Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The wartime resistance groups, organized by 1944–45 into various political movements, were just as suspicious in return. For them, the politicians, functionaries and courtiers who had escaped the Occupation were doubly discredited: by their pre-war errors and by their subsequent absence. In France and Norway the legislators elected in 1936 were disqualified by their actions in 1940. In Belgium and the Netherlands their absence in the intervening five years had cut off the returning governments from any appreciation of local suffering and the change in public mood brought about under Nazi occupation. In central and eastern Europe, with the important exception of Czechoslovakia, the former governments were rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Red Army (though they were sometimes slow to grasp this).