by Tony Judt
‘Resistance’, in short, was a protean and unclear category, in some places an invented one. But ‘collaboration’ was another matter. Collaborators could be universally identified and execrated. They were men and women who worked or slept with the occupier, who threw in their lot with Nazis or Fascists, who opportunistically pursued political or economic advantage under cover of war. Sometimes they were a religious or national or linguistic minority and thus already despised or feared for other reasons; and although ‘collaboration’ was not a pre-existing crime with legal definitions and stated penalties, collaborators could plausibly be charged with treason, a real crime carrying satisfactorily severe punishment.
The punishment of collaborators (real and imagined) began before the fighting ended. Indeed it had been going on throughout the war, on an individual basis or under instructions from underground resistance organizations. But in the interval between the retreat of the German armies and the establishment of effective control by Allied governments, popular frustrations and personal vendettas, often coloured by political opportunism and economic advantage, led to a brief but bloody cycle of score-settling. In France some 10,000 people were killed in ‘extrajudicial’ proceedings, many of them by independent bands of armed resistance groups, notably the Milices Patriotiques, who rounded up suspected collaborators, seized their property and in many cases shot them out of hand.
About a third of those summarily executed in this way were dispatched before the Normandy landings of June 6th 1944, and most of the others fell victim during the next four months of fighting on French soil. If anything, the numbers are rather low considering the level of mutual hatred and suspicion abroad in France after four years of occupation and Marshall Pétain’s regime at Vichy; no-one was surprised at the reprisals—in the words of one elderly former French prime minister, Edouard Herriot, ‘France will need first to pass through a blood bath before republicans can again take up the reins of power’.
The same sentiment was felt in Italy, where reprisals and unofficial retribution, especially in the Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions, resulted in death tolls approaching 15,000 in the course of the last months of the war—and continued, sporadically, for at least three more years. Elsewhere in western Europe the degree of bloodshed was much lower—in Belgium about 265 men and women were lynched or executed in this way, in the Netherlands less than 100. Other forms of revenge were widespread, however. Accusations against women, for what French-speaking cynics were already calling ‘collaboration horizontale’, were very common: ‘moffenmeiden’ in the Netherlands were tarred and feathered, and all over France there were scenes of women stripped and shaved in public squares, often on the day of local liberation from the occupiers or very shortly thereafter.
The frequency with which women were charged—often by other women—with consorting with Germans is revealing. There was some truth to many of the accusations: offering sexual services in exchange for food or clothing or personal help of one kind or another was one avenue, often the only one, open to women and families in desperate straits. But the popularity of the charge and the vindictive pleasure taken in the punishment is a reminder that for men and women alike the occupation was experienced above all as a humiliation. Jean-Paul Sartre would later describe collaboration in distinctly sexual terms, as ‘submission’ to the power of the occupier, and in more than one French novel of the 1940s collaborators are depicted as either women or weak (‘effeminate’) men, seduced by the masculine charms of their Teutonic rulers. Wreaking revenge on fallen women was one way to overcome the discomforting memory of personal and collective powerlessness.
Anarchic acts of retributive violence in liberated eastern Europe were also widespread but took different forms. In the West the Germans had actively sought collaborators; in occupied Slav lands they ruled directly and by force. The only collaboration they encouraged on a sustained basis was that of local separatists, and even then only so long as it served German ends. As a result, once the Germans retreated the first victims of spontaneous retribution in the East were ethnic minorities. The Soviet forces and their local allies did nothing to discourage this. On the contrary, spontaneous score-settling (some of it not altogether unprompted) contributed towards a further removal of local elites and politicians who might prove an impediment to post-war Communist ambitions. In Bulgaria, for example, the newly-constituted Fatherland Front encouraged unofficial retribution against wartime collaborators of all colours, invoking the charge of ‘Fascist sympathiser’ on a wholesale basis and inviting denunciations of anyone suspected of pro-Western sentiments.
In Poland, the main target of popular vengeance was frequently Jews—150 Jews were killed in liberated Poland in the first four months of 1945. By April 1946 the figure was nearly 1,200. Attacks on a smaller scale took place in Slovakia (at Velké Topolčany in September 1945) and in Kunmadaras (Hungary) in May 1946, but the worst pogrom occurred in Kielce (Poland), on July 4th 1946, where 42 Jews were murdered and many more injured following a rumour of the abduction and ritual murder of a local child. In a sense these, too, were reprisals against collaborators, for in the eyes of many Poles (including former anti-Nazi partisans) Jews were suspected of sympathy for the Soviet occupiers.
The exact number of people killed in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, or in Yugoslavia, during the first months of ‘unauthorised’ purging and killing is not known. But nowhere did the unregulated settling of accounts last very long. It was not in the interest of fragile new governments, far from universally accepted and often distinctly makeshift, to allow armed bands to roam the countryside arresting, torturing and killing at will. The first task of the new authorities was to assert a monopoly of force, legitimacy and the institutions of justice. If anyone was to be arrested and charged with crimes committed during the occupation, this was the responsibility of the appropriate authorities. If there were to be trials, they should take place under the rule of law. If there was to be bloodletting, then this was the exclusive affair of the state. This transition took place as soon as the new powers felt strong enough to disarm the erstwhile partisans, impose the authority of their own police and damp down popular demands for harsh penalties and collective punishment.
The disarming of the resisters proved surprisingly uncontentious in western and central Europe at least. A blind eye was turned to murders and other crimes already committed in the frenzied liberation months: the provisional government of Belgium issued an amnesty for all offences committed by and in the name of the Resistance for a period of 41 days following the official date of the country’s liberation. But it was tacitly understood by all that newly re-constituted institutions of government must take upon themselves the task of punishing the guilty.
Here the problems began. What was a ‘collaborator’? With whom had they collaborated and to what end? Beyond straightforward cases of murder or theft, of what were ‘collaborators’ guilty? Someone had to pay for the suffering of the nation, but how was that suffering to be defined and who could be assigned responsibility for it? The shape of these conundrums varied from country to country but the general dilemma was a common one: there was no precedent for the European experience of the preceding six years.
In the first place, any law addressing the actions of collaborators with the Germans would necessarily be retroactive—before 1939 the crime of ‘collaboration with the occupier’ was unknown. There had been previous wars in which occupying armies sought and obtained cooperation and assistance from the people whose land they had overrun, but except in very particular instances—like that of the Flemish nationalists in German-occupied Belgium during 1914-18—this was regarded not as an invitation to crime but simply as part of the collateral damage of war.
As noted, the only sense in which the crime of collaboration could be said to fall under existing law was when it amounted to treason. To take a representative instance, many collaborators in France—whatever the details of their behaviour—were brought to trial and convicted under Arti
cle 75 of the 1939 Penal Code, for ‘intelligence with the enemy’. But men and women brought before French courts had often worked not for the Nazis but rather with the regime of Vichy, led and administered by Frenchmen and ostensibly the legitimate heir to the pre-war French state. Here, as in Slovakia, Croatia, the Protectorate of Bohemia, Mussolini’s Social Republic at Salò, Marshal Ion Antonescu’s Romania and in wartime Hungary, collaborators could and did claim in their defence that they had only ever worked for or with the authorities of their own state.
In the case of senior police or government officials who were palpably guilty of serving Nazi interests via the puppet regimes that employed them, this defence was at best disingenuous. But lesser figures, not to speak of the many thousands charged with accepting employment in these regimes or in agencies or businesses that worked with them, could point to a genuine confusion. Was it right, for example, to charge someone with membership after May 1940 of a political party that had been legally represented in a pre-war parliament but had gone on to collaborate with the Germans during the occupation?
The French, Belgian and Norwegian governments-in-exile had tried to anticipate these dilemmas by issuing wartime decrees warning of harsh post-war retribution. But these were intended to deter people from cooperating with the Nazis; they did not address the broader questions of jurisprudence and fairness. Above all, they could not resolve in anticipation the problem of weighing individual against collective responsibility. The balance of political advantage in 1944-45 lay in assigning blanket responsibility for war crimes and crimes of collaboration to predetermined categories of people: members of certain political parties, military organizations and government agencies. But such a procedure would still pass over many individuals whose punishment was widely demanded; it would include people whose chief offence was inertia or cowardice; and above all it would entail a form of collective indictment, something anathema to most European jurists.
Instead, it was individuals who were brought to trial, with results that varied greatly with time and place. Many men and women were unfairly singled out and punished. Many more escaped retribution altogether. There were multiple procedural irregularities and ironies, and the motives of governments, prosecutors and juries were far from unsullied—by self-interest, political calculation or emotion. This was an imperfect outcome. But as we assess the criminal proceedings and associated public catharsis that marked the transition in Europe from war to peace, we need to keep constantly in mind the drama of what had just taken place. In the circumstances of 1945 it is remarkable that the rule of law was re-established at all—never before, after all, had an entire continent sought to define a new set of crimes on such a scale and bring the criminals to something resembling justice.
The numbers of people punished, and the scale of their punishments, varied enormously from country to country. In Norway, a country with a population of just 3 million, the entire membership of the Nasjonal Sammlung, the main organisation of pro-Nazi collaborators, was tried, all 55,000 of them, along with nearly 40,000 others; 17,000 men and women received prison terms and thirty death sentences were handed down, of which twenty-five were carried out.
Nowhere else were the proportions so high. In the Netherlands 200,000 people were investigated, of whom nearly half were imprisoned, some of them for the crime of giving the Nazi salute; 17,500 civil servants lost their jobs (but hardly anyone in business, education or the professions); 154 people were condemned to death, forty of them executed. In neighbouring Belgium many more death sentences were passed (2,940), but a smaller percentage (just 242) carried out. Roughly the same numbers of collaborators were sent to prison but whereas the Dutch soon amnestied most of those convicted, the Belgian state kept them in prison longer and former collaborators convicted of serious crimes never recovered their full civil rights. Contrary to longstanding post-war myth the Flemish population was not disproportionately targeted for punishment, but by effectively repressing the (mostly Flemish) supporters of the wartime New Order the pre-war Belgian elites—Catholic, Socialist, Liberal—re-established their control of Flanders and Wallonia alike.
The contrast between Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands (and Denmark), where the legitimate governments had fled into exile, and France, where for many people the Vichy regime was the legitimate government, is suggestive. In Denmark the crime of collaboration was virtually unknown. Yet 374 out of every 100,000 Danes were sentenced to prison in post-war trials. In France, where wartime collaboration was widespread, it was for just that reason punished rather lightly. Since the state itself was the chief collaborator, it seemed harsh and more than a little divisive to charge lowly citizens with the same crime—the more so since three out of four of the judges at the trials of collaborators in France had themselves been employed by the collaborationist state. In the event, 94 people in every 100,000—less than 0.1 percent of the population—went to prison for wartime offences. Of the 38,000 imprisoned, most were released under the partial amnesty of 1947 and all but 1,500 of the remainder under an amnesty in 1951.
In the course of the years 1944-51, official courts in France sentenced 6,763 people to death (3,910 in absentia) for treason and related offences. Of these sentences only 791 were carried out. The main punishment to which French collaborators were sentenced was that of ‘national degradation’, introduced on August 26th 1944, immediately after the Liberation of Paris and sardonically described by Janet Flanner: ‘National degradation will consist of being deprived of nearly everything the French consider nice—such as the right to wear war decorations; the right to be a lawyer, notary, public-school teacher, judge or even a witness; the right to run a publishing, radio or motion-picture company; and above all the right to be a director in an insurance company or a bank.’
49,723 Frenchmen and women received this punishment. Eleven thousand civil servants (1.3 percent of state employees, but a far smaller number than the 35,000 who had lost their jobs under Vichy) were removed or otherwise sanctioned, but most of them were re-instated within six years. All in all the épuration (purge), as it was known, touched some 350,000 persons, most of whose lives and careers were not dramatically affected. No-one was punished for what we should now describe as crimes against humanity. Responsibility for these, like other war crimes, was imputed to the Germans alone.
The Italian experience was distinctive, for a number of reasons. Although a former Axis power, Italy was authorized by the Allied governments to carry out its own trials and purges—it had, after all, switched sides in September 1943. But there was considerable ambiguity as to what and who should be prosecuted. Whereas elsewhere in Europe most collaborators were by definition tarred with ‘Fascism’, in Italy the term embraced too broad and ambiguous a constituency. Having been governed by its own Fascists from 1922-43, the country was initially liberated from Mussolini’s rule by one of his own marshals, Pietro Badoglio, whose first anti-Fascist government itself consisted largely of former Fascists.
The only obviously prosecutable Fascist crime was collaboration with the enemy after (the German invasion of) September 8th 1943. As a result, most of those charged were in the occupied north and were connected to the puppet government installed at Salò on Lake Garda. The much-mocked ‘Were you a Fascist?’ questionnaire (the ‘Scheda Personale’) circulated in 1944 focused precisely on the difference between Salò and non-Salò Fascists. Sanctions against the former rested on Decree #159, passed in July 1944 by the interim legislative Assembly, which described ‘acts of special gravity which, while not in the bounds of crime, [were] considered contrary to the norms of sobriety and political decency’.
This obscure piece of legislation was designed to get around the difficulty of prosecuting men and women for acts committed while in the employ of recognised national authorities. But the High Court established in September 1944 to try the more important prisoners was staffed by judges and lawyers who were themselves mostly ex-Fascists, as were the personnel of the Extraordinary Assize Courts set up to
punish minor employees of the collaborationist regime. In these circumstances the proceedings were hardly calculated to garner much respect among the population at large.
Unsurprisingly, the outcome satisfied no-one. By February 1946, 394,000 government employees had been investigated, of whom just 1,580 were dismissed. Most of those questioned claimed gattopardismo (‘leopardism’ or ‘spot-changing’), arguing that they had played a subtle double game in the face of Fascist pressure—after all, membership of the Fascist Party had been obligatory for civil servants. Since many of those doing the questioning could just as easily have found themselves on the other side of the table, they were decidedly sympathetic to this line of defense. Following the highly-publicized trials of a few senior Fascists and generals the promised purge of government and administration petered out.
The High Commission assigned the task of administering the purge was shut down in March 1946 and three months later the first amnesties were announced, including the cancellation of all prison sentences under five years. Virtually every prefect, mayor and mid-level bureaucrat purged in the years 1944-45 would get his job back or avoid payment of the fines imposed, and most of the nearly 50,000 Italians imprisoned for Fascist activities spent little time in jail.13 At most 50 people were judicially executed for their crimes, but that does not include 55 Fascists massacred by partisans in Schio Prison on July 17th 1945.
During the Cold War, Italy’s suspiciously painless transition from Axis power to democratic ally was often blamed upon foreign (American) pressure as well as the political influence of the Vatican. In reality matters were more complex. To be sure, the Catholic Church got off very lightly indeed, in view of Pius XII’s warm relations with Fascism and the pro-actively blind eye he turned to Nazi crimes in Italy and elsewhere. Church pressure was brought to bear. And the Anglo-American military authorities certainly were reluctant to remove compromised administrators while they were trying to re-establish normal life throughout the peninsula. And on the whole the purge of Fascists was more efficiently carried out in regions where the left-wing Resistance and its political representatives held sway.