Post-Wars and Violence: Europe Between 1918 and the Later 1940S

Chapter 10 Post-wars and Violence: Europe between 1918 and the Later 1940s

Robert Gerwarth

One hundred years ago, on 11 November 1918, the world officially emerged from a conflict that has been aptly described as “the great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.1 Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the Middle East in particular experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, and bearing in mind the devastating legacies of that conflict, this verdict seems more than justified. Estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and ten million dead combatants and between five and six million killed civilians – excluding the hundreds of thou- sands of men who were permanently disfigured or psychologically damaged.2 The horrors of that war were only surpassed by the (in many ways) connected Second World War – the deadliest conflict in human history – which killed some 80 million people, most of them civilians. The intensity and ‘totality’ of these two conflicts left most post-war societies visibly scarred and devastated. In all major combatant countries of both world wars, a substantial part of the able-bodied male population had been mobilized for service, many of them never to return while others came home physi- cally or psychologically damaged. Mass conscription, on a scale never seen before, left tens of millions of soldiers to be demobilized in 1918 and again in 1945, often returning to home fronts that had also endured severe hardship for years and societies which had been fundamentally transformed by the strains of war. Obviously, the nature and timing of post-war transitions from war to peace in Europe depended on geography and political contexts. ‘Post-war’ meant something very different in Russia in 1918 than it did in Britain after the Great War had ended, just like the ‘post-war’ experiences after 1945 were very

1 George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. Franco-Russian Relations, 1875– 1890 (Princeton NJ, 1979), 3–4. Most standard textbooks of the period follow that notion. See, for example: Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (Lon- don, 1994); and Europe 1900–1945, ed., Julian Jackson (Oxford, 2002). 2 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York NY, 1998), ix; David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2004), xix.

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dissimilar in, say, Greece in 1945 and in France at the same time. In many countries war and bloodshed did not end with the formal conclusion of hostilities in 1918 and 1945, and the ‘overspill’ of violence in Europe (or its absence in some places) in this period will be the main focus of this essay. Between 1918 and 1923 alone, inter-state wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars and putsches claimed the lives of well over four million people, notably, but by no means exclusively, in Russia and its former western borderlands.3 Despite the relative political and economic stabilization of the years 1924–29, Europe soon plunged into crisis again, with all but a handful of democracies surviving the challenge posed by the Great Depression and the ensuing rise of extremist movements of the Left and Right. Violence – if not open civil war – returned to the streets of many European cities while international tensions eventually escalated into the Second World War.4 The defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945 did not lead to an immediate peace everywhere either. While Western Europe returned to some semblance of sta- bility after years of fighting, civil wars continued to rage in Greece and Yugosla- via for several years after the official end of hostilities. Violence also outlasted the defeat of Hitler in other parts of Eastern Europe, notably in the Baltic States and Ukraine, where nationalist partisans continued to fight the occupy- ing Soviet troops well into the 1950s.5 The picture of a post-1945 ‘peace period’ becomes even more blurred when we employ a global perspective which – although not the focus of the essay – shows some parallels that are worth ex- ploring elsewhere: in those territories previously occupied by Imperial Japan, anti-colonial movements resisted the attempts of Western imperial powers to return to the pre-1941 status quo while in French Algeria, violence remained endemic for years to come.6 The body of scholarship devoted to the two world wars, their origins and legacies, is unsurprisingly large, but its coverage remains somewhat uneven: while the political events and diplomatic entanglements that led to the out- break of war in 1914 and 1939, the major battles of both wars, or the peace

3 Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford & New York NY, 2011); Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (London, 2016). 4 There are too many books on that conflict to list here, but for a competent survey, see Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (London, 2011) or, with a stronger focus on Eu- rope, Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–49 (London, 2015). 5 Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (New York NY, 2013); Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War ii (London, 2012). 6 On Africa, see Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization (London, 2014); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge and New York NY, 1996). With a broader geographical focus: John Springhall, Decolonization Since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empires (New York NY, 2001).