Anti-Fascist Reprisals

As it became evident that the Axis powers would not win the war, a wave of retaliation swept over the conquered areas. People accused of collaborating with Japan or Germany were often mercilessly killed by liberating troops from Italy to China to Russia. Because the majority of the victims were fascists and Nazi collaborators, it has become a rallying cry for numerous fascist and neo-Nazi parties in Europe.

Many, though, were not. Apart from collaborationist forces in occupied nations and Axis soldiers, the violence was also intended against ethnic Germans and Croats, royalist Chetniks, and anybody else ethnically or ideologically associated to the Nazis in any manner. In one occasion, hundreds of prisoners of war and alleged collaborators were buried alive within a coal mine near Huda Jama, Slovenia. The exact figure is difficult to calculate because the site has never been fully uncovered and studied because of the large number of bodies found there.

While it’s true that the majority of them were fascists, the severity of this violence would be significant in the region's politics for many decades to come, particularly during the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

• Year: 1943–1945
• Location: Europe
• Deaths: 70–85 million people