Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (12 page)

The newspaper article went on to suggest that it was a blessing that so many of these children were being killed in the fighting, and that the remainder should be dealt with similarly for the good of the world. ‘But whether you exterminate them or sterilise them, Nazism in all its horribleness will not perish from the earth until the last Nazi is dead.’
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The horrors of Nazi rule had at last found a mirror in the thoughts and writings of the Allies. Here, in a mainstream British newspaper, was a proposal of extermination as a
moral
solution to the evil Hitler had unleashed on Europe. There is nothing to separate these ideas from some of Goebbels’ most rabid German articles in the
Völkischer Beobachter.
The difference – and it is a huge one – is that in Britain men with such ideas did not hold the reins of power, and such proposals were therefore never carried out. But the very fact that these thoughts could be seriously expressed in the national media demonstrates the damaged morality that existed even in those countries that had not been occupied during the war.

6

Hope

Despite all the destruction to people’s lives and physical surroundings, the end of the war also brought with it a great deal of optimism. When the people of Europe looked around themselves in May 1945 they discovered that there was actually much to feel proud of. Not all of the changes that had been thrust upon them were entirely negative ones. The removal of dictatorships had left the continent freer, safer and fairer than it had been before the war, and democratic governments had at last been able to re-establish themselves – even, for a time, in much of eastern Europe. There was a universal sense that whatever the future might bring, it would at the very least be brighter than the period they had just lived through.

The postwar years saw an explosion of activity and idealism at every level of society. Art, music and literature began to flourish once more, and hundreds of new journals and newspapers were established across the continent. New philosophies were born, which envisaged a world of optimism and action, where the human condition was one of being ‘totally committed and totally free’.
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Dozens of new political movements and parties were created, some of which would come to dominate political thought for the next half-century.
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These things would have been impossible had the population of Europe been exclusively demoralized, exhausted and corrupt. Hope was at least as important as any of these darker elements of the postwar atmosphere. It was hope that revitalized the continent and allowed it to drag itself back to its feet. And it was hope that softened the inevitable cynicism with which the people viewed the new governments and institutions that were springing up in place of the old. Much of this hope was a natural, spontaneous reaction to the renewal of rights and freedoms that accompanied Hitler’s downfall. But some of it was manufactured by the deep-rooted needs, desires and even the prejudices of European society.

The Cult of Heroism

After the war was over, Europe seems to have experienced an insatiable demand for stories about the conflict. This was partly because people needed to make sense of what they had just experienced – but the types of stories that tended to emerge show that these were not the only needs being met. The most popular stories were those of extreme heroism, which appeared by the thousand all over the continent. In almost every case the heroes were local men and women whose feats of bravery or sacrifice came to represent, in the popular imagination at least, the
true
spirit of their countrymen. The evils of the war, meanwhile, were projected onto the villains of the stories, who were almost always foreign, and usually German. This contrast between foreign evil and homegrown nobility was hugely important in the rebuilding of national identities after the war, and one of the principal ways in which Europe’s battered nations chose to lick their wounds.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Britain, which was much in need of positive distractions after the war. Britain in 1945 was a country prostrate. Not only were the British obliged to nurse their own damaged infrastructure and virtually bankrupt economy, but they were also expected to shoulder the burden of policing the rest of Europe, as well as their collapsing empire in Africa and the Far East. The only thing the British had to compensate them for the decade of hardship and rationing that lay ahead was the thought that they had remained undefeated by the war, and that they had acted nobly in the face of evil – that they were, in short, a nation of heroes.

As an antidote to the tales of horror from abroad, and the tales of misery at home, the British turned out stories of heroism by the score. The end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s saw a veritable avalanche of British war stories –
The Great Escape, The Cruel Sea, The Dam Busters, Ill Met by Moonlight, The Colditz Story, Reach for the Sky,
to name but a handful of the most famous accounts. None of the protagonists in these stories ever express any doubts about the justness of their cause, their abilities, or the belief that they would succeed despite the seemingly insuperable obstacles before them. This was not merely the recycling of wartime propaganda – this was how the British
needed
to see themselves in the years after the war. The myth that the British never despaired, doubted or even grumbled – a myth that is contradicted by even a short visit to the wartime ‘Mass Observation’ archives – was a comforting stereotype that endures to this day.

This need to tell positive stories about one’s countrymen was universal in the aftermath of the war in Europe. For those countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, such stories were if anything more important: not only did they serve to distract people from the harshness of postwar life, as they did in Britain, they also drew attention away from the unpleasant fact of collaboration.

In Norway, for example, the purge of collaborators from society was accompanied – and eventually overshadowed – by the very public celebration of the nation’s war heroes. Dozens of public speeches were made praising the bravery of the Resistance, and medal ceremonies were held to reward those whose stories were most inspiring. In the mid-to-late forties a series of war memoirs were published, detailing the exploits of Norwegian soldiers, agents and saboteurs. Jens Müller’s
Tre kom tilbake
told the story of the ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp: Müller was one of only three who made it all the way home. Oluf Olsen’s memoirs told the story of how he blew up the Lysaker Bridge after the Nazi invasion, escaped to Britain, and then parachuted back into Norway in 1943 as an agent for the British Special Operations Executive. Knut Haukelid told how he and his fellow agents destroyed the Nazis’ heavy water plant in Rjukan – an act that would be immortalized in the British film
The Heroes of Telemark.
Max Manus’s extraordinary career involved a series of breathtaking escapes, intrigues and acts of sabotage. His memoirs were published in Norway in 1946, but the story was made into a feature film as late as 2008. At the time of writing this is the biggest-budget movie in Norway’s history. It is a testament to the enduring appeal of the country’s war heroes.
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When repeated often enough, it was easy to imagine that wartime resistance had been the everyday experience of the majority of the country. There were other positive effects of such stories too: by constant reference to the wartime links between the Resistance and Britain, Norway was confirmed as an active player not only in her own liberation but in the liberation of Europe as a whole.

For these reasons, stories of resistance became the dominant narrative of the wartime experience in all the countries that had been occupied by the Nazis. Holland celebrated the bravery of men such as Bram van der Stok, one of the ‘Great Escapers’ and the most decorated Dutch serviceman of all time. Denmark had people like Mogens Fog, the founder of the Resistance newspaper
Frit Danmark,
who escaped from the Gestapo when, by luck, the RAF bombed their headquarters in Copenhagen. The Czech Communists had heroes like Marie Kude
íková, a student who was executed for protesting against Nazi rule; while the Czech conservatives had the famous spy and saboteur Josef Mašin, whose sons would later follow in their father’s footsteps by resisting the Communist regime.

There were hundreds, if not thousands of such stories, in every country that took an active part in the Second World War. Some of them were exaggerated, and some idealized, but in their straightforward portrayal of ordinary people triumphing against extraordinary odds they came to represent the wider struggle of Europe as a whole. Not only were these stories an inspiration to a whole generation who had not always lived up to such high ideals – they also reminded people that, no matter how hard life in postwar Europe might be, it was infinitely better than living under the tyranny they had overthrown.

Brotherhood and Unity

Heroism was not the only aspect of the war that was universally celebrated in its aftermath. On 9 May 1945 the Yugoslav leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito delivered a victory speech in which he paid tribute to the ‘heroism’ of the Partisans he had led during the war, whose ‘matchless exploits’ would ‘inspire future generations and teach them how to love their homeland’. However, the main emphasis of his speech was not so much a celebration of heroism as a tribute to unity:

Peoples of Yugoslavia!

Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Moslems!

The long-awaited day you have yearned for has come! … The power which was intent on enslaving you has been defeated. The German and Italian Fascist set you against each other so that you might destroy yourselves in internecine strife. But your best sons and daughters, inspired by love of their country and its nations, have foiled these diabolical plans of the enemy. Instead of mutual discord and hostility, you are united today in a new and happier Yugoslavia …

Later in the speech Tito appealed not only to the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of his own countrymen, but to that of the Balkans as a whole, the Allies and their armies, and indeed the whole of the United Nations. VE Day, he said, was a day of ‘common victory’ for all, and he hoped that ‘in the aftermath of this great victory in the field of battle, the same unanimity and understanding among the United Nations continues to prevail in peacetime as in wartime’.
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The sentiments in this speech were replicated by virtually every leader in Europe at various points during the war. Churchill, for example, not only promised that ‘the British Commonwealth and Empire stands more united … than at any time in its long romantic history’, but also repeatedly stressed the ‘unity, comradeship and brotherhood’ that existed between the Allies. The war had been won, he said, because ‘almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers’.
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Romania’s first post-liberation leader, Constantin S
n
tescu, spoke of a ’‘spirit of perfect union’ across the ‘entire country’.
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Even Stalin spoke of how ‘the ideology of friendship among the peoples has emerged completely victorious over the Hitlerite ideology of … racial hatred’.
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