Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Author: Keith Lowe | Language: English | ISBN:
B006ZL9C8E | Format: EPUB
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Description
The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...
The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century’s most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.
- File Size: 3701 KB
- Print Length: 497 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1250000203
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press; Reprint edition (July 3, 2012)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B006ZL9C8E
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,168 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #95
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military > World War II
- #95
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military > World War II
In the introduction to his book, Keith Lowe writes that the story of Europe in the immediate period following WW2 " is not primarily one of reconstruction and rehabilitation-it is firstly one of descent into anarchy". Such a history has never been written before.
This book,which comes to fill in this void, has four main parts and its main theme is that of vengeance. Its other themes are those of displacement, famines, moral destruction, rape and civil wars.
In other words, after WW2 there was an atmosphere of chaos and violence almost everywhere and people decided to take the law into their hands. It was also the time to settle old scores. Yogoslav partisans decided to cut off the noses of their opponents, while Sudeten Germans were butchered in Czechoslovakia. Dutch and Belgian collaborators were summarily executed and their houses were set on fire, while in Italy the bodies of Fascists were displayed in the streets where they could be spat at by passers-by. In Hungary, members of the far-right Arrow Cross were forced to exume mass Jewish graves in very hot weather while local people threw sticks and stones at them. In France, clandestine prisons were set up where suspected collaborators were subjected to multiple forms of sadism including mutilation, rape, enforced prostitution and every type of torture imaginable.
This book is also about the history of ethnic cleansing and inter-communal and political violence. Poland harnessed the wartime hatred for Ukrainians to launch a program of expulsion and forced assimilation. Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians embarked on a series of population exchange.
Take, for example, Berlin. It was there where Hannelore Thiele was raped by seven in a row, "like animals".
This book opens a window on the "Old Europe" of virulent ethnic hatreds and murderous ethnic cleansings against minority groups. The book reveals that contrary to what we've been taught these atrocities did not end with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. In fact the defeat of the Nazis inflamed them for several more years. It really wasn't until 1948 or 1949 that Europe gained some sense of political and economic stability. During this time murderous inter-ethnic wars added a toll of hundreds of thousands more to the tens of millions killed outright in the war.
Author Keith Lowe brings home the terror of these early post-war years:
* He describes the near-total destruction of European cities. Some cities like Warsaw had nearly 100% of their housing stock destroyed and most of their pre-war populations obliterated. They might as well have been vaporized with hydrogen bombs. The prewar economy in all of Central and Western Europe was defunct due to loss of life, worthless currencies, and obliteration of urban and industrial infrastructure. America did its part to restore economic order in Europe with billions of dollars of aid via the Marshall Plan, but this took several years to produce results.
* People resorted to desperate means to survive even in places where the war ended relatively early, such as Southern Italy. Lowe illustrates degrading scenes like those in Italian railway stations and public buildings where hundreds of Italian women lined up to prostitute themselves on the public benches for American soldiers who traded sex for a tin of rations. Later on this happened in Germany. This was a time of starvation rations when the lifeline of many families depended on having a young woman in the household to trade for sex.
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