For most people in the defeated nations life was desperate. There were several million displaced persons in Germany, many of them slave labourers like Buruma père, others fleeing before the Soviet tide. Women, when not being raped, could at least sell their bodies. Men generally had less to offer, though enormous black markets sprang up everywhere which gave some scope to the fleet of foot. There was a symbiosis between well-meaning Allied relief efforts and the new gangsters.

Germans and Japanese had to come to terms not only with their defeat but with the realities of the immediate past. Oddly, this seems to have been easier in Japan, where there was wide revulsion against the raw militarism that had left the nation a broken wreck. It may have helped also that postwar Japan was firmly an American responsibility, and that responsibility lay with one man: General Douglas MacArthur, who had the right mixture of vanity, self-belief and determination to make the Japanese dance to a new and partly progressive tune.

In both the defeated Axis nations, the conquerors had to make decisions about whom to punish and whom to rehabilitate. Nuremberg and some high profile Japanese trials apart, the Allies soon accommodated themselves to the reality that they needed to employ former enemies with questionable wartime records if they were going to rebuild effectively.

Amid the overwhelming human wreckage, the surviving Jews found themselves in the most poignant position. Those who had endured the camps were often told to keep their heads down and get on with their lives. It is no wonder that Zionism and the promise of an independent Israel loomed ever larger.

Jewish migration to Mandate Palestine was a particular challenge for the British, who faced an impossible balancing act around the world: the duty to restore order while adapting themselves to their post-imperial role, especially in the light of the overwhelming Labour victory in July 1945.