Economic Recovery and Prosperity 1119tion about Communists in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, grow
ing anti-communism put a brake on purges of wartime collaborators in West
ern Europe. Other war criminals managed to fade into the chaos of post-war
Europe, some with new names and identities. Some did not even bother to
change their names, and more than a few eventually served in the West Ger
man government. In 1959, Israeli agents in South America kidnapped Adolph
Eichmann, who had participated in the murder of thousands of Jews. He was
put on trial in Israel, where he was convicted and put to death. In the mid
1980s, a French court convicted Klaus Barbie, a Nazi war criminal who had
fled after the war, sentencing him to life in prison. Maurice Papon, an official
who had signed away the lives of hundreds of Jews during Vichy and then
gone on to a successful career as an official in several French governments,
was finally tried and convicted in 1998, proud to the end that his superiors
thought well of his work as a bureaucrat. The justice meted out to Nazis and
collaborators may have been imperfect, and sometimes came quite late, but it
was better than no justice at all.
Economic Recovery and Prosperity, the Welfare State,
and European Economic Cooperation
The European economy lay in ruins. Bombing on both sides had been sys
tematic, destroying with increasing accuracy the industrial structure of Eu
rope. Sunken ships blocked port harbors. Almost all bridges over the major
rivers had been destroyed. Only fragments of Europe’s transportation and
communication networks remained in service. In Britain, gold and silver
reserves had sunk dramatically, and the government had been forced to take
out large loans, initiating a long period of virtual British dependence on the
United States, which provided the bulk of these funds. Non-military manu
facturing had plunged during the war. The markets for British manufactured
goods, which had all but disappeared during the war, could not be quickly
reconstituted.
Agricultural production in every war zone had fallen by about half, leav
ing millions of people without enough to eat. Inflation was rampant; the
value of European currencies plunged. As after World War I, the German
currency became virtually worthless. German housewives picked through
the rubble of bombed-out buildings looking for objects of value, combing
forests for mushrooms and berries for their families to eat. The black mar
ket supplied many necessities.
However, the European economy revived with impressive, unanticipated
speed (see Table 27.1). As a response to growing Communist influence, in
March 1947 President Truman announced the “Truman Doctrine,” which
proclaimed “the policy of the United States to support free people who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”