The Holocaust was a German project but it was not a German-only operation. Most of the killing in occupied Europe was carried out, on the ground, by hundreds of thousands of non-German collaborators. Some were the citizens of Axis allied states acting under their own governments. Some were citizens of occupied countries who joined SS units, auxiliary police forces, or paramilitary movements working for the Germans. Some were individual denouncers, blackmailers and informers. The collaboration network was wide and varied, and without it the Germans could not have killed at the scale they did. The German occupation forces in most of Eastern Europe, where the bulk of the killing happened, were thinly spread; they relied on local manpower for the round-ups, the camp guards, and a substantial share of the actual shooting.
The state collaborators
Several Axis allied states ran their own deportation programmes, with German encouragement but on local initiative and using local resources. The Hungarian state in 1944, the Romanian state in 1941 and 1942, the Slovak state in 1942, the Croatian Ustasha state from 1941 to 1945, the Bulgarian state in the Macedonian and Thracian territories in 1943, the Vichy French state from 1940 to 1944, the Norwegian Quisling regime in 1942: each operated as a sovereign or quasi-sovereign government making its own decisions about its Jewish citizens. The decisions were not the same. Some governments deported almost all of their Jewish citizens (Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary post-March 1944). Some deported foreign Jews but protected most of their own (Vichy France, Romania post-1942). Some refused to deport at all (Bulgaria for native Bulgarians, Finland, Italy until 1943).
The variation matters. The states that did deport made the choice. They did not have to. Other states in similar circumstances chose differently. The argument that local governments were under impossible German pressure does not survive comparison with the cases where they refused.
The auxiliary military and police forces
The German Order Police, the Wehrmacht and the SS recruited large numbers of non-Germans into uniformed killing units. The Lithuanian Activist Front, the Latvian Arājs Commando, Ukrainian and Belarusian volunteer battalions, the Croatian Ustasha, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian gendarmerie. These units carried out, between them, several hundred thousand individual killings. Many were trained at the SS school at Trawniki in occupied Poland, where Soviet prisoners of war (mostly Ukrainian and Baltic) were given the choice of cooperation or starvation and were turned into camp guards and execution squad personnel. The Trawniki men served as guards at the Operation Reinhard death camps and ran much of the day-to-day work of the killing.
The Waffen-SS itself, despite being nominally a German formation, became increasingly multinational in the later war years. By 1944 the Waffen-SS included divisions of Croatian, Albanian, Bosnian, Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainian, French, Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish and other foreign volunteers. Many were drawn from the local fascist movements of the occupied countries.
The civilian collaborators
Beyond the uniformed forces was the larger and harder-to-quantify layer of civilian collaboration. Local police forces in occupied countries cooperated with round-ups. Local civil servants drew up the deportation lists, certified the racial classifications, and issued the property confiscation orders. Local railway personnel ran the deportation trains. Local civilians took over Jewish-owned shops, houses and businesses at confiscated prices. Local denouncers identified Jewish refugees on the Aryan side of cities and either reported them for the German bounty or extorted payment from them.
The size of the civilian collaboration layer varied enormously. In some occupied countries, local denunciation was a marginal phenomenon. In others, particularly in occupied Poland, the Soviet territories, and the Netherlands, denunciation was a substantial enough business to support a class of full-time blackmailers and informers. The Polish szmalcownicy, the so-called blackmailers of the Warsaw streets, are the best-documented case. Comparable groups operated in Amsterdam, Paris, Budapest and elsewhere.
The motives
Collaborators acted from a mixed bag of motives. Ideological antisemitism was real and substantial, particularly in the Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian and Croatian cases. Anti-communism was a stated motive of some collaborators in the eastern territories, who associated Jews with Soviet rule. Material gain was a motive for many, particularly the civilian denouncers and the men who acquired Jewish property at confiscatory rates. Personal grievance accounted for some denunciations. Career advancement accounted for others. Coercion was real for some categories of collaborator, particularly the Trawniki men, who faced starvation as the alternative.
The point of cataloguing motives is not to excuse the collaborators. The collaborators chose to do what they did, mostly under conditions in which refusal was possible. The point is that the Holocaust required a wide range of human types willing to participate, and the regime found those types in every occupied country.
The post-war reckoning
The post-war prosecution of collaborators was uneven across countries. France prosecuted around 50,000 collaborators in the immediate post-war period, with around 1,500 executed and many more imprisoned. The Netherlands prosecuted similar numbers. Italy and Belgium pursued comparatively fewer cases. Eastern European prosecutions, conducted under the new communist regimes, often pursued political opponents alongside actual collaborators and have been re-examined since 1989. Many collaborators escaped through the post-war ratlines to South America, North America and Australia. The Nazi hunting of the post-war period, by Simon Wiesenthal and others, focused on the major German perpetrators but caught a number of senior non-German collaborators as well.
The post-war public memory of collaboration has been particularly difficult to establish in countries where the wartime collaborators included men who became senior figures in post-war national life. Several Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Hungarian wartime collaborators rose to prominence in their post-war national emigre communities and, after 1989 or 1991, in their independent nation-states. The argument over how to remember them, and over what wartime conduct should disqualify a man from post-war national honour, continues today in many countries.
What it means
The Holocaust was a German crime. It was also a European crime, in the sense that it required, and got, the active or passive cooperation of governments, police forces, civil services, and a substantial number of ordinary citizens across the entire continent. The full record of European participation, only partially recovered even now, is one of the harder things to learn about the Holocaust. It complicates the satisfying picture of a clear distinction between perpetrators and the rest of Europe. The Germans organised the killing, designed the machinery, and ran it. They could not have done it alone. They did not have to.
See also
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003
- David Cesarani (ed), The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, Routledge, 1994
- Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, Allen Lane, 2008
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, HarperCollins, 1992
- USHMM: Collaboration