Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The real problem with any consistent programme aimed at rooting out Nazism from German life was that it was simply not practicable in the circumstances of 1945. In the words of General Lucius Clay, the American Military Commander, ‘our major administrative problem was to find reasonably competent Germans who had not been affiliated or associated in some way with the Nazi regime . . . All too often, it seems that the

only men with the qualifications . . . are the career civil servants . . . a great proportion of whom were more than nominal participants (by our definition) in the activities of the Nazi Party.’

On May 8th 1945, when the war in Europe ended, there were 8 million Nazis in Germany. In Bonn, 102 out of 112 doctors were or had been Party members. In the shattered city of Cologne, of the 21 specialists in the city waterworks office—whose skills were vital for the reconstruction of water and sewage systems and in the prevention of disease—18 had been Nazis. Civil administration, public health, urban reconstruction and private enterprise in post-war Germany would inevitably be underta...

Sixteen million Fragebogen (questionnaires) were completed in the three western zones of occupied Germany, most of them in the area under American control. There, the US authorities listed 3.5 million Germans (about one quarter of the total population of the zone) as ‘chargeable cases’, though many of them were never brought before the local denazification tribunals, set up in March 1946 under German responsibility but with Allied oversight. German civilians were taken on obligatory visits to concentration camps and made to watch films documenting Nazi atrocities. Nazi teachers were removed, librar...

There was considerable opposition even to these measures. On May 5th 1946, the future West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer spoke out against the denazification measures in a public speech in Wuppertal, demanding that the ‘Nazi fellow travellers’ be left in peace. Two months later, in a speech to his newly-formed Christian Democratic Union, he made the same point: Denazification was lasting much too long and doing no good. Adenauer’s concern was genuine. In his view, confronting Germans with the crimes of the Nazis—whether in trials, tribunals or re-education projects—was mo...

thought it more prudent to allow and even encourage silen...

He was not altogether mistaken. 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 preoccupied with their own post-war difficulties—food shortages, housing shortages and the like—than the sufferings of their victims across occupied Europe. Indeed they were more likely to see themselves in the role of victim and thus regarded trials and other confrontations with Nazi crimes as the victorious Allies’ revenge on a defunct regime.3 With certain honorable exceptions, Germany’s post-war political and religious authorities offered ...

By the time the western Allies abandoned their denazification efforts with the coming of the Cold War, it was clear that these had had a decidedly limited impact. In Bavaria about half the secondary schoolteachers had been fired by 1946, only to be back in their jobs two years later. In 1949 the newly-established Federal Republic ended all investigations of the past behaviour of civil servants and army officers. In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance

ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis. By 1952 one in three of Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party. Of the newly-constituted West German Diplomatic Corps, 43 percent were former SS men and another 17 percent had served in the SD or Gestapo. Hans Globke, Chancellor Adenauer’s chief aide throughout the 1950s, was the man who had been responsible for the official commentary on Hitler’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The chief of police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Wilhelm Hauser, was the Obersturmführer responsible for wartime massacres in Byelorussia.

Universities and the legal profession were the least affected by denazification, despite their notorious sympathy for Hitler’s regime. Businessmen also got off lightly. Friedrich Flick, convicted as a war criminal in 1947, was released three years later by the Bonn authorities and restored to his former eminence as the leading shareholder in Daimler-Benz. Senior figures in the incrimi...

Even the Nazi judges and concentration camp doctors convicted under American jurisdiction saw their sentences reduced or commuted (by the American administrator, John J McCloy).

In October 1946, when the Nuremberg Trial ended, only 6 percent of Germans were willing to admit that they thought it had been ‘unfair’, but four years later one in three took this view. That they felt this way should come as no surprise, since throughout the years 1945–49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that ‘Nazism was a good idea, badly applied’. In 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’.

In the same poll of November 1946, one German in three agreed with the proposition that ‘Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan

race’. This is not especially surprising, given that respondents had just emerged from twelve years under an authoritarian government committed to this view. What does surprise is a poll taken six years later in which a slightly higher percentage of West Germans—37 percent—affirmed that it was better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory. But then in t...

In the Soviet-occupied zone the Nazi legacy was treated a little differently. Although Soviet judges and lawyers took part in the Nuremberg trials, the main emphasis in denazification in the East was on the collective punishment of Nazis and the extirpation of Nazism from all areas of life. The local Communist leadership was under no illusions about what had taken place. As Walter Ulbricht, the future leader of the German Democratic Republic, put it in a speech to German Communist Party representatives in Berlin just six weeks after the defeat of his country, ‘The tragedy of the German people consists in the fact that they obeyed a band of criminals . . . The German working class and the productive parts of the population failed before history.’ This was more than Adenauer or most West German politicians were willing to concede, a...

the Soviet authorities paid little attention to the distinctively racist side of Nazism, and its genocidal outcome, and instead focused their arrests and expropriations on businessmen, tainted officials, teachers and others responsible for advancing the interests of the social class purportedly standing behind Hitler. In this way the Soviet dismantling of the heritage of Nazism in Germany was not fundamentally different from the social transformation

that Stalin was bringing about in other parts of central and eastern Europe.

Thus on the one hand Soviet occupation forces fired from their jobs huge numbers of ex-Nazis—520,000 by April 1948—and appointed ‘anti-Fascists’ to administrative posts in their zone of occupation. On the other hand, German Communist leaders actively encouraged former Nazis whose records were not too publicly compromised to join them. Not surprisingly, they were very successful. Ex-Nazis were only too happy to expunge

their past by throwing in their lot with the victors. As party members, local administrators, informers and policemen they proved uniquely well-adapted to the needs of the Communist state. The new system, after all, was remarkably like the one they had known before: the Communists simply took over Nazi institutions like Labor Fronts or residential block-wardens and gave them new names and new bosses. But the adaptability of ex-Nazis was also a product of their vulnerability to blackmail. The Soviet authorities were quite prepared to conspire with their former enemies in lying about the nature and extent of Nazism in eastern Germany—asserting that Germany’s capitalist and Nazi heritage was confined to the western zones and that the future German Democratic Republic was a land of workers, peasants and anti-Fascist heroes—but they also knew better and had the Nazi files to prove it, should the need arise. Black-marketeers, war profiteers and ex-Nazis of all sorts thus made excellent Communists, for they had every incentive to please.

The newly-formed Stasi (state security agency) took over not just the role and the practices of the Nazi Gestapo but many thousands of its employees and informers. Political victims of the incoming Communist regime, often charged in a blanket manner as ‘Nazi criminals’, were arrested by ex-Nazi policemen, tried by ex-Nazi judges and guarded by ex-Nazi camp guards in Nazi-era prisons and concentration camps taken over en bloc by the new authorities.

In post-war Hungary the Communists openly courted former members of the Fascist Arrow Cross, even going so far as to offer them support against Jews seeking the return of their property. In wartime London the Slovak Communists Vlado Clementis and Eugen Löbl were stalked by Soviet agents recruited from pre-war Czech Fascist parties, whose testimony would be used against them in their show trial a decade later.

In Austria, former Fascists were often favoured by Western authorities and allowed to work in journalism and other sensitive occupations: their association with 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. The Allied Military Government in the frontier zone of north-east Italy protected former Fascists and collaborators, many of them wanted by the Yugoslavs, while Western intelligence services everywhere recruited experienced and well-informed ex-Nazis—including the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie—for future use: not least against the ex-Nazis in Soviet service, whom they were well-placed to identify.

This distrust of short-term memory, the search for serviceable myths of anti-Fascism—for a Germany of anti-Nazis, a France of Resisters or a Poland of victims—was

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

Anti-Fascist resisters everywhere saw themselves in battle not just with the wartime occupiers and their local surrogates but with an entire political and social system which they held directly responsible for the disasters their countries had undergone. It was the politicians and bankers and businessmen and soldiers of the inter-war years who had brought their countries to catastrophe, who had betrayed the sacrifices of the First World War and laid the ground for the Second.

Resistance was thus everywhere implicitly revolutionary. This was inherent in its logic. To reject a society that had produced Fascism led one naturally ‘to a dream of revolution which would take off from a tabula rasa’ (Italo Calvino). In much of eastern Europe the slate was indeed wiped clean, as we have seen.

Seen from the point of view of the wartime Resistance movements, post-war politics would be the continuation of their wartime struggle, a natural projection and extension of their clandestine existence. Many young men and women who came to the fore in the wartime underground had known no other form of public life: in Italy since 1924, in Germany, Austria and most of Eastern Europe since the early thirties, and throughout occupied continental Europe since 1940, normal politics were unknown. Political parties had been banned, elections rigged or abolished. To oppose the authorities, to advocate social change or even political reform, was to place your self beyond the law. For this new generation, politics was therefore about resistance—resistance to authority, resistance to conventional social or economic arrangements, resistance to the past.

The chief impediment to radical change in the aftermath of Hitler’s defeat was not the reactionaries or Fascists, who had thrown in their lot with the dictators and been swept away with them, but the legitimate governments-in-exile, most of which had sat out the war in London planning their return. They saw the local resistance organizations in their countries as a problem rather than as allies: careless youngsters who would need to be disarmed and returned to civilian life,

In western Europe, provisional authorities took office pending new elections. And in every case the resistance movements were encouraged and eventually forced to hand in their weapons and disband their organizations. It is striking, in retrospect, how little resistance there was to this restoration of the institutional status quo. In Poland and parts of the western Soviet Union armed partisan groups survived for a few more years, but theirs was a specifically national and anti-Communist struggle. In Norway, Belgium, France and Italy the organized resistance merged peacefully into post-war political parties and unions with only muted protests. In Belgium in November 1944 armed members of the wartime resistance were given two weeks to hand over their weapons. This led to a large protest rally in Brussels on November 25th at which the police opened fire, injuring 45 people.

The demobilization of the resistance was greatly facilitated by Soviet strategy, which favoured the restoration of parliamentary regimes in western Europe (as, nominally, in eastern Europe too).

breaking down of the centuries-long denominational divide between communities of Catholics and Protestants, began with personal links forged in wartime.

plans for a post-war ‘Resistance Party’ failed everywhere.

Rather than being governed by a new, fraternal community of resisters, then, most Europeans in the immediate post-war years instead found themselves ruled by coalitions of left and left-centre politicians rather similar to the Popular Fronts of the 1930s. This made sense. The only pre-war political parties able to operate normally in these years were those with anti-Fascist credentials—or, in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, those to whom it suited the new authorities to ascribe such credentials at least for the time being. In practice this meant Communists, Socialists and a handful of liberal or radical groups. These, together with the newly-prominent Christian Democratic parties, thus constituted the parties of government in the first post-war

war years and they brought with them many of the policies and men of the Popular Front era. The existing parties of the Left had gained immensely by their engagement in the wartime resistance: especially in France, where the Communists’ succeeded in converting their (sometimes exaggerated) wartime exploits into political capital and convinced even dispassionate observers of their unique moral standing—‘the great heroes of the Resistance’ as Janet Flanner described them in December 1944. It is thus not especially odd that the reform programs of post-war European governments echoed and recapitulated the unfinished business of the 1930s.

But above all the resisters were handicapped by a lack of experience. Among clandestine organizations only the Communists had practical knowledge of politics, and except in the French case not much of that. But Communists in particular were reluctant to tie their hands with detailed programmatic statements that might alienate future tactical allies. The Resistance thus bequeathed little in the way of post-war projects beyond high-minded statements of intent and broad generalities—and

On one thing, however, all were agreed—resisters and politicians alike: ‘planning’. The disasters of the inter-war decades—the missed opportunities after 1918, the great depression that followed the stock-market crash of 1929, the waste of unemployment, the inequalities, injustices and inefficiencies of laissez-faire capitalism that had led so many into authoritarian temptation, the brazen indifference of an arrogant

ruling elite and the incompetence of an inadequate political class—all seemed to be connected by the utter failure to organize society better. If democracy was to work, if it was to recover its appeal, it would have to be planned.

The vogue for plans and planning began long before 1945. Throughout the inter-war depression, from Hungary to Great Britain, voices were raised in support of a planned economy of one kind or another.

Some of the ideas propounded, notably in Austria and among the British Fabians, derived from an older Socialist tradition, but many more had their origins in pre-1914 liberal reformism. The nineteenth-century ‘caretaker’ state, its attention confined to security and policing, was outmoded, so the argument ran. If only on prudential grounds—to forestall political upheaval—it would now be necessary to intervene in economic affairs to regulate imbalances, eliminate inefficiencies and compensate for the inequities and injustice of the market. Before 1914 the main emphasis in such reformist projects was confined to calls for progressive taxation, protection of labour and, occasionally, state ownership of a restricted number of natural monopolies. But with the collapse of the international economy and the ensuing war, planning took on a greater urgency and ambition. Competing proposals for a national Plan, in which the state would intervene actively to support, discourage, facilitate and if necessary direct key economic sectors, circulated widely among young engineers, economists and civil servants in France and Germany.

The idea that one might ‘plan’ a capitalist economy seemed to both sides a non-sense. The frustrated advocates of economic planning thus frequently found themselves attracted to authoritarian parties of the radical Right, distinctly more hospitable to their approach.

Mussolini’s cheerleaders in France and Britain, before 1940, envied what they saw as his success in overcoming Italy’s economic disadvantages through state-led planning and the establishment of umbrella agencies for whole economic sectors. Albert Speer, the administrator of Hitler’s New Order, was much admired abroad for his programme of economic direction and regulation. In September 1943, Speer and Jean Bichelonne, Vichy’s Minister of Industrial Production, worked out a system of tariff reductions based on inter-war ‘plan-ist’ ideas that closely anticipated European trading relations and Franco-German economic coordination in later years. In ‘Jeune Europe’, a club founded in 1933 for young thinkers and politicians keen to set a new direction in policy making, the future Belgian statesman and Europhile Paul-Henri Spaak exchanged ideas about an enhanced role for the state with similarly-minded contemporaries

in Britain it was the war above all that placed the government at the heart of economic life. The Emergency Powers Bill of May 1940 authorised the government to direct anyone to do anything in the national interest, to control any property and assign any industrial plant to any national end it chose. In the words of Kenneth Harris, the biographer of Clement Attlee, Britain’s post-war Labour leader: ‘National planning and national ownership, which in the period 1945–51 seemed the result of a Labour government putting socialist principles into effect, were to a great degree the legacy of a state which had been organized to fight a total war.’ Fascism and war were thus the bridge linking heterodox, marginal and often controversial notions of economic planning with mainstream post-war economic policy. Yet this compromised heritage had little impact on planning’s appeal—whatever its associations with far Right, far Left, occupation or war, planning was quite distinctly not associated with the discredited politics of the inter-war years, a point widely held in its favour. 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. But contemporary enthusiasm for an interventionist state went beyond desperation or self-interest. The vision of Clement Attlee, the British Labour leader whose party defeated Churchill’s Conservatives in the dramatic election upset of 1945, nicely captured the contemporary mood: what was needed now were ‘well-planned, well-built cities and parks and playing fields, homes and schools, factories and shops.’ There was a great faith in the ability (and not just the duty) of government to solve large-scale problems

by mobilizing and directing people and resources to collectively useful ends. Obviously this way of seeing things was particularly attractive to socialists; but the idea that a well-planned economy meant a richer, fairer and better-regulated society was taken up by a very broad constituency, including th...

What was ‘Planning’? The term is misleading. What all planners had in common was belief in an enhanced role for the state in social and economic affairs. Beyond this there was great variation, usually a consequence of distinctive national political traditions. In Britain,

where very little actual planning ever took place, the real issue was control—of industries and social and economic services—through state ownership as an end in itself. Thus nationalization—notably of mines, railways, goods transportation and utilities—and the provision of medical services lay at the heart of the Labour Party programme after 1945. The ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, in short, were taken over. But that was all. In Italy the Fascist institutional legacy—which had brought large tracts of the economy under state oversight—was left largely intact after the war. What changed was the political colour of the parties now benefiting from the industrial and financial power base afforded them by holding companies and state-owned agencies. In West Germany, after 1948, the economy would remain mostly in private hands but with detailed, publicly-approved arrangements for factory management, employer-employee relations and conditions of employment and distribution. In the Netherlands central planning entailed a variable mix of predictive and prescriptive edicts for the use of private enterprise. Most countries of western Europe had rapidly growing public sectors, when measured by government expenditure or the number of public-sector employees. But only in France did rhetorical enthusiasm for state planning translate into the real thing. Like the British, post-war French governments nationalized: air transportation, banks, thirty two insurance companies, utilities, m...

The Monnet Plan was unique. It was the work of an unusual man.2 But above all it was the product of a political culture already favourably disposed to authoritarian decision-making and consensus building by governmental fiat. Under its auspices France became the first western country to commit itself wholeheartedly to economic growth and modernization as public policy. The Plan depended heavily on assumptions about French access to German raw materials and markets, and thus the story of its success is part of the narrative of France’s relations with Germany and the rest of Europe in the post-war decade: a story of many false starts, constraints and frustrations. The first Monnet Plan was largely an emergency measure to address France’s post-war crisis. Only later was it extended and adapted to the terms of Marshall Aid. But the basic outline of post-war French economic strategy was present from the start. French planning was never more than ‘indicative’: it only ever set targets, not production quotas. In this respect it was quite unlike Soviet planning, whose characteristic feature

(and prime defect) was its insistence upon arbitrary and rigid output figures by sector and by commodity. The Monnet Plan confined itself to providing government with a strategy and levers for actively fostering certain favoured objectives. At the time this was a strikingly original undertaking.

In Czechoslovakia a Central Planning Commission with some Monnet-like features and aspirations was established in June 1946 to guide and coordinate the sizeable public s...

Banks, mines, insurance companies, major utilities, steel and chemical works, food processing industries and all large enterprises had been taken over: 2,119 firms comprising some 75 percent of all manufacturing output.