The following is based on the introduction and the first chapter of Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. It is, of course, not comprehensive of the information discussed there.
Demographic Consequences of the Second World War
It is disturbing to consider the extent to which the brutal policies of the Nazis and the Communists planted the seeds of post-war stability in Europe. "Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid." (9) (Though it seems clear that the Allies engaged in or endorsed many post-war population transfers that presumably contributed to this stability, and perhaps were not strictly "voluntary".)
Before the disastrous events of the first half of the twentieth century, many European cities were "truly multicultural societies...". "Between 1914 and 1945...that Europe was smashed into the dust.” “The ancient diasporas of Europe...shriveled and disappeared.” (8, 9, 28) There were many components of the demographic transformation of Europe that took place during and after the Second World War (and beginning before that war, as Judt indicates).
Following the August 1939 treaty signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union Poland was invaded and occupied. For the Nazis, the occupation of Poland was part of a strategy to create lebensraum or "living space" for Germans. The Nazis sought to settle the western portion of Poland with ethnic Germans currently dispersed throughout Europe. This policy involved the forced removal of populations, and the Nazis expelled 750,000 Polish peasants during the period prior to the Holocaust. During this same period, 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union deported over a million people from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic region to eastern Russia. (22-23)
Judt seems to sort of leap over the years 1941 to 1943. As a segway into discussing the demographic consequences of German retreat, he merely states, "Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43." (23) One assumes that he means strictly what he writes and that this number does not include civilian and military casualties or Holocaust victims. He mentions that in Germany, “two out of every three men born in 1918 did not survive Hitler’s war...”. (19)
A major group of those uprooted by the Second World War were those that the Nazis brought to Germany as forced laborers. Though he writes that this group constituted "the largest single group of Nazi-displaced persons in 1945", it is not clear if he means in the single year of 1945, or if more people had been displaced by conscription as forced laborers for the Nazis than by other methods of displacement by the end of the war.
Not all of Germany's foreign workers were forced laborers, who migrated involuntarily. Some had accepted work in Germany prior to 1939 and simply stayed there throughout the war. Though wages during the war were poor, "men and women from eastern Europe, the Balkans, France and the Benelux countries were often better off there than staying at home." (24) It is not discussed whether or not they had the choice to leave once the war began. Also, it is not explicitly discussed if voluntary emigrants were being received by Germany during the war. This might be expected because of the need for labor, but perhaps would have confronted ideological obstacles in a state striving more and more for racial purity. However, it seems implied by Judt that such emigrants were being received by Germany.
Judt points out that not all forced laborers were necessarily unhappy about being conscripted to labor in German factories. Such was the desperation of the subjects of Soviet rule.
German retreat and ultimate defeat had dramatic demographic consequences. The German retreat precipitated massive fleeing, the Red Army in pursuit, veritably raping its way westward. (19-20) At the end of the war the three million Germans in Czechoslovakia had their property placed under state control, land expropriated, and citizenship revoked. They were then expelled from the country. Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Poland also expelled their German populations. (25-6)
After the war Poland's borders were adjusted. The Soviet Union absorbed a portion of eastern Poland while Poland absorbed a portion of eastern Germany. Seven million Germans now found themselves in Poland. They were unwelcome and were expelled westward. "Eastern Europe had been forcibly cleared of its German populations...". (26)
Jews were not suddenly embraced by their societies upon the death of Adolf Hitler. I was surprised to read--though in retrospect should not have been--of "post-war pogroms in Poland". Judt emphasizes the dramatic changes wrought by the Second World War, but for Americans my age for whom the Second World War was not a direct experience--and for whom terms like "baby-boom" and images of post-war prosperity are among the first thoughts that come to mind at the mention of WWII--it is enlightening to remember that the Europeans who emerged from the Second World War were the same Europeans who had participated in it, and lots of them had participated on the side that lost.
Few Jews survived the camps. Of those who technically did, four out of ten died within weeks of their liberation. Jews remaining in Eastern Europe fled. Ironically, they fled to Germany, as Germany was the base of Allied relief agencies. From there they fled to France, Britain, Australia, North and South America, and eventually Israel. (24, 32)
Millions upon millions of people were in a different place at the conclusion of WWII than they had been at its inception. Most presumably had no means of livelihood. Many had nowhere to return. The immediate responsibility for these people fell upon the US Army--the only existing authority in Germany, Austria or northern Italy. And it was only the US Army that had the capacity--resources and otherwise--to manage the situation. This responsibility eventually gave way to organizations of the nascent United Nations. In November 1943 the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was established (UNRRA); in December 1946, the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The former was funded almost exclusively by the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The latter was primarily funded by the United States and the United Kingdom. (28-9)
Judt writes that the “distinction between displaced persons...and refugees...was just one of the many nuances that were introduced in these years.” Displaced persons have a place to return to, ostensibly anyway; refugees have nowhere to go. My understanding of the distinction between UNRRA and the IRO is that UNRRA dealt either with both displaced persons as well as refugees, or it dealt exclusively with displaced persons; or its mission evolved. At any rate, clearly the purpose of the IRO was to deal specifically with the problem of refugees. (29)
September 1945 saw the largest number of people being cared for by UNRRA. Judt states that 7 million “United Nations civilians (i.e. not including citizens of former Axis countries)” were under the care of UNNRA or “other Allied agencies...”. (29) But were the citizens of former Axis countries not cared for by the UN? If not, did they remain under the care of the US Army? In addition to this 7 million, Judt writes that there were "millions of displaced Germans."
At any rate, the largest group constituting the 7 million were Soviet prisoners and forced laborers. In order of their representation among the seven million: the Soviet Union, France, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Belgium, and of course, "countless others."
In addition to both the displaced Germans and millions under the care of the UN, there were "7 million under Soviet authority...". The Soviet Union was a member of the United Nations but it refused to cooperate with the IRO because "the IRO was always regarded by the USSR...as a purely Western instrument...". Therefore, "its services were...confined to refugees in areas controlled by Western armies of occupation." (29) It has to be assumed that the "7 million under Soviet authority" were not all refugees. However, it seems implied that displaced persons were also not handed over the UN.
“At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.” (The exception was Poland.) The Allies and the UN had “succeeded in repatriating, integrating or resettling” all of Europe’s displaced persons and refugees by 1957. (27, 32)
Civil Wars
In The Battle for Spain, Antony Beevor describes the Spanish Civil War as part of "the international civil war, which started in earnest with the bolshevik revolution." (Beevor, xxv) If that phrase--"international civil war"--means anything, its purpose must be to signal that the conflicts between liberal democracy, fascism, and communism that existed between European states also raged within European societies. Beginning in the 1930s ("the Indian summer of nineteenth-century radical visions", Judt writes) Europe experienced "an unprecedented sequence of murderous civil conflicts within the boundaries of existing states." (32)
France, Belgium and Norway are indicated to have been relatively passively occupied. "...not until the very end of the occupation did the number of active resisters exceed the numbers of those who collaborated with the Nazis out of belief, venality or self-interest...". (33)
"In Italy, circumstances were more complicated." Italy of course had been an Axis power under Mussolini. By July 1943, when Mussolini was overthrown, there was little resistance within Italy to Fascism. But by September 1943, when Italy was brought into the war on the Allied side, the northern, German-occupied region of Italy witnessed a "small but courageous partisan resistance...". Judt writes that post-war Italy was inclined to forget the extent of support for the puppet regime in the north, but "The anti-Fascist resistance was in reality one side in a struggle among Italians...". (33-4)
In Eastern Europe, Judt writes that Croats and Slovaks used Nazi occupation as an opportunity to create "independent" states. In the Baltic states and Finland Nazi occupation was seen as preferable to Soviet occupation. In Ukraine and Poland it seems that especially bloody conflicts ensued during invasion or occupation. "Poles and Ukrainians fought with or against the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and each other according to the moment and the place." (34) In Poland, resistance would last into the Soviet period following the conclusion of World War II.
“...in the Balkans...the Second World War was experienced above all as a civil war...”. (34) Judt does not extensively discuss these civil wars. Muslims seem to have been persecuted, and even resorted to assisting the Germans in order to defend themselves. And he mentions that Tito in Yugoslavia “devoted time and resources to destroying the Chetniks...”. In Greece, the civil war that began at the end of the Second World War did not come to an ultimate conclusion until the end of the decade. “The Greek civil war lacked many of the ethnic complexities of the fighting in Yugoslavia and Ukraine, but in human terms it was costlier still.” (34) I cannot help but wonder to what extent the population was engaged on either side of the civil war in Greece and to what extent the conflict was driven by support lent to the contending sides by the west and the Soviet Union.
Hitler’s Social Revolution
“With the exception of Germany and the heartland of the Soviet Union, every continental European state involved in World War Two was occupied at least twice...”. Old elites lost authority and legitimacy--and probably much more. (35-6) “Under German occupation, the right to property was at best contingent.” Jews, and many others, saw their property expropriated without compensation, “in what amounted to wholesale de facto nationalization.” This included “factories, vehicles, machinery and finished goods...”. (38)
Lawlessness and violence became ordinary elements of daily life in occupied Eastern Europe. Judt only briefly touches upon this point by highlighting illegal bartering and the black market, and the prevalence of theft. He also makes clear that it was not simply the laws of the occupiers that were violated, but “also conventional laws and norms as well.” (37)
Another consequence of war and occupation--in Europe generally--was a thriving of cynicism. “As occupying forces, both Nazis and Soviets precipitated a war of all against all.” During Nazi occupation--and, in Eastern Europe, during Soviet occupation--people apparently readily turned on one another. “Everyone, in short, had good reason to be afraid of everyone else.” (37)
Eastern European societies were transformed as a consequence of Nazi expulsions, deportations, and genocide as the homes and businesses of former shop-keepers and homeowners were taken over by others. At the end of the war, ethnic Germans throughout eastern Europe saw a fate similar--though obviously less catastrophic--to that of the Nazis’ victims. After the war, their property was expropriated before they faced expulsion. The significance of this “completion” of “the radical transformation that had begun with the Germans’ own removal of the Jews” is starkly painted by the example Judt gives of Czechoslovakia. “In Czechoslovakia, goods and property seized from the Germans and their collaborators amounted to one-quarter of the national wealth, while the redistribution of farmland alone directly benefited over 300,000 peasants, agricultural labourers and their families.” (38-9)
Demographic Consequences of the Second World War
It is disturbing to consider the extent to which the brutal policies of the Nazis and the Communists planted the seeds of post-war stability in Europe. "Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid." (9) (Though it seems clear that the Allies engaged in or endorsed many post-war population transfers that presumably contributed to this stability, and perhaps were not strictly "voluntary".)
Before the disastrous events of the first half of the twentieth century, many European cities were "truly multicultural societies...". "Between 1914 and 1945...that Europe was smashed into the dust.” “The ancient diasporas of Europe...shriveled and disappeared.” (8, 9, 28) There were many components of the demographic transformation of Europe that took place during and after the Second World War (and beginning before that war, as Judt indicates).
Following the August 1939 treaty signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union Poland was invaded and occupied. For the Nazis, the occupation of Poland was part of a strategy to create lebensraum or "living space" for Germans. The Nazis sought to settle the western portion of Poland with ethnic Germans currently dispersed throughout Europe. This policy involved the forced removal of populations, and the Nazis expelled 750,000 Polish peasants during the period prior to the Holocaust. During this same period, 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union deported over a million people from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic region to eastern Russia. (22-23)
Judt seems to sort of leap over the years 1941 to 1943. As a segway into discussing the demographic consequences of German retreat, he merely states, "Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43." (23) One assumes that he means strictly what he writes and that this number does not include civilian and military casualties or Holocaust victims. He mentions that in Germany, “two out of every three men born in 1918 did not survive Hitler’s war...”. (19)
A major group of those uprooted by the Second World War were those that the Nazis brought to Germany as forced laborers. Though he writes that this group constituted "the largest single group of Nazi-displaced persons in 1945", it is not clear if he means in the single year of 1945, or if more people had been displaced by conscription as forced laborers for the Nazis than by other methods of displacement by the end of the war.
Not all of Germany's foreign workers were forced laborers, who migrated involuntarily. Some had accepted work in Germany prior to 1939 and simply stayed there throughout the war. Though wages during the war were poor, "men and women from eastern Europe, the Balkans, France and the Benelux countries were often better off there than staying at home." (24) It is not discussed whether or not they had the choice to leave once the war began. Also, it is not explicitly discussed if voluntary emigrants were being received by Germany during the war. This might be expected because of the need for labor, but perhaps would have confronted ideological obstacles in a state striving more and more for racial purity. However, it seems implied by Judt that such emigrants were being received by Germany.
Judt points out that not all forced laborers were necessarily unhappy about being conscripted to labor in German factories. Such was the desperation of the subjects of Soviet rule.
German retreat and ultimate defeat had dramatic demographic consequences. The German retreat precipitated massive fleeing, the Red Army in pursuit, veritably raping its way westward. (19-20) At the end of the war the three million Germans in Czechoslovakia had their property placed under state control, land expropriated, and citizenship revoked. They were then expelled from the country. Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Poland also expelled their German populations. (25-6)
After the war Poland's borders were adjusted. The Soviet Union absorbed a portion of eastern Poland while Poland absorbed a portion of eastern Germany. Seven million Germans now found themselves in Poland. They were unwelcome and were expelled westward. "Eastern Europe had been forcibly cleared of its German populations...". (26)
Jews were not suddenly embraced by their societies upon the death of Adolf Hitler. I was surprised to read--though in retrospect should not have been--of "post-war pogroms in Poland". Judt emphasizes the dramatic changes wrought by the Second World War, but for Americans my age for whom the Second World War was not a direct experience--and for whom terms like "baby-boom" and images of post-war prosperity are among the first thoughts that come to mind at the mention of WWII--it is enlightening to remember that the Europeans who emerged from the Second World War were the same Europeans who had participated in it, and lots of them had participated on the side that lost.
Few Jews survived the camps. Of those who technically did, four out of ten died within weeks of their liberation. Jews remaining in Eastern Europe fled. Ironically, they fled to Germany, as Germany was the base of Allied relief agencies. From there they fled to France, Britain, Australia, North and South America, and eventually Israel. (24, 32)
Millions upon millions of people were in a different place at the conclusion of WWII than they had been at its inception. Most presumably had no means of livelihood. Many had nowhere to return. The immediate responsibility for these people fell upon the US Army--the only existing authority in Germany, Austria or northern Italy. And it was only the US Army that had the capacity--resources and otherwise--to manage the situation. This responsibility eventually gave way to organizations of the nascent United Nations. In November 1943 the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was established (UNRRA); in December 1946, the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The former was funded almost exclusively by the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The latter was primarily funded by the United States and the United Kingdom. (28-9)
Judt writes that the “distinction between displaced persons...and refugees...was just one of the many nuances that were introduced in these years.” Displaced persons have a place to return to, ostensibly anyway; refugees have nowhere to go. My understanding of the distinction between UNRRA and the IRO is that UNRRA dealt either with both displaced persons as well as refugees, or it dealt exclusively with displaced persons; or its mission evolved. At any rate, clearly the purpose of the IRO was to deal specifically with the problem of refugees. (29)
September 1945 saw the largest number of people being cared for by UNRRA. Judt states that 7 million “United Nations civilians (i.e. not including citizens of former Axis countries)” were under the care of UNNRA or “other Allied agencies...”. (29) But were the citizens of former Axis countries not cared for by the UN? If not, did they remain under the care of the US Army? In addition to this 7 million, Judt writes that there were "millions of displaced Germans."
At any rate, the largest group constituting the 7 million were Soviet prisoners and forced laborers. In order of their representation among the seven million: the Soviet Union, France, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Belgium, and of course, "countless others."
In addition to both the displaced Germans and millions under the care of the UN, there were "7 million under Soviet authority...". The Soviet Union was a member of the United Nations but it refused to cooperate with the IRO because "the IRO was always regarded by the USSR...as a purely Western instrument...". Therefore, "its services were...confined to refugees in areas controlled by Western armies of occupation." (29) It has to be assumed that the "7 million under Soviet authority" were not all refugees. However, it seems implied that displaced persons were also not handed over the UN.
“At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.” (The exception was Poland.) The Allies and the UN had “succeeded in repatriating, integrating or resettling” all of Europe’s displaced persons and refugees by 1957. (27, 32)
Civil Wars
In The Battle for Spain, Antony Beevor describes the Spanish Civil War as part of "the international civil war, which started in earnest with the bolshevik revolution." (Beevor, xxv) If that phrase--"international civil war"--means anything, its purpose must be to signal that the conflicts between liberal democracy, fascism, and communism that existed between European states also raged within European societies. Beginning in the 1930s ("the Indian summer of nineteenth-century radical visions", Judt writes) Europe experienced "an unprecedented sequence of murderous civil conflicts within the boundaries of existing states." (32)
France, Belgium and Norway are indicated to have been relatively passively occupied. "...not until the very end of the occupation did the number of active resisters exceed the numbers of those who collaborated with the Nazis out of belief, venality or self-interest...". (33)
"In Italy, circumstances were more complicated." Italy of course had been an Axis power under Mussolini. By July 1943, when Mussolini was overthrown, there was little resistance within Italy to Fascism. But by September 1943, when Italy was brought into the war on the Allied side, the northern, German-occupied region of Italy witnessed a "small but courageous partisan resistance...". Judt writes that post-war Italy was inclined to forget the extent of support for the puppet regime in the north, but "The anti-Fascist resistance was in reality one side in a struggle among Italians...". (33-4)
In Eastern Europe, Judt writes that Croats and Slovaks used Nazi occupation as an opportunity to create "independent" states. In the Baltic states and Finland Nazi occupation was seen as preferable to Soviet occupation. In Ukraine and Poland it seems that especially bloody conflicts ensued during invasion or occupation. "Poles and Ukrainians fought with or against the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and each other according to the moment and the place." (34) In Poland, resistance would last into the Soviet period following the conclusion of World War II.
“...in the Balkans...the Second World War was experienced above all as a civil war...”. (34) Judt does not extensively discuss these civil wars. Muslims seem to have been persecuted, and even resorted to assisting the Germans in order to defend themselves. And he mentions that Tito in Yugoslavia “devoted time and resources to destroying the Chetniks...”. In Greece, the civil war that began at the end of the Second World War did not come to an ultimate conclusion until the end of the decade. “The Greek civil war lacked many of the ethnic complexities of the fighting in Yugoslavia and Ukraine, but in human terms it was costlier still.” (34) I cannot help but wonder to what extent the population was engaged on either side of the civil war in Greece and to what extent the conflict was driven by support lent to the contending sides by the west and the Soviet Union.
Hitler’s Social Revolution
Judt explains the events of the Second World War to have wrought nothing short of a social revolution in Eastern Europe. In Western Europe the Nazis faced less resistance and subjected the populations to less brutality than in Eastern Europe. “The Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French and, after September 1943, the Italians were humiliated and exploited. But unless they were Jews, or Communists or resisters of one kind or another they were, on the whole, left alone.” Not so in Eastern Europe, where the civil wars, “Together with the unprecedented brutality of the Nazi and, later, Soviet occupations...corroded the very fabric of the European state.” These developments together “transformed World War Two--Hitler’s war--into a social revolution.” Thus, “the Soviets and their local representatives inherited a sub-continent where a radical break with the past had already taken place.” (35, 39, 40)Thus it was Hitler, at least as much as Stalin, who drove a wedge into the continent and divided it. [40]
“With the exception of Germany and the heartland of the Soviet Union, every continental European state involved in World War Two was occupied at least twice...”. Old elites lost authority and legitimacy--and probably much more. (35-6) “Under German occupation, the right to property was at best contingent.” Jews, and many others, saw their property expropriated without compensation, “in what amounted to wholesale de facto nationalization.” This included “factories, vehicles, machinery and finished goods...”. (38)
Lawlessness and violence became ordinary elements of daily life in occupied Eastern Europe. Judt only briefly touches upon this point by highlighting illegal bartering and the black market, and the prevalence of theft. He also makes clear that it was not simply the laws of the occupiers that were violated, but “also conventional laws and norms as well.” (37)
Another consequence of war and occupation--in Europe generally--was a thriving of cynicism. “As occupying forces, both Nazis and Soviets precipitated a war of all against all.” During Nazi occupation--and, in Eastern Europe, during Soviet occupation--people apparently readily turned on one another. “Everyone, in short, had good reason to be afraid of everyone else.” (37)
Eastern European societies were transformed as a consequence of Nazi expulsions, deportations, and genocide as the homes and businesses of former shop-keepers and homeowners were taken over by others. At the end of the war, ethnic Germans throughout eastern Europe saw a fate similar--though obviously less catastrophic--to that of the Nazis’ victims. After the war, their property was expropriated before they faced expulsion. The significance of this “completion” of “the radical transformation that had begun with the Germans’ own removal of the Jews” is starkly painted by the example Judt gives of Czechoslovakia. “In Czechoslovakia, goods and property seized from the Germans and their collaborators amounted to one-quarter of the national wealth, while the redistribution of farmland alone directly benefited over 300,000 peasants, agricultural labourers and their families.” (38-9)
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