Complicity and Indifference in Eastern Europe under Nazi Rule

Abstract

While western Europeans have for some time been facing up to questions of complicity and collaboration with Nazi Germany, debates over collaboration in Eastern Europe have been far slower to surface. In part this had to do with the relative inaccessibility of archives and the hegemony of Soviet narratives of heroic communist resistance during the Cold War period. But in part it relates to the continuing significance of the Nazi past even in the post-1989 period. As the editors of this volume, Peter Black, Bela Rasky, and Marianne Windsperger, point out, with the collapse of communist rule, former anti-communist resistance activists were often celebrated as national heroes, overlooking the fact that many had been antisemitic fascists during the Nazi period. Moreover, the topic raises sensitive questions about far larger numbers of people. As Paul Schapiro points out in his opening remarks, ‘bystanding’ in face of collective violence is not neutral’.1 Commenting that