pbWinner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize pA superb and immensely important book.--Jonathan Yardley, bbiThe Washington Post piThe Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years... pbThe end of World War II in Europe is remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, but the reality was quite different. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed, and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted--such as police, media, transport, and local and national government--were either entirely absent or compromised. Crime rates soared, economies collapsed, and whole populations hovered on the brink of starvation. p In iSavage Continenti, Keith Lowe describes a continent where individual Germans and collaborators were rounded up and summarily executed, where concentration camps were reopened, and violent anti-Semitism was reborn. In some of t