Hitler’s Collaborators by Philip Morgan, OUP, 366pp, £20
History is read backwards, but lived forwards. The historian must remember what we often forget – that events that are now in the past were once in the future. We all know that the Battle of France was lost in the early summer of 1940. We have to try to remember that nobody then knew what would follow, but made decisions in ignorance of whatever consequences they might have.
It is the first great merit of Philip Morgan’s study of collaboration in the five Western European states defeated and occupied by Germany in 1940 that he never forgets this. He recognises that in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway the essential question was: “What do you do when you have lost a war?”
Ordinary citizens will mostly just try to make the best of it, and get on with everyday life as far as this is possible. Politicians, state officials and the police, can’t opt out; they have to come to terms of some sort with the occupier. Collaboration is of necessity forced on them. In 1940, it was reasonable to assume that Germany had won the war. Nobody knew how long the occupation would last.
Morgan has previously written about European, and especially Italian, fascism. Now he makes a useful distinction between “collaborationists” and “collaborators”.
The former were ideological allies of the Germans, members of indigenous fascist parties; the latter, usually conservatives or liberals, were persuaded of the need to collaborate in order to keep normal life going and the economy functioning. Collaboration involved a delicate balancing act.
Morgan makes the point that Hitler had little time for the collaborationists, though they were his ideological allies. This was because they aspired to play an equal and quasi-independent role in a New European Order after the war. But it was only in Norway that the Germans permitted a native fascist party, Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, to form a wartime government. In France, on the other hand, the fascist parties, based in Paris, despised the Vichy government, which was conservative, authoritarian and Catholic. It was only in the last year of the occupation that the fascists forced their way into the government.
The situation was different in each of these occupied countries. The Dutch and Norwegian governments had gone into exile in England. So had the Belgian one, but the king, Leopold III, remained in Belgium (to Hitler’s irritation). Denmark was only lightly occupied, because it had surrendered after no more than token resistance and because the Danes were regarded as almost-Germans.
It was as the last prime minister of the Third Republic that Marshal Pétain requested an armistice. A couple of weeks later the Republic was dissolved and the marshal became chef de l’État français.
De Gaulle would later say that Pétain’s Vichy government was “always null and void”, but this was self-serving nonsense. Vichy was recognised by most states including the Holy See and the US – indeed, the Americans kept an ambassador in Vichy until November 1942, when the Germans invaded the “Free Zone” and Vichy lost most of its authority.
Vichy collaborated of necessity, with an eye on France’s position after the war, which till the winter of 1942-43 still seemed likely to be won by Germany. Vichy and the marshal were popular at first; the Armistice had come as a relief to many, and the end of the Third Republic was welcomed by much of Catholic France. The royalist ideologue Charles Maurras called it “a divine surprise”. Even the communists, obedient to orders from Moscow, were happy to collaborate until Hitler made his fatal decision to invade the Soviet Union, whereupon Stalin ordered them to embark on resistance.
The darkest blot on Vichy’s record was its anti-Semitism. This was indigenous, not forced on Vichy by Germany. Legislation restricting the liberties of Jews, both French nationals and “foreign Jews”, and many refugees from Germany, was quickly passed by the new regime in the late summer of 1940.
Nevertheless, there were Jews who supported Vichy, although, like the governments of other occupied countries, it later collaborated with the round-up and transportation of Jews to camps in Germany and Poland. The Vichy prime minister, Pierre Laval, tried to make a distinction between the foreign Jews he was happy to hand over and the French ones he was reluctant to surrender.
Morgan’s book is fair, judicious and restrained. This is surely as it should be now, a lifetime later. Collaboration, he writes, “was a relationship between collaborators and occupiers … an unequal relationship because of defeat … and its imbalances led to officials doing the dirty work of the occupier, as with the deportation of Jews and workers”.
It was natural that there was a hunger for revenge immediately after the Allies’ liberation of the occupied countries. It was also natural, if shameful, that many of those most eager to punish others for the supposed crime of collaboration had themselves acquiesced in the occupation and been obedient to Vichy and the other national wartime governments.
Anyone now critical of the behaviour of men and women in Nazi-occupied Europe should ask themselves why they suppose they would have behaved better.
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