Savage Continent

April 2, 2012
Hitler’s defeat did not end WWII, writes historian Lowe (Inferno: The Fiery Devastation of Hamburg, 1943) in this horrific account of years of violence and misery that immediately followed the war. Civil wars ignited by Nazi invasion raged for years in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Poland. Partisans in the Baltic states and Ukraine fought the Red Army until the 1950s. After WWII the victors moved people to suit borders—moving ethnic minorities, often with good intentions, to prevent future hostilities, but with cruel results. Vengeful neighbors expelled 11 million Germans from Poland, but a dozen other acts of “ethnic cleansing” involved millions of Ukrainians, Hungarians, Poles, and other Slavs. Nor were Allied nations idle. Twenty-four thousand German POWs died in French camps. Americans kept millions of German soldiers in open fields with no shelter or sanitation and little food. Despite Lowe’s thoughtful explanations for the actions he recounts, few readers will emerge unshaken from this meticulous history of unspeakable behavior by both governments and ordinary citizens. 16 pages of color photos, 12 maps. Agent: Daniel Mandel, Sanford J. Greenberger Associates.

Starred review from June 15, 2012
A breathtaking, numbing account of the physical and moral desolation that plagued Europe in the late 1940s. Drawing on recently opened Eastern European archives, Lowe (Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg 1943, 2007, etc.) presents a searing and comprehensive view of postwar Europe that calls into question the very nature of World War II. Europe in this era is often seen through a rosy mythology of liberated nations cheerfully coming together to begin the task of reconstruction. In fact, the story of this period "is firstly a story of the descent into anarchy." Across this devastated, lawless continent, millions of displaced persons trudged on foot in search of vanished homes or safety, some voluntarily, some driven at bayonet point as part of the massive ethnic cleansing that engulfed Eastern Europe; all were generally unwelcome on arrival. Everyone was "hungry, bereaved and bitter about the years of suffering they had been made to endure--before they could be motivated to start rebuilding they needed time to vent their anger, to reflect and to mourn." Vent they did. Hostilities ended with the defeat of Germany, but violence continued unabated as partisans and communities punished collaborators, terrorized and expelled ethnic minorities, and pursued with brutal enthusiasm the class wars and civil wars that had long bubbled just beneath the surface. Viewed in this light, the familiar Allies-Axis war appears as a simplistic cover for the far more complicated and vicious local conflicts beneath. Lowe writes with measured objectivity, honoring the victims of atrocity and understanding the causes of, but refusing to excuse, the violence directed by freed victims against their former oppressors. Authoritative but never dry, stripping away soothing myths of national unity and victimhood, this is a painful but necessary historical task superbly done.

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May 15, 2012
Perhaps no single volume can catalog the revenge that convulsed Europe in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Lowe's, however, gives a good if grim impression of the processes of retribution by recounting representative events against the backdrop of what statistics of disease, death, and deportation he can extract from biased sources. For in the chaotic conditions following the Nazis' defeat, a kind of competition in victimhood ensued, in which nationalities and ethnicities could inflate their sufferings and minimize those of others as expedient for vendettas or politics. Alert to this problem, Lowe covers initial reckonings with Nazis and their collaborators, the last an elastic category that stretched differently from Norway to Greece. While accounts evened out, roughly and raggedly, millions of peopleGerman POWs, ex-slave laborers, and German expelleeswere afoot, heading somewhere and often reigniting the war's hatreds, as Lowe's litany of interethnic violence attests. Adding the political surge of communism, which involved all-out war in Greece, guerrilla war in Lithuania, and the imposition of Stalinist regimes, Lowe remorselessly surveys a history reemerging from postCold War scholarship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)