Julius H. Schoeps

Martina Bitunjac

Complicated Complicity is about the forms taken, motives and spectrum of actions of European collaboration with the Nazis. State authorities, local military organizations and individual players in different countries and areas including France, Scandinavia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Italy, Portugal and the countries of the former Yugoslavia are discussed in the context of the history of World War II, the history of occupation and everyday life and as an essential influencing factor in the Holocaust. New forms of right-wing populism, nationalism and growing intolerance of Jewish fellow citizens and minorities have made such historically sensitive studies considerably more difficult in many countries today. In this time of increasing historical revisionism in Europe, such elucidating discourse is particularly relevant.

European Collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II

Complicated Complicity

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the occupation of other European countries in the following years generated new military, economic and social constellations. The conflict areas were on the one hand characterized by fear, violence and terror; members of the resistance and people stigmatized by the racial policies were arrested, tortured and killed by the Nazis. At the same time, different agents and individuals became interdependent; in this extreme state of emergency, people were confronted with new alternative attitudes and behaviors. Collaboration, i.e. the pragmatic, at times open, cooperation of governments, military and political organizations, as well as individuals with the German overlords, the Gestapo and the Nazi authorities became the norm in the occupied countries and satellite states. The consequence was the wide-scale surrender particularly of the Jewish population and the rapid implementation of their deportation to concentration and extermination camps.

Martina Bitunjac

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