The subject of
retribution after WWII has fascinated me for a
long time; I can even confess to making
snail’s progress in writing a book on
collaboration,
resistance and retribution in
Europe during and after WWII. The origin of
the fascination is that, back in 1946, I
witnessed some of the court proceedings and
even the execution of a few war criminals. The
particular topic of this lecture came to me
while pondering one of the more dramatic
aspects of retribution. Why were so many
statesmen assassinated in Europe in the 19th
and 20th centuries, at least up to
1939, and why so many European statesmen were
tried in a court, imprisoned, or even hanged
during and after WWII. Why again has it become
nearly impossible to try and punish a
Communist political leader following the fall
of Communism and of the Soviet Empire.
Clearly,
WWII engendered a great innovation, namely the
idea that leading statesmen can be held
legally responsible for the defeat and ruin of
their country as well as for war crimes
committed by the country’s citizens at the
orders of their government. The effect of this
innovation was, however, temporary. Soon
Europe returned to the pre-1939 situation when
statesmen were practically immune to
prosecution.
The first
point I want to make is that no matter how
terrible the wars they had fought and lost;
how heinous the crimes they had committed, to
the best of my knowledge no European head of
state or head of government, except one, was
tried and executed between the beheading of
Louis XVI in 1793 and World War II. The single
exception was the Hungarian Prime Minister
Count Lajos Batthyány whom an Austrian firing
squad executed in 1849. Napoleon I and
Napoleon III were never tried, only exiled,
although they had been responsible for
terrible destruction and the utter defeat of
France. The victorious Allied Powers made
vague attempts to have the Kaiser arrested and
tried for war crimes but were relieved when
the Dutch refused to surrender him to a yet to
be constituted international court of justice.
As for the German people, despite the fact
that they suffered horribly as a result of the
lost war, they would rather have re-started
hostilities than allow their wartime leaders
to be tried by either an international or a
national court. Nor was Emperor-King Charles
of Austria-Hungary called to justice for
having sacrificed the lives of thousands and
for losing an empire.
Instead
of a trial, a devastating number of rulers and
prime ministers were assassinated by
anarchists or killed by secret governmental
order during the nineteenth and the first half
of the twentieth century: a president of
France; a king and a prime minister of
Portugal; a prime minister of Spain; a king of
Italy, an empress and a crown prince of
Austria-Hungary; a prime minister and a
chancellor of Austria ; a former chancellor of
Germany; a president and a king of Greece, two
kings of Serbia; a king of Yugoslavia; a prime
minister of Bulgaria; two prime ministers of
Romania; a former prime minister of Hungary, a
prime minister of Poland, and three tsars of
Russia fell to the bullets of conspirators or
to the bombs and daggers of assassins.
Undoubtedly, it was a very dangerous
occupation to lead a state in Europe during
those years but we can say that, at least,
these statesmen were spared the public
humiliation of a trial and the horrors of the
gallows. In Europe of the period it was
nearly inconceivable for a legitimate
statesman to be tried and executed by his
underlings.
Everything changed with the coming of World
War II and, even more, with the defeat of Nazi
Germany. The idea that a statesman ought to be
tried for the defeat of his country caught on
first in Vichy France where, at the so-called
Riom trial which opened in 1942, three former
prime ministers, among them Léon Blum, several
ministers and a commanding general were made
to stand trial, charged with having “betrayed
their duties” toward France, that is they had
lost the war against Nazi Germany.
Remarkably, the accused were allowed to defend
themselves eloquently and to use the services
of outstanding lawyers. The proceedings were
suspended in the following year, but the
Germans later transported two prime ministers
to the Buchenwald concentration camps, and
French fascists assassinated another
high-ranking defendant.
This was
only a beginning: during the war, both radical
Nazi collaborators and left-wing anti-Nazi
resisters developed the notion that those
responsible for the sufferings of the nation
ought to be made to account for their deeds as
part of a great national catharsis. This
épuration, as the French resisters called
it, would rid the nation of the residues of
the old regime and allow for the creation of a
new society led by an elite that had grown out
of wartime developments. In one version, the
new leadership would emerge from the
right-radical camp, in the other version, from
the left-wing resistance movements, quite
especially from among the Communists.
Only the
more moderate among the collaborators and
among the resisters hoped for a return to a
status quo ante, although even such
conservative monarchists as the commanders of
Milak, the Norwegian military resistance
organization, and the Cetnik commander General
Draza Mihailović of Serbia envisaged a rather
different country from that before the German
invasion. Milak, for instance, foresaw a more
centralized Norway, and the Cetniks projected
the end of Yugoslavia and the rise of an
independent Greater Serbia. Or, to take
another example, what tied the pro-Nazi Prime
Minister General Milan Nedić of Serbia to the
anti-Nazi Hungarian ex-Prime Minister Count
István Bethlen was that they were equally
terrified of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union.
One trusted German victory until it was too
late, and the other hoped against hope that
the Anglo-American troops would arrive in his
country before the Soviet Red Army troops. Not
surprisingly, the collaborator Nedić ended in
a prison of the Titoist regime while the
anti-Nazi resister Bethlen died in a Moscow
jail.
Before we
proceed any further let us remind ourselves
that, in the first four years of the war,
almost the entire continent of Europe was
allied to Germany, the so-called neutrals
included. Even the countries defeated by
Germany were generally allowed a government or
an administration that was friendly to the
Nazi regime. With the exception of Poland in
which underground resistance arose
immediately, the majority of Europeans
supported the German-friendly governments, at
least until after the battle of Stalingrad.
Therefore, such leaders who were tried after
the war for collaboration, could look back to
years when they had been celebrated by a
population that was now asking for their
blood. The popular French greeting addressed
to Marshal Philippe Pétain at public
assemblies: “Maréchal nous voila” -- Marshal
we are ready for you -- was repeated in
various forms in other countries, all the way
from Belgium, where the collaborationist King
Leopold III was hailed as the savior of his
nation, to Greece where Prime Ministers
Ioannis Rallis was perceived by many as a
defender of national interests and a bulwark
against the native Communist threat.
Devotion
to their leader was particularly keen in those
countries that were allies of Germany and
therefore those leaders enjoyed considerable
liberty of action in domestic affairs and even
in military policy. This was the case in
Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and
Finland. Moreover, the population nearly
idolized the leaders of such countries that
owed their existence to Nazi Germany, namely
Slovakia and Croatia; Ante Pavelić and Msgr.
Jósef Tiso were seen as liberators of their
nation. In the first years of the war, the
idea of trying and even executing these men
was only a faint hope on the part of such an
embittered exile as Czechoslovakia’s Edvard
Beneš.
After
Stalingrad, everything changed. Former
collaborators gradually transformed themselves
into resisters or, as was more often the case,
they began to play both sides. Hungary’s
Regent Miklós Horthy was proud of his soldiers
fighting shoulder to shoulder with the German
Kamaraden but after Stalingrad, and
especially following the surrender of Italy to
the Allies in September 1943, he sought
contact with the Western Allies in the hope of
a negotiated surrender. Even such a staunch
admirer of the Führer as Marshal Ion Antonescu
rightly claimed before his judges in the
people’s court of post-war Romania that he had
sought contact with the Allies behind the back
of Hitler.
Because
practically all heads of states and government
ministers in Hitler’s Europe had enjoyed some
popularity in the first few years of the war,
and because they felt that, during the war,
they had acted as shields of their country
against German exactions, they bitterly
resented their arrest and trial after the war.
Only such off-beat creatures as Norway’s
Vidkun Quisling and Hungary’s Arrow Cross
leader Ferenc Szálasi claimed, when in court,
that fighting alongside the Nazis had been a
good thing for which their nation should be
grateful. For them, the court was simply a
representative of their temporarily triumphant
mortal enemies. Most other defendants expected
the court to appreciate the services they had
rendered in defense of the nation.
Agitation
for the punishment of collaborators, traitors,
and war criminals arose fairly early during
the war, spearheaded by the exile European
governments in London. It was at their
prompting that the Great Allies decided to try
the major German war criminals as well as to
order the new governments in the defeated
countries to try their guilty leaders. Trials
of collaborators in underground courts
actually began under the German occupation,
especially in Poland, Italy, and France.
Following liberation, the task of judging the
war criminals generally fell to so-called
people’s courts. These revolutionary
institutions were meant to substitute for, or
at least to complement, the undermanned, often
Nazified, and ossified regular courts. The
proceedings at these courts were under the
supervision of the now ruling anti-fascist
parties which tried to combine the need to
purify society with that of respecting at
least a minimum of legitimacy. Except in the
Soviet Union, these were no show trials.
Those
investigated and tried numbered in the
hundreds of thousands with every country in
Hitler’s Europe arresting and trying
proportionally similar number of suspects. The
defendants were mostly adult males, the
proportion of those being sentenced in court
or punished administratively, including
expulsion from the country, amounted to
perhaps five percent of those in this group.
Only in West Germany and Finland were far
fewer people investigated and tried, whereas
in such countries as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and
the Soviet Union, the proportion was probably
larger but statistics and studies on this
subject are hard to come by.
The most
dramatic of all were the trials of heads of
states and prime ministers. In Italy,
Mussolini was tried and hanged by a kangaroo
court made up of anti-fascist partisans but in
most other places some kind of decorum was
respected. The number of highest-ranking
defendants is staggering: Hungary, for
instance, executed one head of state and four
prime ministers; in Bulgaria, virtually the
entire old political elite was wiped out
either through court action or arbitrary
killings. Hungary and Slovakia executed their
heads of state; Norway, France, Romania, and
Bulgaria executed their prime ministers. One
head of state of France; two prime ministers
of Greece, and the prime minister of Serbia
perished in prison. President Emil Hácha of
the Czech Protectorate was lucky enough to die
in a prison hospital a few weeks after the end
of the war.
True, not
all the wartime leaders considered guilty
shared the fate of Quisling, Pierre Laval,
Tiso, Antonescu , and others. Ante Pavelić,
the head of the Croatian fascist state,
escaped punishment by fleeing abroad with the
help of the Vatican; Hungary’s Regent Miklós
Horthy was protected from extradition to
Yugoslavia by his American captors in Germany,
and the assistance of Stalin who apparently
appreciated the old admiral’s effort to
surrender to him in October 1944. Occupied
Belgium and the Netherlands had in lieu of
constituted governments only heads of
administration during the war, and the Danes
whose king and government had stayed put
during the German occupation, successfully
cultivated the legend of the king and his
government having been heroic resisters. In
reality, Danish economic assistance to Germany
had been invaluable. In Finland, under Soviet
pressure, President Risto Ryti was sentenced
to ten years in prison but was pardoned in
1949, and when he died, a few years later, he
was buried with full honors. All in all then,
escaping the death penalty for a wartime head
of state or prime minister was a question of
luck or of having been able to maintain a
great degree of political autonomy and thus
also a parliamentary regime during the war;
this was the case especially of Denmark and
Finland.
As is
well-known, Hitler preferred well-established,
conservative statesmen in the non-German
countries to fascists and other radicals who
might not be disciplined enough to mobilize
their nation for the German war effort. The
fascists were only the last resort, hence the
appearance in the post-war courts of such
non-Nazi conservatives as Marshal Pétain of
France, Prime Ministers László Bárdossy and
Döme Sztójay of Hungary, Marshal Antonescu of
Romania, General Nedić of Serbia, and Prime
Ministers Tsolakoglou and Rallis of Greece.
With the exception of Bárdossy and Rallis,
these were military men. All defended
themselves with dignity, although Pétain, who
had volunteered to return to France from
Switzerland, refused to recognize the court
and kept silent. László Bárdossy, who was
accused, among other things, of having
illegally started the war against the Soviet
Union in 1941, dazzled the audience with
quotations in Latin and English; he also
proved both polite and contemptuous of his
opponents. His popularity soared during the
proceedings even though he adamantly refused
the prosecutor’s suggestion that he shoulder
the blame for Hungary’s fatal alliance with
Nazi Germany. It was believed that Bárdossy’s
confession might shift the burden of guilt
from the Hungarian people, especially in view
of the coming peace treaty with Hungary.
Perhaps in appreciation of his dignified
behavior and his popularity, Bárdossy was
sentenced to facing a firing squad; nearly all
other main defendants were hanged.
Every
member of the late-war Arrow Cross government
in Hungary was held to be guilty until proven
innocent; meanwhile, members of the Horthy
regime were often acquitted; many were not
even tried but, rather, acted as witnesses for
the prosecution. Yet it was under Horthy that
Hungary entered the disastrous war against the
Allies, and it was under him that nearly half
a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Let
us note here that in Romania, too,
conservatives and the regular administration
were far more guilty of murder than the wild
and violent Iron Guard. It was Marsal
Antonescu who ordered the massacre of at
least 300,000 thousand Romanian and Ukrainian
Jews whereas the fascist Iron Guard was
responsible for pogroms which claimed the
lives of “only” a few thousand victims.
The
National Socialist former Prime Minister Béla
Imrédy tried in court to embellish his sorry
wartime record but the Arrow-Cross National
Leader Ferenc Szálasi behaved in court as
though he were one of the great world leaders
asked to present to the public his political
views and his plans for a future. This
fanatic, whom many judged to be demented,
actually behaved with even more dignity than
Bárdossy did. Assaulted by invectives not only
by the prosecutor but also by the presiding
judge and the audience made up mainly of
Jewish survivors, Szálasi insisted that he was
still the head of the nation whom he would
guide to world-historical greatness in
partnership with Germany and Japan.
The
sentences of the major defendants were decided
everywhere by the political party leaders and
not really by the courts. The question must be
asked whether the trials achieved their
purpose which was, first, to punish the
guilty, second, to warn all statesmen that
they may be held personally accountable for
actions undertaken by their government and,
third, to make way in the centers of power for
members of the anti-fascist parties. The
judgment is still out on all this, but it is
clear that, despite their great shortcomings
and biases, the courts succeeded in punishing
most of those who had been responsible for the
ruin of their country. Never mind such
delicate problems as, for instance, whether
heads of state can legally be punished at all,
and whether it was right to punish people on
the basis of ex-post-facto laws.
Nearly
everywhere the new leaders hoped that the
trials, especially of the highest-ranking
traitors, would serve the purpose of educating
the public. In this respect, it is difficult
to talk of success; immediately after the
trials, which were held roughly between 1944
and 1946, the more radical former resisters
judged the process of purification totally
inadequate (épuration manquée; epurazione
mancata) while the more moderate and
conservative anti-Nazis considered the
judgments too drastic. Wartime collaborators
considered all trials illegal. Some
defendants, such as Bárdossy, and Prime
Minister Pierre Laval in France, earned some
popularity with their courageous behavior and
the cravenness of some of their accusers.
There is
no evidence of the trial proceedings having
penetrated public consciousness in a way
planned by the anti-fascist parties. Little if
any of the proceedings were ever taught in
schools. On the other hand, the great fear of
the post-war governments, namely that new
right–wing politics would arise from the
legacy of the “martyrs,” did not materialize
either. Despite the efforts of Slovak,
Romanian, Croatian, and Hungarian
right-wingers, to create a cult of their
wartime radical leaders, only a small minority
honors Tiso, Antonescu, Pavelić and Szálasi in
their country.
The final
question is how to explain the execution,
imprisonment and a myriad of other forms of
punishment meted out in their countries to a
nearly unbelievable number of fellow-citizens
and, especially, to pre-war and wartime
leaders. After all, World War I had not been
less bloody, and yet it was followed by
virtually no charges and no punishment. The
explanation I suggest is that the extent of
European collaboration with Nazi Germany had
been so extensive and so spontaneous, that it
was felt to be necessary to sacrifice a great
number of fellow-citizens, and especially the
country’s leaders, in order to clear the
conscience of the others. There was also the
perceived need to project the entirely false
image of one’s country having been that of
heroic resistance fighters and of only a small
number of dastardly traitors.
The
post-World War II purges might well have been
a unique phenomenon with no effect on later
generations; witness the failure of
“lustration” in post-Communist Central- and
Eastern Europe. The few statesmen tried and
imprisoned for crimes committed in the name of
Marx and Lenin were released almost
immediately. One reason for his is that, by
the time the Communist regimes fell, Stalinist
excesses were part of history. Unlike Nazism,
Communism was able to experiment with a
post-radical, more relaxed, more liberal
phase. After 1989, very few Stalinist mass
murderers were available for trial.
Secondly,
there was little political reason for engaging
in purges. After World War II, the former
anti-fascists resisters now in power needed to
get rid of the representatives of both the
war-time collaborationists and the pre-war
régimes. So they engaged in what they called a
great purification heralding the rejuvenation
of society. By the 1990s, however, Europe
appeared to have exhausted its retributionist
energy: the nations had been rehabilitated and
collective punishment was no longer
fashionable. In brief, the time for
reconciliation had arrived in a peaceful and
almost completely united Europe. Whether it
would have been better for the morale and
self-respect of the newly feed peoples in
Eastern Europe to engage in mass purges, is
still an open question.
Appendix 1:
European heads of
state and prime ministers murdered between
1793 and 1939
France:
President Marie-Francois Sadi-Carnot (1894)
Portugal:
King Carlos I (1908) and Prime Minister
General Sidonio Paes (1918)
Spain:
Prime Minister José Canalejas (1912)
Italy:
King Umberto (1900)
Austria-Hungary: Empress Elisabeth (1898) and
Crown Prince Francis Ferdinand (1914)
The
Austrian Empire: Prime Minister Karl Stürgkh
(1916)
The
Austrian Republic: Chancellor Engelbert
Dollfuss (1932)
Germany:
Former Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher
(1934)
Greece:
President Giovanni Kapodistria (1831) and King
George (1913)
Romania:
Prime Ministers Armand Calinescu (1939) and
Nikolae Iorga (1940)
Serbia:
Kings Michael (1868) and Alexander (1903)
Yugoslavia: King Alexander II (1934)
Bulgaria:
Prime Minister Alexander Stamboliski (1923)
Hungary:
Prime Minister Count István Tisza (1918)
Poland:
Prime Minister Gabriel Narutowicz (1922)
Russia:
Prime Minister Peter Stolypin (1911); Tsars
Paul I (1801), Alexander II (1881) and
Nicholas II (1918) fell to the bullets of
conspirators or to the bombs and daggers of
assassins.
Appendix 2: European
heads of state and prime ministers tried and
executed between 1793 and 1939
France:
King Louis XVI (1793)
Hungary:
Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány (1849)
The
Soviet Union: Prime Minister Aleksei Rykov
(1939)
Appendix 3: European
heads of state and prime ministers tried and
executed during, at the end, or soon after the
end of World War II
Note
that some of these statesmen died in prison.
Eliaš
of the Czech Protectorate was executed by the
Germans and Bethlen of Hungary was an
anti-Nazi seized by the Soviets. All others
were tried and sentenced for treason and
collaboration with Nazi Germany.
(PM
stands for prime minister)
Bulgaria:
PM Bogdan Filov as well as 24 ministers and 68
parliamentary deputies
Czechoslovakia/Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia: President Emil Hácha (died in
prison); PM General Alois Eliaš (tried and
shot by the Germans in 1942)
France:
Chef d’Etat (head of state) Marshal Philippe
Pétain (died in prison); PM Pierre Laval
Greece:
PM General Georgios Tsolakoglou and PM Ioannis
Rallis {both died in prison)
Hungary:
Nemzetvezető (national leader) Ferenc Szálasi;
PM István Bethlen (died in prison in Moscow in
1946?), PM Béla Imrédy, PM László Bárdossy, PM
General Döme Sztójay, Deputy PM Jenő Szöllősy,.
Italy: PM
(Il Duce) Benito Mussolini (shot by Italian
partisans after a mock trial in May 1945)
Norway:
PM Vidkun Quisling
Romania:
Conducator (leader) PM Marshal Ion Antonescu
Serbia:
PM General Milan Nedić
Slovakia:
President Monsignor Józef Tiso, PM Vojtech
Tuka
Appendix 4: Leading
politicians tried following the fall of
Communism
Bulgaria:
Todor Zhivkov, 1st Secretary CC of
the BCP and chairman of the State Council.
Arrested in 1990 and sentenced in 1992 for two
tears in prison for embezzlement, he served
under house arrest and was acquitted by the
Bulgarian Supreme Court in 1996. Died in 1998.
Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic: Milouš Jakeš,
general secretary of the CP of Czechoslovakia.
Tried in 1993 for his role in the events of
August 1968, he was acquitted of the charge of
treason.
Germany/GDR: Erich Honecker, general secretary
of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), chairman
of the Council of State of the GDR. Accused of
the death of 192 East Germans who tried to
escape from East Germany, Honecker’s trial
opened in January 1993 but he was released due
to ill health and was allowed to move to Chile
where he died in 1994.
Germany/GDR: Erich Mielke, head of the
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi).
Sentenced in October 1993 to six years for the
murder, on August 9, 1931, that is during the
Weimar Republic, of police captains Paul
Anlauf and Franz Lenck. Paroled in 1995,
Mielke died in a nursing home in 2000.
Romania:
Nicolae Ceausescu, general secretary of the
RCP, president of the Socialist Republic of
Romania. Overthrown in December 1989, Nicolae
and his wife Elena were sentenced to death by
a military court and executed by a firing
squad at Targoviste on Christmas Day. .
