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

In the Wake of Devastation 1115

pledged to come to the defense of their allies in case any one of them was

attacked. Thus, in March 1948, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Nether­

lands, and Luxembourg signed the Pact of Brussels. It served as the military

component of the subsequent Council of Europe to which most of the

nations of Western Europe adhered. The United States joined members of

the Pact of Brussels in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in

1949, which subsequently added Italy, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Portugal,

Canada, Greece, and Turkey (see Map 27.2). Directed against the Soviet

Union, the treaty bound all of the member countries to defend jointly any of

the signatories who were attacked, creating a unified command for a com­

mon army and placing NATO’s headquarters in Paris. NATO became the

cornerstone of the alliance between the United States and Western Europe.

Confronting Turmoil and Collaborators

Europe became a continent of “displaced persons” (DP’s) as well as of wid­
ows and orphans. Now national minorities within newly redrawn boundaries
were forced into boxcars and moved—displaced—to new locations so as to
correspond more or less to new'ly drawn national frontiers. In all, there w'ere
about 50 million refugees in the immediate post-war period. Furthermore,
millions of prisoners of war, such as Germans incarcerated in the Soviet
Union, had to be repatriated. Germans living in Lithuania, which in 1940
had been incorporated against its will into the Soviet Union, were returned
to Germany. In the spring of 1945, about 20 million people were on the
move. In addition, tens of thousands of Germans were forcibly expelled from
Czechoslovakia during the period from May to August of 1945 and during
the organized transfers of January through November 1946. Thousands died
during this hard time. In all, about 12 million Germans were forced to leave
their homes. Almost 4 million returned to Germany, most arriving from the
U.S.S.R. and Poland with virtually nothing. In Germany, one of every six
persons was a refugee and 1.5 million Germans still lived in camps for dis­
placed persons in 1947.
Although drab and carefully regulated along military lines by the Ameri­
can, British, and French occupiers, with barbed wire, the careful distribu­
tion of food and clothing, and curfews, DP camps brought some normalcy
to the lives of their occupants, many of whom had been slave laborers for
Germany, including Polish and Ukrainian Jews, as well as Jews from the
Baltic states, and some fortunate survivors of the death camps.
Stalin repopulated East Prussia with about 1 million people hauled from
Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and even distant Kazakhstan. Poles whose home­
land had become part of the Soviet Union now moved into western Poland.
At the same time, almost 500,000 Ukrainians were forced by Poland to
head eastward to the Soviet Union. Several hundred thousand Jews from
Eastern Europe who had survived the Holocaust now headed west, some
fleeing new pogroms in Poland in 1946. In all, about 7 million members of