Simon Wiesenthal Conference 2013: Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust
Postwar Europe’s grand narratives of the war years focused on the courageous and undeniable resistance movements—the Resistenza, the Résistance, or the Odboj—and the local uprisings against Nazi occupation and Axis-aligned fascist regimes. Complicity and collaboration were simply denied: The theory that Austria was Nazism’s first victim is just one striking example, though not unique in the European context. The issues of responsibility, collaboration, and—above all—shared culpability in the persecution and destruction of the Jewish communities of Europe only began to be addressed, belatedly and only tentatively, in Western Europe in the 1980s. Moreover, the impulse to take a fresh look at the postfascist societies of Western Europe often came from historians and researchers who stood outside of nationally oriented research traditions and their attendant scholarly coteries.
Behind the Iron Curtain, these conflicts proved to be even more entrenched: Civilian populations—some of which were also targets of the Nazis’ wider race war—had cruelly suffered under Nazi occupation. This shifted the focus of postwar memory even more toward the glorification of resistance, partisans, and underground fighters than further west, while a censured and Communist Party-controlled politics of the past concentrated above all on the antifascist myth over the murder of the Jews and Roma.
The fall of Communism in 1989 did not make the interpretation of the recent past for either the societies or the historians of East Central and Eastern Europe any less fraught. Instead, they complicated the questions about the fascist period with which the democratic societies of Western Europe had already begun to grapple, if late and hesitantly. In the East, the question of collaboration with both Nazism and Communism was simultaneously scrutinized and recast.
Against the backdrop of the uneven and controversial Western European experiences, the 2013 Simon Wiesenthal Conference—co-organized by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies — takes stock of the recent research on complicity and collaboration in the Nazi-occupied and Axis-aligned countries Eastern Europe.