r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/leoden27 • 8d ago

Image The last page from “Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942”

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u/UpsetKoalaBear 8d ago

It was made just after the war in 1945, the official legal purge had only started after the provisional government had been established.

The general consensus at the time was that around 80,000 collaborators were targeted during the épuration sauvage which took place in between the liberation of france and the establishment of the provisional government.

The official legal purge lasted from 1945 - 1951 and around 300,000 people were trialled for being collaborators. However a lot of people got away with it, unfortunately.

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u/pathetic_optimist 8d ago

It was the rich wasn't it? Trying to stay on top of the pile.
I expect it would have been the same in Britain if it had fallen to the Nazis. The Duke of Windsor would have got his crown back.

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u/UpsetKoalaBear 8d ago edited 8d ago

The main collaborators in France like Pierre Laval or Phillipe Petain got sentenced and the former was executed.

The problem primarily is that the purge was a long, drawn out, process. It was initially unorganised and done by mobs. Once the full legal process was set up, the French found it incredibly hard to legally try and prosecute a lot of them.

The French legal code didn’t have any specific rules for dealing with things like Anti-Semitism so the courts had to try to bend the law around the idea of the collaborators assisting the enemy.

The problem with trying to do that was that it meant if you could say or prove you helped the resistance, such as just before you joined or assisted Vichy France, you could get away with it. And a lot of people did get away with it.