With no system to keep law and order in place, people could get away with anything and there was a big wave of crime and violence across Europe, particularly revenge killings. There was no real government, no police force, no transport infrastructure – there was nothing. The first thing to say is that all of the institutions that had been taken for granted before the war had been swept away. What were the consequences of this and how long did the chaos last? That’s the general atmosphere that existed when formal hostilities ended. They were so used to seeing violence and destruction around them that they had begun to look at it as something that was quite normal. People didn’t really know what was right and wrong any more. There was also a sense of moral destruction across the continent. More than 35 million people had been killed and there was physical destruction everywhere. There were literally millions of displaced people wandering around not knowing where to go. Perhaps you could describe for us continental Europe in the months and years immediately after VE Day in May 1945, the date when hostilities officially ended.Įurope, after what we call the ending of the war, was a continent in complete chaos. It’s very convenient to think of wars as having neat beginnings and endings but that’s rarely the case, especially World War II. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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