Egypt (p. 298):

The first lesson of Suez was that Britain could no longer maintain a global colonial presence. The country lacked the military and economic resources, as Suez had only too plainly shown, and in the wake of so palpable a demonstration of British limitations the country was likely now to be facing inreased demands for independence. After a pause of nearly a decade, during which only the Sudan (in 1956) and Malaya (in 1957) had severed their ties with Britain, the country thus entered upon an accelerated phase of de-colonization, in Africa above all. The Gold Coast was granted its freedom in 1957 as the independent state of Ghana, the first of many. Between 1960 and 1964, seventeen more British colonies held ceremonies of independence as British dignitaries traveled the world, hauling down the Union Jack and setting up new governments. The Commonwealth, which had just eight members in 1950, would have twenty-one by 1965, with more to come.

More post-Suez (p. 299):

In 1968 the Labour government of Harold Wilson drew the final, ineluctable conclusion from the events of November 1956 and announced that British forces would henceforth be withdrawn permanently from the various bases, harbors, entrepôts, fuelling ports and other imperial-era establishments that the country had maintained 'East of Suez' -- notably at the fabulous natural harbor of Aden on the Arabian peninsula. The country could no longer afford to pretend to power and influence across the oceans. By and large this outcome was met with relief in Britain itself: as Adam Smith had foreseen, in the twilight of Britain's first empire in 1776, forsaking the 'splendid and showy equipage of empire' was the best way to contain debt and allow the country to 'accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.'

The second lesson of Suez, as it seemed to the overwhelming majority of the British establishment, was that the UK must never again find itself on the wrong side of an argument with Washington. This didn't mean that the two countries would always agree -- over Berlin and Germany, for example, London was far more disposed to make concessions to Moscow, and this produced some coolness in Anglo-American relations between 1957 and 1961. But the demonstration that Washington could not be counted on to back its friends in all circumstances led Harold Macmillan to precisely the opposite conclusion to that drawn by his French contemporary De Gaulle. Whatever their hesitations, however ambivalent they might feel about particular US actions, British governments would henceforth cleave loyally to US positions. Only that way could they hope to influence American choices and guarantee American support for British concerns when it mattered. This strategic re-alignment was to have momentous implications, for Britain and Europe.

The illustrations between pp. 234-235 include a cartoon quoting Dean Acheson in 1962 saying "Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role." The cartoon shows JFK's head poking out the shoulder of a horse suit, with Harold Macmillan approaching him, the caption "Er, could I be the hind legs, please?" Could just as easily be recycled with Bush and Blair.

On free trade, globalization, and the exploitation of the Third World (p. 326):

In the forty-five years after 1950 worldwide exports by volume increased sixteen-fold. Even a country like France, whose share of world trade remained steady at around 10 percent throughout these years, benefited greatly from the is huge overall increase in international commerce. Indeed, all industrialized countries gained in these years -- the terms of trade moved markedly in their favor after World War Two, as the cost of raw materials and food imported from the non-Western world fell steadily, while the price of manufactured goods kept rising.In three decades of privileged, unequal exchange with the 'Third World', the West had something of a license to print money.

On the Sixties (pp. 477-478):

There is no doubt that this change in mood was also a response to the heady indulgence of the previous decade. Europeans who only recently had enjoyed an unprecedented explosion of energy and originality in music, fashion, cinema and the arts could now contemplate at leisure the cost of their recent revelries. It was not so much the idealism of the Sixties that seemed to have dated so very fast as the innocence of those days: the feeling that whatever could be imagined could be done, that whatever could be made could be possessed; and that transgression -- moral, political, legal, aesthetic -- was inherently attractive and productive. Whereas the Sixties were marked by the naive, self-congratulatory impulse to believe that everything happening was new -- and everything new was significant -- the Seventies were an age of cynicism, of lost illusions and reduced expectations.

On Thatcher (p. 545):

Most of Mrs Thatcher's Tory contemporaries, not to mention the party's cohort of elder statesmen whom she thrust aside as soon as she dared, were genuine conservatives, old enough in many cases to remember the bitter political divisions of the inter-war years and wary of arousing the demon of class warfare. Thatcher was a radical, bent upon destruction and innovation; she scorned compromise. For her, class warfare, suitably updated, was the very stuff of politics. Her policies, often dreamed up at very short notice, were secondary to her goals; and these in turn were in large measure a function of her style. Thatcherism was about how you govern, rather than what you do. Her unfortunate Conservative successors, cast out upon the blasted landscape of post-Thatcherism, had no policies, no goals -- and no style.

On Chernobyl and the decline and fall of the Soviet Union (pp. 597-599):

On that day, at 1:23 am, one of the four huge graphite reactors at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl (Ukraine) exploded, releasing into the atmosphere 120 million curies of radioactive matériel -- more than one hundred times the radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The plume of atomic fallout was carried north-west into Western Europe and Scandinavia, reaching as far as Wales and Sweden and exposing an estimated five million people to its effects. In addition to the 30 emergency workers killed on the spot, some 30,000 people have since died from complications caused by exposure to radiation from Chernobyl, including more than 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer among residents in the immediate vicinity.

Chernobyl was not the Soviet Union's first environmental disaster. At Cheliabinsk-40, a secret research site near Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, a nuclear waste tank exploded in 1957, severely polluting an area 8 km wide and 100 km long, 76 million cubic metres of radioactive waste poured into the Urals river system, contaminating it for decades. 10,000 people were eventually evacuated and 23 villages bulldozed. The reactor at Cheliabinsk was from the first generation of Soviet atomic constructions and had been built by slave labour in 1948-51.

Other man-made environmental calamities on a comparable scale included the pollution of Lake Baikal; the destruction of the Aral Sea; the dumping in the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea of hundreds of thousands of tons of defunct atomic naval vessels and their radioactive contents; and the contamination by sulphur dioxide from nickel production of an area the size of Italy around Norilsk in Siberia. These and other ecological disasters were all the direct result of indifference, bad management and the Soviet 'slash and burn' approach to natural resources. They were born of a culture of secrecy. The Cheliabinsk-40 explosion was not officially acknowledged for many decades, even though it occurred within a few kilometers of a large city -- the same city where, in 1979, several hundred people died of anthrax leaked from a biological weapons plant in the town centre.

The problems with the USSR's nuclear reactors were well known to insiders: two separate KGB reports dated 1982 and 1984 warned of 'shoddy' equipment (supplied from Yugoslavia) and serious deficiencies in Chernobyl's reactors 3 and 4 (it was the latter that exploded in 1986). But just as this information had been kept secret (and no action taken) so the Party leadership's first, instinctive response to the explosion on April 26th was to keep quiet about it -- there were, after all, fourteen Chernobyl-type plants in operation by then all across the country. Moscow's first acknowledgement that anything untoward had happened came fully four days after the event, and then in a two-sentence official communiqué. [ . . . ] The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate.

Judt then notes that the impossibility of keeping Chernobyl secret led Gorbachev to "shift gears" and relax censorship, thus initiating how perestroika policy.

The book extensively covers the fall of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Here's a note on the rather anomalous case of Romania (pp. 622-623):

Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceasescu's privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population -- a traditional 'Romanianist' obsession -- he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinationsfor all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a Party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut.

The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: as the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. Over the ensuing twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week -- the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceausescu was overthrown the death rate of new-born babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children.

The setting for this national tragedy was an economy that was deliberately turned backward, from subsistence into destitution. In the early Eighties, Ceausescu decided to enhance his country's international standing still further by paying down Romania's huge foreign debts. The agencies of international capitalism -- starting with the International Monetary Fund -- were delighted and could not praise the Romanian dictator enough. Bucharest was granted a complete rescheduling of its external debt. To pay off his Western creditors, Ceausescu applied unrelenting and unprecedented pressure upon domestic consumption. [ . . . ]

Ceausescu's policies had a certain ghoulish logic. Romanic did indeed pay off its international creditors, albeit at the cost of reducing it spopulation to penury.

On the triumph of capitalism in Russia (pp. 688-689):

Capitalism, in the gospel that spread across post-Communist Europe, is about markets. And markets mean privatization. The fire-sale of publicly owned commodities in post-1989 eastern Europe had no historical precedent. The cult of privatization in western Europe that had gathered pace from the late Seventies offered a template for the helter-skelter retreat from state ownership in the East; but otherwise they had very little in common. Capitalism, as it had emerged in the Atlantic world and Western Europe over the course of four centuries, was accompanied by laws, institutions, regulations and practices upon which it was critically dependent for its operation and its legitimacy. In many post-Communist countries such laws and institutions were quite unknown -- and dangerously underestimated by neophyte free-marketers there.

The result was privatization as kleptocracy. At its most shameless, in Russia under the rule of Boris Yeltsin and his friends, the post-transition economy passed into the hands of a small number of men who became quite extraordinarily rich -- by the year 2004 thirty-six Russian billionaires ('oligarchs') had corralled an estimated $100 billion, one quarter of the country's entire domestic product. The distinction between privatization, graft and simple theft all but disappeared: there was so much -- oil, gas, minerals, precious metals, pipelines -- to steal and no-one and nothing to prevent its theft. Public assets and institutions were pulled apart and re-allocated to one another by officials extracting and securing quite literally anything that moved or could be legally re-assigned ot private parties.

On Bush-era politics (p. 786):

The European public (as distinct from certain European statesmen) was overwhelmingly opposed both to the American invasion of Iraq in that year and to the broader lines of US foreign policy under President George W. Bush. But the outpouring of anxiety and anger to which this opposition gave rise, though it was shared and expressed by many European intellectuals, did not depend upon them for its articulation or organization. Some French writers -- Lévy, again, or Pascal Bruckner -- refused to condemn Washington, partly for fear of appearing unreflectively anti-American and partly out of sympathy for its stance against 'radical Islam'. They passed virtually unheard.

Once-influential figures like Michnik and Glucksmann urged their readers to support Washington's Iraq policy, arguing by extension from their own earlier writings on Communism that a policy of 'liberal interventionism' in defense of human rights everywhere was justified on general principles and that America was now, as before, in the vanguard of the struggle against political evil and moral relativism. Having thus convinced themselves that the American President was conducting his foreign policy for their reasons, they were then genuinely surprised to find themselves isolated and ignored by their traditional audiences.

A little bit on what we remember as history, specifically on how France remembers itself (pp. 816-817):

Following the Liberation, for all the obloquy poured upon Pétain and his collaborators, his regime's contribution to the Holocaust was hardly ever invoked, and certainly not by the post-war French authorities themselves. It was not just that the French successfully corralled 'Vichy' into a corner of national memory and then mothballed it. They simply didn't make the link between Vichy and Auschwitz. Vichy had betrayed France. Collaborators had committed treason and war crimes. But 'crimes against humanity' were not part of the French juridical lexicon. They were the affairs of Germans. [ . . . ]

As so often in France in those years, such sentiments probably had more to do with wounded pride than with unadorned racism. As recently as 1939, France had been a major international power. But in three short decades it suffered a shattering military defeat, a demeaning occupation, two bloody and embarrassing colonial withdrawals, and (in 1958) a regime change in the form of a near-coup. La Grande Nation had accumulated so many losses and humiliations since 1914 that the compensatory propensity to assert national honour on every possible occasion had become deeply ingrained. Inglorious episodes -- or worse -- were best consigned to a memory-hole. Vichy, after all, was not the only thing that the French were in a hurry to put behind them -- no-one wanted to talk about the 'dirty wars' in Indo-China and Algeria, much less the torture practised there by the army.

posted 2007-07-18