Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (97 page)

7. March 1946: Doctors in Yugoslavia tend to a nine-year-old boy. Four hours earlier the boy had been playing in a field near his home when a land mine exploded. He lost both arms and was blinded.

8. The plight of women after the war: American sailors in Naples take advantage of impoverished local girls.

9. Soviet soldiers molest a German woman in Leipzig, 1946.

10. In the aftermath of the war, no one in Germany could afford to be fussy about where he found shelter. UNRRA used this building in Heilbronn to house displaced persons.

11. Postwar Europe saw the almost complete breakdown of law and order. Here, freed slave labourers loot a German marshalling yard.

12. Revenge: the bodies of German men hanging from lamp-posts and trees in Roudnice nad Labem, a Czech town just a few miles from Theresienstadt concentration camp.

13. At Dachau, liberated prisoners taunt one of their former guards. In the background is the wall against which captured Germans were shot by American soldiers.

14. August 1944: a French collaborator receives a beating after the liberation of Rennes in Brittany.

15. Fascists summarily executed by partisans in Milan, April 1945. Around 15,000 Italian Fascists met a similar fate.

APPALLING CONDITIONS FOR GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR

16. In this temporary enclosure at Remagen in the final week of the war, just a few hundred American soldiers guarded more than 100,000 captured Germans.

17. At Sinzig, after the war was over, German prisoners were still obliged to live in holes in the ground.

18. A tearful Corsican woman, accused of consorting with German soldiers, is ritually humiliated by her neighbours. By shaving her and stripping her naked they are effectively reclaiming her body for France.

19. Continued anti-Semitic violence sparked the flight of Jews from eastern Europe after the war. This ramshackle ship, the Exodus 47, was carrying Jews to Palestine before it was intercepted by the British.