Postwar Summary and key ideas

Postwar, by Tony Judt.

Europe in 1945 was not liberated into an intact past. Tony Judt presents it as a violent rupture: war had destroyed populations, institutions, and confidence in law, leaving a question of what could replace the old order. The conflict exceeded its formal dates. It began before 1939 in some places, while occupation and civil war continued in the East after Germany’s defeat.

World War Two was total because civilian life stood at its center. Under Nazi occupation, Europeans were treated as economic resources for Germany or as populations marked for removal and destruction. Mines, factories, farms, railways, and workers fed German needs, while bombing, shelling, retreating armies, and deliberate demolition ruined homes, transport, and cities. Eastern Europe suffered far more than the West. The modern state itself became an instrument of violence against Europeans.

Material devastation was only the visible surface. Judt estimates roughly thirty-six and a half million European deaths from war-related causes, including at least nineteen million civilians. Extermination, starvation, disease, reprisals, massacres, bombing, combat, and slave labor all contributed, so these figures remain estimates. Poland lost about one-fifth of its prewar population, with an especially heavy loss among educated people. The shortage of men reshaped households and rural economies, leaving women with new responsibilities.

Survival did not become secure when the guns fell silent. Orphanhood, sexual violence, homelessness, hunger, illness, and broken families continued the emergency. Destroyed farms and transport, broken currencies, hoarding, and black markets made food scarce. Allied armies, then the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Refugee Organization, managed camps and movement. Relief saved lives, but nationality, political status, occupation zone, and labor value shaped who was repatriated or resettled.

The continent was also rearranged by policy. Between Hitler and Stalin, roughly thirty million people were uprooted between 1939 and 1943, and the process continued through flight, retaliation, expulsions, and agreements. Western authorities sometimes forced people back, including more than two million Soviet citizens returned between 1945 and 1947. Governments moved populations instead of borders: nearly three million Germans left Czechoslovakia, and about thirteen million were eventually resettled. Judt treats these expulsions as coercive and deadly, while distinguishing removal from Nazi extermination and forced labor.

The result was a more ethnically homogeneous, though never fully homogeneous, Europe. Historic diasporas contracted or disappeared, and mixed regions became national enclaves. The new map looked tidier partly because populations had been removed. This was not a neutral by-product of peace.

War also unsettled collaboration, resistance, and legitimate authority. Occupation gave local groups opportunities to pursue autonomy, settle ethnic scores, or fight older enemies. Italy’s conflict from 1943 to 1945 was a genuine civil war, not simply national resistance. Greece likewise moved from occupation into reprisals and civil war, ending only in 1949. Civilians became the main victims.

Repeated occupation dismantled regimes, administrations, and social elites. Jewish professional classes were murdered and German populations later expelled, allowing others to inherit homes, jobs, land, and businesses. Law and property rights became contingent on power. Under Nazi and Soviet rule, the state often appeared as a predator, while survival could require black markets, forbidden institutions, or actions later blurred with resistance.

That is why 1945 cannot mean simple liberation or restoration. Western Europe retained enough continuity to imagine normality; farther east, upheaval made the prewar order politically unrecoverable. Hitler, as much as Stalin, helped create the divide by producing radically different conditions east of the Elbe before Soviet power imposed its system. Western recovery and Eastern domination thus emerged from one shared catastrophe, by different means. Later stability began on broken ground, shaped by trauma, displacement, and coercion.