1118 Ch. 27 • Rebuilding Divided Europe
A French collaborator whose head has been shaved is paraded, with her baby, througl
a village near Cherbourg following liberation of the region by Allied troops, 1944.
of the population had seemed to welcome union with Hitler’s German;
with frenzied enthusiasm, only 9,000 people were tried and only 35 col
laborators executed. In Italy, where reprisals against Nazi collaborators a
the war’s end had been carried out with speed and efficiency (about 15,00(
executions between 1943 and 1946), there were few trials of fascists afte
the war. This was in part because the Italian fascists had been, at leas
when compared to the Nazis, relatively mild in their treatment of thei
enemies. Furthermore, millions of people had joined fascist organization
or unions because they felt obliged to do so. In Eastern Europe, purges o
former Nazi collaborators took on a high profile, such as in Yugoslavia
where Tito’s victorious forces executed thousands of Serbs, Croats, am
Slovenes who had collaborated, many of them murderously.
The most dramatic post-war trial occurred in Nuremberg in August 194'
when the Allies put twenty-four high-ranking German officials on trial befor
an international tribunal. The court found twenty-one of the defendant
guilty of war crimes, and ten were executed. Hermann Goring committee
suicide in his cell shortly before he was to be executed. Less spectacular tri
als of more minor Nazi figures went on in Germany for years.
Many war criminals, however, escaped or were let free after the war. Doc
tor Josef Mengele, who had carried out brutal experiments on living patient*
including children, managed to escape to Paraguay. A good many Nazis foun<
a warm welcome from right-wing dictatorships. The U.S. government facili
tated the escape of a number of Nazi war criminals in exchange for informa
