The horrors of the Second World War are etched into the imagination of public discourse.

But what of its aftermath?

How does a continent at war for six years, and unstable for much longer, create peace when so many national, ideological and social resentments remain?

It’s easy to forget that a military victory for the allies doesn’t mean that a defeated people’s attitudes and ideologies suddenly change.

And World War Two was not just a military conflict – so many in Europe let their resentment be unleashed on their ideological or ethnic enemies, whether from the same state or not.

To think, then, that the end of the war means the end of resentment is naïve.

In the Soviet Union, 70,000 villages and 1,700 cities were destroyed by the Nazis during the war, and 16 million people died – over 15% of its population.

But when the Nazis were defeated and the Soviets occupied Berlin at the beginning of May 1945,
retribution had already begun.

In Vienna alone, which the Soviets had taken by the beginning of April, some 87,000 women were
reported by doctors to have been raped by Soviet soldiers. In Berlin the numbers were even higher.

Throughout 1945, the citizens of Vienna lived on just 800 calories per day.

It was already clear that the post-war period was going to be almost as horrific as the war, but in
different and unexpected ways.

Countries in Eastern Europe expelled all Germans living there and confiscated their property.

And the defeat of the Nazis didn’t mean anti-Semitism went away.

Anti-Semitism wasn’t a German phenomenon, it was a European and a global one.

Between 1948 and 1951, 332,000 Jews emigrated in Israel.

But when the horrors of anti-Semitism and fascism were at their height and France and much of
Eastern Europe was under occupation, there was always some optimism, and most countries had some form of underground resistance.

But personal indignation, ideological bitterness and the psychology of submission to an invading
oppressor – what the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre likened to the kind of sadomasochism of sexual submission – meant that incidents of neighbours reporting their own neighbours to the Nazis was disturbingly high.

In the aftermath of the war, formerly occupied nations would ask themselves difficult questions: what did resistance mean? And what did collaboration mean?

Retribution against the Nazis through the Nuremberg trials is well-known, but as governments busied themselves attempting to fix a broken and desperate Europe, people, communities, neighbours, wanted revenge.

During the occupation some slept with Nazis, some worked with them, some welcomed them; some out of support, some out of destitution.

The situation was not only difficult, it was, of course, desperate.

When the revenge on these collaborators began after the war it was merciless.

In France, some 10,000 were killed in extrajudicial executions by bands of local resistors. In Italy,
Belgium, and the Netherlands many more were lynched and murdered.

In Norway, 55,000 members of a pro-Nazi organisations were tried and in the Netherlands 100,000 were sent to prison.

In Belgium, almost 3000 were sentenced to death but only 242 executions were carried out.

Czechoslovakia sentenced 713 to death, 741 to life and almost 20,000 to shorter sentences.

Austria had 700,000 Nazi party members in a country of only 7 million, and only 13,600 of them were sent to prison. In a country where Nazism was so entrenched, Austria had to distinguish between lower and higher Nazis so as not to tear the entire country apart.

But it was the French that had the most complicated questions to ask. The state itself – Vichy France – collaborated with the Nazis as a puppet state. Vichy France deported 76,000 Jews to the
extermination camps. But authors like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre edited, published or
contributed to underground resistance newspapers like Combat.

One, maybe apocryphal, story tells of a German officer visiting Picasso’s studio in Paris. Picasso
offered him a postcard of Guernica, his famous painting of fascist bombing during the Spanish Civil War. Did you do this? The officer asked. No, you did, Picasso replied.

In France, as this infamous image taken by photojournalist Robert Capa shows, women’s heads were shaved as punishment for having liaisons with the Nazis.

This punishment has a long history in Europe, and the resistance threatened collaborators with it
through the underground press. When a place was liberated, punishment was swift. Many were shorn in groups in public squares, then marched through the streets stripped and marked with swastikas. Around 20,000 women had their heads shaved in France, and some 80,000 children were born to German fathers occupying the country.

We can see why the historian Stanley Hoffman distinguishes between two types of collaboration. The first is collaboration for the benefit and survival of France and the French people – a practical and necessary collaboration. The second is collaboration with the Nazis in the sense of cooperation for personal gain or due to political affinity.

The latter, of course, must be judged more harshly. But one can quickly turn into the other.

This, of course, doesn’t even begin to look at the question of how the allies were to denazify Germany – in the city of Bonn, for example, 102 out of 112 doctors had been registered Nazi
members. In 1946, 37% of Germans answered in a questionnaire that yes, the extermination of Jews and other non-‘Aryans’ was necessary for the security of Germans. In 1952, 25% still had a ‘good opinion’ of Hitler. In all, 100,000 Germans were convicted across Europe in the aftermath of the war, less than the total convictions for collaboration in other countries.

So, with collaboration so widespread, as the historian Tony Judt has pointed out, the need for Europe to forget the extent of fascist sympathy quickly superseded the need for retaliation.

By the end of the 1950s there were hardly any Nazis remaining in prison across Europe at all.

Sartre wrote that, ‘the whole country both resisted and collaborated. Everything we did was equivocal; we never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions’.

Sources

Tony Judt, Postwar

An Ugly Carnival, The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/05/womenvictims-d-day-landings-second-world-war

S. Hoffman, Collaborationism in France During World War II

D. O. Pendas, Seeking Justice, Finding Law: Nazi Trials in Postwar Europe

D. Bell, The New Normal, The Atlantic: https://newrepublic.com/article/83186/nazi-occupied-parisreview