by Tony Judt
As a consequence, in Italy and West Germany Christian Democrat parties secured (with some American assistance) a near monopoly of political power for many years to come. In France—thanks to the corrosive effects of two colonial wars, followed in 1958 by De Gaulle’s return to power—the MRP did rather less well. But even there it remained the arbiter of power until the mid-fifties, with an uncontested claim to certain key ministries (notably Foreign Affairs). Catholic parties of a Christian Democrat bent exercised unbroken power in the Benelux countries for more than a generation, in Austria through 1970.
The leaders of Christian Democratic parties, like Britain’s Winston Churchill, were men of an earlier time: Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876, Alcide de Gasperi five years later, Churchill himself in 1874. This was no mere coincidence or biographical curiosity. By 1945 many continental European countries had lost two generations of potential leaders: the first to death and injury in the Great War, the second to the temptation of Fascism or else to murder at the hands of Nazis and their friends. This shortfall manifested itself in the generally rather mediocre quality of younger politicians in these years—Palmiro Togliatti (who had spent much of the previous twenty years as a political operative in Moscow) was an exception. The special appeal of Léon Blum, who returned to public life in France after imprisonment by Vichy and incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald, was not just his heroism but also his age (he was born in 1872).
At first sight it may seem rather odd that so much of the rehabilitation of postwar Europe was the work of men who reached maturity and entered politics many decades before. Churchill, who first entered Parliament in 1901, always described himself as a ‘child of the Victorian Age’. Clement Attlee, too, was a Victorian, born in 1883. But it is perhaps not so very surprising after all. In the first place such older men were rather unusual in surviving politically and ethically unscathed from thirty years of turmoil—their political credibility enhanced, as it were, by their scarcity value. Secondly, they all came from the remarkable generation of European social reformers who reached maturity during the years 1880-1910—whether as socialists (Blum, Attlee), liberals (Beveridge, or the future Italian President Luigi Einaudi, born in 1874) or progressive Catholics (De Gasperi, Adenauer). Their instincts and interests were very well suited to the post-war mood.
But thirdly, and perhaps most important, the old men who rebuilt Western Europe represented continuity. The vogue between the wars had been for the new and the modern. Parliaments and democracies were seen by many—and not just Fascists and Communists—as decadent, stagnant, corrupt and in any case inadequate to the tasks of the modern state. War and occupation dispelled these illusions, for voters if not for intellectuals. In the cold light of peace, the dull compromises of constitutional democracy took on a new appeal. What most people longed for in 1945 was social progress and renewal, to be sure, but combined with the reassurance of stable and familiar political forms. Where the First World War had a politicizing, radicalizing effect, its successor produced the opposite outcome: a deep longing for normality.
Statesmen whose experience reached back beyond the troubled inter-war decades to the more settled and self-confident era before 1914 thus had a particular attraction. In the continuity of their person they could facilitate a difficult transition from the over-heated politics of the recent past to a coming era of rapid social transformation. Whatever their party ‘label’, the elder statesmen of Europe were all, by 1945, skeptical, pragmatic practitioners of the art of the possible. This personal distance from the over-confident dogmas of inter-war politics faithfully reflected the mood of their constituents. A post-‘ideological’ age was beginning.
The prospects for political stability and social reform in post-World War Two Europe all depended, in the first place, on the recovery of the continent’s economy. No amount of state planning or political leadership could conjure away the Himalayan task facing Europeans in 1945. The most obvious economic impact of the war was on housing stock. The damage to London, where three and a half million homes in the metropolitan area were destroyed, was greater than that wrought by the Great Fire of 1666. Ninety percent of all homes in Warsaw were destroyed. Only 27 percent of the residential buildings in Budapest in 1945 were habitable. Forty percent of German housing stock was gone, 30 percent of British, 20 percent of French. In Italy 1.2 million homes were destroyed, mostly in cities of 50,000 or more people. The problem of homelessness, as we have seen, was perhaps the most obvious consequence of war in the immediate post-war era—in West Germany and Britain the housing shortage would last well into the mid-1950s. As one middle-class woman expressed it, upon emerging from a Post-War Homes Exhibition in London: ‘I’m so desperate for a house I’d like anything. Four walls and a roof is the height of my ambition.’19
The second area of evident damage was in transport—merchant fleets, railway lines, rolling stock, bridges, roads, canals and tramways. There were no bridges across the Seine between Paris and the sea, just one left intact across the Rhine. As a consequence, even if mines and factories could produce necessary goods they could not move them—many European coal mines were working again by December 1945 but the city of Vienna was still without coal.
The visual impact was the worst: many countries looked as though they had been battered and broken beyond any hope of recovery. And it was true that in almost every European country involved in the Second World War the national economy stagnated or shrunk when compared even with the mediocre performance of the inter-war years. But war is not always an economic disaster—on the contrary, it can be a powerful stimulus to rapid growth in certain sectors. Thanks to World War Two the US surged into an unassailable commercial and technological lead, much as Britain had done during the Napoleonic wars.
And indeed, as Allied surveyors soon realized, the destructive economic impact of the war against Hitler was by no means as total as they had first thought, even in Germany itself. The bombing campaign, for all its human costs, had wrought less economic damage than its advocates expected. Little more than 20 percent of German industrial plant had been destroyed by May 1945; even in the Ruhr, where much Allied bombing had been concentrated, two thirds of all plant and machinery had survived intact. Elsewhere, in the Czech lands for example, industry and agriculture thrived under the German occupation and emerged virtually unscathed—Slovakia, like parts of Hungary, saw accelerated industrialization during the war years and actually emerged better off than before.
The dramatically skewed nature of much of the damage, such that it was people and places that suffered terribly while factories and goods were relatively spared, contributed to an unexpectedly speedy recovery after 1945 of core economic sectors. Engineering industries flourished during the war. The UK, the USSR, France, Italy and Germany (as well as Japan and the USA) all emerged with a larger stock of machine tools than they started with. In Italy only the aeronautic and shipbuilding industries suffered serious damage. Engineering firms situated in the North, and thus out of reach of the heaviest fighting during the Italian campaign, did rather well (as they had in World War One), their wartime output and investment more than compensating for any harm they suffered. As for the machine tool industry in what became West Germany, it lost just 6.5 percent of its equipment through war damage.
In some countries, of course, there was no war damage. Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden all remained neutral throughout the conflict. This does not mean that they were not affected by it. On the contrary, most of the European neutrals were intimately engaged, albeit indirectly, in the Nazi war effort. Germany depended heavily on Franco’s Spain for its wartime supply of manganese. Tungsten reached Germany from Portugal’s colonies, via Lisbon. Forty percent of Germany’s wartime requirements in iron ore were met from Sweden (delivered to German ports in Swedish ships). And all this was paid for in gold, much of it stolen from Germany’s victims and channeled through Switzerland.
The Swiss did more than act as money-launderer and conduit for G
erman payments, in itself a substantial contribution to Hitler’s war. In 1941-42 60 percent of Switzerland’s munitions industry, 50 percent of its optical industry and 40 percent of its engineering output was producing for Germany, remunerated in gold. The Bührle-Oerlikon small arms firm was still selling rapid-fire guns to the Wehrmacht in April 1945. All told, the German Reichsbank deposited the gold equivalent of 1,638,000,000 Swiss francs in Switzerland during the Second World War. And it was Swiss authorities before the outbreak of the conflict who asked that German passports indicate whether their holders were Jewish, the better to restrict unwanted arrivals.
The Swiss authorities, in their defence, had good reason to keep the Nazis friendly. Although the Wehrmacht high command postponed its June 1940 plans for an invasion of Switzerland, it never abandoned them; the experience of Belgium and the Netherlands was a grim reminder of the fate awaiting vulnerable neutral states that got in Hitler’s way. For similar reasons the Swedes also extended their cooperation to Berlin, on whom they were historically dependent for coal. Selling iron ore to Germany was something Sweden had been doing for many years—even before the war half of German iron-ore imports came across the Baltic, and three-quarters of all Swedish iron-ore exports went to Germany. In any case, Swedish neutrality had long been slanted toward Germany out of fear of Russian ambitions. Co-operation with the Nazis—allowing the transit of 14,700 Wehrmacht troops at the start of Operation Barbarossa, as well as German soldiers on leave from Norway passing through on their way home, deferring the draft for Swedish iron mine workers so as to ensure regular deliveries to Germany—was thus not a departure from habit.
After the war the Swiss (though not the Swedes) were initially the object of resentful international suspicion as accomplices to Germany’s war effort; in the Washington Accords of May 1946 they were constrained to offer a ‘voluntary’ contribution of 250 million Swiss francs to European reconstruction, as a final settlement of all claims relating to Reichsbank transactions through Swiss banks. But by that time Switzerland was already rehabilitated as a prosperous island of fiscal rectitude: its banks highly profitable, its farms and engineering industries set to supply food and machinery to needy European markets.
Before the war neither Switzerland nor Sweden had been especially prosperous—indeed they contained significant regions of rural poverty. But the lead they secured in the course of the war has proved lasting: both are now at the top of the European league and have been there steadily for four decades. Elsewhere the path to recovery was a little steeper. But even in Eastern Europe the economic infrastructure at least was repaired with remarkable speed. Despite the worst efforts of the retreating Wehrmacht and the advancing Red Army, the bridges, roads, railways and cities of Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia were rebuilt. By 1947, transportation networks and rolling stock in central Europe had been brought up to or surpassed their pre-war levels. In Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania and Romania, where there was less war-related destruction, this process took less time than in Yugoslavia or Poland. But even the Polish economy recovered quite rapidly—in part because the western territories newly seized from Germany were actually more fertile and better supplied with industrial towns and factories.
In western Europe, too, material damage was repaired with remarkable speed—quickest, on the whole in Belgium, somewhat slower in France, Italy and Norway, slowest in the Netherlands, where the worst harm (to farms, dykes, roads, canals and people) had all come in the last months of the war. The Belgians benefited from Antwerp’s privileged status as the only major European port more or less intact at the end of the war, and from the high concentration of Allied troops in their country, pumping a steady flow of hard cash into an economy that had long specialized in coal, cement and semi-finished metals, all vital for reconstruction work.
Norway, by contrast, was considerably worse off. Half the nation’s vital fishing and merchant fleet was lost in the war. Thanks to deliberate German destruction in the course of the Wehrmacht’s retreat, Norway’s industrial output in 1945 was just 57 per cent that of its 1938 level, with nearly a fifth of the country’s capital stock gone. In later years the contrast with Sweden was not lost on embittered Norwegians. But even Norway was able to restore most of its rail and road network by the end of 1946; and in the course of the following year, as in the rest of western and most of eastern Europe, fuel shortages and inadequate communications were no longer an impediment to economic recovery.
To contemporary observers, however, it was Germany’s capacity to recover which seemed the most remarkable of all. This was a tribute to the efforts of the local population who worked with a striking singularity of purpose to rebuild their shattered country. The day Hitler died, 10 percent of German railways were operational and the country was at a literal standstill. A year later, in June 1946, 93 percent of all German rail tracks had been re-opened and 800 bridges had been rebuilt. In May 1945 German coal production was barely one-tenth that of 1939; a year later it had quintupled in output. In April 1945 it seemed to Saul K. Padover, an observer with the advancing US Army in western Germany, that it would surely take the flattened city of Aachen 20 years to rebuild. But within a few weeks he was already recording the re-opening of the city’s tyre and textile factories and the beginnings of economic life.
One reason for the speed of Germany’s initial recovery was that once the workers’ houses had been rebuilt, and the transport networks put back in place, industry was more than ready to deliver the goods. At the Volkswagen works 91 percent of the machinery had survived wartime bombing and post-war looting, and by 1948 the factory was equipped to produce one in every two cars made in western Germany. Ford of Germany was largely undamaged. Thanks to wartime investment, one-third of German industrial equipment was less than five years old in 1945, compared to just 9 percent in 1939. And the industries in which wartime Germany had invested most heavily—optics, chemicals, light engineering, vehicles, non-ferrous metals—were precisely those which would lay the foundations for the boom of the Fifties. By early 1947 the chief impediment to a German recovery was no longer war damage, but rather raw material and other shortages—and, above all, uncertainty over the country’s political future.
The year 1947 was to prove crucial, the hinge on which was suspended the fate of the continent. Until then Europeans had been consumed with repairs and reconstruction, or else were busy putting in place the institutional infrastructure for long-term recovery. In the course of the first eighteen months following the Allied victory the mood of the continent swung from relief at the mere prospect of peace and a fresh start, to stony resignation and growing disillusion in the face of the magnitude of the tasks still ahead. By the beginning of 1947 it was clear that the hardest decisions had not yet been taken and that they could not be postponed much longer.
To begin with, the fundamental problem of food supply was not yet overcome. Food shortages were endemic everywhere except Sweden and Switzerland. Only UNRRA supplies built up in the spring of 1946 kept Austrians from starving in the twelve months that followed. Caloric provision in the British Zone of Germany fell from 1,500 per day per adult in mid-1946 to 1,050 in early 1947. Italians, who suffered two consecutive years of hunger in 1945 and 1946, had the lowest average food levels of all the west European populations in the spring of 1947. In French opinion polls taken in the course of 1946 ‘food’, ‘bread’, ‘meat’ consistently out-paced everything else as the public’s number one preoccupation.
Part of the problem was that western Europe could no longer turn to the granaries of eastern Europe on which it had traditionally depended. For there, too, no-one had enough to eat. In Romania the 1945 harvest failed, through mismanaged land reforms and bad weather. From western Wallachia through Moldavia, into the western Ukraine and the middle Volga region of the USSR, poor harvests and drought led to near-famine conditions in the autumn of 1946, with aid agencies describing one-year old children weighing just three kilograms and sending back reports of cannibalism. Relief wo
rkers in Albania described the situation there as one of ‘terrifying distress’.
Then came the brutal winter of 1947, the worst since 1880. Canals froze, roads were impassable for weeks at a time, frozen points paralyzed whole rail networks. The incipient post-war recovery came to a grinding halt. Coal, still in short supply, could not keep up with domestic demand and anyway could not be moved. Industrial production slumped—steel output, having just begun to recover, promptly fell back by 40 percent over the previous year. When the snows melted, many parts of Europe were flooded. A few months later, in June 1947, the continent entered one of the hottest, driest summers since records began. It was clear that the harvest would be inadequate, in some places for the third year running: agricultural yields fell by about a third even over the previous year’s meager crop. The shortfall in coal could be made up in part from American imports (34 million tonnes in 1947). Food, too, could be purchased from America and the British Dominions. But all these imports had to be paid for in hard currency, usually dollars.
Two structural dilemmas underlay the European crisis of 1947. One was the effective disappearance of Germany from the European economy. Before the war Germany had been a major market for most of central and eastern Europe, as well as the Netherlands, Belgium and the Mediterranean region (until 1939, for example, Germany bought 38 percent of Greece’s exports and supplied about one-third of the country’s imports). German coal was a vital resource for French steel manufacturers. But until its political future was resolved Germany’s economy—for all its restored potential—remained frozen, effectively blocking the economic recovery of the rest of the continent.