National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (review)

In National Cleansing, Frommer presents the first full account of retribution trials in the Czech lands after World War II. Previous assessments conflicted sharply: Czech Communists condemned the trials as corrupted and incomplete, but their rivals alleged that the left used retribution to eliminate those who opposed its seizure of power in 1948. Frommer's work supports neither option, but agrees that the trials were about more than the guilt of collaborators; they were "a battleground between clashing forces intent on imposing their own interpretations of the past in order to determine the country's future" (9).

Rather than rehearsing dichotomies inherited from the Cold War, Frommer emphasizes that these interpretations did not involve a black and white opposition of evil and good. Edvard Benes, an avowed liberal, and his followers framed the major laws governing the trials of collaborators, and these laws "encouraged gross abuses to be perpetrated later" (9). The abuses took essentially two forms: the "wild retributions" of the immediate postwar months, in which thousands of Germans were tortured or murdered by Czech vigilantes, and the extreme severity of Czech national courts, which rendered decisions beyond appeal, and death sentences that had to be carried out within hours of the verdict. As a result, the Czech lands, with "one-fourth of the French population," "executed almost as many defendants as France" (90).

Frommer concludes that "Nazi occupation and its attendant horrors discredited liberal ('bourgeois') democracy as a form of government" (343), but his analysis suggests that greater optimism might be in store. The Communists and their allies indeed attempted to incite a popular desire for vengeance in the service of "class struggle," but with the passing months, they encountered greater resistance from voices in the press, like Ferdinand Peroutka; from former concentration-camp inmates who had been enlisted to work in people's courts; and from the public at large, whose "passions [for vengeance] cooled considerably" by 1947 (211). The Communist coup of February 1948 might have cut short a gradual recovery of Czech liberalism, though this question of political culture has been ignored in previous accounts, which tend to focus on the dealings of elites.

National Cleansing also provokes a range of questions in regard to its central theme of justice. The author addresses the matter of the Holocaust squarely: "Amid condemnations of political intrigue and naked vengeance, it should not be forgotten that Czech people's courts exacted a measure of justice for the Nazis' crimes, including their genocide of the Jews" (180). But what about justice for the many other crimes committed in the Protectorate? The book offers little guidance about the penalties that might have fallen within reasonable bounds, adopting instead a mostly critical attitude toward the actions of the first postwar government.

These questions do nothing to diminish Frommer's achievement; indeed opening paths of inquiry is more the rule than the exception for works of lasting importance such as this one. In the magnitude of its contribution, Frommer's book stands out among all relevant historiographies, whether work on East Central Europe or on the legacies of World War II, or on war-crime tribunals. The author employs a mass of archival research and exhaustively surveys newspapers and secondary literature in an analysis that moves relentlessly through his major subjects. Frommer displays unusual gifts of storytelling and a sure hand for the revealing formulation or anecdote, and no matter how attuned to detail, his narrative never becomes dry or routine. Though the book focuses on the Czech lands, Frommer also treats related debates in other contexts (especially the French) when they are relevant.

Frommer shows unusual boldness in launching new assessments into a historiographical field that harbors a fair number of unexploded mines, for example on the issue of wartime collaboration. After dismissing the extreme views, Frommer writes, "like most people throughout occupied Europe, Czechs accommodated themselves." But he also notes the unflattering specificity of "Schweikism," which did "more...