Jodenvervolging en daderprocessen in België en Nederland (1944-1951) : rechtspraak en herinneringsculturen

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a number of 'didactic trials' against perpetrators of the Holocaust heavily influenced historiography, the construction of memory and historical thinking. The influence of small scale, serial trials immediately following the war is much harder to detect. In this article, we compare post war trials against Dutch and Belgian policemen, denouncers and concentration camp guards between 1944 and 1951. Both countries lacked specific 'trial narratives' with regard to local perpetrators in the Holocaust. The trials were a legal confirmation of the existing consensus to deny the full responsibility of local perpetrators, a situation which persisted in Belgium for decades. In the Netherlands, however, the 'closed off' past resurfaced when 'memory incidents' came up in the 1950s. The notion of local perpetrators in the Holocaust was linked to a wave of more general social criticism during the 1960s