Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (28 page)

Deep hatred of the collaborators and a desire for revenge were so widespread that some kind of punishment was inevitable. Though it was on everyone’s mind, no one really knew what form this retaliation would take. There were rumours of a ‘day of the axes’, when the mob would take the law into its own hands.
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This ‘day of the axes’, or what the French would call
‘l’épuration sauvage’,
was repeated to some extent in every country. The list of those who were targeted is seemingly endless: not only wartime leaders and politicians but also local mayors and administrators; not only members of Europe’s far-right militias but also those ordinary policemen and gendarmes who had enforced repressive laws; not only prominent industrialists who had made money from Nazi contracts but also the owners of cafés and shops who had made money by serving German soldiers. Journalists, broadcasters and film-makers were vilified for disseminating Nazi propaganda. Actors and singers were attacked for entertaining German troops; as were priests who had given succour or encouragement to fascists, prostitutes who had slept with German soldiers, and even ordinary women and girls who had smiled at Germans a little too readily.

Every form of vengeance shown to Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland was also visited upon collaborators and fascists across Europe. During the chaos of the liberation, Dutch and Belgian collaborators were summarily executed and their houses burned down ‘while the police looked on with indifference or even approbation’.
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In Italy the bodies of Fascists were displayed in the streets where they could be kicked or spat at by passers-by – even Mussolini’s corpse was treated like this, before being suspended from the roof of a petrol station in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.
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In Hungary, members of the far-right Arrow Cross party were forced to exhume Jewish mass graves in very hot weather while local people threw sticks and stones at them.
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In France clandestine prisons were set up where suspected collaborators were subjected to various forms of sadism, including mutilation, rape, enforced prostitution and every type of torture imaginable.
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The incoming authorities and the Allies alike witnessed these events with horror. Even the Resistance themselves found such stories distressing. ‘The terrible thing is,’ reported
La Terre Vivaroise
newspaper on 29 October 1944,

that we are repeating some of the most heinous procedures carried out by the Gestapo; it would seem that Nazism has intoxicated a number of individuals to the point where they believe that violence is always legitimate, that they can do what they please to those they consider to be their adversaries, and that everyone has the right to take another person’s life. What was the point in triumphing over the Barbarians if only to imitate them and become like them?
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It was clear that such a state of affairs could not be allowed to continue. The Allies could not afford any suggestion of anarchy behind their own lines, particularly while the war was still going on. Neither could the incoming governments permit local people to take the law into their own hands, since this challenged their own authority. ‘Public order is a matter of life and death,’ claimed Charles de Gaulle on his return to Paris in August 1944. In a radio broadcast to the people, he insisted that the Provisional Government was now in charge, and that ‘absolutely all improvised authorities must stop’.
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The new governments of western Europe attacked the problem from several angles at once. Firstly, recognizing that part of the problem was the people’s lack of faith in the police, they did whatever they could to bolster the position of the police force as the most important pillar of law and order. In some areas, particularly in Italy and Greece, they merely relied on the massive Allied presence to provide support. But in other areas they tackled the problem head-on by purging suspect officers from the force. Within a year of the liberation of France, for example, one policeman in every eight had been suspended, and one in five French detectives had lost their jobs.
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Other countries followed suit: the purge of the police in Norway and Denmark was equally impressive, although perhaps less so in the rest of western Europe. The important thing was to restore the legitimacy of the police so that they could stand up to the vigilantes who had taken control of many towns and neighbourhoods.

Secondly, the new authorities set about trying to disarm the groups of former resisters who were committing most of the violence. This was often easier said than done. In Paris, for example, the Patriotic Militia continued to conduct armed patrols in open defiance of the authorities. In Valenciennes they maintained huge secret arms caches, which included grenades, anti-aircraft machine-guns and anti-tank rifles.
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In Brussels, where members of the ‘Secret Army’ were given two weeks to disband, a protest demonstration degenerated into a minor riot: the police opened fire, wounding forty-five people.
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In Italy and Greece thousands of partisans refused to give up their weapons for the simple reason that they did not trust the authorities, which still, even after the bloodshed of the liberation, contained countless people who were tainted with connections to the old regime.

In an attempt to coax former partisans back into civilian life many countries announced amnesties for crimes committed in the name of the liberation. In Belgium, for instance, the authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to almost any Resistance activity that occurred in the forty-one days after the Germans had been ejected. In Italy the amnesty on revenge killings covered the first twelve weeks after the end of the war, and in Czechoslovakia it lasted an astonishing five and a half months.
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But if crimes of passion, committed in the heat of the liberation, were regarded with leniency, those committed much later, when power was supposed to have been returned to the state, were punished extremely harshly. In France, for example, a series of arrests of former
maquisards
in the winter of 1944 – 5 was widely interpreted as a warning to the Resistance to bring an end to lynch justice.
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Such measures, however, were little more than a sticking plaster. The real problem, and the main reason why lynch mobs were so common, was that many people believed vengeance to be their only real recourse to justice. In the words of the British ambassador to Paris, Duff Cooper, who wrote several reports on lynchings in France, ‘So long as people believe that the guilty will be punished, they are prepared to leave them to the law but when they begin to doubt this is so, they will take the law into their own hands.’
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In the aftermath of the war, such doubts were everywhere. The only real way to stop revenge attacks was to convince the people that the state was capable of administering what the Belgian newspapers called
‘justice sévère et expéditive’.
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Accordingly, every incoming government in Europe made a show of reforming the law and its institutions. New courts were set up, new judges appointed, and new prisons and internment camps opened to cope with the sudden flood of arrestees. New treason laws were enacted to replace outdated and irrelevant ones. Because of the scale of the collaboration, new concepts of justice had to be devised and applied retrospectively. In western Europe the new punishment of ‘national degradation’ was introduced for minor crimes, which deprived collaborators of a range of civil rights, including the right to vote. For more serious crimes the death penalty, which had long been consigned to history in Denmark and Norway, was reinstated.
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Some parts of Europe were convinced by this show far more easily than others. In Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway, the Resistance were on the whole quite happy to turn collaborators over to the proper authorities and be done with them. In parts of France, however, as well as large parts of Italy, Greece and much of eastern Europe, the partisans - and indeed the people in general – were much more keen to take the law into their own hands. There was a whole range of reasons for this, many of them political, as will become clear later on. But the most important reason was a lack of trust in the authorities. After years of fascist rule, the people of Europe took a very dim view of official ‘justice’.

Perhaps the best example of such mistrust was provided by Italy. This country was certainly an extreme case: while the rest of Europe sought retribution for a relatively short period of collaboration, many Italians had been storing up resentment against the Fascists for over twenty years. The process of liberation had been more protracted here than anywhere else – lasting almost two years – and the north of the country had been involved in a bitter civil war throughout the whole of this time. Many events that occurred in other parts of Europe also happened here, but in exaggerated form. As a consequence Italy provides a stark demonstration of many of the themes that were causing popular discontent across the continent.

The Italian
Epurazzione

In 1945, Italy was a nation divided. For much of the last two years of the war this divide had been physical: the south had been occupied by the British and Americans, while the north had been occupied by the Germans. But the divide was also political, especially in the north. On one side were the Fascists, whose atrocities against their own people had only accelerated after the Germans had invaded; on the other side were the opposition groups, many of them Communist, many of them not, who were united only by their common hatred of Mussolini and his followers.

When the Fascists were finally defeated in April 1945, the partisans embarked on a frenzy of revenge. Anyone who had anything to do with the Fascists was targeted – not only fighting members of the Black Brigades or Decima Mas, but also members of the Women’s Auxiliary Service, or even ordinary secretaries and administrators from the Fascist Republican Party. According to Italian sources, the regions of Piemonte, Emilia-Romagna and Veneto were the most violent, with thousands of shootings taking place in each area.
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British sources claimed that some 500 people were executed in Milan in the run-up to VE Day, and a further I,000 in Turin, although, as liaison officers reported to the British ambassador in Rome, ‘no one had been shot who didn’t deserve it’. These figures were, if anything, an underestimate.
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The Allies evidently felt powerless to intervene in this bloodbath, at least in the early days. In Turin, the president of the local liberation committee, Franco Antonicelli, was reportedly told by the head of the Allied mission, Colonel John Stevens: ‘Listen, president, clear things up in two, three days, but on the third day, I no longer want to see dead on the streets.’
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Many ordinary partisans also claimed that the Allies allowed them to administer their own forms of justice. ‘The Americans allowed us to do it,’ said one former partisan after the war. ‘They saw us, let us torture them a little, then took them away from us.’
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As a consequence of factors like this, the postwar violence that took place in northern Italy was far worse than anywhere else in western Europe. The statistics tell the story. The number of collaborators killed during the liberation of Belgium was around 265, and in Holland only around 100.
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France, which suffered a more protracted and violent liberation, saw around 9,000 Vichyites killed during the course of several months, although only a few thousand of these happened
after
the liberation.
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In Italy the final death toll is even higher: somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000, depending on whose figures one believes.
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In other words, for every 100,000 people in each country, Holland saw only a single suspected collaborator killed in vengeance, while Belgium had more than three, France more than twenty-two, and Italy somewhere between twenty-six and forty-four.

One of the striking things about the revenge in northern Italy is not so much the scale of the killings as the urgency with which they were carried out. According to the Italian Interior Ministry in 1946, some 9,000 Fascists or their sympathizers were killed in April and May 1945 alone.
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Some historians have portrayed it as an orgy of violence, more or less uncontrolled in character – but while crimes of passion certainly took place in abundance, there was also a strongly organized element which was more dispassionate, and more systematic in its approach. Specific individuals were sought out and executed by military-style firing squads, and in some cases the partisans even held brief improvised trials before executing their captives.

Rather than waiting for the Allies to arrive and handing over their prisoners to the conventional justice system – as most resisters did in most other western European countries – these partisans were making a conscious decision to take the law into their own hands. The reason for this is that few of them believed that the Fascists would receive the sentences they deserved if left to the Italian courts. In the words of Roberto Battaglia, the former commander of a partisan division, ‘We have to conduct the purge now because after the liberation it will not be possible, because in war you shoot, but when the war is finished you can’t shoot any more.’
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