Keith Lowe > Quotes

“When considering stories like these, two things become immediately apparent. Firstly it appears that the moral landscape of Europe had become every bit as unrecognizable as the physical landscape. Those who had grown used to living amidst ruins no longer saw anything unusual about the rubble that surrounded them – likewise for many of Europe’s women after the war there was no longer anything unusual about having to sell one’s body for food. It was left to those coming from outside continental Europe to express surprise at the wreckage they were witnessing.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“The Second World War was never merely a conflict over territory. It was also a war of race and ethnicity. Some of the defining events of the war had nothing to do with winning and maintaining physical ground, but with imposing one’s own ethnic stamp on ground already held. The Jewish Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing of western Ukraine, the attempted genocide of Croatian Serbs: these were events that were pursued with a vigour every bit as ardent as the military war. A vast number of people – perhaps 10 million or more – were deliberately exterminated for no other reason than that they happened to belong to the wrong ethnic or racial group.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“In an extraordinary article in the Daily Express, Major R. Crisp stated that the ordinary German soldiers he used to come across had been replaced by an army of fanatical fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who appeared incapable of anything but brutality. There is nothing that is decent, or gentle, or humble to be read in them. Everything that is beastly and lustful and cruel. This is a generation of men trained deliberately in barbarity, trained to execute the awful orders of a madman. Not a clean thought has ever touched them … Every German born since 1920 is under this satanic spell. The younger they are the more fiercely impregnated are they with its evil poison. Every child born under the Hitler regime is a lost child. It is a lost generation. The newspaper article went on to suggest that it was a blessing that so many of these children were being killed in the fighting, and that the remainder should be dealt with similarly for the good of the world. ‘But whether you exterminate them or sterilise them, Nazism in all its horribleness will not perish from the earth until the last Nazi is dead.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Lidice, along with thousands of other villages, was switched off like a light.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“This insistence on unity was the source of one of the most potent myths of the postwar period – the idea that the responsibility for all the evils of the war rested exclusively with the Germans. If it was only ‘they’ who had perpetrated atrocities upon ‘us’, then the rest of Europe was released from all accountability for the injustices it had perpetrated upon itself.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“The Western powers recognized this, and seemed prepared to endorse almost any injustice as long as it held communism at bay.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Such sentiments demonstrate that the recent rise in anti-Semitism across Europe is not merely a product of the relatively new tensions in the Middle East. Traditional forms of hatred towards Jews are also alive and well. The same could be said for the rise in animosity towards Gypsies since the fall of communism, particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. In Bulgaria riots broke out in the autumn of 2011, after a series of racist demonstrations against Gypsies.5”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“I thought you’d be there waiting for me … What greeted me instead was the lingering stench of ashes and the empty sockets of our ruined home. Samuel Puterman on his return to Warsaw, 1945”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Large areas of Europe that had once been home to thriving, bustling communities were now almost entirely empty of people. It was not the presence of death that defined the atmosphere of postwar Europe, but rather the absence of those who had once occupied Europe’s sitting rooms, its shops, its streets, its markets. From the distance of the twenty-first century, we tend to look back on the end of the war as a time of celebration. We have seen images of sailors kissing girls in New York’s Times Square, and smiling troops of all nationalities linking arms along Paris’s Champs Elysées. However, for all the celebration that took place at the end of the war, Europe was actually a place in mourning. The sense of loss was both personal and communal.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Hidden within the main conflict were dozens of other, more local wars, which had different flavours and different motivations in each country and each region.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“The rationing system that was set up in Britain at the outbreak of the hostilities was as revolutionary as anything the Communists could have dreamed up. Almost every basic item of food was rationed , as were other essentials such as clothing and household goods. Nobody was entitled to more food if they were richer, or of a higher social standing than their neighbors -the only people entitled to better rations were those in the armed forces, or those in occupations that required heavy physical labour. As a consequence, the general health of the population actually improved (italics) during the war: by the late 1940's infant mortality rates in England were in steady decline, and deaths from a variety of disease had also dropped substantially since the prewar years. From the standpoint of public health, the war made Britain a much fairer society. There were other changes in Britain during the war that had a similar effect, such as the introduction of conscription to people of all classes, and both sexes. "Social and sexual distinctions were swept away.' wrote Theodora FitzGibbon. 'and when a dramatic change such as that takes place, it never goes back quite in the same way.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“In some respects the Hamburg firestorm can be considered a microcosm of what happened to Europe in the war. As with the rest of Europe, the bombing had transformed the city into a landscape of ruins – and yet there were still parts of it that lay serenely, miraculously, untouched.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Perhaps George Santayana’s famous aphorism that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ should be reversed – that is, it is because we remember the past that we are condemned to repeat it. The depressing re-emergence of national hatreds in the last”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“The first camp to be discovered in the west was the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, which the French army entered on 23 November 1944. Natzweiler-Struthof was one of the principal Nacht und Nebel camps – those institutions that were designed to make suspected Resistance fighters disappear into the ‘night and fog’. Here the French discovered a small gas chamber, where prisoners were hung by their wrists from hooks while Zyklon-B gas was pumped into the room. Many of the victims were destined for the autopsy tables of Strasbourg University, where Dr August Hirt had amassed a collection of Jewish skeletons in order to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race through anatomical study. Others, mostly Gypsies brought here from Auschwitz, were subjected to medical experiments within the camp.21”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Attempts to rehabilitate the political right in western Europe have not only resulted in a whitewash: in some cases, absurdly, it has allowed right-wing extremists to portray themselves as the injured party.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“It is this undercurrent of ‘anti-creation’ and ‘definitive evil’ that makes the destruction of Europe’s towns and cities so disturbing to contemplate. What is implied in all the descriptions of this time, but never overtly stated, is that behind the physical devastation is something far worse. The ‘skeletons’ of houses and framed pictures sticking out of the rubble of Warsaw are highly symbolic: hidden beneath the ruins, both literally and metaphorically, there was a separate human and moral disaster.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Perhaps the only way to come close to understanding what happened is to stop trying to imagine Europe as a place populated by the dead, and to think of it instead as a place characterized by absence. Almost everyone alive when the war ended had lost friends or relatives to it. Whole villages, whole towns and even whole cities had been effectively erased, and with them their populations. Large areas of Europe that had once been home to thriving, bustling communities were now almost entirely empty of people. It was not the presence of death that defined the atmosphere of postwar Europe, but rather the absence of those who had once occupied Europe’s sitting rooms, its shops, its streets, its markets.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“This contrast between foreign evil and homegrown nobility was hugely important in the rebuilding of national identities after the war, and one of the principal ways in which Europe’s battered nations chose to lick their wounds.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“The sheer variety of grievances that existed in 1945 demonstrates not only how universal the war had been, but also how inadequate is our traditional way of understanding it. It is not enough to portray the war as a simple conflict between the Axis and the Allies over territory. Some of the worst atrocities in the war had nothing to do with territory, but with race or nationality. The Nazis did not attack the Soviet Union merely for the sake of Lebensraum: it was also an expression of their urge to assert the superiority of the German race over Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. The Soviets did not invade Poland and the Baltic States only for the sake of territory either: they wanted to propagate communism as far westwards as they were able. Some of the most vicious fighting was not between the Axis and the Allies at all, but between local people who took the opportunity of the wider war to give vent to much older frustrations.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“In his memoirs of the late 1940s and 50s, published after his death following the famous ‘umbrella assassination’ in London in 1978, the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov told a story that is emblematic of the postwar period – not only in his own country, but in Europe as a whole. It involved a conversation between one of his friends, who had been arrested for challenging a Communist official who had jumped the bread queue, and an officer of the Bulgarian Communist militia: ‘And now tell me who your enemies are?’ the militia chief demanded. K. thought for a while and replied: ‘I don’t really know, I don’t think I have any enemies.’ ‘No enemies!’ The chief raised his voice. ‘Do you mean to say that you hate nobody and nobody hates you?’ ‘As far as I know, nobody.’ ‘You are lying,’ shouted the Lieutenant-Colonel suddenly, rising from his chair. ‘What kind of a man are you not to have any enemies? You clearly do not belong to our youth, you cannot be one of our citizens, if you have no enemies! … And if you really do not know how to hate, we shall teach you! We shall teach you very quickly!’1 In a sense, the militia chief in this story is right – it was virtually impossible to emerge from the Second World War without enemies. There can hardly be a better demonstration than this of the moral and human legacy of the war. After the desolation of entire regions; after the butchery of over 35 million people; after countless massacres in the name of nationality, race, religion, class or personal prejudice, virtually every person on the continent had suffered some kind of loss or injustice. Even countries which had seen little direct fighting, such as Bulgaria, had been subject to political turmoil, violent squabbles with their neighbours, coercion from the Nazis and eventually invasion by one of the world’s new superpowers. Amidst all these events, to hate one’s rivals had become entirely natural. Indeed, the leaders and propagandists of all sides had spent six long years promoting hatred as an essential weapon in the quest for victory. By the time this Bulgarian militia chief was terrorizing young students at Sofia University, hatred was no longer a mere by-product of the war – in the Communist mindset it had been elevated to a duty.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Over the coming days, one of the things that shocked the British most was the nonchalant way that the surviving prisoners lived their lives amongst the corpses, as if such sights were perfectly normal. One horrified medical officer described several such vignettes: a woman too weak to stand propping herself against a pile of corpses, as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels; a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.36”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“In October 1944, after more than two years of butchery between the Germans and the Soviets, the Red Army finally crossed the frontier onto German soil. The little village of Nemmersdorf bears the unhappy distinction of being the first populated place they came across, and the name of the village soon became a byword for atrocity. In a frenzy of violence, Red Army soldiers are reputed to have murdered everyone they found here – men, women and children alike – before proceeding to mutilate their bodies.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Those who wish to harness hatred and resentment for their own gain always try to distort the proper balance between one version of history and another. They take events out of context; they make blame a one-sided game; and they try to convince us that historical problems are the problems of today. If we are to bring an end to the cycle of hatred and violence we must do precisely the opposite of these things. We must show how competing views of history can exist alongside one another. We must show how past atrocities fit into their historical context, and how blame necessarily attaches itself not just to one party, but to a whole variety of parties. We must strive always to discover the truth, particularly when it comes to statistics, and then put that truth to bed. It is, after all, history, and should not be allowed to poison the present.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Here perhaps is the key to why the plight of returning Jews was so commonly ignored in the aftermath of the war, not only in Holland but all over western Europe. While stories of resistance gave people the chance to feel good about themselves, and reassure themselves that they too had produced their fair share of heroes, the stories of the Jews had the opposite effect. They were a reminder of former failings at every level of society. Their very presence was enough to create discomfort, as though they might at any moment reveal an embarrassing secret. It was far easier, therefore, simply to pretend that what had befallen the Jews was really just the same as what had happened to everyone else. Far from being welcomed, they were ignored, sidelined, silenced.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“...habían sido objeto de revueltas políticas, violentas disputas con sus vecinos y finalmente de invasión por una de las nuevas superpotencias mundiales. En medio de todo esto, odiar a un adversario se convirtió en algo completamente natural.”
― Keith Lowe

“This was not discrimination against Jews as such, but it was almost as bad: it was an attempt to ignore them altogether. As one Dutch camp survivor put it, ‘Where there should have been pity, I encountered the dry, difficult to approach, repellent, amorphous mass known as officialdom.’13”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“The Germans had done their best to evacuate Majdanek before the Red Army arrived, but in their hurry to leave they had failed to conceal the evidence of what had taken place here. When Soviet troops drove into the compound they discovered a set of gas chambers, six large furnaces with the charred remains of human skeletons scattered around them and, nearby, several enormous mounds of white ash filled with pieces of human bones. The ash mounds overlooked a huge field of vegetables, and the Soviets came to the obvious conclusion: the organizers of Majdanek had been using human remains as fertilizer. ‘This is German food production,’ wrote one Soviet journalist at the time. ‘Kill people; fertilize cabbages.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“But it is also true to say that the conduct of those ‘democratic’ countries in the aftermath of the war was often far from perfect. In some instances it was demonstrably worse than the Communists’ – the treatment of peasants in the south of Italy, for example, who were denied the land reforms they had been promised by government, compares badly with the progressive attitude in eastern Europe during the early days of Communist rule. Neither side had a monopoly on virtue. In a continent as large and diverse as Europe, it is always unwise to generalize.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“This insistence on unity was the source of one of the most potent myths of the postwar period – the idea that the responsibility for all the evils of the war rested exclusively with the Germans. If it was only ‘they’ who had perpetrated atrocities upon ‘us’, then the rest of Europe was released from all accountability for the injustices it had perpetrated upon itself.47 Better still, the bulk of Europe would be able to share in the ‘victory’ over Germany. The loathing that all Europeans expressed towards Germany and Germans in the aftermath of the war was therefore only partly a reaction to the things Germany had actually done – it was also a way for each country to heal its own wounds.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“In recent years there has been a tendency by some Western historians and politicians to look back at the aftermath of the Second World War through rose-tinted spectacles. Frustrated with the progress of rebuilding and reconciliation in the wake of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they pointed to the success of similar projects in Europe in the 1940s. The Marshall Plan in particular was singled out as the template for postwar economic reconstruction. Such politicians would have done well to remember that the process of rebuilding did not begin straight away in Europe – the Marshall Plan was not even thought of until 1947 – and the entire continent remained economically, politically and morally unstable far beyond the end of the decade. As in Iraq and Afghanistan more recently, the United Nations recognized the need for local leaders to take command of their own institutions. But it took time for such leaders to emerge. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the only people who had the moral authority to take charge were those with proven records of resistance. But people who are skilled in the arts of guerrilla warfare, sabotage and violence, and who have become used to conducting all their business in strict secrecy, are not necessarily those best suited to running democratic governments.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II