Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

It is thus hard to know how far the trials of Nazis contributed to the political and moral re-education of Germany and the Germans. They were certainly resented by many as ‘victors’ justice’, and that is just what they were. But they were also real trials of real criminals for demonstrably criminal behaviour and they set a vital precedent for international jurisprudence in decades to come.

They made clear that crimes committed by individuals for ideological or state purposes were nonetheless the responsibility of individuals and punishable under law. Following orders was not a defense.

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.’

The crimes of the Nazis might have been ‘committed in the name of Germany’ (to quote the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, speaking half a century later), but there was little genuine appreciation that they had been perpetrated by Germans.

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 scant contradiction to this view, and the country’s natural leaders—in the liberal professions, the judiciary, the civil service—were the most compromised of all.

the main emphasis in denazification in the East was on the collective punishment of Nazis

although denazification in the Soviet zone actually went further in some instances than it did in the West, it was based upon two misrepresentations of Nazism: one integral to Communist theory, the other calculatedly opportunistic. 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.

Their only political prospect, beyond brute force and electoral fraud, lay in appealing to calculated self-interest.

The German working class, like the German bourgeoisie, had failed in its responsibilities. But for precisely that reason it would be more, not less likely to adapt itself to Communist goals, given the right combination of stick and carrot.

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.

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.

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.

In much of eastern Europe the slate was indeed wiped clean, as we have seen. But even in western Europe there was widespread expectation of dramatic and rapid social transformation:

For this new generation, politics was therefore about resistance—resistance to authority, resistance to conventional social or economic arrangements, resistance to the past.

From resisting Fascism to resisting a post-war retreat to the errors of the thirties seemed a natural step.

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.

It is thus not especially odd that the reform programs of post-war European governments echoed and recapitulated the unfinished business of the 1930s.

Resistance units had been too preoccupied fighting, or just surviving, to busy themselves with detailed plans for post-war legislation.

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.

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.

But with the collapse of the international economy and the ensuing war, planning took on a greater urgency and ambition.

The frustrated advocates of economic planning thus frequently found themselves attracted to authoritarian parties of the radical Right, distinctly more hospitable to their approach.

Fascism and war were thus the bridge linking heterodox, marginal and often controversial notions of economic planning with mainstream post-war economic policy.

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.

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.

The chief purpose of planning in post-war continental Europe was public investment. At a time of acute capital shortage and with huge demand for investment in every sector, government planning consisted of hard choices: where to place the limited resources of the state and at whose expense.

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.

In the conventional wisdom of the 1940s, the political polarizations of the last inter-war decade were born directly of economic depression and its social costs. Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor. If the democracies were to recover, the ‘condition of the people’ question must be addressed.

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.

the Second World War transformed both the role of the modern state and the expectations placed upon it.

Comprehensive welfare systems, however, are inherently re-distributive. Their universal character and the sheer scale on which they operate require the transfer of resources—usually through taxation—from

from the privileged to the less well off.

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.

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. Secondly, the welfare states of western Europe were not politically divisive. They were socially re-distributive in general intent (some more than others) but not at all revolutionary—they did not ‘soak the rich’.

the real long-term beneficiaries were the professional and commercial middle class.

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. But the chief basis of support for state-funded welfare and social service provisions lay in the popular sense that these corresponded to the proper tasks of government.

It had an obligation to provide not only the institutions and services necessary for a well-regulated, safe and prosperous land, but also to improve the condition of the population,

And in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion.

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.

The years following World War Two were a sort of foreshortened Age of Reform, during which many long-pressing problems were belatedly addressed. One of the most important of these was the matter of agrarian reform,

After the war it was thus widely believed, particularly on the Left, that Fascism appealed especially to desperate peasants and that any revival of Fascism in Europe would begin in the countryside.

Between 1944 and 1947 every east European country saw the creation of a large class of smallholders beholden to the new authorities for their land.

The Communists’ initial political leverage in western Europe came from their association with Socialist parties,

In western Europe the balance was always held, and in many cases dominated by, a new political animal, the Christian Democratic parties.

Christian Democracy avoided class-based appeals and emphasized instead social and moral reforms.

Christian Democratic parties were ideally placed to capitalize on virtually every aspect of the post-war condition: the desire for stability and security, the expectation of renewal, the absence of traditional right-wing alternatives and the expectations vested in the state—for