In The Rubble | 2023 International Conference on WWII 

Thanks to the staff for the trouble you went through to video and record these sessions. It is greatly appreciated!

Great stuff.. thanks..

I have Keith Lowe's Savage Continent and am reading it in chunks due to the harsh reality of the aftermath of WWII and the utter destruction of infrastructure and social upheaval left in the wake of 6 years of war. I wondered about displaced people, Holocaust survivors, and the defeated German citizens. Prior to this book I had read books or watched documentaries on the rise of Nazism wanting to know how a populace could embrace or tolerate Hitler's ideology; also read/watched about the Nuremberg trials and the concept of crimes against humanity; read/watched too about the Britsh and American reasoning for the bombing of German cities and whether that carnage really helped the war effort. But the one aspect that was seldom covered about the aftermath, other than the intent of the Marshall Plan, was how do you rebuild a continent and a chaotic populace. I was also concerned about the revisionist theories that were popping up claiming widespread crimes committed by the Allies, such as the Rhine Meadows camps, deliberately punishing German civilians with starvation rations, that fire bombing was intended to destroy and make Europe subservient to a growing American Empire. So aI started searching for an accounting of the aftermath and was intrigued by Keith Lowe's book. This book illustrates how the Allies struggled mightily to even feed people because of the damage to infrastructure (transportation, industrial mfg, agriculture, communication netwotks) and governance. While the Allies were very good about the logistics of war, they were unprepared for the magnitude of destruction. While military hostilities had ceased, there was plenty of anger and revenge that grew everywhere and hampered recovery. As he mentioned in his talk, Jews were still persecuted, displaced people either slave labor or refugees trying to go home or find refuge from deprivation as well as German people being expelled from other occupied countries all added to the chaos. The stories told within are harrowing, depressing and sometimes dystopian. But there are stories that illustrate the effort to bring order to chaos, moments of understanding, and the compromises made to achieve hope and a path to self-redemption. It's not an easy read, hence my reading in chunks. But it does illuminate the combined effort that took place to restore Western Europe to a productive and relative peaceful state. It is also a good reminder of why Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo and now Ukraine also face destruction and rebuild. Why rebuilding must happen and also why America must also face our own divisions or else! It is worth reading.