The Holocaust would not have happened at the scale it did without non-German collaboration. The German occupation forces in most of Eastern Europe, where the bulk of the killing took place, were thinly spread. The German army, the SS, and the Order Police could not, on their own, have rounded up, deported and killed six million people across an entire continent. They depended on the cooperation of national governments, of local police forces, of paramilitary movements, and of ordinary citizens. The pages in this section cover the major collaborationist movements and the named individuals who led collaborationist regimes.
What is here
Collaborationist Gangs and Paramilitary Groups covers the movements that provided the operational manpower for the killing in their own countries. The Arrow Cross in Hungary, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Ustasha in Croatia, the Lithuanian Activist Front, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, the French Milice, the Polish Blue Police. Each is on its own page. They differed widely in size, organisation, ideology and lethality. Together they accounted for several hundred thousand individual killings, mostly of Jews but also of other categories the regime considered enemies.
The named individual collaborators are figures who led collaborationist national governments or who held positions of senior responsibility under German occupation. Ion Antonescu ruled Romania as Conducator from 1940 to 1944 and is the case of the head of state who organised the killing of around 380,000 of his own country’s Jews while protecting the rest. Miklos Horthy ruled Hungary as Regent from 1920 to October 1944 and is the case of the head of state who protected his own country’s Jews until the German occupation of March 1944, then authorised the deportation of provincial Hungarian Jewry, then halted the Budapest deportations in July 1944 under international pressure. Pierre Laval and Philippe Petain ran Vichy France and are the case of an occupied country’s leadership voluntarily authorising the deportation of Jews, particularly foreign Jews, to the Germans. Vidkun Quisling ran Norway and gave his name to the English word for collaborator. Anton Mussert ran the Dutch National Socialist Movement under German occupation. Kurt Waldheim, included here, served as a German army intelligence officer in the Balkans during the war and concealed his wartime record during his post-war career as UN Secretary-General and Austrian President.
Pope Pius XII and the Vatican covers the contested question of the wartime conduct of the Catholic Church under Pius XII. The page sets out what the Pope did and did not do, the arguments for and against his conduct, and the documentary record as it has emerged with the gradual opening of the Vatican wartime archive.
The point of including these pages
The Holocaust is sometimes presented as an exclusively German crime. The presentation has two effects. It removes the moral burden from non-Germans who actually participated. And it makes the killing seem less ordinary, less something other Europeans could have produced too. Both effects are misleading. The pages in this section are part of restoring the broader picture: the Holocaust 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 Germans organised it. They could not have done it alone. They did not have to.
Each of the named individuals and movements covered here made choices, in conditions that were often difficult but in which alternatives existed. The choices each one made, and the consequences each choice produced, are the substance of the pages that follow.
The substantive academic record
The substantive academic record on Collaborators and Collaborating Nations is documented in the substantive postwar academic literature on the wartime killing programme of European Jewry. The operational features of the substantive subject are addressed in the substantive body of substantive postwar academic, judicial, and testimonial work that has been produced over the postwar period of approximately eighty years.
The substantive subject is part of the wider substantive academic reconstruction of the wartime killing programme. The substantive subject is connected to the wider operational features of the killing programme through the substantive parent topics addressed elsewhere in this section: Who Did It. The substantive subject substantively contributes to the academic understanding of the substantive wartime period.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Yisrael Gutman, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols, Macmillan, 1995