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

This is a remarkable study in the practical morality of collaboration and of resistance. Rab Bennett shows clearly how these terms have been over-simplified in many previous studies of the second world war. The reader is invited to put herself or himself into the position of partisans who had to weigh up the economic value of sabotage against the certainty that reprisals would be enormous. Or the mother in a concentration camp who had the choice of either hiding her own newly born baby and inviting the murder of the other inmates in the hut, or herself killing it in order to save lives. Given the nazi policy of effectively holding whole populations as hostages for the good behaviour of individuals, the choices on offer were well nigh morally impossible. The author has succeeded in illustrating for the general reader the issues which faced ordinary women and men on the ground. He also makes plain that murder and atrocity were also used by resisters against Germans especially as the Reich empire crumbled from 1943. This is an excellent account of the moral dilemmas which formed the basis of German rule of subject populations.

Among the many books about World War II and the Holocaust, very few come close to explaining how the Nazis were able to successfully subjugate and exterminate entire populations and ethnic groups. Why did so many peoples (not just the Jews) seem to have cooperated in their own self-destruction? I believe Rab Bennett's "Under the Shadow of the Swastika" has the answer. At the core of Nazi policy in dealing with conquered nations and population groups was one main central principle: the doctrine of Collective Responsibility. "On the 26 December 1939 two German soldiers were killed in a bar by criminals in Wawer, a suburb of Warsaw. The Germans rounded up all the men in the area, and in houses where there were several men in the family, the women were forced to choose who should be taken in reprisal. In one house a mother had to choose between her two sons, and another woman had to decide between the life of her husband, brother or father. Every tenth man was shot, including 34 youths under the age of 18-a total of 106 hostages..." This was the beginning of the practice of Collective Responsibility. From then on, the Nazis refined this doctrine until they made fear and terror into "an exact science." Why didn't more people fight back? Why didn't more people help the Jews? "..In Poland, a family of eight people were shot because they had hidden one Jewish child. In a similar incident, five Poles in a family, which included a 13-year-old and a one-year-old baby, were killed after it was discovered that they had hidden four Jews...In February 1944 the Germans were informed by Ukrainian collaborators in the ethnically mixed area of Galicia in eastern Poland, that about 100 Jews were being hidden in the Polish villages of Huta Pienacka and Huta Werchobuska. With the help of Ukrainian policemen, the Germans surrounded both villages and burned them to the ground. The soldiers assembled all the farmers together with their families and locked them in the barns..[They] stood guard to make sure that no living thing, human or animal, would escape from the burning buildings. The village burned all day." Could the Resistance have done more to stop the Nazis? They were constantly facing dilemmas forced on them by the Collective Responsibility doctrine, which Rab Bennett explores in detail. For each act of sabotage or assassination against the Germans, members of the Resistance faced reprisals on a ratio of 10-1, 50-1, 100-1, and in many cases, 1000-1. "On 20 October 1941, after an ambush upon a German convoy had left 30 dead and numerous others wounded, an estimated 4000 inhabitants of the village of Kraljevo [Serbia] were killed. The following day, in reprisal for the death of 10 German soldiers and 26 wounded, the town nearest the raid, Kragujevac, was subject to the most bloody reprisal of the German occupation. According to the official German hostage quota, 2300 people were executed: 1000 for the ten dead soldiers, and 1300 for the 26 wounded men."