Rules about capitalizing east/East, northwards/Northwards etc.?

In a text about Jews fleeing Romania during WWII, when do I capitalize things like:

All these relatives fled East/east and North/north from the German and Romanian armies
The Germans marched from the west/West into Russia
France was split in two: the northern/Northerm part, including occupied Paris, and the southern/Southern part (Vichy).

And simple things like -
At this point the boulevard ran from east to west, parallel to the river.

But also -
In 1944 we became “allies” of the West.
(Was there even a division into blocs then?)

Yours confusedly.

I would only capitalize the last one.

I don't know what it means. Anyone who became allied with the US and the UK in 1944 also became allied with the USSR. (Footnote) And Germany and Italy are west of the USSR, where most of the fighting was going on.

Footnote: Unless they declared war only on Japan, and not on Germany. But I don't think anyone did that in 1944.

I see all sorts of words being capitalized these days – the most irritating ones are those mergers of two words with a capital letter in the middle of the word.

North, east, south and west within a text should not be capitalized in the sample text you provided. The words would be capitalized when they are forming terms such as North Sea or East Africa etc. Same applies to “the East” (countries lying to the east of Europe, e.g. India or China), “the West” as VinnyD pointed out or “the East”, i.e. the former communist states of eastern Europe.

Yes, don't capitalize for ordinary location or direction, only for proper names, and when the direction is a metonym for a political (or quasi-political) entity. Besides Cold War references to the West and the East, in the United States it was the North that fought the South during the Civil War.

Where it gets a little grey is that in the US we also capitalize broad geographic regions (e.g. "Chicago is biggest city in the Midwest" or "I've lived in the West all my life.").

Edited by: zashibis

The examples in the OP are pretty straightforward.

But I've noticed that some newspapers can't make their mind up re "Western governments" vs "western governments".

Thanks, everyone. Wonder why I had doubts in the first place. Perhaps South (ah) Africans are wont to write things like "I'm going up North for the holidays".

"Western governments" should be capitalized because it refers to a group of countries in "the West".

(See this typical example. 3 out of 10. That's the spanner in the brainworks.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22going<i>up+north%22+za&oq=%22going+up+north%22+za&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65l3j0l2.3390j0&sourceid=chrome&espvd=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=93&q=%22up+north%22+joburg</i>-johannesburg

(And it seems now there's quite a bit of it in the opposite direction, too:)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22going<i>down+south+for+the+holidays%22&oq=%22going+down+south+for+the+holidays%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.7829j0&sourceid=chrome&espvd=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=93&q=%22going+down+south%22+cape</i>town

(Fancy that. I never realized it was an SA thing.)

"Western governments" should be capitalized because it refers to a group of countries in "the West".

Yes, the logic of that is not beyond me.

Some newspapers have their own way of thinking.

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AnQxRM0X1VClTzYLvRaOaxc4hJp4;_ylc=X1MDMjAyMzM5MjMxMgRfcgMyBGZyA3lmcC10LTcwMgRuX2dwcwMwBG9yaWdpbgN1ay55YWhvby5jb20EcXVlcnkDc2l0ZTpndWFyZGlhbi5jby51ayAid2VzdGVybiBnb3Zlcm5tZW50cyIEc2FvAzE-?p=site%3Aguardian.co.uk<i>%22western</i>governments%22&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-702