The Spiegel writers note, "it's already clear that this last big Nazi trial in Germany will be a deeply extraordinary one because it will for the first time put the foreign perpetrators in the spotlight of world publicity. They are men who have until now received surprisingly little attention - Ukrainian gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers. Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers - they all took part in Germany's Holocaust."
"Dieter Pohl of the German Institute for Contemporary History estimate that more than 200,000 non-Germans - about as many as Germans and Austrians 'prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder.' And often they were every bit as cold-blooded as Hitler's henchmen." However, what such a statement fails to remind readers is that many of the Nazi "helpers" in Eastern Europe had already faced two or more years of Soviet occupation and persecution before the German military showed up and persuaded them to join their at-the-time-apparently-winning campaign.
Nonetheless, the Spiegel authors do hint at such explanations several times. Such a comments don't relinquish guilt of any of the perpetrators, but it does place the perpetrator's activities in much clearer context. In short, the peoples of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Balkan states had already suffered enough to be considered victims of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorders) when they were offered a chance to show they supported their new German occupiers, e.g. in some cases they chose to join perpetrators rather than to languish or die in a prison themselves. .
On the other hand, the Spiegel authors also report: "Historian Feliks Tych estimates that some 125,000 Poles rescued Jews without being paid for their services. [So] It's clear that the perpetrators always made up a small minority of their respective population. But the Germans relied on that minority. The SS, police and the army lacked the manpower to search the vast areas where the Nazi leadership planned to kill all people of Jewish origin. Across the 4,000 kilometers stretching from Brittany in western France to the Caucasus, the Nazis were bent on hunting down their victims, deporting them to extermination camps or to local murder sites, preventing escapes, digging mass graves and then carrying out their bloody handiwork."
The main point for Der Spiegel authors of "THE DARK CONTINENT: HITLERS HOLOCAUST HELPERS" seems to be that in "the killing fields of Eastern Europe, there were up to 10 local helpers for every German policeman. The ratio is similar in the extermination camps. Not in Auschwitz, which was run almost entirely by Germans, but in Belzec (600,000 killed), Treblinka (900,000 deaths) or in Demjanjuk's Sobibor. There, a handful of SS members were assisted by some . . . Travniki men."
Travniki was the training camp in Poland for camp guards, set up in the early 1940s by Nazi leadership. Travniki was especially set up by the SS leadership for creating the most violent- and conscious-less helpers of the SS for the various death camps (and work camps) across the continent. Demjanjuk was among those trained at Travniki.
WAS THE HOLOCAUST A PAN-EUROPEAN PROJECT?
Despite the extensive brainwashing involved in the training of some of the SS helpers, it is clear that far too many Europeans did help in the Nazi's projects or crimes against humanity. (Naturally, a similar helpfulness was found in Germany and Austria of the 1930s. This is what Goldhagen had focused on in his book, HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS. ) The Spiegel staff concluded the first of their three-part article by noting that the "stupefying number of victims raises disturbing questions, and Berlin historian Götz Aly already started asking them a few years ago: Was the so-called Final Solution in fact a 'European project that cannot be explained solely by the special circumstances of German history?'"
Jewish researchers, writing with similar criticisms of most of the different European states in the 1930s through mid-1940s, have come to similar conclusions to Götz Aly. According to the Spiegel authors in the second-part of THE DARK CONTINENT, "Since 1945 the countries invaded and ravaged by Hitler's armies have seen themselves as victims - which they doubtless were, with their vast numbers of dead. That makes it all the more painful to concede that many compatriots aided the German perpetrators." Specifically, in "Latvia, local assistance was greater than anywhere else. According to the American historian Raul Hilberg, the Latvians had the highest proportion of Nazi helpers. The Danes are at the other end of the scale. When the deportation of Denmark's Jews was about to begin in 1943, large parts of the population helped Jews to escape to Sweden or hid them. Some 98 percent of Denmark's 7,500 Jews survived World War II. By contrast, only nine percent of the Dutch Jews survived."
Obviously, European anti-Semitism played an evident role in the lives and actions of someor even manyof the volunteers. Spiegel staff explain: "In the 1930s, anti-Semitism grew across Europe because the upheaval after World War I and the global economic crisis had unsettled people. In Eastern Europe, the tendency to regard Jews as scapegoats and to try and exclude them from the job market was especially strong. In Hungary, Jews were banned from public office at the end of the 1930s and were forbidden to work in a large number of professions. Romania voluntarily adopted Nazi Germany's racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. In Poland, many universities restricted access for Jewish students."
On the other hand, Spiegel writersand many modern European historiansnote that there is no clear profile to the minds and activities of the various perpetrators. Some perpetrators were anti-Semitic. Some were not. Some were bureaucrats, some soldiers, some wealthy, some well-educated while others were poor and under-educated.
All-in-all, " [i]t's hard to determine what motivated people to kill. Often nationalism or anti-Semitism were just excuses. During the war, no one had to go hungry in Germany, but living conditions in Eastern Europe were squalid. 'For the Germans, 300 Jews meant 300 enemies of humanity. For the Lithuanians they meant 300 pairs of trousers and 300 pairs of boots,' says one eyewitness. That was greed on a personal level. But it also featured on a collective level. In France, 96 percent of aryanized companies remained in French hands. The Hungarian government used the assets seized from Jews to extend its pension system and reduce inflation."
Some of the Spiegel staff are particularly hard on the countries of Western Europe, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and France. They wrote, "Some 29,000 Jews from Belgium were murdered, many after being denounced in return for cash. Denunciations also happened in the Netherlands and France. Local authorities obediently paved the way for the deportation of Jews and later said they hadn't suspected what fate the Jews faced. That excuse was used by henchmen, opportunists and pen-pushing bureaucrats - a category of perpetrator that was denied for a long time after the war in France as the country sought to build a myth that the entire French people had been involved in the heroic resistance."
IN CONCLUSION: Rules of War and War Crimes
In short, only a few European states, like Denmark, are spared condemnation by most Jewish and German historians for the tendency of their peoples to side with the perpetrators of crimes against humanityrather than the victims.
This tendency to side with the winning side during a war is true for many in the midst of any long term occupation or war, especially if the perpetrators are ruthless and have guns. People find all kinds of supporting arguments not to openly resist the occupiers.
