IB History Economic Factors Notes

Collapsed Economies: Why People Had No Reason to Stay

1. The Second World War destroyed the economic foundations of European life.
   1. Currencies lost their value, banks failed, trade routes were severed, and the systems that had sustained employment, food distribution, and housing simply stopped functioning.
   2. For millions of people, displacement was not a choice but a consequence of having nothing left to stay for.
2. Economic displacement operated differently from flight caused by combat or persecution.
   1. People moved because their homes were rubble, because there was no work, because food had run out, or because new political regimes seized their land.
   2. These economic pressures often worked alongside military and political ones, making it impossible to separate a single cause for any individual's displacement.

War Economies Drained Every Resource

1. Every belligerent nation redirected its economy toward the war effort.
2. Britain spent over 50% of its gross national product on the war by 1943.
   1. Germany extracted resources from every occupied territory through a system of occupation economics, forcing conquered nations to supply raw materials, manufactured goods, and labour.
   2. France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and others saw their industrial output redirected to serve German military needs.
3. By 1945, these economies had been hollowed out.
   1. Factories that survived bombing had been stripped of machinery or reconfigured for military production.
   2. Farmland had been neglected, mined, or fought over.
   3. The infrastructure needed to restart civilian economic life, from railways to power stations, was wrecked across the continent.

Physical Destruction Made Millions Homeless

1. The war brought unprecedented destruction to civilian areas.
   1. Strategic bombing campaigns targeted cities on both sides.
   2. Hamburg, Dresden, Coventry, and Warsaw were devastated.
   3. Entire towns like Lidice in Czechoslovakia were razed as reprisals.
2. By the war's end, 75% of buildings in central Berlin were uninhabitable.
3. The scale of homelessness was staggering.
   1. In Germany alone, 20 million structures were damaged or destroyed.
   2. Hamburg had 500,000 homeless residents.
   3. France lost 500,000 dwellings.
   4. The Soviet Union saw 70,000 villages and 1,700 towns destroyed.
   5. In Greece, over 1,000 villages were burned.

Infrastructure Collapse Cut Off Entire Regions

1. Destruction of transport networks made recovery almost impossible.
2. France's locomotive fleet dropped from 12,000 to 2,800.
   1. Bridges, roads, and rail lines were systematically demolished during retreats or targeted by bombing.
   2. Without functioning transport, food could not reach cities, workers could not reach jobs, and displaced people could not return home even if their homes still stood.
3. The Netherlands suffered the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 after German forces cut off food supplies to the western provinces as punishment for a Dutch railway strike.
   1. Thousands starved.
   2. The Soviet Union lost 32,000 factories, 40,000 miles of railway, and much of its agricultural capacity.
   3. Yugoslavia lost 25% of its vineyards, 50% of its livestock, 60% of its roads, and 75% of its ploughs.

Civilian Casualties Left Communities Unable to Function

1. The war killed civilians on a scale that crippled entire societies.
2. Poland lost 5.7 million civilians.
   1. The Soviet Union lost 13.5 million.
   2. Yugoslavia lost 1 million.
   3. Even smaller nations suffered heavily: Greece lost 325,000, Hungary 450,000, and the Netherlands 325,000.
3. These losses meant that communities lacked the people needed to rebuild.
   1. Entire age cohorts of working-age men were gone.
   2. The war also created enormous numbers of orphans: 200,000 in Poland, 300,000 in Yugoslavia, 60,000 in the Netherlands, and 49,000 in Czechoslovakia.
   3. Many of these children became displaced persons themselves, cared for by relief agencies rather than families.

Labour Shortages Slowed Recovery Everywhere

1. With millions dead, imprisoned, or still in military service, post-war Europe faced severe labour shortages.
   1. Women had taken over farming and factory work during the war, but the scale of destruction required far more workers than were available.
   2. As soldiers were demobilized (discharged from military service), they returned to find their former workplaces destroyed.
2. Governments and relief agencies recruited displaced persons and former prisoners of war to fill labour gaps.
   1. This created a paradox: DPs were needed for reconstruction, but the regions that needed them most often lacked the housing and food to support them.
   2. Labour shortages both resulted from and contributed to continued displacement.

Food Shortages and Disease Forced People to Move

1. Destroyed farmland, broken supply chains, and collapsed transport networks led to widespread food shortages across Europe.
   1. Official rations were often inadequate, pushing people toward black markets (illegal trade networks where goods were sold above official prices).
   2. People travelled long distances to find food, bartering possessions for basic supplies.
2. Malnutrition made populations vulnerable to disease.
   1. Trachoma (a bacterial eye infection that can cause blindness) spread through refugee camps in Greece.
   2. Dysentery was widespread in Berlin.
   3. Diphtheria and typhus swept through overcrowded camps and damaged cities.
3. In Warsaw, tuberculosis infection rates reached 20%.
   1. Disease outbreaks in turn drove further displacement as people fled affected areas or were moved by authorities trying to contain epidemics.

Land Redistribution Displaced Millions More

1. The redrawing of borders after 1945 triggered large-scale land redistribution.
   1. Populations that had lived on the same land for generations were displaced when territory changed hands.
   2. German-speaking communities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary lost their property as those states expelled ethnic Germans and redistributed their farms and businesses to the majority population.
2. In Eastern Europe, the spread of Soviet influence brought collectivized agriculture, a system in which private farms were merged into large state-controlled or cooperative units.
   1. Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia all implemented collectivization programs between 1945 and the early 1950s.
3. Collectivization displaced landowners, tenant farmers, and agricultural workers who either resisted the new system or were deemed class enemies by communist authorities.
   1. Many fled west.
   2. Others were forcibly relocated to collective farms or industrial centres.
   3. The economic transformation of Eastern Europe under Soviet-aligned governments became one of the major drivers of displacement in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
4. The Marshall Plan of 1947 tied continued US economic aid to political stability, gradually easing the shortages that had pushed people to move.