Abstract
The experience and memory of the Second World War and its violent aftermath deeply marked the history of Cold War Europe after 1945. During the war, Central, Eastern and South-East Europe became the scenes of an all-out confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as well as their allies.
Mass murder, partisan warfare, bombings and destructive battles characterized the everyday lives of millions of people. But the traumatic experiences of defeat, occupation, collaboration and resistance also became key elements in the reconstitution of Western European states and their societies after 1945.
A few years after the end of the war, in 1951, the International Federation of Resistance Fighters (FIR) was founded in Vienna as an umbrella organization for former resistance fighters and victims of Nazism and fascism. As this chapter will show, this organization did not only operate in communist Eastern Europe.
Its main purpose was to transcend the Cold War divide and to create a Europe-wide network based on a shared experience of "anti-fascism". Together with other international communist "front organizations" - as Western observers called them - which presented themselves as independent but were in fact controlled by the Soviets, FIR contributed to the creation of a communist-controlled transnational sphere, the heyday of which took place during the Cold War.