Re-education in times of transitional justice: the case of the Dutch and Belgian collaborators after the Second World War

After the liberation of the Second World War, the governing parties in both Belgium and The Netherlands agreed that it was necessary to punish the collaborators. But the notion that the large majority had to be ‘re-educated’ for social reintegration also very soon prevailed in both countries. Collaborators had to be ‘cured’ to become full democratic national citizens again, and their punishment was designed to achieve this. Although in the last few decades the research scope of transitional justice has developed greatly and has contributed to an ever more nuanced picture of the punishment of collaboration in the post-war period, the question of to what extent prisons were used as places to ‘improve’ enemies of the state during a regime change has largely been overlooked. But precisely by studying the execution of the punishment, underlying ideologies and interests are exposed, and we can see how well defined citizenship was. This paper, with the aid of the Dutch–Belgian comparison, considers how post-war re-education was approached in those countries and what this says about the meaning of imprisonment during regime changes.