12
Note though that the Protectorate of Bohemia was run in 1942 by just 1,900 German bureaucrats. In these as other respects, Czechoslovakia was at least partly western.
13
As late as 1960, 62 out of the 64 prefects responsible for Italy’s provincial administration had held office under Fascism, as had all 135 police chiefs.
14
The Domobran was the wartime Croatian Home Guard. Of course Tito’s Communist partisans had frequently behaved no better: but they won.
15
In 1946 the West German Landerrat (Council of regions) recommended to the Allied authorities that in view of current shortages in Germany, food rations for displaced persons be reduced. General Lucius Clay confined his reply to a reminder that the food in question was provided by other European nations, victims of Germany’s own war of aggression.
16
Stephan Hermlin,
17
The last armed Italian partisans were rounded up in a series of military operations around Bologna in the autumn of 1948.
18
Jean Monnet was born in Cognac in 1888, the son of a brandy merchant. Upon leaving school he spent many years living and working abroad, notably in London; after the First World War he was named Secretary General of the new League of Nations. He passed much of the Second World War in the US, negotiating arms supplies on behalf of the British government and the Free French. His devotion to economic planning and his later contribution to the Schuman Plan for European economic cooperation thus drew upon a familiarity with large-scale organization and inter-state collaboration that was strikingly unusual for a Frenchman of his class and time.
19
Quoted in Maureen Waller,
20
Note, though, that 4 out of 10 Communist voters in France were in favour of accepting Marshall Aid, despite the Party’s opposition. French suspicion of the Marshall Plan was not so much political as cultural; many people seem to have been especially offended by what were described as ‘des questionnaires insipides et nombreux’ emanating from American bureaucracies—a particularly irritating reminder of their subordination to an inferior civilisation.
21
The frontier between Poland and Soviet Russia as proposed by the British Foreign Secretary after the First World War.
22
Stalin had broken off relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943 following the latter’s demand for an international examination of the Katyn massacre. The Germans, who uncovered the site, correctly claimed that it was the location of a mass execution by the Soviets of captured Polish officers. The Soviet authorities and their Western supporters, then and for the next half century, angrily denied it.
23
India and some of the British overseas Dominions had substantial holdings in sterling, built up as credit during the war years especially. Had the pound been freely convertible into dollars in the immediate post-war era many of these holdings might have been run down, thus further weakening Britain’s already fragile stock of foreign exchange. That is why, after an initial, disastrous experiment with convertibility imposed from Washington as a condition for the US loan, Britain re-imposed sterling controls in 1947.
24
