In the summer of 1945 the old Europe was in ruins. Literally. In the shell of Hitler’s Chancellery building his marble-topped desk lay shattered in pieces, surrounded by a litter of Iron Crosses and once-secret documents. Like Berlin, the cities of Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden—in fact most of urban Germany—had been ravaged by bombing and fire. It was the same story across the continent. Paris, Rome, and Prague had been spared but they were the exceptions. The great Habsburg monuments of Budapest and Vienna had largely disappeared; commercial centres
From Rotterdam to Piraeus had become rubble; vital arteries like the Rhine and the Danube were blocked by sunken ships and demolished bridges. Destruction brought disease in its wake. War and occupation left the 1 million people of Naples ravaged by typhus and VD on a scale reminiscent of the great plagues of the seventeenth century. And recovery promised to be painfully slow. France, whose ‘liberation’ had occurred rapidly in 1944, faced the post-Nazi era with railways paralysed, bridges destroyed, and coal production at half its pre-war levels. Even Britain, spared German occupation, lost a quarter of her national wealth and became the world’s leading debtor. Hitler had failed, but, true to his promise, he had brought Europe down with him.
Victors in this terrible conflict were the United States and the Soviet Union, the two ‘superpowers’ — a word coined specially at the end of the war. The price they paid for victory was not the same. America had been neither bombed nor occupied and had lost only 300,000 dead (about 0.25 per cent of the population). In fact, the war boom had pulled the country out of depression to produce half the world’s industrial output by 1945. Across Europe gum-chewing GIs in their ubiquitous jeeps became symbols of American wealth and technology. In August 1945 the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki dramatized America’s status as the world’s first (and, until 1949, only) nuclear power.
The Soviet Union, by contrast, had been a battleground for three years and had borne the brunt of the struggle against the German army. Authoritative estimates of Soviet dead during the war have now reached at least 28 million—over 14 per cent of the pre-war population. Yet the extent of Soviet losses were not known at the time. What struck the rest of the world were images of Soviet power—the hammer and sickle hanging over the ruined Reichstag, Stalin’s face adorning a huge hoarding on the Unter den Linden, and the cascade of Nazi standards tossed at his feet during the Victory Parade in Red Square (a deliberate replay of Tsar Alexander’s triumph over Napoleon). The Red Army had vanquished the German Wehrmacht and now occupied eastern Europe, much as America and her junior partners, Britain and France, garrisoned the west.
For the superpowers it seemed a triumph of ideals as well as might. Twice in thirty years the great powers and so-called ‘civilized’ countries of Europe had fought with unparalleled horror and brutality. Eight million and now 50 million had died. The follies of nationalism seemed particularly evident to Americans, citizens of a federal country the size of a continent. For Congressmen and GIs alike a visit to Europe in 1945, with its ruined cities and wretched people, confirmed their sense of American moral as well as military superiority. But the most shocking images of 1945 were those of the Nazi concentration camps. The Allied leaders and publics had not known (or had ignored) their full horror during the war; afterwards the systematic, genocidal character of German racism became appallingly evident. Slavs, gypsies, the mentally ill, above all the Jews had been exploited, tortured, and executed with ruthless ingenuity. Names like Belsen and Auschwitz became household words, and shocked Allied generals forced local Germans to visit the camps and see for themselves the human costs of Aryan race purity. Virtually all of European Jewry, some 6 million people, had been exterminated. The death camps seemed to sum up the moral bankruptcy of Europe.
Post-war Europe therefore became an arena of contending ideologies as well as powers. Undoubtedly American liberty and largesse had a widespread appeal. In 1945-6 American relief aid was already making its mark in Germany and Italy. Yet the discrediting of fascism led initially to a widespread swing to the left. One cannot grasp the strength and tenacity of communism in post-war Europe unless this is appreciated. Suspicions of American plutocracy and philistinism remained strong among European elites, especially in France, while the communists benefited both politically and morally from their prominent role in wartime resistance movements, notably in France and Italy. The years 1945-6 saw communists in coalition in France, Italy, and Belgium, and socialist governments mounted ambitious programmes of welfarism and nationalization in Britain and Scandinavia. In eastern Europe, too, socialist, communist, and agrarian parties formed coalition governments in the mid-i94os and agreed on the need to eliminate large landowners and bring heavy industry under state control, for example in eastern Germany and Hungary.
Yet in 1945 Cold War Europe had not yet taken shape. Under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the American policy, despite growing suspicion, was to work with the Soviets, and there was a strong inclination to disengage from Europe. ‘Bring the boys home; don’t be a Santa Claus; don’t be pushed around,’ as Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed up the mood at the end of 1945. Stalin, for his part, was determined to guarantee Russia’s security and to advance her influence through a strong position in east-central Europe. Yet he was not bent on unlimited expansion. He left Greece, for instance, under Britain’s aegis, as agreed with Churchill in 1944, and he certainly did not want confrontation with the West to disturb his priority of post-war reconstruction. It is likely, of course, that two strong powers, competing in a vacuum and motivated by rival ideologies, would eventually have come up against each other. But what caused relations to deteriorate rapidly was their dispute over the post-war settlement. Eastern Europe was not the main problem: the Americans conceded Soviet influence in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania in 1945, though the lack of democracy was regarded as sinister. The European cold war really took shape as another struggle for mastery of Germany.
To the Russians, German recovery posed a military threat; to the Americans it was an economic necessity if Europe was to be prosperous again. In 1945-6 the Russians stripped German industry to rebuild their own economy and blocked moves for economic recovery, while the United States and British governments tired of feeding Germany at the expense of their own taxpayers — ‘paying reparations to Germany’, as the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton put it. After European production plummeted in the harsh winter of early 1947 and Allied diplomats reached deadlock in a month of discussions in Moscow in April, the Americans decided to act. On 5 June 1947 Secretary of State George C. Marshall promised American funding for a European recovery programme, if the Europeans came up with a joint package. Quickly British and French leaders convened meetings in Paris and the outlines of a plan were then thrashed out with the Americans, though it was not until March 1948 that the European Recovery Program (better known as the Marshall Plan) completed its passage through Congress.
Equally important was the Soviet reaction. The Russians sent an eighty-strong delegation to Paris, and east European countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland expressed keen interest. But Stalin saw the American offer as a challenge to his sphere of influence. He warned the Czechs and others against participating and withdrew the Soviet delegation. That autumn he declared ideological war on western capitalism, creating Comin-form (the Communist Information Bureau) to orchestrate foreign communist parties and replacing the coalitionist strategy in France and Italy with strikes intended to bring down the governments. In the east, Soviet influence now became Soviet domination. The coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 (a country previously independent but friendly to the USSR) was followed by the Stalinization of much of the region. All but communists were proscribed, those independent of Moscow were purged, agriculture and heavy industry were brought under state control, and civil and political liberties systematically abolished. In March 1946 Winston Churchill had talked of an ‘iron curtain’ descending from the Baltic to the Adriatic, but it was in 1947-8, with the Marshall Plan and Stalin’s response, that the barriers really came down.
The Americans pressed ahead with the rehabilitation of western Germany, including plans for a new federal state. Fearful of this trend, Stalin tried to warn off them (and the Germans) in June 1948 by imposing a blockade of Berlin, where all the Allied powers maintained zones in a city deep within Soviet-controlled territory. Instead of backing down, the Americans and British sustained Berliners through the winter by a hazardous airlift, and eventually Stalin was obliged to desist in May 1949. It was a major political and propaganda defeat. Not only had he been outfaced in a trial of strength, he had also lost the moral battle. The Czech coup and the Berlin crisis did much to damage the Soviet image in Europe, even in France where the communist party was still picking up about a quarter of the vote in elections. Equally important, well-advertised Marshall aid was winning hearts and minds. Between 1948 and 1951 the United States put into western Europe about $13 billion; during the same period the Soviet took out roughly the same amount from their part of the continent.
In the autumn of 1949 two new German states came into exis-tence—the Federal Republic in the west and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the old Soviet zone. The four-power presence in Berlin remained a potential flashpoint. Over the next few years the two superpower blocs gradually became armed camps. Again, this was not intended but was a process of action and reaction on both sides. In April 1949, after months of negotiation, the United States, Canada, and ten west European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty. Henceforth, an attack on one would be an attack on all. This was the first time the once-isolationist United States had made a peacetime alliance — some commentators called it a modern American Revolution. Yet the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was initially a loose defence pact and not a military alliance. What ‘put the “O” into NATO’ (in American diplomat Averell Harriman’s phrase) was Stalin’s second great error of the post-1945 period—the Korean war.
When Stalin sanctioned the North Korean attack on the South in June 1950, he assumed that America would be indifferent. Instead he precipitated a full-scale conflict in Korea and also a massive war scare in Europe. The Americans committed four United States combat divisions to Europe — the beginnings of a substantial military presence—and pressed the rest of NATO to increase their own conventional forces. Above all, they demanded German rearmament as the price for their own increased involvement. Reconciling that with the fears of their allies, especially France, took four years. But in May 1955 the Federal Republic became a member of NATO and the Soviet satellites were organized into the Warsaw Pact. Exactly a decade after Nazi Germany had surrendered, the division of Europe was complete.
World History
