Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

by Mark Bray

Shortly after the physical destruction of fascist regimes, waves of historical amnesia amplified the prevalence of resistance to Hitler, Mussolini, and their allies, while muffling the truly widespread nature of collaboration. Punishing that collaboration and fomenting European democracy, whether liberal capitalist democracy in the West or “people’s” democracy in the East, was encapsulated in the process of “denazification.” In the Western occupation zones, a half-hearted process of prosecuting individuals based on questionnaires drew to a close in late 1946 with more than two million cases still open.131 Many former Nazis and fascists remained in office as the focus of the West shifted away from a brief “moment of antifascist unity” toward the hostility of the cold war moving into 1947.

Why? Was it too much work? Did we not want to admit who had collaborated?