Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Anne O’Hare McCormick, a New York Times correspondent, recorded her impressions on October 23rd 1946: ‘The scale of this resettlement, and the conditions in which it takes place, are without precedent in history. No one seeing its horrors first hand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution.’ History has exacted no such retribution. Indeed, the 13 million expellees were settled and integrated into West German society with remarkable success, though memories remain and in Bavaria (where many of them went) the subject can still provoke intense feeling. To contemporary ears it is perhaps a little jarring to hear the German expulsions described as a ‘crime against humanity’ a few months after the revelation of crimes on an altogether different scale committed in the name of those same Germans. But then the Germans were alive and present, whereas their victims—Jews above all—were mostly dead and gone. In the words of Telford Taylor, the US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership, writing many decades later: there was a crucial difference between the post-war expulsions and the wartime population clearances, ‘when the expellers accompany the expelled to ensure that they are kept in ghettos and then either kill them or use them as forced labor.’

With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever before. The Soviet Union of course remained a multi-national empire.

in 1948 rejected girls and women applying to emigrate to Canada for jobs in domestic service if there was any sign that they had education beyond secondary school. And no-one wanted older people, orphans or single women with children. Refugees in general, then, were not met with open arms—post-war polls in the US and western Europe revealed very little sympathy for their plight. Most people expressed a desire to see immigration reduced rather than increased.

Austria could hardly be treated as just another Nazi-occupied country whose local Fascists and Nazi-collaborators would need to be punished, after which normal life could be resumed. 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).

The presence of Soviet prosecutors and Soviet judges was interpreted by many commentators from Germany and Eastern Europe as evidence of hypocrisy. The behaviour of the Red Army, and Soviet practice in the lands it had ‘liberated’, were no secret—indeed, they were perhaps better known and publicized then than in later years. And the purges and massacres of the 1930s were still fresh in many people’s memory. To have the Soviets sitting in judgment on the Nazis—sometimes for crimes they had themselves committed—devalued the Nuremberg and other trials and made them seem exclusively an exercise in anti-German vengeance. In the words of George Kennan: ‘The only implication this procedure could convey was, after all, that such crimes were justifiable and forgivable when committed by the leaders of one government, under one set of circumstances, but unjustifiable and unforgivable, and to be punished by death, when committed by another government under another set of circumstances.’

German civilians were taken on obligatory visits to concentration camps and made to watch films documenting Nazi atrocities. Nazi teachers were removed, libraries restocked, newsprint and paper supplies taken under direct Allied control and re-assigned to new owners and editors with genuine anti-Nazi credentials.

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 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 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 ...

Re-education had a decidedly limited impact. It was one thing to oblige Germans to attend documentary films, quite another to make them watch, much less think about what they were seeing. Many years later the writer Stephan Hermlin described the scene in a Frankfurt cinema, where Germans were required to watch documentary films on Dachau and Buchenwald before receiving their ration cards: ‘In the half-light of the projector, I could see that most people turned their faces away after the beginning of the film and stayed that way until the film was over. Today I think that that turned-away face was indeed the attitude of many millions . . . The unfortunate people to which I belonged was both sentimental and callous. It was not interested in being shaken by events, in any “know thyself.”

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 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.’

It was a Marxist commonplace and Soviet official doctrine that Nazism was merely Fascism and that Fascism, in turn, was a product of capitalist self-interest in a moment of crisis. Accordingly, 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 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 lesson was not lost on Berlin. The German Communist Party (KPD) decided instead to offer its services and its protection to millions of former Nazis.

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.

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.

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.

In his first official address to the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany, on September 20th 1949, Konrad Adenauer had this to say about denazification and the Nazi legacy: ‘The government of the Federal Republic, in the belief that many have subjectively atoned for a guilt that was not heavy, is determined where it appears acceptable to do so to put the past behind us.’ There is no doubt that many Germans heartily endorsed this assertion. If denazification aborted, it was because for political purposes Germans had spontaneously ‘denazified’ themselves on May 8th 1945. And the German people were not alone. In Italy the daily newspaper of the new Christian Democrat Party put out a similar call to oblivion on the day of Hitler’s death: ‘We have the strength to forget!’, it proclaimed. ‘Forget as soon as possible!’

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 the most important invisible legacy of World War Two in Europe.

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

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, leaving public affairs in the hands of a political class duly cleansed of collaborators and traitors. Anything less would mean anarchy—or else an indefinite occupation by Allied armies.

The wartime resistance groups, organized by 1944–45 into various political movements, were just as suspicious in return. For them, the politicians, functionaries and courtiers who had escaped the Occupation were doubly discredited: by their pre-war errors and by their subsequent absence. In France and Norway the legislators elected in 1936 were disqualified by their actions in 1940. In Belgium and the Netherlands their absence in the intervening five years had cut off the returning governments from any appreciation of local suffering and the change in public mood brought about under Nazi occupation. In central and eastern Europe, with the important exception of Czechoslovakia, the former governments were rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Red Army (though they were sometimes slow to grasp this).

Contacts made in the Resistance did sometimes survive—the post-war ‘depillarization’ of Dutch society, for example, the breaking down of the centuries-long denominational divide between communities of Catholics and Protestants, began with personal links forged in wartime. But plans for a post-war ‘Resistance Party’ failed everywhere. They came closest to fruition in Italy, where Ferrucio Parri became Prime Minister in June 1945 and promised that his Action Party would pursue the spirit and goals of the Resistance. But Parri was no politician and when he fell, six months later, political power shifted definitively into the hands of the traditional parties. De Gaulle, in France, was a far better political strategist but he, too, abandoned office (one month after Parri) rather than accommodate his wartime ambitions to parliamentary routine—thus paying unintended tribute to his own success in re-establishing the continuity of the Republic.

War-time leaders/politicians did not last long in power after the war, even De Gaulle.

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 years and they brought with them many of the policies and men of the Popular Front era.

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.

Everyone after the war felt capitalism had failed and everythinf needed to be planned.

In post-war western and central Europe only Communists put their faith in Soviet-style Plans (about which they knew very little), and even they had no notion of how such Plans might be applied to their local circumstances. The Soviet obsession with numerical targets, production quotas and centralized direction was alien to all but a few of the contemporary western advocates of planning. The latter—and they came in many varieties—were drawing on a very different set of sources. 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.

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. For most of the inter-war years, would-be planners and their supporters languished in frustration at the political margins. The older generation of politicians was deaf to their appeals: to 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.

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.

It was not by chance, therefore, that Oswald Mosley and some other British Labourites turned to Fascism out of frustration at their Party’s inadequate response to the Great Depression. In Belgium Hendrik de Man likewise failed to convince his fellow Socialists of the viability of his ‘Plan’ and began propounding more authoritarian solutions. In France a number of the brightest young leaders of the Socialist Party broke away to form new movements, frustrated at their party’s failure to respond imaginatively to the economic crisis. Many of these and others like them ended up as Fascists. 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-mind...

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.

The English historian A. J. P. Taylor told BBC listeners in November 1945 that ‘[n]obody in Europe believes in the American way of life—that is, private enterprise; or, rather, those who believe in it are a defeated party which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites in England after 1688’. Taylor exaggerated as always, he was wrong in the long run (but who isn’t?) and he might have been surprised to learn about the planist enthusiasms of many New Dealers prominent in the contemporary US administration of Germany. But at the time he was broadly correct.

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.

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, mines, munitions industries, aircraft manufacturing and the giant Renault concern (as punishment for its owner’s contribution to the German war effort). One fifth of France’s total industrial capacity was in state ownership by May 1946.

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.

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.

The British, as we shall see, were constrained to accept years of ‘austerity’ as the price for economic recovery. In France or Italy, where there was almost no long-term private capital market, all major investments had to be publicly funded—which was why the first Monnet Plan was skewed towards capital investment in major industries at the expense of domestic consumption, housing and services. The political consequences of this were predictable: by 1947 France, like Italy, was threatened with strikes, violent demonstrations and a steady increase in support for the Communist Party and its trade unions. Deliberate neglect of the consumer goods sector and the diversion of scarce national resources to a handful of key industrial sectors made long-term economic sense: but it was a high-risk strategy.

Our present discomfort with notions of race, eugenics, ‘degeneration’ and the like obscures the important part these played in European public thinking during the first half of the twentieth century: it wasn’t only the Nazis who took such matters seriously. By 1945 two generations of European doctors, anthropologists, public health officials and political commentators had contributed to widespread debates and polemics about ‘race health’, population growth, environmental and occupational well-being and the public policies through which these might be improved and secured. There was a broad consensus that the physical and moral condition of the citizenry was a matter of common interest and therefore part of the responsibility of the state. As a consequence, rudimentary welfare provisions of one kind or another were already widespread before 1945, although their quality and reach varied widely. Germany was typically the most advanced country, having already instituted pension, accident and medical insurance schemes under Bismarck, between 1883 and 1889. But other countries began to catch up in the years immediately before and after World War One.

Britain and France established ministries of health immediately following the end of the Great War, in 1919 and 1920 respectively.

Compulsory unemployment insurance, first introduced in Britain in 1911, was instituted in Italy (1919), Austria (1920), Ireland (1923), Poland (1924), Bulgaria (1925), Germany and Yugoslavia (1927) and Norway (1938). Romania and Hungary already had accident and sickness insurance schemes in place before World War One, and all the countries of eastern Europe introduced national pension systems between the wars. Family allowances were a key element in plans to increase the birth rate—a particular obsession after 1918 in countries badly hit by wartime losses—and were introduced first in Belgium (1930), next in France (1932) and in Hungary and the Netherlands just before the outbreak of war.

The post-1945 European welfare states varied considerably in the resources they provided and the way they financed them. But certain general points can be made. The provision of social services chiefly concerned education, housing and medical care, as well as urban recreation areas, subsidized public transport, publicly-funded art and culture and other indirect benefits of the interventionary state. Social security consisted chiefly of the state provision of insurance—against illness, unemployment, accident and the perils of old age. Every European state in the post-war years provided or financed most of these resources, some more than others.

In eastern Europe, for example, the Communist regimes after 1948 on the whole did not usually favour universal welfare systems—they did not need to, since they were at liberty to redistribute resources by force without spending scarce state funds on public services. Peasants, for instance, were frequently excluded from the social insurance and pension arrangements on political grounds. In western Europe only six countries—Belgium, Italy, Norway, Austria, the Federal Republic of Germany and the UK—introduced compulsory and universal unemployment insurance after 1945. Subsidized voluntary schemes remained in the Netherlands until 1949, in France through 1967, in Switzerland until the mid-1970s. In Catholic Europe long-established local and communal coverage against unemployment probably impeded the development of universal systems of insurance by reducing the need for them. In countries where inter-war unemployment had been especially traumatic—the UK, or Belgium—welfare spending was driven in part by the desire to maintain full or close to full employment. Where it had not been so significant—in France or Italy, for example—this was reflected in a rather different balance of priorities.

Although Sweden and Norway (but not Denmark) were in the vanguard of benefit provision across a broad range of social services, and West Germany kept in place the welfare provisions inherited from past regimes (including Nazi-era programmes aimed at encouraging a high-birth rate), it was in Britain that the most ambitious efforts were made to build, from scratch, a genuine ‘Welfare State’. In part this reflected the unique position of Britain’s Labour Party, which won an outright victory at the elections of July 1945 and—unlike the governments of most other European countries—was free to legislate its entire electoral programme unconstrained by coalition partners.

The social legislation of post-war Britain was based on the justly famous wartime report by Sir William Beveridge, published in November 1942 and an immediate best-seller. Beveridge was born in 1879, the son of a British judge in imperial India, and his sensibilities and ambitions were those of the great reforming Liberals of Edwardian Britain. His Report was at once an indictment of the social injustices of pre-1939 British society and a policy template for root and branch reform once the war was over. Even the Conservative Party did not dar...

Non-working women with no private health insurance of their own got coverage for the first time. The humiliation and social dependency of the old Poor Law/Means Test system was done away with—on the (presumptively) rare occasion when the citizen of the Welfare State needed public assistance he or she was now entitled to it by right.

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. But anyone who grew up (like the present writer) in post-war Britain has good reason to be grateful for the Welfare State.

nowhere outside Britain was comprehensive social coverage attempted on so generous a scale and all at once.

Why were Europeans willing to pay so much for insurance and other long-term welfare provisions, at a time when life was still truly hard and material shortages endemic? The first reason is that, precisely because times were difficult, the post-war welfare systems were a guarantee of a certain minimum of justice, or fairness. This was not the spiritual and social revolution for which many in the wartime Resistance had dreamed, but it was a first step away from the hopelessness and cynicism of the pre-war years.

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.

Many commentators today are disposed to see state-ownership and state-dependency as the European problem, and salvation-from-above as the illusion of the age. But for the generation of 1945 some workable balance between political freedoms and the rational, equitable distributive function of the administrative state seemed the only sensible route out of the abyss.

Only in England, the Low Countries, Denmark, the Alpine lands and parts of France was it possible to speak of a prosperous, independent class of farmers. The overwhelming majority of Europe’s predominantly rural population lived in conditions of indebted penury.