Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most controversial and uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Although a widespread phenomenon, this was long ignored in the years after the war, when peoples and governments understandably emphasized popular resistance to Nazi occupation as they sought to reconstruct their devastated economies and societies along anti-fascist and democratic lines. Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects, the Quislings who backed Nazi occupation because they were fascists, and focuses instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi uthorities and agencies, and who were ultimately responsible for gearing the economies of the occupied territories to the Nazi war effort. It was their choices which had the greatest impact on the lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen in the occupied territories, including the deportation of slave-workers to the Reich and hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the death camps in the East. In time, as the fortunes of war shifted so decisively against Germany between 1941 and 1944, these collaborators found themselves trapped by the logic of their initial cooperation with their Nazi overlords -- caught up between the demands of an increasingly desperate and extremist occupying power, growing internal resistance to Nazi rule, and the relentlessly advancing Allied armies.

About the Author
Philip Morgan is now Senior Fellow at the University of Hull, after a career lecturing in contemporary European history in the Departments of European Studies and History at the University of Hull. His previous publications include Italian Fascism, 1919-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 (Routledge, 2002), and The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War (2007), which was also published by Oxford University Press.

Reviews
meticulously researched ... Hitler's Collaborators takes a much-needed fresh look at the complexities of collaboration during the Nazi era. * Zoe Waxman, Times Higher Education *
Collaborating with an occupying power is a tangled skein of complex motives: opportunism, survival, fear, a sense of professional responsibility. That is Morgan's subject in this solid and accessible account of Germany's occupation of western Europe from 1940 to 1944 and the occupation's reverberations in the various countries of Europe. Morgan (Univ. of Hull, UK) moves carefully and thoroughly, country by country. He examines not only governmental officials in powerful positions but also bureaucrats, businessmen, educators, and others who played a critical role in supplying the Nazi war machine. * CHOICE *
The reader is left wanting to know more about how the changing course of the war influenced the calculations of state officials and industrialists. More might also have been said about the relationship between resistance and collaboration. Morgan sometimes presents the relationship in binary terms: collaboration or resistance. Yet considerable space conceivably existed between the two, and one way to probe this space is to examine not only the constraints operating on officials and industrialists, but also their room for maneuver. * Talbot C. Imlay, Journal of Modern History *
A subject as contentious and divisive as the Nazi occupation of wartime Europe deserves a historian of Philip Morgan's stature... Hitler's Collaborators is meticulously researched. There is a wealth of empirical detail, much of which demonstrates the complexities of the interaction between business and politics in a fraught wartime situation. * Andrew Moore, Labour History *
In Hitler's Collaborators: Choosing between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe, Philip Morgan provides an essential synthesis of wide-ranging Nazi occupation policy across Western Europe from a base of secondary sources in several languages. * Jadwiga Biskupska, H-War *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199239733
Author Philip Morgan
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 634g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 161mm * 34mm