Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II by István Deák and: Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past ed. by Jie-Hyun Lim et al. (review)

Among all the right- and left-wing regimes of terror in the twentieth century, Nazi Germany occupies an exceptional place. It is not the number of victims for which the Germans are singled out. In the numbers game they would be easily beaten by Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. It is the targeting of Jews for extermination and the way in which this mass killing was carried out that credit Germans with a unique project of destruction. This mass-killing event, which was called by the Nazis the “Final Solution” and since the late 1950s the “Holocaust” or “Shoah,” has been frequently explained in terms of archetypal anti-Semitic features of German culture. This was articulated in an ideologically loaded way by Liah Greenfeld in her book on Nationalism, in which she wrote in the part on Germany under the heading “The Final Solution of Infinite Longing”: “The possibility of the Final Solution was inherent in German national consciousness”; and “Germany was ready for the Holocaust from the moment German national identity existed.”¹⁴ In István Deák’s Europe on Trial, this German-centric understanding of the destruction of European Jews becomes somewhat revised through descriptions given in tragic detail of an anti-Semitic, collaborationist mentality supporting the Nazis all over occupied Europe. Whenever this general charge is raised, it is not particularly appreciated in contemporary Europe; in Poland, where the death camps were established by the occupiers with the questionable intent of keeping the mass killing secret and invisible, it is especially resented.

In a sweeping way, Deák, who is professor emeritus for modern Central European history at Columbia University and has a Hungarian background, paints almost all Western and Eastern European societies that became occupied or formed alliances with Nazi Germany as more or less complicit with the Nazis and in many cases with their anti-Semitic master narrative. He distinguishes, though, between Western and Eastern European forms of collaboration. Already in his introduction he makes it clear that it was the German defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–1943 that brought about the “most formidable change in outlook.” He writes: “This faraway event caused millions of Europeans to begin to doubt that Germany would win the war, which in turn started a sea change—from accommodation or collaboration to greater and greater forceful opposition to the Nazis” (p. 1). For Deák the Germans were not the only aggressors in World War II: They “were not alone,” as he writes, “in conquering and occupying territory. The Soviets grabbed large areas in Europe during those years, as did Germany’s allies, including Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Bulgaria” (p. 2). In conjunction with these conquests, he refers to “the greatest ethnic cleansing in European history primarily, but by far not exclusively in the form of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’” (p. 3). Yet he also deals with the “unprecedented purges” after the war: “Millions became the targets of retribution; millions also acted as the initiators and executors of retribution. It is my estimation that post–World War II criminal courts investigated … one in every twenty adult males for treason, war crimes, or collaboration with Germany” (p. 8).

Deák is not a historical revisionist who wants to rewrite European history. Like Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands (NY, 2010) and Norman Naimark in Fires of Hatred (Cambridge, MA 2001) and Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton 2010), he wants to set the record straight about a continent that was dragged by both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia into one...