The legacy of war. Physical destruction ; Absence ; Displacement ; Famine ; Moral destruction ; Hope ; Landscape of chaos -- Vengeance. The thirst for blood ; The camps liberated ; Vengeance restrained : slave labourers ; German prisoners of war ; Vengeance unrestrained : Eastern Europe ; The enemy within ; Revenge on women and children ; The purpose of vengeance -- Ethnic cleansing. Wartime choices ; The Jewish flight ; The ethnic cleansing of Ukraine and Poland ; The expulsion of the Germans ; Europe in microcosm : Yugoslavia ; Western tolerance, Eastern intolerance -- Civil war. Wars within wars ; Political violence in France and Italy ; The Greek Civil War ; Cuckoo in the nest : Communism in Romania ; The subjugation of Eastern Europe ; The resistance of the 'Forest Brothers' ; The Cold War mirror

Recounts the disorder in Europe after World War II, describing the brutal acts against Germans and collaborators, the anti-Semitic beliefs that reemerged, and the Allied-tolerated expulsions of citizens from their ancestral homelands