Another effect of The Return of prisoners and forced laborers to France in the summer of 1945 that we’ve been talking about for the last few posts was a resurgence of what’s sometimes called the “extra-legal purge.”

During the occupation, civilians who collaborated with the Germans had increased access to power, influence and material goods such as food. Collaborators had various reasons for working with the enemy. Some did so out of pure self-interest. Others felt that they were in a sense protecting their community from the hard reality of life. Some just agreed with Nazism and its vision of society. They all attracted the envy and contempt of their neighbors. Everyone expected that if the Germans lost the war, their collaborators would be held to account for what many considered to be treason.

The purge of collaborators took different forms with different levels of effectiveness in different countries. In France Charles de Gaulle’s postwar government very much wanted to funnel the passions swirling around collaboration into the regular court system and keep it under the control of the central government in Paris.

Many citizens had other ideas about that. Most famously, in some places, resisters rounded up the local women known to have consorted with the enemy in “horizontal collaboration” on the day of liberation or shortly their after. They often paraded these women through town, shaved their heads in front of a crowd and painted swastikas on their skulls. Local resisters also arrested plenty of local men whom they accused of collaboration, gathered them in jails and waited to turn them over to the courts. In some instances, they convened extraordinary courts to hold immediate trials that could result in public hangings. There were also cases of lynchings in regions that had suffered the most under German rule.

Most such extra-legal actions happened in the summer of 1944 while the country was being liberated. They almost completely petered out that winter. But vigilante justice reappeared in the summer of 1945 in reaction to frustrations over the petty-fogging slowness of the regular courts and the shocking revelations of The Return. When people saw the documentary from Bergen-Belsen, or saw the terrible physical condition of returning prisoners, or realized that certain prisoners would never return, the horrifying end result of collaboration became all too real. As long as people could hope that a loved one would return from the concentration camps or forced labor, they were willing to let the government follow its procedures. But when they had to accept that their loved ones or colleagues would never return and that they had died amidst deprivation and dehumanization, they lost patience and took matters into their own hands.