Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In the introduction to his book, Keith Lowe writes that the story of Europe in the immediate period following WW2 " is not primarily one of reconstruction and rehabilitation-it is firstly one of descent into anarchy". Such a history has never been written before. This book,which comes to fill in this void, has four main parts and its main theme is that of vengeance. Its other themes are those of displacement, famines, moral destruction, rape and civil wars. In other words, after WW2 there was an atmosphere of chaos and violence almost everywhere and people decided to take the law into their hands. It was also the time to settle old scores. Yogoslav partisans decided to cut off the noses of their opponents, while Sudeten Germans were butchered in Czechoslovakia. Dutch and Belgian collaborators were summarily executed and their houses were set on fire, while in Italy the bodies of Fascists were displayed in the streets where they could be spat at by passers-by. In Hungary, members of the far-right Arrow Cross were forced to exume mass Jewish graves in very hot weather while local people threw sticks and stones at them. In France, clandestine prisons were set up where suspected collaborators were subjected to multiple forms of sadism including mutilation, rape, enforced prostitution and every type of torture imaginable. This book is also about the history of ethnic cleansing and inter-communal and political violence. Poland harnessed the wartime hatred for Ukrainians to launch a program of expulsion and forced assimilation. Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians embarked on a series of population exchange. Take, for example, Berlin. It was there where Hannelore Thiele was raped by seven in a row, "like animals". Anothee woman was raped by Russian soldiers-twenty-three of them, therefore she had to be " stitched up in a hospital. I never want to have anything to do with any man again". Some Lithuanian partisans who fought against the Russians and against Communism were hunted down by the KGB even in the seventies. One of them, Juozas Luksa, was betrayed by someone he thought he was his friend and by 1956, the last of the partisan groups in Lithuania was finally destroyed. For years hundreds of thousands of nationalist partisans "fought a doomed war against the Soviet occupiers in the forlorn hope that the West would eventually come to their aid". Lowe also describes in great detail the civil wars which tore Europe apart from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. He emphasizes that Europe as we know it today emerged out of a complete and total chaos and reminds his readers not to forget this fact. If one can speak of ruthlessness and the pursuit of power while destroying any civil rights, Romania can serve as a very good example, and in one of the best chapters of the book, Lowe shows how the Communists seized absolute power there by suppressing free speech and by a process of collectivization of farms introduced by the Petru Groza government. The Stalinization of the whole country manifested itself in the suppression of churches. The authorities placed bans on baptisms, church weddings and public celebration of Christmas. The mighty shadow of the Soviet Union was everywhere in Eastern Europe. The book is extremely original in its contents and views about the re-emergence of Europe-a continent which knew so many dark days. Lowe has conducted a meticulous and scrupulous research, incorporating primary sources and interviews in eight languages-a tremendous task in itself. This chilling and outstanding book should be read by anyone who is interested in contemporary history and especially in the origins of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the Cold War. Highly recommended!