Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

final settlement of all claims relating to Reichsbank transactions through Swiss banks. But by that time Switzerland was already rehabilitated as a prosperous island of fiscal rectitude: its banks highly profitable, its farms and engineering industries set to supply food and machinery to needy European markets. Before the war neither Switzerland nor Sweden had been especially prosperous—indeed they contained significant regions of rural poverty. But the lead they secured in the course of the war has proved lasting: both are now at the top of the European league and have been there steadily for four decades. Elsewhere the path to recovery was a little steeper. But even in Eastern Europe the economic infrastructure at least was repaired with remarkable speed. Despite the worst efforts of the retreating Wehrmacht and the advancing Red Army, the bridges, roads, railways and cities of Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia were rebuilt. By 1947, transportation networks and rolling stock in central Europe had been brought up to or surpassed their pre-war levels. In Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania and Romania, where there was less war-related destruction, this process took less time than in Yugoslavia or Poland. But even