Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler's Europe.

Kennedy, Sean ; Colwill, Elizabeth

Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler's Europe, by Rab Bennett. New York, New York University Press, 1999. ix, 318 pp. $40.00 U. S.

At the core of this wide-ranging work of synthesis is an impassioned reminder of the nature of Nazi "security policy" in Occupied Europe during the Second World War, and its ghastly implications for European resistance movements. Hitler's army, Rab Bennett emphasizes, employed the principle of "collective responsibility" with respect to civilian populations wherever it had the power to do so. Acts of sabotage, to say nothing of the killing of German soldiers, would lead to savage retaliation. The practice was not new, but the Nazis made it an integral part of their occupation policy. Furthermore, their racist ideology led to the employment of a "sliding scale," with the number of people to be killed rising dramatically the further East one went. If in Holland or France ten people would die if a German soldier was killed, in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Greece it was at least one hundred, and often more than that.

Since their actions were liable to lead to the deaths of innocents, resisters were faced with recurring and searing moral dilemmas. In Bennett's view, many acted without proper consideration of the consequences. In one of a number of vividly recounted episodes, he describes the Ardeatine Caves Massacre of the spring of 1944, in which the killing of thirty-three SS troops and ten Italian civilians by a bomb led to the execution of 335 hostages south of Rome. Given the imminent retreat of the Germans and the continuing advance of the Allies, Bennett argues, the massacre provides a telling example of resisters asserting their own ideological priorities over individual lives.

The group which exploded the bomb -- the Gappists ("Groups for Patriotic Action") -- was Communist-led, and the author does not see this as a coincidence. Throughout Europe, he suggests, a fault line developed between Communist resisters, who believed killing individual German soldiers would increase popular disaffection and thus swell their ranks, and those who rejected such actions. It was not only there, however, where resisters -- of various political stripes -- surrendered some of the moral high ground. German prisoners were tortured, while in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere partisans, too, employed the doctrine of collective responsibility, sometimes against entire families or communities. In July 1942, the Polish underground press even called on the British and Americans to turn over all German nationals on their soil to Sikorski's government-in-exile; one hundred of them were to be shot for every Pole killed.

While Bennett seeks to provide a searching critique of this darker side of the Resistance legacy, he does not limit his criticisms to the resisters themselves. In his discussion of the activities of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) he again sees operations in which other people's lives were too readily risked. The killing of Reinhard Heydrich by Czech operatives in 1942 is a case in point. While conceived by Eduard Benes's government in exile, SOE could have halted the operation but instead allowed it to go ahead, equipping and transporting the Czech agents, while it was hoped that the assassination would stimulate retaliations and bolster Czech dissidence -- a purported lack of which was a matter for concern in London -- the opposite occurred. Massive reprisals, including the destruction of Ldice, were carried out and were not followed by an upsurge of armed resistance.

Bennett's indignation at this and other incidents is palpable, but he recognizes that there were occasions when risks had to be taken, and instances where actions were conducted with sufficient presence of mind. For example, he views the attack on a ferry carrying "heavy" water from the Norsk Hydro Works at Vermork (Norway) as an instance of SOE co-operation with resisters who displayed great concern for the lives of their fellow citizens, while civilians were killed, the utmost care was taken to minimize deaths. Moreover, given the fear that Germany would be able to develop a commanding lead in atomic weapons technology, the action was warranted, even though it later emerged that the Nazi atomic program was not in fact as far along as previously believed.

Throughout the book the author strives to make clear just how hard it was for Europeans living under German occupation to know what to do. He is particularly concerned that British and American readers, whose societies did not have to cope with such dilemmas, develop empathy for people who found themselves in impossible situations. This is apparent in his discussion of the plight of Europe's Jews. Here Bennett refutes the arguments of Raul Hilberg concerning the supposed lack of Jewish resistance and Hannah Arendt's assertions concerning "collaboration" by the Jewish Councils. He notes the tremendous pressures exerted on the Jewish leaders, and their attempts to mitigate the impact of Nazi demands. He also points out that severely criticized individuals such as Chaim Rumkowski, leader of the Lodz ghetto, employed strategies that preserved their communities for long periods of time, though in the case of the former these were accompanied by autocratic governing methods, megalomania, and making life-or-death decisions about who was to be considered "productive." As for armed resistance, here again Bennett emphasizes the need to keep the Nazi practice of collective responsibility in mind. If fear of massive reprisals was something all resisters shared, in the Jewish case the punishment was even more severe, and lacked the level of external support that many other movements had. Ultimately, he concludes, given the terrible circumstances, the most pertinent question is how was there any Jewish resistance at all.

This comparative exploration of the context in which different resistance movements operated is revealing. On the other hand, elements of Bennett's chapter on collaboration are more problematic. After exploring the choices which had to be made by those in certain occupations, among them doctors, civil servants, and the police, the author turns to the question of state collaboration, focussing on the example of Vichy France. Here the problems the occupiers created for the French authorities are presented starkly; he describes an incident in 1941 when the Germans, having taken hostages in retaliation for an assassination, offered to reduce the number of executions if the French carried them out themselves. But if this demonstrates how Vichy officials were implicated in the crimes of the occupiers, to characterize Marshal Philippe Petain and Premier Pierre Laval as being motivated primarily by a desire "to moderate the excesses and limit the damage of the occupation" (p. 56), as Bennett seems to do, is at best incomplete. While he does not deny the callousness of Vichy's policies, a sense of Laval's zeal for collaboration with Nazi Germany is missing from the book. This is best encapsulated in his June, 1942 remarks "I desire the victory of Germany for without it Bolshevism would tomorrow install itself everywhere" -- a phrase which he claimed, at his 1945 trial, had been modified from "I believe in" to "I desire" at Petain's behest (see Nicholas Atkin, Petain [London, Longman, 1998], pp. 161-62).

Still, if Bennett's characterization of the Vichy leadership rests uneasily alongside his in-depth exploration of the more troubling actions of the European Resistance, Under the Shadow of the Swastika covers much ground effectively. It makes clear the moral challenges facing resisters, and should encourage readers to consider carefully the context in which they operated.

Sean Kennedy

University of New Brunswick