It is very interesting to read Judt’s Postwar because he provides a great picture of what was happening on the ground immediately following the German surrender in May 1945. In the various classes on world and European history I have taken, the main things we learn about what was going on in Europe immediately following World War II were the implementation of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift, basically two instances of American money and power staving off misery in Europe. But we never learned much about what happened to the Jews and minority populations immediately following the war.
After the war, hundreds of thousands of people across Europe were relocated for various reasons, and the ultimate end was to create a “tidier Europe.” Judt points out that “at the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite…boundaries were left intact and people were moved instead” (27). Especially interesting were the movements of German-speaking populations themselves. The German population in Czechoslovakia, for example, was forcibly expelled to Germany from the Sudetenland. B y 1950, the German population in Bohemia and Moravia had been reduced from approximately 29 percent to 1.8 percent (26). Other nations to export their German-speaking communities en masse included Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and many lands in what was formerly the eastern portion of Germany itself. One of Hitler’s most important objectives in beginning World War II was to unify all Europe’s German diasporas in one German empire. With the consolidation of the German population in the borders of Germany, no German leader would have reason to pursue expansionist policies in order to unify the German people again.
Particularly difficult to repatriate were the surviving members of Europe’s Jewish population. They were unwanted in both Eastern and Western Europe, and many of them remained in Germany for years following the war for lack of anywhere else to go. This large Jewish population, essentially existing in a stateless limbo, was only able to find a permanent home with the creation of Israel in 1948. A massive number of Jews emigrated to Israel, a population measuring about 332,000 (32).
The reason for the relative peace that existed between the nations of postwar Western Europe and, after 1989, between all the nations of Europe that was always given was the economic integration effort of France and Germany as well as the generous American aid in the form of the Marshall Plan. However, Judt seems to suggest that another less known reason for the avoidance of another war in Europe is its new “tidiness” and ethnic homogeneity. We are beginning to see increased domestic problems in Western European nations now that there is a large influx of immigrants from places like North Africa and the Middle East, disrupting Europe’s homogeneity. Europe’s age-old difficulties dealing with minority populations came to a head in World War II, and seem to be beginning to resurface. It will be interesting to see if the proportional representation electoral system will continue to keep the peace in Europe as it becomes increasingly genuinely heterogeneous again.
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