The Devastated Continent: Europe in 1945

The spring of 1945 found Europe a landscape of unimaginable destruction. Polish writer Janina Broniewska, returning to Warsaw after liberation, described it simply as “a graveyard, a land of death.” Across the continent, cities lay in ruins, their names remaining where communities once thrived. Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, returned from twelve years of exile to find some German towns where “only the name remained.”

Europe’s infrastructure – its railways, canals, bridges and roads – had been systematically destroyed either by bombing or retreating armies. Basic utilities like gas, electricity and running water became luxuries. As the harsh winter of 1945 approached, fuel shortages compounded the misery. Agricultural production stood at barely half pre-war levels, leading to widespread malnutrition and starvation-related diseases. Housing shortages forced strangers into uncomfortable cohabitation. The Soviet Union’s western regions, brutalized by German occupation, counted 25 million homeless. Germany itself had lost 40% of its housing stock – some 10 million units. Across Europe, over 50 million people struggled to survive amid the rubble.

The Human Tide: Displacement and Desperation

Millions more existed in a different kind of homelessness – displaced persons, forced laborers, refugees and prisoners of war. The International Red Cross worked tirelessly while the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), established in 1943, coordinated efforts to repatriate some 6.5 million displaced persons. Many bore deep psychological scars from their wartime experiences.

Returning home often proved bittersweet. Years of separation turned spouses into strangers, contributing to skyrocketing divorce rates. Many never returned at all, dying in displaced persons camps or Soviet prisoner-of-war camps where over a million perished under brutal conditions. About two million people, including tens of thousands of Cossacks who had fought for the Axis, were forcibly repatriated to the USSR under Allied agreements with Stalin, only to face execution or years in labor camps.

Jewish survivors faced particular horrors. With their communities destroyed and families murdered, 220,000 remaining Polish Jews and 250,000 Hungarian Jews found themselves targets of renewed violence. The July 1946 Kielce pogrom in Poland, sparked by blood libel rumors, left 41 Jews dead and prompted 70,000 Polish Jews to flee to Palestine within three months. Across Eastern Europe, returning Jewish survivors often found their homes occupied and former neighbors hostile to their return.

Reckoning and Retribution: Postwar Justice

Before reconstruction could begin, Europe had to confront its recent past. The immediate postwar period saw widespread lawlessness as occupying forces gradually established control. Where local authorities existed, they often turned a blind eye – or actively encouraged – brutal revenge against collaborators.

Initial violence against former oppressors knew few bounds. Concentration camp survivors sometimes turned on their guards with Allied troops looking on. Displaced persons and former slave laborers looted stores and attacked German civilians. In Yugoslavia, violence focused not on Germans (who had left by April 1945) but on hated Croatian Ustaše and Slovenian collaborators, with Serbian communist partisans executing an estimated 70,000.

Western Europe saw its own reckoning. Italy witnessed about 12,000 revenge killings, mostly of fascists. France saw around 9,000 Vichy supporters executed around the time of liberation. Women accused of “horizontal collaboration” – sleeping with the enemy – faced public humiliation across France, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and the Channel Islands, with about 20,000 French women subjected to ritual head-shaving and other abuses.

Remarkably, this wave of violence proved relatively short-lived outside Greece, where civil war erupted. By 1949, new European contours emerged from the political, ideological and economic fragmentation.

The Great Expulsions: Ethnic Cleansing in Postwar Europe

The Potsdam Agreement sanctioned the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe under the euphemism of “population transfers.” Beyond Germans, border changes shifted Poland westward, incorporating former German territories while ceding eastern lands to the Soviet Union. This triggered forced migrations of Poles and Ukrainians as well.

At least 1.2 million Poles and nearly 500,000 Ukrainians were violently expelled from their homes. Over 50,000 Ukrainians left Czechoslovakia while 40,000 Czechs and Slovaks moved in the opposite direction from Ukraine. Approximately 100,000 Hungarians were expelled from Romania, with similar numbers relocated between Slovakia and the Sudetenland.

The expulsions were anything but “orderly and humane” as promised. Ethnic German communities, some established for centuries, became targets of particular brutality. By July 1945, 500,000-750,000 Germans had been expelled from territories transferred to Poland, with countless atrocities reported. Soviet reports from August 1945 noted “increasing numbers of senseless murders, arrests, lengthy detentions and deliberate humiliation” of German civilians.

In Czechoslovakia, Sudeten Germans were collectively branded traitors. President Edvard Beneš’s May 1945 call for a “final solution to the German problem” prompted the immediate expulsion of 20,000 Germans from Brno to the Austrian border, many dying en route. A Catholic priest declared Christian love of neighbor did not apply to Germans who “represented evil” and deserved punishment.

The Usti massacre of July 31, 1945 saw hundreds of Germans killed. By 1947, about three million Germans had been expelled from Czechoslovakia, with at least 19,000-30,000 Sudeten Germans dead (the true toll from disease and exposure was certainly higher). Overall, at least 12 million Germans were expelled to occupied Germany, where devastated local communities could scarcely absorb them. Mutual resentment festered between locals and newcomers, with 60% of native Germans and 96% of expellees reporting poor relations in 1949 surveys.

Conservative estimates place deaths from the expulsions at 500,000 Germans, with 1.5 million more unaccounted for. Germans from Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia faced particularly grim fates as “living reparations” in Soviet camps.

By 1950, Eastern Europe’s ethnic diversity had dramatically decreased. While minority populations didn’t disappear entirely – significant Russian minorities remained in Baltic states and Ukraine, for instance – postwar Eastern Europe became far more ethnically homogeneous than before the war. The multiethnic Eastern Europe of the interwar years had been destroyed through violent expulsions and horrific ethnic cleansing.

The Limits of Denazification: Confronting the Nazi Past

Germany’s postwar reckoning with Nazism proved particularly complex. Some major Nazis like Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler escaped justice through suicide. Others like Adolf Eichmann fled abroad, often with Vatican assistance. The Allies nonetheless captured 21 Nazi leaders for trial at Nuremberg.

The Nuremberg Trials (1945-46) broke new legal ground as an international military tribunal without precedent. While criticized as “victor’s justice,” they established important principles of accountability. Twelve defendants including Hermann Göring (who committed suicide), Joachim von Ribbentrop and Wilhelm Keitel were sentenced to death. The Nazi Party, SS and Gestapo were declared criminal organizations.

Subsequent U.S. trials from 1946-49 convicted 185 additional figures from government, military, industry, medicine, law and the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, with 24 death sentences and 98 prison terms. German public opinion generally approved of the trials’ fairness, with 70% believing many more war criminals remained unpunished.

Denazification proved even more challenging. With over eight million Nazi Party members (about 10% of Germany’s population) and tens of millions more in affiliated organizations, thorough denazification was impossible. Initial American zeal gave way to pragmatism as occupation authorities faced millions of questionnaires to process. By 1947, the U.S. had only processed 1.6 million cases with 3.5 million Nazis still awaiting classification.

The British and French zones saw similar challenges. Britain dismissed about 200,000 Germans from positions but prioritized economic recovery over ideological purity. France initially dismissed three-quarters of German teachers only to rehire them by September 1945. Only 18,000 faced punishment in the French zone compared to 1,654 “major offenders” in the American zone.

By 1946, Western Allies handed denazification to German-run tribunals. The process became increasingly farcical, with over 6 million cases processed but two-thirds immediately amnestied. Over 90% of defendants were classified as mere “fellow travelers” or exonerated entirely. The 1951 Amnesty Law pardoned hundreds of thousands, leaving only the most notorious Nazis punished.

The Soviet zone pursued denazification more ruthlessly, with tens of thousands dying in camps. Over 500,000 were dismissed by 1945’s end, with 40,000 new teachers by 1946. Two-thirds of judges and three-quarters of elementary school teachers were replaced by 1950. Yet even here, pragmatism sometimes prevailed – doctors kept practicing, and some Nazi scientists were quietly put to work on Soviet projects.

Ultimately, denazification’s failure reflected both German resistance to collective guilt and the realities of administering a shattered country. Polls showed many Germans believed National Socialism had been “a good idea badly executed.” The past would haunt Germany for decades as war criminals continued to be uncovered and prosecuted well into the late 20th century.

Political Reawakening: Europe’s New Landscape

Postwar Europe witnessed a dramatic resurgence of pluralist politics. Except in a few countries, political continuity had been broken by Nazi conquest, requiring entirely new systems. Left-wing parties, despite years of persecution, often emerged stronger for their resistance credentials. Even conservative and liberal parties, though more disrupted, rebuilt surprisingly quickly under new names.

Fascism’s total defeat eliminated any threat of its resurgence (though fears persisted about Nazism reviving in Germany). Conversely, Soviet communism gained prestige from the Allied victory, enjoying significant support among the reinvigorated left. Yet most leftists either explicitly supported pluralist democracy or accepted it as necessary. Conservative elements, often church-influenced, remained strong especially outside cities. Each country’s political system took shape gradually through this tension.

The left’s resurgence proved brief in Western Europe, for several reasons. Anti-fascism alone couldn’t maintain leftist unity, with old divisions quickly reemerging between socialists willing to work within democratic capitalism and communists taking orders from Moscow. Meanwhile, Christian Democracy emerged as a powerful new political force – conservative yet democratic, anti-communist yet reformist. Prewar elites who had resisted change now embraced social reform and parliamentary democracy.

Most importantly, the growing East-West divide hardened political lines. As Soviet domination of Eastern Europe became clearer, Western conservatives effectively exploited anti-communist sentiment. Political affiliations crystallized into socialist, communist and Christian democratic blocs, with communist influence waning as Christian democracy grew stronger.

Reconstruction and Division: The Marshall Plan and the Birth of Two Europes

By 1949, both halves of Europe – in very different ways – achieved stability and growth unimaginable in 1945. Five key factors enabled this remarkable transformation: the end of German ambitions, the effects of purging collaborators, Europe’s clear division, accelerating economic growth, and the sobering new threat of nuclear war.

Germany’s total defeat removed a central destabilizing force that had haunted Europe since before World War I. Postwar purges, however incomplete, prevented far-right violence from poisoning politics as after 1918. Border changes and population transfers, despite their brutality, created more ethnically homogeneous Eastern European states. The Iron Curtain’s division, while tragic for those under Soviet rule, provided stability through superpower balance.

American protection allowed Western Europe to pursue unity while abandoning the nationalism that had caused such devastation. Economic recovery, supported by U.S. loans and without crippling reparations, laid foundations for unprecedented prosperity. The Marshall Plan (1948-51), while not solely responsible for Europe’s recovery, provided crucial support – $12 billion (2% of U.S. GDP) that helped rebuild infrastructure and restore trade. Western Europe’s GDP index rose from 87 in 1948 to 102 in 1950 (1938=100), launching a period of sustained growth.

Nuclear weapons, while terrifying, likely prevented superpower conflict through mutually assured destruction. This grim equilibrium helped maintain stability unimaginable after World War I.

By 1949, new institutions like NATO (founded April 4, 1949) and the Council of Europe (May 1949) began knitting Western Europe together. The 1950 Schuman Plan for pooling Franco-German coal and steel production – initially a French security measure – became the foundation for the European Economic Community and eventual EU.

From war’s ashes, a new Europe arose with astonishing speed. Divided yet stable, prosperous beyond 1945’s darkest nightmares, it stood as a testament to human resilience amid history’s greatest catastrophe. The road ahead remained uncertain, but the postwar years had laid foundations for peace and progress that would transform the continent.