Who are the losers now?

Keith Lowe’s horrifying book is a survey of the physical and moral breakdown of Europe in the closing months of the second world war and its immediate aftermath. It is a complex story and he tells it, on the whole, very well. Though the first world war took the lives of more uniformed young men, in the useless slaughter of the Flanders trenches, many more people, chiefly civilians, died in 1939-45. Soviet casualties were the greatest: 23 million killed, of whom two million came from Belarus and seven million from Ukraine. Next came the Poles, with losses of 6,028,000, the largest percentage of the population in any country. The Germans also lost six million, and the Yugoslavs over a million.

The slaughter did not end with the war in May 1945 but, especially in Eastern Europe, continued for many months afterwards, and in some areas — Greece, for instance — for years. In Yugoslavia it broke out again a generation later, when Tito’s state was dismembered. Serbian ethnic cleansing and the transformation of Greece into a kleptocracy both had their origins in the war. In the rough-and-ready settlement of 1945, huge portions of Poland were transferred to Russia, the Poles being compensated by chunks of Germany, including the whole of eastern Prussia. These changes involved the largest population transfers in history, of over 20 million people.

Lowe surveys this continental catastrophe country by country and topic by topic: destruction of buildings, loss of life and fortune, rape, revenge killings and theft, for instance. More women were raped in 1944-5 than at any other period in history, and it is likely that more people died of starvation (250,000 in Greece alone). Bombing produced some large-scale atrocities: 60,000 died in one Hamburg firestorm, and the Allied destruction of German cities exceeded by a factor of 16 anything the Luftwaffe inflicted on Britain.