The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe
This history of Europe’s liberation in 1945 centers on what happened to civilians as, and after, the Allies overran Germany. An assiduous researcher, historian Hitchcock emphasizes personal stories, an effective tool for humanizing events that enveloped millions upon millions of traumatized survivors of Nazi brutality. The victims had to be fed and housed pending repatriation or resettlement, while their victimizers had to be dealt out justice. How well or poorly these imperatives were met courses through Hitchcock’s subtopics, which encompass civilian casualties in France and Belgium, improvised relief of starvation in the Netherlands, the performance of the Allies’ formal relief organization, the UNRRA, and the operation of displaced-persons camps. Hitchcock also considers whether German civilians were victims. In balancing context and the illustrative anecdote, Hitchcock successfully recovers—in contrast to the euphoria of victorious memory—the less enlightened acts and attitudes of the liberators toward the liberated, without, however, compromising the basic rightness of the Allied cause. This is history mined and written at a high level of quality, worthy of inclusion in any World War II collection. --Gilbert Taylor