Abstract
Deák, István. 2015. Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution during World War II. Boulder: Westview Press. 257 pp. with maps and photographs. Reviewed by Kees Boterbloem, University of South Florida
Highlights
The eminent Hungarian-American historian István Deák has delivered one of his finest works with this book that problematizes what once seemed a deceptively simple history of the Second World War
Deák's book in a way even surpasses the chilling account of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands – Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010) that covered the savagery before, during and after the war in northern and Central-Eastern Europe, wherein much of the worst butchery unfolded
Deák, too, observed the hypocrisy about the war that became the norm in the postwar period, when every European country began to claim to have been a victim of Nazism, with the great majority of its population allegedly aiding-and-abetting the resistance against the Germans
Summary
The eminent Hungarian-American historian István Deák has delivered one of his finest works with this book that problematizes what once seemed a deceptively simple history of the Second World War. In a lucid manner and an admirably brief fashion, Deák's work offers a comprehensive account of the "collaboration, accommodation, resistance, and retribution" of all European countries [excluding Ireland] during this bloodiest chapter of human history" (11). Deák, too, observed the hypocrisy about the war that became the norm in the postwar period, when every European country (including, most notoriously, Austria) began to claim to have been a victim of Nazism, with the great majority of its population allegedly aiding-and-abetting (or actively participating in) the resistance against the Germans.
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