But to pin down the exact number is very difficult because the whole continent was in such chaos and there was no one keeping records of these things. For example, in Germany for many years all sorts of groups have claimed that two or three million Germans were killed in revenge after the war. There are so many different people with so many vested interests to make sure the statistics suit them. Well, statistics are really tricky when you’re talking about this subject. We have a good idea how many people were killed during the war, but do we know the number who perished in the lawlessness that followed? In central and Eastern Europe it lasted much longer than anywhere else, simply because the destruction was so much worse there – not only the physical destruction but also the human and moral destruction. So the chaos lasts for different periods in different countries.
In southern Italy it was in 1943, whereas France was a year later in the autumn of 1944, and the closer you get to Germany, the later the liberation comes. What you have to remember is that the liberation occurred at different times across the continent. “There were literally millions of displaced people wandering around not knowing where to go.” With no system to keep law and order in place, people could get away with anything and there was a big wave of crime and violence across Europe, particularly revenge killings. There was no real government, no police force, no transport infrastructure – there was nothing. The first thing to say is that all of the institutions that had been taken for granted before the war had been swept away. What were the consequences of this and how long did the chaos last? That’s the general atmosphere that existed when formal hostilities ended. They were so used to seeing violence and destruction around them that they had begun to look at it as something that was quite normal. People didn’t really know what was right and wrong any more. There was also a sense of moral destruction across the continent. More than 35 million people had been killed and there was physical destruction everywhere. There were literally millions of displaced people wandering around not knowing where to go. Perhaps you could describe for us continental Europe in the months and years immediately after VE Day in May 1945, the date when hostilities officially ended.Įurope, after what we call the ending of the war, was a continent in complete chaos. It’s very convenient to think of wars as having neat beginnings and endings but that’s rarely the case, especially World War II. Foreign Policy & International Relations.