Savage Continent
Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize
"A superb and immensely important book."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...
The end of World War II in Europe is remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, but the reality was quite different. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed, and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted—such as police, media, transport, and local and national government—were either entirely absent or compromised. Crime rates soared, economies collapsed, and whole populations hovered on the brink of starvation.
In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent where individual Germans and collaborators were rounded up and summarily executed, where concentration camps were reopened, and violent anti-Semitism was reborn. In some of the monstrous acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands.
Savage Continent is the story of post–war Europe, from the close of the war right to the establishment of an uneasy stability at the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is the chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post–World War II Europe for years to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
