collaboration See also under government section of the occupied powers discussed here;see also Channel Islands.

1. Introduction

In wartime, collaboration assumed meanings that went far beyond its neutral dictionary definitions of ‘co-operation’ or ‘unity of effort’ (OED). It was almost always used in the pejorative sense of ‘working with the enemy’ or ‘assisting the occupying power’. On the Allied side it became a synonym for treasonable or hostile activity, so that to call people collaborators was to express strong disapproval for their actions.

It is important to recognize, therefore, that collaboration, like heroism, liberation, and occupation, is a subjective concept which depends on the loyalties of those who use it. One side's ‘collaborator’ was the other side's ‘ally’ or ‘auxiliary’ or ‘friendly assistant’. Those denounced by the western Allies as collaborators were naturally viewed by the Axis powers in a favourable light.

The problem was particularly complex in those countries of eastern Europe which were forcibly occupied both by the USSR and by the Nazis. As the USSR was part of the Grand Alliance, it has been the convention in the UK and USA to restrict ‘collaborators’ to persons who worked for the Nazis. From an impartial point of view, however, there is every reason to extend the term to those who chose to work for the Soviets; and when Germany was occupied by the Allied powers at the end of the war, Germans who seemed to co-operate over-zealously with the occupation regime stood to be regarded as collaborators by their compatriots.

However, for the purposes of this entry the term ‘collaborator’ has been restricted to describe co-operation with an Axis occupying power, though section 3 does touch on collaboration with the USSR.

Norman Davies

2. Western and Northern Europe

The term collaboration was first used, in its wartime sense, after the memorable meeting between Hitler and Pétain at Montoire-sur-le-Loir on 24 October 1940. Six days later Pétain declared on French radio that ‘collaboration had been envisaged between our two countries’ and that he ‘accepted it in principle’.

It was the formal acceptance of this political principle that gave rise to the modern definition of collaboration, and that lead, unfortunately, to numerous historical misconceptions and misinterpretations. Collaboration was initially seen as a political arrangement between two nations: the victorious one which had occupied foreign territory, and the loser which tried to preserve as much independence as possible. This narrow definition automatically excluded all other forms of co-operation between victor and vanquished, which were then left open to moral judgement and in most cases moral condemnation.

Collaboration can take numerous forms, and apply to many different cases: political (often ideological), economic, social, or cultural. Naturally collaboration depended upon the aims, the quality, and the actual course of the occupation. Looking at the map of Nazi-dominated western and northern Europe from 1939 to 1945, there was a great variety of political and administrative structures, ranging from military administration, as in Belgium until 1944, to civil administration, as in Norway and the Netherlands, to a retention of sovereignty, as in Denmark until August 1943. The French case initially offered four different forms of political and administrative structures.

During the war, each occupied country developed its own patterns of behaviour, but there were also signs of similar, comparable, reactions among the populations. This was particularly true for the first part of the war, when the Axis powers seemed to be heading for a quick, decisive victory. Under the impact of German military successes by blitzkrieg, the prevailing attitude in most western and northern European countries hovered between a cautious waiting approach, a form of playing for time (attentisme), and a growing willingness to come to terms with the supposedly victorious power in the interest of maintaining law and order; thereby accepting that the political and military situation had been totally transformed in favour of German supremacy in Europe. Such apparent accommodation was in no way equivalent to the kind of notorious collaboration by some fascist groups or individuals, later associated with the names of Quisling, Mussert, and Laval, and with such organizations as the Milice, but was simply a matter of carrying on with routine functions and the needs of daily life.

In Belgium, where, after the war, 53,000 men and women were convicted of collaboration, officials used the phrase la politique du moindre mal, the policy of doing the least harm, to cover the ways in which they tried to accommodate themselves to the Germans' demands: giving way when they had to, holding out for old- established ways when they could. A similar policy was adopted in several areas, as far apart as the Baltic states, the Netherlands, and Salonika, by the elders of the Jewish community in the earliest stages of coming to terms with Nazi rule; they were bitterly undeceived in the end (see Final Solution).

Some motives for accommodation were soon eclipsed by motives for collaboration, specific to the individual institutions and organizations concerned. An example of this is the so-called ‘New Order’ (see Germany, 4) debate among Dutch, Belgian, and French industrialists and high-ranking civil servants. This debate related to the anticipated collective re-orientation of national industries to the political and economic realities that the Third Reich sought to create: the dismantling of national economic systems, the development of new spheres and methods of production, the reorganization of social systems, and the possible restructuring of the administrative sector after the removal of parliamentary control. This discussion was ultimately dominated by fear of economic and social chaos, and concern for the maintenance of industrial production and jobs, even though rudiments of the political accommodation of the first phase of the occupation continued to be apparent.

Economic collaboration provides a test case for demonstrating the ambiguity of arguments and attitudes during the occupation period. There were entrepreneurial as well as more general economic reasons for ensuring the continuity of production and intensive economic co-operation with Germany. These included an interest in maintaining companies as viable entities; a desire to safeguard invested capital—including its potential future proceeds—from possible seizure by the occupying power; and the aim of preventing the penetration of the national economy by German big business. The closure of factories could lead to the dismantling and sequestration of machinery, of goods, and of whatever raw materials were still available. Moreover, the workers who lost their jobs in this process had to face the prospect of being sent to Germany as forced labour. A high level of industrial production, on the other hand, provided a tolerable livelihood and relative security for many employees. Besides, those goods and finished products which were not intended for export to Germany would benefit the local population.

But there was more to all this than just the aim of maintaining production and keeping enterprises alive. In most of occupied western and northern Europe all major industries increased their output and indeed their profits during the first two years of occupation; some entrepreneurs were able to expand even during the later periods of the war, when general economic decline had become obvious. In some countries, the process of modernization intensified and the monopolization of industries increased as the result of measures taken by the German occupying authorities in co-operation with larger companies and industrial groups. There was certainly something seductive for many businessmen and politicians about linking their country with a vibrant, renovated European economy, as a near-equal partner. However, the reality was quite different. In economic terms the German ‘New Economic Order’, had it ever been fully established, would have been a large-scale structure organized for, and run on, the principles of the crudest kind of colonialism. So long as the war lasted, Germany's economic policy towards the occupied territories of Europe can be summed up in two terms; exploitation and colonization.

The co-operation of native fascists with the Nazi invaders can be regarded as the classic case of collaboration during the war. In no other case is the range of collaborationist behaviour more clear; nowhere is it more starkly revealed that both the prospects and the limits of collaboration were always linked with the interests of the occupying power. In most cases the demarcation line between Nazi occupation policy and fascist collaboration was very thin, where they did not actually overlap as a result of ideological identification. Collaboration with the occupying power was thus regarded, although perhaps with differing degrees of intensity and conviction, as an ultimate objective; either as a long-term, unlimited co-operation with Nazi Germany or (for a small radical section of the fascist movement) as a total absorption into a future Germanic empire, to be created under the auspices of Himmler'sSS. The wartime fascist collaborators held rather diverse convictions, which allowed some of them, at times, to appear to be social revolutionaries and modernizers. Yet despite their progressive rhetoric and youthful-sounding slogans of revolution and socialism, these ‘revolutionary fascists’ remained strongly reactionary and largely anti-modernist.

Fascist collaboration certainly contained an element of his torical continuity, although opportunism and political, even personal, corruption also became dominant features. But the element of continuity also applied to other practitioners of collaboration who, like Marshal Pétain in France, viewed close co-operation with Germany as providing the only operational basis for their policies. The French political scene during the occupation was a logical and to a large extent inevitable consequence of the political events and constellations of the 1930s. What has been called Vichy's ‘pluralistic dictatorship’ began with Pétain's reactionary-patriarchal regime (1940–2), was followed by Laval's authoritarian-technocratic rule (1942–4) and ended with Darnand's openly fascist system ( 1944). Yet despite different motives and diverse approaches, all the protagonists of the Révolution Nationale (see France, 3(c)) agreed that there was no alternative to collaboration with the Third Reich.

However, in every case the potential, as well as the limits, of political collaboration were subordinated to the interests of the occupying power. Nazi Germany was not interested in creating a genuine fascist state in France or elsewhere. The occupation authorities regarded political collaboration (and, incidentally, any other form of it) first and foremost as a useful means of achieving their own goals. Concessions were only temporary, and never constituted any real change of policy.

Hitler made it quite clear that there would be no anticipation of a future political design for Europe. The much-acclaimed European idea was left to propagandists such as Goebbels who sought to save Europe from Bolshevism in a crusade. The hopes of political collaborators for genuine co-operation with Germany were brushed aside. Native fascist parties and their leaders in most occupied countries, who had constantly demanded a share of power, were reduced to mere puppets and useful tools in the administration, and economic exploitation, of their respective homelands, Quisling in Norway, Mussert in the Netherlands, Doriot and Déat in France, to name but a few, all had to realize that Germany's European policy and Hitler's New Order had served one purpose only: to establish and strengthen Germany's superior power and to give it maximum support for conducting the war. There never was a real chance for European partnership for all the right-wing, authoritarian and fascist parties and movements. In this respect Hitler remained a true follower of the nationalistic ideas of the 19th century. He always put the emphasis of his ‘Germanic Empire of German Nations’ on the word ‘German’.

But only a few of the fascist leaders and their supporters were prepared to draw the right conclusion. Most of them remained faithful followers of the Third Reich—even if they promised themselves that after the war things would be totally different—even if they were already politically and morally corrupted to such an extent that they saw no possible escape for themselves. Some were not willing to give up their dreams of a peaceful fascist new order in Europe that easily. The Dutch fascist leader Anton Mussert continued to bombard Hitler with his grandiose ideas about a possible ‘League of Germanic Peoples’ in Europe in which the ‘Greater Netherlands’ would take second place after Germany. The last memorandum arrived in November 1944. Hitler did not even bother to read it.

Gerhard Hirschfeld

Bibliography

Burrin, P. , Living With Defeat. France and German Occupation, 1904–1944 (London, 1996).
Hirschfeld, G. , Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration. The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (Oxford, 1988).

3. Central and Eastern Europe

(a) Baltic States

When Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were invaded and annexed by the USSR in 1940, the invasion was greatly facilitated by the activities of local communist agents who subverted the existing governments and participated in the formation of pro-Soviet regimes. These communists and fellow-travellers, who helped to destroy their countries' independence, were widely held to be collaborators.

In 1941, when German forces invaded the Soviet-occupied Baltic states, many units from the former military and police forces were turned over to German command, and were sent to serve on the Eastern Front. Some of these units also participated in Nazi repressions and in the mass murders of Jews. However, since fighting against the USSR was generally considered a patriotic duty, assisting the Germans was not so widely condemned as aiding the Soviets. No forms of independent politics were permitted in the Ostland, so there was no question of political collaboration, but the Waffen-SS was able to recruit several divisions of volunteers for purely military duties.

When Soviet forces returned in 1944, all persons who had worked for the Germans in any capacity, willingly or unwillingly, were treated as collaborators and subjected to repression.

Norman Davies

(b) Poland

Polish history books tend to take pride in one of the few countries which was free of collaborators. In reality various forms of collaboration took place, though on a smaller scale than elsewhere. Very few Poles sympathized with either the Soviets or the Nazis.

In the Polish campaign of September 1939, the invasion of Poland was assisted by various groups of citizens. In the west, some elements of the German community (see Volksdeutsche) formed a fifth column which was organized in advance to assist the Wehrmacht. In the east, a minority of Poland's Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Jewish population welcomed the arrival of the Red Army and took a lead in repressions and in the organization of the Soviet regime. Since Stalin had purged the Polish Communist Party in 1938, killing most of its leading members after luring them to the USSR, there were very few party members available to assist in the process of communization. But a handful of individuals such as Wanda Wasilewska, who was escorted at her request from the Nazi to the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland, were active in the Soviet service.

During the German occupation the Nazis took no steps to set up any form of Polish political organization, so there was no scope for political collaboration. It was the only country where no attempt was made to recruit Waffen-SS divisions, although large numbers of Poles were forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht from regions, such as Silesia or Posnania, that were directly annexed to the Reich.

In the General government (see Poland, 2(b)), units of the former Polish ‘Blue Police’ continued to serve under German command, as did Jewish police formations in the ghettos instituted by the Nazis. In conditions of extreme terror, where the entire economy was directed to Germany's war effort, all Poles who did not escape abroad, engage in sabotage, or join the resistance were obliged to collaborate. Even in the concentration camps it was possible to exact a measure of collaboration from those who were prepared to serve as Kapos or ‘trusties’, or to work in the Sonderkommando.

In 1943–5 large numbers of Poles were mobilized by the Soviets, either to fight under Soviet command (see Berling's army, for example) or to join the cadres of the nascent communist dictatorship. Their motives were extremely varied, but in the eyes of patriotic opinion they were generally considered collaborators.

Norman Davies

(c) USSR

Collaboration was not a negligible phenomenon during the first phases of the German–Soviet war. But a distinction must be drawn between the populations of the Soviet Union's 1921 territory and those ‘re-integrated’ into the Soviet Union only in 1939–40 (see Map 107) and also between (Great-)Russians and other nationalities. In the newly incorporated areas the German soldiers were greeted as liberators. Collaboration was widespread even in areas of the Ukraine which had always been part of the Soviet Union—not surprisingly, after the horrors of Stalin's policy of collectivization imposed during the 1930s. Among the nationalities of the Caucasus, along the Volga (even where German troops never set foot), and among the Crimean Tatars sympathy for the Germans was obvious. Great Russians often seemed indifferent and not openly hostile to the Germans, but the inclination to collaborate was limited and the nature of the German occupation soon reduced it further. Ukrainian nationals often joined German auxiliary police forces and the growing partisan movement (see USSR, 8) forced German acceptance of this. Some Ukrainian units also acted as guards in extermination camps (see OPERATION REINHARD) and, against the express orders of Hitler, regular units were formed from Soviet subject nationalities (see Soviet exiles). By the end of 1941 the Wehrmacht was employing captured Cossacks against the partisans, while the most spectacular case of collaboration was that of the Sovietarmy General Vlasov, who fell into German hands in July 1942.

As the Red Army advanced westwards, recapturing areas held by the Germans, tens of thousands of real or supposed collaborators were sent to the GUlag. In 1943 alone, when the Nazis still held vast parts of the USSR Beria reported to Stalin that NKVD troops had arrested 931,549 people for checking (582,515 civilians, 349,034 soldiers), of whom 80,296 (probably there were more) had been detained as ‘spies, traitors, members of punitive squads, deserters, bandits and similar criminal elements’. With the extension of liberated areas during 1944 hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Chechens, Ingushi, Balkars, and Karachai were deported on Stalin's orders and dispersed over the eastern territories. Beria spoke of 650,000 Chechen, Ingushi, Kalmyks, and Karachai alone, in whose deportation 119,000 officers and troops of the NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH took part. Not surprisingly, members of Vlasov's army and others who fought with the Germans were harshly dealt with: large numbers of their officers were shot. The others were sent to camps in Asiatic Russia. Particularly tragic was the experience of roughly 5.5 million Soviet citizens repatriated after the war, of whom 2.3 million were handed over on the basis of agreements concluded at the Yalta conference (see ARGONAUT), often against their will. The core of the repatriated were 2.1 million Ostarbeiter (‘labour from the east’; see forced labour) and about a million prisoners-of-war. The Ostarbeiter had mostly not gone to Germany voluntarily. None the less, half of all those repatriated were condemned to hard labour.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

4. Balkans

Of the Balkan states, Romania and Bulgaria formally sided with the Axis during the Second World War, Greece and Yugoslavia with the Allies, while Albania had already been reduced to the status of an Italian protectorate. Under the dictatorship of Marshal Antonescu, Romania fought alongside Germany in the war against the USSR from June 1941 in order to recover the territories it had lost to the Soviet Union a year earlier under the terms of the second Vienna award. Antonescu was also indirectly fighting for Northern Transylvania, hoping that Romania might recover what it had lost to Hungary under the same award, and fearing that it could well lose the rest if it did not continue in the war. Although Romania's animosity was directed against its Soviet neighbour, most Romanians sympathized with the western Allies. In August 1944, King Michael was able to carry out a coup which removed Antonescu and brought his country over to the side of the Allies.

Bulgaria hardly participated in the war. Once Greece and Yugoslavia had been defeated, it was allowed to occupy Thrace and Macedonia, which satisfied nationalist opinion. Under the personal rule of King Boris, who died in August 1943, it resisted German pressure to commit troops to the Eastern Front, which would have conflicted with traditional feelings towards Russia, and managed to resist most measures demanded against its Jews. The appearance of the Red Army on the Danube a year later and a Soviet declaration of war eventually brought an end to the pro-German alignment.

Albania had been run since 1939 as a protectorate of Italy with a client regime. It was used as a base for operations against Greece and Yugoslavia, and rewarded with territories. The Albanian population of the annexed areas welcomed the Italian occupation which gave them the opportunity of paying off old scores against Serbs. The Germans, after they had taken over from the Italians, continued to give ostentatious support to the Albanian acquisition of Kosovo and were thus able to recruit an SS Division there.

Greece and Yugoslavia were kept under a harsh occupation regime shared out between Germany, Italy, and their allies. A collaborationist administration was appointed in Athens, organized in the first instance under General Georgios Tsolakoglou, who considered it his primary duty to assure political order until the end of the war. As resistance increased, with Greeks fighting each other as well as outside enemies, and once the Italians had left, the collaborationist government set up Security Battalions to fight against the communist insurgents. Equipped by the occupation forces and active in the Peloponnese, these units also attracted recruits from other resistance groups that had been the victims of the communists.

Yugoslavia was partitioned between Germany, Italy, and their satellites. The Ustašas were allowed to set up a greater Croatian state. As a party-state under Pavelić, the Independent State of Croatia took its place among the satellites of the Axis, formally declared war on the Allies, set up its own armed forces, and sent troops to the Eastern Front. It established a reign of terror that sought to exterminate Serbs and Jews, causing a mass rising of its Serbian-populated areas and shocking its protectors. The Italian military had to intervene to contain the insurgency, but they could only do so by coming to terms with many of the Serbian rebels. There as well as in Montenegro, where the Italians had failed in their attempt to set up a client state and made non-aggression arrangements with some of the insurgents, these local Serbian bands manoeuvred between increasing dependence on the Italian Army and nominal allegiance to General Mihailović's movement in their fight against the communists.

In southern Slovenia, which had been annexed to Italy, as communist partisans increasingly alienated the peasantry, the traditional parties organized village guards. These were gradually pushed into collaboration as they came to depend on the Italians for arms. The Germans, after they had taken over from the Italians, set up a native administration under General Leon Rupnik, who was allowed to turn what remained of the village guards into an anti-communist Home Guard.

Serbia was one of the areas of the Balkans under direct German military administration. At the end of August 1941, in an attempt to keep the area quiet by indirect means, a government was appointed under General Milan Nedić, who accepted the task in the hope that collaboration might prevent Serbia from disappearing entirely from Hitler's ‘New Europe’ (see Germany, 4), and to provide a refuge for persecuted Serbs from other regions. He was authorized to organize a Serbian State Guard into which gendarmes were enrolled, but most of them would in due course turn out to be auxiliaries of Mihailović's resistance rather than of the occupation. The only reliable collaborators the Germans could find in Serbia were the adherents of the small pro-Axis movement of Dimitrije Ljotić, who were formed into a Serbian Volunteer Corps which was used in operations against Mihailović's organization.

Stevan Pavlowitch

5. Far East

The problems of collaboration with the Japanese had few parallels with those in western Europe, but had some similarities with those posed in eastern Europe where the evils of one kind of occupation were replaced only by the evils of another. While Japanese rule was quite as ruthless as that imposed by Germany or the Soviet Union, it was based on a different premise. With the exception of China (see China, 3; China incident; and Manchukuo); Thailand, where the government initially welcomed collaboration to avoid usurption of its powers; and the Philippines, which was self-governing but had yet to achieve full independence, the territories occupied by the Japanese were not sovereign states but colonies. There could therefore be no cases of a sovereign nation trying to treat with the occupying power, as Pétain attempted to do—though it is interesting to note that in French Indo-China the Japanese did allow the colonial government to remain in place for most of the war, thus allowing it to collaborate by continuing to exploit the country's resources, but for Japan's benefit not France's. Otherwise it was a matter of the colonial powers being ousted by the Japanese who then imposed their own form of colonialism (see Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere) under the guise of Asians liberating economically exploited colonies belonging to fellow Asians. As such they were almost universally welcomed by the indigenous populations whose leaders genuinely believed at first that the Japanese were true liberators who had come to give them their political and economic independence. In varying degrees and on a varying time scale they were disabused of this notion. Even when the Japanese did grant a population its independence, as in Burma and the Philippines, it was purely nominal and ended, in the case of Burma at least, with some of its leaders siding, in a kind of counter-collaboration, with the old occupying power in order to oust the new one (see Burma Independence Army).

Overall, Japanese talk of being fellow-Asians did not conceal the contempt they felt for all nationalities except their own and often their attitude was infinitely worse than the superiority of the white sahibs they had replaced. In the streets of Singapore the local citizens were required to bow whenever they passed a Japanese sentry, and the heads of recalcitrant Malays were exposed on planks to impress passers-by that the newcomers meant business. This was not an atmosphere in which collaboration in its broader sense could be expected to flourish.

So though the premiss for occupation, and therefore the attitude of the native population towards collaboration, was different, the end result—economic exploitation—was the same. Nevertheless, the Japanese did create, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, the right conditions for the eventual independence of the countries they occupied. For when they overran the American, British, and Dutch controlled areas of South-East Asia, they also set out to eradicate European and American influence and civilization altogether. In this, at least, all the local populations collaborated. It certainly assisted the Netherlands East Indies in their struggle to throw off the Dutch yoke—a struggle that resolved into the Republic of Indonesia in 1949—that the local population were able to watch their white masters being humiliated in Japanese internment camps; and that the Japanese encouraged the Indonesian nationalist movement and set up a satellite Indonesian government (see Java). Equally, Japanese occupation created a new situation in Malaya. There, the old forms of administration were eradicated and the formation of a resistance movement against the Japanese was used to gain post-war independence, while in French Indo-China Japanese exploitation, and then occupation, led to local support of the Viet Minh which spearheaded the long post-war fight for an independent Vietnam. Thus, collaboration in the Far East did, indirectly, often achieve the goal its indigenous populations sought.

M. R. D. Foot

collaboration (France) The act of co-operating with the German authorities in France during World War II. It was the public policy of the Vichy government, whose leader Pétain announced his readiness to ‘enter into the way of collaboration’ in October 1940. In the French territory under German occupation considerable numbers of French bureaucrats, police officers, and other public officials also collaborated, although their number is uncertain. In recent years, the compliance of many ordinary French people with the occupying forces – partly out of conviction, but mostly to avoid repression – has been established by historians. To make a clean break after the Liberation in 1944, it was rumoured that over 100,000 collaborators were executed, though the real figure was less than 10,000. Many public officials, especially lawyers and bureaucrats needed for the country's reconstruction after the war, were kept in office. Few of the collaborators in business and commerce were punished, and some Vichy officials were even elected to the Chamber of Deputies after 1945.

Collaboration (Magazine)

Quarterly journal concerned with the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and his successor, The Mother (Mira Richard, 1878-1973). It carries news of Auroville, the New Age city near Pondicherry, and the various Aurobindo centers in the United States. It may be contacted through the Sri Aurobindo Association, Box 163237, Sacramento, CA 95816-9237.

collaboration traitorous cooperation with an enemy; the term was particularly used of those in occupied countries who cooperated with the Axis forces in the Second World War.