Postwar

surprise of many of his followers.

In a country where many millions of people, by no means all of them on the political Right, were compromised by their association with Fascism, Togliatti saw little advantage in pushing the nation to the brink of civil war—or, rather, in prolonging a civil war already under way. Far better to work for the re-establishment of order and normal life, leave the Fascist era behind, and seek power through the ballot box. Moreover Togliatti, from his privileged standpoint as a senior figure in the international Communist movement whose strategic perspective reached beyond the shores of Italy, had the Greek situation in mind as a caution and a warning.

In Greece, despite a significant level of wartime collaboration among the bureaucratic and business elites, post-war purges were directed not at the Right but the Left. This was a unique case but a revealing one. The civil war of 1944-45 had convinced the British that only the firm re-establishment of a conservative regime in Athens would stabilize this small but strategically vital country. To purge or otherwise threaten businessmen or politicians who had worked with Italians or Germans could have radical implications in a country where the revolutionary Left seemed poised to seize power.

In short order, then, the threat to stability in the Aegean and south Balkans switched from the retreating German army to the well-dug-in Greek Communists and their partisan allies in the mountains. Very few people were severely punished for wartime collaboration with the Axis powers, but the death penalty was liberally assigned in the war against the Left. Because no consistent distinction was drawn in Athens between left-wing partisans who had fought against Hitler and Communist guerillas trying to bring down the post-war Greek state (and indeed, more often than not, they were the same men), it was wartime resisters rather than their collaborationist enemies who were likely to find themselves tried and imprisoned in the coming years—and excluded from civil life for decades afterwards: even their children and grandchildren would pay the price, often being refused employment in the bloated state sector until well into the 1970s.

The purges and trials in Greece were thus blatantly political. But so, in a sense, were the more conventional proceedings in western Europe. Any judicial process brought about as the direct consequence of a war or a political struggle is political. The mood at the trials of Pierre Laval or Philippe Petain in France, or the police chief Pietro Caruso in Italy, was hardly that of a conventional judicial proceeding. Score-settling, blood-letting, revenge and political calculation played a crucial role in these and many other post-war trials and purges. This consideration needs to be borne in mind as we turn to official post-war retribution in central and eastern Europe.

There is no doubt that from the point of view of Stalin and the Soviet occupation authorities throughout the territories under Red Army control, the trials and other punishments of collaborators, Fascists and Germans were always and above all a way of clearing the local political and social landscape of impediments to Communist rule. The same applied to Tito’s Yugoslavia. Many men and women were accused of Fascist felonies when their major crime was membership of the wrong national or social group, association with an inconvenient religious community or political party, or simply an awkward visibility or popularity in the local community. Purges, land expropriation, expulsions, prison sentences and executions aimed at extirpating incriminated political opponents were important staging points in a process of social and political transformation, as we shall see. But they also targeted and punished genuine Fascists and war criminals

Thus in the course of his attack on the Catholic church in Croatia Tito also prosecuted the notorious Cardinal Alois Stepinac of Zagreb, apologist for some of the worst crimes of the Croat Ustase regime, who might well have considered himself fortunate to spend the next fourteen years under house arrest before dying in his bed in 1960. Draza Mihajlovic, the Chetnik leader, was tried and executed in July 1946. In his wake many tens of thousands of other non-Communists were killed in the two years following Yugoslavia’s liberation. They were all victims of a politically-motivated policy of revenge; but considering their wartime actions in the Chetniks, the Ustasa, the Slovenian White Guard or as armed Domobranci many of them would have received heavy sentences under any system of law. [14] The Yugoslavs executed and deported many ethnic Hungarians for their role in Hungarian military massacres in the Vojvodina during January 1942, and their land was made over to non-Hungarian supporters of the new regime. This was a calculated political move, but in many cases the victims were surely guilty as charged.

Yugoslavia was a particularly tangled case. Further north, in Hungary, post-war Peoples’ Courts really did begin by trying actual war criminals, notably activists in the pro-German regimes of Dome Sztojay and Ferenc Szalasi during 1944. The ratio of fascists and collaborators condemned in Hungary did not exceed the numbers found guilty in post-war Belgium or the Netherlands—and there is no doubt that they committed serious crimes, including anticipating and enthusiastically executing German plans to round up and transport to their death hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Only later did the Hungarian authorities add categories like ‘sabotage’ and ‘conspiracy’, whose overt purpose was to net a broader range of opponents and others likely to resist a Communist takeover.

In Czechoslovakia the Extraordinary Peoples’ Courts, established by Presidential Decree on May 19th 1945, handed out 713 death sentences, 741 life sentences and 19,888 shorter prison terms to ‘traitors, collaborators and fascist elements from the ranks of the Czech and Slovak nation’. The language is redolent of Soviet legalspeak and certainly anticipates Czechoslovakia’s grim future. But there really had been traitors, collaborators and Fascists in occupied Czechoslovakia; one of them, Father Tiso, was hanged on April 18th 1947. Whether Tiso and others received a fair trial—whether they could have received a fair trial in the atmosphere of the time—is a legitimate question. But the treatment they got was no worse than that accorded to, say, Pierre Laval. Post-war Czech justice was much preoccupied with the troubling and vague category of ‘crimes against the nation’, a device for visiting collective punishment on Sudeten Germans especially. But the same was true of French justice in those years, with perhaps less cause.

It is hard to judge the success of the post-war trials and anti-Fascist purges in formerly-occupied Europe. The pattern of sentencing was much criticized at the time—those who were tried while the war was still going on, or immediately following a country’s liberation, were apt to receive tougher punishments than those prosecuted later. As a result, minor offenders dealt with in the spring of 1945 received far longer prison terms than major collaborators whose cases did not come to court for another year or more. In Bohemia and Moravia a very high percentage (95 percent) of death sentences was carried out because of a rule requiring that prisoners be executed within two hours of the passing of judgment; elsewhere, anyone who avoided immediate execution could anticipate a commutation of his sentence.

Death sentences were frequent at the time and provoked scant opposition: the wartime devaluation of life made them seem less extreme—and better warranted—than under normal circumstances. What caused greater offence, and may ultimately have undercut the value of the whole proceedings in some places, was the manifest inconsistency of the punishments, not to mention that many of them were being passed by judges and juries whose own wartime record was spotty or worse. Writers and journalists, having left a written record of their wartime allegiance, came off worst. Highly publicized trials of prominent intellectuals—like that of Robert Brasillach in Paris in January 1945—provoked protests from bona fide resisters like Albert Camus, who thought it both unjust and imprudent to condemn and execute men for their opinions, however ghastly these might be.

In contrast, businessmen and high officials who had profited from the occupation suffered little, at least in western Europe. In Italy the Allies insisted that men like Vittorio Valletta of FIAT be left in place, despite his notorious engagement with the Fascist authorities. Other Italian business executives survived by demonstrating their erstwhile opposition to Mussolini’s Social Republic at Salo—and indeed they had often opposed it, precisely for being too ‘social’. In France, prosecutions for economic collaboration were pre- empted by selective nationalization—of the Renault factories, for example, in retribution for Louis Renault’s considerable contribution to the German war effort. And everywhere small businessmen, bankers and officials who had helped administer occupation regimes, build the ‘Atlantic Wall’ against an invasion of France, supply German forces and so forth were left in place to perform similar services for the successor democracies and provide continuity and stability.

Such compromises were probably inevitable. The very scale of destruction and moral collapse in 1945 meant that whatever was left in place was likely to be needed as a building block for the future. The provisional governments of the liberation months were almost helpless. The unconditional (and grateful) cooperation of the economic, financial and industrial elites seemed vital if food, clothing and fuel were to be supplied to a helpless and starving population. Economic purges could be counter-productive, even crippling.