Read Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 for Free Online

end with the defeat of Hitler, since occupation (by the Soviet army) and civil war continued long after the dismemberment of Germany.
    Wars of occupation were not unknown in Europe, of course. Far from it. Folk memories of the Thirty Years War in seventeenth-century Germany, during which foreign mercenary armies lived off the land and terrorized the local population, were still preserved three centuries later, in local myths and in fairy tales. Well into the nineteen-thirties Spanish grandmothers were chastening wayward children with the threat of Napoleon. But there was a peculiar intensity to the experience of occupation in World War Two. In part this was because of the distinctive Nazi attitude towards subject populations.
    Previous occupying armies—the Swedes in seventeenth-century Germany, the Prussians in France after 1815—lived off the land and assaulted and killed local civilians on an occasional and even random basis. But the peoples who fell under German rule after 1939 were either put to the service of the Reich or else were scheduled for destruction. For Europeans this was a new experience. Overseas, in their colonies, European states had habitually indentured or enslaved indigenous populations for their own benefit. They had not been above the use of torture, mutilation or mass murder to coerce their victims into obedience. But since the eighteenth century these practices were largely unknown among Europeans themselves, at least west of the Bug and Prut rivers.
    It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans. In order to fight and win the war, the British exploited and ransacked their own resources: by the end of the war, Great Britain was spending more than half its Gross National Product on the war effort. Nazi Germany, however, fought the war—especially in its latter years—with significant help from the ransacked economies of its victims (much as Napoleon had done after 1805, but with incomparably greater efficiency). Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Bohemia-Moravia and, especially, France made significant involuntary contributions to the German war effort. Their mines, factories, farms and railways were directed to servicing German requirements and their populations were obliged to work at German war production: at first in their own countries, later on in Germany itself. In September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany, most
    Axis-Occupied Europe: November 1942

    of them there against their will, and they constituted 21 percent of the country’s labour force.
    The Nazis lived for as long as they could off the wealth of their victims—so successfully in fact that it was not until 1944 that German civilians themselves began to feel the impact of wartime restrictions and shortages. By then, however, the military conflict was closing in on them, first through Allied bombing campaigns, then with the simultaneous advance of Allied armies from east and west. And it was in this final year of the war, during the relatively brief period of active campaigning west of the Soviet Union, that much of the worst physical destruction took place.
    From the point of view of contemporaries the war’s impact was measured not in terms of industrial profit and loss, or the net value of national assets in 1945 when compared to 1938, but rather in the visible damage to their immediate environment and their communities. It is with these that we must begin if we are to understand the trauma that lay behind the images of desolation and hopelessness that caught the attention of observers in 1945.
    Very few European towns and cities of any size had survived the war unscathed. By informal consent or good fortune the ancient and early-modern centers of a few celebrated European cities—Rome, Venice, Prague, Paris, Oxford—were never targeted. But in the first year of the war