By the late 1940s, most Europeans were anxious to put the war and its recriminations behind them. As Tony Judt noted, “Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.” But planning for that future was complicated by the vast difference in experiences and outlook between those who had spent the war in London and those who had been trapped at home. Between the two groups, there existed a mutual failure to grasp what the other had endured.
Writing about the postwar disillusionment of himself and his fellow Engelandvaarders, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema noted that “through the entire war, one dream never left us, not for single day: our homecoming to Holland as we remembered it. We did come home, but the memory was crushed by reality and the dream exploded. Our country lay before us unrecognizable, emaciated like a wretch from a concentration camp. We couldn’t cope, we turned away as from a leper, sickened and uncomfortable. We felt more at ease with our Allied buddies, with whom we had fought the war in freedom, than with our old friends who carried the mark of the Occupation.” When he first visited his parents at their home in an affluent suburb of The Hague, Roelfzema recalled, he felt like “a creature from another, foreign world.” When he left after a few hours, “we said goodbye like strangers.”
For their part, Europeans who had stayed behind, particularly those who had risked their lives in resistance work, greatly resented their compatriots from London, who, in their view, had lived out the war in comfort and safety, with none of the daily tension, terror, and privations of occupation.
These deep fissures between compatriots were exacerbated by sharply divided visions of their nations’ postwar futures. Many Europeans who had fought in the resistance, for example, were determined to re-create the sense of community that they had experienced during the war, which transcended traditional social and economic divisions. “The fearsome dangers had left no room for petty distinctions of social background, class and religion,” wrote Roelfzema, who had been part of the Dutch underground early in the conflict. “We stood together, we fell together, we died together, brothers and sisters in the classic sense.” What meaning could the war have if it did not result in radical changes in society, leading to a more just and equal world?
But the great majority of Roelfzema’s countrymen, along with most other Europeans, did not share that view. Exhausted after the chaos and trauma of occupation, they wanted nothing more than to re-create the normalcy of their prewar world, craving little else but peace, order, a roof over one’s head, enough to eat, and the other necessities of everyday life. They were encouraged in that view by members of their countries’ governments in exile, many if not most of which were kept in power when they returned home. Representing continuity, these elder statesmen, Tony Judt observed, were “skeptical, pragmatic practitioners of the art of the possible. They reflected the mood of their constituents.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, one of those most disappointed by the return to the status quo was Queen Wilhelmina, who, throughout her long exile in London, had yearned to return to a Netherlands transformed, like herself, by the war. Her hopes had been strengthened by wartime reports from Engelandvaarders that the Dutch were disillusioned with the intrigues and divisions of the prewar political system and wanted drastic social and economic changes, in which they hoped the queen would play an important role.
When Wilhelmina returned to Holland, however, she discovered that few of her subjects felt, as she did, that the old political and government establishment should go. When national elections were held in May 1946, all of the prewar parties except the Dutch Nazis were returned to Parliament in roughly their former strength—a scenario that was replicated throughout western Europe.
Although the queen reluctantly backed down in her campaign for change, she defied efforts by government and court officials to force her back into the royal “cage” that had separated her from her countrymen before the war. She did so even as she took up residence again in the stately, cavernous Noordeinde Palace in The Hague, which, in Roelfzema’s words, “was the embodiment of everything she hated about her former life.” She once said to him in a facetious tone tinged with bitterness, “You and your RAF, you missed your targets often enough. So why couldn’t you have dropped just one little bomb by mistake on this old place?”
Once reinstalled in the palace, she insisted on maintaining the informal style she had adopted in London and Anneville, breaking as many rules of protocol and tradition as she could and urging her staff to do the same. “She set the tone, we performed accordingly,” said Roelfzema, who continued as Wilhelmina’s military aide for several months after the war. “I whizzed around the endless corridors of Noordeinde Palace on a motorbike, scandalizing all the lackeys and missing the occasional ancient retainer by a hair.”
Working hard to strengthen her bonds with her people, the queen, during the lean, impoverished postwar years, refused to turn on heat or electricity in her palaces as long as most Dutchmen had to do without them. She also rode a bicycle around the devastated countryside to meet and encourage farmers and others who had lost their homes and land.
Although Wilhelmina never again recognized the restrictions of class and rank, her subjects, to her distress, could not bring themselves to do the same. “To every Hollander, she offered her hand in equality, but Hollanders continued to bow,” Roelfzema said. “After reigning for half a century, she had, in the end, become too democratic for them. She never gave up, but she could not break down the barrier.”
Nonetheless, for all the disappointments of her later years, Wilhelmina could take pride in all that she had accomplished. During the war, she had, in fact, achieved her greatest childhood ambition—to perform great deeds, as her ancestors William the Silent and William of Orange had done. Hers, however, had been achieved not on the battlefield but during her London exile. In a never-to-be-repeated moment, a modern monarch of the Netherlands had been given the chance to exercise real leadership, and Wilhelmina had made the most of it. As was true of Winston Churchill and the British, World War II had been her “finest hour.” She had stopped her defeatist government from capitulating, kept Holland in the fight, and inspired and united her people, thus gaining “a victory that assured her a place in Dutch history second to none,” Louis de Jong wrote. In doing so, she greatly strengthened the House of Orange. Thanks to the queen, the Dutch monarchy had become not merely a “stabilizing element” in the country, Time magazine observed in May 1946, but “the spokesman for all elements of the people.”
In September 1948, Wilhelmina, citing ill health and advancing age, abdicated after fifty-eight years on the throne, giving way to her daughter, Juliana. She retreated to a small house in a suburb of The Hague, spending much of her time painting and babysitting her three granddaughters. But before she died in 1962, she had the satisfaction of seeing her country finally making some of the dramatic social changes she had championed more than a decade earlier, including the so-called depillarization of Dutch life—a breakdown of the rigid, centuries-old divisions between various segments of society, including that between Catholics and Protestants.
In much of the rest of western Europe, the stasis of the immediate postwar era also began to crumble, giving way to profound economic and social shifts.“The idea that the world as it was before the war could simply be restored…was surely an illusion,” the Dutch writer Ian Buruma remarked. “It was an illusion held by governments as much as by individual people….But the world could not possibly be the same. Too much had happened, too much had changed.”
Indeed, one of the earliest harbingers of change occurred even before the war ended, involving, of all countries, conservative France. On March 23, 1944, Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government granted voting rights to women, a decision reflecting the enormous role that women had played in the French resistance. As it happened, twelve members of the provisional assembly approving the measure were women, the first in French parliamentary history. In 1946, just months after women’s suffrage was inscribed in the country’s new constitution, Frenchwomen cast their first-ever ballots in national elections.
In the rest of Europe, too, former resistance members began having an impact on their countries’ political life, even though, in many cases, it took much longer than they had originally hoped. A considerable number eventually moved into positions of prominence and responsibility in their local and national governments, helping to enact significant social and economic reforms that in just a few years would culminate in the modern welfare state and change the face of western Europe.
Such an extraordinary transformation would not have been possible without the economic bounty of the United States, a country whose president had wanted nothing more to do with Europe once the war was over. At the Yalta Conference in early 1945, Franklin Roosevelt had made it clear that he had little interest in further close collaboration or partnership with the United States’ Western Allies, whose empires and global influence were fast disintegrating. Serenely confident of his own country’s power, he envisioned the Soviet Union as its main ally in dealing with postwar international problems.
The onset of the Cold War, however, put an end to that notion, as well as to Roosevelt’s plan for a speedy U.S. withdrawal from European affairs. Having spent much of the war pacifying the Soviets, the U.S. government—now led by Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman—launched a campaign to contain them. To do so, Washington realized it must not only maintain but increase its wartime involvement with Europe. Specifically, the Truman administration realized it must take urgent steps to assist European countries if total economic collapse and the spread of communism were to be warded off. “It is now obvious that we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by the war,” said U.S. undersecretary of state William Clayton after a fact-finding tour across the Continent in the spring of 1947. “Millions of people in cities are slowly starving.”
In June 1947, George Marshall, now Truman’s secretary of state, outlined what came to be known as the Marshall Plan, a far-reaching program to jump-start the economic recovery and reconstruction of Europe. For the countries of western Europe, the Marshall Plan offered resurrection from disaster. For their wartime eastern allies, Czechoslovakia and Poland, it spelled calamity.
ON JULY 12, 1947, U.S. officials held a meeting in Paris to discuss and explain the workings of the Marshall Plan. Every country in Europe was invited, and almost all agreed to attend. Among those who accepted were Poland, now in thrall to the Soviets, and Czechoslovakia, which, despite a strong communist presence, still retained traces of democracy. As Andrei Zhdanov, a top Soviet official and one of Stalin’s closest allies, dourly put it, the Soviets had achieved a “complete victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie in every East European land except Czechoslovakia, where the power contest still remains undecided.”
Indeed, in the summer of 1947, it appeared that the pendulum might be swinging away from Soviet influence. Ever since the war’s end, the Czechs had grown increasingly disenchanted with their communist-dominated government. The strong-arm tactics of the state police had alienated many citizens, and farmers were up in arms over talk of collectivization. Workers, meanwhile, opposed communist demands for increased output without higher wages in return. With national elections scheduled for May 1948, it became increasingly clear that the communists would probably fail to achieve their goal of a majority in the country’s parliament.
Such an outcome was unacceptable to Stalin, who had had enough of this facade of democracy. He used the United States’ invitation to join the Marshall Plan as an opportunity to show the Czechs who was in charge. Summoning Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister, and Masaryk’s Polish counterpart to Moscow, the Soviet leader ordered them to reject the United States’ offer of economic aid. Both did so.
To Masaryk, it was obvious that democracy was nearing its end in his homeland. “I left for Moscow as the minister of foreign affairs of a sovereign state,” he remarked when he returned to Prague. “I am returning as Stalin’s stooge.” When a friend asked him how Stalin had treated him, he replied, “Oh, he’s very gracious. Of course, he’d kill me if he could. But, still, very gracious.”
It was an agonizing time for Masaryk. His friends in Britain and the United States chided him for not standing up to Stalin. If he and his noncommunist colleagues had insisted on accepting Marshall Plan aid, his critics said, they would have won the overwhelming backing of their fellow citizens, making it considerably harder for the Soviets to crack down on the country.
But in Masaryk’s view, such resistance would have had little or no effect unless the Czechs had strong support from the United States and Britain. A few months earlier, he had traveled to Washington to urge the president and his administration to supply that support. But neither Harry Truman nor his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, would see him. The message was clear: the United States had written Czechoslovakia off. “What happened in Washington broke Jan’s heart,” said Marcia Davenport, an American novelist and close friend of his. Caught in the middle of a maelstrom, Masaryk alternated between despair and frantic gaiety. “He was straining to stay in a position that assaulted and offended everything he inherently was,” Davenport remarked.
In Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, the conflict between the communists and their democratic opponents grew increasingly bitter. The situation came to a head in February 1948, when Václav Nosek, the communist interior minister and head of the state security police, illegally removed all noncommunist senior police officials from the force. The remaining noncommunist ministers in Edvard Beneš’s cabinet resigned in protest after Nosek refused to reinstate the men he had purged.
The noncommunists assumed that Beneš would refuse to accept their resignations and keep them in a caretaker government, thus forcing the dissolution of parliament and the calling of an immediate national election. “Facing an implacable foe, the democratic leaders still put their trust in constitutional procedures,” Josef Korbel wrote. “It was the decent procedure of decent men in such a situation, but the tragic weakness of such a process is that the enemy is often not burdened with any such regard for decency.”
Beneš did nothing to help the ministers’ cause, despite his insistence to Korbel a month earlier that he would never permit the communists to take over the government: “They have found out for themselves that I enjoy a certain authority in the nation….They have come to realize that they cannot go against me.” Beneš assured Korbel that “I shall not move from my place and I shall defend our democracy till my last breath. They know it, and therefore there will be no coup.” But just as at Munich, his brave words meant nothing when the time came for action. Announcing that he planned to remain above the political fray, he refused to confront the communists, who immediately took advantage of the leadership vacuum.
On February 25, 1948, the masquerade of democracy in Czechoslovakia finally ended. The communists seized control of the government, and Beneš, once again surrendering his country to the demands of a foreign power, obediently signed the list of new ministers put before him. He remained as figurehead president and Jan Masaryk as figurehead foreign minister.
Two weeks later, Masaryk’s body, clad in blue silk pajamas, was found at sunrise, lying spread-eagled in the courtyard of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just below his apartment. The Czech communists insisted that he had committed suicide. Nearly half a century later, the Prague police ruled that Masaryk had been murdered. “What died with him,” wrote one historian, “was the liberty of his country.”
The shocking twin deaths of Masaryk and Czech democracy reinforced the West’s fear of an imminent spread of communism and galvanized it into action. Vigorous measures were taken to keep communists out of power in the governments of France and Italy. In Washington, Congress, which had been dithering over legislation authorizing the Marshall Plan, approved it immediately. Less than a month after Masaryk’s murder, Truman signed the bill into law, granting an initial $5 billion in economic and technical assistance to sixteen European nations, including Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Luxembourg. Another $8 billion was spent during the four years of the plan’s existence; when it ended in 1952, the economy of every participant country had easily surpassed its prewar level.
The Marshall Plan marked a definitive parting of the ways between the two halves of the Continent. While western Europe embarked on several decades of unprecedented growth and prosperity, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the rest of eastern Europe sank further into poverty and repression.
IN 1949, THE CZECHOSLOVAKIA coup and worries about further Soviet aggression gave rise to another historic event—the groundbreaking decision of the United States, Britain, and Canada to join the countries of western Europe in creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which promised a collective defense by all member nations in the event of an armed attack on any one member.
The impetus for NATO came the previous year, just days after Masaryk’s death, when Britain, for the first time in its history, committed itself to a peacetime European defense confederation. Its partners were France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. On the day the European treaty was announced, President Truman expressed strong support in a speech to Congress, remarking that the “determination of the free countries of Europe to protect themselves will be matched by an equal determination on our part to help them do so.”
Truman’s declaration marked an extraordinary about-face for the United States, whose policy since its founding had been a determination to stay away from European military commitments. Indeed, at Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt had announced that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Europe, including occupied Germany, within two years. But the Cold War had put an end to such aloofness; with the stroke of a pen in Brussels, the United States became a permanent and leading force in keeping peace in Europe.
Just as dramatic was the change of heart of the European nations, most of which had zealously guarded their neutrality before the outbreak of World War II. Norway was the most striking example. Arguably the least prepared of all the nations invaded by the Germans, it had spent almost nothing on its defenses in the interwar years in the hope of remaining distant from any future conflict. The shock of defeat and calamity of war, however, swept away its ostrichlike attitude.
The trauma of 1940 “really made us grow up as a nation,” noted one Norwegian who had fought in the war. “Until then we had been part of nothing. We learned the lesson that we had to be prepared ourselves; we couldn’t just leave it to others to fight our wars. We became determined not to be taken with our pants down anymore.” Since the creation of NATO, Norway has remained one of its most stalwart members.