A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

1110 Ch. 27 • Rebuilding Divided Europe

In the Wake of Devastation

Putting Europe back together proved a daunting task. By the time World
War II ended in 1945, as many as 60 million people had been killed as a
result of the war. Although fewer people from France and Great Britain were
killed in the Second World War than the First World War, death tolls in Cen­
tral and Eastern Europe during the Second World War were almost beyond
comprehension. In the Soviet Union, deaths due to the war can only be esti­
mated at between 15 and 25 million people—even more, if one includes the
millions who were victims of Joseph Stalin’s purges. Moreover, 1,700 cities
and towns and 70,000 villages were completely destroyed. About 6 million
Germans died in Hitler’s w'ar. Poland lost 6 million people—a fifth of the
population—including 3 million Jews, more than 90 percent of the Jewish
population. Ten percent of the population of Yugoslavia had perished. Dam­
age to property from air raids, ground warfare, and reprisals by retreating
German forces was incalculable. German air raids in the first year of the war
devastated sections of London and Coventry in Britain, Leningrad and Kiev
in the Soviet Union, and the Dutch port of Rotterdam. The German army
completely leveled Warsaw in retaliation for the 1944 uprising there. In
turn, Allied bombing runs left Berlin, Dresden, and the industrial cities
of the Rhineland in ruins, and key French industrial and port cities were
severely damaged as well.
Only recently have historians become aware of the tragedies stemming
from what would in the 1990s be known as “ethnic cleansing’’ during and
immediately after the war. For example, between April 1943 and August 1947
in the territories that would become Communist Poland and the Soviet
republic of Ukraine, about 100,000 civilian Poles and Ukrainians were killed
and another 1.4 million were forced from their lands by the invading Red
Army. During the period of Nazi and then Soviet occupation (for the second
time, as the Soviets had occupied these territories during 1939-1941), first
Ukrainians and then Poles themselves undertook “ethnic cleansing.” Ukrain­
ian nationalists killed Poles in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943, and the Poles
committed atrocities when civil war between the two ethnic groups followed
the liberation of Poland.

The Potsdam Conference

Decisions taken by the Allies toward the end of the war brought a radical

restructuring of the national boundaries of Central and Eastern Europe.

The restructuring was largely determined by the Soviet military advance.

By the time of the German surrender in May 1945, the Red Army had

occupied all of the states of Eastern Europe except Yugoslavia and Greece.

In Germany, Soviet troops controlled what became the eastern zone; the

British held the industrial Rhineland and Ruhr Basin, as well as much of