Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In Poland, the main target of popular vengeance was frequently Jews—150 Jews were killed in liberated Poland in the first four months of 1945. By April 1946 the figure was nearly 1,200.

the worst pogrom occurred in Kielce (Poland), on July 4th 1946, where 42 Jews were murdered and many more injured following a rumour of the abduction and ritual murder of a local child.

Someone had to pay for the suffering of the nation,

very few men and women at the time were disposed to blame their countrymen for the worst crimes. For these, it was universally agreed, the Germans must take full responsibility.

Winston Churchill’s insistence on the Prussian origins of Nazism, a view driven by his generation’s obsession with the emergence of the Prussian threat

Allies—Austria’s pivotal geographical position and the uncertainty over central Europe’s political future made it seem prudent to detach her fate from that of Germany.

In a country of under 7 million inhabitants there had been 700,000 NSDAP members: at the war’s end there were still 536,000 registered Nazis in Austria; 1.2 million Austrians had served in German units during the war. Austrians had been disproportionately represented in the SS and in concentration camp administrations. Austrian public life and high culture were saturated with Nazi sympathizers—45 out of 117 members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra were Nazis (whereas the Berlin Philharmonic had just 8 Nazi Party members out of 110 musicians).

130,000 Austrians were investigated for war crimes, of whom 23,000 were tried, 13,600 condemned, 43 sentenced to death and just 30 executed. Some 70,000 civil servants were dismissed.

1947 the Austrian authorities passed a law distinguishing between ‘more’ and ‘less’ incriminated Nazis.

500,000 of the latter were amnestied the following year and their voting rights restored. The former—about 42,000 in all—would all be amnestied by 1956.

the conservative People’s Party, heir to the pre-war Christian Social Party, had every reason to burnish its own and Austria’s ‘un-German’ credentials so as to divert attention from the corporatist regime they had imposed by force in 1934.

The Austrian Social Democrats, indisputably anti-Nazi, had nonetheless to overcome the record of their pre-1933 calls for Anschluss with Germany.

votes of ex-Nazis, a significant electoral constituency that would shape the country’s political future. And

influence of nazism on pol identity

an extraordinary amount of documentation and testimony on record (notably concerning the German project to exterminate Europe’s Jews), at the very moment when Germans and others were most disposed to forget as fast as they could.

They made clear that crimes committed by individuals for ideological or state purposes were nonetheless the responsibility of individuals and punishable under law. Following orders was not a defense.

Precisely because the personal guilt of the Nazi leadership, beginning with Hitler himself, was so fully and carefully established, many Germans felt licensed to believe that the rest of the nation was innocent, that Germans in the collective were as much passive victims of Nazism as anyone else.

more likely to provoke a nationalist backlash than induce contrition.

Just because Nazism did have such deep roots in his country, the future Chancellor thought it more prudent to allow and even encourage silence on the subject.

Germans in the 1940s had little sense of the way the rest of the world saw them. They had no grasp of what they and their leaders had done and were more preo...

November 1946, 37 per cent of Germans questioned in a survey of the American zone took the view that ‘the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans’.

collective punishment

This was more than Adenauer or most West German politicians were willing to concede, at least in public.

although denazification in the Soviet zone actually went further in some instances than it did in the West, it was based upon two misrepresentations of Nazism:

In Austria the local Communist Party made the mistake, in elections held in late 1945, of rejecting the potentially crucial support of minor Nazis and former Party members. In doing so it doomed the prospects for Communism in post-war Austria.

The German Communist Party (KPD) decided instead to offer its services and its protection to millions of former Nazis.

Ulbricht and his colleagues certainly believed that the way to expunge Nazism from Germany was by effecting a socio-economic transformation: they were not particularly interested in individual responsibility or moral re-education.

The German working class, like the German bourgeoisie, had failed in its responsibilities.

the corporatist, authoritarian regime of pre-war Austria was neutralized by the Nazi invasion and by their altogether credible and increasingly serviceable antipathy for the Left.

for political purposes Germans had spontaneously ‘denazified’ themselves on May 8th 1945.

Without such collective amnesia, Europe’s astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible.

how much post-war Europe rested on foundation myths that would fracture and shift with the passage of years.

Now The War Is Over

It is striking, in retrospect, how little resistance there was to this restoration of the institutional status quo

the state would intervene actively to support, discourage, facilitate and if necessary direct key economic sectors,

many on the conservative Right and Center state intervention in the economy was still abhorrent, while on the socialist Left it was generally believed that only a post-revolutionary society could plan its economic affairs rationally.

frustrated at their party’s failure to respond imaginatively to the economic crisis. Many of these and others like them ended up as Fascists.

Indeed in Britain it was the war above all that placed the government at the heart of economic life.

What planning was really about was faith in the state. In many countries this reflected a well-founded awareness, enhanced by the experience of war, that in the absence of any other agency of regulation or distribution, only the state now stood between the individual and destitution.

providing government with a strategy and levers for actively fostering certain favoured objectives.

Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor.

Eligibility for unemployment benefits in inter-war Britain rested on a ‘Means Test’. This drew on the nineteenth-century Poor Law principle of ‘least eligibility’ and required an applicant for public assistance to demonstrate his virtual destitution in order to qualify.

recognition of an obligation upon the state to guarantee a given set of services to all citizens,

signified a fundamental strategic choice.

Sir William Beveridge,

humiliation and social dependency of the old Poor Law/Means Test system

mid-nineteenth century Factory Acts,

Within a few years many of the universal provisions of the NHS proved unsustainably expensive; the quality of the services provided has not been maintained across the years; and over time it has become clear that certain of the fundamental actuarial assumptions—including the optimistic prediction of permanent full employment—were short-sighted or worse.

Far from dividing the social classes against each other, the European welfare state bound them closer together than ever before, with a common interest in its preservation and defense.

Would UBI do the same?

Christian Democracy avoided class-based appeals and emphasized instead social and moral reforms.

Christian Democrats of the first post-war years saw free-market liberals rather than the collectivist Left as their main opponents and were keen to demonstrate that the modern state could be adapted to non-socialist forms of benevolent intervention.