Year Zero: A History of 1945

During the so-called wild purge (l’épuration sauvage) in France, which took place in 1944, before the war was even over, about six thousand people were killed as German collaborators and traitors by various armed bands with links to the resistance, often communists. Double that number of women were paraded around, stripped naked, their heads shaven, swastikas daubed on various parts of their anatomy. They were jeered at, spat on, and otherwise tormented. Some were locked up in improvised jails, and raped by their jailers. More than two thousand women were killed. Similar scenes, though not nearly on the same scale, took place in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and other countries liberated from German occupation. Sometimes, the naked women were tarred and feathered in the traditional manner of vengeful mobs.

And so the Korean People’s Republic was doomed. What followed was a tragedy. The country would effectively be split into two, with Kim Il-sung in charge of the provisional Communist Party government in North Korea, and Rhee controlling the South. Keene’s Korean friends in Tsingtao soon proved to be more correct than even they could possibly have anticipated. The ghastly Korean War, started by an invasion from the North in 1950, ended in a stalemate after more than two million civilian deaths. Seoul, having survived World War II more or less intact, lay in ruins, as did Pyongyang in the North. The North continued to be ruled by a tyrannical quasi-imperial dynasty, and the South endured decades of military rule.