Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Chetniks, the Ustasa, the Slovenian White Guard or as armed Domobranci many of them would have received heavy sentences under any system of law.2 The Yugoslavs executed and deported many ethnic Hungarians for their role in Hungarian military massacres in the Vojvodina during January 1942, and their land was made over to non-Hungarian supporters of the new regime. This was a calculated political move, but in many cases the victims were surely guilty as charged. Yugoslavia was a particularly tangled case. Further north, in Hungary, post-war Peoples’ Courts really did begin by trying actual war criminals, notably activists in the pro-German regimes of Döme Sztójay and Ferenc Szálasi during 1944. The ratio of fascists and collaborators condemned in Hungary did not exceed the numbers found guilty in post-war Belgium or the Netherlands—and there is no doubt that they committed serious crimes, including anticipating and enthusiastically executing German plans to round up and transport to their death hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Only later did the Hungarian authorities add categories like ‘sabotage’ and ‘conspiracy’, whose