Une justice rendue sous silence : juger les collaborateurs des nazis en Pologne dans les années 1950 et 1960
Used to judge Nazi perpetrators and their local collaborators but also as a political tool against opponents, the August decree of 1944 almost vanished after the 1956 Thaw: it could only be implemented when direct participation in murder was proved. The number of trials and condemnations subsequentl...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Criminocorpus
2023-04-01
|
| Series: | Criminocorpus |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/12719 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Used to judge Nazi perpetrators and their local collaborators but also as a political tool against opponents, the August decree of 1944 almost vanished after the 1956 Thaw: it could only be implemented when direct participation in murder was proved. The number of trials and condemnations subsequently dropped. Yet the files of the Main Commission for the Prosecution of German Crimes in Poland hold at least 130 cases opened until 1970. All of the accused claimed Polish citizenship, and most had been enrolled during the war in the local police under German supervision or as members of the civil administration (county mayors, supply intendants…).Contrary to the trials of Nazi perpetrators, those later trials of collaborators were usually very scarcely publicized. Nevertheless, they reveal the evolving judicial narrative on local collaboration during the Holocaust in the 1960s, while pointing at the intense circulations of information within the Eastern bloc (many trials dealt with crimes committed in territories now located in the USSR) and at times also with the West. My paper will focus on one specific trial, which involved the direct participation of Jewish survivors who initiated and came to testify in person or through letters from the USA or Israel, against the chief member of the local police of Braslaw, a border town in postwar Soviet Belarus. This unusual and non-mediatic trial, that ended after the 1968 antisemitic campaign, sheds light on the agency of the victims, their transnational links but also on the internal political debates about how to fit the story of local collaboration within the official narrative on the Second World War. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2108-6907 |