Comment by spwa4
6 months ago
Which means 90% of people who committed extremely serious crimes in service of the Nazis, serious enough to warrant the death penalty, were gradually let out of prison in the years after that. Of the people not convicted to death, 100% were "forgiven". Not really, but read on.
Most people convicted to death (AND Robert Schuman, who was convicted, but later founded the EU) were guilty of helping the Nazis deport and massacre people, and not one or two, hundreds at least. Tens of thousands, some.
And the reason for releasing most of them is even worse, if you disregard that half managed to escape. The reason is that the resistance (and remaining Nazis, by the way, who in some places killed literally everyone they could get their hands on in retreat) carried out their own executions in French towns, villages and cities. Without courts, or judgement. Needless to say, pretty much everyone in government was guilty and more and more were getting executed.
So a "clean slate" was declared, to prevent the country falling apart entirely, and these people were let go. Not just in France. Spain. Italy. Belgium. Luxembourg. The Netherlands. In countries that were Nazi-leaning (like the Netherlands, Austria or Italy) some government departments (think health, youth, justice and education departments) literally have archives of their own cooperation with the holocaust.
Please note that it is now known that quite a few victims of both the courts and the extrajudicial killings were convicted as Nazi collaborators ... BY Nazi collaborators who remained in government and wanted revenge.
Needless to say, there was a wave of murders around the time of every release, with suspiciously little effort going to finding the perpetrators.
A lot of things were swept under the rug and twisted following the war.
Disposition of the Vichy was complicated. In the weeks following WW2, there was an épuration (purge) where Charles de Gaulle estimated about 10,000 were killed. Others estimate 30,000.
In January 1944, the daughter of the US Ambassador to Russia Averill Harriman, Kathleen Harriman Mortimer, visited the Katyn Forest in Russia where 22,000 Polish military and police were executed. She was instructed to say that the Germans committed the atrocity. That was official US policy. Following this, Mortimer was said to be the second most popular and known US woman in Russian, exceeded only by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Her Wikipedia page now states:
"Mortimer was called as a witness to try to determine which nation had performed the mass summary execution. Mortimer's conclusion was that the Germans were responsible for the killing, and that the limited evidence that Soviets had been responsible was a German ploy. That was later proven incorrect, and it has been widely established that the crime was carried out by the Soviets."
In February 1946, Russia tried and convicted seven Germans for a massacre committed by Russians, and used the daughter of the US ambassador as a puppet. Russia then presented Ambassador Harriman with a large, hand carved wooden seal of the United States, and Harriman had it hung behind his desk in the embassy. Seven years later, it was discovered to have a concealed microphone and transmitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Harriman_Mortimer