Near the end of the war in Europe, a teenage boy in Holland rhapsodized about what life would be like in peacetime. “There will be food again, and gas, light and water,” he said. “Trains and trams will be running; our men will come back from forced labor in Germany; our prisoners of war and students will return. I will be able to go out whenever I want. I don’t have to be afraid when a car comes into the street or when the doorbell rings at night. There will be papers, cinemas, dancing, and cars; families will be reunited.”
But as the boy would soon discover, the grim reality of postwar life in Holland and the rest of scarred, impoverished Europe would bear scant resemblance to his comforting daydream. Bombed-out buildings still littered the landscape; in France alone, more than 1.5 million buildings had been destroyed, almost twice as many as in World War I. Throughout the Continent, rail lines, bridges, dikes, docks, and ports were in ruins. Once fertile farmland was flooded, cities were landscapes of desolation, and postal, telephone, and other vital services were largely nonexistent. There were food shortages everywhere; the same was true for coal and other fuel. During the bitter winters of 1945 and 1946 (two of the coldest in Europe on record), most homes, offices, and schools went unheated. In the words of the American journalist Theodore White, the countries of Europe were “as close to destitution as a modern civilization can get.”
As the nations struggled to survive and then to begin the massive job of rebuilding, they were forced, too, to confront their wartime pasts, to acknowledge that although many of their citizens had defied the Germans, many others had collaborated with them. Like so many war-related questions, the issue of collaboration involved layer upon layer of complexity, including how the term should be defined. For some people, including the British writer and ex–MI6 operative Malcolm Muggeridge, the definition was obvious: “Under the German occupation, everyone who did not go underground or abroad was in some degree a collaborator and could be plausibly accused as such.” Such black-and-white views tended to be held by people who lived in unoccupied countries such as Britain and the United States and, as a result, had no idea of the ambiguities of life under the Germans. In Britain and America, “we [regarded ourselves] as the good guys,” the British novelist Paul Watkins remarked. “We did not have to think about what it might have been like to live as collaborators. Anyone who collaborated was weak and deserved to die along with the rest of the bad guys.”
Those who thought of collaboration in simplistic terms could not comprehend the reality of trying to survive in an uncivilized, unstable environment in which the norms of society had broken down. “If you wanted to eat and go to school, you had to collaborate,” Watkins observed. “The only other choice was to vanish into the hills or risk being sent to a concentration camp. If you wanted to hold on to some semblance of your former life, your only choice was to do as you were told.”
Sir Isaiah Berlin, the noted Russo-British philosopher and historian, was more understanding of human nature in his thoughts on collaboration: in order to make it through the war, an individual might be forced to have dealings with the Germans, but “you did not have to be cozy with them.” The historian Stanley Hoffmann, who lived through the German occupation in France, had another, more complex definition. Hoffmann divided collaboration into two categories: involuntary, in which one reluctantly recognizes the necessity of cooperation in order to survive, and voluntary, in which one exploits the necessity and actively abets the enemy for his or her own gain.
However collaboration was defined, those believed guilty of it were subjected to violent retribution at the end of the war. In every occupied country, resistance members and other citizens rose up against suspected informers and collaborators “with as much fury and disregard for personal civil liberties as collaborators had moved against resistance workers during the war,” one historian noted. Such vengeance was particularly ferocious in France, where it was known as the épuration sauvage (“savage purification”).
In the days and weeks following the war, thousands of French citizens were killed by their own countrymen, many of whom were members of communist and other resistance-linked groups. Estimates of the number of these summary executions vary widely, ranging from 6,000 to 40,000. Calling the period “one of the more squalid episodes in France’s history,” Malcolm Muggeridge observed that some of the killings, supposedly committed in the name of justice, were later revealed to be “the working off of private grudges and envies.”
A hostile crowd surrounds Frenchwomen accused of sexual involvement with Germans. Stripped down to their undergarments, they likely all suffered the fate of the woman on the left—having their heads shaven.
Throughout the occupied countries, women accused of “horizontal collaboration”—sexual involvement with Germans—also suffered widespread public wrath. Their heads shaven, they were paraded like cattle through the streets of countless cities and towns, often stripped naked, sometimes beaten and/or tarred and feathered. Crowds of onlookers jeered and spat on them.
British and U.S. soldiers and war correspondents who witnessed these postwar spasms of violence were shocked at such intolerance by supposedly civilized Europeans. Most knew little of the brutality to which much of captive Europe had been subjected, especially in the last year of the occupation, or of the Continent’s lawless wartime environment, in which once cherished personal and political rights had not existed for at least half a decade. “People who did not live under German domination…will find it difficult to understand that every moral law, convention, or restriction on impulses simply disappeared,” a Polish resistance member wrote after the war. “Nothing remained but the desperation of an animal caught in a trap. We fought back by every conceivable means in a naked struggle to survive against an enemy determined to destroy us.”
Shocking as the pan-European campaign of vengeance was, it burned itself out in a matter of months, with personal vigilantism finally giving way to the institution of official trials for collaborators. “In the circumstances of 1945, it is remarkable that the rule of law was re-established at all,” noted the British historian Tony Judt, who wrote a magisterial history of postwar Europe. “Never before, after all, had an entire continent sought to define a new set of crimes on such a scale and bring criminals to something resembling justice.”
In judging collaborators, France was faced with a particularly difficult dilemma. Its own government had been guilty of collaboration, as had a large percentage of its business, industrial, cultural, and social elites. Faced with such high-level cooperation with the enemy, the French courts were relatively selective in those they chose to charge and punish. By the end of 1945, only about 90,000 persons had been investigated or arrested. A little more than half—half of one percent of the population—were convicted of wartime offenses. Of that number, slightly more than 18,000 were given prison sentences, while the rest received other sanctions, including fines. Meanwhile, a relative handful of prominent Frenchmen were executed for war crimes, among them Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval. Marshal Pétain was also condemned to death, but because of his age and feebleness, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
In other European countries, the net was thrown far more widely. That was especially true in Norway, whose postwar government arrested and tried about 2 percent of the nation’s population, including all 55,000 members of Vidkun Quisling’s pro-Nazi organization, Nasjonal Samling. About a third of that number—17,000—received prison terms.
In the Netherlands, nearly 100,000 people—slightly more than 1 percent of the population—were jailed for war crimes. More than half were members of the Dutch Nazi Party, many of whom had fought for the Germans in a Dutch unit of the Waffen-SS. In Belgium, 56,000 persons—slightly more than one half of one percent of the country’s citizens—were sent to prison.
In Czechoslovakia and Poland, the question of how many citizens collaborated is virtually impossible to answer. Although there were certainly those who cooperated with the Germans in both countries, the Czech and Polish communist governments more often than not used the charge of fascist collaboration to rid themselves of perceived political opponents, including many Czechs and Poles who had served in the resistance or fought with the Western Allies during the war.
IN THEIR PROSECUTION OF those who had aided the enemy, the former captive countries paid virtually no attention to one type of collaboration—assisting the Nazis in the mass killing of Europe’s Jews. Of the estimated 7 million civilians who died during the war in Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, and Czechoslovakia,* nearly half—3.3 million—were Jews, most of whom were murdered in Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
As Germany began to implement the Final Solution in late 1941, it relied heavily on the cooperation of local bureaucrats in the occupied countries. The most enthusiastic collaboration was found in France, where the Vichy government not only obeyed Nazi directives but did far more than the Germans asked. Indeed, just two months after France’s capitulation in 1940, Vichy had already introduced anti-Jewish policies in its territory without receiving orders from Berlin to do so. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France to the death camps, more than 90 percent were rounded up by French police.
In other occupied countries, the local aid was not quite as egregious. None of the other nations had indigenous governments like the one in Vichy; they were governed instead by German military or civilian administrations. Still, as a Dutch historian noted, the Germans “needed and received local administrative help in their efforts to isolate Jews in…society and to deport them to extermination camps.” In all these nations, the Nazis had earlier weeded out civil servants and policemen who were not regarded as sufficiently pro-German; they then relied on the rest to do the Nazis’ bidding, which most did with alacrity. Among the duties of the local police and militia was to take part in the Nazi roundups and deportation of Jews.
Cooperation extended far beyond local bureaucracies and police forces. Many ordinary citizens collaborated as well, informing on and otherwise betraying Jews who not infrequently were their neighbors, friends, or acquaintances. In some cases, local people actually took part in the murder of Jews. Perhaps the most notorious example occurred in the Polish village of Jedwabne in July 1941, where a group of Poles from the area, urged on by German forces, killed more than three hundred Jews.
ALTHOUGH IT’S BEEN MORE than seventy years since the end of the war, the issues of national and individual responsibility regarding the Holocaust remain highly fraught. How much should the former occupied nations be held accountable for the small minority of their citizens who helped the Nazis in carrying out the Final Solution? Or, indeed, for the vast majority of their people who did little or nothing to help the Jews?
Such widespread apathy has a number of explanations. Before and during the war, anti-Jewish prejudice was strong throughout the Continent, as it was in countries such as Britain and the United States. Even in western Europe, where Jews were more integrated into society than in the east, they were, more often than not, still considered outsiders. “During the first two years of the Occupation [in France], the prevailing sentiment towards Jews ranged from indifference to hostility,” noted Julian Jackson. “People had more pressing concerns on their minds.”
The same held true for the populations of other occupied countries. In Holland, “fear and their own worries held [the Dutch] back,” remarked the writer Elsa van der Laaken, who was a child in The Hague during the war. There was “fear of losing a job or of being imprisoned….People were self-centered now. Your own family and home came first, then you might see what you could do for others without endangering yourself and your family.”
After the war, most of the governments and peoples of Europe chose to consign to oblivion their indifference to the fate of the Jews. Such deliberate forgetfulness was particularly obvious in France. More than twenty years after the war’s end, revisionist historians and filmmakers finally began revealing the reality of the country’s wartime experience. A particular landmark was The Sorrow and the Pity, a 1969 documentary by Marcel Ophuls that, through a series of filmed interviews, closely examined the Nazi occupation of France, shattering the idea of a country united in resistance and underscoring Vichy’s collaboration with the Nazis, especially in the Jewish deportations. The film, which was extraordinarily controversial in France, was banned from French television and most movie theaters. It ended up playing in a single theater on the Left Bank in Paris.
Another twenty-four years would pass before France formally acknowledged its wartime complicity in the persecution and deportation of its Jews. “The criminal madness of the occupier was supported by the French people and by the French State,” French president Jacques Chirac declared in July 1995. “It is undeniable that this was a collective fault.”
Chirac’s assertion was certainly true. Yet it’s also important to keep in mind the complexity of the times and the harrowing moral choices that the French and other occupied Europeans had to make—a point made by Marcel Ophuls himself. In 2000, Ophuls said that his purpose in making The Sorrow and the Pity was not to condemn the French or “give a ‘message’ about how they behaved.” He went on, “This would be pompous, stupid and prosecutorial—to make a statement about a country that had been defeated and had to live under these conditions for four years. I did not set this up to [indict] France for being a collaborator. In times of great crisis, we make decisions of life and death. It’s a lot to ask of people to become heroes. You shouldn’t expect it of yourself and others.”
Nonetheless, when it came to saving Jews, many thousands of Europeans were, in fact, heroes. They may have comprised only a tiny minority of their countries’ populations, but because of their efforts, nearly half a million Jews were able to survive the war.
A case in point is France, which, despite its actively collaborationist government, ended the conflict with about three-quarters of its Jews—some 225,000—still alive. As the historian Julian Jackson saw it, the success of the efforts to save French Jews “required the solidarity, passive or active, formal or informal, of the French people.” Jackson added that, for decades before the war, “the Jews of France had looked to the State to protect them, if necessary, from sudden anti-Semitic outbursts of civil society. In the Occupation, it was civil society that helped protect Jews from the state.”
In the effort to rescue Jews, no country faced more daunting challenges than Poland. It was extremely difficult to spirit anyone into or out of the tightly sealed ghettos in which many if not most of Poland’s 3 million Jews were confined during the war. In addition, Poland was the only country in occupied Europe whose citizens and their families faced immediate execution if caught trying to help Jews.
Yet Poland was also the only nation whose resistance movement created a formal department for Jewish rescue. Known as Żegota, the group managed to find hiding places for thousands of Jews outside the ghettos. It also provided them with money, forged identification papers, food, and medical care. Of the 50,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust, “every [one of them] did so only because gentile Poles risked their lives to save them,” declared Lucjan Blit, a Jewish socialist leader from Poland who spent much of the war in London. Echoing that view, the British-American historian Walter Laqueur, whose Jewish parents died in the Holocaust, wrote of the Poles, “It is not surprising that there was so little help, but that there was so much.” The same could be said of the rest of occupied Europe as well.