Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

overt purpose was to net a broader range of opponents and others likely to resist a Communist takeover. In Czechoslovakia the Extraordinary Peoples’ Courts, established by Presidential Decree on May 19th 1945, handed out 713 death sentences, 741 life sentences and 19,888 shorter prison terms to ‘traitors, collaborators and fascist elements from the ranks of the Czech and Slovak nation’. The language is redolent of Soviet legalspeak and certainly anticipates Czechoslovakia’s grim future. But there really had been traitors, collaborators and Fascists in occupied Czechoslovakia; one of them, Father Tiso, was hanged on April 18th 1947. Whether Tiso and others received a fair trial—whether they could have received a fair trial in the atmosphere of the time—is a legitimate question. But the treatment they got was no worse than that accorded to, say, Pierre Laval. Post-war Czech justice was much preoccupied with the troubling and vague category of ‘crimes against the nation’, a device for visiting collective punishment on Sudeten Germans especially. But the same was true of French justice in those years, with perhaps less cause.