Dark Continent by Mark Mazower

Author:Mark Mazower [Mazower, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-55550-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

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.35

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.”36

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.

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