Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

    This book is a clear masterpiece. I feel like I got a full semester of a college course out of it. Tony Judt does what I notice the true masters of history writing do: he can elucidate the biggest trends and most important events of the time not only by giving us the critical data that proves what happened (and why and how), but he can also tie it to the emotional aspects of living through the time, giving us quotes and perspectives from the people who lived it. It's a history book that reads like a storybook. Judt rises above other historians by not being shy about his own beliefs or trying to obscure his own bias. He tells the reader what he thinks and has a clear moral advocacy based in the grappling he's done with the major events and thinkers of the times he covers in the book. The biggest theme of all is memory, and Europe's willful forgetting of inconvenient truths. Postwar transitions between its major themes very smoothly and I loved the book.

Part One. Post-War: 1945-1953

    The first hundred or so pages of the book deal with the Second World War. Judt goes into excellent detail about the war and its cost on European society. He makes some very interesting points too. Something I would like to have heard more about is Judt's assertion that "because Germany didn't pay its First World War debts the cost of victory to the Allies exceeded the cost of defeat to Germany, which thus emerged relatively stronger than in 1913." I've definitely heard a lot about the failings of the Treaty of Versailles, but I've never heard it put like this that Germany was stronger than the other European states coming out of the hyperinflation and Depression.

    The gist of part one of the book is that the first half of the twentieth century completely destroyed Europe, and then set the path for its future. 36.5 million Europeans died between 1939 and 1945 due to war-related causes, equivalent to the pre-war population of France. The number doesn't include those who died of natural causes and the numbers of children not conceived or born due to the war. So the war dramatically reduced Europe's population. Of these 36.5 million, 19 million were non-combatants. Only in the UK and Germany did military losses significantly outnumber civilian losses. Poland lost one-fifth of its pre-war population, disproportionately falling on the highly educated, as they were targeted most by the Nazis. Yugoslavia lost one in eight people, the USSR one in eleven, Greece on in fourteen, Germany one in fifteen, France one in 77 and Britain one in 125. 

    The World Wars also rearranged the ethnic groups in Europe. While the Turks may have been an exception in pursuing genocidal strategies in WWI, the First World War ended with the European countries rearranging their borders around ethnic groups. In the Second World War, Europe rearranged its ethnic groups around its borders. the Germans did the dirty work of slaughtering the Jewish population, which most in Europe didn't have any complaints about. Most Jews then ironically spend their post-war years in Germany before going to the USA or Israel, since there was no future for the Jewish people in Europe. The Nazis also purged the Roma people. At the end of the war and afterwards, the people of Europe deported the Germans in their borders. Germans were forcibly removed from all over eastern Europe, as Czechoslovakian President Edouard Benes proclaimed that "we have decided to eliminate the German problem in our republic once and for all." Czechoslovakia expelled nearly three million Germans, and over 250,000 died during the expulsions. Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland expelled 623,000, 786,000, 500,000, and 1.3 million, respectively. It was truly revolutionary, as the wealth of Germans seized by Czechoslovakian authorities amounted to 25% of national wealth, and was redistributed to the remaining citizenry. 

    The western European experience was completely different from the east. Eastern Europeans fought viciously against the Germans and paid dearly for it. But in western Europe, there was little German-owned property to redistribute and they had suffered far less during the war. In 1941, the Germans occupied Norway with just 806 personnel, and France with just 1,500. The Germans were so confident in the docility of the French that they only ever used 6,000 troops to ensure the compliance of 35 million French. The Dutch were the same. Judt compares the western Europeans to the Yugoslavians, who in contrast held down entire German divisions trying to contain armed partisans.

    De-Nazification was not really very successful in Germany. I had thought that it was more complete, but Judt makes it a point to show how Germans were not really convinced, despite laws that exist now against Nazism and reparations to victims of Nazism. Judt writes that while only 6% of Germans claimed the Nuremberg Trials were unfair in October 1946, by 1950 one-third thought so. Throughout the rest of the forties, a majority of Germans believed that "Nazism was a good idea, badly applied." In November 1946, one-third of Germans thought Jews should not have the same rights as those of the Aryan race, and the number actually increased to 37% in West Germany by 1952. In the same year, 25% of Germans had a "good opinion" of Hitler. 

    Further, in 1951, only 5% of West Germans felt "guilty" towards Jews in a poll. Only 29% acknowledged that Germany owed some restitution to the Jewish people. 40% felt that only those who were "truly responsible" should pay, and 21% believed the Jews had brought it upon themselves. Despite that popular opposition, centrists in West Germany succeeded in passing a reparations package that would end up totaling over 100 billion dollars over the decades. 

    As the European states came out of the war, Social Democracy was the winning ideology of the day in the west. In France of Italy, there was basically no ability to restart capital markets, so everything had to be completely publicly funded. The western Europeans created welfare states, which were socially redistributive, but not revolutionary. Judt argues that while the greatest immediate advantages of the plan went to the poor, the real long-term beneficiaries were the professional and commercial middle classes, who had previously been ineligible for work-related health, unemployment, or retirement benefits. They had to purchase such services from the private sector before, but now got them provided by the government. I think Judt's bias is showing here, and he's trying to convince the reader of broader benefits of social democratic states. But this seems like something that real conservatives would not entertain at all as an argument. If taxes go up, I don't usually see professionals who are paying them happy about getting some increased welfare. But I do agree with him in the content that middle class people are better off when they have free education for their children and other government benefits in exchange for moderately higher taxes. 

    Judt also explores how the political scene of Europe was totally different after World War Two compared to World War One. After the first war, there was a radicalizing effect, as people sought out communism and fascism as competing ideologies, which came to dominate Russia and Germany, respectively, but also had major impacts in other countries. In fact, Italy was the first country to become officially fascist. But in 1945, the mood of Europe favored dull, compromising politicians. The most successful of them were the oldest. Now that two generations had been culled by two world wars, there were fewer young and middle-aged men. And of those who survived Europe's purge, many were discredited by their poor policies or advocacy of rejected ideologies. The European social reformers of the turn of the century returned to power or remained in it, such as Blum in France or Atlee in Britain.  

    It took about a year for the Soviet Union and the western nations to split their alliance. Something that comes up in a million books about the end of the war, especially those written by the English, is that the Americans totally got played by the USSR and had no idea what was coming in the Cold War. Americans were shocked when the Soviets stayed out of Bretton Woods, prompting Kennan to write his telegram. All sides had originally intended for Germany to remain united, but none could agree on how to govern it. In Spring of 1946, it ended up de facto divided along the lines agreed to at the end of the war. So something I learned was that there was no "plan" to divide Germany, it just happened. Both sides essentially split Germany so they could each profit from its revival.

Part Two. Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971.

    Judt starts this chapter by bringing up the work of English historian J.H. Plumb to decribe Europe in the early 1950s. Plumb wrote that, "there is a general folk belief ... that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the result of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing, I think, is further from the truth. Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice. Now that's an interesting thought. Judt argues that that's what happened to Europe after World War Two, emerging from a half century of chaos and war to suddenly embrace peace and integration once again.

    A huge takeaway from this part of the book is the importance of 1956. On October 26, the Red Army invaded Hungary and seized Budapest in just 72 hours. On October 29, the Israelis invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal with British and French support. Eisenhower was furious with the British and French for keeping him out of the loop and distracting attention from Hungary at a time when he was indisposed, as he was campaigning for reelection on November 7. It is amazing to consider that all three of those events happened in just twelve days. It is also incredible to think of how far Russia has fallen, from seizing the Hungarian capital in just three days to failing to seize the Ukrainian capital in what's nearly been three months of fighting. Judt identified a significant dynamic that occurred the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Hungary in 1956: the USSR lost its cultural cache among left-wingers throughout the west that it had enjoyed through the 1940s. Somehow, despite Stalin's immense evil, he was popular in the west, and the invasion of Hungary cemented the USSR as an evil empire in the eyes of most sensible people. Hungarian writer Istvan Bibo wrote that, "in crushing the Hungarian revolution, the USSR has struck a severe blow at 'fellow traveler' movements (Peace, Women, Youth, Students, Intellectuals, etc.) that contributed to Communism's strength." The people who once admired Stalinism and the communist project now turned to the decolonization movement as their ideological pet project and counter-cultural feeling. 

    The Franco-British-Israeli tactical success and strategic failure at Suez marked the end of an era in which European states could conduct their foreign policy wholly independent of the United States. Soon, everything they would do would be in relation to perceived American reactions. Britain realized it could no longer retain a global colonial presence, and between 1960 and 1964, seventeen British colonies declared independence. Britain responded to Suez by becoming much closer to the United States, while France moved further away from Washington, sometimes antagonizing the Americans throughout the Cold War. 

    Britain was in need of a much larger industrial export market in the face of decolonization costing the former colonizer its subject peoples as consumers. Harold Macmillan's government applied to join the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961, six years after London disengaged from the original talks to form the EEC. Ireland and Denmark applied alongside the UK because of their close economic ties. However, De Gaulle rejected Britain's application in 1963. It wasn't until 1973 that the UK was successful in joining the EU. It had to wait for De Gaulle to leave power in France, and also for its own economy to become relatively weaker so that the other European states in the EEC would feel less threatened by British influence and Britain reduced its own demands. 

    But the EEC wasn't a necessary precondition for European economic integration. Instead, the EEC, writes Judt, was just a formalization of the economic links already formed. Prior to the Treaty of Rome, future states of the EEC were already primarily trading with one another, in a complete reversal of the trend from the late 19th century. You can really see how people would come to believe in trade as the means to world peace. In 1958, 29% of Germany's exports went to France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. 30% went to other European states. On the eve of signing the Rome Treaty, 44% of Belgian exports were already going to its initial EEC partners. Countries that wouldn't join the EEC or the EU until later were already integrated into its networks in the 1950s and would only strengthen those connections. 

    Additionally, European nations were faced with mass migrations between and among one another. Seven million Italians left Italy between 1945 and 1970. Greece lost a quarter of its labor force between 1950 and 1970. Portugal lost half a million people out of its population of eight million and its workforce of three million. The shortfall in people was made up for in immigrants from former colonies and other regions outside Europe, which created little social upheaval at the time due to the segregation of peoples and the popular understanding in the receiving countries that these workers would only be in their countries temporarily. Judt sums up the immigration changes in Europe: "without heap and abundant labour in this vulnerable and mostly unorganized form, the European boom would not have been possible. The post-war European states--and private employers--benefited greatly from a steady flow of docile, low-paid workers for whom they frequently avoided paying the full social cost. When the boom ended and it came time to lay off the excess labour, the immigrant and migrant workforce was the first to suffer."

    The welfare states grew tremendously in Europe in the 1950s and 60s. Between 1950 and 1973, French government spending rose from 27.6% to 38.8%, 30.4% to 42% in West Germany, 34.2% to 41.5% in the UK, and 26.8% to 45.5% in the Netherlands. And this was all at a time when these countries' GDP were rising faster than ever before or since. Most of this spending went to insurance, pensions, healthcare, education, and housing. I learned in this part of the book the difference between the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Europe. While each of these parties thought that the welfare state should provide for its citizens from cradle to grave, the Christian Democrats favored a state role in the morality and social affairs of its citizens, where the Social Democrats were more socially liberal. 

    In Italy, the end of the reign of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) meant huge changes for the church and country. Pius XII had been closely tied to Mussolini and ambivalent in the face of Nazism. He was enthusiastically in favor of Spanish and Portuguese fascism. He strongly pushed Catholics throughout Europe to vote for Christian Democrats, and not until 1967 would a Dutch bishop suggest in public that Dutch Catholics may mote for a non-Catholic party without risking excommunication. This really strikes home why there was so much anti-Catholic sentiment in the US at the time and why people would fear that Kennedy would have been beholden to the Pope. It doesn't excuse it, but it adds up when you see what this Pope was supporting. But after the death of Pius XII, the church entered a period of change, with Vatican II, the final divorce between politics and religion in Europe. In that meeting, the Vatican removed itself from politics and Pope John XXIII declared that all church services would use the vulgar languages instead of Latin. 

Part Three. Recessional: 1971-1989

    In the 70s, Europe, like the United States, entered a long recession. Judt traces it first to the American decision to end the gold standard, which the Americans got rid of because of the high cost of the Vietnam War and the need to pay for it with borrowed money, which artificially raised the dollar's value. When the Americans floated the dollar, all the Europeans had to float their currencies as well to keep their currency values balanced. But then, after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Arab States in OPEC decided to punish the West for its support of Israel by constricting the global supply of oil, drastically increasing prices and provoking shortages. From 1955 to January 1971, the price of oil had only risen from $1.93 per barrel to $2.18 per barrel, making the West completely dependent on it. Then, by raising prices, OPEC caused huge inflation in the economies dependent upon them that no longer tied their currencies to the gold standard. The inflation rate in non-communist Europe was just 3.1% from 1961-69, 6.4% from 1969-73, and 11.9% from 1973-79. Inflation was compounded again by the shock from the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

    At the same time, European economies slowed down significantly from the rapid pace of the 1950s and 60s. From 1953-73, French annual growth was around 5%, while West Germany was at 6% and the UK over 3%. But it turned out to be an aberration. As the economic growth slowed, unemployment rose, with France reaching 7%, Italy 8%, and the UK 9%. Unemployment levels in the 1970s were comparable to the 1930s in many cases and actually were worse in France and Italy. Europeans hardened their attitudes towards foreign workers at this time, the people who were the most affected by layoffs and probably also undercounted in those unemployment numbers. In 1974-75, three in four BMW workers who lost their jobs were foreign nationals. In 1975, 290,000 immigrant workers left West Germany and returned to Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy mainly. 

    Politically, Europe moved towards the center in the 1970s and 80s. In Greece, Italy, and Spain, dictatorships fell, and throughout western Europe, people reacted to terrorist movements like the ETA, Baader-Meinhoff, and others by becoming more centrist in their outlook. I took some notes on the specifics of these but decided not to go into it here, as well as the political changes that led to the fall od the USSR. Basically, governments exposed themselves as illegitimate. Greece failed in its invasion of Cyprus. Portugal crashed its economy. And the USSR's autonomous republics, by showing other political viewpoints on TV, killed themselves because they'd only been propped up by the individual fear one held that everyone else was a true believer. Once the veil was pierced, it was over. But in Spain, the dictator died old and in power.

Part Four. After the Fall: 1989-2005

    German reunification came much quicker than anyone anticipate and was a surprise, but a welcome surprise to the Americans. At first, President George HW Bush wanted to only unify Germany after the end of the unpredictable changes in the Soviet Union, and then for Germany to only unite with the USSR's consent. But then Washington "caught the prevailing mood" after polls revealed in 1990 that 58 percent of West Germans "favored a united and neutral Germany." So that would be bad for the US: a bigger, united Germany that was not on the Western side. Therefore, the USA supported German unification under West Germany so that all of Germany would join NATO. When the GDR (East Germany) was assumed into West Germany, the East Germans changed town names and signed back to pre-1933 usages and continued a process of forgetting all the history since Hitler rose to power. People were more focused on the future. In East Germany a quarter of houses lacked a bath, one third had only an outdoor toilet, and over three-fifths lacked any form of central heating. Since East Germany was so much poorer, someone would have to pay to develop it and bring it up to speed. But Chancellor Helmut Kohl chose not to raise taxes, instead deficit spending, which the Bundesbank responded to by raising interest rates. This increased unemployment and slowed German growth just as the newly united country joined the Eurozone, essentially making the rest of Europe pay for Germany's reunification, a major windfall.

    The end of the Soviet Union came just as unexpectedly fast as German reunification. I'll just point out something that stood out to me- Judt writes that Ukraine sat on Russia's access routes to the Black Sea and was a critical part of the Russian economy. With only 2.7% of the USSR's land area, Ukraine held 18% of the USSR's population, 17% of GNP, 40% of agricultural output, a majority of titanium, and 60% of coal reserves. This is all good motive for Vladimir Putin's invasion of the country a quarter-century later. Interestingly, it wasn't Ukrainian nationalists who declared independence, but actually Communists in the Ukrainian Soviet beat them to the punch on July 16, 1990.

    The next year, in August 1991, plotters sought to remove Gorbachev from power while he vacationed in Crimea (did he think he was in a foreign country at this point?), just as had been done to Nikita Khrushchev nearly three decades earlier. But the plotters didn't have unanimous support of their own agencies, most importantly lacking some of the major officers of the KGB. The plotters were clearly against Gorbachev, but they weren't for anything better. At that critical moment, Boris Yeltsin denounced the Kremlin takeover and placed himself at the head of the resistance. In the midst of the coup, Latvia and Estonia declared their independence. Coup leaders were arrested by Yeltsin except for the Interior Minister, who killed himself. Gorbachev, despite having survived this coup, went out easy against a different sort of coup. On December 17th, Gorbachev met with Yeltsin and conceded that the Soviet Union could not continue to exist, and he resigned. On December 31, 1991, the USSR ceased to exist. Judt writes that the end of the Soviet Union came when Gorbachev eliminated the repressive apparatus of the state. Once it was clear that the KGB would no longer be deployed to punish dissent, the massive empire could no longer hold its external provinces to the center. Interestingly, there was no immediate transition to democracy. That came later. First, the same autocratic Communists who always ran things ruled over smaller states around Russia, and then they were ousted later. So it really isn't the story of democracy prevailing over Communism, it's more like the classic story of an empire no longer willing to subjugate it's far-flung regions, which then break away.

    Yugoslavia went through a painful decade in the 90s. Slobodan Milosevic was elected President of the Serbian republic within Yugoslavia in May 1989, immediately forcing through an amendment to Serbia's constitution to absorb the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina into Serbia, giving Serbia a block of four out of eight federal votes in any federal dispute (also including the ally Montenegro). Milosevic sought to create a more unitary state with the Serbs in control, which the Croats, Bosnians, Slovenians, and Macedonians opposed, deadlocking Yugoslavia 4-4. In December 1990, Milosevic seizes without authorization 50% of the drawing rights of Yugoslavia to cover back pay for federal employees and state workers. Since they basically stole Yugoslavia's money, the Slovenians were especially upset, being that with just 8% of the population of Yugoslavia they contributed 25% of the federal budget. They immediately declared independence, and the Croats and Macedonians followed suit within a month.

    There was no single Yugoslav war, rather, there were five. The Yugoslav effort to keep Slovenia in lasted for just a few weeks in 1991, then allowing the country to secede in peace. But then there was a far bloodier war between Croatia and a rebelling Serbian minority (backed by the Yugoslavian army in practice controlled by Serbs). That ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire after a year. But then, after the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia voted for independence in March 1992, the Serbs of Bosnia declares war on Bosnia and set out to create the Republika Srpska, which got the backing of the Yugoslav army, laying siege to many towns as well as the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Meanwhile, another civil war broke out between the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia, with some Croats trying to carve out a region of Herzegovina. Finally, after all these conflicts ended, but not before another Croat-Serb war broke out in 1995, there was a war over Kosovo. Since he lost everywhere else, Milosevic tried to expel the Albanian population from Kosovo, but NATO forces intervened and stopped him in spring 1999. Judt identifies the Serbians and their elected leader, Slobodan Milosevic, as the instigators of these wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia, who thrust the Balkans into unnecessary chaos.

    The European Union states witnessed a reduction in power of national borders during the 1990s and early 2000s. There was first a trend of national devolution in the 1980s, and then a trend of internationalization in the 1990s. So national borders became weaker as the borders of the EU itself became stronger, as well as internal borders, especially in Belgium. One unforeseen effect of the Maastricht Treaty and greater "Europianization" was that it boosted NATO, as many countries that were refused from joining Europe's economic union (Eastern European countries mainly) were able to join its military alliance, as Washington was happy to have them, and the Americans pulled the strings anyway. The growing power of the EU also increased the general public awareness of Brussels' inner workings, as politicians like to blame problems on Brussels and citizens paid more attention to what was going on in European Parliament. But was it good to enlarge the EU? German Foreign Minister Genscher proposed enlargement to prevent nationalistic backlash after the end of the USSR, and UK PM Thatcher supported enlargement as a way to dilute the EU's power into a pan-European trade area. But France slowed them all down for many years, demanding a more deliberate approach to expansion.

    Some of the most interesting things Judt writes about are the portions that feel like a relic of having written this book in 2005. He talks a lot about Europeans ceasing, with the end of the Cold War, to identify with America, and choosing to identify themselves in opposition to it. Europeans saw themselves as more mature (their countries were certainly older) and having different values than the USA based on the welfare state. I'm not sure this is so clear today as it was during the Bush administration. Certainly Europe likes America less every time we elect a Republican, but it feels like there's been an inversion of the economic policies, where the USA became more fiscally liberal after 2008 whereas Europe embraced austerity under German leadership. And moreso, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and again this spring, I think Europe and America feel much closer than in 2005. Some of Judt's best writing in the book is when he characterizes an event or an era in a way I never considered before. Writing of the Cold War, he says it was "an extended epilogue to the European civil war that had begun in 1914, a forty-year interregnum between the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the final resolution of the unfinished business left behind by his war." 

    Judt finishes the last chapter of the book by characterizing the 20th century as America's century, when Europe plunged into the abyss, but says that perhaps the 21st century will be Europe's century. I find that to be a nice thought, but hard to believe 17 years later. Since the book was written, America has only increased its leadership over Europe in the economic and military spheres. The dollar is stronger as the reserve currency of the world, and the US is spending more on its military to defend Europe than the Europeans do, a trend that may only start changing this year. But where Judt may be right is when he says that neither America nor China have serviceable models to be emulated. This is almost certainly true. America in 2022 has become so dysfunctional that most would call it broken. While China is extremely effective at governance but politically in the complete wrong direction, becoming some kind of economically prosperous version of North Korea. Europe, on the other hand, offers a model of social democracy and mutual cooperation without warfare that may be a better model from the world if they can just make the EU governance functional.

Conclusion

    In the epilogue, Judt chooses to focus on European memory of the Holocaust, something that I didn't expect, but was extremely well-written. Judt convincingly writes that, whereas the entry ticket for Jews into Europe was baptism, as Heinrich Heine wrote in the 19th century, today the entry ticket into Europe is the acknowledgement of genocide. Poland and other Eastern European countries had to acknowledge the Holocaust before entering the EU, and Turkey still refuses to admit to the Armenian genocide, remaining without.

    Europeans were largely indifferent to the Jews after the Holocaust, and were uninterested in the Jews suffering compared to their own milder difficulties (which were still great). But in the 1970s, things started to change first in Germany. It had taken a long time. In 1955, still 48% of Germans saw Hitler as one of Germany's greatest statesmen "but for the war," and the number had only declined to 32% by 1967. But several events changed things: the Six Day War, Chancellor Brandt dropping to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and , most important, the 1979 telecast of the "Holocaust" miniseries for four days straight in January 1979. Twenty million viewers (over half the adult population) watched the program, and it changed Germany. Whereas in 1968 just 471 school groups visited Dachau, which was so close to Munich, by the end of the 70s, over five thousand visited annually. 

    Then, in the 1990s, there was an outpouring of interest in the Holocaust and its survivors, and public figures acknowledges their countries' roles in the Holocaust. Yet there was also a reactionary movement to this of those who wanted to shift all the blame onto Germany, or ignore the part their own countries played. In the USSR, they had a policy similar to much of Western Europe in which victims of the Holocaust were described by nationality, so that you would never know any Jews were killed (or had even been there in the first place. For Europeans, World War Two hadn't been about the Jews. It had been about them, and their brave resistance to the Nazis (even if their country had been allied with the Nazis). Judt says that anti-semitism was not at the root of European feeling in World War Two, rather it was just indifference. The real anti-semites were the few Nazi officials who plotted the final solution, and the rest of Europe simply didn't care.  

    I think Judt's point about anti-semitism is semantic, and reminds me of concepts of anti-racism discussed by Ibram Kendi. To most people who do not experience oppression, oppression is something people do. But to the oppressed, oppression is something that is done to you. So when Europe is indifferent to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, and before and after, I don't think it matters whether that's anti-semitism or not, all that matters is that it's bad. And if the supposedly good people don't do anything when evil strikes against the weak, maybe those people aren't so good after all. Ibram Kendi says it's not enough to just be not racist, people should be anti-racist. And I think that makes a lot of sense applied to his situation.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In September 1944 there were nearly 7.5 million foreigners in Germany, most against their will, who constituted 21 percent of the country's labor force. 
• Hungarian inflation reached 5 quintillion pengos to the dollar, so that by the time the pengo was replaced by the forint in August 1946, the dollar value of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation combined was just one-thousandth of a cent!
• When the allies created a new currency for Germany, the "deutsche mark," it was exchanged for the "reichsmark" at a 1:1 ration for the first forty and then 10:1. I have no idea how this was possible since it sounds absolutely revolutionary and shocking in destroying savings. I need to read more about this.
• Judt writes that the only reason the French assented to the creation of a West German state was because of the promise of NATO.
• Vienna was also divided between the Allied powers after WWII like Berlin. I never heard about that.
• Something that Judt points out that for all the fuss made out of social movements on college campuses in the 1960s, in 1968 most young people in every European country were not students, and they had completely different experiences in the 1960s. 
• After the Six Day War, there were enormous persecutions of Jews in the Soviet Union. In Poland specifically, Jews were referred to as a fifth column, and 20,000 of Poland's 30,000 remaining Jews left the country.
• The Romanian dictator, Ceausescu approved the following official nicknames for himself: The Architect, the Creed-shaper, the Wise Helmsman, the Tallest Mast, the Nimbus of Victory, the Visionary, the Titan, the Son of the Sun, A Danube of Thought, and the Genius of the Carpathians.
• Lithuania was in the 1990s and still is the only Baltic country without a very significant Russian minority, with the country being only 5% Russian compared to over 20% in each Latvia and Estonia. Most Russians historically live in the major cities, having moved there under the reign of the Soviet Union.
• By 2004. 36 Russian oligarchs controlled $110 billion, one-quarter of Russia's entire GDP.
• I don't know if this is still true, but apparently in the 1990s, any German who lost his or her job would get 60% of their last wage for the next 32 months, and then 53% indefinitely. The numbers are 67% and 57% if they have a child.
• In a 2003 measure of worker productivity, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, and Italy were all similar to the USA while Ireland, Belgium, Norway, France, and the Netherlands were all more productive, but just worked less hours. 
• Austria had one-tenth the population of pre-war Germany but supplied half the concentration camp guards.
• Lech Walesa commented on a study of a massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors that the Jewish writer was a "Jew who tries to make money." Walesa said he was just trying to sow discord between Poles and Jews. It seems to me like Walesa proved his point.
• Old Soviet joke: A listener calls up "Armenian Radio" with a question: "Is it possible to foretell the future?" They reply, "Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past- that keeps changing."