Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II QUOTES

21 " This insistence on unity was the source of one of the most potent myths of the postwar period – the idea that the responsibility for all the evils of the war rested exclusively with the Germans. If it was only ‘they’ who had perpetrated atrocities upon ‘us’, then the rest of Europe was released from all accountability for the injustices it had perpetrated upon itself. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

22 " Attempts to rehabilitate the political right in western Europe have not only resulted in a whitewash: in some cases, absurdly, it has allowed right-wing extremists to portray themselves as the injured party. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

23 " In his memoirs of the late 1940s and 50s, published after his death following the famous ‘umbrella assassination’ in London in 1978, the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov told a story that is emblematic of the postwar period – not only in his own country, but in Europe as a whole. It involved a conversation between one of his friends, who had been arrested for challenging a Communist official who had jumped the bread queue, and an officer of the Bulgarian Communist militia: ‘And now tell me who your enemies are?’ the militia chief demanded. K. thought for a while and replied: ‘I don’t really know, I don’t think I have any enemies.’ ‘No enemies!’ The chief raised his voice. ‘Do you mean to say that you hate nobody and nobody hates you?’ ‘As far as I know, nobody.’ ‘You are lying,’ shouted the Lieutenant-Colonel suddenly, rising from his chair. ‘What kind of a man are you not to have any enemies? You clearly do not belong to our youth, you cannot be one of our citizens, if you have no enemies! … And if you really do not know how to hate, we shall teach you! We shall teach you very quickly!’1 In a sense, the militia chief in this story is right – it was virtually impossible to emerge from the Second World War without enemies. There can hardly be a better demonstration than this of the moral and human legacy of the war. After the desolation of entire regions; after the butchery of over 35 million people; after countless massacres in the name of nationality, race, religion, class or personal prejudice, virtually every person on the continent had suffered some kind of loss or injustice. Even countries which had seen little direct fighting, such as Bulgaria, had been subject to political turmoil, violent squabbles with their neighbours, coercion from the Nazis and eventually invasion by one of the world’s new superpowers. Amidst all these events, to hate one’s rivals had become entirely natural. Indeed, the leaders and propagandists of all sides had spent six long years promoting hatred as an essential weapon in the quest for victory. By the time this Bulgarian militia chief was terrorizing young students at Sofia University, hatred was no longer a mere by-product of the war – in the Communist mindset it had been elevated to a duty. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

24 " In the winter of 1941 the German army succeeded in starving between 1.3 and 1.65 million Soviet prisoners of war to death. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

25 " This was not discrimination against Jews as such, but it was almost as bad: it was an attempt to ignore them altogether. As one Dutch camp survivor put it, ‘Where there should have been pity, I encountered the dry, difficult to approach, repellent, amorphous mass known as officialdom.’13 "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

26 " Here perhaps is the key to why the plight of returning Jews was so commonly ignored in the aftermath of the war, not only in Holland but all over western Europe. While stories of resistance gave people the chance to feel good about themselves, and reassure themselves that they too had produced their fair share of heroes, the stories of the Jews had the opposite effect. They were a reminder of former failings at every level of society. Their very presence was enough to create discomfort, as though they might at any moment reveal an embarrassing secret. It was far easier, therefore, simply to pretend that what had befallen the Jews was really just the same as what had happened to everyone else. Far from being welcomed, they were ignored, sidelined, silenced. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

27 " Lidice, along with thousands of other villages, was switched off like a light. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

28 " The British knew as early as December 1942 that hundreds of thousands of Jews were being ‘slowly worked to death in labour camps’ and even ‘deliberately massacred in mass executions’. But the government was reluctant to publicize the fact too widely in case they might then be expected to do something about it.15 The British Ministry of Information were still working to instructions issued earlier on in the war that ‘horror stuff … must be used very sparingly and must deal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent opponents. And not with Jews.’16 "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

29 " The American government also seemed unwilling to admit that Jews were worse off than any other persecuted group. Despite regular reports of the threat to European Jewry from as early as 1940, and despite Roosevelt’s unequivocal announcement in March 1944 of ‘one of the blackest crimes of all history … the wholesale, systematic murder of the Jews of Europe’, Americans seemed reluctant to believe that the Holocaust was really taking place.17 Even within Roosevelt’s administration there was scepticism, and senior figures like Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his assistant John McCloy regarded ‘special pleading’ by Jews with suspicion. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

30 " Perhaps George Santayana’s famous aphorism that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ should be reversed – that is, it is because we remember the past that we are condemned to repeat it. The depressing re-emergence of national hatreds in the last "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

31 " Hidden within the main conflict were dozens of other, more local wars, which had different flavours and different motivations in each country and each region. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

32 " It is this undercurrent of ‘anti-creation’ and ‘definitive evil’ that makes the destruction of Europe’s towns and cities so disturbing to contemplate. What is implied in all the descriptions of this time, but never overtly stated, is that behind the physical devastation is something far worse. The ‘skeletons’ of houses and framed pictures sticking out of the rubble of Warsaw are highly symbolic: hidden beneath the ruins, both literally and metaphorically, there was a separate human and moral disaster. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

33 " In some respects the Hamburg firestorm can be considered a microcosm of what happened to Europe in the war. As with the rest of Europe, the bombing had transformed the city into a landscape of ruins – and yet there were still parts of it that lay serenely, miraculously, untouched. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

34 " Perhaps the only way to come close to understanding what happened is to stop trying to imagine Europe as a place populated by the dead, and to think of it instead as a place characterized by absence. Almost everyone alive when the war ended had lost friends or relatives to it. Whole villages, whole towns and even whole cities had been effectively erased, and with them their populations. Large areas of Europe that had once been home to thriving, bustling communities were now almost entirely empty of people. It was not the presence of death that defined the atmosphere of postwar Europe, but rather the absence of those who had once occupied Europe’s sitting rooms, its shops, its streets, its markets. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

35 " Of the 3 million prisoners taken by the Soviets during the war, more than a third died in captivity. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

36 " The men the Americans now call ‘the Greatest Generation’ were not all the selfless heroes they are often portrayed to be: a proportion of them were also thieves, plunderers and abusers of the worst kind. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

37 " But it is also true to say that the conduct of those ‘democratic’ countries in the aftermath of the war was often far from perfect. In some instances it was demonstrably worse than the Communists’ – the treatment of peasants in the south of Italy, for example, who were denied the land reforms they had been promised by government, compares badly with the progressive attitude in eastern Europe during the early days of Communist rule. Neither side had a monopoly on virtue. In a continent as large and diverse as Europe, it is always unwise to generalize. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

38 " 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. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

39 " McCarthy’s portrayal of American Communists as ‘a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man’ was every bit as irrational as eastern Europe’s anti-Americanism.4 "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

40 " The sheer variety of grievances that existed in 1945 demonstrates not only how universal the war had been, but also how inadequate is our traditional way of understanding it. It is not enough to portray the war as a simple conflict between the Axis and the Allies over territory. Some of the worst atrocities in the war had nothing to do with territory, but with race or nationality. The Nazis did not attack the Soviet Union merely for the sake of Lebensraum: it was also an expression of their urge to assert the superiority of the German race over Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. The Soviets did not invade Poland and the Baltic States only for the sake of territory either: they wanted to propagate communism as far westwards as they were able. Some of the most vicious fighting was not between the Axis and the Allies at all, but between local people who took the opportunity of the wider war to give vent to much older frustrations. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II