Aftermath of World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  The Aftermath of World War II reshaped nearly every nation on earth, beginning with a simple fact: by the time the guns fell silent in 1945, roughly 70% of Europe's industrial infrastructure lay in ruins. Tens of millions of people had been killed. Tens of millions more found themselves homeless, stateless, or living inside borders they had never chosen. Two powers emerged from the wreckage not merely intact, but stronger than anything the world had seen: the United States and the Soviet Union. They had been allies. They would soon become something far more dangerous to each other. What follows is the story of how a devastated world was divided, rebuilt, and remade - and why the decisions made between 1945 and 1955 still govern the shape of the world today.

• 2. A World Divided

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  On the 5th of March 1946, Winston Churchill stood at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and told his audience that a shadow had fallen across Europe. Stalin, he said, had dropped an Iron Curtain between East and West. The speech named something that was already happening. Eastern Europe had already begun its transformation into a Soviet sphere. Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and East Germany were established as satellite states under Soviet control. Yugoslavia, owing to the independent nature of Josip Broz Tito's wartime Partisans, emerged as a Communist state aligned with but not controlled by Moscow.

  The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had begun to crack even before the war ended. The immediate quarrel was over Poland: Roosevelt and Churchill backed the Polish government-in-exile, while Stalin backed the Provisional Government. Stalin won. On the 19th of May 1945, U.S. Under-Secretary of State Joseph Grew said openly that war between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable. It did not come - but not because the two powers trusted each other. They possessed nuclear weapons, and each understood that using them meant mutual annihilation.

  In mid-1948, the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on the Western zone of occupation in Berlin, testing whether the West would back down. American planners, concerned about further Soviet expansion, had already drawn up a contingency plan code-named Operation Dropshot in 1949. It anticipated a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eastern Asia beginning around 1957, and called for saturating the Soviet Union with atomic and high-explosive bombs before an invasion. The plan was never used, but its existence shows how close the world was to something catastrophic in those early years.

• 3. Rebuilding the Ruins

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  In 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall devised what he called the European Recovery Program. From 1948 to 1952, the United States government allocated $13 billion for the reconstruction of Western Europe. The Soviet Union refused the offer and instead coerced Central and Eastern European nations to supply it with machinery and raw materials. Germany and former Nazi satellites paid reparations. The Soviet reconstruction programme emphasized heavy industry at the expense of agriculture and consumer goods. By 1953, Soviet steel production had doubled its 1940 level, but the production of many consumer goods and foodstuffs was lower than it had been in the late 1920s.

  Germany itself was treated as both a patient and a problem. The Allied industrial plan signed in 1946 required the destruction of 1,500 manufacturing plants, cutting German heavy industry output to roughly 50% of its 1938 level. By 1950, equipment had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants, and steel production capacity had been reduced by 6.7 million tons. It was only after lobbying by Generals Lucius D. Clay and George Marshall that the Truman administration reversed course. In July 1947, President Truman rescinded on national security grounds the directive ordering U.S. occupation forces to take no steps toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany. A new directive recognized that an orderly, prosperous Europe required a stable and productive Germany.

  Britain's situation was more quietly desperate. The country had placed 55% of its total labour force into war production. Before Lend-Lease began in 1941, it had spent over 437 million pounds on aircraft alone. When the U.S. abruptly ended Lend-Lease on the 2nd of September 1945, the new Labour government was left financially stranded. It was not until the 15th of July 1946 that the Anglo-American loan gave Britain some measure of stability. From 1946 to 1948, Britain introduced bread rationing - something it had never done even during the war itself.

• 4. The Science of Conquest

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  Beginning in 1945, the United States imported 1,600 German scientists and technicians under a program called Operation Paperclip. Among them were researchers who had worked on the V-2 long-range rocket at the Baltic coast German Army Research Center at Peenemünde. In late 1945, three groups of German rocket scientists arrived for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, classified as War Department Special Employees. The intellectual value of what the U.S. acquired - patents, industrial processes, scientific knowledge - was estimated at around $10 billion.

  The Soviets moved with equal urgency. In 1946, in an operation called Osoaviakhim, NKVD and Soviet army units deported thousands of technical specialists from the Soviet occupation zone of Germany to the Soviet Union, using 92 trains to transport an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people along with their families and equipment. The aim was to transplant entire research and production centers, including the V-2 rocket center at Mittelwerk Nordhausen. Personnel were taken from companies including AEG, BMW, Junkers, Telefunken, and Carl Zeiss AG.

  Not all recruitment was so clean. In 2014, reporting disclosed that the CIA and other U.S. agencies had employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants, and had concealed those ties as recently as the 1990s. According to Timothy Naftali, the CIA's central concern in recruiting former Nazi collaborators was not the extent of the criminal's guilt but whether the agent's criminal past could remain a secret. Arthur Rudolph left the United States in 1984 rather than face prosecution for his wartime activities. Georg Rickhey, brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip in 1946, was returned to Germany to stand trial at the Mittelbau-Dora war crimes trial in 1947, acquitted, and then returned to the United States in 1948.

• 5. Decolonization and New Nations

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  India and Pakistan gained independence from the United Kingdom. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, French India, and Vanuatu gained independence from France. Indonesia broke free from the Netherlands after a four-and-a-half-year struggle in which the Dutch used a significant portion of their Marshall Plan aid to try to re-establish colonial rule. The Philippines and Guam were returned to the United States. Nations in Sub-Saharan Africa achieved independence from the 1950s through the 1970s. The State of Israel was established following the disestablishment of British-ruled Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 Palestine War.

  Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel on the orders of the U.S. Department of War. A U.S. military commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, enlisted many former Japanese administrative officials to serve in the new government in Seoul. North of that line, the Soviets were simultaneously enabling a buildup of heavy armaments to pro-communist forces. The military line became a political line in 1948, when separate republics emerged on both sides of the parallel, each claiming to be the legitimate government of Korea. Two years later, the north invaded the south.

  In French Indochina, the communist-controlled Viet Minh Front had been formed in 1941 to fight both Japanese and French forces. After the Japanese surrender created a power vacuum in August 1945, the Viet Minh seized power and declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The First Indochina War began that same year and ended in 1954 with the French withdrawal and the partition of Vietnam. The conflict that followed ultimately ended with North Vietnam conquering the South in April 1975.

• 6. Population and Human Cost

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  The Soviet Union's population decreased by about 27 million during the war. Of those deaths, 8.7 million were combat losses. The remaining 19 million were non-combat deaths from starvation in the siege of Leningrad, German concentration camps, mass shootings of civilians, famine and disease, and conditions in Soviet camps. After the war, 226,127 Soviet ex-prisoners of war and repatriated civilians were sent to forced labour camps following scrutiny by the NKVD, suspected of having been Nazi collaborators.

  Approximately 12 million people were expelled from Germany under the agreements reached at Potsdam, including seven million from Germany proper and three million from the Sudetenland. Poland lost roughly half its pre-war territory, the Kresy region, and received most of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, including the industrial regions of Silesia. The Soviet Union expelled at least 2 million Poles from the east of the new border. Former Polish cities such as Lwów came under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The border change reversed the results of the 1919-1920 Polish-Soviet War.

  In the Philippines, an estimated one million military and civilian Filipinos were killed from all causes; of these, 131,028 were listed as killed in seventy-two war crime events. The partition of British India into India and Pakistan resulted in communal violence and mass displacement, described as the largest mass human migration and one of the largest refugee crises in history. And in Japan, survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha, were ostracized by Japanese society. Japan provided no special assistance to them until 1952. By the 65th anniversary of the bombings, total casualties from the initial attacks and later deaths had reached about 270,000 in Hiroshima and 150,000 in Nagasaki.

• 7. Institutions and Long Shadows

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  The United Nations officially came into existence on the 24th of October 1945, replacing the League of Nations, which had formally dissolved on the 20th of April 1946 after having in practice ceased to function in 1939. The UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. The Soviet Union abstained from the vote. The U.S. did not ratify the social and economic rights sections.

  The five major Allied powers - the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China - were given permanent membership in the UN Security Council with veto power over any binding resolution. The Republic of China retained that seat even after retreating to Taiwan in 1950, until 1971 when the People's Republic of China was given the permanent membership instead. Russia inherited the Soviet Union's seat in 1991.

  In West Germany, denazification was formally ended by several laws passed in 1951. The results were mixed. West German President Walter Scheel and Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger were both former Nazi Party members. In 1957-77% of the West German Ministry of Justice's senior officials were former Nazi Party members. Konrad Adenauer's State Secretary Hans Globke had played a major role in drafting the antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws. The unexploded remnants of the war still surface literally: in 2017, fifty thousand people were evacuated from Hanover so wartime bombs could be defused. As of 2023, thousands of unexploded bombs from World War II are still estimated to remain underground. And beneath the ocean floor, an estimated 1 million metric tons of chemical weapons dumped under direction of the UK, U.S., and Russia rust quietly in unknown locations, with sulfur mustard exposure still being reported in parts of coastal Italy.