Book Review: "Savage Continent" by Keith Lowe

Book: Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe (2012)--497 pp.

Overview: Lowe presents a history of Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II--1945 to the early 1950's. In particular, he examines the social and political consequences of the mass forced relocations of people and "ethnic cleansing" undertaken by the Nazis, the collapse of the wartime governments, and the destruction of infrastructure during the immediate post-war period, together with the rise of communism in Eastern Europe and the dawn of the Cold War.

Although armed conflict between nation states largely ceased at the end of the war, the collapse of social government and the still active partisan groups led to continued conflict between different ethnic, religious, and political groups well into the 1950s in some areas. The Germans had made the idea of mass expulsion and relocation of ethnic groups conceivable, and this continued after the war--sometimes with the official sanction of the allied powers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Reprisals for real and imagined war crimes, collaboration, old ethnic tensions, and outright greed lay behind much of the violence and expulsion.

Impression: This book reveals an often overlooked period of history. In the United States, the popular history of WWII, even taught at the university level, is that the Germans surrendered to the allied forces, reconstruction began, the Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe, and then the Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe. There is some discussion of the resettlement of Jews into Palistine, but the United States quickly recovered from the war, and so U.S. history tends to refocus quickly on political and social issues in the United States, and the Cold War on the international scene.

From the author's description, the post-war history is often edited in Europe as well to emphasize what a particular nation did that was "good," and minimize what was "bad." What the author describes is that throughout Europe, even in England to large extent, it was a period of privation, and a period of revived national and ethnic bigotry. Lowe suggests that if it wasn't for the presence of the allied armies, Europe could have easily continued fighting for generations.

The core of the book, though, is that the nature of Europe was forever changed. The mix of ethnicities ceased to exist. The Jews had been practically exterminated from many countries, and the few that survived were not welcome back. The masses of slave labor deported from various countries within the Third Reich, were attempting to return to their home countries. At the same time, German hatred ran deep, and German populations in many other countries--communities that had been extant for hundreds of years--were killed, herded up, and driven out. The same occurred among other communities. For instance, Polish authorities not only expelled Jews and Germans, but also Ukrainians and other ethnic groups. But this happened all across Europe, although mostly heavily in Eastern Europe. So, the immediate aftermath of the war saw mass movements of displaced peoples attempting to move across a continent that lacked food and infrastructure, without a functioning economic base. Many of the these people were confined in internment camps--some of them death camps that the Nazis had used--for months and, in some cases, several years.

Revenge reared its head. In many countries, Nazis and Nazi collaborators were rounded up and killed. In Yugoslavia, pro-Nazi forces were systematically rounded up and executed en masse. Almost all countries used prisoners of war as slave labor to help rebuild destroyed infrastructure. Interestingly, crime--even in neutral countries that had not been part of the war--skyrocketed.

Finally, there were the conflicts between partisan and underground political groups, and the eventual split of the continent into communist and democratic. In Greece and parts of Eastern Europe, these took the means of political violence, strikes, and mass arrests and torture. The Soviets made good use of the pent up hatred. Says the author:

Rather than fighting against racial and ethnic hatred in the areas they controlled, the Soviets sought to harness it. There are many ways in which the nationalist and racist policies that swept eastern Europe after the war suited the Soviets. To begin with, displaced people were far easier to control than people who were entrenched in their homelands and traditions. The chaos created by the deportations were also the ideal atmosphere for preaching revolution. The lands and businesses left behind could be parcelled out and redistributed amongst the workers and the poor, thus furthering the Communist agenda. It also created a new loyalty amongst those who received land....

(p. 266). The author later notes:

Next, the Communists would seek to engineer splits amongst their rivals. They would try to discredit certain factions of other parties, and pressurize [sic] their leaders into disowning these factions. Or they would invite rivals to join them in a united 'front', causing rifts between those who trusted the Communists and those who did not. ... Eventually, having split them time and time again, the Communists would swallow what was left of these parties whole.

(p. 344).

This book appears to fill a largely ignored piece of history. It was interestingly written, although overwhelming at times. There were times after reading page after page of atrocities that I had to put the book down because I couldn't bear to read anymore. Although the atrocities during the post-war period cannot equal those perpetrated during the active time of the war, it is apparent that the Nazis had released a great evil--a Pandora's box--upon Europe that only with great effort and time was shut again.

Notable Points:

Survival is possible even under the harshest of conditions. For instance, the author relates:

After the war had passed on, Jews began to emerge from hiding even in the most unlikely places. Thousands had survived in the forests and swamps of Lithuania, Poland and Belarus. Thousands more had spent the war hidden in the basements and attics of sympathetic Gentiles. Even in destroyed Warsaw handfuls of Jews emerged from the ruins, like the biblical Noah stepping onto the shores of a changed world. They had weathered the flood of the Holocaust by hiding in sewers, tunnels and purpose-built bunkers--their own personal arks.

(p. 17). One thing that this brings to mind is the assistance that Jews received from some of the non-Jews. Hiding someone in an attic or basement, particularly during periods of food rationing and shortages, is very difficult. Consider that you may someday be placed into the same circumstance, and your food stores may mean the difference of two families surviving on ration stamps or food allocations meant for a single family, or starving.

As noted earlier, the social fabric of Europe was altered considerably during the post war years. Not only were communities divided along ethnic lines, but whole communities were destroyed, never to reappear. There was also the consequences of the wartime dead. The author writes, for instance:

In many other parts of Europe, entire generations of young women were doomed to spinsterhood, for the simple reason that most of the local young men were dead. In there Soviet Union, for example, there were over 13 million more women than men by the end of the war. The loss of men was felt most harshly in the countryside, where 80 per cent of the collective farm workers were women.

(p. 21). The author further notes the huge numbers of orphaned children following the war, who often formed gangs to survive, and prostituted themselves for money and food, or engaged in crime. "In 1946 there were still some 180,000 vagrant children living in Rome, Naples and Milan: they were forced to sleep in doorways and alleys, and kept themselves alive by theft, begging and prostitution." In the summer of 1945, the author states, there were 53,000 lost children in Berlin alone.Poland had over 1 million war orphans--children that had lost at least one parent. A third of all children in Germany had lost their fathers.

Food became scarce. The author relates that in Britain, for instance, "[s]ugar was one of the first things to become scarce, as well as perishable goods like milk, cream, eggs and fresh meat." (p. 32). And it was not simply a loss of calories. "Crucially, this amount [of calories] cannot be made up of carbohydrates alone if they are to avoid hunger-related illnesses like oedema--it must also contain vitamins supplied by fresh vegetables, proteins and fat." (p. 34). The author notes that food shortages gave rise to black markets in foods, as well as forcing people to trek into the countryside to locate food. In that regard, the author notes that people living in the countryside, who were able to raise food, were generally better off than those in the towns. (p. 36). Lowe writes:

Instead the people relied much more heavily on the black market--which meant city dwellers made regular trips to the countryside to barter their belongings for food. The war years saw a vast redistribution of wealth away from urban areas and into the countryside, thus reversing the trend of centuries.

(p. 65).

Crime increased across the continent. The author reports crime increasing by 200 to 400% in some areas, even neutral countries. Theft, especially, became common place. The author explains:

Why the neutral countries should have suffered a rise in crime during the war has long puzzled social scientists. The only credible explanation seems to lie in the deep sense of anxiety created throughout Europe at the onset of war: social instability appears to have spread across the entire continent like an infection.

(p. 43).

If you were one of those "chosen" after the war for retribution or forced removal by your neighbors, firearms were critical to your defense. For instance, the author relates the following story of a Jew who had returned to his native village in Hungary, only to face severe persecution. Anti-Semitic tensions were high in the region, and on one particular day, an Hungarian woman accused a Jewish merchant of stealing her children. It was common belief that Jews stole children and turned them into sausages and sold them to the public. His egg stand was destroyed and he fled to his home for safety.

Kuti's house quickly became surrounded by a mob. For a while the crowd refrained from entering because they were afraid he might have a gun. But when the police went in and discovered that he was unarmed--and made the mistake of announcing this to the crowd--the rabble surged inside. Kuti apparently begged the intruders for mercy but was killed by a man named Balazs Kalman, who beat him to death with an iron bar, shouting 'I'll give you sausages made out of the flesh of Hungarian children!'

(p.  197). This attack unleashed a pogrom against all the Jews in the area. And this is only one example of pogroms against not only Jews, but other ethnic and religious groups following the war. As has been pointed out on these pages and by other survival/prepper writers, your friends and neighbors may, under the right circumstances, turn against you and kill you or drive you out of your home.