After World War II a new era of tensions emerged based on opposing ideologies, mutual distrust between nations, and a nuclear arms race. This emerged into an environment dominated by a international balance of power that had changed significantly from the status quo before the war. A number of boundary disputes emerged in countries affected by the war, and the dwindling of power of the imperial nations such as Britain and France resulted in an increase in the demand for national self-determination in European colonial territories.
The immediate post-war period in Europe was dominated by the Soviet Union annexing, or converting into Soviet Socialist Republics[1][2][3], all the countries captured by the Red Army driving the German invaders out of central and eastern Europe. New Soviet satellite states rose in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary,[4] Czechoslovakia,[5] Romania,[6][7] Albania,[8] and East Germany; the last of these was created from the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany.[9] Yugoslavia emerged as an independent Communist state, allied but not aligned with the Soviet Union, owing to the independent nature of the military victory of the Partisans of Josip Broz Tito in the Yugoslav Front.
The Allies established the Far Eastern Commission and Allied Council For Japan to administer their occupation of that country. They demilitarised the nation, dismantled its arms industry, and installed a democratic government with a new constitution.
A similar body, the Allied Control Council, administered occupied Germany. In accordance with the Potsdam Conference agreements promising territorial concessions to the Soviet Union in the Far East in return for entering the war against Japan, the Soviet Union occupied and subsequently annexed the strategic island of Sakhalin.
Contents |
At the end of the war, millions of people were homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. The Soviet Union, too, had been heavily affected. In response, in 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall devised the "European Recovery Program", which became known as the Marshall Plan. Under the plan, during 1948-1952 the United States government allocated US$13 billion (US$128 billion in 2011 dollars) for the reconstruction of Western Europe.
By the end of the war, the economy of the United Kingdom was exhausted. More than a quarter of its national wealth had been spent. Until the introduction of Lend-Lease the UK had been spending its assets to purchase American equipment including aircraft and ships - over £437 million on aircraft alone. Lend-lease came just before its reserved were exhausted. Britain put 55% of its total labour force into in war production.
In Spring 1945, the Labour Party withdrew from the wartime coalition government, forcing a general election. Following a landslide victory, Labour held more than 60% of the seats in the House of Commons and formed a new government on 26 July 1945 under Clement Attlee.
Britain's war debt was described by some in the American administration as a "millstone round the neck of the British economy". Although there were suggestions for an international conference to tackle the issue, in August 1945 the U.S. announced unexpectedly that the Lend-Lease programme was to end immediately.
The abrupt withdrawal of American Lend Lease support to Britain on 2 September 1945 dealt a severe blow to the plans of the new government. It was only with the completion of the Anglo-American loan by the United States to Great Britain on 15 July 1946 that some measure of economic stability was restored. However, the loan was made primarily to support British overseas expenditure in the immediate post-war years and not to implement the Labour government's policies for domestic welfare reforms and the nationalisation of key industries. Although the loan was agreed on reasonable terms its conditions included what proved to be damaging fiscal conditions for Sterling. From 1946-1948 the UK had to introduce bread rationing which it had never had to do during the war.[10][11][12][13]
The Soviet Union suffered enormous losses in the war against Germany. The Soviet population decreased by about 40 million during the war; of these, 8.7 million were combat deaths. The 19 million non-combat deaths had a variety of causes: starvation in the siege of Leningrad; conditions in German prisons and concentration camps; mass shootings of civilians; harsh labour in German industry; famine and disease; conditions in Soviet camps; and service in German or German-controlled military units fighting the Soviet Union.[14] The population would not return to its pre-war level for 30 years.[15]
Soviet ex-POWs and civilians repatriated from abroad were suspected of having been Nazi collaborators, and 226,127 of them were sent to forced labour camps after scrutiny by Soviet intelligence, NKVD. Many ex-POWs and young civilians were also conscripted to serve in the Red Army. Others worked in labour battalions to rebuild infrastructure destroyed during the war.[16][17]
The economy had been devastated. Roughly a quarter of the Soviet Union's capital resources were destroyed, and industrial and agricultural output in 1945 fell far short of pre-war levels. To help rebuild the country, the Soviet government obtained limited credits from Britain and Sweden; it refused assistance offered by the United States under the Marshall Plan. Instead, the Soviet Union compelled Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to supply machinery and raw materials. Germany and former Nazi satellites made reparations to the Soviet Union. The reconstruction programme emphasised heavy industry to the detriment of agriculture and consumer goods. By 1953, steel production was twice its 1940 level, but the production of many consumer goods and foodstuffs was lower than it had been in the late 1920s.[18]
In the west, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. The Sudetenland reverted back to Czechoslovakia following the European Advisory Commission's decision to delimit German territory to be the territory it held on December 31, 1937. Close to one quarter of pre-war (1937) Germany was de facto annexed by the Allies; roughly 10 million Germans were either expelled from this territory or not permitted to return to it if they had fled during the war. The remainder of Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation, coordinated by the Allied Control Council. The Saar was detached and put in economic union with France in 1947. In 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was created out of the Western zones. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic.
Germany paid reparations to the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union, mainly in the form of dismantled factories, forced labour, and coal. German standard of living was to be reduced to its 1932 level.[19] Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years, the U.S. and Britain pursued an "intellectual reparations" programme to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany. The value of these amounted to around US$10 billion[20] (US$112 billion in 2011 dollars). In accordance with the Paris Peace Treaties, 1947, reparations were also assessed from the countries of Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland.
U.S. policy in post-war Germany from April 1945 until July 1947 had been that no help should be given to the Germans in rebuilding their nation, save for the minimum required to mitigate starvation. The Allies' immediate post-war "industrial disarmament" plan for Germany had been to destroy Germany's capability to wage war by complete or partial de-industrialization. The first industrial plan for Germany, signed in 1946, required the destruction of 1,500 manufacturing plants to lower German heavy industry output to roughly 50% of its 1938 level. Dismantling of West German industry ended in 1951. By 1950, equipment had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants, and steel production capacity had been reduced by 6.7 million tons.[21] After lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Generals Lucius D. Clay and George Marshall, the Truman administration accepted that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously had been dependent.[22] In July 1947, President Truman rescinded on "national security grounds"[23] the directive that had ordered the U.S. occupation forces to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." A new directive recognised that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."[24] From mid-1946 onwards Germany received U.S. government aid through the GARIOA programme. From 1948 onwards West Germany also became a minor beneficiary of the Marshall Plan. Volunteer organisations had initially been forbidden to send food, but in early 1946 the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany was founded. The prohibition against sending CARE Packages to individuals in Germany was rescinded on 5 June 1946.
After the German surrender, the International Red Cross was prohibited from providing aid such as food or visiting POW camps for Germans inside Germany. However, after making approaches to the Allies in the autumn of 1945 it was allowed to investigate the camps in the UK and French occupation zones of Germany, as well as to provide relief to the prisoners held there. On February 4, 1946, the Red Cross was permitted to visit and assist prisoners also in the U.S. occupation zone of Germany, although only with very small quantities of food. The Red Cross petitioned successfully for improvements to be made in the living conditions of German POWs.[25]
Austria was separated from Germany and divided into four zones of occupation. These zones reunited in 1955 to become the Republic of Austria.
After the war, the Allies rescinded Japanese pre-war annexations such as Manchuria, and Korea became independent. At the Yalta Conference, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had secretly traded the Japanese Kurils and south Sakhalin to the Soviet Union in return for Soviet entry in the war with Japan. [26] In response, the Soviet Union annexed the Kuril Islands, provoking the Kuril Islands dispute, which was ongoing as of 2011.
Hundreds of thousands of Japanese were forced to relocate to the Japanese main islands. Okinawa became a main U.S. staging point. The U.S. covered large areas of it with military bases and continued to occupy it until 1972, years after the end of the occupation of the main islands. The bases still remain. To skirt the Geneva Convention, the Allies classified many Japanese soldiers as Japanese Surrendered Personnel instead of POWs and used them as forced labour until 1947. The UK, France, and the Netherlands conscripted some Japanese troops to fight colonial resistances elsewhere in Asia. General Douglas MacArthur established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The Allies collected reparations from Japan.
To further remove Japan as a potential future military threat, the Far Eastern Commission decided to de-industrialise Japan, with the goal of reducing Japanese standard of living to what prevailed between 1930 and 1934.[27][28] In the end, the de-industrialisation program in Japan was implemented to a lesser degree than the one in Germany.[27] Japan received emergency aid from GARIOA, as did Germany. In early 1946, the Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia were formed and permitted to supply Japanese with food and clothes. In April 1948 the Johnston Committee Report recommended that the economy of Japan should be reconstructed due to the high cost to U.S. taxpayers of continuous emergency aid.
Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha (被爆者), were ostracized by Japanese society. Japan provided no special assistance to these people until 1952.[29] By the 65th anniversary of the bombings, total casualties from the initial attack and later deaths reached about 270,000 in Hiroshima[30] and 150,000 in Nagasaki.[31] About 230,000 hibakusha were still alive as of 2010,[30] and about 2,200 were suffering from radiation-caused illnesses as of 2007.[32]
In the Winter War of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded neutral Finland and annexed some of its territory. The Finnish attempt to recover this territory in the Continuation War of 1941-44 failed. Finland retained its independence following the war but remained subject to Soviet-imposed constraints in its domestic affairs.
In 1940 the Soviet Union invaded and annexed the neutral Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In June 1941, the Soviet governments of the Baltic states carried out mass deportations of "enemies of the people"; as a result, many treated the invading Nazis as liberators when they invaded only a week later.
The Atlantic Charter promised self-determination to peoples deprived of it during the war. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, argued for a weaker interpretation of the Charter to permit the Soviet Union to continue to control the Baltic states.[33] In March 1944 the U.S. accepted Churchill's view that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the Baltic states.[34]
With the return of Soviet troops at the end of the war, the Forest Brothers mounted a guerrilla war. This continued until the mid-1950s.
As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large populations suddenly found themselves in hostile territory. The Soviet Union took over areas formerly controlled by Germany, Finland, Poland, and Japan. Poland received most of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, including the industrial regions of Silesia. The German state of the Saar was temporarily a protectorate of France but later returned to German administration.
The number expelled from Germany, as set forth at Potsdam, totalled roughly 12 million, including seven million from Germany proper and three million from the Sudetenland. Mainstream estimates of casualties from the expulsions range between 500,000 and two million dead.
The Soviet Union expelled two million Poles from east of the new border approximating the Curzon Line. This border change reversed the results of the 1919-1920 Polish-Soviet War. Former Polish cities such as L'vov came under control of the of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Additionally, the Soviet Union transferred more than two million people within their own borders; these included Germans, Finns, Crimean Tatars, and Chechens.
During the war, the United States government interned approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.[35][36] Canada interned approximately 22,000 Japanese Canadians, 14,000 of whom were born in Canada. After the war, some internees chose to return to Japan, while most remained in North America.
As Soviet troops marched across the Balkans, they committed rapes and robberies in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.[37] The population of Bulgaria was largely spared this treatment, due possibly to a sense of ethnic kinship or to the leadership of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin.[37] The population of Germany was treated significantly worse.[38] Rape and murder of German civilians was as bad as, and sometimes worse than, Nazi propaganda had anticipated.[39][40] Political officers encouraged Soviet troops to seek revenge and terrorise the German population.[41] Estimates of the numbers of rapes committed by Soviet soldiers range from tens of thousands to two million.[42][43][44] About one-third of all German women in Berlin were raped by Soviet forces.[42] A substantial minority were raped multiple times.[44][45] In Berlin, contemporary hospital records indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 women were raped by Soviet troops.[44] About 10,000 of these women died, mostly by suicide.[42][44] Over 4.5 million Germans fled towards the West.[46] The Soviets initially had no rules against their troops fraternising with German women, but by 1947 they started to isolate their troops from the German population in an attempt to stop rape and robbery by the troops.[47] Not all Soviet soldiers participated in these activities.[48]
Foreign reports of Soviet brutality were denounced as false.[49] Rape, robbery, and murder were blamed on German bandits impersonating Soviet soldiers.[50] Some justified Soviet brutality towards German civilians based on previous brutality of German troops toward Russian civilians.[51] Until the reunification of Germany, East German histories virtually ignored the actions of Soviet troops, and Russian histories still tend to do so.[52] Reports of mass rapes by Soviet troops were often dismissed as anti-Communist propaganda or the normal byproduct of war.[42]
Rapes also occurred under other occupation forces, though the majority were committed by Soviet troops.[45] French Moroccan troops matched the behavior of Soviet troops when it came to rape, especially in the early occupations of Baden and Württemberg.[53] In a letter to the editor of TIME published in September 1945, an American army sergeant wrote, "Our own Army and the British Army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping ... This offensive attitude among our troops is not at all general, but the percentage is large enough to have given our Army a pretty black name, and we too are considered an army of rapists."[54] Robert Lilly’s analysis of military records led him to conclude about 14,000 rapes occurred in Britain, France and Germany at the hands of U.S. soldiers between 1942 to 1945.[55] Lilly assumed that only 5% of rapes by American soldiers were reported, making 17,000 GI rapes a possibility, while analysts estimate that 50% of (ordinary peace-time) rapes are reported.[56] Supporting Lilly's lower figure is the "crucial difference" that for World War II military rapes "it was the commanding officer, not the victim, who brought charges".[56]
German soldiers left many war children behind in nations such as France and Denmark, which were occupied for an extended period. After the war, the children and their mothers often suffered recriminations. In Norway, the “Tyskerunger“ (German-kids) suffered greatly.[57][58]
The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate even before the war was over,[59] when Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill exchanged a heated correspondence over whether the Polish Government in Exile, backed by Roosevelt and Churchill, or the Provisional Government, backed by Stalin, should be recognised. Stalin won.[60]
A number of allied leaders felt that war between the United States and the Soviet Union was likely. On May 19, 1945, American Under-Secretary of State Joseph Grew went so far as to say that it was inevitable.[61][62]
On March 5, 1946, in his "Sinews of Peace" (Iron Curtain) speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill said "a shadow" had fallen over Europe. He described Stalin as having dropped an "Iron Curtain" between East and West. Stalin responded by charging that co-existence between Communist and capitalist systems was impossible.[63] In mid-1948 the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on the Western zone of occupation in Berlin.
Due to the rising tension in Europe and concerns over further Soviet expansion, American planners came up with a contingency plan code-named Operation Dropshot in 1949. It considered possible nuclear and conventional war with the Soviet Union and its allies in order to counter a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, the Near East and parts of Eastern Asia that they anticipated would begin around 1957. In response, the U.S. would saturate the Soviet Union with atomic and high-explosive bombs, and then invade and occupy the country.[64] In later years, to reduce military expenditures while countering Soviet conventional strength, President Dwight Eisenhower would adopt a strategy of massive retaliation, relying on the threat of a U.S. nuclear strike to prevent non-nuclear incursions by the Soviet Union in Europe and elsewhere. The approach entailed a major buildup of U.S. nuclear forces and a corresponding reduction in America's non-nuclear ground and naval strength.[65][66] The Soviet Union viewed these developments as "atomic blackmail".[67]
In Greece, civil war broke out in 1947 between Anglo-American-supported royalist forces and communist-led forces, with the royalist forces emerging as the victors.[68] The U.S. launched a massive programme of military and economic aid to Greece and to neighbouring Turkey, arising from a fear that the Soviet Union stood on the verge of breaking through the NATO defence line to the oil-rich Middle East. On March 12, 1947, to gain Congressional support for the aid, U.S. President Harry Truman described the aid as promoting democracy in defence of the "free world", a principle that became known as the Truman Doctrine.[69]
The U.S. sought to promote an economically strong and politically united Western Europe to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union. This was done openly using tools such as the European Recovery Program, which encouraged European economic integration. The International Authority for the Ruhr, designed to keep German industry down and controlled, evolved into the European Coal and Steel Community, a founding pillar of the European Union. The United States also worked covertly to promote European integration, for example using the American Committee on United Europe to funnel funds to European federalist movements. In order to ensure that Western Europe could withstand the Soviet military threat, the Western European Union was founded in 1948 and NATO in 1949. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, famously stated the organisation's goal was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down". However, without the manpower and industrial output of West Germany no conventional defence of Western Europe had any hope of succeeding. To remedy this, in 1950 the U.S. sought to promote the European Defence Community, which would have included a rearmed West Germany. The attempt was dashed when the French Parliament rejected it. On May 9, 1955, West Germany was instead admitted to NATO; the immediate result was the creation of the Warsaw Pact five days later.
The Cold War also saw the creation of propaganda and espionage organisations such as Radio Free Europe, the Information Research Department, the Gehlen Organization, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Special Activities Division, and the Ministry for State Security.
In Asia, the surrender of Japanese forces was complicated by the split between East and West as well as by the movement toward national self-determination in European colonial territories.
At the Yalta Conference the Allies agreed that an undivided post-war Korea would be placed under four-power multinational trusteeship. After Japan's surrender, this agreement was modified to a joint Soviet-American occupation of Korea.[70] The agreement was that Korea would be divided and occupied by the Soviets from the north and the Americans from the south.[71]
Korea, formerly under Japanese rule, and which had been partially occupied by the Red Army following the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan, was divided at the 38th parallel on the orders of the U.S. War Department.[70][72] A U.S. military government in southern Korea was established in the capital city of Seoul.[73][74] The American military commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, enlisted many former Japanese administrative officials to serve in this government.[75] North of the military line, the Soviets administered the disarming and demobilisation of repatriated Korean nationalist guerrillas who had fought on the side of Chinese nationalists against the Japanese in Manchuria during World War II. Simultaneously, the Soviets enabled a build-up of heavy armaments to pro-communist forces in the north.[76] The military line became a political line in 1948, when separate republics emerged on both sides of the 38th parallel, each republic claiming to be the legitimate government of Korea. It culminated in the north invading the south, and the Korean War two years later.
The Kuomintang (KMT) party and Communist Chinese forces resumed their civil war, which had been temporarily suspended when they fought together against Japan. Despite U.S. support to the Kuomintang, Communist forces were ultimately victorious and established the People's Republic of China on the mainland. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan.
Labour and civil unrest broke out in the British colony of Malaya in 1946. A state of emergency was declared by the colonial authorities in 1948 with the outbreak of acts of terrorism. The situation deteriorated into a full-scale anti-colonial insurgency, or Anti-British National Liberation War as the insurgents referred to it, led by the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military wing of the Malayan Communist Party.[77] The Emergency would endure for the next 12 years, ending in 1960. In 1967, communist leader Chin Peng revived hostilities, known as the Communist Insurgency War, ending in the defeat of the communists by British Commonwealth forces in 1969.
France retook French Indochina, which had fallen to Japan during the war. Following the reoccupation, the Việt Minh launched a rebellion against the French authorities, who were backed by the U.S.
Japan invaded and occupied Indonesia during the war and replaced much of the Dutch colonial state. Although the top positions were held by Japanese, the internment of all Dutch citizens meant that Indonesians filled many leadership and administrative positions. Following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence. A four and a half-year struggle followed as the Dutch tried to re-establish their colony, using a significant portion of their Marshall Plan aid to this end.[78] The Dutch were directly helped by UK forces who sought to re-establish the colonial dominions in Asia. The UK also kept 35,000 Japanese Surrendered Personnel under arms to fight the Indonesians.
Although Dutch forces re-occupied most of Indonesia's territory a guerrilla struggle ensued, and the majority of Indonesians, and ultimately international opinion, favoured Indonesian independence. In December 1949, the Netherlands formally recognised Indonesian sovereignty.
British covert operations in the Baltic States, which began in 1944 against the Nazis, escalated after the war. In Operation Jungle, the Secret Intelligence Service (known as MI6) recruited and trained Balts for the clandestine work in the Baltic states between 1948 and 1955. Leaders of the operation included Alfons Rebane, Stasys Žymantas, and Rūdolfs Silarājs. The agents were transported under the cover of the "British Baltic Fishery Protection Service". They launched from British-occupied Germany, using a converted World War II E-boat captained and crewed by former members of the wartime German navy.[79] British intelligence also trained and infiltrated anti-communist agents into Russia from across the Finnish border, with orders to assassinate Soviet officials.[80] In the end, counter-intelligence supplied to the KGB by Kim Philby allowed the KGB to penetrate and ultimately gain control of MI6's entire intelligence network in the Baltic states.[81]
Vietnam and the Middle East would later damage the reputation gained by the US during its successes in Europe.[82]
The KGB believed that the Third World rather than Europe was the arena in which it could win the Cold War.[83] Moscow would in later years fuel an arms buildup in Africa. In later years, African countries used as proxies in the Cold War would often become "failed states" of their own.[82]
When the divisions of postwar Europe began to emerge, the war crimes programmes and denazification policies of Britain and the United States were relaxed in favour of recruiting German scientists, especially nuclear and long-range rocket scientists.[84] Many of these, prior to their capture, had worked on developing the German V-2 long-range rocket at the Baltic coast German Army Research Center Peenemünde. Western Allied occupation force officers in Germany were ordered to refuse to cooperate with the Soviets in sharing captured wartime secret weapons.[85]
In Operation Paperclip, beginning in 1945, the United States imported 1,600 German scientists and technicians, as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the U.S. and the UK, including about $10 billion (US$112 billion in 2011 dollars) in patents and industrial processes.[86] In late 1945, three German rocket-scientist groups arrived in the U.S. for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as “War Department Special Employees”.[87]
The wartime activities of some Operation Paperclip scientists would later be investigated.[88] Arthur Rudolph left the United States in 1984,in order to not be prosecuted.[89] Similarly, Georg Rickhey, who came to the United States under Operation Paperclip in 1946, was returned to Germany to stand trial at the Mittelbau-Dora war crimes trial in 1947. Following his acquittal, he returned to the United States in 1948 and eventually became a U.S. citizen.[90]
The Soviets began Operation Osoaviakhim in 1946. NKVD and Soviet army units effectively deported thousands of military-related technical specialists from the Soviet occupation zone of post-war Germany to the Soviet Union.[91] The Soviets used 92 trains to transport the specialists and their families, an estimated 10,000-15,000 people.[92] Much related equipment was also moved, the aim being to virtually transplant research and production centres, such as the relocated V-2 rocket centre at Mittelwerk Nordhausen, from Germany to the Soviet Union. Among the people moved were Helmut Gröttrup and about two hundred scientists and technicians from Mittelwerk.[93] Personnel were also taken from AEG, BMW's Stassfurt jet propulsion group, IG Farben's Leuna chemical works, Junkers, Schott AG, Siebel, Telefunken, and Carl Zeiss AG.[94]
The operation was commanded by NKVD deputy Colonel General Serov,[91] outside the control of the local Soviet Military Administration.[95] The major reason for the operation was the Soviet fear of being condemned for noncompliance with Allied Control Council agreements on the liquidation of German military installations.[96] Some Western observers thought Operation Osoaviakhim was a retaliation for the failure of the Socialist Unity Party in elections, though Osoaviakhim was clearly planned before that.[97]
As a general consequence of the war and in an effort to maintain international peace,[98] the Allies formed the United Nations, which officially came into existence on October 24, 1945.[99] The UN adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, "as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations." The Soviet Union abstained from voting on adoption of the declaration. The U.S. did not ratify the social and economic rights sections.[100]
By the end of the war, the European economy had collapsed with 70% of the industrial infrastructure destroyed.[101] The property damage in the Soviet Union consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, and 31,850 industrial establishments.[102] The strength of the economic recovery following the war varied throughout the world, though in general it was quite robust. In Europe, West Germany, after having continued to decline economically during the first years of the Allied occupation, later experienced a remarkable recovery, and had by the end of the 1950s doubled production from its pre-war levels.[103] Italy came out of the war in poor economic condition,[104] but by 1950s, the Italian economy was marked by stability and high growth.[105] France rebounded quickly and enjoyed rapid economic growth and modernisation under the Monnet Plan.[106] The UK, by contrast, was in a state of economic ruin after the war[107] and continued to experience relative economic decline for decades to follow.[108]
The Soviet Union also experienced a rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era.[109] Japan experienced rapid economic growth, becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world by the 1980s.[110] China, following the conclusion of its civil war, was essentially bankrupt. By 1953, economic restoration seemed fairly successful as production had resumed pre-war levels.[111] This growth rate mostly persisted, though it was interrupted by economic experiments during the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
At the end of the war, the United States produced roughly half of the world's industrial output. This dominance had lessened significantly by the early 1970s.[112]