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Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/gerhis/ghz063

1477-089X

Julia S. Torrie,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

At dinner in October 1941 with Fernand de Brinon, who served as the Vichy regime’s representative to the German High Command in Paris, German novelist Ernst Jünger made the acquaintance of French writer and actor Sacha Guitry. As Guitry and Jünger conversed about a third writer, Octave Mirbeau, Guitry reported that on his deathbed, Mirbeau had whispered to Guitry, ‘Ne collaborer jamais!’ ‘What he meant,’ Jünger later wrote in his diary, ‘was collaborating on comedies, for in those days, the word did not have the odor it does now’ (diary entry for 8 October 1941, A German Officer in Paris: The War Journals, 1941–45, New York, 2019). Even in 1941, then, Jünger was aware that collaboration had a ripe ‘odour,’ and this scent grew only worse as the Second World War went on. Surveying the malodorous terrain of collaboration in Northern and Western Europe, Philip Morgan’s book aims to answer the complex question of what motivated officials and businessmen, in particular, to cooperate with an invading enemy.