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lion dead, 35 million wounded, 3 million lost; some 30 million civil
ian deaths, including 6 million European Jews. Some survivors con
soled themselves with the hope that war had become unthinkable.
Others nursed incurable wounds and insatiable grievances. Still others
set about to make a better world.
These responses, often fused in the same person, sparked a diversity
of objectives and means. The larger goals were the same: restoration
and repair, material improvement, peace and happiness. Like mother
hood—everyone was in favor. For all the idealistic consensus, how
ever, the world after 1945 was riven by the rivalry between bourgeois,
capitalist countries on the one hand, Socialist and Communist societies
on the other. This conflict had slept during the war, permitting all to
collaborate against a Germany gone berserk in the pursuit of racial
"purity" and world dominion.
The reaction to the German threat had been slow and reluctant.
How could the land of Goethe and Beethoven become a cesspool of
savagery and a threat to all?* Also, after the folly of the Great War, what
could possibly justify another conflict? Fatigue and fear engendered an
unconditional tolerance for evil, so long as the victims were strangers
and far away. Only when it became clear that Germany's appetite was
growing with the eating, and when the Nazi-Soviet pact freed Ger
man's rear for aggression against the West, did the democratic gov
ernments face up to reality and declare war.
They did not do well; and once Germany had taken just about all of
Continental western Europe, it turned eastward against the Soviet
Union, which had slept with the devil and now felt his fangs. So de
mocratic (capitalist) and socialist countries joined against the common
enemy. The West poured in supplies, played Russian songs, romanti
cized "Uncle Joe" Stalin and the Red Army, fought a two-front war in
the Adantic and Pacific. Colonial troops helped their masters out. The
Soviets did most of the dying: of a population of almost 200 million,
more than one out of four was killed or wounded. (The Germans also
lost heavily, but that's the price of trying to take over the world.)
Meanwhile the Western Allies unwittingly provided shelter for Soviet
spies, both insiders and outsiders. Military collaboration had not re
moved the underlying differences, and the Communist regime was de
termined to use the alliance to lay groundwork for postwar success.
- In fact, the German record of racism and group hate in the decades preceding the
Nazi regime gave ample warning that this was a very sick society. See Weiss, Ideology
of Death.