War In Europe: The Legacy : Good Vanquishes Evil : War Haunts, Still Shapes the World

It was the worst of wars.

Launched by a satanic, Austrian-born psychopath onto an ill-prepared world, World War II claimed 53 million lives, decimated great centers of civilization and fueled the assembly-line mass murder of European Jewry before finally ending six years later in the first atomic mushroom clouds.

It exposed a frightening new darkness to the human soul, yet it remains the last great triumph of good over evil.

Its impact changed the course of history such as few events before or since.

Despite the passing of half a century since it began in the early hours of Sept. 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, the war’s legacy still grips humankind.

Old World Divided

The war ended a European ascendancy that had endured since the Middle Ages, leaving the Old World divided and in ruins, its intellectual vitality sapped, its vast empires on the brink of collapse, its collective destiny suddenly in the hands of two new giants: the United States and the Soviet Union.

Only in the late 1980s has a resurgent Europe begun to chafe at this superpower hegemony.

Japan lay crushed, its gamble for Pacific supremacy that began with the attack on Pearl Harbor ending in disgrace and the mass destruction of its home islands.

Slumbering in isolation 50 years ago, America and the Soviet Union were dragged irrevocably by the war from their roles as oversize bystanders to new ones as global power brokers, triggering a Cold War that has only recently begun to thaw.

Gentleman statesmen from London, Paris and Berlin may have decided the shape of world events before 1939, but in the years since, it has been the views from Moscow and Washington that count.

Suddenly, it was American ideas and American tastes--from chewing gum, nylon stockings and jeans to one-person-one-vote democracy, rock ‘n’ roll and pop art--that mattered in cities from Calgary to Calcutta.

With men gone to soldier, the war provided a strong feminine claim to the workplace, a claim relinquished after the war before reviving to a point where, today, two of every three women in Northern Europe and the United States are employed outside the home.

Postwar baby booms on both sides of the Atlantic set their own time bombs that in the 1950s and early 1960s would unleash a new concept into Western culture: the teen-ager and the youth cult.

The war made household words out of blitz, blueprint, pin-up and black market , along with jaunty expressions such as “a piece of cake” to describe a hard job done easily--a phrase first coined by Royal Air Force pilots fighting off the Nazi onslaught during the 1940 Battle of Britain.

The war was a midwife for inventions including the jet engine, the microwave oven, the tape recorder and the radar that today monitors airways and helps predict tomorrow’s weather.

For better or worse, it harnessed nuclear power, gave the kitchen its pots-and-pans miracle substance Teflon (first used in the Manhattan Project’s reactors) and gave students everywhere the ballpoint pen, developed when fountain pens proved impractical for use during high-altitude flying.

It brought the first bananas to Italy (after the Fascist conquests in East Africa that were preliminaries to the war itself) and the first white lines on British roads (to guide motorists during blackouts).

“The Second World War was one of history’s most powerful catalysts,” said Peter Hennessy, co-founder of the British Institute for Contemporary History and now a visiting professor at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland. “The changes of at least three generations were crammed into those six years of war.”

But almost more remarkable than its role as a catalyst for change is the manner in which the impact of World War II continues to echo throughout Europe, as much a part of the Continent’s present as its past.

In the streets of Warsaw, children today play “Nazis and the Resistance” the way their American counterparts play “cowboys and Indians,” while stone memorials to the dead grace every European village green.

President Bush’s decision to attend the funeral of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito last January raised hardly a ripple of protest in the United States, but Britain’s Prince Philip departed for Tokyo amid a storm of protest. Reacting to similar emotions in the Netherlands, the Dutch Royal Family decided not to attend.

Two German officials from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands languished in a Dutch jail for 44 years despite repeated West German pleas in recent years that enough was enough. With one of them on the verge of death, the two were finally released last January, and even then with mixed Dutch emotions.

Incredibly, the legal process grinds on. In France, the 1987 trial of former Nazi Klaus Barbie and the arrest last spring of French Nazi accomplice Paul Touvier on charges of crimes against humanity have rekindled emotions. An upcoming parliamentary debate in Britain will do the same as lawmakers decide whether to try postwar emigres on charges of committing atrocities in the Baltic states during the war.

Even death is a reminder.

Reports on the recent passing of the gifted German conductor Herbert von Karajan dwelt as much on the extent of his links with the Nazi Party as they did on his decades of musical genius.

The lessons of the war that began 50 years ago still shape government policies and trouble relations between states.

And well they might.

No formal peace treaty has ever been signed between the Allies and Germany. Indeed, there is little agreement any more as to exactly what Germany is--especially among the Germans themselves.

The so-called “German Question” and the possibility of reunifying the divided nation hang over Europe like some great, interminable riddle.

The walled, barbed-wire division of Germany and its capital, Berlin, along with the presence of nearly three quarters of a million Allied troops still based on German soil, are reminders of a gifted people’s darkest hour.

The unseen scars are worse.

West Germans refer to 1945, the year the war ended, simply as “the Year Zero,” when existence began again.

And for all the miraculous achievements that have flowed from that rebirth--an economic success that has turned Western Europe into a de facto deutsche mark currency area and a political success that makes the new German democracy a model for others to emulate--West Germans remain crippled by their past.

Rebuilt West German cities may seem pleasant, convenient and modern to outsiders, but they are as empty of time and a sense of history and place as the West German state itself.

“Our legacy remains emotional insecurity within this tremendous material wealth,” said Michael Stuermer, director of the Institute of Science and Politics near Munich, who was 6 at the war’s end. “I can’t say I feel (personally) guilty, but somehow I was born into a civilization which produced this sinister dynamism, this arch-evil of the 20th Century. Every country has skeletons in the closet, but for us it’s of another order. It colors everything.”

In the glare of national television, Germans still debate whether they were conquered or freed in 1945.

Japan, the only nation to outstrip West Germany in the pace of its postwar recovery, may have become an economic superpower, but its political influence remains diminished, far out of proportion to that status, and its military strength is barely above token levels. The nation whose tradition-based, aggressive militarism won it great swaths of Asia even before the war began, and then most of the rest after 1941, today devotes a paltry 1% of its gross national product to defense.

Nonetheless, Japan’s every move is scrutinized by its one-time Asian victims, weighed and assessed with suspicion by those simultaneously eager to receive its aid and investment yen. Many charge that, as a nation, Japan has failed to face the realities of its role in the war. Every few years, renewed efforts by Tokyo’s nationalists and right-wingers to sanitize history textbooks of their accounts of wartime aggression and atrocities draw furious international outcries.

East Germans are also among those who have yet to face the past.

For them, history remains clouded by half-truths in which Adolf Hitler was more anti-Communist than anti-Semite, Nazi concentration camps held more Communists than Jews and Josef Stalin endures as a hero. How East German authorities will eventually deal with such realities as the fact that Stalin executed more German Communists than Hitler remains unclear.

Austrians clung for 40 years to the myth that their land was Hitler’s first victim, not his willing accomplice. Their first tentative look at the truth came only in 1986 amid allegations that Austrian President Kurt Waldheim concealed his own link to wartime atrocities while serving in Greece as a junior Wehrmacht officer.

The war haunts other parts of Europe too.

The Soviet Union’s appalling wartime losses of 20 million civilians and soldiers--roughly 70 times the 292,000 Americans killed--have kept the conflict the pivotal reference point for the Soviets’ strategic thinking ever since.

The limits of the Nazi advance remains etched for all to see on the highway into Moscow’s northwestern suburbs. The memory of that near-defeat is the Soviet Union’s principal raison d’etre for subsidizing its East Bloc empire, for keeping a massive nuclear arsenal and for maintaining a level of military spending that has virtually broken its domestic economy.

As Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms begin to loosen the locks of history, wartime skeletons have emerged from Moscow’s closet to confront the country’s leadership with some of the most explosive issues it has ever faced.

Moscow’s relations with its Baltic republics and with Poland are littered with political land mines, many of which are only now being uncovered.

Despite the potential dangers, pressure for full disclosure grows.

“Without it . . . the improvement of our society is impossible,” declared respected Soviet historian Vyacheslav Dashichev.

While in France, the Nazi occupation period remains a topic best avoided in polite company, for the English, the war is a time to be savored.

For them, the Battle of Britain remains the finest hour in a century of decline--a fleeting moment during which a tired, class-ridden people standing alone summoned their waning strength, pulled together and averted defeat against the odds.

Britain’s subsequent retreat from empire and gradual economic slide have only embellished the legend told and retold today in schools, factories and playgrounds as a symbol of courage and grit to emulate.

But nowhere was the war a more unqualified triumph than for America.

In his best-selling book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” Yale University historian Paul Kennedy noted that the end of World War II left the United States probably more powerful than it would ever be again.

America alone, he noted, held the secret to the atomic bomb. It also held two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves, half its manufacturing production and half its ships and supplied one-third of the globe’s exports.

In a war that laid waste to much of the industrialized world, mainland American territory came under attack on only four occasions: twice by a solitary Japanese pilot attempting to ignite an Oregon forest with incendiary bombs (he failed), once by a Japanese submarine that fired 25 rounds at a coastal oil refinery north of Santa Barbara (it caused minor damage), and by a series of ill-directed high-altitude balloon bombs, all but one of which fell harmlessly.

The total of home front American civilian war dead was six--a clergyman and five parish children on a mountain hike in Oregon killed when the balloon bomb they found exploded.

“The ‘Pax Americana’ had come of age,” Kennedy concluded.

The Western United States, a largely forgotten backwater in 1939, began a boom after America’s entry into the war that has yet to subside.

If taken as an independent political entity, California today would be the world’s sixth-richest industrial power, ahead of Britain, Italy and Canada.

While the extent of America’s overwhelming economic and military superiority has declined since 1945, its position as leader of the Western World has not.

“For better or worse, America (today) is going to remain the dominant democratic power,” said Robert O’Neill, former director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and currently a professor of history at Oxford University. “There is no serious challenge to its role.”

But there are stirrings.

Gone is the exhaustion of postwar Europe, where victorious Britons were forced to grub for coal to keep warm, where Parisians managed on four hours of electricity a day and where defeated Germans survived in bombed-out ruins on rations of 1,040 calories a day--an energy intake equivalent to that provided by a solid breakfast.

Fueled by Marshall Plan aid, Western Europe began a miraculous economic revival on the same amount of money that America today has been asked to pay for 26 Stealth bombers: $13 billion.

Western Europe’s collective gross national product of $5.3 trillion now easily exceeds that of the United States, and a gradually unifying, increasingly confident European Community has begun to confront America on key trade issues.

Of potentially greater significance, Europeans for the first time in modern history have started to develop a sense of common identity and interests.

“No one can deny that greater cooperation in political and security matters are part of the EC’s future,” the Community’s external affairs commissioner, Frans Andriessen, told a group of reporters recently.

The sense of optimism and movement in Europe is today greater than at any time since the first years of the century.

Washington Post columnist David S. Broder commented after returning home this summer from a three-month stint in Europe: “The first impression is one of deceleration. The Old World is moving faster than the New World, paradoxical as that may seem.”

As Western Europe coalesces, the states of Eastern Europe test new frontiers while a distracted Soviet Union focuses increasingly on stemming its own internal decline.

Collectively, these developments constitute the first major cracks in the post-World War II order. They are unfolding with breathtaking speed.

While events in Western Europe are less dramatic and more subtle, their implications for the Atlantic Alliance are considerable.

As Europeans nudge America in their search for a more assertive global role, Americans struggle to cut deficits and ask why they should spend $175 billion a year defending such an obviously wealthy region.

“The issue is not if an adjustment in the role of the United States in the Atlantic relationship will happen--it will--but rather what the European response will be,” said James E. Howell, a professor of economics at the Stanford Business School, in a London speech last April.

So far, however, European confidence remains well short of openly advocating U.S. military withdrawal.

Nearly half a century after they first arrived, more than 300,000 American troops remain assigned to Europe, an American nuclear shield forms the backbone of the Continent’s defense, and roughly one of every two U.S. defense dollars is spent either directly or indirectly on the protection of Western Europe.

The war also unleashed other powerful forces, including the full brunt of American culture, which burst forth on an unsuspecting world.

American innovations such as swing music and Hollywood movies had already established footholds in Europe in the 1930s, but the true force of Americana crossed the Atlantic only with the war and its aftermath.

In Britain, the Big Band sounds of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey in the mid-1940s touched off a love affair with American music that dominated for 20 years before being partially eclipsed by the Beatles.

Terry Charman, a researcher at the Imperial War Museum in London, noted that even Nazi authorities stewed about it.

Benny Goodman’s influence on a rebellious German minority dubbed “Swing Youth” was so great that the Nazis were forced to erect notices in Berlin nightclubs declaring “Swingmusik ist Verboten.”

The postwar arrival on the London stage of upbeat American productions such as “Oklahoma!” and “Annie Get Your Gun” sent a charge of energy through a war-weary nation.

“They made British productions seem insipid by comparison,” said Charman. “They brought color to a gray Continent.”

American troops in Italy brought refrigerators, revolutionizing culinary lives in a land that has always placed eating above fighting.

In the years since the war, American economic strength and Hollywood’s Technicolor dream merchants have consolidated this cultural beachhead.

Londoners shop at Safeway supermarkets, travelers arriving at Munich’s airport read--in English--”MasterCard, Your Key to Germany,” while the sounds of the Beach Boys’ “Help Me Rhonda” waft from a French army barracks in Strasbourg.

When asked last fall what bellwethers he monitored to detect new trends, senior Swedish government adviser Bjoern von Sydow responded, “The attitude of American TV producers, the attitudes in New York and California.”

Worried about the impact of new satellite television programming, some European authorities want to restrict American programming.

In nearly every important area of culture--in art, in science, in the humanities, in innovation and technology--the war eclipsed centuries of European dominance.

The center of Western culture shifted from Central Europe to the Anglo-Saxon world as the giants of modern thought--individuals such as psychologist Sigmund Freud, physicist Albert Einstein and architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius--fled the Continent in the gathering storm that preceded the war.

Writer on European affairs Timothy Garton Ash called the destruction of Central European culture one of the most tragic legacies of the war.

“It (World War II) destroyed irrevocably what Central Europe was for a thousand years: a coexistence of diverse cultures and peoples which was fraught with conflict but which was also incomparably creative,” Ash said. “I’m afraid that Central Europe in that sense may never be put together again.”

While some of these refugees stopped in Britain, the majority of Europe’s talent settled in the United States.

In the visual arts, men such as Fernand Leger, Andre Masson, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian and others fled Europe for New York, bringing with them a new dimension to American art. The result shifted the art world’s epicenter to America from Paris, where it had been for 300 years.

Inspired by direct exposure to such Europeans, young Americans of the 1940s such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell ignited a new school of Abstract Expressionism. Within half a generation, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and others explored new areas with the Pop Art movement.

“In America after the 1940s, a group of artists decided quite consciously and literally that the world leadership of art belonged to them,” said Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy of Art in London and an expert on 20th-Century art. “In a way, the story since then has been that of America trying to hold onto that leadership.

“These things happened gradually, and they might have happened anyway because European art was in a crisis during the 1930s,” Rosenthal added. “But they were certainly speeded up by the war.”

Much of Europe’s brain drain was tied to the exodus of Jews fleeing a Nazi persecution that with the onset of war would become a systematic genocide.

The Holocaust not only decimated an intelligentsia but virtually wiped out one of Europe’s most colorful, productive cultures.

Of the estimated 8.9 million Jews living in Europe when Hitler rose to power in 1933, roughly 6 million died before the war ended.

It is one of history’s supreme ironies that among those forced to flee Nazi Europe were the men whose brilliance helped find the weapon of ultimate Allied victory: the atom bomb.

The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war began a frightening new age, an age in which peace is kept as much by a balance of terror as by prudent diplomacy and the idea of “winning” a major war no longer applies.

The globe’s nuclear arsenal that totaled three warheads in the early summer of 1945 today exceeds 20,000.

In addition to its Jews, Central Europe lost another important fountainhead of vitality, its aristocracies, which were also purged.

Statistics reflect, at least in part, the toll of these events on Europe’s creative energies.

During the period between 1901 and 1938, citizens from 10 principal European nations (but excluding Britain) garnered 113 Nobel prizes, nearly five times the 23 such awards won by Americans.

During the 50 years since the outbreak of World War II, the ratio has been virtually reversed, with Americans awarded 150 Nobel prizes, compared to 64 won by the same 10 European countries.

In some areas, though, Europe retained its superiority.

The sensational New Look fashion unveiled on a cold February morning in 1947 by a daring but little-known French designer named Christian Dior shocked an impoverished Europe but instantly re-established Paris as a world fashion capital.

The level of Europe’s austerity was reflected in the anger that there simply was not enough fabric available to emulate Dior’s lavish creations.

Last month, when the Dior house presented a line with such striking similarities that it was dubbed the Nouveau New Look, one London newspaper noted only in passing that the average cost of an original creation was $17,000.

The end of war touched off a wave of idealism.

In Western Europe, it was socialism’s hour, with Britain and France rejecting heroic wartime leaders Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle in favor of new welfare states advocated by their opponents. West Germany’s Willy Brandt and Austria’s Bruno Kreisky, who had fled the Nazis, returned to their shattered lands from Scandinavian exile, eventually instilling similar ideals in their lands.

For the first time in Europe’s history, quality medical care, housing and education were within reach of the general population.

In the United States, President Harry S. Truman ordered the racial integration of military units, a pivotal step in a long march toward racial equality.

On a global scale, the desire to build a better world spawned such ideas as the United Nations, the World Bank, the Marshall Plan and the European Common Market--all of which have fulfilled their founders’ first goal: preventing another world war.

This postwar spirit also sowed the seeds of ideas that today push much of Western Europe toward greater cooperation.

Pooling West German and French steel production in 1950 under a higher independent authority may seem a modest idea by current standards, but the plan, cooked up by a senior French administrator named Jean Monnet, was visionary.

It laid the foundation of today’s European Community and began a reconciliation between France and Germany that stands as one of modern diplomacy’s greatest triumphs--a reconciliation that has blessed France with enhanced status and security, West Germany with legitimacy and Western Europe with an unaccustomed stability.

Carefully nurtured by successive leaders, the Franco-German rapprochement remains the motor of European unity.

“For me, this reconciliation is the most important legacy of the war,” said Simone Veil, who returned from Auschwitz as a young girl to eventually become a French Cabinet minister and, later, president of the European Parliament. “It has broken the cycle of hate.”

For Veil and many of her generation, younger Europeans who argue the need for greater unity on grounds of economic and political strength miss the point.

“The most important reason is that France and Germany are reconciled,” she said. “Even in Auschwitz, I knew it was the only way to peace.”

Fifty years after fascism propelled the world to war, Europe’s extreme political right has once again begun to stir, aroused in part by a nationalistic backlash to European unity and a racism awakened by the influx of mainly Muslim immigrants.

In West Germany, some commentators noted a certain ominous symmetry that the stunning electoral gains by ultra-rightist parties came in the month that marked the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s birth. Last month, members of the 12-nation European Parliament in Strasbourg walked out in protest against an aggressive speech by French National Front member Claude Autant-Lara.

So far, however, few judge the right wing as a serious threat.

“There is no support for what he stands for,” said Veil, one of those who walked out on Autant-Lara. “The danger isn’t from these extreme parties, but something much more subtle: that larger (centrist) parties begin to take on their ideas.”

But the very shape of Western Europe today, with its modest, tidy affluence, its welfare-for-all safety net and its polished democracies seem a negation of all that characterized the Fascist totalitarian ideal.

The centers of the New Europe--cities such as Brussels, Bonn and Strasbourg--hardly embody a region seething with aggressive discontent.

Indeed, many of those most steeped in the knowledge of Europe’s history are convinced that the experience of becoming the main battlefield of both world wars has sustained an overwhelming desire to prevent another, a desire that remains strong despite the passage of time.

“The whole image of war as a rather splendid thing, as a means of heroic self-fulfillment, which was there before 1914 and remained in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it’s all gone,” said Oxford historian Michael Howard.

“It’s simply gone.”

Times researcher Christine Courtney contributed to this article.

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

On Sept. 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland, touching off the Second World War. On Sept. 17, the Soviet Union attacked from the east, and the country fell to the invaders on Sept. 28.

The Baltic states were independent before the war, but a secret Soviet-German protocol paved the way for a Soviet takeover of the Baltics in return for giving Adolf Hitler a free hand to invade Poland.

Shaded area indicates farthest extent of Nazi Germany’s military conquests--to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad in the east, Norway and Denmark in the north, the English Channel in the West and (not shown) North Africa in the south.

A CONTINENT FORGED IN CONFLICT

Germany, once Europe’s giant, is today a fragmented nation as a result of its defeat at the hands of the World War II Allies.

The western sector is the Federal Republic, pro-Western and a linchpin of the Atlantic Alliance. To the east is the Democratic Republic, a major component of the Soviet Bloc. In addition, a large portion of eastern pre-war Germany is now a part of Poland. Isolated in East Germany is the old capital, Berlin, now itself divided.

All of Eastern Europe is now Communist, except for Poland, which is forming its first non-Communist government in 45 years. Most of the region’s countries, including Poland, fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. The two exceptions, Yugoslavia and Albania, operate independently of Moscow.

The Baltic states--Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia--although absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1940, are today the scene of an upsurge in nationalist feeling. The three Soviet republics are considered among the Kremlin’s most threatening trouble spots.