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Where Did All the Collaborators Go?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Martin Dean
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Abstract

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Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide in-sight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.

Type
Forum: On Collaboration in Poland and the Soviet Union during World War II
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , Winter 2005 , pp. 791 - 798
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2005

References

The opinions stated in this paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

1 See my recent article, “Soviet War Crimes Lists and Their Role in the Investigation of Nazi War Criminals in the West, 1987–2000,” in Gottwaldt, Alfred, Kampe, Norbert, and Klein, Peter, eds., NS-Gewaltherrschaft: Beiträdge zur hislorischen Forschung und juristischen Aufarbeitung (Berlin, 2005), 456–70.Google Scholar The figure of some 320,000 individuals arrested as “collaborators“ in the Soviet Union after the war was published recently on the web site of the Federal'naia sluzhba bezopasnosti (FSB, the successor organization in Russia of the KGB). See O. B. Mozokhin, “Statistika repressivnoi deiatel'nosti organov bezopasnosti SSSR na period s 1921 po 1953 gg.,” at http://www.fsb.ru/new/mozohin.html (last consulted 1 July 2005). See also the accompanying paper of Tanja Penter regarding Soviet trials.

2 See the essay of Penter, Tanja in this volume and also her essay, “Die lokale Gesellschaft im Donbass unter deutscher Okkupation 1941–43,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, vol. 19, Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der “Kollaboralion” im ost- UchenEuropa 1939-1945 (Gottingen, 2003), 183-223.Google Scholar

3 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) holds a video documentary on the Krasnodar trial, including some footage from the court proceedings, prepared by Irmgard and Bengt von zur Mühlen in the late 1980s, “Krasnodar: The Trial of Krasnodar, 1943” (Waltham, Mass., 199-?). I am grateful also to Ilya Bourtman for making available to me his unpublished paper, “The People’s Verdict!’ The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar in 1943” (paper, presented to the Faculty and Graduate Seminar in the Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, 2004).

4 For the reports on the city of Rostov, see Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow (GARF), f. 7021, op. 40, d. 1,10,14, 778, 779, 780, 781, 782 and 844. Copies crediof these files are also available at USHMM, RG 22.022M, reel 10. A short article on the Holocaust in Rostov, where no ghetto was formed, can be found in Ehrenburg, Llya and Grossman, Vasily, eds., The Complete Black Book of Russian Jeiwy, trans, and ed. Patterson, David; foreword, Horowitz, Irving Louis; introduction, Segall, Helen (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002) ,214–16;Google Scholar see also Angrick, Andrej, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgnippe D in dersudlichen Sowjelunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg, 2003), 560–65.Google Scholar

5 On the Ostarbeiter and their repatriation, see Polian, P. M., Zhertuy dvukh diktalur: Ostarbaitery i voennoplennye v Tret'em Reikhe i ikh repatriatsiia (Moscow, 1996).Google Scholar

6 See Dean, Martin, “Microcosm: Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust in the Mir Rayon of Belarus, 1941-44,” in Gaunt, D., Levine, P. A., and Palosuo, L., eds., Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Bern, 2004), 254.Google Scholar

7 See Berkhoff, Karel C., “The ‘Russian’ Prisoners of War in Nazi-Ruled Ukraine as Victims of Genocidal Massacre,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1-32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

8 The most amazing example of a translator acting in this way is the story of Oswald Rufeisen. See Nechama Tec, , In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

9 The conference entitled “German and Soviet Occupation in Poland, 1939-1945“ was held in Poznań, 24–26 February 2005, and hosted jointly by the Instytut Pamieci Naradowej and the German Historical Institute, Warsaw. Papers from the conference are scheduled to be published in 2006.

10 Alexander Guryanov, “Soviet Repressions in Eastern Poland, 1939-41” (paper, conference on “German and Soviet Occupation in Poland, 1939-1945,” Poznari, 25 February 2005). Dr. Guryanov works for the Memorial organization in Moscow.

11 Fishman, Lala and Weingartner, Steven, Lala’s Story: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Evanston, 1997), 193–97.Google Scholar

12 On the scale of partisan warfare in Belarus, see Gerlach, Christian, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg, 1999).Google Scholar

13 See Dean, Martin, “Polen in der einheimischen Hilfspolizei: Ein Aspekt der Besatzungsrealität in den deutsch besetzten ostpolnischen Gebieten,” in Chiari, Bernhard, ed., Die polnische Heimatarmee: Geschichte und Mylhos der Armia Krajowa seit dem Zrueiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2003), 355–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar An English translation is forthcoming: “Poles Serving in the German Local Police in the Eastern Districts of Poland and Their Role in the Holocaust,“ in Polin 18 (2005).

14 Bergen, Doris L., “The Nazi Concept of ‘Volksdeutsche’ and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939-45,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (1994): 569–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the competition between ideological and pragmatic interpretations of racial purity in the implementation of the Volksliste in the Incorporated Territories (western Poland), see, for example, Heinemann, Isabel, “'Ethnic Resettlement’ and Inter- Agency Cooperation in the Occupied Eastern Territories,” in Feldman, Gerald and Seibel, Wolfgang, eds., Netxuorks of Nazi Persecution: Business, Bureaucracy, and the Organization of the Holocaust (Oxford, 2005), 223–27.Google Scholar

15 During the 1990s the personnel files of the former “Anders Army” were held at a storage location of the Public Records Office in a former aircraft hanger at Hayes, Middlesex. 1 was able to examine several hundred such files, including many that referred specifically to previous service with the Germans, as part of my research at that time for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit based in New Scotland Yard. Regarding the some fifty thousand members of the “Anders Army” who had fought previously with the Axis, see Sir Hetherington, Thomas and Chalmers, William, War Crimes: Report of the War Crimes Inquiry (London, 1989).Google Scholar