The WAR AFTER the war
The Nazis were defeated. Peace had been declared. But an orgy of savage vengeance made 1946 . . .
Most histories of World War II end in 1945. With victory won, you might suppose that everybody went home a nd lived reasonably happily ever after.
Not a bit true. As years go, 1946 was as terrible for some — and as exasperating for nearly all — as any wartime year.
Victor sebestyen demonstrates this with an impressively wideranging and detailed survey of the war’s aftermath. Centred on Europe, where misery and want were the worst, but including the build-up of earthquakes in the Middle East, Asia and Japan, his book is a lesson in much-neglected history, made clear and appalling in the telling of it.
Churchill described the Europe left by the war in telling terms: ‘A vast quivering mass of tormented human beings scans the horizon for some new tyranny or terror . . . in a sullen silence of despair.’
Europe was in a total mess. Nothing worked. Whol e populations of refugees were on the move. In Germany alone, there were 14 million homeless people, of whom eight to nine million had been transported there by the Nazis as forced slave labour.
Add to them liberated prisoners of war, more than two million captives who did not want to be repatriated to stalin’s soviet Union, and you have the biggest refugee crisis ever known.
In countries that had been under the Nazi yoke, the sheer hatred of Germans resulted in their mass expulsion. Germans who had been resident for generations in areas of what is now the Czech Republic were forced to leave their homes, ordered to march to the German border and pelted with stones and garbage as they went.
POLAND expelled thousands more. Many were interned in former concentration camps like theresienstadt in conditions little better than under the Nazis.
they died of hunger and illness and the roads they were forced to march along were lined with the bodies of those too ill or too old to make it.
one-and-a-half million ethnic Germans arrived in the British and American zones of occupied Germany; 780,000 were dumped in the Russian zone. No one knows exactly how many died in the process but the best estimate is 200,000.
the killing had not stopped either f or such Jews as had survived in Poland, Hungary and slovakia. Anti-semitism had not been dimmed by the Holocaust.
Pogroms blew up in which Jews were stoned, lynched or thrown out of upper windows — at least 1,500 perished. others returned, having survived the death camps, to find their houses had been seized by squatters who would not give them back.
one of the ugliest events of 1946 was forced repatriation. Under an agreement made in 1944 between Anthony Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov, the British and soviet f oreign ministers, all soviet citizens were to be repatriated after the war, whether willingly or not.
so British troops f ound t hemselves having to f orce unwilling Ukrainians or Cossacks onto trains. Knowing what fate awaited them — the gulag or the firing squad — many committed suicide in front of their horrified escorts. British officers who
objected to obeying such orders were told to shut up; the agreement must be honoured.
It was a year of revenge. In Germany, nobody knows how many women were raped by Soviet troops — but 200,000 ‘Russian’ babies were born without fathers in 1946.
The Russians took reparations galore — dismantling railway lines, telephone exchanges, factories, machinery and even the Leipzig zoo to transport them to Russia.
Unofficially, high-ranking Russian officers helped themselves to works of art, silver porcelain, jewellery and anything that was going. The victorious Marshal Georgy Zhukov furnished several of his homes before being disgraced and displaced by a jealous Stalin. None of this turmoil affected Britain. We had our own problems — chiefly that of being broke. The war had emptied the coffers and left a national debt of £3 billion, in the days when billions were awesome figures.
John Maynard Keynes went to Washington intending to win an interest-free loan for that amount. He got the loan, but at two per cent per annum, which Britain didn’t finish paying off until 2006.
The Americans, the only people to emerge from the war both richer and stronger, were not inclined to be generous. There was much resentment among Clement Attlee’s government that Britain was being penalised for having fought the Nazis earlier and for longer.
Meanwhile, food had to be imported and rationing had to be tightened — in some cases halved — from what it was in war time.
THE l ast straw was the introduction, for the first time, of bread rationing. We had all t he grim, pinched deprivation of wartime without the excitement.
It was obvious, but it took a long while to sink in, that Britain could no longer afford its empire.
Plans to give India independence were rushed into being. Meanwhile Mr Attlee, the silent but effective and determined prime minister backed by the most talented Labour Cabinet there has yet been, set about transforming Britain into a welfare state, with the approval of overwhelming public opinion.
A national health service had to wait until 1948 to begin, due to the reluctance of leaders of the medical profession. But the most important and far- seeing speech of the year was made by Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, when he declared that ‘an iron curtain has descended between Stettin in the Baltic and Trieste on the Adriatic’.
He was the first to recognise that the true victor of all the fighting had been Stalin.
Thus began the Cold War, though it was not yet called that.
There is far more in this book — a fascinating analysis of why and how Japan kept its emperor, for example. It gives you an uncommonly clear bird’s-eye view of a post-war world of rivalry, hardship and chaos.