Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (174 page)
Kushner, Tony.
The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History
. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
LaCapra, Dominick.
History and Memory after Auschwitz
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Levi, Primo.
The Drowned and the Saved
. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
———.
Survival in Auschwitz
. New York: Collier Books, 1993.
Maier, Charles S.
The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Mankowitz, Zeev W.
Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Marrus, Michael Robert.
The Holocaust in History
. New York: New American Library, 1989.
Marrus, Michael Robert, and Robert O. Paxton.
Vichy France and the Jews
. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Mikhman, Dan.
Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945-2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses
. New York: P. Lang, 2002.
Mitscherlich, Alexander.
The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior
. New York: Grove Press, 1984.
Mitten, Richard.
The Politics of Anti-Semitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria
. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
Moore, Bob.
Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945
. New York: Arnold, 1997.
Müller, Jan-Werner.
Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Nossiter, Adam.
The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Polonsky, Antony.
“My Brother’s Keeper?” Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust
. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Presser, J.
Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry
. London: Souvenir Press, 1968.
Rousso, Henry.
The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Todorov, Tzvetan.
Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Utgaard, Peter.
Remembering and Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity, and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria
. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.
In the chapters that follow the footnotes are, for the most part, of the traditional sort: that is, they comment on the text rather than identify a source. To avoid adding to what is already a very long book addressed to a general readership, a full apparatus of references is not provided here. Instead, the sources for
Postwar
, together with a full bibliography, will in due course be available for consultation on the Remarque Institute website [
http://www.nyu.edu/pages/remarque/
].
Or by Stalin, who ordered the shooting of 23,000 Polish officers in Katyn forest in 1940 and then blamed it on the Germans.
By way of comparison—the average daily calorie consumption in France in 1990 was 3,618.
They had good grounds for fear. The British army in Austria would later hand them over to the Yugoslav authorities (under an Allied agreement to return such prisoners to the government against whom they had fought) and at least 40,000 of them were killed.
Yet they, too, had little real choice—during the Depression years anyone who refused a proffered work contract from Germany risked losing his Dutch unemployment benefits.
In a speech in Bratislava on May 9th 1945, Benes declared that Czechs and Slovaks no longer wished to live in the same state as Hungarians and Germans. This sentiment, and the actions that followed, has haunted Czech-German and Slovak-Hungarian relations ever since.
With the significant exception of Greeks and Turks, following the Lausanne Treaty of 1923.
At the end of May 1945 the British Army turned over to Yugoslav authorities 10,000 Slovenian soldiers and civilians who had fled to Austria. Most of them were trucked south to the Kocevje forests and summarily shot.
The Halychnya or Galician Division of the Waffen SS was made up of Ukrainians who had been citizens of inter-war Poland and whose region of origin was incorporated into the USSR after the war. They were thus not repatriated to the Soviet Union, despite having fought against it alongside the Wehrmacht, and were treated by Western authorities as stateless persons.
The wartime ‘Chetnik’ partisans were named after upland guerilla bands who had fought against Serbia’s Ottoman rulers in the eighteenth century.
But not all—the Greek Communists’ opportunistic post-war support for the annexation to Communist Bulgaria of ethnically Slav regions of northern Greece did little to advance their cause.
Note though that the Protectorate of Bohemia was run in 1942 by just 1,900 German bureaucrats. In these as other respects, Czechoslovakia was at least partly western.
As late as 1960, 62 out of the 64 prefects responsible for Italy’s provincial administration had held office under Fascism, as had all 135 police chiefs.
The Domobran was the wartime Croatian Home Guard. Of course Tito’s Communist partisans had frequently behaved no better: but they won.
In 1946 the West German Länderrat (Council of regions) recommended to the Allied authorities that in view of current shortages in Germany, food rations for displaced persons be reduced. General Lucius Clay confined his reply to a reminder that the food in question was provided by other European nations, victims of Germany’s own war of aggression.
Stephan Hermlin,
Bestimmungsorte
(Berlin, 1985), p. 46, quoted in Frank Stern,
The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge
(1992), p. xvi
The last armed Italian partisans were rounded up in a series of military operations around Bologna in the autumn of 1948.
Jean Monnet was born in Cognac in 1888, the son of a brandy merchant. Upon leaving school he spent many years living and working abroad, notably in London; after the First World War he was named Secretary General of the new League of Nations. He passed much of the Second World War in the US, negotiating arms supplies on behalf of the British government and the Free French. His devotion to economic planning and his later contribution to the Schuman Plan for European economic cooperation thus drew upon a familiarity with large-scale organization and inter-state collaboration that was strikingly unusual for a Frenchman of his class and time.
Quoted in Maureen Waller,
London 1945
(2004), page 150.
Note, though, that 4 out of 10 Communist voters in France were in favour of accepting Marshall Aid, despite the Party’s opposition. French suspicion of the Marshall Plan was not so much political as cultural; many people seem to have been especially offended by what were described as ‘des questionnaires insipides et nombreux’ emanating from American bureaucracies—a particularly irritating reminder of their subordination to an inferior civilisation.
The frontier between Poland and Soviet Russia as proposed by the British Foreign Secretary after the First World War.
Stalin had broken off relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943 following the latter’s demand for an international examination of the Katyn massacre. The Germans, who uncovered the site, correctly claimed that it was the location of a mass execution by the Soviets of captured Polish officers. The Soviet authorities and their Western supporters, then and for the next half century, angrily denied it.
India and some of the British overseas Dominions had substantial holdings in sterling, built up as credit during the war years especially. Had the pound been freely convertible into dollars in the immediate post-war era many of these holdings might have been run down, thus further weakening Britain’s already fragile stock of foreign exchange. That is why, after an initial, disastrous experiment with convertibility imposed from Washington as a condition for the US loan, Britain re-imposed sterling controls in 1947.
According to Kennan, ‘[O]ur national leaders in Washington had no idea at all, and would probably have been incapable of imagining, what a Soviet occupation, supported by the Russian secret police of Beria’s time, meant for the people who were subjected to it.’
In February 1945, when asked who would do most to help France recover, 25 percent of those polled said the USSR, 24 percent the USA.
Marshall was probably not much reassured to learn from Bidault that this public emphasis upon the
German
threat was strictly for domestic consumption.
Under the terms of a secret Czech-Soviet agreement of March 1945, the USSR had the right to mine and extract uranium from the Jachymov deposits in Western Bohemia.
In Poland, of course, it was anything but reassuring—just because it was so familiar.
In 1990 Edvard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Secretary, reportedly observed that despite a forty-year-long Cold War with the United States, when his grandchildren played war games, Germany was still the enemy.
Italy lost all of its colonies, paid $360 million in reparations to the USSR, Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania and Ethiopia, and ceded the Istrian peninsula to Yugoslavia. The disposition of the border city of Trieste remained in dispute for eight more years.
This proved an easy accommodation. In the words of one American GI, pleasantly surprised at his reception in Germany following the rather frosty French response to their liberators, ‘Hell, these people are cleaner and a damned sight friendlier than the French. They’re our kind of people.’ Quoted in Earl Ziemke,
The U.S.Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944-46
(Washington DC, 1985), p. 142.
In September 1947 Andrej Zdanov, speaking as always for his master, would inform delegates at the founding Congress of the Cominform that the Truman Doctrine was directed at least as much against Britain as against the USSR, ‘because it signifies Britain’s expulsion from its sphere of influence in the Mediterranean and the Near East’.
The Bulgarians had actually oscillated quite markedly over the years from enthusiastic pro-Germanism to ultra-Slavophilism. Neither served them well. As a local commentator remarked at the time, Bulgaria always chooses the wrong card . . . and
slams
it on the table!
This was not the first time armed Russians had personally supervised crucial Polish elections: during the local parliamentary elections of 1772 at which Poles were asked to chose representatives who would confirm the partition of their country, foreign troops stood menacingly by to ensure the desired outcome.
The Agrarian Party in the Czech lands and its partner, the People’s Party in Slovakia, were banned after the war for connivance with Nazi policies.
Western public opinion was also influenced by Masaryk’s death on March 10th 1948—he was reported to have ‘fallen’ from his window into the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry. The exact circumstances of his death have never been elucidated.
When Tito closed the Greek land border with Yugoslavia in July 1949, following his break with Stalin, the Greek Communist resistance collapsed almost immediately.
The PCI actually increased its vote somewhat at the 1948 elections, but only at the expense of the Socialists, who lost heavily. The victorious Christian Democrats outscored the combined Left by over four million votes.
It was no coincidence that Soviet advisers were withdrawn from Yugoslavia on March 18th 1948, just forty-eight hours before General Sokolovski walked out of the Allied Control Council meeting in Germany.
Had he wished to do so, there was little practical impediment. In the spring of 1948 the Soviet Union had three hundred divisions within reach of Berlin. The US had only 60,000 soldiers in all of Europe, fewer than 7,000 of them in Berlin.
The Basic Law was deliberately
provisional
—‘to give a new order to political life for a transitional period’: i.e. until the country was reunited.
The French Finance Minister Henri Queuille complained to the US Ambassador to France of Britain’s ‘complete lack of loyalty.’
A point of view nicely captured in lines anonymously penned during the negotiations on Britain’s postwar loan:
‘In Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes:
“It’s true they have the moneybags
But
we
have all the brains.”’
Germans understandably did
not
remember the war in this light and would be mystified in decades to come when subjected to English football supporters’ chants and British tabloid newspaper headlines referring to ‘Huns’, ‘Krauts’ and the like.
Professor Kenneth Jowett of UC Berkeley.
The institutions of the German Democratic Republic were somewhat distinct, reflecting its interim standing in Soviet eyes. But the spirit of its laws and practices was impeccably orthodox.
The Baltic states, fully incorporated into the Soviet Union itself, were even worse off than the rest of eastern Europe. In 1949 kolkhozes in northern Estonia were required to begin grain deliveries even before the harvest had begun, in order to keep in line with Latvia, four hundred kilometers to the south. By 1953 rural conditions in hitherto prosperous Estonia had deteriorated to the point where cows blown over by the wind were too weak to get back on their feet unaided.