27. THE COLD WAR AND THE REMAKING OF EUROPE, 1945

Chaos in Europe

In contrast to the often stationary trench warfare of World War I, armies in World War II had fought a war of movement on the ground and in the air. Massive bombing had leveled thousands of square miles of territory, and whole cities were clogged with rubble. On the Rhine River, almost no bridge remained standing; in the Soviet Union, seventy thousand villages and more than a thousand cities lay in shambles. Everywhere people were suffering. In the Netherlands, the severity of Nazi occupation left the Dutch population close to death, relieved only by a U.S. airlift of food. To control scarce supplies, Italian bakers sold bread by the slice. Allied troops in Germany were almost the sole source of food: “To see the children fighting for food,” remarked one British soldier handing out supplies, “was like watching animals being fed in a zoo.” There were no mass uprisings as after World War I; until the late 1940s, people were too absorbed by the struggle for bare survival.

The tens of millions of refugees suffered the most, as they wandered a continent where the dangers of assault, robbery, and ethnic violence were great. An estimated thirty million Europeans, many of German ethnicity, were forcibly expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary (Map 27.1). The USSR lobbied hard for the return of several million Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers, and the Allies transported millions of Soviet refugees home. The Allies slowed the process when they discovered that Soviet leaders had ordered the execution of many of the returnees for being “contaminated” by Western ideas.

Figure 27.1: MAP 27.1 The Impact of World War II on Europe

Figure 27.1: European governments, many of them struggling to provide food and other necessities for their populations, found themselves responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new refugees. Simultaneously, millions of prisoners of war, servicemen, and slave laborers were returned to the Soviet Union, many of them by force. This situation unfolded amid political instability and even violence. What does the movement of peoples shown on the map suggest about social conditions in post–World War II Europe?

Survivors of the concentration camps discovered that their suffering had not ended with Germany’s defeat. Many returned home diseased and disoriented, while others had no home to return to because their property had been confiscated. Anti-Semitism—official policy under the Nazis—lingered in popular attitudes, and people used it to justify their claim to Jewish property and to jobs vacated by Jews. In the summer of 1946, a vicious crowd in Kielce, Poland, assaulted some 250 Jewish survivors, killing at least 40. Survivors fled to the port cities of Italy and other Mediterranean countries, eventually leaving Europe for Palestine, where Zionists had been settling for half a century.