Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (30 page)

The differing treatment of collaborators in different countries is just one of the many inconsistencies that hampered the pursuit of justice in Europe after the war. The courts everywhere tended to be harsher on the poor and the young, who were less well connected, less articulate and less able to afford expensive lawyers. (This was true even in eastern Europe in the months before the purge was hijacked by the Communists for their own political purposes.) They were also harsher on those who were tried in the early days of the purge, when emotions were still running high: many crimes that were punishable by death in 1944 were only punishable by a few years in prison after the war was over.
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Different categories of collaboration were also treated differently. Military and political collaborators, for example, were punished harshly everywhere, as were informers. Those who worked in the media were perhaps punished most severely of all, given the relatively minor nature of their crimes, since there was ample documentary evidence of their guilt and it was easy to make an example of them.
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Economic collaborators, by contrast, were barely punished at all, at least in the western half of Europe. Not only was it difficult to prove a case against most businessmen, but they were much more likely to be able to afford lawyers who could string out their trials until an acquittal was more likely. Besides, the political will to try businessmen was not there: the abysmal conditions of postwar Europe meant that they were needed, no matter how unpopular they were.

One cannot entirely blame the courts for this state of affairs. Putting aside the emotional demands of the people, some of the dilemmas that the courts had to grapple with were genuinely baffling. For example, the legal arguments surrounding the issue of what exactly constituted ‘collaboration’ were impossible to unravel. Was it really treason, for example, if the defendant truly believed himself to be acting in the best interests of his country? Many politicians and administrators claimed that they had only gone along with the Nazis because it was better than the massive repression that would have resulted if they had collectively resisted. Similarly, economic collaborators often claimed that if they had shut off production in their factories the people would have starved, and their workers would have been conscripted into forced labour and deported to Germany. By collaborating with the Germans they had prevented their country from experiencing a much worse fate. Others pointed out that the new laws against collaboration were being applied retroactively – in other words, since their actions had not been against any law
at the time
, how could they be considered a crime? Could someone ‘collaborating’ under duress be held responsible for their actions? And how could the postwar authorities proclaim membership of far-right political parties illegal — again, retrospectively – while at the same time espousing the universal right to freedom of association?

In France, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Croatia prosecutors grappled with the additional problem that the state itself had collaborated with Germany. While the leaders of these states could certainly be accused of working for the Germans, most of the ordinary bureaucrats and administrators had had nothing to do with Germany or the Nazis. Could one be a traitor if one was simply following the instructions of one’s apparently legitimate government?
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The subtleties of such legal arguments were lost on the general population, who cared less about level-headed justice and more about their own emotional need to see people punished. Inevitably, many trials got bogged down in details. Far from being
‘justice sévère et expéditive’,
it was often lukewarm and painfully slow. In Belgium, for example, six months after the liberation, 180,000 cases had been opened, but only 8,500 brought to trial. As one Allied observer noted wryly, ‘If this slow rate of progress were maintained it would take ten years before the last case came before the courts.’
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The only way to speed things up was to take short cuts, or to write off cases before they ever came to court. In the end this is exactly what happened in Belgium. Of the 110,000 charges of economic collaboration that were laid, only 2 per cent ever ended up in court.
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In the rest of Europe, too, the great majority of cases were dropped before they came to trial.

The Construction of Convenient Myths

The main reason Europe’s purges ended up being such mild affairs is because, in the end, the political will for anything stronger simply was not there. Harsh and rigorous retribution was not in any nation’s interest. De Gaulle’s expatriate government, for example, had spent most of the war portraying the French as a people united in their struggle against both the Germans and the tiny elite at Vichy. When de Gaulle came to power after the liberation it did not make sense to drop this myth of unity, especially since the French people were apparently united behind
him.
And besides, France would need to be united if it were ever to have the strength to rebuild itself. Collaborators and resisters still had to live together in the same communities after the war. To promote enmity between them would only store up trouble for the future.

Other governments and Resistance groups across Europe played exactly the same game. The Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian and Czech expatriate governments also wanted to ease national tensions by portraying their respective peoples as united against the Nazis. The Resistance were happy to have their wartime exploits repeated like a mantra after the war, even if it gave the impression that
their
behaviour, rather than that of petty everyday collaboration, had been the norm. The Communists, especially, were keen to pretend that the people stood as one behind them, since it gave greater legitimacy to their seizure of power in eastern Europe. The illusion of unity was far more important to all the postwar governments than the purge ever was. In general, therefore, the purge was only ever pursued vigorously in order to remove those who threatened that unity – to justify the expulsion of hostile ethnic groups, for example, or to remove outspoken political opponents from power in eastern Europe.

This insistence on unity was the source of one of the most potent myths of the postwar period – the idea that the responsibility for all the evils of the war rested exclusively with the Germans. If it was only ‘they’ who had perpetrated atrocities upon ‘us’, then the rest of Europe was released from all accountability for the injustices it had perpetrated upon itself.
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Better still, the bulk of Europe would be able to share in the ‘victory’ over Germany. The loathing that all Europeans expressed towards Germany and Germans in the aftermath of the war was therefore only partly a reaction to the things Germany had actually done – it was also a way for each country to heal its own wounds.

As a defeated nation, Germany had little choice but to take this on the chin. Germany had, after all, started the war. It had enslaved millions of forced labourers from all over Europe, and had presided over the Holocaust. And yet, even in Germany it was possible to dodge any feeling of accountability for these crimes. The stereotypical image of the German who continually apologizes for the war is largely a creation of the 1960s: before then, Germans were just as likely as any other nationality to deny both personal and collective responsibility for the events of 1939—45. The majority of Germans saw themselves as victims, not perpetrators - victims of Nazism, of their leaders’ failure to win the war, of bombing, of Allied revenge, of postwar shortages, and so on. Blame was easily shifted elsewhere.

In general, the denazification trials yielded the same results as the purges elsewhere, with all the same inconsistencies. Some zones of Germany pursued Nazis more vigorously than others; some categories of prisoner were treated more harshly than others; and many prominent Nazis got off scot free while their ‘fellow travellers’ were punished.
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The single trial that overshadowed all the others was that of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg in 1946. The blaze of publicity that accompanied this event was designed to educate the nation in the horrors of Nazism - but it also gave the impression that the guilt of the nation resided in these men
alone.
Once the trial was over, it was easy to imagine that justice had been done.

The continued rooting out of Nazis in the following years, particularly in the American zone, was universally resented. It did not come to an end until 1949, when the new Federal Republic was established in West Germany. As elsewhere in Europe, at the same time that the purge was officially brought to a close, many of the punishments that had been doled out to former Nazis were formally annulled or reversed. On 20 September that year the new West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer announced in his first official address to parliament that it was time to ‘put the past behind us’.
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The nightmare of the war would be deliberately forgotten, in favour of new dreams of the future.

It is tempting to imagine that such postwar myth-making was fairly benign. If the myth of unity brought about a
real
unity of sorts, then what harm could it do? And if forgetting the facts of wartime guilt and collaboration allowed Europe to move on and forge a better future, then surely that too was for the best? Unfortunately, however, there have been some significant side-effects to this particular medicine. Attempts to rehabilitate the political right in western Europe have not only resulted in a whitewash: in some cases, absurdly, it has allowed right-wing extremists to portray themselves as the injured party.

As the myth that responsibility lay
exclusively
with Germany began to take hold, the harsh treatment of collaborators began to look less like rough justice and more like a slaughter of the innocents. In France, by the 1950s, hundreds of lurid stories began to emerge in the popular press giving graphic details of the torture and abuse perpetrated by
maquisards
upon civilians. In all of these stories the innocence of the victims was either assumed or overtly stressed. Many focused on the treatment of women, who were stripped, shaved, insulted, beaten with iron bars, sexually mutilated and raped. These things did indeed happen after the war – but the stories in the press were often based on hearsay rather than fact, and exaggerated accordingly.
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Along with the stories came bogus statistics. Many writers in the 1950s claimed that around 105,000 collaborators were executed by the French Resistance in the months after the liberation. This figure was based on a casual remark supposedly made in November 1944 by Adrien Tixier, who was Minister of the Interior at the time – but Tixier himself died in 1946, and there has never been any documentary evidence to back this figure up. The real number, repeatedly confirmed by government agencies and independent academic studies, was less than a tenth of this total.
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In Italy, too, the political right lost no time in painting themselves as victims. Ever since the 1950s they have portrayed the immediate aftermath of the war as a bloodbath, in which anything up to 300,000 people were murdered.
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These frankly absurd claims, if repeated often enough, begin to attain an air of authenticity. More importantly, they dwarf the number of partisans killed by the Fascists during the war – a mere 45,000 – making it seem as if the resisters had been the greater villains.
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In reality, the number of people killed by partisans after the war was nowhere near 300,000, but at least twenty times smaller.
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The myth of the innocence of the right is just as strong in Italy as it is in France. Indeed, in recent years it has been gaining strength. One of the most controversial books to have been published in Italy at the beginning of the twenty-first century was Giampaolo Pansa’s
Il Sangue dei vinti,
which attacked the heroic idea of the Italian resistance movement by describing in detail the murders that they carried out during and after the liberation. Pansa’s book concentrated heavily on the innocence of many of those killed, often citing a ‘not guilty’ verdict from the courts as proof of that innocence. The book caused outrage on the left because it lacked the subtlety of other studies, which took much more account of the context in which these killings took place, the popular anger felt towards fascism at the time, and the often understandable lack of trust in the judgement of the courts. But what really angered the left was the popularity of the book, which sold over 350,000 copies in its first year.
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Pansa had tapped into the mindset of a newly confident Italian right wing, which happily latched on to his well-argued polemic - as well as the works of more dubious historians – as a way of rehabilitating their past.

Since the fall of communism in the early 1990s, and the subsequent rise of right-wing parties everywhere, a similar process has been taking place across Europe. Figures who were once universally reviled are now being resurrected as role models simply because they opposed the ‘greater evils’ of communism and the Soviet Union. In the popular imagination, the crimes of wartime dictators like Mussolini or Romania’s Ion Antonescu have been excused or even ignored in favour of their supposed virtues. Ultra-nationalists in Hungary, Croatia, Ukraine or the Baltic States – men who indiscriminately murdered Jews, Communists and liberals both during and after the war – are now being rehabilitated as national heroes. These are more than benign myths: they are dangerous distortions of the truth that need to be exposed as such.