Wartime Collaboration Research Articles

Wat zit er in een naam? Een kritische discoursanalyse van de veranderende collectieve herinneringen aan de collaboratie in België (1944-2020)

In 1991 Luc Huyse and Steven Dhondt famously wrote that “Belgium is sick of its 1940s”. In this short sentence, they referred to the country’s complicated collective memories related to the Belgian wartime collaboration between 1940 and 1944. This article focusses on a discursive shift within these memories, in which the interpretation of the crime “collaboration” moved from a crime against the Belgian state, described in a patriotic and nation-centred vocabulary, towards a global crime against humanity, infused with the human rights discourse of the 1990s. It highlights the crucial interactions between collective memories and the various rhetorical frames of reference in society. This way, the discursive shift is approached through an exploration of the prominent national and international discourses.

The Neglected Campaign: The Italian Navy Contribution to the Siege of Leningrad

German and Finnish forces encircled Leningrad in the fall of 1941, but were unable to complete the siege. A passage across Lake Ladoga, through which the Soviets sustained the defence of the city, remained open. To enforce the siege, the German Maritime Warfare Command ordered that light naval forces be transferred to Lake Ladoga. However, the Germans did not have those boats at their disposal and asked the Italians to provide them. Based on a critique of archival sources, this article analyses this largely neglected aspect of the Leningrad campaign and argues that, although the performance of the Regia Marina was excellent, its activity was not decisive in breaking Soviet resistance and forcing the fall of Leningrad. Even though circumstances prevented the Regia Marina from making the impact that its planners had wanted – a naval guerrilla force on Lake Ladoga could never have achieved a tight blockade of Leningrad – the campaign on Lake Ladoga offers an important and enlightening example of Axis wartime collaboration.

Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency and Everyday Life. By Keith Rathbone

As Keith Rathbone outlines in his Introduction, scholarly interpretations of les années noires continue to evolve in response to new research and changing attitudes. A first wave of historiography depicted the Pétain administration as the ‘Good France’, a political shield pragmatically defending the nation against the depredations of the Nazis. This gave way to the ‘Bad France’ position, ushered in by Robert O. Paxton’s seismic study of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), which detailed the shameful specifics of wartime collaboration. Since the 1990s, the ‘Poor France’ viewpoint has prioritized the civilian population’s struggle for survival. Following Robert Gildea, Rathbone opts instead for an emphasis on ‘Innovative France’, foregrounding the creativity as well as the complexity of individual and associative responses to the authoritarian État français and its project of Révolution nationale. Drawing incisively on a wealth of archival material, Rathbone builds a compelling narrative of plurality and diversity in the reactions of players, spectators, clubs, and federations to drastically changed circumstances within the sporting sphere. A tiny minority opted for direct resistance, as exemplified by the very special cases of Jewish sportifs from Paris to Algiers. More typically, a tactics of selective application, strategic conciliation, and special pleading made it possible to subvert Vichy’s agenda to the benefit of local stakeholders. These ranged from professional football in the industrialized north-east to rugby union in the predominantly rural south-west — without, for all that, wholly exculpating those responsible for the infamous decision to outlaw rugby league. Crucially, this monograph provides compelling evidence for an understanding of Vichy’s sports policy as characterized by continuities at least as much as by changes. Thus regarded, the regime’s substantial investment in physical culture was unprecedented in its scale, but its success depended on attitudes and structures inherited from the Third Republic and expressed most explicitly by the Front populaire of 1936–38. By this mechanism, an established pre-war consensus served to legitimize the wartime administration’s commitment to biopolitical management, bringing together such personally and politically contrasting figures as Léo Lagrange and Jean Borotra, and even Jean Zay and François de La Rocque. The resulting support across the spectrum created the conditions for Vichy’s paradoxical sporting ‘golden age’, as the numbers of participants and spectators boomed. As Rathbone shows, the regime’s approach to female participation was authentically inclusive, albeit consciously designed to reinforce traditionally conceived gender roles. Vichy’s mass mobilization of sportsmen and sportswomen provides evidence of its national potency, but also offers the key to its local fragility, which made possible the diverse instances of agency and autonomy that Rathbone deftly teases out from his primary materials. The resulting analysis opens by wondering how the number of registered football players in France jumped from 160,000 in 1940 to 240,000 in 1944. It concludes by explaining why a sports-inflected myth of resistance was required to enable post-war administrations to maintain the personnel, policies, and infrastructures developed under Vichy, and which would only come fully to fruition in the new France of the Fourth and Fifth Republics.

Sympathy for the Devil: General Vlasov in the Collective Memory of the Great Patriotic War in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract: Andrei Andreevich Vlasov, a Soviet general who sought to create a Russian Liberation Army under German auspices during World War II, has been the focal point of debates about wartime collaboration that reflect deep divides in memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Stalin era in post-Soviet Russia. Memory entrepreneurs in the literary world, the Orthodox Church and the historical profession have reappropriated Vlasov, inserting him in anti-Soviet historical narratives as a hero, symbol or martyr. Meanwhile, patriotic intellectuals in the Putin years have invoked Vlasov as a figure of national treachery and use him to discredit their political opponents. The debate over Vlasov points to the fractured and unproductive nature of national collective memory in Russia.

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis

Reviewed by: In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia ed. by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis Kelly Anne Hammond (bio) In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia. Edited by Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis. Hong Kong University Press, 2020. vi, 246 pages. $65.00, cloth; $40.00, E-book. Edited collections can be tricky. They often lack cohesion and feel like they are strung together by a theme that is either too broad or too narrow, or the quality of the chapters varies widely. Luckily, this is not the case with Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis's edited volume, In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia . The book presents cutting edge scholarship on many different facets of the underacknowledged and underrepresented continuities between the Japanese imperial project and the postimperial reconstruction throughout East Asia. Essentially, the book is a smorgasbord of postimperial history: there is something for everyone who is interested in the legacies of Japanese imperialism throughout East Asia. Although I do not have the space to review all the chapters, I hope that readers will be prompted by my review to check out the book and see what suits their own interests. This volume examines how political systems and society were rebuilt in the postwar period while simultaneously considering how the collapse of the Japanese empire impacted East Asia (p. 2). The postwar experiences of those living scattered throughout the remains of the defunct empire were varied, as were the processes of "deimperialization" (pp. 3–4). At its core, the edited volume examines the ways that the violence inflicted by imperial Japan informed both the tangible (political and military, especially) legacies as well as the postwar memories of people living throughout East Asia (p. 11). The book coalesces around two central themes. All the chapters address how "newly independent entities, or states reclaiming independence" successfully or unsuccessfully came to terms with Japan's imperial programs in their territories. The collection also investigates how postimperial Japan "worked to reframe" these new political, military, and civilian relationships within the new cold war geopolitics in East Asia (p. 15). For the authors, the "indelible mark" of the Japanese empire is all over East Asia, although it is not fully recognized, nor is it fully reconciled (p. 23). The chapters are divided into three thematic sections: "Collaboration and Dilemmas of Deimperialization" (four chapters); "Negotiating Past and Present in the Military and Political Realms" (three chapters); and "Returning to the Continent, Japan's Relations with New China" (two chapters). [End Page 247] When I started my PhD in 2008, Tim Brook had only recently published Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Harvard University Press, 2007). Although there is a cottage industry in French studies about Vichy and French collaboration with the Nazis, Brook's work was really the first monograph in English to deal with collaboration with the Japanese empire. Such studies have become more frequent and nuanced (see, for example: Jeremy Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: Where Total Empire Met Total War [Cornell University Press, 2020]; and A. Carly Buxton, Unthinking Collaboration: American Nisei in Transwar Japan [University of Hawai'i Press, 2022]). Yet, there is still a lot of work to do on the postwar legacies of these collaborators. Many of the chapters in this book (including Levidis's chapter on Kishi Nobusuke and the wartime antecedents of the Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]) are a step in this direction. Beyond the volume, Ernest Leung's recent article in Palladium (August 2021), "The School That Built Asia," echoes many of the points the authors in this section make about the legacies of wartime collaborators in postwar East Asian politics. In section 1, the authors are attempting to "[b]ring attention to spaces where imperial control ceased but was not really replaced" (p. 18). There were often conflicts about how to handle collaborators in postwar East Asia. The Tokyo War Crimes Trials were so different from Nuremburg (see Tim Brook's article "The Tokyo...

The Secrets of a Loyalist Soul

In the 1930s, Peking Union Medical College oversaw the most advanced neuropsychiatric unit in China. Li, a married twenty-two-year-old college student, sought treatment there in 1937 for his anxiety disorder. In ten months with therapist Bingham Dai (1899–1996), Li worked out his secret desire for homosexual and extramarital relations. Dai, trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, interpreted Li's condition in terms of the psychology of wartime collaboration. Drawing on this case study, this article accomplishes three objectives. First, it reassesses the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality in a non-Western context. The particular dynamics of Sino-Japanese relations advances a rethinking of the global history of sexual science. Second, the essay aims to elucidate the multiple currents of psychodynamic thinking in 1930s China. Dai integrated psychoanalysis into a clinical setting and stressed the unlocking of Chinese cultural factors as the key to successful therapeutic outcome. What distinguished Dai was his interest in the epistemological overlaps between the neo-Freudian and Confucian approaches to social relations and interpersonal dynamics. Finally, the article discusses how Dai's treatment of Li raises subversive questions about the fragile position of the therapist himself, with respect to both sexual orientation and nationalist identification.

Picturing Displaced Persons (DPs), Exhibiting French Prestige?

This article explores how photography documenting humanitarian aid in French-occupied Germany was mobilized to enhance France’s image, against the backdrop of increasing anxieties about its international standing. It draws on images found in the archives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the French occupation zone , which sat between the ‘official’ and the ‘private’. In doing so, it calls for a recognition of the role of amateur and relief workers photographers in sustaining post-war visual discourses of internationalism and national-self fashioning. Although largely overlooked today, these images play a role in wider debates about what it meant to be ‘French’ in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. Relief workers and amateur photographers built on and reproduced aspects of the widely disseminated narrative about the universalism of resistance to disrupt images of the zone as a refuge for wartime collaborators. This neglected aspect of humanitarian imagery offers fresh insights into the contribution of these photographers to post-war diplomatic strategies.

The 1963 Krasnodar Trial

In the city of Krasnodar, capital of the Russian Kuban´, a very special public trial took place from 10 to 24 October 1963. Its nine defendants embodied the darkest aspects of the Second World War in the USSR. Former auxiliary members and officers of Sonderkommando 10-a, they had taken part in the extreme violence committed by this subunit of Einsatzgruppe D, a paramilitary group in charge of the “cleansing” of southern Ukraine and Russia in the wake of the Wehrmacht. The echo given to this trial clearly distinguishes it from the dozens of other trials held throughout the Soviet Union after the 1955 partial amnesty of collaborators, and from trials in the south of the RSFSR more specifically. Numerous articles in the local and central press, a radio broadcast, a documentary film (In the Name of the Living), a best-selling book (The Abyss), and an aborted fiction film project added layers of stories, sounds and images to the story of these nine men, their victims, and the investigators who brought them to justice. The variations in the way the story is told in these various media constitute one of the common threads of the article, which also looks at how these works helped prolong the echo of the Krasnodar trial. The example of the media coverage of the Krasnodar trial goes against several preconceived ideas about the relationship between arts professionals and the police and judiciary. It confirms that artists sometimes enjoyed a margin of freedom during the Thaw and some time beyond. It illustrates various ways of filming a trial (1963 and 1965) and more still the wide array of renditions of court proceedings, from a live broadcast in the urban space to an engagé author’s highly literary short story. This case also shows how the same artist conveyed his vision of the trial depending on whether he was acting as a journalist, a screenwriter or author. The study confirms the importance of the political resources available to the various actors in this story between 1963 and 1967 with regard to the limits of the speakable and the demonstrable. The crucial role of a very committed artist, Lev Ginzburg, overcame great institutional and ideological resistance until the writer finally paid the price for his commitment. Ginzburg’s extremely daring depiction of wartime collaboration and – quite atypically – of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust makes his works singular, privileged though he was in literary circles. Last, it should be stressed that the intensity of the media coverage of this trial, Ginzburg’s particular role in German-Soviet relations, and the confidential steps taken in parallel by the Prosecutor-General of the USSR undoubtedly contributed to the (re)opening in the West of investigations of Germans involved in the crimes of Sonderkommando 10a and to their trial in West Germany between 1972 and 1980.

Transnationalism and insurrection: independence committees, anti-colonial networks, and Germany’s global war

AbstractThis article analyses the Indian, Persian, and Algerian–Tunisian independence committees and their place in Germany’s ‘programme for revolution’, Berlin’s attempt to instigate insurrection across the British, French, and Russian empires during the First World War. The agency of Asian and North African activists in this programme remains largely unknown, and their wartime collaboration in Germany is an under-researched topic in the histories of anti-colonial activism. This article explores the collaboration between the three committees, highlighting their strategic relationships with German officials and with each other. Criticizing the Eurocentric framings still present in studies of wartime strategy, it contributes to a growing historiography on the war as a global conflict. It argues that the independence committees were central actors in Germany’s programme, that the transnationalism of the pre-1914 anti-colonial movements both imprinted Germany’s programme and was furthered by it, and that only a comparative perspective exploring the interactions of its anti-colonial activists fully grasps the global scope of this topic.

CITIZEN OUTCASTS

This article examines the role of the penalty of ‘loss of civil rights’ during the so-called treason trials – the Norwegian authorities’ reckoning with wartime collaborators after 1945. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the penalty had grown out of fashion for being out of line with ‘modern’ punitive theory. But during the occupation, the Norwegian exile government and resistance revisited the penalty ahead of their planned ‘reckoning’ with Nazi collaborators and significantly expanded its scope. The wartime provisions concerning the loss of civil rights were draconian. However, they were never fully implemented following the liberation. This article argues that for policymakers, the penalty of ‘loss of civil rights’ had ‘two lives’: during the war, they relied on it to signal to the Norwegian population that collaborators would be punished harshly, which they hoped would help prevent popular violence following a liberation. But after the war, political pragmatism, economic necessity, and an increasing desire for national reconciliation were key motivations for the government to begin ameliorating the effects of the penalty. The article demonstrates how the official handling of the penalty of ‘loss of civil rights’ points to the ways that the rationales for the punishment of collaborators during the treason trials changed over time.

‘Hoop op iets vaags’: ambiguity, unreliability and indeterminacy in Erwin Mortier’s Marcel (1999)

Erwin Mortier’s acclaimed debut novel Marcel, first published nearly twenty years ago, tells the story of a Flemish family haunted by a dark past: the involvement of several members in the wartime collaboration with the German occupier. The novel has usually been read as a narrative of reconciliation, showing the often painful process of successive generations gradually gaining some understanding of the past and coming to terms with it, before being able finally to lay its guilty weight to rest. However, a close reading and historial contextualisation of Marcel reveals a much more complex picture, casting doubt both on the accuracy of the characters’ understanding and the sincerity of their intentions. This article is the first to offer a rival interpretation of Mortier’s novel, proposing that, rather than recognising their guilty past, the characters may be unable or unwilling to acknowledge it as such, and could instead be poised to sow the seeds of its continuation and repetition.

내셔널리즘의 張力과 對日 ‘協力(collaboration)’의 이해 : 중일전쟁기 ‘漢奸’ 문제 再考

Examining the collaboration-related terms and recent literatures in minute detail, this article reconsiders the Hanjian question during the War. Beyond the nationalist interpretation, regardless of resisting nationalism or collaborative nationalism, this article poses four problems of the existing collaboration studies that should be sublated: Firstly, dichotomous approach between patriotism and treason. When paying attention on complexity, ambivalence, and ambiguity in collaborator’s motivation and practice, we could approach the integrity of the Wartime history. Secondly, teleological approach assuming the victory of the resisting nationalism. The collaboration could be properly, if not impartially, understood from the wartime contemporary context and structure beyond the post-occupation perspective. Thirdly, moralistic dogma. History research is not to pass moral judgement, but to investigate the origin and context from which the moral judgement stems. Fourthly, tensile force of nationalism. Nationalistic approach does not help understand the historical events occurring in the time or in the place in which nationalism was not yet formed. These limits identified in the existing studies have presented an obstacle to objective and structural understanding of the Wartime collaboration. Future researches focusing on the context and conjuncture of the Wartime in which the collaboration was possible could contribute to reconstruction of the integrity of Wartime history, including contemporary Chinese socio-political structure, Republican political culture, the degree of the Nationalist state capacity to propagate its power into society, the local context etc...

Stalinist Purges during and after World War II as Retribution

Stalinist Purges during and after World War II as Retribution Vladimir Solonari Vanessa Voisin, L’URSS contre ses traîtres: L’épuration soviétique 1941–1955( The USSR against Its Traitors: Soviet Retribution, 1941–55). 514 pp. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015. ISBN-10: 2859448977. €35.00. The subtitle of Vanessa Voisin’s book— l’épuration soviétique—more conventionally would be translated as “the Soviet purge.” However, in French scholarship, the term épurationis used both in reference to Lenin- and Stalin-era purges and to the “purification” of European societies in the aftermath of World War II and Nazi occupation. It is also close in meaning to the word “retribution” that has been used in English-language publications in reference to the post–World War II quest for justice and punishment of collaborators and war criminals, which occurred in liberated territories all over Europe, sometimes in the form of spontaneous popular violence, sometimes presided over by the revamped judiciary. 1The polysemantic nature of the French épurationreflects the complex problematic that is the focus of this peculiarly framed and methodologically innovative book. The central question Voisin grapples with is whether and how Stalinist persecution of Soviet wartime collaborators was part of the Europe-wide process of épurationand to what extent it constitutes the continuation of the 1930s Stalinist purges. 2In the Soviet Union, prosecution and punishment of [End Page 216]collaborators started as soon as the first districts were liberated from the Nazi occupation in late 1941, and thus it began earlier than in other countries on the continent. Still, the near-synchronicity of Soviet and European épurationsinvites systematic comparison. At the same time, in the Soviet Union retribution was entrusted to the same punitive institutions—the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the procuracy—that served as pliable instruments of Stalinist terror in the 1930s. Therefore, it is no less important to trace continuity and changes in Soviet repressive practices. The combination of such synchronic and diachronic approaches constitutes an important characteristic of the book. Fostering comparison between Soviet practices and Europe-wide épuration, Voisin leaves out those features that constituted a uniquely Soviet experience and had no similarities with the policies of other anti-Nazi allies. Thus she does not investigate deportations of “enemy nations” during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II or the brutal Stalinist “pacification” of the western periphery of the enlarged USSR. Even the Soviet treatment of military collaborators—such as vlasovtsy, participants in the General Vlasov’s army—is explicitly bracketed-out. Also, the handling of prisoners of war, although investigated, is not the focus of her attention. Voisin analyzes collaboration using the example of exclusively Russian regions. In all likelihood, the number of voluntary and ideology-driven collaborators in the western borderlands was much higher than in Russia per se, even if the extent of collaboration in all its manifestations may have been comparable. 3But determined to analyze Soviet épurationin a pan-European context, Voisin deliberately avoids interference of “ethnic” factors in the story she tells. Such narrowing down of the book’s focus allows Voisin to concentrate on exactly those aspects of retribution in the Soviet Union that are the least researched (30). What, however, wascollaboration and/or treason? Voisin refuses to treat this question from a legalistic perspective. She maintains that German policy [End Page 217]was so brutal that most of the time Soviet citizens in the occupied territories faced a “nonchoice” between collaboration and death (72). Although around 1.2 million people served as policemen or were enlisted in various auxiliary units of the Wehrmacht and “many hundreds of thousands” were employed in various branches of the economy and administration in the occupied zone, “only a few tens of thousands” took the side of the Nazis voluntarily. The majority of the population initially adopted a wait-and see attitude (61,71). While the scope of collaboration in the occupied Soviet Union dwarfed that in most other Nazi-occupied countries, the main motivation of the collaborators was not ideological commitment or personal gain but simple fear as well as desire to survive under extremely harsh...

Gendered Archetypes of Wartime Occupation: ‘New Women’ in Occupied North China, 1937–40

This article examines the creation and use of gendered archetypes by the Provisional Government of the Republic of China (PGROC), the first collaborationist government established in China following the Japanese invasion of 1937. Drawing on a wide range of visual sources, it traces how this regime's messages about where women ‘belonged’ in an occupied China resulted in the creation of unique and complex archetypes which were deployed to convince Chinese women of the advantages of PGROC rule. Chief among these archetypes was the figure of the ‘PGROC new woman’. I show how this figure developed in PGROC poster art and propaganda, and eventually in film, as well as how it evolved out of early wartime and pre‐war precedents. In addition to detailing the uses and meanings of this (and other) archetypes, the article suggests that comparative analyses of gendered archetypes of collaboration developed in cognate regimes during the same period can help shed light on the extent to which the peculiar circumstances of wartime collaboration often resulted in specific ideas by male collaborationist leaders about the roles women were expected to play under occupation.

Wartime Collaboration: Theatrical Space and Power in Conquered Los Angeles

Wartime CollaborationTheatrical Space and Power in Conquered Los Angeles Andrew Gibb (bio) In April and May of 1855, a San Francisco weekly, The Golden Era, printed a three-part serial entitled “The Drama on the Pacific: First Theatricals in California,” providing future theatre scholars with the first published history of theatre in the Golden State.1 That journalistic chronicle contains a description of the first recorded theatrical production in what is now the city of Los Angeles: a series of performances mounted during the occupation of that city by US soldiers near the end of the US-Mexico War of 1846–48.2 For the theatre historian, J. E. Lawrence’s account is maddeningly uneven—by turns painstaking and imprecise, chauvinistic and culturally aware, and frequently contradictory. But if the text is closely read through the context of subsequent scholarship on nineteenth-century Californio (Mexican Californian) society, a remarkable tale emerges from the confusion: one of power, class, resistance, and collaboration (in both the theatrical and wartime senses). Bringing this story to light requires challenging the assumptions about theatrical space that lie at the heart of Lawrence’s account. That this should prove necessary serves as a reminder to theatre historians that spaces of performance are not only a reflection of how a given culture defines performance, but also of how it perceives power. Lawrence’s serialized history begins with the assertion that “theatrical representation in California commenced with the first unfurling of the American Flag on the Western border of our Continent,” a statement revealing an unabashed Anglo-centric bias. And yet, Lawrence’s nationalist fervor led the author to extensively document the theatrical activities of the US soldiers who came to California during the US-Mexico War, inadvertently contributing to the history of theatre in Los Angeles.3 [End Page 64] In the second installment, Lawrence tells of an entire theatrical season offered in Los Angeles by the soldier-actors of a unit known as the New York Volunteers, beginning in June of 1848 and lasting until September of that year. In a three-hundred-seat theatre apparently built for the occasion, the Volunteers gave performances of The Golden Farmer, The Idiot Witness, Bombastes Furioso, and “several more dramas and farces,” together with The Marble Statue and “other pantomimes.” Lawrence goes on to identify eleven “members of the Thespian corps” by name, and details the warm reception the Volunteers received from the populace of occupied Los Angeles.4 Given Lawrence’s patriotic tone, these details paint a picture of industrious and talented New York boys, sharing the theatrical blessings of liberty with the art-starved inhabitants of “a distant and almost unknown dependency of a semi-barbarous Mexico,” and in so doing winning the hearts and minds of the locals.5 In the very next installment of the history, however, appearing only two weeks later, this tale of Los Angeles theatrical genesis is revised. Lawrence admits to “performances in Spanish which preceded the advent of the Volunteers,” productions that “alternated” with those of the Volunteers, once they arrived. These plays were apparently mounted in a theatre that “cost between five and six thousand dollars,” a structure financed by “a gentleman from Mexico.”6 In order to incorporate this new information, the narrative must expand from a tale of magnanimous victors proffering the gift of art to a story of a bicultural rotating repertoire, or maybe even a multicultural theatre district. In either of those scenarios, the story of the first theatrical performance in Los Angeles appears to demonstrate the power of art as an intercultural bridge, even when the cultures in question are separated by the great gulf of war. Theatre may indeed have that power, and a bridging of Anglo American and Mexican Californian cultures may well have been at work with these productions. However, the contradictions apparent in Lawrence’s two accounts, particularly as they involve the performance space, suggest that the shows reflected a more ambiguous reality: one of the powerful forces engaged in the complex intercultural negotiation of California’s future. In short, the performances spatially represented a microcosm of events playing out beyond the theatre’s walls. Precisely locating these wartime productions...

The Chinese Judiciary under the Japanese Occupation: Criminal and Civil Justice in Jiangsu, 1938–45

Sitting at the intersection of Chinese legal-judicial history and the history of wartime occupation and collaboration, this study examines how Chinese judiciary functioned in Jiangsu under the Japanese occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It finds that judicial institutions and procedures established prior to 1937 were carried forward, and the judicial system operated, and Chinese legal culture manifested itself, in a fashion similar to those in the prewar period. It argues that Chinese life under the occupation had multiple dimensions, and multiple shades in each dimension, including but not limited to: tremendous sufferings from the war destruction and the Japanese atrocities; actions of resistance and collaboration; and a majority of the population trying to survive and go about their lives as normally as possible. In the end, the continuity in the judicial field resulted from the interactive dynamics of the long-term effect of the judicial reform and the near-term impact of the Japanese occupation and Chinese collaboration.

A Colonial History of the Bloodlands

The four essays assembled in this issue of Kritika bring together a number of interesting points about the Holocaust in the USSR. The authors pose different research questions, use distinct methodologies to collect empirical evidence, write about specific demographic groups (Zeltser studies the Red Army personnel, for example), and offer commentary on a range of issues. Anna Shternshis's essay, because of its methodology, is among the last of its kind. Soon there will be no more Holocaust survivors for scholars to interview. The author managed to speak with 200 Jews who were Soviet citizens before 1939 and were evacuated from their place of residence in the western USSR into the Soviet interior. Technically, since they never came into contact with the Nazis, they should not be considered Holocaust survivors, but the matter has not been sorted out in the historical literature. Polish Jews deported into the Soviet interior in 1939-41--victims of Soviet repression to which they inadvertently owed their lives, and numerically the largest group of Polish Jews to survive the war--are automatically included among Holocaust survivors. They were allowed to return to their country after liberation and then, already after the war, massively fled from life-threatening Polish antisemitism to displaced persons (DP) camps in the American occupation zone in Germany. Only in 2007 did Attina Grossman begin to puzzle over why their status was not problematized in the literature. (1) Their recollections--including what they learned during the stopover in Poland about their families' deaths under Nazi occupation--are abundant in the archives of Holocaust testimonies, both in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and in Yad Vashem. In Shternshis's article a single pre-Holocaust finding ominously stands out. When queried about what motivated their evacuation decision before the Nazis' arrival her respondents quoted fear of neighbors--of pogroms, in other words--as the most important factor that induced them to flee. Memory of the German occupation from the time of World War I, which lingered among local residents, was benign. And since Soviet propaganda muted criticism of anything untoward that the Third Reich did after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, there was no information about anti-Jewish Nazi policies in occupied Poland. People did, however, remember well the wave of pogroms that swept the area in the aftermath of the October Revolution and during the Civil War. With the prospect of collapse of the Soviet state authority as the front was rapidly approaching, many Jews fled, mindful of their neighbors' aggression a generation earlier. The study by Vladimir Solonari is grounded in the most promising sources of all those drawn upon in these essays. The historiographical breakthrough in Holocaust studies that we have observed in Poland in the last decade came through the systematic exploration of court files produced, for the most part, in the late 1940s when people were brought to justice for alleged wartime collaboration with the Germans. Solonari's essay demonstrates that similar materials--postwar trials and investigations--provide rich details about the mechanism of, and personnel involved in, killings of Jews in southern Ukraine. His study is limited to the area occupied by the Romanians, but there is no reason, it seems to me, why a similar quality of evidence could not be culled from the Soviet-era secret police archives about other regions of Ukraine and Belorussia. Anika Walke's article about Jewish youth in the Minsk ghetto makes in passing an interesting point that Soviet Jews were the most impoverished (542-43). They had no personal property to speak of, which in itself adversely affected their chances of survival in hiding compared to Jews from capitalist Eastern Europe. Among young Jewish boys raised in the Soviet Union, however, only some of them were circumcised (551), which gave them as a cohort more survival chances outside the ghetto. …

Melting the glacial curtain: the politics of Scandinavian–Soviet networks in the geophysical field sciences between two polar years, 1932/33–1957/58

While providing a brief background of the development of Scandinavian–Russian relations in the polar sciences in the early 20th century, this paper focuses on the period from the 1930s when the Swedish geographer Hans Ahlmann and Norwegian oceanographer Harald Ulrik Sverdrup developed a curiosity of the Soviet Union as a field for the practice of Arctic science. Visit of the Arctic Research Institute in Leningrad in 1934 further enhanced Ahlmann's sympathy and in 1935 he co-founded the Society for the Promotion of Cultural and Scientific Relations between Sweden and the Soviet Union. After further wartime collaboration, Ahlmann returned to the Soviet Union in 1958 and 1960 as president of the International Union of Geographical Sciences. Using his longtime Soviet contacts to penetrate the Iron Curtain, Ahlmann became a key figure in maintaining the flow of scientific information between East and West. New materials from archives open perspectives for better understanding of the international connections and transfer of knowledge in geophysical and geographical science in its formative period. The key message from this paper is that while tensions did exist and presented scientists with differential loyalties, they still managed to find ways to undertake fruitful scientific collaborations even under political restraints and could sometimes play political roles.

La dénonciation des Juifs en Pologne pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale

The plague of denunciations and the proliferation of informers was identified by the Polish resistance as one of the most dangerous threats to the internal cohesion of Polish society under the German occupation. This threat was nowhere as present and as wide-spread as in the case of Polish Jews who became the target of preference for people of bad will. The denunciation of the Jews in occupied Poland concerned the prized Jewish possessions, businesses and real estate. Interestingly, Jews were frequently denounced by Poles without any ulterior motives - other than obvious hostility to people who “passed for Aryans”, and who refused to wear the armbands with the star of David. During the later period, after the liquidations of the ghettos, Jews who went into hiding were often given away to the Polish “blue” police, a collaborationist police force which added greatly to Jewish suffering. The files of the German courts established in Poland during the war as well as the post-war investigations into war-time collaboration offer a unique opportunity to study the scale and characteristics of the phenomenon of denunciation in Poland.

Hesitating before the Judgment of History

The ubiquitous experience of wartime collaboration in East Asia has not yet undergone the analysis that its counterpart in Europe has received. The difficulty has to do with the political legacies that the denunciation of collaboration legitimized, as well as the continuing hegemony of the discourse of nationalism. Both inhibitors encourage the condemnation of collaboration rather than its historicization. Reflecting briefly on the 1946 trial of Liang Hongzhi, China's first head of state under the Japanese, this essay argues that the historian's task is not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject. In the face of the natural impulse to render judgment, this essay argues for the wisdom of hesitation.