“This was no slow decadence that came to the
Europeanised world—other civilizations rolled and crumbled down; the European
civilization was, as it were, blown up.”
HG Wells, War in the Air
I.
PROBLEMS OF THE POST WAR WORLD:
A.
REDIRECTED ECONOMIES:
Czechoslovakia , Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Bohemia-Moravia, and France all contributed to the German war effort
B.
CHAOS:
1. DEATH:
36.5
million deaths from 1939-1945…no conflict killed so many so fast.
1 in 5 dead in Poland,
1 in 8 dead in Yugoslavia,
1 in 11 in USSR,
1 in 14 in Greece
(just by contrast, 1/15 in GR, 1/77
in France, 1/125 in GB)
2. DESTRUCTION:
Of 12,000 train engines in pre-war France, only 2800
were in service after the war.
Yugoslavia lost 25% of its vineyards, 50% of its
livestock, 60% of its roads, 75% of its
bridges, 35% of its industrial wealth.
25 million were homeless in the Soviet Union.
20 million homeless in Germany, 500,000 in Hamburg
alone.
3. RAPE:
87,000 women in Vienna …more in Berlin
Milovan Djilas, a fervent Communist who worked with
Tito in Yugoslavia, reported the atrocities to Stalin..
Stalin replied, “Does Djilas, who is himself a
writer, know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can’t he understand
the soldier who has gone through blood and fire and death, if he has fun with a
woman or takes a trifle?”
200,000 “Russian babies” were born between
1945-1946.
II.
SOLUTIONS IN THE POST WAR WORLD:
A.
ORGANIZATIONS:
1. United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA)
1945: 227 UNRRA camps in Germany, 25 in Austria, a
handful elsewhere.
1947: 762 camps caring for
6,795,000 people…
2. International Refugee
Organisation (IRO)
U.S.
share=46%
U.K.
share=15%
France
share=4%
3. Moving people…
WORLD WAR ONE=MOVING BORDERS
WORLD WAR TWO=MOVING PEOPLE
Ancient diasporas of Europe shriveled and
disappeared—Greeks and Turks in the south Balkans, Italians in Dalmatia,
Hungarians in Transylvania, Poles in Volhynia(Ukraine), Lithuania and Bukovina,
Germans from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Rhine to the Volga all
either back home or dead.
Can you imagine any problems with moving all of
these European peoples back to their homelands after the war?
By the end of May, 1945, the British Army turned
10,000 Slovenian soldiers and civilians who had fled to Austria over to
Yugoslav authorities…they were put in trucks, driven south to the Kocevje
forests and shot.
III. UNTANGLING ALLIANCES:
The Baltic…many had welcomed the Wehrmacht
The Balkans…WW II was experienced as a civil war.
Croatia: Ante Pavelic’s Ustase Regime in
Croatia…murdered 200,000 Serbs and Muslims
Mihajlovic’s
Serb Royalist Partisans also killed Muslims.
All of the different types of war in WW Two meant
that the war in Europe did not end in 1945…
IV. REMOVING THE NAZI WITHIN:
A. Punishing collaborators (real and imagined):
1. Punishing Political Traitors…
Edouard Herriot:
“France will need first to pass through a blood bath before republicans can
again take up the reins of power.”
Emilia-Romagna and
Lombardy: 15,000 killed
Belgium: 265 were
lynched
Norway: Nasjonal
Sammlung party was tried: 17,000 guilty
10,000 were killed in
France in extra judicial proceedings.
Courts in France
sentenced 6762 people to death.
791 death sentences
were carried out.
The main punishment for
the French was called “National degradation.”
The sarcastic writer
Janet Flanner quipped, “National degradation will consist of being deprived of
nearly everything the French consider nice—such as the right to be a lawyer,
notary, public school teacher, judge or witness and above all the right to be a
director of an insurance company or a bank.”
49,723 people received
this punishment…11,000 civil servants removed from office…a civil service purge
(epuration)
International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945-1946)
TWO MAJOR FAILINGS:
1. Soviet
presence…
George Kennan: “The only implication this procedure
could convey was that such crimes were justifiable and forgivable when committed
by the leaders of one government, under one set of circumstances, but
unjustifiable and unforgivable, and to be punish by death, when committed by
another government under another set of circumstances.”
2. Overly
personal nature of the charges…
2.
Punishing the Feminine Traitor:
Thousands
of women were accused of "collaboration horizontale."
“Ugly
carnival”…the desexualisation of the victim
Many women were falsely accused of being a “mattress
for the boches"
Others did indeed
“collaborate” sexually with Germans…
Why might that be an
appealing choice?
German writer Ernst Jünger: "food is
power"
20,000 women had their heads
shaved…80,000 children fathered by Wehrmacht soldiers.
B. Punishing “Resistance”
Poland
and Ukraine
C. De-Nazification
Germans were categorized as Major
Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders, Followers and Exonerated Persons.
Americans took over 37 newspapers, 6
radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers,
7384 book dealers and printers.
30,000 books were banned.
In Italy, the questionnaire read “Were you a
Fascist?”
394,000 government employees investigated…most
claimed “gattopardismo” (leopardism or changing spots)
IN CONCLUSION…
