Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (39 page)

A NEW START?

On 18 September 1944 the first High Court trial of a collaborator in Rome was disrupted when a key witness, Donato Carretta, former director of the city’s main prison, was attacked in the courtroom. Spectators, led by a woman whose son had been shot by the Germans a few months earlier, seized Carretta and amid shouts of “Paris, let’s imitate Paris!,” dragged him out of the building and eventually killed him. His battered body was left hanging, by the feet, outside his former prison.
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All over Europe, the withdrawal of the Germans left large numbers of people vulnerable to the charge of collaboration or treachery. Their existence was a shameful reminder of the Nazi New Order; their removal from public life—sometimes from life itself—seemed vital to establish a break with the past. Occupation had revealed disturbingly deep fault-lines in the unity of the European nation. It was
hard to imagine a genuine democracy flourishing anew without the punishment of its enemies, hard too to see a revival of independent nation-states without their purification of those who had betrayed them to a foreign power. However, the legal anarchy and diffusion of power which characterized the first days of liberation allowed a number of very different conceptions of punishment to emerge.

The first was that evident in the death of Carretta—a spontaneous, popular demand for revenge which manifested itself in instant executions, lynchings and public humiliations. Emerging out of the internecine war of 1943–4, this vengeful mood was most evident in countries like Italy, France and Belgium, which had seen high levels of repression by collaborationist squads under German rule. In Italy, above all, liberation offered a chance to turn the tables on two decades of Fascist domination. One partisan recalled an episode where “a guy who’d been made to drink castor oil seized a Fascist and told him: ‘Now you go home and don’t appear in the village for a week.’ And he did. They did to the Fascists what they had done to them for twenty years.” But often the mood was more violent and attacks upon snipers soon turned into a wider wave of killings. In Bologna “the people … roamed the streets on their hunt” and “justice was meted out with a certain freedom to anyone in trouble with the partisans … Some people certainly paid for personal animosities or for quarrels over women.”
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The random and brutal nature of such killings served in the long run to help discredit the whole idea of punishing collaborators at all; but in the short run they raised the spectre of outright civil war and prompted resistance movements to intervene and assert their own authority.

The second response, then, was that of the organized resistance, which steered a difficult course between the passions of its rank and file and the restraint and legalism of its leadership. During the fighting, resistance movements had singled out collaborators for “liquidation”; their commitment to punish traitors after the war was one of their main weapons in demoralizing their opponents. In France, for example, the Conseil National de la Résistance instructed its local leaders to prepare “immediate measures to purge and neutralize traitors.” Of course, defining involvement in Vichy as treason also helped
to assert the legitimacy of the de Gaulle government in the eyes of the Allies. But the resistance was well aware of the need to control the “people’s desire for revenge.” The ad hoc field courts-martial which partisans throughout Europe had employed during the war persisted into the first weeks of liberation; in addition, they set up rudimentary internment camps to secure suspected collaborators and, sometimes, to protect them from mob justice. Inside the resistance itself there were bitter disputes about what sort of justice to mete out. Thus, from northern Italy: “Some partisans said it would be better to chuck a pair of grenades into the room where the prisoners were kept and exterminate them there and then, but the commander and others decided to send the prisoners to the prisons at Rovigo for a regular investigation.”
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Within a decade of the end of the war, anti-communist accounts of this phase would talk darkly of the excesses of
résistentialisme
, and the horrors of “class justice.” This was sheer exaggeration. “It was astonishing that the Liberation happened as it did,” the wartime SOE (Special Operations Executive) agent Francis Cammaerts reminds us. “All you hear about is shaving women’s heads, personal vendettas and so on. But I had a lieutenant who came up to me and said: ‘I’ve got 300 German prisoners. What do the international conventions say about how much food and exercise they are entitled to every day?’ And those were Germans who had strung up resisters and their families. There was something extraordinarily civilized about the Liberation.” However, it is true that an aura of shame surrounded the whole subject (which resistance organizations mostly preferred to forget), and the number of dead in the first wave of purges was certainly high in comparison with the slower pace of official justice that followed—perhaps 10,000–15,000 victims in Italy during 1943–6, 9,000–10,000 in France (with another 40,000 or so held in detention).
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The third source of power, which eventually asserted itself over these “improvisations of authority” (in de Gaulle’s phrase), was that of the new political authorities returning from exile, backed up by some degree of foreign recognition. Here the desire for revenge was milder, the concern with public order and due process of law stronger. In many countries tensions quickly emerged between the slow pace of official justice and popular expectations. This was true, especially while the war was still going on, for both the Allied-backed Italian
government, whose relationship with Fascism remained equivocal, and even for the Free French, whose modest initial efforts to try Vichy officials in Algiers in late 1943 led to harsh criticism inside France.
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But by 1945–6 a pattern was beginning to emerge. Coalition governments responded to the call for a new start by embarking upon sweeping judicial investigations of collaborators with show trials of senior politicians, writers and actresses. (Businessmen usually got off lightly.) Multi-tiered systems of courts were established and new crimes were defined where necessary. Yet few trials ended with severe punishment, and by 1946 disillusionment with the whole process was growing in certain sectors of society. The first amnesty laws were introduced, to be followed by others. By the early 1950s, most judicial investigations had been wound down.

In Norway, for example, the entire membership of the pro-Nazi Nasjonal Samling—some 55,000 people—was brought for trial. But few of these were sentenced to more than five years in jail. Only twenty-five death sentences were carried out and by 1957 the last life prisoner had been released. In the Netherlands, over 200,000 cases were investigated, resulting in some forty death sentences actually carried out. Again, most prisoners were released by the early 1950s. Although French courts tried over 300,000 cases, and sentenced over 6,700 to death, the actual numbers executed or jailed were relatively low. A series of amnesties reduced the numbers in prison from 29,000 in 1946 to fewer than 1,000 in 1954. Much more important in France and elsewhere was the loss of full citizenship rights: the charge of “dégradation nationale” or “incivisme” was important in symbolically distancing post-war regimes from the memory of collaboration and reaffirming the democratic essence of the nation.

Even more fraught with ambiguity were the purges of state administrations, police forces and armies. On the one hand, new political elites desired to govern on the basis of post-Fascist principles; on the other, they needed to ensure effective and orderly government as rapidly as possible to cope with the horrendous socio-economic problems which the Nazis left: in their wake. In Italy, or for that matter Austria, the impracticability of a clean sweep was obvious. By July 1946, Chancellor Figl was telling the Allies that the Austrian administration
was now “free of the National Socialist spirit”; some 70,818 out of 299,000 civil servants had been dismissed—not enough for anti-Nazis, too many for the bulk of the population.
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In Italy, the violence of the initial “wild purges” led to an even swifter backlash: the administrative purges were wound down as early as the autumn of 1945. Only 6,500 out of 850,000 civil servants were dismissed in France, mostly in the Interior Ministry, but outside the police and the army officer corps, little was done, and de Gaulle insisted there could be no question of “sweeping aside the vast majority of the State’s servants.” In the Netherlands, perhaps because there had been much less violence at liberation itself, the purge went deeper, with 17,500 civil servants dismissed and another 6,000 disciplined.
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Overall, west European governments opted for continuity rather than prosecution. Some civil servants were disciplined. But the bastions of state power, notably the police, remained mostly immune to investigation. De Gaulle’s creation of a new republican police force, the CRS, was unusual; more typical in western Europe were the cases of the Italian
carabinieri
or the Greek National Guard, whose personnel simply changed uniforms between 1943 and 1946. Other key areas of society—the judiciary, education and business—escaped with little more than perfunctory investigation. If the Nation was to be reborn, the state machine remained largely the same.

Within the post-war coalition governments, Christian Democrats and conservatives preached the benefits of amnesia and charity. “We have the strength to forget! Forget as quickly as possible!” urged
Il popolo
in April 1945. Fears of “Jacobin improvisations,” intensified by the Greek civil war, contributed to this position as much as any electoral calculation. Conservative anti-communism helps explain the emergence of determined resistance to the idea of any wholesale purge. But so does a more basic popular desire in 1945–6 to see governments focus their energies upon rebuilding the economy and raising living standards, assuaging political passions instead of arousing them.
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Inside the resistance such attitudes appeared scarcely comprehensible. Often the very policemen who had persecuted resisters in 1943 were still telling them what to do five years later. In late 1944 fighting broke out in Athens and Belgium, in part because of resistance fears
that there would be no substantial turnover of personnel by incoming exile governments. Elsewhere, partisan forces were demobilized with extraordinary difficulty only on the basis of pledges of genuine reform. Now it appeared that resistance fears of betrayal had been justified all along. They had been outflanked and found themselves helpless before “the continuity of the State.” Such resentments were highly dangerous and occasionally spilled over into acts of violence. Greece was the extreme case where the temporary truce of 1945 turned into a civil war lasting three years. But the threat was always beneath the surface in Italy too and emerged for one brief, frightening moment in the insurrection which followed the shooting of the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti in July 1948. But by this date, the Cold War had changed people’s perceptions: now the radicalization of the war years had vanished, and with it, the public support for revolutionary violence.

In eastern Europe, too, there were extensive purges after the war, but they served a very different purpose and followed a different course to those in the West. They were not based upon the judicial investigation of individual misdeeds but upon a more sweeping attribution of collective guilt derived from social position or ethnic attribution. This reflected the key difference behind the two social projects, West and East. The philosophy underlying the purges in western Europe separated the punishment of guilty individuals from questions of socio-economic reform, and regarded the latter as matters for democratic debate. In eastern Europe, on the other hand, purges against “Fascists” and “war criminals” became a central part of the construction of society on something approaching the Soviet model.

“Anti-Fascist” campaigns targeted entire social categories for dismissal, deportation, expropriation or worse. In Hungary, for instance, Moscow insisted upon the need to purge “Fascist elements” during the negotiations which preceded the formation of a provisional government in December 1944. It quickly emerged that this was meant to encompass not merely the pro-German Arrow Cross extremists who had seized power in October, but also the “full liquidation of feudal
structures” and measures against “reactionaries” in the state and society.
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During 1945 over 3,000 local committees were set up to imprison and try suspected collaborators. They also formed special police units drawn from workers and farm labourers. At the same time, “People’s Courts” were set up to try high-profile political cases: public executions of war criminals drew large crowds. Though at first these trials focused upon the Arrow Cross, over time the definition of “enemy of the people” broadened. By April 1945, communist papers were criticizing the courts for their moderation, asserting that “the Democracy is behaving too humanely towards these fascist beasts.” Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest that the judicial process ran into the same difficulties in Hungary as it did in western Europe, and produced the same low rate of guilty verdicts.
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In Yugoslavia, Tito ordered the massacre of thousands of members of Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian collaborationist formations who were handed over by the British in April-May 1945. He saw this, according to Milovan Djilas, as a “pragmatic solution,” since he feared the courts could not cope with so many individual investigations. Overall estimates of the numbers of quislings and collaborators killed in post-war Yugoslavia are highly controversial, but as many as 60,000 may have lost their lives in this way. In Greece, the December 1944 fighting saw the communists conduct mass shootings of “people’s enemies,” often identifying them solely on the basis of their status as “bourgeois.” Meanwhile, on the Greek Right, nationalist guerrillas killed hundreds of Chams (Albanian-speaking Muslims) and drove the remaining 15,000 into Albania on the grounds that they had aided the Axis.
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