Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

French-speaking cynics were already calling ‘collaboration horizontale’, were very common: ‘moffenmeiden’ in the Netherlands were tarred and feathered, and all over France there were scenes of women stripped and shaved in public squares, often on the day of local liberation from the occupiers or very shortly thereafter.
    The frequency with which women were charged—often by other women—with consorting with Germans is revealing. There was some truth to many of the accusations: offering sexual services in exchange for food or clothing or personal help of one kind or another was one avenue, often the only one, open to women and families in desperate straits. But the popularity of the charge and the vindictive pleasure taken in the punishment is a reminder that for men and women alike the occupation was experienced above all as a humiliation . Jean-Paul Sartre would later describe collaboration in distinctly sexual terms, as ‘submission’ to the power of the occupier, and in more than one French novel of the 1940s collaborators are depicted as either women or weak (‘effeminate’) men, seduced by the masculine charms of their Teutonic rulers. Wreaking revenge on fallen women was one way to overcome the discomforting memory of personal and collective powerlessness.
    Anarchic acts of retributive violence in liberated eastern Europe were also widespread but took different forms. In the West the Germans had actively sought collaborators; in occupied Slav lands they ruled directly and by force. The only collaboration they encouraged on a sustained basis was that of local separatists, and even then only so long as it served German ends. As a result, once the Germans retreated the first victims of spontaneous retribution in the East were ethnic minorities. The Soviet forces and their local allies did nothing to discourage this. On the contrary, spontaneous score-settling (some of it not altogether unprompted) contributed towards a further removal of local elites and politicians who might prove an impediment to post-war Communist ambitions. In Bulgaria, for example, the newly-constituted Fatherland Front encouraged unofficial retribution against wartime collaborators of all colours, invoking the charge of ‘Fascist sympathiser’ on a wholesale basis and inviting denunciations of anyone suspected of pro-Western sentiments.
    In Poland, the main target of popular vengeance was frequently Jews—150 Jews were killed in liberated Poland in the first four months of 1945. By April 1946 the figure was nearly 1,200. Attacks on a smaller scale took place in Slovakia (at Velké Topolčany in September 1945) and in Kunmadaras (Hungary) in May 1946, but the worst pogrom occurred in Kielce (Poland), on July 4th 1946, where 42 Jews were murdered and many more injured following a rumour of the abduction and ritual murder of a local child. In a sense these, too, were reprisals against collaborators, for in the eyes of many Poles (including former anti-Nazi partisans) Jews were suspected of sympathy for the Soviet occupiers.
    The exact number of people killed in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, or in Yugoslavia, during the first months of ‘unauthorised’ purging and killing is not known. But nowhere did the unregulated settling of accounts last very long. It was not in the interest of fragile new governments, far from universally accepted and often distinctly makeshift, to allow armed bands to roam the countryside arresting, torturing and killing at will. The first task of the new authorities was to assert a monopoly of force, legitimacy and the institutions of justice. If anyone was to be arrested and charged with crimes committed during the occupation, this was the responsibility of the appropriate authorities. If there were to be trials, they should take place under the rule of law. If there was to be bloodletting, then this was the exclusive affair of the state. This transition took place as soon as the new powers felt strong enough