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  • Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two
  • Judith Keene
Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two. By Peter Davies . Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2005. ISBN 0-582-77227-3. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 218. £19.90.

A book that aims to survey the complex history of the relations between an ascendant Nazi Germany and the territories of Europe during World War Two will be welcomed by all those who teach twentieth century European history. What in Nazi-speak was called the "New Europe" was to be forged under German hegemony and according to a ruthless application of Aryanization whereby the occupied territories would be cleansed of those deemed racially and ethnically undesirable and the political opposition savagely extirpated. In tracing this strand of history, Dangerous Liaisons aims to provide a complementary narrative to the well-known story of the rise of Nazism in Germany and its expansion across the European land mass. Peter Davies is in a good position to tackle this large task, having already written several analyses that deal with France during World War Two and the history of the Extreme Right in that nation since the Revolution.

The study offers as context some pre-industrial instances of what he suggests is collaborationist behaviour and a great many examples of the ways in which collaborators were dealt with post 1945. The latter span from Eastern Europe in 1945, the war in ex-Yugoslavia, and, perhaps not surprisingly given the author's scholarly interests, the most telling deal with the significance of the French war crimes trials in the 1990s. The body of the book, however, lays out the workings of the relationship between Nazi Germany and the European states whether they were territories under the heavy boot of occupation as in Byelorussia and the Ukraine; were engaged in formal alliances as in France under Pétain or Pavelic's Croatia; or occupied the dubious category of neutrality as in nations like Spain and Sweden.

Davies, quite correctly, is at pains to remind us that the "infrastructure of Nazi-occupied Europe was a hotch-potch of new states and systems" (p. 98) and that they were as varied as the territories they encompassed. As recent scholarship on wartime Germany has shown, the Nazi state never ran as a well-oiled machine. Instead, it functioned on improvisation and the haphazard patching together of pre-war and Nazi party structures in which there was no all-encompassing blueprint for Nazi administration. Similarly, in the European regions dominated by Germany, there was the same absence of a uniform administrative system. Here too, policy was improvised, often on the run, so that Nazi-occupied Europe most resembled a vast laboratory in which local German administrators and members of the German military machine were crucial in policy formation and implementation. Where it suited, they made arrangements with local administrators, among whom homegrown rightist factions often vied with each other for Nazi attention. In other places the occupiers ruled with a heavy hand.

The analysis consists of eight chapters which examine the various forms of collaboration and the history of these forms. The first chapter offers a typology of collaborationist activities and the second provides a brief [End Page 261] overview of the rise of Nazism. Subsequent chapters survey, with examples, other kinds of collaborationism: business, "horizontal collaboration" between the occupying armies and the local women and the permutations of the Holocaust. It is not always clear how these later chapters fit the initial sets in the typology as those that follow are arranged thematically, seemingly, by the collaborator's motivation.

The three analytical elements that are central to understanding the workings of collaborationism in Europe are: the German state and its representatives in the particular territory; the local elites in that territory whether administrators of the pre-war government or indigenous intellectuals; and the broad mass of the local population. The varying combinations of them and the way in which tensions between, and within them, were played out will determine the quality and the form of the collaborative connection. Dangerous Liaisons offers a schema of the different kinds of collaboration. Given the variety of types involved, it is not an easy undertaking...

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