Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

By the beginning of 1947 it was clear that the hardest decisions had not yet been taken and that they could not be postponed much longer. To begin with, the fundamental problem of food supply was not yet overcome. Food shortages were endemic everywhere except Sweden and Switzerland. Only UNRRA supplies built up in the spring of 1946 kept Austrians from starving in the twelve months that followed. Caloric provision in the British Zone of Germany fell from 1,500 per day per adult in mid-1946 to 1,050 in early 1947. Italians, who suffered two consecutive years of hunger in 1945 and 1946, had the lowest average food levels of all the west European populations in the spring of 1947.

Part of the problem was that western Europe could no longer turn to the granaries of eastern Europe on which it had traditionally depended. For there, too, no-one had enough to eat. In Romania the 1945 harvest failed, through mismanaged land reforms and bad weather. From western Wallachia through Moldavia, into the western Ukraine and the middle Volga region of the USSR, poor harvests and drought led to near-famine conditions in the autumn of 1946, with aid agencies describing one-year old children weighing just three kilograms and sending back reports of cannibalism. Relief workers in Albania described the situation there as one of ‘terrifying distress’.

Then came the brutal winter of 1947, the worst since 1880. Canals froze, roads were impassable for weeks at a time, frozen points paralyzed whole rail networks. The incipient post-war recovery came to a grinding halt. Coal, still in short supply, could not keep up with domestic demand

A few months later, in June 1947, the continent entered one of the hottest, driest summers since records began. It was clear that the harvest would be inadequate, in some places for the third year running: agricultural yields fell by about a third even over the previous year’s meager crop. The shortfall in coal could be made up in part from American imports (34 million tonnes in 1947). Food, too, could be purchased from America and the British Dominions. But all these imports had to be paid for in hard currency, usually dollars.

Two structural dilemmas underlay the European crisis of 1947. One was the effective disappearance of Germany from the European economy. Before the war Germany had been a major market for most of central and eastern Europe, as well as the Netherlands, Belgium and the Mediterranean region (until 1939, for example, Germany bought 38 percent of Greece’s exports and supplied about one-third of the country’s imports). German coal was a vital resource for French

steel manufacturers. But until its political future was resolved Germany’s economy—for all its restored potential—remained frozen, effectively blocking the economic recovery of the rest of the continent. The second problem concerned not Germany but the USA, though the two were connected. In 1938, 44 percent of Britain’s machinery imports by value came from the USA, 25 percent from Germany. In 1947 the figures were 65 percent and 3 percent respectively. The situation was similar in other European countries. This sharply increased demand for American goods was, ironically, an indication of an upswing in European economic activity—but to buy American products or materials required American dollars. Europeans had nothing to sell to the rest of the world; but without hard currency they could not buy food to stop millions from starving, nor could they import the raw materials and machinery needed to move forward their own production. The dollar crisis was serious. In 1947 the UK, whose national debt had increased fourfold since 1939, was buying nearly half its total imports from the USA and fast running out of cash. France, the world’s largest importer of coal, was running an annual p...

In Germany there was no functioning currency. The black market flourished and cigarettes were the accepted medium of exchange: teachers in DP camps were paid 5 packs a week. The value of a carton of American cigarettes in Berlin ranged from $60–$165, an opportunity for soldiers in the American occupation forces to make serious money converting and re-converting their cigarette allocation: in the first four months of the Allied occupation US troops in Berlin alone sent home $11 million more than they received in wages. In Braunschweig, 600 cigarettes w...

In October 1945 Charles de Gaulle had imperiously informed the French people that it would take twenty-five years of ‘furious work’ before France would be resuscitated.

loans had served to plug holes and meet emergencies. American aid hitherto was not used for reconstruction or long-term investment but for essential supplies, services and repairs. Furthermore, the loans—especially those to the major western European states—came with strings attached.

Marshall’s proposals were a clean break with past practice. To begin with, beyond certain framing conditions it was to be left

to the Europeans to decide whether to take American aid and how to use it, though American advisers and specialists would play a prominent role in the administration of the funds. Secondly, the assistance was to be spread across a period of years and was thus from the start a strategic programme of recovery and growth rather than a disaster fund.

Thirdly, the sums in question were very substantial indeed. By the time Marshall Aid came to an end, in 1952, the United States had spent some $13 billion, more than all previous US overseas aid combined. Of this the UK and France got by far the largest sums in absolute amounts, but the relative impact on Italy and the smaller recipients was probably greater still: in Austria, 14 percent of the country’s income in the first full year of the European ...

All of these—Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Ireland, Iceland, Austria and Portugal—would be among the eventual beneficiaries. But despite the initial interest shown by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania, no future Communist state took part in the European Recovery Programme or received a dollar in Marshall aid It is worth pausing to consider the implications of this. The fact that the money was to be confined to the West (with Greece and Turkey as honorary west Europeans) undoubtedly made it easier for Truman to secure passage of the ERP through Congress the following year. But by then much had changed and Congress was willing to be convinced that Marshall Aid was an economic barrier to Soviet expansion. In June 1947, however, the offer of aid through Marshall’s new programme was made to all European countries without distinction. Stalin and Molotov were of course suspicious of American motives—the terms Marshall was proposing were quite incompatible with the closed Soviet economy—but their sentiments were not widely shared elsewhere in eastern Europe, in what was not yet a bloc.

Czechoslovakia’s exclusion from the Marshall Aid programme was an economic and political catastrophe for the country. The same is true of the ‘choice’ imposed on every other country in the region, and above all, perhaps, for the Soviet Union itself. His decision to stand aside from the European Recovery Program was one of Stalin’s greatest strategic mistakes. Whatever their private calculations, the Americans would have had no choice but to include eastern Europe in the ERP, having made the offer available to all, and the consequences for the future would have been immeasurable. Instead, the aid was confined to the West and marked a parting of the ways between the two halves of the continent.

for American policymakers, Europe’s vulnerability was a problem, not an opportunity. As a CIA report argued in April 1947, ‘(t)he greatest danger to the security of the United States is the possibility of economic collapse in western Europe and the consequent accession to power of Communist elements’.

the ERP was not parachuted into a vacuum. Western Europe was able to benefit from American help because it was a long-established region of private property, market economics and, except in recent years, stable polities. But for just this reason, western Europe had to make its own decisions and would ultimately insist on doing so. As the British diplomat Oliver Franks put it: ‘The Marshall Plan was about putting American dollars in the hands of Europeans to buy the tools of

recovery.’ The rest—convertible currencies, good labour relations, balanced budgets and liberalized trade—would depend on Europeans themselves. The obvious comparison, however, was not between American visions and European practices but between 1945 and 1918. In more respects than we now recall, the two post-war eras were uncannily alike. In the 1920s Americans were already encouraging Europeans to adopt US production techniques and labour relations. In the 1920s many American observers saw Europe’s salvation in economic integration and capital investment. And in the 1920s Europeans, too, looked across the Atlantic for guidance about their own future and for practical aid in the present. But the big difference was that after World War One the US gave only loans, not grants; and these were nearly always supplied through the private capital market. As a result they carried a price tag and were usually short-term. When they were called in at the onset of the Depression, the

effect was disastrous. The contrast in this respect is striking—after initial stumbles in 1945–47, American policymakers went to some lengths to correct the mistakes of the previous post-war era. The Marshall Plan is significant ...

The British economy would never recover while the country was spending unprecedented sums ($317 million in 1947 alone) just to sustain

the helpless population of its zone of occupation in northwest Germany. Without Germany to buy their produce the trading economies of the Low Countries and Denmark were moribund. The logic of the Marshall Plan required the lifting of all restrictions upon (West) German production and output, so that the country might once again make its crucial contribution to the European economy. Indeed, Secretary of State Marshall made clear from the outset that his Plan meant an end to French hopes of war reparations from Germany—the point, after all, was to develop and integrate Germany, not make of it a dependent pariah. But in order to avoid a tragic re-run of the events of the 1920s—in which frustrated efforts to extract war reparations from a prostrate Germany had led, as it seemed in retrospect, directly to French insecurity, German resentment and the rise of Hitler—it was clear to the Americans and their friends that the Marshall Plan would only work as part of a broader political

settlement in which French and Germans alike could see real an...

on May 2nd 1945 the Yugoslav Army of National Liberation and the British Eighth Army came face to face in Trieste drawing through that most cosmopolitan of central European cities a line that would become the first true frontier of the Cold War.

the fact is that in Europe the Cold War

began not after the Second World War but following the end of the First. This point was perfectly clear in Poland, which fought a desperate war with the new Soviet Union in 1920; in Britain, where Churchill built his inter-war reputation in part upon the Red Scare of the early 20s and the theme of anti-Bolshevism; in France, where anti-Communism was the Right’s strongest suit in domestic affairs from 1921 until the German invasion of May 1940; in Spain where it suited Stalin and Franco alike to play up the importance of Communism in the Spanish civil war; and above all, of course, in the Soviet Union itself, where Stalin’s monopoly of power and his bloody purges of Party critics relied heavily on the charge that the West and its local associates were plotting to undermine the Soviet Union and destroy the Communist experiment.

The years 1941–45 were just an interlude in an international struggle between Western democracies and Soviet totalitarianism, a struggle whose shape was obscured but not fundamentally altered by the threat posed to both sides by ...

US GNP had doubled in the course of the war, and by the spring of 1945 America accounted for half the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses and virtually all international financial reserves. The United States had put 12 million men under arms to fight Germany and its allies, and by the time Japan surrendered the American fleet was larger than all other fleets in the world combined. What would the US do with its power? In the aftermath of the First World War Washington had chosen not to exercise it; how different would things be after the Second World War? What did America want?

The logic of this initial American approach to the German question was thus demilitarization, denazification, deindustrialization—to strip Germany of her military and economic resources and re-educate the population. This policy was duly applied, at least in part: the Wehrmacht was formally dissolved (on August 20th 1946); denazification programs were set in place in the US-occupied zone especially, as we saw in Chapter Two; and strict limits were placed upon German industrial capacity and output, with steel-making particularly severely restricted under the March 1946 ‘Plan for the Level of the Post-War (German) Economy’.

But from the outset the ‘Morgenthau strategy’ was vigorously criticized within the US Administration itself. What good would be served by reducing (American-controlled) Germany to a virtually pre-industrial condition? Most of pre-war Germany’s best agricultural land was now under

Restrictions on urban or industrial output might keep Germany prostrate but they wouldn’t feed it or rebuild it. That burden, a very considerable one, would fall on the victorious occupiers. Sooner or later they would need to offload this responsibility onto Germans themselves, at which point the latter would have to be allowed to rebuild their economy.

To these concerns, American critics of the initial US ‘hard’ line added a further consideration. It was all very well forcibly bringing Germans to a consciousness of their own defeat, but unless they were given some prospect of a better future the outcome might be the same as before: a resentful, humiliated nation vulnerable to demagogy from Right or Left. As former President Herbert Hoover expressed it to Truman himself, in 1946, ‘You can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both.’ If, in American treatment of Germany, the balance of advantage swung increasingly to ‘peace’ this was largely due to the darkening prospect for US-Soviet relations. Among a restricted circle of Washington insiders, it was obvious from the outset that the incompatibility of Soviet and Western interests would lead to conflict and that clearly delimited zones of power might be a prudent solution to post-war problems. This was the view of George Kennan. Why, he wrote on January 26th 1945, ‘could we not make a decent and definite compromise with [the USSR]?—divide Europe frankly into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and the Russians out of ours? . . . And within whatever sphere of action was left to us we could at least . . . (try) to restore life, in the wake of the war, on a dignified and stable foundation.’ Six weeks later a more pessimistic and implicitly confrontational response to Soviet actions in

eastern Europe was proposed to President Roosevelt in a memo from Averell Harriman, the US ambassador in Moscow: ‘Unless we wish to accept the 20th century barbarian invasion of Europe, with repressions extending further and further in the East as well, we must find ways to arrest the Soviet domineering policy . . . If we don’t face the issues squarely now, history will record the period of the next generation as the Soviet age.’ Harriman and Kennan differed implicitly on how to respond to Soviet actions, but they did not disagr...

The American defense budget was reduced by five-sixths between 1945 and 1947. At the end of the war in Europe the US had 97 combat-ready ground divisions in place; by mid-1947 there were just twelve divisions, most of them under strength and engaged in administrative tasks. The rest had gone home and been demobilized. This met the expectations of American voters, only 7 percent of whom in October 1945 placed foreign problems ahead of domestic concerns; but it played havoc with America’s European allies, who began seriously to fear a reprise of inter-war isolationism. They were only half-mistaken; as the British knew, in the event of a Soviet invasion of western Europe after 1945 American strategy consisted of an immediate retreat to peripheral bases in Britain, Spain and the Middle East.

As early as 1943 he had taken the full measure of Roosevelt’s desire to see the liquidation of the British Empire—indeed, there were times when Roosevelt seemed at least as concerned with reducing post-war Britain as with

containing Soviet Russia. If it is possible to speak of a coherent US strategy spanning the years 1944–47 it would be this: reach a continental European settlement with Stalin; pressure Britain to abandon its overseas empire and embrace open trade and sterling convertibility; and withdraw from Europe with all due speed. Of these, only the second objective was achieved—the third falling victim to the impossibility of the first.

Britain had exhausted itself in the epic struggle with Germany and could not much longer sustain even the outer trappings of a great power. Between Victory-in-Europe Day in 1945 and the spring of 1947 British forces were reduced from a peak of 5.5 million men and women under arms to just 1.1 million. In the autumn of 1947 the country was even forced to cancel naval manoeuvres in order to save fuel oil. In the words of the American Ambassador William Clayton, a far from unsympathetic observer, ‘the British are hanging in by their eyelashes to the hope that somehow or other with our help they will be able to preserve the British Empire and their leadership of it.’

In six traumatic weeks, the cardinal reference points of European inter-state relations changed forever. France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since. For the shattering defeat of June 1940 was followed by four years of humiliating, demeaning, subservient occupation, with Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime playing Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes.

That was in private. In public, post-war French statesmen and politicians insisted upon their country’s claim to recognition as a member of the victorious Allied coalition, a world power to be accorded equal standing with her peers. This illusion could be sustained, in some degree, because it suited the other powers to pretend it was so. The Soviet Union wanted a tactical ally in the West who shared its suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’; the British wanted a revived France to take its place in the counsels of Europe and relieve Great Britain of continental obligations; even the Americans saw some advantage, though not much, in granting Paris a seat at the top table. So the French were given a permanent seat on the new United Nations Security Council, they were offered a role in the joint military administrations of Vienna and Berlin, and (at British insistence) an occupation district was carved for them out of the American zone in south-west Germany, in an area contiguous to the French frontier and well west of the Soviet front line.

Above all, French post-war governments felt very strongly their sense of exclusion from the highest councils of Allied decision-making. The British and the Americans were not to be trusted separately, they thought (remembering the American retreat from Europe after 1920 and the July 1940 British destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir); but above all they were not to be trusted together—a sentiment felt especially acutely by De Gaulle, haunted by recollections of his demeaning wartime status as a guest in London and his low standing in the eyes of FDR. Decisions were being taken in Washington and London, the French came to believe, that directly concerned them but over which they had no influence

Paris had become estranged from its colonial holdings in the course of the occupation.

France’s attention was now fixed, indeed fixated, upon Germany. This was not unreasonable: between 1814 and 1940 French soil had been invaded and occupied by Germans on five distinct occasions, three of them within living memory.

What French policy makers sought was the complete disarmament and economic dismantling of Germany: arms and arms-related production were to be prohibited, reparations were to be made (including obligatory labour service in France for German workers), agricultural produce, timber, coal and machinery were to be requisitioned and removed. The mining districts of the Ruhr, the Saarland and parts of the Rhineland should be separated from the German state, their resources and output placed at French disposal.

France and Russia had been in and out of alliances together for the past half century and Russia still held a special place in French public affection: opinion polls in post-war France consistently revealed a substantial reserve of sympathy for the Soviet Union.5 French diplomats in the aftermath of German defeat could thus hope that a natural concordance of interests—shared fear of Germany and suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’—might translate into sustained Soviet support for French diplomatic goals.

If France finally abandoned these fantasies and came round to the position of her Western partners in 1947, it was for three reasons. In the first place, French strategies for Germany had failed: there was to be no dismantling of Germany and there would be no reparations. France was in no position to impose a German solution of her own, and no-one else wanted the one she was proposing. The second reason for France’s retreat from her initial positions was the desperate economic situation of mid-1947: like the rest of Europe, France (as we have seen) urgently needed not just American aid but German recovery. The former

was indirectly but unambiguously dependent upon French agreement on a strategy for the latter. But thirdly, and decisively, French politicians and the French national mood shifted definitively in the second half of 1947. Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid and the advent of the Cominform (to be discussed in the next chapter) transformed the powerful French Communist Party from an awkward coalition partner in government to the unrestrained critic of all French policies at home and abroad: so much so that through the latter part of 1947 and most of 1948 France seemed to many to be heading into civil war. At the same time there was something of a war scare in Paris, coupling the country’s continued worries about German revanchism with new talk of an impending Soviet invasion.

In these circumstances, and following their rebuff by Molotov, the French turned relu...

It was thus a matter of no small significance when the French parliament approved Anglo-American plans for western Germany in 1948, albeit by a significantly close vote of 297–289. The French had no choice and they knew it. If they wanted economic recovery and some level of American and British security guarantees against German revival or Soviet expansion, then they had to go along—especially now that France was embroiled in a costly

colonial war in Indo-China for which she urgently needed American help.

In short, if you could not destroy Germany, then join her up to a European framework in which she could do no harm militarily but much good economically. If the idea had not occurred to French leaders before 1948 this was not through a shortage of imagination, but because it was clearly perceived as a pis aller, a second-best outcome. A ‘European’ solution to France’s German problem could only be adopted once a properly ‘French’ solution had been abandoned, and it took French leaders three years to accept this. In those three years France had, in effect, to come to terms with the abrupt negation of three hundred years of history. In the circumstances this was no small achievement.

The situation of the Soviet Union in 1945 was precisely the opposite of that of France. After two decades of effective exclusion from the affairs of Europe, Russia had re-surfaced. The resilience of the Soviet population, the successes of the Red Army and, it must be said, the Nazis’ capacity to turn even the most sympathetic anti-Soviet nations against them, had brought Stalin credibility and influence, in the counsels of governments and on the streets.

despite their huge losses in the first six months of the German invasion—when the Red Army lost 4 million men, 8,000 aircraft and 17,000 tanks—the Soviet armies had recovered to the point where, in 1945, they constituted the greatest military force Europe had ever seen: in Hungary and Romania alone they maintained, through 1946, a military presence of some 1,600,000 men.