The Ruins of a Continent: Europe in 1945
When the guns fell silent in 1945, Europe lay in ruins. The scale of destruction dwarfed even the devastation of World War I. Cities like Warsaw had been reduced to rubble – “a graveyard, a land of death” as Polish writer Janina Broniewska described her liberated homeland. Returning exiles like German novelist Alfred Döblin found some towns “only existed as names.”
The physical infrastructure of Europe had been systematically destroyed: railways, canals, bridges and roads either bombed or demolished by retreating armies. Basic utilities – gas, electricity, water – were unavailable in many areas. With winter approaching, shortages of food, medicine and fuel created a humanitarian catastrophe. Agricultural production stood at half pre-war levels. Malnutrition was rampant, with starvation and disease following close behind.
The housing crisis reached catastrophic proportions. In western Soviet territories ravaged by German occupation, 25 million were homeless. Germany itself had lost 40% of its housing stock – some 10 million units. Across the continent, over 50 million displaced persons struggled to survive in the ruins.
The Human Tide: Displacement and Dislocation
Europe in 1945 was a continent of the uprooted. Beyond those who had lost homes, millions existed in various states of displacement: forced laborers, refugees, prisoners of war, and concentration camp survivors. The International Red Cross and UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, established in 1943) worked tirelessly to assist some 6.5 million displaced persons, helping many return home – though not always to happy reunions.
For some, return was impossible. Many perished in displaced persons camps or Soviet POW camps (where over a million died under brutal conditions). Others, like Russians and Ukrainians, feared repatriation to Stalin’s USSR. Under Allied agreements with Stalin, some 2 million people were forcibly “repatriated” to the Soviet Union, including tens of thousands of Cossacks who had fought for the Axis – most faced execution or the Gulag.
Jewish survivors often found no homes to return to, their communities destroyed and relatives murdered in the Holocaust. Some assumed false identities to escape persecution that continued even after Nazi defeat. As Albert Camus wrote in The Plague (1947): “On this earth there are plagues and there are victims – and it’s up to us to refuse to side with the plagues.”
The Paradox of Postwar Stability
The scale of destruction in 1945 far exceeded that of 1918. Death tolls were at least four times higher than World War I. Yet paradoxically, while World War I sowed the seeds of future conflict, the even more destructive Second World War was followed by an unexpected period of stability and unprecedented prosperity in Western Europe. How did this remarkable transformation occur?
In the ruins of 1945, such an outcome seemed unimaginable. The immediate postwar years showed little promise of the coming transformation, instead marked by political turmoil, economic chaos, social suffering, and further atrocities. Only by 1949 would the contours of a new Europe emerge from the political, ideological and economic fragmentation.
Reckoning and Retribution: The Postwar Purges
Before reconstruction could begin, Europe had to reckon with its recent past. The immediate postwar period was marked by lawlessness and violent retribution against collaborators and former Nazis. Across liberated Europe, spontaneous violence erupted against those associated with occupation regimes.
In concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, Allied soldiers shocked by what they discovered sometimes allowed or encouraged prisoners to take revenge on their captors. Displaced persons and former forced laborers attacked German civilians. In Yugoslavia, violence focused not on Germans (who had withdrawn in April 1945) but on hated Croatian Ustaše and Slovenian collaborators, with Serbian communist partisans executing an estimated 70,000.
Western Europe saw its own waves of retribution. Italy witnessed some 12,000 killings, mostly of fascists. France saw about 9,000 executions of Vichy supporters around the time of liberation. Women accused of “horizontal collaboration” – sleeping with the enemy – became targets of public humiliation across Europe, with some 20,000 French women subjected to head-shaving and other ritualized punishments.
The Expulsions: Ethnic Cleansing on a Massive Scale
One of the most tragic episodes of the immediate postwar period was the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. What was euphemistically called “population transfer” affected at least 12 million Germans, with estimates of 500,000 to 1.5 million deaths during the brutal expulsions.
Similar forced migrations affected Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians and others as borders were redrawn. The pre-war multi-ethnic Eastern Europe ceased to exist, replaced by more ethnically homogeneous nation-states – a result of violent expulsions and ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale.
The Limits of Justice: Denazification and Its Failures
The official processes of denazification proved deeply flawed. The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, while establishing important legal precedents, were criticized as “victor’s justice.” The subsequent denazification programs in occupied Germany became increasingly farcical, with many former Nazis receiving light punishments or reintegrating into society through “Persil certificates” – whitewashing testimonials from acquaintances.
By 1951, West Germany had amnestied hundreds of thousands of former Nazis. In the Soviet zone, denazification was more thorough but also served as a tool for communist consolidation of power. Across Europe, the reckoning with the past was incomplete, leaving wounds that would fester for generations.
Political Reawakening: The Division of Europe
The postwar years saw the rapid reemergence of political pluralism in Western Europe, while Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe saw the systematic crushing of political alternatives. Christian Democracy emerged as a powerful new political force in the West, combining conservative values with support for social reform and democracy. Meanwhile, communist parties, initially popular due to their resistance credentials, gradually lost support as Cold War tensions rose.
By 1949, Europe was firmly divided. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was established in May, followed by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in October. NATO was founded in April as a Western defense pact against Soviet expansion. When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949, the stage was set for four decades of Cold War confrontation.
The Foundations of Stability: Why Post-1945 Was Different
Five key factors created the conditions for postwar stability:
1. The definitive end of German great-power ambitions
2. The (imperfect) purging of war criminals and collaborators
3. Europe’s clear and lasting division
4. The economic growth that began in the late 1940s
5. The new threat posed by atomic (and later thermonuclear) war
Unlike after World War I, there were no massive war reparations destabilizing economies. The Marshall Plan (1948-51), while not solely responsible for Europe’s recovery, provided crucial support. Perhaps most importantly, the nuclear standoff created a deterrent against great power war that had been absent in the interwar period.
From the ashes of war, a new Europe had emerged with astonishing speed. Divided in two, each half would build foundations of stability and prosperity that would have seemed impossible in the ruins of 1945. The shadow of war would linger, but the darkest chapters of Europe’s self-destruction had come to an end.