At the turn of a new century, the moral dilemmas of the Nazi nightmare continue to haunt us–and to spark new controversies. There are the lingering restitution questions, trials of collaborators and, most importantly, the chronic impulse to pass quick judgments. The further we get away from the horrors of the Nazi era, the easier it is to moralize. But now Rab Bennett, a senior lecturer in politics at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, has emerged to challenge many of our most basic assumptions. In his book, “Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Europe,” he explores the choices people faced in agonizing detail. In so doing, he forcefully makes the case that we’ve mythologized the history of World War II, blithely categorizing people as either heroes or villains when the reality was often a lot murkier.
Bennett expounds what he calls “a controversial, revisionist thesis” that disputes the standard belief that resistance was always good and collaboration was always bad. In other circumstances, that credo may have been accurate. We rightfully applaud the courage of Mahatma Gandhi, Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa. But they fought against oppressive regimes that, however brutal, worried about their reputations and weren’t ready to use all the means at their disposal–which is why opposition leaders weren’t immediately executed. The Nazis knew no limits, and thereby operated on a different level. Any violent or nonviolent resistance triggered their doctrine of collective responsibility–reprisal killings on a previously unimaginable scale, especially in Eastern Europe. Bennett argues that this is crucial to understanding the responses Nazi policies produced. “When one examines German security policy in detail, the startling thing is not that there was so little resistance, but that there was so much,” he writes.
This is a telling–and accurate–observation. But Bennett is at his most controversial when he asks: was it right for resisters to engage in actions “which would in effect be passing a death sentence upon many innocent hostages?” For him, this is more often than not a rhetorical question. He condemns Soviet and Yugoslav partisans for consciously provoking German retaliation, knowing this would bring them more recruits. He also condemns the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a top Nazi, by British-trained Czech agents, since it triggered an orgy of reprisals that claimed about 5,000 Czech lives. The resisters were split on these issues themselves, with some of them arguing against actions that inflicted militarily negligible damage but provoked massive retaliation against civilians. The problem was that too much agonizing would paralyze them, playing into the Germans’ hands. And Bennett steps right onto this slippery slope, coming perilously close to blaming the resisters as much as the real perpetrators for the massacres.
Initially, Bennett is on firmer ground when he examines the behavior of those usually branded as collaborators. He points out that Dutch resistance leaders asked local mayors not to resign from their posts, even when they were forced to help deport local Jews. Their reasoning: resignation might make the mayors feel better, but the Nazis would put true loyalists in their place who would do their bidding far more vigorously. Bennett reminds us that the Jewish Councils, which certainly collaborated, at first didn’t recognize the scope of the murderous intentions of the Nazis, and later hoped that they could keep some people alive until the war ended. To that end, they were caught up in a macabre exercise. Chaim Rumkowski, the leader of the Lodz ghetto, famously pleaded for his fellow Jews to give up their sick relatives and friends for deportation: “Deliver to me those sick ones and it may be possible to save the healthy ones instead.” To my mind, Bennett can be too understanding of those who played their roles assigned to them by the Nazis, only rarely acknowledging that many collaborators could become as brutal as their masters.
But Bennett is at his best when he reminds us of all the horrific situations where it’s far from clear what was right or wrong, much less what any of us would have done. He’s right on target, too, when he points out that Americans and Brits, whose countries have never experienced foreign occupation, are the most prone to rush to judgment. He has performed a valuable service by asking painfully unsettling questions, even if I disagree with many of his answers. The Talmud warns: “Judge not thy neighbor until thou art come into his place.” Sound advice for the new century as well as the last one.
