1945 was chaos, not liberation

The images of joyful crowds obscure what Judt insists on: Europe in 1945 was a landscape of rubble, starvation, and displaced people numbering in the tens of millions. Cities lacked functioning sewage, currency, or food distribution. Ethnic Germans were expelled en masse from Eastern Europe in brutal marches that killed hundreds of thousands, a population transfer of a scale rarely acknowledged in triumphant narratives.

Judt's point is that recovery wasn't a switch flipped by victory — it was years of grinding, uncertain administration by occupying armies and skeleton governments unsure whether famine or civil war would come first. Contemporaries did not know they were living through a prelude to prosperity; they assumed continued catastrophe was equally likely.

Treating 1945 as an ending rather than the chaotic opening of a new, uncertain chapter distorts how contingent everything that followed actually was.

Takeaway: recoveries that look inevitable in hindsight were experienced as coin-flips at the time.