Hitler's Collaborators: Choosing between bad and worse in Nazi-occupied Western Europe

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction: Dealing with the Past 1: Starting at the End: Liberation and the Post-war Purges of Collaborators 2: The Nature of the Beast: the Nazi New Order, and the Nazi Occupation of Northern and Western Europe 3: Collaboration with the Grain of Occupation, 1940-42 4: Economic Collaboration,1940-42 5: The Collaboration of Officials, 1940-42 6: Collaboration against the Grain of Occupation, 1942-44: the Deportation of Jews 7: Collaboration against the Grain of Occupation, 1942-5: the Deportation of Workers Conclusion: Officials will be Officials Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements Index

About the Author :
Philip Morgan is now Senior Fellow at the University of Hull, after a career lecturing in contemporary European history in the Departments of European Studies and History at the University of Hull. His previous publications include Italian Fascism, 1919-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 (Routledge, 2002), and The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War (2007), which was also published by Oxford University Press.

Review :
`Focussing on Western and Northern countries in Hitler's Europe, Philip Morgan illustrates and assesses the captivating history of collaboration with the German occupier during the Second World War. It ranges from the appeasing and accommodating attitudes during the early phase of Nazi-occupation to the ambivalent role of state officials and businessmen, and finally, discusses the deplorable collusion and complicity in the deportation of Jews. Far from moralizing, Morgan's meticulous study explains the realities and reasons as well as the consequences of this equally diverse and disturbing phenomenon.' Gerhard Hirschfeld, University of Stuttgart, Germany `In common with studies of resistance to Nazi occupation during the Second World War, the myriad forms of collaboration have largely been studied from a purely national perspective. In an overtly comparative and accessibly written approach to the subject, Philip Morgan sets out to summarize the debates on state, bureaucratic and economic collaboration during the Nazi occupation and provides his own distinctive analysis to explain the behaviour of all those involved.' Professor Bob Moore, University of Sheffield