Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

the Polish economy recovered quite rapidly—in part because the western territories newly seized from Germany were actually more fertile and better supplied with industrial towns and factories. In western Europe, too, material damage was repaired with remarkable speed—quickest, on the whole in Belgium, somewhat slower in France, Italy and Norway, slowest in the Netherlands, where the worst harm (to farms, dykes, roads, canals and people) had all come in the last months of the war. The Belgians benefited from Antwerp’s privileged status as the only major European port more or less intact at the end of the war, and from the high concentration of Allied troops in their country, pumping a steady flow of hard cash into an economy that had long specialized in coal, cement and semi-finished metals, all vital for reconstruction work. Norway, by contrast, was considerably worse off. Half the nation’s vital fishing and merchant fleet was lost in the war. Thanks to deliberate German destruction in the course of the Wehrmacht’s retreat, Norway’s industrial output in 1945 was just 57 per cent that of its 1938 level, with nearly a fifth of the country’s capital stock gone. In later years the contrast with Sweden was not lost on embittered Norwegians. But even Norway was able to restore most of its rail and road network by the end of 1946; and in the course of the following year, as in the rest of western and most of eastern Europe, fuel shortages and inadequate communications were no lon...