Given recent natural disasters and the damage they've caused, and places like New Orleans which are still recovering, what was Europe like post-war? Countless villages, towns, and cities were widely destroyed. The dead - both civilian and soldiers - would be all over the place (a few bodies here, a few there) from both major and minor engagements. Unexploded ordinances would surely be widespread too. How did Europe recover? How long did it take? Where did all the rubble go? What did the people do for work? etc etc
My guess is that much of the financing came through the Marshall Plan. One thing I discovered about the plan was that the nations of Europe had to meet together to set out goals and objectives before the allocation of money and resources would come through. Each of 16 nations had to identify its needs and they would be balanced against the needs of the others. Once these were all agreed on, the money would flow. Here is a link to a contemporary Time Magazine article on the negotiations. ECONOMICS: Corrective Lurch - TIME
Great topic. I watched a little doco about how Stalingrad wasnt completely flattened & it was partly to do with the reinforcing steel in the concrete, something that may not have been that widespread in Europe at that time. I guess the the heavily damaged areas of Germany and Eastern Europe were just bulldozed, crushed etc etc, not exactly repaired. Theres a hill in Berlin thats more or less rubble. Does anyone know which nations recovered the quickest, my uneducated guess would be Germany. How long did the reconstruction process take in the heavily damaged areas of Ukraine, Russia etc etc.
I would think Germany as well since they were a vital stronghold of sorts for the imminent cold war. Germany also lost a ton of land during the war so it wouldn't have been that hard. The resources rich areas near the "wall" probably only increased the incentive to develop. There are some parts of Russia that are still damaged or left unrepaired, particularly the Prussian lands near Kalinigrad. They are mostly villages or small towns which were abandoned during or shortly after the war and not done anything to after.
Yeah, I want to sort of focus on the local level. There must be stories or records of what went out? I mean, it takes them 6 months to repave a 100 yd stretch of road down here, and I know at the time over there most roads were dirt or stone (not paved). For instance - in wiped out villages - did people live in makshift shelters and tents while their villages were bulldozed and rebuilt? I assume the gov't paid to rebuild their houses. Or did they rebuild their own houses (farms etc could surely do that).
As far as postwar Britain was concerned, we had a pool of German PoWs to compensate for labour shortages. Now forgetting the ethics of keeping people prisoners 3 years after the war ended, that went a LONG way to starting the reconstruction process. Britain hardly received any Marshall Plan money, so any finance had to come from the public; after seven years of war and nothing to buy, many people had substantial savings lying around. The trick was to persuade them to invest wisely in schemes they could actually see the results in, and the house building boom was the biggest. Many military camps were taken over by squatters and the homeless, while new Displaced Persons camps were built around the country as well.
Now, while I haven't explored all the post-war planning that was being done I do remember that the UNRRA (United Nations Relief & Rehabilitation Administration) was formed in late 1943. They were a completely volunteer organ which had representatives from some 43 nations, and headed by an American (I believe). Their goal was to study and prepare for the end of the war, the displaced persons, and their shelter, food, clothing, and medical care as soon as an area was occupied by liberation troops. It didn't work as smoothly as it could have, but that was mostly due to "turf wars" between the UNRRA and the military higher-ups; SHAEF in particular was loath to surrender their authority to the UN personnel. They weren't tasked with rebuilding the infrastructure, but the care of the displaced and wounded civilians. Look them up on google, their's is a fascinating story even if they were thwarted in many of their efforts, without them the post-war would have been even more chaotic than it was in reality. While it wasn't a "total success", it wasn't a complete failure either. It showed that even planning for the "end" for over a full year wasn't enough time. A book I read not too long ago dealt with this subject, The Bitter Road to Freedom, by William Hitchcock. And there were loans and grants before the Marshall Plan was implemented, but no matter the millions of dollars involved they were ineffective as they were applied and "skimmed" by unscrupulous men in the nations they were designed to aid.
Since I'm Certified in Reconstruction and construction in four trades as a Journeyman and team leader, I'll shed some light. After the destruction of wars we as humans have always rebuild through the ages. WWII was no different, yes many lived in make shift housing with deplorable sanitation. And carried out their daily lives around the rubble, goods and even makeshift stores to buy supplies, the Red Cross as other organizations were also involved. In many cases Governments did help from money they received, but pocket allot also. In many others cases they were left to fend for themselves. Many did die in these post war conditions, and we all read in the history books what the Russians did to the German population in those years after the war ended. Effects of World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The allies did what they could to feed and house the refugees and to reunite families that had been forcibly torn apart, but the scale of the task and the obstacles were enormous. The majority of ports in Europe and many in Asia had been destroyed or badly damaged; bridges had been blown up; railway locomotives and rolling stock had vanished. Great cities such as Warsaw, Kiev, Tokyo and Berlin were piles of rubble and ash. In Germany, it has been estimated, 70% of housing had gone and, in the Soviet Union, 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages. Factories and workshops were in ruins, fields, forests and vineyards ripped to pieces. Millions of acres in north China were flooded after the Japanese destroyed the dykes. Many Europeans were surviving on less than 1,000 calories per day; in the Netherlands they were eating tulip bulbs. Apart from the United States and allies such as Canada and Australia, who were largely unscathed by the war's destruction, Rebuilding the world after the second world war | World news | The Guardian The reconstruction plan, developed at a meeting of the participating European states, was established on June 5, 1947. It offered the same aid to the USSR and its allies, but they did not accept it.The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948. During that period some US$13 billion in economic and technical assistance were given to help the recovery of the European countries that had joined in the Organization for European Economic Co-operation. Marshall Plan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Marshall Plan for Rebuilding Europe Still Echoes After 60 Years Policy directed at combating “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” Read more: http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/May/20070521163245MVyelwarC7.548159e-02.html#ixzz0ipbxayqW U.S. secretly helps rebuilding Finland after WWII
Interesting links, but none really answer what was done on the local level. It seems a lot of the money was devoted to 'modernising' the damaged economies and factories (and all were producing 35% more then 1938 levels) but it doesn't really mention what happened on the local level. All it mentions is governments not being able to 'afford' infrastructure reconstruction in western europe (all the blown bridges etc) which cut off and isolated many peoples. I'd be interested in seeing estimated civilian deaths in the years following WWII due to famine etc. Or finding something on the 'rebuilding' of such-and-such town.
The modernizing came later, in the immediate aftermath and before the "Marshall Plan" there were outright loans and grants in the amounts of millions of US dollars. These were however mismanaged by the recipients and did literally nothing to get the European countries ravaged by WW2 back on track. I really do believe you (Mussolini) should look at the efforts or the UNRRA, as I mentioned in my first post on this. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), organization founded (1943) during World War II to give aid to areas liberated from the Axis powers. There were finally 52 participating countries, each of which contributed funds amounting to 2% of its national income in 1943. A sum of nearly $4 billion was expended on various types of emergency aid, including distribution of food and medicine and restoration of public services and of agriculture and industry. China, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Poland, the Ukrainian SSR, and Yugoslavia were the chief beneficiaries. UNRRA returned some 7 million displaced persons to their countries of origin and provided camps for about 1 million refugees unwilling to be repatriated. More than half the funds were provided by the United States, and the three directors general-Herbert H. Lehman, Fiorello La Guardia, and Gen. Lowell Rooks-were American. UNRRA discontinued its operations in Europe on June 30, 1947. Its remaining work, chiefly in China, ended on Mar. 31, 1949. The functions of UNRRA were transferred to other UN agencies, chiefly the International Refugee Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the United Nations Children's Fund. See: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration: Information from Answers.com When the IRO, WHO, and the UNCF got up and going after 1948, the UNRRA was slowly disbanded and the efforts taken over by those mentioned as well as the new governments themselves with European Economic Recovery Act (Marshall Plan) loans, goods, machinery, and outright grants.
