IB History Collaboration by Individuals and Groups Within Germany and Occupied Territories Notes

Collaboration Turned Persecution Into Mass Murder

Collaboration within Germany

1. Ordinary Germans participated voluntarily. People denounced Jewish neighbours for breaking anti-Jewish regulations, bought Aryanised businesses below market price, staffed concentration camps, worked as railway personnel transporting victims, and served in the reserve police battalions that carried out mass shootings in occupied Europe.
   1. This participation was neither coerced nor centrally directed. It was enabled by everyday economic and administrative incentive.
2. Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows how ordinary men killed. Christopher Browning's study Ordinary Men (1992) examined a unit of middle-aged Hamburg policemen given the choice to opt out of shooting Polish Jews. Very few did.
   1. Browning attributed participation to peer pressure, obedience to authority, careerism, and ideological conditioning, not fanatical Nazi belief.

Collaboration in Occupied Western Europe

1. France shows administrative collaboration. French police carried out the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup of July 1942 and exceeded German quotas by including children. French civil servants administered Jewish property confiscation, and French railways (SNCF) transported deportees to the border.
2. The Netherlands had the highest death rate in Western Europe (about 75%). Dutch civil registration made it easier for German authorities to identify Jews, and local Dutch police participated in roundups.
3. Denunciation ended concealment. Anne Frank and her family were arrested in August 1944, almost certainly as a result of denunciation, having survived in hiding for over two years.
4. Denmark shows the alternative to collaboration. Denmark had one of the lowest Jewish death rates in occupied Europe (under 1%). In October 1943, the Danish population helped evacuate nearly the entire Danish Jewish community to neutral Sweden before German roundups could begin.

Collaboration in Occupied Eastern Europe

1. Local auxiliary police joined the killing directly. Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian auxiliary police participated in mass shootings alongside the Einsatzgruppen.
   1. In Lithuania, local nationalist groups conducted pogroms even before German units arrived. In Ukraine, the OUN-B (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) massacred Jewish communities in several cities in July 1941.
2. Motivations for collaboration varied. Some collaborators were genuinely antisemitic. Others were driven by anti-Communism, identifying Jews with Soviet power after the 1939-41 Soviet occupation. Others sought economic gain from Jewish property, and some were coerced by German occupation authorities.
   1. This complexity of motive makes blanket judgements about "national guilt" historically problematic, even though the scale of participation was undeniable.

The Judenrat: Coerced Collaboration

1. Judenrate administered ghettos under coercion. German authorities forced Jewish community leaders to compile deportation lists, manage ghetto order, distribute food, and organise labour drafts. Failure to comply meant the SS carried out operations directly, usually more violently.
2. Responses to this coercion varied. Adam Czerniakow, head of the Warsaw Judenrat, poisoned himself in July 1942 rather than compile deportation lists for the Treblinka transports. Other councils calculated that some compliance might preserve more lives than complete refusal.
   1. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) controversially criticised Jewish council behaviour, but most subsequent historians concluded that councils faced impossible choices under conditions of extreme coercion.

Paper 3 preparation