The Savage Continent by Keith Lowe
I make fun of Trump for his excessive use of superlatives. When things seem bad they are broadcast as the “worse ever.” This led to the following exercise which reflects my parents’ lifetime and reflects life as it could be when things are really really the most awful possible……
The book is dense and full of anecdotes; the following encapsulates the themes I pulled from it.
As you might expect, things were very hard in Europe after WWII. The recent fires in LA are a useful reference. British officers sent to Germany to manage their zone of Germany after the surrender, were often astounded by the destruction years of bombing had accomplished. While the Blitz in London was a hardship—and a reference to how bad bombing could be, the city of London still stood. The landscape in Germany, city after city, was not unlike the Palisades after the recent fire only with the masonry and skeletons of older buildings remaining. These British officers had no idea that the war had wrought so much destruction because reading the data and seeing the outcome were two very different experiences.
Losing housing, adequate food, and having survived very difficult traumas through the war, societies throughout Europe reflected behavior changes mirroring these physical changes:
Criminal behavior was normalized ie it is easy to rob someone’s house when all the doors and glass have been blown out. Starvation made prostitutes out of mothers and children. Men with guns took risks to take what they would. Revenge would prove a huge motivator for criminal behavior for years after the war. Survivors had PTSD. Children with no male role models surviving had access to weapons and had plenty of time to consider their options. Teenagers in Northern England where there was no physical destruction were much more likely to participate in criminal activity when compared to the pre war years. And everyone (city dwellers) had seen dead bodies as a daily experience for years.
Compromise was a practical need. When millions of slave laborers suddenly found themselves freed, they robbed and got revenge on German civilians to the point that the military authorities had to do something to control armed mobs often speaking different languages and seeking food, shelter, transportation home, and revenge. They often hired trained people, police and national guard soldiers for example, to do this work. The former regime’s authorities were once again controlling victims and this added to chaos and bad behavior on the part of the victims. Of interest, the combat units that came upon the death camps found a reason to fight—even the reluctant draftees—and felt great sympathy for these victims, but the supporting units tasked with administering the now occupied cities felt very differently (feelings of disdain) as death camp survivors exhibited criminal behaviors with a sense of entitlement.
Foreign to us Americans: for Europeans, the language of this war had been Fascism against Communism. Both had been legitimate world-wide forms of societal organization with credibility before the war— and the fascists had lost; the communists had won. For many Europeans, it was the Communists who won this war. Other changing attitudes and conclusions reflected that the war could not have been won (or survived) without the work of women. Women in the workforce, especially given the paucity of available and functioning men became an accepted norm. Resources were redistributed: In both Russian and Western controlled occupied areas, rural communities were enriched by the exchange of food for goods— and wealth was redistributed. The Communists would make this an expected and “good” change.
Also foreign to us Americans: the old empires of Europe and mixtures of different cultures now traumatized and looking to Nazi examples of how to manage such mixing, began wars within the larger war. How many of us know that after WWI there was a war between Poland and Ukraine over territory? There were atrocities then. Now lands with both Poles and Ukraines had bitter fighting with ethnic cleansing—as the Russians marched on Berlin! All of them hated Jews and any Jews coming back to these former homelands after the war promptly moved on (and this was a huge motivation for Jews to simply leave Europe once and for all). The Russians, while still trying to supply armies actively fighting the Nazi army in Germany had these wars going on and after the war required management. The Russians would redraw borders with vast movements of populations: The Ukrainian border moved two hundred miles west into what had been Poland. They (Russian authorities) made clear the need for Poles living in what is now Ukraine would have X time to move West into Poland or face the consequences, not from Russians, but their Ukrainian neighbors. They moved. Likewise, any Ukrainians who were in the new Polish borderlands, needed to take the same choice. As the borders shifted two hundred miles, the Russians decided to move the Polish border 200 miles West in compensation to the Poles, into Silesia and other former German lands. Eight Million Germans were given a timeline to move west with no exceptions. The redistribution of German homes and resources would be a motivator for Poles to move West. As a consequence of this ethnic cleansing, Eastern Europe became much more uniform, country by country with respect to its cultural make up.
The West would take on a heterodox of new populations fleeting both this ethnic fight and Communist rule. So the West became more culturally inhomogeneous. And Yugoslavia would prove to be a mini-Europe with some of the worse atrocities and forced shifting of populations in any post war society. The revenge killings in Yugoslavia we’re ten times higher than places like Italy or France.
Mythologizing the resistance: As each country came to rebuild, a unifying myth was commonly used to build unity and a national story. Resisting the Nazi’s was commonly the unifying theme when in fact, there were often wars within the war in each country. Communists in France when controlling police departments would arrest other fellow resistance soldiers who in the early war, if in power, had arrested leftists as they had refused to join the fight against the Nazis so long as there was an alliance between the USSR and Germany. Guerrilla bands in Italy and Greece often fought each other over political differences. A corollary of this was that resistance fighters, often on their own had the moral authority to assume positions of authority when in fact their skill set was no suited to rebuilding a broken society*. When they did not get their way, they took the law into their own hands.
Americans never “got” the claim Communism had in the political discussions—East or West. To many Europeans, the Communists had in fact won the war. However, Communism was never viable in the US as it had been in Europe. Our governing diplomats and generals were as lost as they would be in Viet Nam and Iraq re not getting how things were perceived or understood on the ground. Americans saw conspiracies and communist plots in the late 40’s when the Europeans in the west saw hated enemies that claimed a third of the electorate (France and Italy) but which had no realistic chance of winning power at the ballot box or with revolution. This disappointed many former resistance fighters but was the assessment of even the communists leadership in the West. What the Americans had which spoke to citizens and Western governments was resources. This helped with elections and nation building which was mostly successful (Marshal Plan). The Soviets influenced their occupied areas to refuse the Marshal Plan as a “conspiracy” to take them down and the Iron curtain became a logical next step.
*Pay attention Mr. Trump, Senate, Congress, Citizens, etc.
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