Collaboration

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COLLABORATION.

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS IN WESTERN EUROPE
POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE BALKANS
FORMS OF COLLABORATION
RETRIBUTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

With the development of nation-states after 1789, civilians and even more so authorities were expected to be loyal with regard to their country. Cooperation with a foreign occupier was considered high treason and made punishable by law. In the long nineteenth century, the balance of power ensured that this phenomenon did not occur. During World War I, the warring parties tried to detach national minorities of the enemy from their patriotic loyalty, and thus some collaboration movements developed, but they remained marginal phenomena. During World War II, the far-reaching cooperation of parts of the population not only with the German, Italian, and Japanese occupiers, but also with Allied occupiers, was an important phenomenon, whereby the collaborators of one side were the allies of the other. After World War II, the phenomenon also existed in contexts of occupation and colonization.

The focus herein is on collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. The notion of Collaboration (with a capital C) is often found having this meaning, so that the term immediately takes on a subjective and morally loaded interpretation, especially in languages other than English. In English, collaboration (with a small c) is a neutral term with which the many and divergent forms of cooperation of an occupied nation with an occupier can be denoted. In the standard literature and in this article too, the terms cooperation and accommodation are used for this concept.

A distinction should also be made between the occupied nation's cooperation with the occupier to make everyday life possible, and collaboration, that is, the purposeful cooperation of groups and individuals to help realize the occupier's policies. Only a small part of the population was prepared to do the latter, a part that was approximately as large as the part of the population that appeared to be prepared to actively offer resistance. The major part of the population adjusted to occupation circumstances, which to a certain extent implied cooperation with the occupier. The Hague Convention of 1907 actually prescribed that the occupied authorities had to cooperate with the occupier insofar as that cooperation did not infringe the laws of the occupied country. In practice, this principle did not result in a clear dividing line between legally permitted cooperation and unlawful cooperation. The fortunes of war affected the boundary between what was considered morally acceptable and morally unacceptable or, in other words, the difference between collaboration and cooperation. When in 1943 the fortunes of war turned definitively to Germany's detriment, cooperation was less approved of than at the beginning of the war, when Germany seemed set for long-term domination of continental Europe.

The circumstances of occupation also affected collaboration and cooperation. There were essential differences between western Europe on the one hand and parts of eastern Europe and the Balkans on the other. At the same time, the occupier's divide-and-rule policy aimed to exploit the occupied countries and the definitive dominance of Germany and Nazification of the "Germanic" core territory. There were differences in the degree to which force and violence were employed to achieve these objectives. In western Europe, the occupying powers were prepared to negotiate with part of the administrative elite, because parts of the social and economic fabric should not be too highly disrupted to exploit them efficiently. The occupiers made room for enforced cooperation, whereby the local elites sometimes succeeded in mitigating the consequences of the occupation, if only because violence stayed within limits. This "policy of the lesser of two evils" was not unideological, because the degree to which the local elites were prepared to negotiate depended on their attitude to a new (social) order or, in other words, on their adherence to liberal-democratic principles. Moreover, the "policy of the lesser of two evils" appeared to be a slippery slope down which organizations and people in positions of authority slid across the boundary into collaboration. But in general their intentions differed from those of the collaborators who supported the Nazification project for ideological, political, or personal reasons. The notion of "collaborationism"—mainly used in the French literature—is appropriate for this ideology-driven collaboration. Not every collaborator, however, was driven by ideological motives. Personal motives frequently played a part. Because of the relatively stable social context in which collaboration developed, collaborator violence remained within limits. Only at the end of the occupation did more excesses occur, which are called "criminal" collaboration.

In large parts of eastern Europe and the Balkans, the occupier pursued the rapid destruction of civil society and total subjugation of the indigenous population to enable a German-Germanic colonization. Stirring up internal civil wars by exploiting national, ethnic, and religious differences was part of this strategy. Therefore, for the subjugated population, cooperation with the occupier was often a survival strategy, one that was detached from ideological considerations and often the consequence of local circumstances and coincidence. Almost inevitably, collaboration with the occupier implied excessive violence so that collaboration and criminal behavior became synonymous.

The fate of the Jewish population and Gypsies went beyond the difference between east and west. The Nazis pursued their total destruction from 1941 on. But whereas Jews and Gypsies from western Europe were deported to Poland to be murdered there, in the Balkans and eastern Europe this often happened in situ with the cooperation of collaborators. These were peaks in the already high curve of violence.

The use of excessive violence and the genocidal policy of Nazi Germany deepened the moral rejection of those who collaborated with that regime. At times the term traitors is used as a synonym for collaborators. Traitors in the narrow sense refers to collaborators who literally gave away compatriots to the occupier and/or exposed them to persecution. In the broad sense it concerns those who cooperated with the occupier for political-ideological reasons. The collaborators' political organizations were the core of the multiple forms of cooperation.

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS IN WESTERN EUROPE

In western Europe, collaboration was embodied in the first place by fascist (in a generic sense) organizations that supported the National Socialist new order. These were minority movements that could attract only a few percent of the population. Some had been in contact with the Third Reich from before the war and were therefore often considered as a German "fifth column" in their own country. Nevertheless, these organizations were always also ultranationalistic. Confronted with German imperialism in the new ordering of Europe dictated by Berlin, the leaders of these movements put the expected, promised, or acquired positions of power before their nationalistic convictions. They were also all prepared to cooperate with the SS, a political organization founded by Heinrich Himmler aimed at the annexation of the territory considered as German and the formation of a Germanic-German elite. Local fascist leaders could acquire positions of power only to the degree that they were prepared to cooperate in the German exploitation of their country. Their followers were brought into the German war machine and the occupation of their country. Thus political collaboration always led to other forms of collaboration in the field of administration, economy, the military, and the police.

In Norway, the leader of the Nasjonal Samling (NS; National Unity), Vidkun Quisling, led a putsch immediately after the German invasion on 9 April 1940. This fact highly impressed the largely still unoccupied Europe. Quisling's name became a synonym for treason and collaboration, so that quislings still lives on as a term for collaborators during World War II, especially in the English language. Quisling was rejected en masse by the Norwegian population, which is the reason why a German Reichskommissar was appointed. With the latter's help, the NS infiltrated the Norwegian government and Quisling was appointed prime minister on 1 February 1942. The members of his party were then brought in at all levels of the Norwegian administration. The seizure of power by the NS was very substantial, especially at a local level.

Because Denmark offered hardly any military resistance to the German invasion, the country supposedly retained its neutral status, and the prewar parties and politicians remained in charge. The Danish state was forced to far-reaching samarbejdspolitikken (cooperation) with Germany, but formally retained its sovereignty. In March and May 1943, national and local elections were even held, in which the Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejderparti (Danish Nazi Party) gained only 2 percent of the votes, drawing some support only among the German minority in Jutland. Even when the Danish government resigned and the country became officially occupied in mid-1943, the Danish Nazi Party played only a minor role.

In France, after the French armistice on 22 June 1940, the Vichy regime (so-called because its headquarters were situated in the town of Vichy) came into being under the leadership of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had been appointed leader of the government and who from then on was to govern an unoccupied zone as head of state. The Vichy regime enjoyed formal sovereignty, which was possible only because Pétain was prepared to carry out far-reaching cooperation with Germany. The French head of state literally used the term collaboration after his meeting with Adolf Hitler on 24 October 1940, by which he meant the French state's cooperation with Germany. Under prime ministers Pierre Laval and François Darlan, the Vichy regime developed de facto into a police state; it handed over Jews to the Nazis, and was unable to offer protection to its own population, culminating in the German military administration taking over all of France in November 1942. The rank and file of the Vichy regime consisted of conservative right-wing forces, some of whom were convinced fascists and/or favored Germany's final victory. Cooperation very quickly became collaboration (or "collaborationism" in the French context of the notion). In France, there were also some collaborating political parties: the Parti Populaire Français under the leadership of Jacques Doriot and the Rassemblement National Populaire under the leadership of Marcel Déat, which mainly supplied manpower for the eastern fronts and against armed resistance by their own compatriots. Finally, collaborating factions were active in the Breton and French-Flemish regionalist and nationalistic movement.

After the capitulation on 15 May 1940, a civilian government was established in the Netherlands that cooperated with the Dutch administrative machinery. Anton Mussert, the leader of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (NSB; National Socialist Movement), claimed political power in vain. Only after the new order–minded Nederlandse Unie (Netherlands Union)—a popular movement that soon had hundreds of thousands of members—did not cooperate adequately did the occupier force the NSB into the Dutch administration.

In Belgium, because of the presence of the head of state in the occupied country, a military government of occupation was installed after the capitulation on 28 May 1940, which meant that Hitler officially still kept the political future of Belgium open. When no modus vivendi resulted from a meeting between the Belgian king and Hitler in November 1940, the occupation administration gave support to the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (Flemish National Union), a Flemishnationalistic, pan-Dutch, and fascist party. The party was allocated administrative positions and mainly gained power in local governments. It was not given any official governmental power and had to tolerate that the SS leaders founded a Greater-German countermovement. This was initially the Flemish SS and then, from 1941, the German-Flemish Labor Community. Because the Nazis did not consider French-speaking Belgians and Walloons as Germans, the leader of the Rex fascist party, Léon Degrelle, received little support. His military and political star rose only when he volunteered as a soldier for the battle on the eastern front. Degrelle was able to convince Hitler that the Walloons should be considered as Romanized Germanics. He joined the Waffen-SS and founded a military recruitment reserve and a police force against the Belgian resistance. On 12 July 1944 Belgium was annexed to the German Reich in the shape of a Reichsgau Flandern ([German] Province of Flanders) and Reichsgau Wallonien ([German] Province of Wallonia).

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was actually annexed as early as 1940, and military conscription was introduced in 1942. The Volksdeutsche Bewegung (Movement of German Peoples) under the leadership of Damian Kratzenberg grouped together annexionist collaborators. It remained a small movement in spite of the fact that civil servants were obliged to join.

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE BALKANS

World War II started with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the destruction of Polish civil society. The German occupation of western Poland and from 22 June 1941 the whole of Poland did not offer any starting point for a Polish collaboration movement. Only individual collaboration was tolerated, among other things in the extermination of Polish Jews.

Even before Poland, Czechoslovakia was the first victim of German imperialism. The Nazis envisaged the destruction of civil society in the Czech Republic so that Czech fascist factions were not given any room for establishing a political collaboration movement worth mentioning. Under the leadership of Josef Tiso, the Slovak nationalists of Andrej Hlinka's Slovak People's Party reformed Slovakia into a German protectorate on 14 March 1939. Slovakia was a military ally of Germany, but it retained its autonomy, and Tiso enjoyed wide support among the population until 1943.

There was a similar situation in Croatia, which was made into a German protectorate under the leadership of the fascist Ante Paveli? a few days after the German invasion of Yugoslavia on 10 April 1941. With his Ustaše militias, he purged Croatia of Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs. In the entire territory of the multiethnic Yugoslavian state a bloody civil war developed, whereby sometimes tactical alliances were concluded with the German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupiers. This strategy did not develop into a stable collaboration policy. The same picture was to emerge in Albania and Greece, where the Italian, Bulgarian, and German occupations provoked and provided the framework for civil war.

Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were allies of the Axis Powers, so that there was no such thing as collaboration movements in the strict sense of the term. The changing extreme-right regimes had their own agenda. They retained their sovereignty, although they had to take into account fascist movements and organizations supported by Germany inasmuch it was expedient to German interests. When Hungary was occupied by German troops on 19 March 1944, the German-minded fascist Arrow Cross Party was given free rein only when the Hungarian regime wanted to break the alliance with Germany. In addition to military security, the extermination of the Jews, with which Hungarian collaborators cooperated, was high on the German agenda.

Collaboration in the Baltic states, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and the other occupied territories of the Soviet Union showed a similar pattern. The German troops were greeted as liberators from Joseph Stalin's regime by some parts of the population, including members of the ethnic-German minorities, the byvshie liudi ("former people" of tsarist elites), and victims of Soviet repression. The Nazis' racism prevented any stable political cooperation. Attempts to establish or revive political structures such as the Byelorussian National Committee and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were nipped in the bud. Berlin considered the Slavic population as Untermenschen (inferior people), not as potential allies. They wanted to colonize the territory, plunder it economically, and drive out, exterminate, or enslave the local population. The German occupational powers exploited the ethnic discrepancies in a divide-and-rule strategy that resulted in complex and violent internal conflicts. Widespread anti-Semitism among the Baltic and Slavic population was exploited in the extermination of the Jewish population. The battle against "Judeobolshevism" was an ideological basis for collaboration. In addition, the war against communist partisans was critical for considerable police collaboration. When in 1943, as a result of the turning fortunes of war, there was yet more room for political cooperation, it was largely limited to the use of local populations and Russian prisoners of war (POWs) in military and paramilitary formations that were employed behind the front in the war against partisans. Attempts to bring about a political movement around the Russian army general and POW Andrei Vlasov misfired. As early as 1942 Vlasov had made an offer to form a "liberation army" consisting of Russian POWs. Only in November 1944 did he receive a green light to form the Russian Liberation Army, which was deployed on the eastern front.

FORMS OF COLLABORATION

Political collaboration was often the basis for other forms of collaboration. Supplying manpower for the war and occupation activities was a way of proving loyalty to the occupier while simultaneously acquiring a local basis for power. The recruitment of personnel for military units, paramilitary guard units, and all kinds of administrative and economic control services often happened through the organizations of political collaborators, which did not prevent the event of an inflow of apolitical collaborators who committed themselves for reasons of livelihood, personal opportunism, or adventurism. In the transfer of information to the occupier, personal motives often played a part, while certain forms of administrative and police collaboration involved the systematic leaking of sensitive information to the occupier and therefore gave rise to "structural betrayal."

Political collaboration was framed by cultural and ideological collaboration by intellectuals, artists, and writers who used their talents to legitimize the cooperation with the occupier. Their collaboration consisted of the distribution of ideas that often had concrete implications. They inspired and legitimized others to collaborate. In particular, the battle on the eastern front against "irreligious bolshevism" gave rise to varied and extensive propaganda that stimulated many to volunteer for the German army.

By signing conscription contracts, military collaborators became subjected to German martial laws, whereby they were bound for a certain period or even for the duration of the war. Turning one's back on collaboration implied desertion for them. In the beginning of the war and before the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, military collaboration was not yet a reality. Serving in the then still victorious German army was considered an honor that was reserved only for "Germanics." The SS recruited volunteers in occupied "Germanic" countries for the Waffen-SS. After Operation Barbarossa, all over occupied Europe anti-Bolshevik legions were founded that were also deployed in the Wehrmacht. In the racist Waffen-SS too there was an influx of non-Germans. SS units were founded in the Balkans, the Baltic states, Central Asia, and Caucasia. At the end of the war the Waffen-SS had approximately two hundred thousand non-Germans. Even more military collaborators fought in the Wehrmacht. Particularly in the Balkans and eastern Europe the volume of military collaboration was very great. But because of the specific conditions in which they aligned themselves with the occupier and under which they operated, military collaborators could easily change sides by defecting to the partisans or the Red Army, which happened frequently starting in 1943.

Economic collaboration is the most complex form of collaboration because it was (and is) very difficult to draw the line between what was perceived as permitted and nonpermitted cooperation. Direct supplies of arms and war infrastructure were generally labeled as collaboration, while indirect industrial cooperation was considered to be unavoidable, as was voluntary work by employees in German industry. A special form of economic collaboration was the exploitation of stolen Jewish property.

RETRIBUTION

After the retreat of the occupier, collaborators were the target of the population's revenge and the reckoning of the Resistance with its enemies. In the days immediately after the liberation there were more or less spontaneous waves everywhere whereby collaborators were traced, taken prisoner, and sometimes killed. The degree to which society was stabilized during the war and had been the scene of violence also determined the volume and violence of this cleanup. Visual forms of collaboration—for example, uniformed military or paramilitary collaborators—were easy targets. Certain forms of collaboration evoked popular fury, such as certain visual forms of economic collaboration (the so-called war profiteers) or the "horizontal collaboration" of women who had entered into sexual relationships with the occupier. Punishment sometimes consisted of a well-defined repertoire, such as destruction of property or shaving off women's hair. Betrayal was also judged a great sin, but was often far more difficult to prove.

The so-called popular repression came to an end when the postwar regime took hold again because, among other things, the monopoly on violence returned to the hands of the authorities. This was the starting signal for judicial repression whereby collaborators had to justify themselves in court. All over Europe collaborators were punished. Thousands of death sentences were pronounced and executed. Hundreds of thousands of collaborators ended up imprisoned for shorter or longer periods of time. There were great differences in judicial procedures between countries, depending on events during the occupation, the legal tradition, and whether or not a constitutional state was founded after the Nazi dictatorship. On this subject there were again major differences between the West European democracies and the new dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Collaborators often remained pariahs in society after the completion of their legal punishment, although that was largely dependent on the degree to which they were able to construct a socially accepted legitimization for their actions during the occupation. Thus collaborators were sometimes rehabilitated by nationalistic movements if they were able to present their collaboration as a national war of liberation. By contrast, certain forms of collaboration that were pardoned in the postwar period were not accepted later on because of a changed social climate. Thus involvement in the extermination of Jews became more heavily reckoned starting in the 1960s, which resulted in trials and sentences through the end of the twentieth century.