Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most
controversial and uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation
of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Although
a widespread phenomenon, this was long ignored in the years after the
war, when peoples and governments understandably emphasized popular
resistance to Nazi occupation as they sought to reconstruct their
devastated economies and societies along anti-fascist and democratic
lines. Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects, the Quislings
who backed Nazi occupation because they were fascists, and focuses
instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to
cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most
difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi
uthorities and agencies, and who were ultimately responsible for
gearing the economies of the occupied territories to the Nazi war
effort. It was their choices which had the greatest impact on the
lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen in the occupied
territories, including the deportation of slave-workers to the Reich
and hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the death camps in the
East. In time, as the fortunes of war shifted so decisively against
Germany between 1941 and 1944, these collaborators found themselves
trapped by the logic of their initial cooperation with their Nazi
overlords — caught up between the demands of an increasingly
desperate and extremist occupying power, growing internal resistance
to Nazi rule, and the relentlessly advancing Allied armies.
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Choosing between bad and worse in Nazi-occupied Western Europe
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192507099
Publisert
2020
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter