Introduction

Author(s): Robert Gerwarth and Robert Gildea

Source: Journal of Modern European History / Zeitschrift für moderne europäische
Geschichte / Revue d'histoire européenne contemporaine , 2018, Vol. 16, No. 2, Resistance
and Collaboration in the Second World War as Transnational Phenomena (2018), pp. 175-182
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26502146

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 Resistance and Collaboration in the 175

Second World War

as Transnational Phenomena

Robert Gerwarth / Robert Gildea

Introduction1

On 12 December 1943 Ignaz («Roman») Krakus, aged 34, dressed as a German sol-
dier, entered the Lyon house of a French magistrate who had condemned one of his
young comrades in the resistance to death, and executed him. Krakus was a Pol-
ish-Jewish communist who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain and,
prompted by the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, fled to France where he was
interned with hundreds of other former Brigadists and Spanish republicans in the
high-security Pyrenean camp of Le Vernet. Escaping in a dustbin, he became one of
the leaders of a group of foreign resisters in Lyon, answering to Norbert Kugler, a
German anti-Nazi and also a former Spanienkämpfer, and commanding young Pol-
ish, Hungarian and Romanian Jews who had escaped arrest and deportation to the
death camps. After the liberation of France, he joined the American army that was
invading Germany with the aim of building a socialist society in his Polish home-
land. His career continued in the Polish army until the Communist regime’s anti-Se-
mitic purges of 1968, when he returned to France, finding work in a nylon factory,
dying in 1970.2
Little more than a year after the Lyon incident, at the close of the Second World
War, similarly unlikely transnational encounters were tested to the extreme: it was in
the rubble of what was left of Nazi Germany’s capital, in the government district of
Berlin, that the remnants of a multi-national SS volunteer division unsuccessfully
defended the logistical headquarters of the Holocaust, the Reich Security Main Of-
fice (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) against the advancing Red Army.3 The

The authors would like to thank the Gerda-Hen- 3

1 A.  Beevor, Fall of Berlin 1945, London 2002, 370–
kel-Stiftung and the Leverhulme Trust for their 406. For a recent comprehensive study of non-Ger-
support which has made this special issue possi- man citizens in the Waffen-SS, see J.  Boeh­ ler / 
ble. R.  Gerwarth (eds.), The Waffen-SS: A European His-
R.  Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows. A New History of
2 tory, Oxford, New York, 2007.
the French Resistance, London 2015, 234–236, 371,
390, 415, 431.
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 176 Robert Gerwarth / Robert Gildea

showdown in Berlin marked the end of multinational collaboration in Germany’s

war of annihilation that ultimately, by 1945, had drawn in half a million non-German
citizens serving – either voluntarily or under different kinds of pressures – under the
SS flag.4
Both related subjects – transnational resistance against and transnational collab-
oration with Nazi Germany – are at the heart of this special issue. Resistance and
collaboration have often been seen as polar opposites, on opposite sides of the Nazi
and Fascist project, almost as «goodies» and «baddies». Collaboration is often con-
sidered a betrayal of national ideals while resistance is seen to affirm them. Both
resistance and collaboration, however, had transnational dimensions which re-
­
flected the international reach of communism and fascism and the destruction of
nation-states in the wartime period. These may be explored by a transnational ap-
proach to the study of resistance and collaboration as a method of historical analysis
which explores how resistance and collaboration were widely experienced in a trans-
national way.
Transnational resistance and collaboration may be narrowly defined as resis­
tance or collaboration outside an individual’s country of origin, for example a Dutch
volunteer fighting in the Spanish Civil War or a Spanish Falangist who fought with
the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front. It is not solely, however, a question of location.
It can also take the form of transnational encounters of individuals from different
national origins in a particular national context. Transnational resistance often in-
volved resisting Nazism or Fascism where one happened to be, in Spain in 1938 or
in France in 1943, while collaboration with the Nazis, for example through «volun-
teering» to fight the Red Army in particular, could take the individual in question to
a variety of battlefronts in Europe. That said, transnational resistance often involved
people who were already on the move as a result of various forms of repression or
persecution. They might be communists, foreigners or Jews but also POW and
forced labourers. They were thrown together in new spaces – internment camps,
ghettos and prisons – or found their way to other spaces, such as Allied training
camps, partisan hideouts in the mountains or forests, or fighting units. These spaces
were often liminal sphere, a place where old values and institutions were under siege
and new values and projects had not yet arrived.5 The same could be said about col-
laboration, which – by its very nature – involved different levels of engagement with
an occupying force. At a local level, this could include members of the Milice
française rounding up French Jews for deportation to German extermination camps
and co-ordinating these activities with the German authorities. At an international

This figure rises to over a million if we add those 5

4 I.  Tames, About Thresholds. Liminality and the Expe-
who served as auxiliaries in the Wehrmacht. rience of Resistance, Amsterdam 2016, 26.
R.-D.  Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht. Hitlers
ausländische Helfer beim «Kreuzzug gegen den
Bolschewismus« 1941–1945, Berlin 2007, 422.
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 Resistance and Collaboration 177

level, it involved, among others, French, Spanish and Dutch anti-Bolsheviks who
perceived Hitler’s Europe as a much less threatening prospect than a Europe ruled
by Stalin. Many of those who actively collaborated with the Nazis had been operating
on the right-wing margins of their respective societies before the war (with the obvi-
ous exception of the Spanish Falange), but on a pan-European level, active collabora-
tion was a mass phenomenon. If we take the most extreme case of institutionalized
collaboration, the Waffen-SS with its roughly 500.000 non-German members, it is
difficult to dispute that we are looking at one of the largest transnational armies of
the time.
The intention here is to offer a fresh perspective on related (but often separately
treated) subjects that have varying degrees of scholarly attention since 1945. In re-
cent years, there has been a noticeable increase in scholarly books and articles on
both resistance and collaboration.6 The timing of the emergence of renewed interest
in resistance and collaboration since 1990 is not coincidental. It could be argued that
in both Western and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War marked the beginning
of the real post-(Second World) war period. Up until then, difficult historical subjects
were discussed and explained within limits set by the context of the Cold War: the
official ideology of anti-fascism in Communist Eastern Europe and the devotion to
reconstruction (combined with silence over widespread collaboration with Nazism)
in the West.7

Dominant Narratives, 1945–1990

In the first decades after 1945, the understanding of resistance and collaboration
was powerfully shaped both by national narratives and narratives of the Cold War.
In the Federal Republic during the time of Adenauer, war crimes were solely attrib-
uted to the SS as a radical organization on the margins of «normal» German society,
while non-Germans who fought for the Nazi regime – for whatever reason – were
portrayed either as criminally inclined traitors or as mentally unstable. In formerly
German-occupied Western Europe, the semi-official doctrine of résistancialisme
(i.e., the idea that everyone, except for a handful of lunatics or traitors, resisted the
Nazis in the occupied territories) required the marginalization of those who volun-

S.  Courtois / D.  Peschanski / A.  Rayski, Le Sang de
6 Occupation in Hitler’s Europe, Basingstoke 1999;
l’étranger. Les immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance, T.  Kirk / A.  McElligott, Opposing Fascism. Communi-
Paris 1989; C.  Pavone, Une guerra civile. Saggio ty, Authority and Resistance in Europe, Cambridge
storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza, Torino 1991, 1999; B.  Moore (ed.), Resistance in Western Europe,
translated as A Civil War: A History of the Italian Oxford, New York 2000; P.  Cook / B.  H.  Shepherd
Resistance, London, New York 2013; T.  Judt (ed.), Re- (ed.), European Resistance in the Second World War,
sistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe Barnsley 2013; O.  Wieviorka, Une Histoire de la Ré-
1939–1948, London 1989; J.-M.  Guillon / R.  Menche- sistance en Europe Occidentale, Paris 2017.
rini (eds.), La Résistance et les Européens du Sud. Act- 7
D.  Stone, Goodbye to all that? The Story of Europe
es du colloque tenu à aix-en-Provence, 20–22 mars since 1945, Oxford 2014, viii.
1997, Paris 1999; R.  Bennett, Under the Shadow of
the Swastika. The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and
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 178 Robert Gerwarth / Robert Gildea

tarily (or under various kinds of pressures) fought for Hitler. The «myth of resist-
ance», as Henry Rousso and Tony Judt have demonstrated, fulfilled a clear political
function: in order to «move on» from the complex realities of collaboration and
complicity in war crimes, it was easier to sentence a handful of prominent collabo-
rators and maintain that the people had been fundamentally opposed to Nazism
and the New Order.8 In reality, in most occupied countries, the active resistance was
heavily outnumbered by those who collaborated in various ways, notably in Western
Europe.9
The Cold War also shaped the ways in which resistance and collaboration was
seen. The late Stalinist USSR and Communist Eastern Europe were hostile to any-
one who had resisted outside the Red Army of partisan units over which they had full
control. They were seen as cosmopolitans, Zionists and agents of Western imperial-
ism and many of them were purged, put on trial and even executed in the period
1948–1952.10 In Western Europe, the communist story of their contribution to resis­
tance held up well until 1948. After that, they were seen as agents of Moscow who
had fought not for France or Italy, for example, but for the triumph of international
communism.11
The Cold War also shaped the way in which collaboration was perceived. In East-
ern Europe, a number of show trials were held with the aim of publicly «cleansing»
society from the «traitors» who, for whatever reason, had worked with the Germans.
Similar trials were held in Western Europe, but the logic of the Cold War quickly put
an end to them, as many former collaborators were now redefined as people who had
not fought with the Germans but against Communism. Western governments often
turned a blind eye on those Ukrainians, Croats and others with shady pasts who were
now re-settling in the Unites States, Ireland or South America – a point often used
in Communist propaganda to underline that Western capitalism was merely a varia-
tion of fascism.
In both West and East, the complexities of collaboration and resistance were
omitted and alternative, more suitable and simplified narratives were created. This
point is well made in Xosé M.  Núñez Seixas’ comparative article on the experiences
of Spanish and Italian soldiers fighting alongside the Germans on the Eastern front
and the politics of memory in Franco’s Spain and post-Mussolini Italy. Regardless of
the political differences between the Francoist regime and Italian democracy, both

H.  Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome. History and Mem-

8 ton, N.  J.  2001; J.  McLellan, Antifascism and Memo-
ory in France since 1944 Cambridge, MA 1994; ry in East Germany. Remembering the International
T.  Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, New Brigades, 1945–1989, Oxford 2004.
York 2005, 41. M.  R.  D.  Foot, SOE in France. An Account of the
11
9 M.  Gutmann, «Debunking the Myth of the Volun- Work of the British Special Operations Executive in
teers», in: Contemporary European History 11 France, 1940–1944, London 1968.
(2013), 585–607.
A.  Weiner, Making Sense of War. The Second World
10
War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, Prince-
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 Resistance and Collaboration 179

countries cultivated an enduring legend according to which Italian and Spanish sol-
diers had been «nice occupants» in the former Soviet territories while all crimes had
been perpetuated by the Germans.

The International Dimensions of Resistance and Collaboration

In spite of these narratives, resistance activity and collaboration across Europe were
shaped by a number of international phenomena, which cut across national borders.
The first was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 which provided a model of interna-
tional communist revolution. It divided socialist parties in each country, which were
organized on a national basis and only weakly in the Second International, and had
failed to prevent the outbreak of war in 1914. The communist parties that broke away
subscribed to the centralized control of the Third International or Comintern and to
the dogma of revolutionary ideology. The Comintern was to be the «global party of
the proletariat» and its executive committee «the general staff of world revolution».12
It was the Comintern which called for volunteers to fight in Spain in 1936, forming
the International Brigades.
The second international phenomenon that shaped both transnational resist-
ance and collaboration was the emergence of authoritarian, fascist and anti-Semitic
states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, often as a response to the real or
perceived threat of communism. These states included not only Italy after 1922 and
Germany after 1933 but a variety of authoritarian regimes across East Central Europe
as well as in Spain and Portugal.13 In authoritarian countries where fascism as such
was not in power, and in countries where democracy still held on, indigenous fas-
cist-inspired movements of different guises developed which provided an important
recruitment ground for wartime collaborators with the Nazis. These regimes and
these movements intensified the persecution of their opponents, notably Commu-
nists and Jews, and created waves of refugees or exiles, which in turn became signif-
icant recruiting ground for resistance against Nazism or Fascism.
The third international phenomenon was that in Second World War most nation
states in Europe were shattered, occupied and divided, while Nazi Germany at-
tempted to build a New European Order, transcending Bismarck’s «smaller-Ger-
man» nation-state of 1871. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 partitioned Poland and the
Baltic, before the Germans launched a Blitzkrieg in the West in 1940 and invaded

A.  Vatlin  /  S.  A.  Smith, «The Comintern», in: S.  A.   13

12 A.  Polonsky, The Little Dictators. The History of
Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eastern Europe since 1918, London, Boston 1975;
Communism, Oxford 2014), 188–189. See also B.  J.  Fischer, Balkan Strongmen. Dictators and Au-
K.  McDermott / J.  Agnew, The Comintern. A History thoritarian Rulers of Southeast Europe, London
of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin, 2007.
Basingstoke 1996; T.  Rees / A.  T horpe, Internation-
al Communism and the Communist International,
Manchester 1998; and S.  Wolikow, Histoire de l’In-
ternationale communiste, Paris 2010.
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 180 Robert Gerwarth / Robert Gildea

the Balkans and the Soviet Union in 1941. Displaced rulers and national govern-
ments fled into exile, leaving their peoples to fend for themselves, or else stayed put,
collaborating with the occupying powers and acting as a conduit for their demands.
At an individual and group level, changes were also dramatic. Wartime conditions
cast doubt on many things that have previously been taken for granted, forcing peo-
ple to reflect on their experiences and expectations, on their lives up to that point and
perhaps on the core of their identity.14
The impact of these shocks on resistance and collaboration was powerful and
complex. As Jochen Böhler and Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk remind us in their essay
on collaboration and resistance in wartime Poland, the various ethnic and political
interest groups within occupied nations could be both local and internationally con-
nected at the same time. Between 1939 and 1945, Poland constituted a particularly
extreme case, not just because of the country’s ethnic diversity or the fact that it suf-
fered a double occupation (by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) against which many
Poles resisted. The country also became the major site for the Nazis’ extermination
camps, to which millions of Jews from all over Europe were deported. Surveying the
political and ethnic vicissitudes of collaboration with – and resistance against – the
Nazis and Soviets in occupied Poland, Böhler and Młynarczyk offer detailed discus-
sion on two specific case studies: the multi-ethnic «Trawniki men», an inter-ethnic
group who were entirely complicit in the German genocide against the Jewish and
Polish populations and the Polish Underground State, co-ordinated from the Lon-
don-based Polish government-in-exile.

The Transnational Method

The essays assembled in this special issue have in common that they all draw on
some of the tools and concepts of transnational history, in particular those of histoire
croisée and transfer history. Histoire croisée involves looking at an object from multi-
ple perspectives, such as the trajectory of an individual resister from their point of
departure described in a source with one viewpoint to successive points of arrival
described in sources with other viewpoints. Transfer history involves looking at
transfers between individuals or groups of different geographical, social, political or
cultural origins. This may involve the transfer of practical skills, or ideas or beliefs.
In some cases, the coming together of these diverse individuals produces a qualita-
tive change and the transformation into something that had not been registered be-
fore. In other cases, the encounter produces an opposite effect, of misunderstand-
ing, confusion or hostility.15

Tames, About Thresholds, 29; A.  Szakolczai, «Limi-

14 ries. Varieties of Liminality, Oxford, New York 2015,
nality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situ- 11–38, 30.
M.  Espagne / M.  Werner (eds.), Transferts. Les rela-
ations and Transformative Events», in: A.  Horvath /  15
B.  T homassen / H.  Wydra (eds.),  Breaking Bounda- tions interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand
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 Resistance and Collaboration 181

To be sure, we recognize that «transnational history» has become a (perhaps

overused) methodological buzzword in historical studies.16 But at least in the context
of twentieth-century European history, transnational approaches have been used
rather one-sidedly, namely to investigate predominantly positive and peaceful pro-
cesses of interaction between two or more different peoples. There is a danger that
such selective application of transnational approaches will lead to a «happy history»
of European integration and convergence in which the two world wars are merely
temporary setbacks. After all, between 1914 and 1945, war was the most defining
form of border-crossing and inter-cultural interaction in Europe creating the space
in which international contacts and transfers of ideas and personnel occurred. The
crossing of borders by invasion armies and the complex relations between occupa-
tion regimes and suppressed populations – including camp inmates, resistance
movements and collaborators – formed very specific forms of wartime encounters
between different cultures which were arguably – in scale, impact and legacies – no
less important for Europe’s entangled history than student exchanges, international
peace movements or summits of European leaders after 1945.17 As recent publica-
tions have been at pains to emphasise, the Second World War cannot be fully under-
stood from the nation-centric perspective.18
From an editorial point of view, we have also tried to somewhat broaden the tra-
ditional chronological timeframe of 1939–1945. The special issue thus includes an
essay that covers aspects of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when some volunteers
fought in the International Brigades sent to Spain (and smaller contingents of inter-
national volunteers, notably from Ireland, who fought for Franco or rather against
republican anti-clericalism). Yet, as Samuël Kruizinga argues in his essay, a truly
«transnational Identity» was hard to establish among the international volunteers.
Focusing on the roughly 800 Dutch volunteers who left the Netherlands to support
the Republic, Kruizinga shows that some International Brigaders had great difficulty
forging a transnational connection with their fellow fighters.
This investigation is somewhat mirrored, but with different conclusions, in Is-
mee Tames’ and Peter Romijn’s essay on the transnational encounters and exchanges
of Dutch Nazi collaborators, notably, how their military service in the German armed
forces reconfigured their sense of identity and belonging, both during the war and in
the post-war period.

(XVIIIè–XIXè siècles), Paris 1988; M.   Werner  / cization: National Socialism and its Place in His­
B.  Zimmermann, «Beyond Comparison: histoire tory», in: K.  Jarausch / T.  Lindenberger (eds.), Con-
croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity», in: Theory flicted Memories. Europeanizing Contemporary
and History 45 (2006), 30–50; M.  Pernau, Transna- Histories, New York, Oxford 2007, 96–116. See,
tionale Geschichte, Göttingen 2011, 49–56. too: A.  
Bauerkämper, «Ambiguities of Transna-
P.  Clavin, «Defining Transnationalism», in: Con-
16 tionalism: Fascism in Europe between Pan-Euro-
temporary European History 14 (2005), 421–439. peanism and Ultra-Nationalism, 1919–1939», in:
Clavin, «Defining Transnationalism», 422.
17 Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London
K.   K. Patel, «In Search of a Transnational Histori­
18 29 (2007), 43–67.
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182 Robert Gerwarth / Robert Gildea

Collectively, the essays in this special issue indicate new ways of approaching the
complex topics of resistance and collaboration in the age of the Second World War.
Without suggesting that this is the only way of thinking about both subjects, we hope
that these approaches will further enrich what has become a much more open-ended
discussion about some of the most contested aspects of that war.

Robert Gerwarth
University College Dublin
School of History
Belfield
IL–Dublin 4
robert.gerwarth@ucd.ie

Robert Gildea
University of Oxford
Worcester College
UK–Oxford OX1 2HB
robert.gildea@history.ox.ac.uk
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