Seventy-five years ago, during the Christmas season of 1944, the people of western Europe had both reason for hope and reason for fear.

They had reason to hope because the Allies had landed in Normandy more than six months earlier and already liberated most of France, Belgium and southern Holland. Anyone who saw the well-fed and well-equipped Allied armies had every reason to expect that the war would finally be over before the end of 1945.

At that time, during the Liberation era, there was also cause to hope that the peace would be accompanied with new levels of social and economic justice.

But the war still raged and even those who had been freed from occupation months earlier had reasons to fear. Most of the Netherlands was still under occupation and was already well into the catastrophe of the Hunger Winter, a man-made famine imposed by the German occupation authorities on the Dutch population north of the rivers as punishment for their support of the resistance and the Allies. It would be many months before the Red Cross and the Allies were allowed to bring food to the Dutch.

On a smaller scale, there were still pockets of Occupation in France along the Atlantic coast. Distressingly, millions of Dutch, Belgian and French POWs, forced laborers and prisoners were trapped in the Third Reich as the Red Army battled their way towards Berlin from the east and the Allies fought towards Berlin from the west. Families at home had no news of their loved ones in the war zone.

In France, popular concern ran so high about the POWs, prisoners and forced laborers that de Gaulle’s provisional government outlawed public dancing until they returned. Actually, they continued Vichy’s policy against dancing in a time of national distress. Although there were certainly people who supported the measure, there were also plenty of other people who wanted to celebrate and to dance.

The more sober minded who may or may not have cared about dancing, could see that rations were getting shorter and coal was getting scarcer as 1944 turned into 1945. Mothers still had plenty to fear over the first Christmas after the Liberation. Even if they did not have a loved one in the Third Reich, they still could not feed, clothe or heat their families with any ease.
The people who were already liberated at Christmas of 1944 had cause for profound rejoicing to be free from the terror of Nazi Occupation. But they also had cause to fear that the transition from war to peace would be difficult in many ways, especially economic.