In Europe

Netherlands and Greece, although the situation improved there.
    Upon his return from the United States, Bertolt Brecht described Berlin as ‘the pile of rubble behind Potsdam’. Amid the ruins of his old, beloved Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin spoke emotionally of ‘the verdict of history’. The Dutch journalist Hans Nesna, who made an initial tour of Germany in an old Model-T Ford in spring 1946, lost his way in what had once been a wealthy residential neighbourhood in Hamburg. It had become a dusty flatland, not a living soul in sight. ‘Most of the streets are unrecognisable and untraceable. You have to pick your way around piles of rubble and debris. All of it sunk in deathly silence.’ Nesna's Swedish colleague, Stig Dagerman, made a similar journey six months later. In the Hamburg U-Bahn he saw people in rags, ‘with faces white as chalk or newsprint, faces that cannot blush, faces that make you feel as though they couldn't bleed even if wounded.’
    Meanwhile, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser extent in Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia, campaigns of ethnic cleansing were being carried out. Almost twelve million ethnic Germans were deported by way of retaliation. It was the largest exodus in human history. Hundreds of thousands of those deportees ‘disappeared’, probably having died along the way. In this way, the starving German population grew by an additional sixteen per cent.
    In some villages in the Soviet Union not a single man returned from the war: of the men born in 1922, precisely three per cent survived the war. The number of kolkhoz workers sank to almost a third of the prewar level. In Siberia, the surviving men were sometimes asked to circulate through the neighbourhood and impregnate women and girls, to ensure that at least a few babies would be born. A Russian author wrote that the first time he experienced not being hungry was in 1952, whenhe entered the army. Another reported that bread was back on the table again in his village only in 1954. Before that, the people had fed themselves with acorns, leaves, weeds and aquatic snails.
    In August 1945, two months before committing suicide, the Nazi leader Robert Ley penned a letter to his dead wife from his Nuremberg cell about the Germany he had dreamed of: ‘Kraft durch Freude, leisure time and recreation, new houses, we had planned the loveliest cities and villages, acts of service and fair pay, a fantastic, unique public health programme, social security for the elderly and invalids, new roads and streets, ports and settlements – how wonderful Germany could have been, if, if, and always if …’
    The amazing thing is that out of the ruins of 1945 it was precisely that German dreamland which arose within the next ten years. In 1958 many German cinemas were showing the film
Wir Wunderkinder
, the story of two students who sold newspapers on Alexanderplatz in the 1930s, fell in love, married, survived the war and the bombardments and finally, in the 1950s, found respectable jobs and a certain prosperity. Their polar opposite was Bruno Tieges, an ambitious Nazi careerist who lived high off the hog during the war, sold goods on the black market afterwards, and became a respected entrepreneur in the 1950s. When Tieges is finally unmasked by the young couple, he falls in his rage into a lift shaft. And everyone lived happily ever after. That young couple was still only in their late thirties.
    The
Wirtschaftswunder
, the economic upturn, was not limited to West Germany, but took place all over Western Europe. The ravaged countries recovered with astonishing speed, and during the 1950s the West actually experienced an explosion of welfare unlike any other in its history. By 1951 all the countries of Western Europe had recovered their pre-war production levels. After 1955, Austria was able to take part fully as well: the Soviets had suddenly withdrawn their occupational forces in exchange for the promise of neutrality, and hoped to solve the German issue in the same fashion.
    Was this explosion of prosperity really, as is so frequently claimed, due primarily to the American Marshall Plan, that brilliant combination of aid and enlightened self-interest intended to help Europe to its feetwhile opening new markets for America? Clearly, generous American humanitarian assistance in the first post-war years made the difference between life and death for many Europeans. But the economic impact of the Marshall Plan was probably less