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    Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
    Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
    Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
    Audiobook15 hours

    Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

    Written by Keith Lowe

    Narrated by John Lee

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    About this audiobook

    The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. 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 the police, the media, transport, local and national government-were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places-particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France-they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe toward the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 24, 2012
    ISBN9781452679945
    Author

    Keith Lowe

    Keith Lowe is an editor in the United Kingdom and the author of Tunnel Vision. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Savage Continent

    4/5

    151 ratings22 reviews

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    • 4/5
      An interesting and well written history of an understudied historical period. I'd really never read anything about the years immediately after WWII in Europe, and I guess I'd just never really thougth about how horrible it must have been. Great book.
    • 5/5
      Shined a light for me on the brutality and vengeance that consumed much of Europe in the wake of war. Though the soviets were behind a degree of the savagery in the East, most of the belligerence involved partisans, nationalist militias, and even neighbor vs neighbor. The ethnic divisions were only stirred up in the aftermath of wartime, resulting in the most horrific "cleansing" and forced evictions the world has seen. Great scholarship, convincing evidence, balanced.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book on an underexamined topic. The audiobook, however, was not as good as it should have been because the reader kept mimicking the voices of all the historical figures, and badly. It was distracting and inappropriate for such grim material. No one needs to hear a Yugoslavian camp survivor's story recounted in the voice of a cut-rate Bela Lugosi.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. It was so informative from all sides involved in the war. Not only the fighting between soldiers, but how civilians lived and died before, during and after the war. Very informative about what happened politically after the war too. Overall this is a great book to read if you want to know about WW2.
    • 4/5
      Brutal and unrelenting. An extremely hard book to read, where every new page brings to light a new atrocity. The machinations of the world powers post WWII are thoroughly sifted through and show that no one, including those bronzed heroes of yesteryear was on the side of angels. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Good stuff--well written, plenty of facts, a few too many anecdotes, but not too long. Not quite as good as 'The Vanquished,' which is a similar idea applied to the first world war, but certainly more worth reading than yet another book about how world war II started or played out.
    • 5/5
      This book is not for the faint of heart. Every time you think you've just read the worst thing that humans can do to other humans, you turn the page and realize that wasn't the worst. It explains why Europe was the way it was when I was growing up and even into early adulthood, but I had never heard or read of these things before. Wow.
    • 4/5
      The immediate aftermath of WWII is an oft-glossed over historical moment that deserves much more attention. Lowe does a very thorough job of not only exploring how WWII was more than just the Axis v. Allies, Good v. Evil but instead a tangled chaotic mess of conflicts regarding nations, ethnicities, territory, and ideologies and these conflicts didn't end with V-E Day.

      The importance of Lowe's work is in portraying how these little-known conflicts can be used by ideologues to "prove" historical culpability of those they oppose. When the numbers are removed from historical context and myths are allowed to become accepted fact, right-wing nationalists are able to encourage further prejudice against their targets. Lowe's use of statistics and narrative to explain how no one came out of WWII without blood on their hands is an important way history can be employed to fight back against extremism.
    • 5/5
      For a person well read in the history of WW2 this book really exposed a huge gap in my own knowledge about the aftermath. In many ways it was worse for more people than the war itself. Who needs to read about the zombie apocalypse? Europe was the apocalypse defined and it was not pretty. The numbers in every realm of human suffering are more or less mind-blowing and hard to 'appreciate' (not that you really want to). Credit to the author for trying to humanize the story with little vignettes to illustrate the nature of the suffering but no one can describe the thousands, millions of lives ended, ruined or damaged without losing the reader completely. It seems he struck a good balance between overview and detail. The book could have easily been twice as long just trying to catalog the litany of suffering and vengeance but again there was enough to tell the 'story' while retaining readability. A fairly nice bibliography will allow readers to delve deeper if so interested. I emerged with more questions on the Greek Civil War. At the end you marvel that Europe was able to recover as it did which is a testimony itself to human resilience.
    • 5/5
      A historian who goes the extra mile to get a better understanding of the issues. Definitely not afraid to take on sacred cows of history or cherished myths. Very good organization with flow of ideas developed in a coherent manner. Unusually good prose for historical writing, very fluid, no need for those pauses and backtracking where you have to untangle the meaning.
    • 3/5
      This tells of the conflicts in Europe after World War II, concentrating on the years 1945 and 1946Mostley it tells of the conflict between Russian supported forces and those opposing those forces. It is pretty balanced, not hesitating to condemn either side for violent and treacherous behavior. It tells of the conflicts in Norway, Italy, and France--where Communists did not triumph, and then tells the dismal story of how Eastern Europe fell into Communist tyranny. It is not a pleasant story and I could not enjoy the book, and did not learn anything that surprised me. Some of the violence of the west European countries as they took revenge on the Hitler-supporting people in their countries was not well-known to me. Countries like Norway, which had long eschewed capital punishment, brought it back to deal with Hitler-supporting countrymen. Fortunately after that they again abandoned capital punishment.
    • 5/5
      Most histories of WWII end with Germany's surrender. That is where this picks up. At times, the descriptions of the brutality and chaos (and it wasn't just the Russians) is at times difficult to get through, but this is a must for anyone interested in how modern Europe came to be. Also, if you think nation building is wasy, because we did in in Europe. Read this. Massive resettlement (today we call it ethnic cleansing) of populations. People who thought nation building in Afganistan or Iraq would be easy should have read this.
    • 4/5
      Perhaps the ultimate argument against anarchy is a history of how people behave, what it's really like, when it occurs. This is an excellent look at a forgotten period of history; the first few years post World War II in Europe.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      I'm no historian, and I've never given much thought to the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe. I knew that the Marshall Plan was devised and implemented to help rebuild the gutted economy and infrastructure, and that the Soviets grabbed much of Eastern Europe. But that was about it.This book documents in considerable detail what actually happened. The fracturing that occurred when nationalities that shared pre-war countries took advantage of the chaotic situation to drive each other out. The vengeance extracted against collaborators. The conflicts that arose when displaced persons returned to their former homes and found them either destroyed or else occupied or looted by their neighbors.
    • 5/5
      After the horror, more horrors still -- Keith Lowe's compelling book about Europe in the aftermath of WWII shows just how devastated the continent was, and how the devastation continued for months and years. His graphic descriptions make clear the extent to which physical and social structures were totally eradicated by VE Day. This left survivors without food, shelter, or any protection from other, stronger survivors -- women, being less likely to be armed, were prime targets. I found particularly telling his story of British observers who expected the sort of devastation they saw at home when they went to the continent, but saw something far, far worse -- unimaginably worse. And his narrative of events after the war shows the extent to which conflict persisted, in waves of crime, in civil wars, in ethnic cleansing, and all manner of violence in between. He buttresses the narrative with statistics, which he makes a serious attempt to evaluate, illustrating that claims of victimhood multiplied through and after the period. Eventually, the stories and numbers of expulsions, battles, and killings have a numbing effect. One might criticize Lowe's book for the absence of individual experiences of the horror, which might prevent the numbing: Ian Buruma's "Year Zero" does show the experiences of individuals, which may be why it is a more affecting read. But Lowe's book is intended to be general, not particular. It an attempt to show as accurately as possible the devastation that was Europe in 1945, and it succeeds. The only wonder is that most Europeans who lived through the war and the immediate postwar went on to rebuild societies, to have children, and to live what looked like normal lives.
    • 3/5
      A very thorough and detailed analysis of the aftermath of WWII in Europe. While informative this was almost "over the top"- too much - statistics upon statistics. The general premise that the unrest and instability the European governments and cultures experienced after WWII were seeded even before the war by the ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts between countries and cultures is valid. This book almost overdoes the analysis. Example after example - atrocity after atrocity - slaughter after slaughter - revenge upon revenge. This telling, at times, makes one wonder if the whole thing was worth the sacrifice made by and the loss of so much from so many countries. Was this continent really worth it ?
    • 4/5
      ”Imagine a world without institutions. It is a world where borders between countries seem to have dissolved, leaving a single, endless landscape over which people travel in search of communities that no longer exist. There are no governments any more, on either a national scale or even a local one. There are no schools or universities, no libraries or archives, no access to any information whatsoever. There is no cinema or theatre, and certainly no television. The radio occasionally works, but the signal is distant, and almost always in a foreign language. No one has seen a newspaper for weeks. There are no railways or motor vehicles, no telephones, or telegrams, no post office, no communication at all except what is passed through word of mouth. There are no banks, but that is no great hardship because money no longer has any worth. There are no shops, because no one has anything to sell… There is no food…Law and order are virtually non-existent, because there is no police force and no judiciary…Goods belong only to those who are strong enough to hold on to them…There is no shame. There is no morality. There is only survival.” This is part of the introductory paragraph of Keith Lowe’s masterful book…wait, are you trying to guess? Is it a book about a dire apocalyptic future? Or maybe a book set on another planet in another galaxy? No, far from it. What Lowe is describing are the conditions in Europe at the end of World War II. This is an era that I never gave much thought to. I’ve read plenty of books, both fiction and non-fiction, that are set during World War II but practically nothing dealing with the conditions in Europe when the war ended. I found out that conditions were bleak, to say the least. Chaos reigned.This book takes you step by step, from one country to another, through the city streets and countryside and describes in detail the prevailing conditions, how governments from near and from very far away, tried to right the sinking ship that was Europe in 1944-1950. Highlights include:Entire generations of women were doomed to spinsterhood because there just weren’t enough men, most having been killed in the war.Vagrant children presented a serious problem. In 1946 there were some 180,000 vagrant children living in Rome, Naples and Milan.The need for revenge was great and women in Norway, France, Holland and other European countries, who had slept with German men, were treated especially harshly. They were rounded up into the village square, stripped and had their heads shaved so that everyone would know what their crime was. If they were unfortunate enough to have become pregnant, the village people would try to have the children taken away, except no other country would take them either.As word of the end of the war spread, people came off of farms and out of factories and headed home, creating a veritable log jam on roads that had been decimated by bombs and artillery. “Swarms of refugees, speaking twenty different languages, were obliged to negotiate a transport network that had been bombed, mined, and neglected through six years of war.”The displaced persons presented unique problems for those charged with repatriation. Because the war made the idea of uprooting individuals and transplanting them somewhere else the norm, this same model was used in the postwar years to move whole sections of the population as frail governments negotiated for borders that seemed to change with no regard for the people involved.The book is only 400 pages long with lots of notes and source material at the end, but it is crammed with information about things that happened right after the war. Famine, looting and theft, the black market, rape (so much rape that it is unfathomable), slave laborers, the Jewish flight and the establishment of Israel, ethnic cleansing in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine, civil war in Greece and the rise of Communism throughout Europe and the Cold War. The last hundred pages or so were fairly dry and I ended up skimming them but most of the book is very compelling and I haven’t learned so much from a book in a long time. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Just finished Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe, a book which makes you wonder where we, in the U.S., ever got the idea that our relatively peaceful coexistence is the natural state of mankind. Mayhem, contempt, and mass murder has been the soup served to most of humanity. I've been reading world history for the past 2 years, covering the Near East, the Caribbean, South Asia, and Central and South America: the story is always of the same cruelty and avarice. We're so lucky here, and desperately need to cherish and hold together our nation.
    • 4/5
      The author's thesis is that VE day, which ended the war between the Allies and the Axis, was just the beginning of continent-wide violence. The causes ranged from vengeance (against Germans and Nazi collaborators), as well as local and regional conflicts that pitted one nation against another, or one ethnic group against another. One learns a great deal, for example, that the most common--and sexist--method of achieving revenge on Nazi collaborators was by concentrating on the millions of women who had affairs with Germans. The barbarism conveyed is astounding; whether it was the tit for tat engaged in by the Poles and Ukraninians, or the slaughter of competing partisan groups engaged in by Tito in Yugoslavia, it is clear that this has been a topic that has escaped serious attention. It is almost too big to be covered in one volume, and the author is forced to use examples (i.e., one battle standing for many, or one nation's experience standing for many). We are in debt to Lowe however; he has furnished a great deal of data and convinces the reader of his thesis with multiple depictions of the most horrible violence imaginable (equivalent, or even surpassing the Nazis).
    • 5/5
      Excellent treatment of World War 2 in Europe’s final days and the months that followed. Most accounts of the transition from war to peace tend to focus either on Germany or on specific aspects [demobilization, reconstruction, displaced persons, Holocaust, etc.]. This author has done excellent work covering the broad panorama of a shattered continent with tens of millions of people caught away from home, millions of whom had no home to return to for reasons ranging from destruction [other than Prague Europe from the Vistula to the Rhine was a wasteland suitable for a Mad Max movie], to politics [Poles in Germany who had no wish to return to a Stalinist Poland, Jews who would be unwelcome going ‘home’, etc.] to generalized chaos [government order outside of the armies had evaporated in many places with gangs of deserters and feral children running wild]. Lowe takes the various threads and weaves a tapestry that was immediate postwar Europe.
    • 4/5
      Reveals much about the "ethnic cleansing" that occured following WW2 -- not just the Germans but the Poles, Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs, Croats -- much more than anyone seems to recall 57 years later. Lowe sometimes gets carried away with statistics counting all those affected.