The Desperate Landscape of Postwar Europe
When British officer Norman Lewis entered a Naples square in October 1943, shortly after the city’s liberation, he witnessed a scene that would become emblematic of Europe’s moral disintegration. The once-grand municipal building now served as an open-air marketplace of human dignity, where Italian housewives stood like wax figures against the walls, their bodies available for the price of a canned ration from Allied soldiers. This disturbing tableau wasn’t unique to Naples – across the continent, the collapse of social order had created conditions where survival routinely trumped morality.
The war’s physical destruction was matched only by its psychological devastation. By 1945, Europe’s infrastructure lay in ruins, its governments fractured, and its populations displaced. But beneath the visible wreckage ran deeper fault lines – the erosion of ethical boundaries that had once defined civilized society. As Lewis observed, even the soldiers who initially reveled in their power over desperate women found themselves morally unsettled by the transactions, suggesting that Europe’s crisis extended beyond material deprivation into the realm of human values.
The Economics of Survival: Food as Currency
In the immediate postwar period, food became the universal currency of survival. The war had disrupted agricultural production across Europe while Allied blockades and Nazi requisition policies had depleted reserves. By 1945, official rations in Germany provided just 1,000 calories per day – barely half the minimum requirement for survival. This scarcity created a brutal calculus where traditional moral frameworks collapsed under physiological necessity.
The Naples incident Lewis documented revealed this dynamic in microcosm. Italian women, many from respectable working-class backgrounds, participated in what amounted to institutionalized prostitution not for luxury but for basic sustenance. Similar scenes played out across the continent:
– In Germany, women traded intimacy for chocolate bars
– In the Netherlands, 12-year-olds propositioned soldiers using crude German phrases
– Greek hospitals recorded venereal diseases in children as young as 10
War correspondent Alan Moorehead described Naples as exhibiting “the total collapse of moral values.” Beyond the sexual barter system, he witnessed children fighting over sugar cubes, black marketeers selling counterfeit alcohol, and prepubescent boys hawking pornographic postcards featuring their own sisters. The normal rules of civilized behavior had suspended themselves in favor of what Moorehead called “the law of the animal.”
Theft as Resistance: Moral Inversion in Occupied Europe
Property crimes surged during and after the war, creating what historian Keith Lowe terms “a continent-wide epidemic of theft.” What began as survival necessity evolved into opportunity and eventually moral justification:
– In Greece, civilians looted shops preemptively before German requisitions could claim the goods
– Belarusian partisans “taxed” local farmers at gunpoint
– Berlin housewives stripped stores bare despite posted death penalties for looting
The moral calculus shifted dramatically under occupation. Theft from oppressors became framed as resistance – French farmers slaughtered 350,000 cattle annually off the books to deny meat to German forces. This moral inversion created ethical confusion that persisted postwar, when UN relief officials reported that most Western Europeans participated in black markets simply to survive.
Violence and Its Aftermath: The Psychological Toll of Total War
The war’s violence didn’t end with formal hostilities. Across Europe, liberated populations exacted revenge on collaborators while displaced persons and former forced laborers exhibited what relief workers called “lawless aggressiveness.” The scale of violence had numbed populations to brutality:
– In Poland and Ukraine, partisan groups used farm tools to torture enemies
– Soviet troops in Germany committed atrocities including mass rape and mutilation
– Former concentration camp inmates showed extreme cynicism toward humanitarian aid
Psychologically, the line between victim and perpetrator blurred. Many who had suffered extreme violence later replicated it, while soldiers conditioned to battlefield brutality struggled to reintegrate. As Soviet writer Lev Kopelev observed, men who had committed atrocities abroad posed potential dangers when returning home as celebrated heroes.
The Epidemic of Sexual Violence
Rape became endemic during the war’s final stages, particularly in Eastern Europe. Soviet advances into Germany saw systematic sexual violence:
– Berlin hospitals recorded 110,000 rape cases
– Vienna clinics treated 87,000 rape victims
– Estimates suggest nearly 2 million German women were assaulted
The scale reflected multiple factors – revenge motivations, cultural differences between occupiers and locals, and the breakdown of military discipline. French colonial troops in Germany and Soviet soldiers in Hungary committed particularly brutal attacks, often targeting very young and elderly victims.
The consequences extended beyond physical trauma:
– Germany saw 200,000 illegal abortions annually postwar
– 150,000-200,000 “occupation babies” were born
– Divorce rates doubled as relationships strained under the psychological burden
Children of the Ruins: The Next Generation’s Moral Education
Europe’s children grew up amidst this moral chaos, with disturbing consequences:
– German children played “air raid” and “Frau komm” (Russian rape scenarios) games
– Juvenile delinquency spiked 40% in Britain during the war
– Hamburg saw a 300% increase in youth crime
Particular concern focused on German youth raised under Nazism. Some Allied commentators advocated extreme measures against the “lost generation,” revealing how even victors’ morality had been compromised by total war.
Legacy: The Shadow of Moral Collapse
The postwar moral crisis left enduring marks:
1. Legal Systems: Pervasive black market activity eroded respect for law
2. Gender Relations: Mass rape trauma affected generations of women
3. Social Trust: Widespread betrayal and collaboration poisoned communities
4. Psychological Health: PTSD symptoms appeared decades later in survivors
Historians continue debating whether this represented temporary survival behavior or fundamental moral change. The evidence suggests that while most societies eventually restored traditional ethics, the war permanently altered European consciousness about human nature’s fragility under extreme conditions.
As Norman Lewis reflected while driving away from that Naples square, throwing canned goods to scrambling civilians, the war hadn’t just destroyed buildings – it had demolished the invisible architecture of moral boundaries that make civilization possible. The challenge of postwar reconstruction would involve not just rebuilding cities, but reconstructing the ethical foundations of European society.