Hitler's collaborators
Subtitle: choosing between bad and worse in Nazi-occupied Western Europe
By: Philip Morgan
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 366
ISBN-13: 9780199239733
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Collaborationists; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); World War, 1939-1945; National socialism; History
Description: Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most controversial and uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Although a widespread phenomenon, this was long ignored in the years after the war, when peoples and governments understandably emphasized popular resistance to Nazi occupation as they sought to reconstruct their devastated economies and societies along anti-fascist and democratic lines. Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects, the Quislings who backed Nazi occupation because they were fascists, and focuses instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi authorities and agencies, and who were ultimately responsible for gearing the economies of the occupied territories to the Nazi war effort. It was their choices which had the greatest impact on the lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen in the occupied territories, including the deportation of slave-workers to the Reich and hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the death camps in the East. In time, as the fortunes of war shifted so decisively against Germany between 1941 and 1944, these collaborators found themselves trapped by the logic of their initial cooperation with their Nazi overlords, caught up between the demands of an increasingly desperate and extremist occupying power, growing internal resistance to Nazi rule, and the relentlessly advancing Allied armies.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 345-353) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: dealing with the past; title: Starting with the end: liberation and the post-war purges of collaborators; title: The nature of the beast: the Nazi new order and the Nazi occupation of northern and western Europe; title: Collaboration with the grain of occupation, 1940-1942; title: Economic collaboration, 1940-1942; title: The collaboration of officials, 1940-1942; title: Collaboration against the grain of occupation, 1942-1944: the deportation of Jews; title: Collaboration against the grain of occupation, 1942-1945: the deportation of works; title: Conclusion: officials will be officials.