Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-2dmjx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-08T03:03:33.125Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Democratic Revisionism in Postwar Europe: Justifying Purges and Amnesty Laws in France, Austria and West Germany, 1943–1957

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2025

Thorsten Holzhauser Open the ORCID record for Thorsten Holzhauser [Opens in a new window]
Thorsten Holzhauser*
Affiliation:
Federal President Theodor Heuss House Foundation, Stuttgart, Germany
*
holzhauser@stiftung-heuss-haus.de
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

After the Second World War, lawmakers in the re-established democracies of Western and Central Europe set in place various judicial, administrative and political review processes. These were highly controversial as they had to manage two conflicting demands: the desire to purge former Nazis, fascists and collaborators as a means of re-democratisation, and to keep them away from power through a series of democratic restrictions such as temporary disenfranchisement. In this article, I investigate how postwar elites in France, Austria and West Germany dealt with this democratic conundrum and how their opponents used the concept of democracy in order to discredit postwar purges and achieve their revision through amnesty laws. I put forward the notion of democratic revisionism and I try to define its role within the wider framework of postwar transition and democracy.

Information

Type
Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , August 2025 , pp. 882 - 897
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

All societies in democratic transition face the challenge of reckoning with people incriminated by their past. For Europe's re-established democracies after the Second World War, this question came to the fore when dealing with former Nazis, fascists and collaborators. Confronted with citizens deemed both a burden and a threat to democratic transition, lawmakers in many European countries in the 1940s – such as France, Denmark, Norway and the Benelux countries, but also Austria, Italy and West Germany – set in place various judicial, administrative and political review processes. These aimed at punishing culprits and removing them from positions of power and influence. However, these operations were highly controversial as societies had to choose or to balance between two – potentially conflicting – logics: the first leading to exclusion and systematic expulsion of perpetrators, the second to their eventual inclusion and reintegration. Most postwar democracies in Europe at the end of the war gave priority to the first logic, but within half a decade they had changed track, initiating measures of amnesty and reintegration.Footnote 1

The reasons for this development are manifold. Scholars of transitional justice such as Luc Huyse point to a variety of motives of a ‘moral’, a ‘pragmatic’ and a ‘politico-strategic’ nature, ranging from overcrowded prisons to the effects of the Cold War that led to a closing of the ranks in the face of a foreign enemy.Footnote 2 German historians, on the other hand, have mostly interpreted the shift from purges (Säuberung) to reintegration as part of a certain politics of the past (Vergangenheitspolitik) that tried to ensure the internal cohesion of what has been described as a ‘post-national socialist Volksgemeinschaft’.Footnote 3 From this point of view, amnesty laws in favour of former Nazis and collaborators can be seen both as a pragmatic necessity and as a sign of antiliberal legacies.Footnote 4

This article tries to add another facet to the discussion by looking at the relationship between postwar sanctions and amnesties, and the project of liberalisation and democratisation after the Second World War. The link between both phenomena is obvious. In the eastern parts of Europe, the question of dealing with former Nazis and collaborators quickly became a factor in the construction of communist regimes. In Western Europe, by contrast, it was closely linked to the re-establishment of liberal democracies: by removing perpetrators and followers of the past regimes from their posts and excluding them from decision-making, European societies tried to rebuild a democratic order uncompromised by – and protected from – any anti-democratic influence. However, these provisions came along with certain restrictions of democratic participation: parts of the population were (temporarily) stripped of some of their democratic rights, such as their right to vote and their right to choose their profession. Whilst these measures were based on different procedures – as a sanction under penal law or through an administrative act, for instance – they triggered heated and long-lasting discussions in many European postwar societies on the character of the ongoing transitions to democracy.

How did the democratic postwar elites, the political parties and lawmakers that supported the democratic transition in particular, deal with this conundrum? How did their enemies, and those affected by the postwar sanctions, use the concept of democracy in order to achieve their political revision? And what role did this discourse play in Europe's transition from dictatorship and occupation to a new form of polity that has been described by historians such as Pepijn Corduwener, Martin Conway or Claudia Gatzka as the ‘postwar model of democracy’?Footnote 5 According to Conway, European re-democratisation efforts after the Second World War went along with two opposing tendencies: on the one hand, they involved an expansion of democratic rights and attitudes.Footnote 6 On the other hand, they were shaped by ‘a mentality of caution’ on the part of leaders, which led to a highly controlled version of democratic rule that prioritised stability over participation.Footnote 7 Conway argues that ‘the people would have to undergo an apprenticeship in democratic procedures before they could be authorized to operate it’.Footnote 8 At first glance, democratic restrictions for former Nazis and collaborators seem to fit this description of a cautious democracy; but how exactly does the rapid succession of postwar sanctions and reintegration measures fit into this duality of participation and control? Looking at postwar Germany, Sean A. Forner has put forward a different interpretation. According to his account, a group of ‘committed democrats’ pursued a much more participatory vision of democratic renewal after 1945 that involved both democratic re-education and participation – learning democracy by doing democracy – instead of redemptive exclusion of (former) anti-democrats.Footnote 9 However, whether and how this vision influenced the concepts of postwar sanctions and amnesties has not yet been clarified, especially not beyond the particular case of Germany.

This will be examined in more detail below by taking a look at some inherent contradictions and problems of democratic politics in the broader field of sanctions and amnesties in the 1940s and 1950s – from the first enactments of the French purification (épuration) in 1943–4 to the Austrian general amnesty of 1957.Footnote 10 On the basis of legislative, parliamentary and journalistic sources on the question of postwar sanctions and amnesties in three European postwar democracies (West Germany, Austria and France), the article will focus on the changing discourses and ideas among lawmakers and political party leaders on the relationship between transitional justice and re-democratisation between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1950s. These sources – laws, decrees and parliamentary minutes – do not reveal the general attitudes among the population. However, they do indicate the ideas among legislators and political elites about how former Nazis and collaborators should be dealt with in a democracy. Special attention will be paid to the debates on voting rights, eligibility and related civil rights, which concerned the core of democratic participation and were particularly controversial.Footnote 11

By comparing West Germany to Austria and France, the article follows a pragmatic comparative design which combines elements of a most similar systems approach (West Germany vs. Austria) with those of a most different systems design (Austria/West Germany vs. France).Footnote 12 By doing so, I try to identify both similarities and differences across different national cultures, political systems and democratic traditions, in particular between former parts of Nazi Germany and formerly occupied countries. As former parts of Hitler's ‘Greater German Reich’, West Germany and Austria share many similarities. They had already got rid of their pre-war democracies several years before the start of the war; in both countries, democratic transition and denazification were initiated by Allied occupation forces but largely executed by domestic institutions; and the main question was how to deal with former Nazis and Nazi perpetrators.Footnote 13 Moreover, in both cases, re-democratisation was linked to efforts to regain national sovereignty and territorial unity in the early years of the Cold War.Footnote 14 France, by contrast, was a traditional Western European democracy that experienced the end of its liberal regime and the start of occupation and collaboration as a result of the Second World War. Similarly to Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark or Norway, postwar France was faced with the question of how to deal with those citizens who had compromised themselves through their collaboration with the enemy or with the collaborationist war-time regime. At the same time, French lawmakers looked back at a long history of democracy and political transitions; the country had a unique wealth of experience with transitional justice, purges and amnesties for supporters of the previous regime.Footnote 15 All of these aspects influenced the debates on the French ‘purification’ (épuration) and on the amnesty laws of the late 1940s and early 1950s.Footnote 16

At first sight, these three cases differ greatly, not only in the nature of crime and retribution but also in the way they conducted their postwar sanctions and amnesties. Nevertheless, they share many similarities on a level of discourse and reasoning. These similarities, I will argue, point to a more general phenomenon shared by many Western European postwar democracies. As will be demonstrated, in France, Austria and West Germany transitional justice in the first postwar decade was characterised by both democratising and revisionist tendencies. These tendencies did not simply contradict each other but corresponded with one another and were in parts even mutually dependent. In dealing with former Nazis and collaborators, postwar leaders and lawmakers put forward new resources of political identity and negotiated democratic norms and values by discussing the possibilities and limits of democratic politics.Footnote 17 Yet at the same time, they opened a door for revisionist movements whose aim was to get rid of the sanctions that had been imposed and of the political measures taken to deal with the past. This conundrum between re-democratisation and the revision of postwar sanctions – for which I suggest the term democratic revisionism – played a major role in the re-democratisation of Western European societies after the Second World War.

Postwar Sanctions: Democratic or Anti-democratic?

As the future president of West Germany, Theodor Heuss, noted in 1947, ‘all the world is talking about democracy’.Footnote 18 In fact, after the Second World War ‘democracy’, although a contested term, quickly became a universal value invoked by virtually all political forces as a guiding principle for reconstruction.Footnote 19 Dealing with citizens deemed compromised by their past was no exception. Accordingly, political, judicial and administrative sanctions against citizens who were identified as former Nazis and collaborators were typically justified as a means of reconstructing political life ‘on a democratic basis’, as the victorious Allies argued in West Germany.Footnote 20 According to this objective, any member of the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] who had been ‘more than a nominal participant in the activities of the Nazi Party’ had to be removed from public and semi-public office.Footnote 21 Depending on their respective degree of personal incrimination (Belastung), more than a million German citizens faced penalties such as fines, property losses, bans on certain jobs or even work camps.Footnote 22 In Austria, postwar denazification followed a very similar reasoning. As the country's provisional government under the Social Democratic Chancellor Karl Renner declared on 27 April 1945, anyone who ‘out of contempt for democracy and democratic freedoms had set up a regime of violence’ should ‘not be able to count on any leniency after the end of the war’.Footnote 23 This was meant to purge those Austrians who had become members of the NSDAP or one of their affiliated organisations. Around half a million Austrians had to formally register as Nazis and were therefore subject to sanctions of varying scope, an operation that most justified as a necessary stepping stone to re-democratisation.Footnote 24 But the link between transitional justice and democracy was not only evident in the successor states of the ‘Third Reich’. In France, too, the legal purges (épuration légale) brought forward by the provisional authorities, first in Algiers and then in mainland France, aimed at the restoration of ‘republican legality’.Footnote 25 On this basis, some 350,000 people were charged with collaborating crimes and around 40,000 were imprisoned. In addition, around 50,000 people were stripped of their civil rights; tens of thousands of civil servants were sanctioned.Footnote 26

While in France, Austria and West Germany alike these sanctions were based on a discourse of re-democratisation, at the same time they revolved around the question of what distinguished a democratic ‘purge’ from an anti-democratic one. In the eyes of the French resistance forces who dominated the legislative assemblies up until 1951, any restoration of republican legality had to be based on democratic and constitutional liberties. Dealing with collaborators in republican France should differ significantly from the purges committed by the Vichy regime and by the German occupiers.Footnote 27 By this, members of the French opposition against Vichy used the épuration as a means to reclaim the country's democratic tradition and to foster a new narrative of national emancipation and liberation which can also be found in neighbouring countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway or Denmark.Footnote 28

Similarly, democratic postwar elites in Austria – from communist and socialist leaders to those of the Catholic camp – used reckoning with former Nazis as a means of strengthening the country's own national identity vis-à-vis pan-Germanism: denazification was seen as part of the country's ‘de-prussification’ (Entpreußung) and thus as part of an independent Austrian nation-building.Footnote 29 According to Chancellor Karl Renner, the democratic postwar order could not be built ‘with Hitlerian methods’, but only ‘as a constitutional state with legal means’.Footnote 30 Even in postwar Germany, dealing with former Nazis was seen as a way to distance the country from its fascist past by rediscovering German civility and adhering to liberal and democratic principles. Postwar elites, therefore, believed that any sanctions put forward by a democratic Germany against former Nazis had to be fundamentally different from the ‘barbaric methods of National Socialism’, as a Center Party MP put it in the state assembly of North Rhine-Westfalia in December 1947.Footnote 31

This emphasis on a clear and visible difference between democratic ‘purification’ of society and anti-democratic ‘purges’ was a cornerstone of the liberal postwar settlement in Central and Western Europe. However, the relationship between democratisation and transitional justice proved to be much more complicated than the statements cited above would suggest. In liberated France, one of the first enactments of the provisional government under Charles de Gaulle was the ordonnance of 26 August 1944 which established the legal status of national indignity (indignité nationale). This new legal norm was based on the notion that there were French citizens who were found to be ‘undeserving’ of their full civil rights because of their ‘anti-national’ acts of collaborationFootnote 32 – an idea that had a long history in French republicanism going back to the French Revolution of 1791.Footnote 33 By being sanctioned with national degradation (dégradation nationale), French citizens could be partially and temporarily deprived of some of their civil rights, including the right to vote, to stand as a candidate in elections or to freely choose one's livelihood. In addition, the ordinance explicitly broke with basic principles of the rule of law, in particularly with the principle of nullum crimen sine lege, as it effectively set in place new retroactive norms and regulations.Footnote 34 In fact, the French legislature was very aware of the explosive nature of these provisions, as is shown by the enactment's wording: the preamble explicitly recognised ‘that such a legal distinction between citizens may appear serious, because democracy excludes any discriminatory measure’. Nonetheless, the members of the French Resistance deemed it ‘necessary’ to exclude certain individuals from offices ‘that give their holder political influence’.Footnote 35 While this argument points at a certain pragmatism of democratisation it was, at the same time, linked to a notion of honour and virtue (honneur-vertu) that was seen by French republicans as a fundamental prerequisite of democracy: honour had to be re-established so that the republic could flourish once again.Footnote 36

West German and Austrian postwar elites were no less aware that a comprehensive ‘cleansing’ (Säuberung) of society based on existing laws would hardly be possible and that it needed more creative ways to judge former Nazis. Much like the French lawmakers of 1944, the Austrian Secretary of Justice, Josef Gerö, in June 1945 felt the need to make a clarification on the relationship between denazification and democracy. According to Gerö, creating retroactive law was a highly problematic operation that ‘blemished’ the new democratic order from the start. Still, given the circumstances, this was deemed necessary and justifiable on a moral level: ‘we calm our conscience with the fact that the criminals had to tell themselves in their inner conscience that their crimes cannot go unpunished’, Gerö argued.Footnote 37 During a March 1946 meeting of the South German Länderrat, which consisted of German state representatives within the American occupation zone, Hessian minister-president Karl Geiler asked a very similar question: was it not a violation of democratic fundamentals when a citizen was judged for having joined a particular party (i.e. the NSDAP)? After all, democracy allowed and even encouraged its citizens to participate in politics. Geiler – a Social Democrat who had been imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazi regime – found his answer not in democracy itself but in a moral argument. The answer was ‘no’, because the regime in question ‘did not only lead the German people into the abyss and into ruin, but also brought untold suffering and misery to large parts of the rest of humanity’.Footnote 38

A particularly controversial issue associated with postwar sanctions against Nazis and collaborators was the question of voting rights and eligibility. In France, the loss of both democratic rights was a typical sanction for former collaborators and citizens deemed ‘unworthy’. This was particularly controversial in the case of the 570 former MPs and senators who, on 10 July 1940, had voted in favour of Pétain's constitution-amending powers and thus were stripped of their eligibility. The disenfranchisement of members of parliament based on their parliamentary decisions was a clear violation of the Constitutional Act of 16 July 1875, according to which no member of parliament could be prosecuted on the basis of their views or their vote in parliament.Footnote 39 In addition, some MPs only lost their eligibility after they had already been re-elected to office. To large parts of the French right, who were particularly affected by these sanctions, this ex post practice appeared as a violation not only of the candidates’ democratic rights but of the democratic sovereign's expressed will.Footnote 40 While heavily criticised by the right, the communist and socialist left argued in favour of this practice. From their point of view, the parliamentarians of the Third Republic had themselves given up their right to democratic participation by voting ‘yes’ to Pétain. Universal suffrage can only apply to those who are worthy of it, as socialist deputy Louis Noguères argued in the Provisional National Assembly on 31 March 1945.Footnote 41

The question of voting rights and eligibility was a subject of much controversy in Austria and West Germany as well. In neither of these countries did democrats and antifascists support a general and permanent exclusion of ‘ordinary’ Nazis from the postwar polity. Rather, they supported their eventual reintegration, provided they committed to the new democratic order.Footnote 42 As late as 1945, the Austrian governing parties were of the firm opinion that former NSDAP members would have to prove themselves as ‘real democrats’ before they would be allowed to cast their vote again.Footnote 43 In a very similar way, the German liberal democrat Reinhold Maier (who himself had voted in favour of Hitler's extra-ordinary powers in 1933) argued in 1946 that ‘anyone who has associated himself with inhumanity through [party] membership or in an even closer way, has no right to invoke a democratic procedure. They must wait until [the right to participate] is granted to them’.Footnote 44 Though a very atypical argument for a liberal, it fit the dominant interpretation at the time that any affiliation to the Nazi Party automatically affected the right to democratic participation. Citizens with a particular Nazi past (NS-Belastete) were thus excluded from the 1945 and 1946 local and state elections in Germany, although the exact groups of people affected varied from state to state, even within one and the same occupation zone.Footnote 45

In addition to this ethical and political argument, many Austrian and West German politicians used a more educational justification for their policies. Given the longevity of anti-democratic rule in both countries, they believed, former Nazis had to be re-educated in order to participate in democracy. ‘They first have to learn what it means to be in a democracy, […] they have to fit into the democratic system’, Socialist MP Heinrich Hackenberg argued in the Austrian National Council in July 1946.Footnote 46 But this educational argument was very quickly challenged and pushed into the background. From 1946 onwards, a counter-argument gained ground. Based on the belief that most former Nazis were indeed redeemable, democratic lawmakers argued that an overly restrictive sanctions policy would run the risk of ‘permanently excluding those affected from participating in public life’, as Austrian Socialist Alfred Migsch put it in the National Council.Footnote 47 He argued that the public's ‘educational task cannot be fulfilled when the ordinary Nazi constantly walks around with the stigma: “you were a Nazi!”. It can only be accomplished if those who have done their atonement are accepted back with clemency and grace’.Footnote 48 While the idea of democratic re-education was initially used as an argument for sanctions and exclusion, many lawmakers now saw it as an argument for mercy, relief and reintegration.

These conflicting arguments led to a direct confrontation during the debates in West Germany's Parliamentary Council of 1948/49 which had to decide on an electoral law for the first Bundestag elections. During the parliamentary debate, Communist and Social Democrat lawmakers Heinz Renner and Jean Stock argued in favour of a ‘clean election law’.Footnote 49 One had to be firm in order to keep the new parliament free of fascist influence, they believed. Hence, not just former Nazi leaders but also those who were considered compromised to a lesser extent (Minderbelastete) should lose their right to vote and being elected. For most of their colleagues in the council, this strict line went too far. Like most representatives of the centre and the right, the liberal member Theodor Heuss believed that any disenfranchisement of former Nazis would be counterproductive to the country's efforts at re-democratisation. Instead of converting them into good democrats, they might be further alienated from the new democratic order, Heuss argued during a meeting of the council's main committee on 23 February 1949. According to Heuss, who would become West Germany's first Federal President some months later, many former Nazis had already begun to ‘acclimatise’ to democracy. Restricting their participation rights, he argued, might hinder their learning process and instead turn them into opponents of the new democracy.Footnote 50

This argument was representative of a relatively ‘thin version of the democratic psyche’, as Anthony Kauders puts it, which was widespread among liberal democrats in postwar Germany. According to this interpretation of political transition, the belief system of post-fascist Germany could be altered fairly easily by means of active participation in the democratic system.Footnote 51 Instead of being controlled by their ‘defensive mentality’, liberal German lawmakers were hopeful that former Nazis would quickly adapt to the new democracy when they were allowed to participate. Therefore, non-socialist forces in particular did not see any need for legal restrictions to eligibility as they trusted in people's abilities to change and in the main parties’ commitment not to put forward any outspoken Nazi candidates. As the Christian Democrat council member Carl Schröter argued in the council's main committee on 9 May 1949, they would not be so ‘foolish and tactless’ to do such a thing.Footnote 52

Fighting for Participation

All of these early debates about the democratic character of postwar sanctions against former Nazis and collaborators can be seen as examples of an open and earnest deliberation among democrats on the limits of democracy and the rule of law. In the parliaments and assemblies of the immediate postwar years (and in the liberal democratic media), former opponents of fascism, resistance fighters and victims of the Nazi and Vichy regimes discussed how to deal with their former enemies and those who, in their eyes, had compromised themselves. They saw their dealing with former Nazis and collaborators as a cornerstone of the new democratic order. While most of them believed in the necessity of a thorough democratic re-education they also recognised a certain ‘right to political error’, to use the words of German anti-Nazi intellectual Eugen Kogon in 1947. According to Kogon, one had to distinguish between ‘crime’ and ‘political error’. While the former was reason for punishment, the latter had to be atoned for but did not constitute a reason for permanent exclusion.Footnote 53 We can see here what Forner has pointed out for a group of ‘engaged democrats’ among postwar intellectuals in Germany who tried to build ‘bridges of understanding’ between ‘zealous antifascists and bankrupt apologists’, being conciliatory towards most Nazi followers whom they considered redeemable.Footnote 54 Members of the Free French and the French Resistance movement tended to be less understanding toward former collaborators but they similarly acknowledged that not every follower of the Pétain regime was a bad citizen and ‘unworthy’. Many of them had been ‘deceived’ (trompé) and ‘misled’ (égaré) by the regime and thus deserved their eventual democratic reintegration.Footnote 55

Those affected by the postwar sanctions were mostly absent in these early discussions. Once they entered the debate, democratic revisionism took increasingly rampant forms. During the latter half of the 1940s, in all three countries in question, extra-parliamentary movements of varying influence advocated an end to postwar sanctions. In contrast to the democratic elites who supported sanctions but discussed their shortcomings and democratic problems, these new movements tried to get rid of denazification and purification (épuration) altogether. Instead they argued in favour of extensive amnesty regulations. Comprising both persons affected by the sanctions themselves and those sympathetic to their cause, the European amnesty movements of the time owed much of their success to a clever political spin: they did not simply cast doubt on democracy, the new guiding concept of the postwar order, but on the contrary, used the democratic argument themselves to justify their demands.

A paradigmatic case is the French amnesty movement of the 1940s and early 1950s: led by the Catholic cleric Jean-Marie Desgranges and some convicted collaborators such as Paul Faure and Pierre-Etienne Flandin, the movement campaigned against the so-called ‘injustices’ of the postwar settlement, i.e. alleged crimes committed by parts of the Resistance and their political supporters against former collaborators.Footnote 56 A main representative of the movement was the Association of Representatives of the People of the Third Republic (Association des Représentants du Peuple de la IIIe République), a lobby group dedicated to the fate of the so-called inéligibles, i.e. those former elected representatives who had lost their political participation rights on the basis of the postwar ‘indignity’ provisions.Footnote 57 According to Desgranges and his followers, these sanctions showed that the purification (épuration) was not contributing to the restoration of republican values, as their supporters argued, but rather risked their further erosion and corruption.

This argument was prominently brought forward during a ‘Banquet of the 100’ in Paris in February 1948. Organised by the association of inéligibles, the banquet's official purpose was to commemorate the republican revolution of 1848. At the same time, the association sought to bring about a clear revision of postwar sanctions, thus linking the struggles of the past to those of the present. At the banquet, the speakers did not try to come across as die-hard apologists or anti-republicans. Instead, they staged the fight for their own rehabilitation as a democratic fight for freedom and participatory rights in the tradition of the French Republic. Like the revolutionaries of old on the streets of Paris, they styled themselves as fighters for universal suffrage, freedom of expression and free choice of profession – and, by extension, for liberté, égalité, fraternité. In doing so, the épurés tried to counter the hegemonic notion that they were extreme right outcasts. Instead, they wanted to be seen as patriots, revolutionaries and fighters for democratic sovereignty. In their view, the voters alone should decide whether those French citizens compromised by their collaborationist past were worthy of taking part in democratic reconstruction. Only an extensive amnesty settlement could give back this power to the people and thereby produce ‘true democracy based on law and freedom’, as Lucien Lamoureux, a former Third Republic minister and member of Vichy's National Council, argued in his banquet speech.Footnote 58 In this way, Lamoureux and his fellow campaigners tried to transform themselves from ‘bad citizens’ into good, loyal Frenchmen. They underlined their position with anti-communist propaganda and an anti-totalitarian terminology typical of the early years of the Cold War. In order to discredit the postwar sanctions put forward by the French Resistance at the time of liberation, they exaggerated the scope of the bloody ‘wild purges’, claiming more than 100,000 victims, and retroactively blamed them solely on communists.Footnote 59 This retroactively delegitimised the French Resistance's common project of épuration by framing it as part of a ‘red terror’ campaign and an attempted coup by communists against the Republic's liberal and democratic values.Footnote 60

During the mid-1940s, the various amnesty lobby groups remained rather marginal actors in French politics. In particular, their attacks against the French Resistance were met with fierce opposition from parts of the public, especially from Resistance groups and allies.Footnote 61 But, over the years, they were able to spread their narrative and gain ground. Soon even non-communist résistants, such as journalist Rémy Roure, felt that they had to distance themselves from the ‘excesses’ of the liberation period.Footnote 62 The April and May 1949 issues of the Resistance daily newspaper Combat show how far public opinion had moved in this direction. Under the title ‘clemency or rehabilitation’, the newspaper launched a series of daily articles, allowing different voices to have their say on the amnesty issue. Almost every contributor agreed that the épuration had caused a great deal of injustice and that an amnesty law of some kind was necessary.Footnote 63 As a result, by the late 1940s, the main forces of the parliamentary right in France, the conservative National Centre of Independents and Peasants (Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans; CNIP) and the Christian Democratic Popular Republican Movement (Mouvement Républicain Populaire; MRP), were openly campaigning for an amnesty law.Footnote 64 Even France's main liberation hero, General Charles de Gaulle, used the amnesty issue as an argument in his propaganda war against the Fourth Republic. According to the general, the government's uncompromising way of dealing with former collaborators showed that the political system had gone astray and lacked democratic integrity.Footnote 65

Postwar election campaigns in Austria and West Germany brought forth very similar arguments. In the run-up to the 1949 Austrian National Council elections, virtually all major parties agreed that they had to stop the ‘disenfranchisement of parts of the population’, allegedly imposed by the voting rights regulations of 1945.Footnote 66 A loud voice in this debate came from the newly-established Federation of Independents (Verband der Unabhängigen; VdU), founded in March 1949. A predecessor of the right-wing Freedom Party, the Federation of Independents claimed to represent those Austrian citizens banned from participating in the first postwar elections due to their Nazi past.Footnote 67 However, the federation was not the only Austrian party openly wooing former Nazis and their families (who represented about 1.5 million Austrians). This was seen as a viable strategy by virtually all political forces in Austria. Even the communists tried to find a balance between condemning ‘Nazi perpetrators’ and wooing the ‘small culprits’ and ‘fellow travellers’, while simultaneously supporting the ‘National League’, a pro-Moscow lobby group of Ehemaligen (i.e. former members of the Nazi Party).Footnote 68 As a result, virtually all of the Austrian parties agreed that postwar democracy had to actively include former National Socialists.Footnote 69 By the late 1940s, Austria's mainstream parties even criticised the mere fact that sanctions had been imposed on NSDAP members at all: ‘persecution (!) because of mere membership of a political party, i.e. because of a certain attitude without specific individual guilt, is an offense against any true democracy’, conservative MP Karl Brunner argued on 11 December 1948.Footnote 70

By that time, this had become a prototypical line of argument in Europe's postwar democracies: only individual guilt, as proven by a judicial trial, was seen as a legitimate reason for legal sanctions. By contrast, a fascist attitude as indicated by acts of speech or a party association was not. In a similar stance, another high-profile politician of Austria's conservative camp, the later Chancellor Alfons Gorbach, spoke out against the ongoing ‘persecution and discrimination of all former supporters of National Socialism’ and equated denazification with the ‘arbitrariness’ of Nazi rule.Footnote 71 Against this background, democracy itself became a prerequisite for apologetic revisionism. The 1949 National Council elections in Austria were seen as a veritable ‘race for the Nazi votes’ between all major parties, as the socialist newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung called it in October 1949.Footnote 72 Campaigners of various democratic parties even began to style former Austrian members of the Nazi Party as double victims of Nazism and of Allied postwar retribution, drawing a parallel between their fate and that of Austria itself. Tempted and overpowered by German Nazism, and then punished by the Allies, they had to be rehabilitated and reintegrated in order to restore postwar Austrian sovereignty.

This argument was a major factor in West German politics as well. As has recently been shown by Sebastian Rojek, West German postwar administrators and lawmakers were regularly contacted by persons who criticised denazification for allegedly violating democratic and ‘liberalistic’ principles.Footnote 73 Realising that liberal democracy was to be the core principle of any future polity in West Germany, many citizens who had been affected by denazification used democracy as a discursive resource to legitimise their personal and often apologetic narratives. In this respect, democracy became an heir to the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft as the main resource of legitimacy, and was often associated with the same nationalistic and authoritarian ideas. In many cases, as shown by Rojek, claims of anti-democratic purges went along with verbal aggression and only slightly hidden threats that those responsible for today's purges could once again be the purged of tomorrow. Just as significant was the amalgamation of (pseudo-)democratic arguments and the idea of national sovereignty. As in Austria, denazification was seen as both a violation of liberal democracy and of national self-determination, as it was allegedly imposed by the Allies against the wishes of the German demos.Footnote 74

When the first elections to West Germany's Bundestag were held in the autumn of 1949, a broad political consensus had emerged among virtually all major forces that denazification had caused a great deal of injustice and should therefore be ended as soon as possible. As in neighbouring countries, an extra-parliamentary amnesty movement made up of churches, parties and interest groups played a key role in this discursive shift.Footnote 75 One of their prime slogans was Kogon's ‘right to political error’, which was increasingly used as a justification for undoing denazification and allowing former Nazis a bigger role in West Germany's democratic reconstruction. During the election campaigns of the late 1940s, the slogan was taken up in particular by the liberal Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei; FDP), which in some regions assembled large numbers of former Nazi Party members.Footnote 76 The FDP's political stance towards denazification was an obvious example of the new connections between liberal democracy and revisionism: on their election posters, the Free Democrats urged the government to draw a line under ‘denazification’ and ‘disenfranchisement’. Instead of treating former Nazis as ‘second class citizens’ there should be legal equality among all German citizens, they argued.Footnote 77

This strategy was copied by a number of other German parties. Even before the first federal election in 1949 – parallel to the election campaign in Austria – a ‘race for the votes of [Nazi] followers’ had begun, based on the assumption that excluding them from the democratic process was a violation of democratic principles in itself.Footnote 78 Much as in France and Austria, erasing postwar sanctions against ‘ordinary’ or ‘small’ Nazis and collaborators was seen by most West German postwar politicians as a necessary step to creating a proper democratic sovereignty among equal citizens and thus to finding a new sense of democratised Germanness.

Towards Revision by Amnesty

The debate over the democratic character of denazification reached its climax during the first legislation period of the new West German Bundestag, which met in September 1949. For a majority of MPs, the birth of a new democratic polity represented a suitable point in time to ‘clear the table’ when it came to the past, as the newly elected Chancellor Konrad Adenauer put it in September 1949. According to Adenauer, himself a long-time opponent of Nazism, ‘a lot of misfortune and a lot of mischief’ had been caused by denazification. Those ‘really guilty’ of the Nazi crimes would, of course, have to be punished. Apart from that, though, one should ‘no longer differentiate between two classes of people in Germany: the politically correct and the incorrect’, the Chancellor argued, taking up a similar reasoning as De Gaulle and as his conservative colleagues in the Austrian National Council cited above.Footnote 79

Adenauer's speech provides an insight into some of the key arguments of democratic revisionism seen in Austria and France as well. First, by alluding to the secret victims of denazification, Adenauer and his contemporaries turned those citizens purged for their past association with the Nazi Party or the Nazi regime into victims who had to be given a chance at redemption. This parallels similar attempts in Austria and even in France, where the so-called ‘misled people’ (égarés) – those who had merely been ‘mistaken’ about the true nature of the Vichy regime and the occupation – became a main point of reference in debates on the épuration and were soon offered the opportunity to ‘come back into the national community’, as stated by the National Assembly in July 1949.Footnote 80

Second, by opposing the division of citizens into ‘two classes of people’, Chancellor Adenauer paid tribute to a new anti-communist rhetoric that now dominated the political discourse on democracy and reintegration, as already seen in France. By associating the postwar purges and similar measures with Marxist terminology of class and class-struggle they were reinterpreted as communist and therefore anti-democratic. What had once been propagated as a means of democratisation was now seen as an ‘abortion of totalitarian thinking and Klassenkampf objectives’, as one conservative MP in the German Bundestag put it in early 1950. The campaign for the broadest possible amnesty thus became a central component of the fight ‘against all forms of totalitarianism’.Footnote 81 This argument was strengthened by incoming news from Central and Eastern Europe where communists indeed used ‘antifascist’ purges in order to establish their respective version of ‘people's democracy’.

Third, Christian Democratic party leader Adenauer – and many other critics of postwar sanctions – made extensive use of Catholic terminology, effectively amalgamating concepts of democracy, nation and Christianity. By arguing that the ‘sinners’ of the Nazi period deserved to be treated with ‘mercy’ and ‘clemency’, the supporters of a general amnesty presented their goal as the imperative of a real Christian attitude. In a time that was shaped by attempts at re-Christianisation and saw the rise of a new kind of Christian Democratic party family in Europe, these kinds of arguments were highly successful. Hence, they became core messages brought forward by the new mass integration parties of Christian democracy, such as Germany's CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union in Bavaria), Austria's People's Party and France's MRP.Footnote 82

In West Germany, the result was a series of amnesty provisions and similar measures enacted by the newly formed Bundestag and by several state legislatures.Footnote 83 These included a first federal ‘Impunity Act’ as well as the so-called ‘131’ act to bring back formerly purged members of the civil service into office.Footnote 84 The latter was passed unanimously by the Bundestag, supported by all political groups including the communists, and claimed to bring an end to widespread ‘deprivation’ and ‘defamation’.Footnote 85 In doing so, West Germany's federal parliament effectively granted a right of re-integration to those civil servants who had been sanctioned as Nazi collaborators. It was an important discursive shift from showing mercy to fulfilling a legal claim, from grace to entitlement. Again, democratic arguments played a crucial role in justifying these measures. Denazification was made responsible for violating the democratic core principle of equality. Only a far-reaching amnesty settlement was to restore what the small populist Union for Economic Reconstruction (Wirtschaftliche Aufbau-Vereinigung; WAV) described as ‘true democracy’ and ‘equal rights for all German citizens’.Footnote 86

In Austria, the conservative People's Party had already introduced an amnesty bill for those incriminated by their Nazi past just a few months before the 1949 elections. This was intended to end the ‘serious reprimand’ of Austrians sanctioned by denazification laws.Footnote 87 According to this proposal, anyone not classified as a war criminal under the United Nations Charter should be exempt from sanctions. This goal, however, was not politically feasible. Although the Austrian parties, including the communists, had agreed on a comprehensive amnesty bill in 1952, the Allies rejected it.Footnote 88 It was therefore not until the Austrian State Treaty came into force and Austria regained its sovereignty in 1955 that federal lawmakers in Austria were able to pass the desired laws. With the amnesty act of 1957, the National Council finally dropped all existing sanctions against those who were incriminated by their Nazi past. ‘Equality of citizenship’ was to be established for all Austrians ‘and thus the interim period from the collapse of the National Socialist tyranny to the consolidation of the democratic legal system […] was to be closed’, as the parliamentary rapporteur, the Socialist Max Eibegger, argued in the National Council on 14 March 1957.Footnote 89 The amnesty was presented as the final step on the way to Austria's postwar democratisation.

When the Austrian amnesty law came into effect in 1957, most French citizens subject to postwar sanctions had already been amnestied by a couple of successive laws, most importantly the amnesty acts of 1951 and 1953.Footnote 90 By abolishing the national degradation in toto, the French parliament gave back full rights to some hundreds of politicians who had lost their eligibility due to their behaviour during the war. This included outspoken anti-democrats such as Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a former high-ranking official in Vichy's propaganda machine who would go on to become a member of parliament in 1956 and an extreme right presidential candidate in 1965.Footnote 91

The French amnesty debates featured very similar elements of democratic revisionism to those in Austria and West Germany, but they differed in two key aspects. First, in the two German-speaking countries the overall policy of reintegrating former Nazis had been supported by large political majorities, including the communists, reflecting a virtual all-party consensus. In France, by contrast, the debate was much more controversial due to the strength and attitude of the French communists, who clearly rejected the amnesties. On the one hand, granting amnesty to former collaborators was seen by French communists as an offence against the patriotic legacy of the Resistance, one of their main sources of legitimacy in postwar France. On the other hand, their concept of democracy was less about granting liberal rights to all citizens equally, irrespective of their attitude and past, than about excluding those who were seen as traitors to the people and its collective interest. However, reservations against the principle of democratic revisionism in France were not limited to communist forces. In contrast to their counterparts in the West German and Austrian parliaments, French lawmakers never agreed on the view that democratic equality demanded full legal and symbolic rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators. Whilst West Germany's aforementioned ‘131’ act effectively gave former Third Reich civil servants a right to re-integration into public service, the French National Assembly explicitly stated the opposite: former collaborators in the civil service did not automatically gain a right to reinstatement.Footnote 92 By this and similar decisions, French lawmakers chose not to erase the difference between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ citizens, i.e. those who were compromised by their collaborationist past and those who were not. They simply decided to pardon those deemed guilty in a symbolic act of clemency. Or, as centre-right MP Louis Roullin put it in the parliamentary debate, ‘Mother France, surrounded by perils, does not deny her children, even those who have gone astray, the right to return to the home of the nation.’Footnote 93

Democratic Revisionism and Re-democratisation

The allegedly ‘democratic’ or ‘undemocratic’ character of postwar sanctions played a significant part in Western and Central Europe's transition from authoritarianism to democracy during the 1940s and 1950s. For postwar democrats in Central and Western Europe, there was no question that the difference between dictatorship and democracy was revealed in the way they dealt with anti-democrats. Denazification and sanctions against Nazi collaborators had to comply with democratic and liberal criteria as much as possible, even if there was little agreement about how far the sanctions could go and still be read as democratic.

In this way, the state's approach to citizens deemed compromised by their past became a practical test that touched on fundamental issues of democracy and liberalism. Some argued that democracy could only be rebuilt without former Nazis and collaborators – or that they first had to prove their democratic loyalty. Others saw the legal and symbolic equality of those compromised and those uncompromised as a democratic imperative. While one can identify certain differences between left-wing and right-wing interpretations – with the former tending towards sanctioning those seen as traitors to the people and the latter upholding individual liberties – they were not as big as one would expect (with Austrian and German left-wing forces adopting some right-wing arguments). The same holds true for differences between the countries in question. In the German-speaking countries, liberal interpretations dominated which put an emphasis on democratic equality, while in France a more republican distinction between worthy and unworthy citizens persisted longer. Yet, the amnesty laws of the 1950s were based on very similar arguments about popular sovereignty, Christian clemency and national unity.

The relationship between transitional justice and democracy was a central component of the postwar liberal democratic order in Western and Central Europe. It helped in the long run to anchor democratic principles and values as a discursive benchmark. On the other hand, the same debates on the democratic character of postwar sanctions represented a gateway for political opportunism and apologetic revisionism. The liberal, pluralistic framework of postwar democracy in Central and Western Europe allowed former Nazis and collaborators to form lobby groups and parties and to fight for the reversal of purges and sanctions in a democratic, constitutional way. As a result, both democratic and anti-democratic parties started to woo those formerly deemed unfit for democracy. Moreover, those affected by postwar sanctions were able to use democracy as a main argument in order to pursue their revisionist goals. By arguing that purges against those compromised by their past contradicted democracy, they gained ground and put pressure on lawmakers to reverse the postwar sanctions. Indeed, the amnesty laws of the late 1940s and 1950s were often justified as the final steps in re-democratisation. Postwar European democracies set their own incentives to reintegrate former Nazis, fascists and collaborators and to regard them as democratic citizens with equal rights.

Conway is, therefore, right, when he argues that ‘democracy worked predominantly against any coming to terms with the legacies of the Nazi and wartime past’.Footnote 94 At the same time, his notion of postwar democracy as a framework of caution and control that prioritises stability over participation fits the phenomenon of democratic revisionism only to a limited extent. There is no doubt that most democratic postwar politicians in the three countries in question supported some form of democratic re-education. However, they also showed a high degree of confidence that they could successfully integrate former Nazis and collaborators by letting them participate in the new democratic process. Exclusion and the restriction of democratic rights, by contrast, were seen more and more as obstacles to re-democratisation. This inclusive tendency could be easily used by anti-democrats and apologists in order to de-legitimise any postwar purges in the name of democracy, popular sovereignty and liberal rights – but at the same time it made them conduct their reintegration campaigns within the rhetorical and formal framework of liberal democracy.

This came along with an important discursive shift. While it was still clear to the European postwar elites in 1945, many of whom had actively fought against fascism, that democratic reconstruction demanded the exclusion of former fascists and collaborators, a decade later the opposite was true: the act of ‘classifying’ citizens based on their past was now perceived as undemocratic and even totalitarian, including when applied to former SS perpetrators.Footnote 95 Another side-effect of democratic revisionism was the further marginalisation of Nazi victims who remained largely invisible. European Jews, for example, only played a role in this discourse insofar as they were called upon to ‘reconcile’ themselves with their tormentors and thus not to endanger democratic community building.

References

1 See Wouters, Nico, ed., Transitional Justice and Memory in Europe (1945–2013) (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mouralis, Guillaume and Weinke, Annette, ‘Justice’, in Europe's Postwar Periods – 1989, 1945, 1918: Writing History Backwards, eds. Conway, Martin, Lagrou, Pieter and Rousso, Henry (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 55–80Google Scholar; Brechtken, Magnus, Bulhak, Wladislaw and Zarusky, Jürgen, eds., Political and Transitional Justice in Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mihr, Anja, Pickel, Gert and Pickel, Susanne, eds., Handbuch Transitional Justice (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2020)Google Scholar; for a classic account see Elster, Jon, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past: A Framework for the Study of Justice in the Transition to Democracy’, European Journal of Sociology 39 (1998): 7–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Luc Huyse, ‘Comparing Transitional Justice Experiences in Europe’, in Transitional Justice and Memory in Europe (1945–2013), ed. Wouters, 353.

3 Frei, Norbert, ‘Revisionismus als Versuchung: Die deutschen Deutungseliten und die NS-Vergangenheit’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 8 (2023): 66Google Scholar; see also Frei's seminal study Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: Beck, 1996).

4 As pointed out by recent historiography, these developments contributed to a high degree of ‘Nazi continuities’ in West Germany's postwar institutions: see, among others, Goschler, Constantin and Wala, Michael, ‘Keine neue Gestapo’. Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2015)Google Scholar; Görtemaker, Manfred and Safferling, Christoph, Die Akte Rosenburg. Das Bundesministerium der Justiz und die NS-Zeit (Munich: CH Beck, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bösch, Frank and Wirsching, Andreas, eds., Hüter der Ordnung. Die Innenministerien in Bonn und Ost-Berlin nach dem Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018)Google Scholar; Frei, Norbert, Im Namen der Deutschen. Die Bundespräsidenten und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: CH Beck, 2023)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Creuzberger, Stefan and Geppert, Dominik, eds., Die Ämter und ihre Vergangenheit. Ministerien und Behörden im geteilten Deutschland 1949–1972 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018), 165Google Scholar; Mesner, Maria, ed., Entnazifizierung zwischen politischem Anspruch, Parteienkonkurrenz und Kaltem Krieg. Das Beispiel der SPÖ (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2005)Google Scholar; Reiter, Margit, Die Ehemaligen. Der Nationalsozialismus und die Anfänge der FPÖ (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Corduwener, Pepijn, The Problem of Democracy in Postwar Europe: Political Actors and the Formation of the Postwar Model of Democracy in France, West Germany, and Italy (New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar; Conway, Martin, ‘The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945–1973’, Contemporary European History 3, no. 1 (2004): 87Google Scholar; Gatzka, Claudia, Die Demokratie der Wähler. Stadtgesellschaft und politische Kommunikation in Italien und der Bundesrepublik 1944–1979 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2019), 27–34Google Scholar.

6 Conway, Martin, ‘Democracies’, in Europe's Postwar Periods – 1989, 1945, 1918: Writing History Backwards, eds. Conway, Martin, Lagrou, Pieter and Rousso, Henry (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 129Google Scholar.

7 Conway, Martin, Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 16Google Scholar; see also Müller, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 5–6Google Scholar.

8 Conway, Martin, ‘Democracy in Western Europe after 1945’, in Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History, eds. Kurunmäke, Jussi, Nevers, Jeppe and Velde, Henk te (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 235Google Scholar; see also Corduwener, Problem, 22–5.

9 Forner, Sean A., German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Kauders, Anthony D., ‘No Country for Old Minds: The Psychology of West Germany's Democratization’, in The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany, eds. Kapczynski, Jennifer M. and Kita, Caroline A. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022), 97–9Google Scholar.

10 Main points of reference will be the debates surrounding the French ordonnances of 26 June 1944 and 28 Aug. 1944, the ineligibility law of 4 Oct. 1946 and the amnesty laws of 16 Apr. 1946, of 16 Aug. 1947, of 28 Aug. 1947, of 9 Feb. 1949, of 5 Jan. 1951, of 20 Feb. 1953 and of 6 Aug. 1953; the Austrian constitutional laws of 8 May 1945, of 26 June 1945, of 19 Oct. 1945, of 6 Feb. 1947, of 21 and 22 Apr. 1948, of 13 July 1949, of 18 July 1956 and of 14 Mar. 1957; for West Germany, among others, the Allied directive 24 of 12 Jan. 1946, the Liberation Law of 5 Mar. 1946, and the federal laws of 15 June 1949, of 31 Dec. 1949, of 11 May 1951, and of 17 July 1954.

11 For similar problems in Norway see Vaale, Lars-Erik and Borge, Baard Herman, The Intended Pariahs: Norway's Legal Settlement with Passive Nasjonal Samling Members after 1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, 2024)Google Scholar; Borge, Baard Herman and Vaale, Lars-Erik, ‘Stretching the Rule of Law: How the Norwegian Resistance Movement Influenced the Provisional Treason Decrees of the Exile Government, 1944–1945’, Scandinavian Journal of History 46, no. 1 (2021): 105–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For the different contextual factors of transitions such as the preceding regime, the earlier experiences with transitional justice, the type of transition and the international context, see Huyse, ‘Comparing’, 360–62.

13 On denazification see Fürstenau, Justus, Entnazifizierung. Ein Kapitel deutscher Nachkriegspolitik (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969)Google Scholar; Henke, Klaus-Dietmar, Politische Säuberung unter französischer Besatzung. Die Entnazifizierung in Württemberg-Hohenzollern (Stuttgart: dva, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Niethammer, Lutz, Die Mitläuferfabrik. Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns (Berlin: Dietz, 1982)Google Scholar; Möhler, Rainer, Entnazifizierung in Rheinland-Pfalz und im Saarland unter französischer Besatzung von 1945 bis 1952 (Mainz: Hase & Koehler, 1992)Google Scholar; Leßau, Hanne, Entnazifizierungsgeschichten. Die Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen NS-Vergangenheit in der frühen Nachkriegszeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stiefel, Dieter, Entnazifizierung in Österreich (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1981Google Scholar; Sebastian Meissl, Klaus-Dieter Mulley and Oliver Rathkolb, eds., Verdrängte Schuld, verfehlte Sühne. Entnazifizierung in Österreich 1945–1955 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986); Schuster and Weber, eds., Entnazifizierung im regionalen Vergleich.

14 See Thorsten Holzhauser, ‘Zwischen “Säuberung” und “Versöhnung”. Politische Belastung als nationaler Ordnungsdiskurs in Westeuropa’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 70, no. 10 (2022): 830–51.

15 See for example Gacon, Stéphane, L'amnistie. De la commune à la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: Seuil, 2002)Google Scholar; Nicolaidis, Dimitri, ed., Oublier nos crimes. L'amnésie nationale, une spécificité française? (Paris: Autrement, 1994)Google Scholar; Simonin, Anne, Le déshonneur dans la République: Une histoire de l'indignité 1791–1958 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2008)Google Scholar.

16 See Novick, Peter, The Resistance Versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Lottman, Herbert, The Purge: The Purification of French Collaborators after World War II (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986)Google Scholar; Baruch, Marc, ed., Une poignée de misérables (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 480–512Google Scholar; Bergère, Marc, Une société en épuration (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cointet, Jean-Paul, Expier Vichy, L’épuration en France (1943–1958) (Paris: Perrin, 2008)Google Scholar; Vergez-Chaignon, Bénédicte, Histoire de l’épuration (Paris: Larousse, 2010)Google Scholar; Boudriot, Pierre-Denis, L’épuration 1944–1949 (Paris: Grancher, 2011)Google Scholar; François Rouquet, Une épuration ordinaire (1944–1949) (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2011).

17 See Bergère, Marc, Campion, Jonas, Droit, Emmanuel, Rigoll, Dominik and Vincent, Marie-Bénédicte, eds., Pour une history connectée et transnationale des épurations en Europe après 1945 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schuster, Walter and Weber, Wolfgang, eds., Entnazifizierung im regionalen Vergleich (Linz: Archiv der Stadt Linz, 2004)Google Scholar; Göllner, Siegfried, ‘The Politics of Denazification: Parliamentary Debates in Austria 1945–57’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation 38 (2018): 76–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holzhauser, Thorsten, Demokratie, Nation, Belastung. Kollaboration und NS-Belastung als Nachkriegsdiskurs in Frankreich, Österreich und Westdeutschland‘ (Berlin: De Guyter, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Theodor Heuss, ‘Das deutsche Schicksal und unsere Aufgabe’ (1947), in Theodor Heuss, Politiker und Publizist. Aufsätze und Reden (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1984), 340.

19 Corduwener, Problem, 12.

20 ‘Directive to Commander in Chief of United States Forces of Occupation Regarding the Military Government of Germany, 26 Apr. 1945’, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1945, European Advisory Commission, Austria, Germany, Volume III (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1968), document 351.

21 ‘Directive No 24: Removal from Office and from Positions of Responsibility of Nazis and of Persons Hostile to Allied Purposes’, Official Gazette of the Control Council for Germany No 5, 31 Mar. 1946, 98–115.

22 See Clemens Vollnhals, ed., Entnazifizierung. Politische Säuberung und Rehabilitierung in den vier Besatzungszonen 1945–1949 (Munich: dva, 1991), 333.

23 ‘Government declaration, 27 Apr. 1945’, Staatsgesetzblatt, 1 May 1945, 4.

24 ‘Constitutional law, 8 May 1945’ (‘Verfassungsgesetz vom 8. Mai 1945 über das Verbot der NSDAP’), Staatsgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich (StGBl Ö), 6 June 1945, § 21; ‘Constitutional law, 19 Oct. 1945’ (‘Verfassungsgesetz vom 19. Oktober 1945 über die erste Wahl des Nationalrates, der Landtage und des Gemeinderates der Stadt Wien in der befreiten Republik Österreich (Wahlgesetz)’), Staatsgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich (StGBl Ö), 21 Oct. 1945, § 7; see also Mizuno, Hiroko, ‘“Die Hand zur Versöhnung ist geboten.” Die Reintegration der ehemaligen Nationalsozialisten in Österreich’, in Mapping Contemporary History. Zeitgeschichten im Diskurs, eds. Franz, Margit et al. (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 388Google Scholar; Dieter Stiefel, ‘Forschungen zur Entnazifizierung in Österreich. Leistungen, Defizite, Perspektiven’, in Entnazifizierung, eds. Schuster and Weber, 45.

25 Marc Bergère, ‘Les pouvoirs publics et la conduite des processus d’Épuration’, in Poignée, ed. Baruch, 118.

26 Novick, Resistance, 148–9; Rousso, Henry, ‘L’épuration en France: une histoire inachevée’, Vingtième Siècle 33 (1992): 78–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Novick, Resistance, 140–41.

28 Conway, Democracy, 234.

29 Stiefel, Entnazifizierung, 23; Wolfgang Kos, ‘Zur Entnazifizierung der Bürokratie’, in Schuld, eds. Meissl, Mulley and Rathkolb, 56.

30 Renner, Karl, Drei Monate Aufbauarbeit der provisorischen Staatsregierung Österreich (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1945)Google Scholar, 9.

31 Bernhard Reismann in the State Assemly of North Rhine-Westfalia, quoted after Landtag Nordrhein-Westfalen, ed., Stenographische Berichte, 1. WP, 9 Dec. 1947, 61.

32 ‘Ordonnance du 26 août 1944 instituant l'indignité nationale’, Journal Officiel de la République Française (Algiers), 28 Aug. 1944, 767–68 (exposé des motif; article 1).

33 See Simonin, Déshonneur.

34 Novick, Resistance, 143–9.

35 ‘Ordonnance du 26 août 1944 instituant l'indignité nationale’, Journal Officiel de la République Française (Algiers), 28 Aug. 1944, 767–68, exposé des motifs.

36 Simonin, Déshonneur, 9–13.

37 State Secretary Josef Gerö in the Austrian cabinet meeting of 19/20 June 1945, quoted after Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, ed., Protokolle der Kabinettsrates der Provisorischen Regierung Karl Renner 1945 (Vienna: Verlag Österreich, 1995), 260; Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ‘Die Trennung vom Nationalsozialismus. Selbstzerstörung, politische Säuberung, “Entnazfizierung”, Strafverfolgung’, in Säuberung, eds. Henke and Woller, 27.

38 Minister-President of Hesse, Karl Geiler, during the sixth session of the Länderrat des amerikanischen Besatzungsgebietes, 5 Mar. 1946, quoted after Bundesarchiv and Institut für Zeitgeschichte, eds., Akten zur Vorgeschichte, vol. I, 332.

39 ‘Loi constitutionnelle du 16 juillet 1875 sur les rapports des pouvoirs publics’, Journal officiel de la République Française, 18 July 1875, 5489–90; see also Oliver Wieviorka, Les Orphelins de la République. Destinées des députés et sénateurs français (1940–1945) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 368 and 374.

40 Mathias Bernard, ‘Inéligibilité et incidents électoraux au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (1945–1953)’, in L'incident électoral de la Révolution française à la Ve République, eds. Philippe Bourdin, Jean-Claude Caron and Mathias Bernard (Clermont-Ferrand: Presse Universitaire Blaise-Pascal, 2002), 263–83, 272–3.

41 Quoted in Journal Officiel de la République Française, supplément, 31 Mar. 1945, 1035; see also Wieviorka, Orphelins, 396–8.

42 Forner, Intellectuals, 63.

43 ‘Demokratie den Demokraten’, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 11 Oct. 1945; Alfred Migsch, ‘On the Solution of the Nazi Question’, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 24 June 1946.

44 Minister-President of Württemberg-Baden, Reinhold Maier, during the sixth session of the Länderrat des amerikanischen Besatzungsgebietes, 5 Mar. 1946, quoted after Bundesarchiv and Institut für Zeitgeschichte, eds., Akten zur Vorgeschichte, vol. I, 334. For similar positions in the Social Democratic Party see Dominik Rigoll, Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland. Von der Entnazifizierung zur Extremistenabwehr (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 34.

45 See Laura Jung, ‘Auf Befehl der Besatzer? Das Nachkriegswahlrecht zur Bayerischen Verfassunggebenden Landesversammlung zwischen demokratischem Ideal und alliierter Kontrolle’, in Verordnete Demokratie? Die Nachkriegswahlen 1946/47, eds. Martin Löhnig and Fabian Michl (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2023), 17–34; Rudolf Billerbeck, Die Abgeordneten der ersten Landtage (1946–1951) und der Nationalsozialismus (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), 165–9; Rüdiger Wenzel, ‘Wahlrecht und Wahlausschluß in der Besatzungszeit’, Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 15 (1984): 44–57.

46 Quoted in Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Nationalrates der Republik Österreich, V. GP, 24 July 1946, 603.

47 Ibid., 589.

48 Ibid., 6 Feb. 1947, 1213.

49 Jean Stock, quoted after Deutscher Bundestag and Bundesarchiv, eds., Der Parlamentarische Rat 1948–1949. Akten und Protokolle, vol. 6 (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1996), 679.

50 Quoted after Bundestag and Bundesarchiv, eds., Parlamentarische Rat, vol. 14/2, 1723.

51 Kauders, ‘Country’, 98–9.

52 Quoted after Bundestag and Bundesarchiv, eds., Parlamentarischer Rat, vol. 14/2, 1838.

53 Eugen Kogon, ‘Das Recht auf den Politischen Irrtum’, Frankfurter Hefte 2 (1947): 641–55; see Forner, Intellectuals, 63.

54 Ibid.

55 See Holzhauser, Demokratie, 94.

56 Desgranges, Jean-Marie, Les crimes masqués du résistantialisme (Paris: L’Élan, 1948)Google Scholar.

57 Cointet, Michèle, ‘Le banquet des Mille’, in La Recomposition des droites en France à la Libération 1944–1948, eds. Richard, Gilles and Sainclivier, Jaqueline (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 325–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vinen, Richard, Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Lucien Lamoureux, ‘Discours’, in Banquet des ‘Mille’ du 14 Mars 1948. Les Discours, ed. Association des Représentants du peuple de la IIIe République (Paris: Association des Représentants du peuple de la IIIe République, 1948), 13–14.

59 See Novick, Resistance, 202–8; Rousso, ‘L’épuration’, 81.

60 Emma Kathryn Kuby, ‘Between Humanism and Terror: The Problem of Political Violence in Postwar France’ (PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2011).

61 This was evident, for example, in the spring of 1947: after the former Résistant André Mutter gave a public speech criticising the épuration in the presence of well-known Vichy supporters, the Ramadier government issued a ban on further events and referred to the danger to public order posed by demonstrations; see Vincent Auriol, Journal du septennat 1947–1954, vol. 1 (Paris: A. Colin, 1971), 93.

62 Rémy Roure, ‘Un “Comité d'action”’, Le Monde, 12 Apr. 1948.

63 Jean-Paul David, ‘Un large apaisement est necessaire’, Combat, 26 Apr. 1949.

64 ‘Proposition de loi tendant à amnistier certaines condamnations’, 1 July 1949, Journal Officiel de la République Française, ‘Documents’, 1949, Appendix No. 7734, 1278; see also Vinen, Politics, 116 and 130–31; Rousso, Henry, The Vichy Syndrome. History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 31Google Scholar.

65 Charles de Gaulle, ‘Conférence de la presse tenue au Palais d'Orsay, 16 Mars 1950’, in Charles de Gaulle, Discours et Messages. Dans l'Attente, Février 1946 – Avril 1958 (Paris: Plon, 1970), 355–6; cf. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 34–5.

66 ‘Klare Fronten’, Das Kleine Volksblatt, 11 Oct. 1945; on this in detail see Göllner, ‘The Politics of Denazification’; Hiroko Mizuno, ‘“Die Vergangenheit ist vergessen”. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in Österreich. Die Österreichische Amnestiepolitik und die Reintegration der ehemaligen Nationalsozialisten 1945–1957’ (PhD thesis, University of Graz, 1999).

67 See Margit Reiter, ‘“National” versus “Liberal”? Politische Konfliktlinien und Deutungskämpfe im Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU) und in der FPÖ’, Heuss-Forum 14 (2017), 3; Reiter, Die Ehemaligen. Der Nationalsozialismus und die Anfänge der FPÖ, 71–7.

68 Margit Reiter, ‘Zwischen Antifaschismus und Patriotismus: Die Haltung der KPÖ zum Nationalsozialismus, Antisemitismus und Holocaust’, in Schwieriges Erbe. Der Umgang mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus in Österreich, der DDR und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, eds. Werner Bergmann et al. (Frankfurt: Campus, 1995), 183–4. Österreichische Justiz und NS-Verbrechen am Beispiel der Engerau-Prozesse 1945–1954 (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006), 40; Kos, ‘Zur Entnazifizierung der Bürokratie’, 62.

69 Accordingly, former party members who were willing to join one of the governing parties (People's Party, Socialists and Communists) were put on lists to be pardoned by the federal president. By membership in one of the ‘democratic’ parties, it was argued, they signalled their renunciation of National Socialism and their conversion to democracy; see Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, ‘Das Volk sitzt zu Gericht’. Österreichische Justiz und NS-Verbrechen am Beispiel der Engerau-Prozesse 1945–1954 (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006), 40; Kos, ‘Zur Entnazifizierung der Bürokratie’, 62.

70 Quoted after Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Nationalrates der Republik Österreich, V. GP, 11 Dec. 1948, 2676.

71 Alfons Gorbach, quoted after Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Nationalrates der Republik Österreich, V. GP, 11 Dec. 1948, 2659, and Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Nationalrates der Republik Österreich, V. GP, 21 Apr. 1948, 2247.

72 ‘Beim Wettlauf um die Nazistimmen die Vernunft verloren’, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 4 Oct. 1949.

73 Rojek, Sebastian, Entnazifizierung und Erzählung. Geschichten der Abkehr vom Nationalsozialismus und vom Ankommen in der Demokratie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2023), 52–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Ibid., 59–61.

75 Schildt, Axel, ‘Der Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in der Öffentlichkeit der Nachkriegszeit’, in Verwandlungspolitik. NS-Eliten in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft, eds. Loth, Winfried and Rusinek, Bernd (Frankfurt am Main: Campusverlag, 1998), 34Google Scholar; Weinke, Annette, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland. Vergangenheitsbewältigung 1949–1969 oder: Eine deutsch-deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002), 50–62Google Scholar.

76 Buchna, Kristian, Nationale Sammlung an Rhein und Ruhr. Friedrich Middelhauve und die nordrhein-westfälische FDP 1945–1953 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010), 50–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Partei, Freie Demokratische, ed., ‘Schlußstrich drunter!’: Poster for the 1949 Federal Election (Frankfurt am Main: Graphischer Großbetrieb Georg Stritt & Co., 1949)Google Scholar.

78 von Aretin, Karl Otmar Freiherr, ‘Der Erfolgsdeutsche. Studie zu einer beklemmenden Gegenwartsfrage’, Frankfurter Hefte 13, no. 11 (1958): 761Google Scholar; see Will, Martin, Ephorale Verfassung. Das Parteiverbot der rechtsextremen SRP von 1952. Thomas Dehlers Rosenburg und die Konstituierung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 479Google Scholar.

79 Quoted after Deutscher Bundestag, ed., Stenographische Berichte, 1. WP, 20 Sept. 1949, 27.

80 ‘Proposition de loi tendant à amnistier certaines condamnations’, 1 July 1949, Journal officiel de la République, “Documents”, 1949, Annexe No 7734, 1278.

81 German Party MP Hans-Joachim von Merkatz and liberal MP August-Martin Euler, both quoted after Deutscher Bundestag, ed., Stenographische Berichte, 1. WP, 23 Feb. 1950, 1332 and 1337.

82 See Bernard, ‘Inéligibilité et incidents électoraux au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (1945–1953)’, 278.

83 See Fürstenau, Entnazifizierung, 153–9.

84 See Norbert Frei, ‘Coping with the Burdens of the Past: German Politics and Society in the 1950s’, in The Postwar Challenge: Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945–58, ed. Dominik Geppert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 27–40.

85 Christian-democratic MPs Franz-Josef Wuermeling and Wilhelm Nowack, quoted after Deutscher Bundestag, ed., Stenographische Berichte, 1. WP, 10 Apr. 1951, 5090 and 5096.

86 Quoted after Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksachen, 1. WP, Drucksache 1/27, 21 Sept. 1949.

87 ‘Amnestie für einige Gruppen Belasteter’, Das Kleine Volksblatt, 10 Mar. 1949.

88 See Mizuno, Vergangenheit, 219–46.

89 Quoted after Stenographische Protokolle, VIII. GP, 14 Mar. 1957, 1241.

90 The first law was issued some months before the 1951 parliamentary elections and amnestied some 50,000 people who had been sentenced to less than 15 years of dégradation nationale or who had distinguished themselves through service to the Resistance. The second law went even further and amnestied collaborating sentences of up to 15 years; see ‘Loi no 51-18 du 5 janvier 1951 portant amnistie, instituant un régime de libération anticipée, limitant les effets de la dégradation nationale et réprimant les activités antinationales’, Journal Officiel de la République Française, Lois et décrets, 6 Jan. 1951, 260–62; ‘Loi no 53-112 du 20 février 1953 portant amnistie en faveur des Français incorporés de force dans les formations militaires ennemies’, Journal Officiel de la République Française, Lois et décrets, 21 Feb. 1953, 1747; see Stéphane Gacon, ‘L'Amnistie de la Collaboration’, in Baruch, éd., Poignée, 471.

91 Mathias Bernard, La Guerre des droites (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 111–12.

92 See Gacon, ‘L'amnistie’, 472.

93 Quoted after Journal Officiel de la République Française, Débats, Assemblée nationale, 25 Oct. 1950, 7109.

94 Conway, Age, 82.

95 Albert Finck in the main committee of the Parliamentary Council, 53rd session, 23 Feb. 1949, quoted after Deutscher Bundestag and Bundesarchiv, eds., Parlamentarische Rat, vol. 14/2, 1719.