Occupied: European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937–1945 [New ed.] 1108479790, 9781108479790

Citation preview

Occupied

For much of the population of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the most persistent and significant aspect of their experience of the Second World War was that of occupation by one or more of the Axis powers. In this ambitious and wide-ranging study, Aviel Roshwald brings us the first single-authored, comparative treatment of European and Asian responses to German and Japanese occupation during the war. He illustrates how patriotic, ethno-national, and internationalist identities were manipulated, exploited, reconstructed, and reinvented as a result of the wholesale dismantling of states and redrawing of borders. Using eleven case studies from across the two continents, he examines how behavioral choices around collaboration and resistance were conditioned by existing identities or loyalties as well as by short-term cost– benefit calculations, opportunism, or coercion.

Aviel Roshwald is Professor of History at Georgetown University. His previous books include The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (2006), Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (2001), and Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War (1990).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Occupied European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937–1945 Aviel Roshwald Georgetown University, Washington DC

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108479790 DOI: 10.1017/9781108786430 © Aviel Roshwald 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roshwald, Aviel, author. Title: Occupied : European and Asian responses to Axis conquest, 1937-1945 / Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University, Washington DC. Other titles: European and Asian responses to Axis conquest, 1937-1945 Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022052253 (print) | LCCN 2022052254 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108479790 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108790826 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108786430 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945–Occupied territories. | Military occupation–History–20th century. Classification: LCC D802.A2 .R675 2023 (print) | LCC D802.A2 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/37–dc23/eng/20221104 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052253 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052254 ISBN 978-1-108-47979-0 Hardback ISBN 978-1-108-79082-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Mordecai and Miriam Roshwald, and to the memory of my father-in-law, William C. Moyer, II

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Contents

List of Figures List of Maps Acknowledgments Introduction

page ix x xi 1

Part I Patriotisms under Occupation (the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Thailand) Prologue

15

1 Initial Choices and Conditions

18

2 Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

38

3 The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

99

Conclusion to Part I

127

Part II Fractured Societies and Fractal Identities: Civil Wars under Occupation (Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, and China) Prologue

135

4 The Civil Wars in a Nutshell: Historical Overview

142

5 Continuities and Ruptures

179

6 From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions: The Fractal Structures of Political Identity in Civil Wars 198 Conclusion to Part II

243

vii

Published online by Cambridge University Press

viii

Contents

Part III Conquest in the Guise of Liberation (the Philippines, Indonesia, and Ukraine) Prologue

253

7

Colonial Histories

257

8

The Ghosts of Colonialisms Past and the Weight of Occupations Present

309

Conclusion to Part III

389

Conclusion

397

Bibliography Index

411 442

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figures

1 Anton Mussert with members of the Dutch National Socialist Movement 2 Amsterdam Jews being deported to concentration camps 3 A mother telling her children about Marshal Pétain 4 Hermann Göring steadies Philippe Pétain 5 Erik Scavenius at the Reich Chancellery 6 Disarmed Japanese soldiers await rail transport to POW camps 7 Danish Jews being ferried to safety in Sweden 8 Italian Action Party partisan fighters during the liberation of Milan 9 ELAS fighters circa 1944 10 EAM/ELAS banner welcoming British troops to Athens 11 Pro-EAM demonstrators struck by police gunfire 12 British Royal Air Force dropping supplies to Yugoslav resistance forces 13 Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek toast one another 14 Survivors of Japanese bombing in Chungking 15 March in Guangzhou in celebration of Wang Jingwei’s regime 16 Wang Jingwei 17 Josip Broz Tito 18 Benito Mussolini and Alessandro Pavolini 19 Assembly of the Greater East Asiatic Nations 20 USAFFE forces surrender to the Japanese 21 Japanese bicycle-mounted troops 22 Japanese troops celebrate victory in the Philippines 23 Survivors of Japanese forced-labor program 24 Sukarno declares Indonesian independence 25 German propaganda photo of Ukrainians welcoming a Wehrmacht soldier

page 42 54 63 71 79 111 123 140 148 149 150 156 167 171 172 186 202 211 236 263 276 313 339 357 369 ix

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Maps

1 Alliances, regimes, and occupations in Europe, c. July 1942 2 Imperial Japanese territory and occupation in the Pacific, summer 1942 3 Vichy France, mid-1942 4 Wartime Thailand, c. 1943 5 Occupied Denmark and the Netherlands 6 (a) Greece and Yugoslavia, c. 1937; (b) occupied Greece, June 1943 7 Occupied and partitioned Yugoslavia, c. June 1943 8 The Italian peninsula, late November to early December 1943 9 The Republic of China, mid- to late 1942 10 The Philippines under Japanese occupation 11 Japanese occupation and administration of the Dutch East Indies, c. 1944 12 Heavily Ukrainian-populated borderlands in interwar East Central Europe 13 Occupied Ukraine, mid-1942

x

Published online by Cambridge University Press

page 4 5 28 86 116 146 153 158 162 265 274 298 305

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have helped me in the research and writing of this book. I am very grateful to Steven Marks and Jordan Sand for reading the entire main body of the manuscript and making countless productive suggestions. Steven Marks was also always ready and willing to help me with any difficulties in deciphering difficult passages in Russian. My wife, Alene Moyer, turned her keen editorial eye to drafts of the introduction and conclusion, to the enormous benefit of both. My thanks go to Cathie Carmichael and Matthew D’Auria for their helpful feedback on an early version of Part I. Thank you to Sophie De Schaepdrijver, Vejas Liulevicius, and Jerry Muller for having encouraged this undertaking, and also to Nick Doumanis for suggesting, in another context, the topic of civil wars during the Second World War, which led to what is now Part II of the book. I thank Vejas Liulevicius for inviting me to the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus to give a presentation on a very early foreshadowing of this project back in 2009; the feedback from faculty and students was very helpful. My colleague Michael David-Fox kindly invited me to present a paper related to this project at the International Conference on World War II, Nazi Crimes, and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, which took place at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in December 2012. I also benefited from the opportunity to present papers on aspects of this topic at annual conferences of the American Historical Association and the Society for Military History. Georgetown University’s History Department has been a source of unstinting encouragement, stimulation, and insight over the years. I am particularly grateful to all the graduate students who have contributed their ideas in the context of my seminar on wartime occupations. Among my many wonderful colleagues, I wish to thank John McNeill, for inspiring me to think globally. Michael David-Fox generously offered some excellent bibliographic suggestions and the physical loan of books, among other forms of support. Dagomar Degroot patiently allowed me xi

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xii

Acknowledgments

to pester him with Dutch-translation questions. As an institution, Georgetown University supported this project with sabbatical leave, a senior faculty research leave, a summer research grant, and generous research expense funding. Thank you to Paula Chan for graciously sharing some primary source material she had collected and to Viviana Bianchi for sharing her annotated bibliography on Italy and the Holocaust. I am deeply indebted to Geoffrey Wallace, cartographer extraordinaire, whose exquisite work has added so much to this book in the form of the historical maps it includes. A number of regional experts kindly provided valuable feedback on early drafts of maps, in some cases via the novel(ish) medium of Twitter. Among them were Philippe Henri Blasen, Emil Kerenji, Ethan Mark, and my Georgetown colleagues, Michael David-Fox, Diana Dumitru, and James Millward. I am grateful to Arlene Balkansky of the Library of Congress for her invaluable help with locating digitized European wartime publications online. The staff at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland are always there when one needs them, and I am particularly thankful to Eric Van Slander for consistently guiding me to precisely the records I was looking for – or did not even know to look for. Thank you to Elliott Wrenn of the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for facilitating my research there. Michael Watson of Cambridge University Press is an ever-patient and encouraging editor, who was also very helpful in the surprisingly difficult task of narrowing down a title for the book. Carol Fellingham Webb was ever the patient and sharp-eyed copyeditor; her careful work spared me the embarrassment of more than one error or oversight. Many thanks also to Emily Plater, Melissa Ward, Anshu Sinha, and the rest of the CUP team for all their work in getting this manuscript to press. I appreciate Anonymous Reviewer no. 1 for offering such encouraging feedback along with constructive suggestions. And one more big, heartfelt thank you to my wife, Alene Moyer, for her unfailing support and enthusiastic morale boosting in this, among other, undertakings. It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that any of this book’s shortcomings, oversights, and mistakes are strictly my own responsibility and no one else’s. Part I of this book incorporates material that first appeared in the form of my 8,900-word chapter entitled “Patriotism in the Second World War: Comparative Perspectives on Countries under Axis Occupation,” in

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Acknowledgments

xiii

Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D’Auria, and Aviel Roshwald, eds., The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Vol. I: Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée (Cambridge University Press, 2022) (ISBN 9781108427050), published by Cambridge University Press and Assessment, reproduced with permission. Part II of this book incorporates material that first appeared in the form of my 8,000-word chapter entitled “Europe’s Civil Wars, 1941–1949,” in Nicholas Doumanis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2016), 537–54: www .oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199695669.001 .0001/oxfordhb-9780199695669-e-30. Permission to use this material is granted by Oxford University Press under the terms of its standard policy as indicated at the following web page: https://global.oup.com/academic/ rights/permissions/autperm/?cc=gb&lang=en (accessed August 6, 2021). The maps in this volume were made by Geoffrey Wallace, in part with the University of Minnesota’s Historical National Boundaries Dataset, generously provided by U-Spatial at UMN, and with data from Stanford University’s Spatial History Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

The term “total war” evokes images of violent clashes between militaries and of mass mobilization, as well as indiscriminate targeting, of civilian populations over the course of a protracted armed conflict.1 The Second World War featured these characteristics on an unimaginable scale. But for much of the population of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the most persistent and significant aspect of wartime experience was that of occupation by one or more of the Axis powers.2 This was a function of the relatively quick and massive victories won early on by the principal aggressor states, starting with Japan’s 1937 onslaught on China, and continuing with Germany’s partition of Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union in 1939, the Nazis’ decisive victories in Northern and Western Europe the following year, the German advance into Southeastern Europe (as well as parts of North Africa) and its deep inroads into Soviet territory in 1941, and Japan’s sweep into Southeast Asia in 1941–42. The rest of the war was dominated by the long-drawn-out efforts of the principal Allied powers (Britain, the USSR, and the United States) to reverse these initial outcomes. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of people found themselves under one form or another of Axis control or domination. A steady stream of archive-based monographs is constantly enriching historians’ understanding of how these occupations played out in individual countries. But there has been very little in the way of broadly comparative syntheses of this crucial aspect of the war.3 This book sets out to 1

2 3

See Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner, eds., World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See Peter Fritzsche, An Iron Wind: Europe under Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2016), Introduction and passim. As to single-authored treatments published in English, Peter Davies has written a descriptive survey of collaboration with (but not resistance to) the Nazi occupiers in wartime Europe. Peter Davies, Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two (London: Longman, 2004). Mark Mazower has written a brilliant history of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008). István

1

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2

Introduction

develop a thematically structured approach to this task. Its focus is explicitly on the political dimensions of responses to occupation, with the understanding that the political is intimately intertwined with the personal, the social, the economic, and the cultural. It is a study of the fragility and resilience of loyalties and identities under extreme conditions. The ordeal of wartime occupation by Axis powers was shared by an extraordinarily wide array of regions and peoples across significant stretches of Europe and Asia, from the Channel Islands in the west to the Philippines in the east. The most consistent feature of the occupations was the transformative impact they had on the countries that underwent them. This was a function both of the ambitiously transformative agendas of the occupying powers and of the context of global total war in which the history of these occupations unfolded. The violent impositions, iron constraints, as well as unexpected (and sometimes unintended) opportunities created by these occupations tested the elasticity of socio-cultural and ideological norms and systems of legitimization – both preexisting ones and those introduced by occupation authorities and their local clients. The political choices made by members of occupied societies in responding to their countries’ subjugation were critically important in shaping Eurasian and global history both during the Second World War and in the decades since. There were some notable differences between German and Japanese patterns of occupation and forms of domination. The Japanese state had a more continuous history of incremental imperial expansion stretching from the 1890s to the early 1930s. Taiwan (acquired in 1895), Korea (declared a protectorate in 1905, then annexed in 1910), and Manchuria (1932) had been its major colonial acquisitions over the course of these decades, and its authority over the first two had been recognized under the international law of the time. It was the unilateral establishment of a Japanese puppet state – Manchukuo – in the northeastern Chinese region

Deák’s single-authored publication on this theme is an extremely well-informed textbook that wrestles with the European occupation experience from the familiar perspective of the moral and political ambiguities of collaboration and resistance. István Deák, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution in World War II Europe (Boulder: Westview Press, 2015). Philip Morgan’s well-written book focuses exclusively on Western European countries. Philip Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). There is a very brief overview of Asian and European experiences of occupation by Axis powers in Sean Kennedy, The Shock of War: Civilian Experiences, 1937–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), ch. 2. There are various edited collections of great value, but these by definition lack a cohesive authorial perspective. I am not aware of any single-authored work that brings a systematic analytical framework to bear on the comparative study of European as well as Asian responses to wartime enemy occupations.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

3

of Manchuria that marked Japan’s definitive break with liberal internationalism and led to the outbreak of a broader Sino-Japanese war in 1937. In retrospect, 1937 can be seen as the start of the Second World War in Asia, as it was the United States’ attempts to coordinate the economic sanctioning of Japan in an effort to dislodge it from China that led to the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and launch of the Pacific War. The war against China also marked the transition away from a successful, piecemeal phase of Japanese imperialism that had been marked by the effective repression of resistance, cooptation of colonial elites, and integration of economies on terms that were generally profitable to Japanese industrial and commercial enterprises. From 1937 on, the specter of a military quagmire in China and of a growing backlash from Western powers began to obscure the rays of the Rising Sun. Japan’s imposition of a wartime command economy on Southeast Asia following its rapid conquest of the region in late 1941 and early 1942 was intended to maximize the utilization of the region’s resources in the pursuit of victory against Japan’s foes. Instead, in combination with the region’s sudden isolation from its historic export markets in the West, Japan’s policies served to create disincentives for production in Southeast Asia’s largely agricultural- and commodity-export-dependent economies.4 Germany’s history as an imperial power on the European continent was marked by dramatic pendulum swings rather than steady growth.5 At the height of its success on the Eastern Front during the First World War, marked by the conclusion of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks in March 1918, Berlin had acquired a vast area of control in the western regions of the former Russian empire, including Poland’s heartland, the Baltic region, Belorussia (Belarus), and Ukraine. In parts of this sphere, the German conquerors posed as sponsors and enablers of self-determination on the part of peoples such as the Poles and Ukrainians, over whom they planned to exercise long-term dominance through the creation of puppet regimes.6 But Germany’s imperial triumph was abruptly reversed by its November 1918 defeat on the Western Front. In the aftermath, it lost not only its East European acquisitions and its wartime occupation of Belgium and northeastern 4 5

6

Gregg Huff, World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 372. On continuities in German imperialism from the Second to the Third Reich, see Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Borislav Chernev, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

4

Introduction

d pie ccu -O nish Fin

Iceland

Sw ed en

N ORWEGIAN S EA

Finland

N or wa y

Soviet Union

United Kingdom

R.K. Ostland

DK

r ste Ea

N ORTH S EA

Ireland

NL

Germany

BE

TLANTIC

O CEAN

Occupied Zone

Vichy France

BM

LU

SK

CH

Italianoccupied zones

Italy

un

R.K. Ukraine TN

gary Romania

HR

AD

PO

Gen. Govt.

H

A

SA

ME

M E DI T E R R A NE A N S E A ia (Vichy France) Alger

BL

AC

K

SEA

Bulgaria

AL

Turkey

Spain

SM FM

nm ost Ge rm an adv anc e

Greece

Cyprus (UK)

TU

Neutral

Allied powers

Axis-occupied

Axis allies, protectorates, and puppet regimes

Abbreviations: AD: Andorra AL: Albania BM: Bohemia and Moravia BE: Belgium CH: Switzerland DK: Denmark FM: French Morocco (Vichy France) Gen. Govt: General Government (Occupied Poland) HR: Croatia (nominally independent, but de facto divided into Italian and German areas of troop deployment)

Major Axis powers (inc. annexed territories)

LU: Luxembourg ME: Montenegro NL: Netherlands PO: Portugal R.K.: Reichskomissariat SA: Serbia SK: Slovakia SM: Spanish Morocco TN: Transnistria (occupied by Romania) TU: Tunisia (Vichy France) © G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

Map 1 Alliances, regimes, and occupations in Europe, c. July 1942.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

5

Al aska (USA)

Soviet Union

B ERING S EA

Sakhalin Is.

Al e u

TT

M

(pup an

Ap p r o x i m

Ku (

pe

Korea (Japan)

Okinawa (Japan) Taiwan (Japan)

BU

Ogasawara Is. (Japan) Mariana Is. (Japan)

Philippines (USA)

TH FIC

Guam (US)

BN FMS

Ceylon (UK)

P ACIFIC O CEAN

Palau Is. (Japan)

Dut

I NDIAN O CEAN

Gilbert Is. (UK)

Solomon Is. (US)

ch East Indies PT

Terr. of Papua (AUS)

Australia

NH

Fiji Is. (UK) New Caledonia (Free French)

New Zealand

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

Allied powers

Marshal Is. (Japan)

Caroline Is. (Japan) NE New Guinea (AUS)

SG

tion in the Pacific cupa se oc ane Jap al eri

BT

Japan

a

mp

Occupied Areas

fi

in

it o

NP

India (UK)

Republic of China

Ch

Tibet

li m

ied

ate

Occup

Xinjiang

Ja ril I pa s. n)

ukuo cht state)

Mongolia

tian Islands (USA)

Attu Kiska

Major Axis powers (inc. annexed territories) Axis-occupied Neutral Terr. claimed by the Republic of China

Abbreviations: BN: Brunei (UK) BT: Bhutan (UK) BU: Burma (UK) FIC: French Indochina (Vichy France controlled, Japanese supervised) FMS: Federal Malay States (UK) NP: Nepal

NH: New Hebrides (UK/Free French) PT: Portuguese Timor (neutral) SG: Singapore (UK) TH: Thailand (independent and allied with Japan, but de facto occupied) TT: Tannu Tuva (Soviet Union-affiliated)

Map 2 Imperial Japanese territory and occupation in the Pacific, summer 1942.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

6

Introduction

France, but also its overseas colonies in Africa and the Pacific and significant portions of territory that had lain within its own national borders. Berlin resumed an expansionist path in 1938, with the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region, justifying both seizures through the right to national self-determination of these lands’ German-speaking populations. The British and French, notoriously, acquiesced to these moves, but drew a line following Hitler’s dismantling of the rump Czechoslovak state in March 1939 and declared war following his invasion of Poland in September. As the Japanese were to do, Nazi Germany achieved spectacular successes in its initial series of campaigns between 1939 and 1941, which brought the bulk of the European continent under its direct or indirect control. (See Map 1.) In Western Europe, Nazi occupation was marked initially by the cooptation rather than decapitation of national-level governments or administrations – to the extent that this was facilitated by the courses of action chosen by defeated countries’ governments. These countries’ economies were integrated into the Nazi empire on terms that were negotiated under duress and were disproportionately advantageous to Germany, but that still created incentives for collaboration on the part of the subjugated societies’ industrial and agricultural interests and administrative institutions.7 In much of Eastern Europe, by contrast, the Nazis tended to regard indigenous populations as racially unworthy of even the token forms of self-determination their predecessors had been willing to offer in 1918. Naked exploitation was the order of the day from the onset of occupation. Plans existed (largely on paper) to establish a vast zone of plantation agriculture run by German colonists in conquered areas of the Soviet Union, and local populations were seen as fit only for enslavement or reduction via mass starvation. Across the entirety of the European continent, the Nazis and their collaborators sought to systematically murder Jewish populations, among other targeted categories of people.8 Nazi Germany’s preoccupation with racist ideology to the extent of allowing racial doctrines to determine the broad outlines of its occupation policies set it apart from Japan, which presented itself as the wouldbe liberator of fellow East Asian peoples who had long suffered under the yoke of racialized European imperialism. This contrast should not be taken too far, however. In practice, Japanese invasion and occupation forces responded to resistance with wholesale atrocities on a monstrous 7 8

Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, ch. 9. On the Nazis’ imperialism as the culmination of a long German historical pattern of seeking empire in the conviction that the alternative was to be subjected to the imperialism of others, see Baranowski, Nazi Empire, Introduction.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

7

scale, most notoriously in China. Moreover, the talk of a shared racial and civilizational identity among East Asian peoples was undercut by propagandist rhetoric about the allegedly singular purity, and hence virtue, of Japan’s “Yamato race,” as well as by prejudice against other Asian populations and cultures as worthy of paternalistic condescension at best. Each nation was to have “its proper place” in the vision of a new regional and global order articulated by wartime Japan’s leadership. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that Tokyo held out as its vision for a post-imperial, post-war era was to be a stratified system with Japan at its head, rather than an association of fully equal partners. One might say of it that an empire by any other name would smell no sweeter.9 The wartime coordination of policy by Germany, Japan, Italy, and their lesser allies was haphazard. Hitler approved the 1939 German– Soviet Non-Aggression Pact at a time when armed conflict between Japanese and Soviet forces along the Mongolian–Manchurian border was culminating in Japanese defeat. Less than two years later, Japan negotiated a neutrality pact with Moscow just a few months before Germany’s onslaught on the USSR. Indeed, Japan’s July 1940 declaration that it was pursuing a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was motivated in part by a determination to stave off any potential German imperial intrusion into a region that Tokyo wished to secure as its own sphere of influence.10 In December 1941, Hitler did follow through on his promise to declare war on the United States if Japan would take the plunge into a Pacific war. Despite their differences, there was a strong element of convergence and mutual influence between the two regimes’ conceptions of their imperial expansions. They both saw their aggressions as marking paradigm-shifting breaks from the liberal-internationalist/liberal-imperialist system, inaugurating a new world order.11 Their shared vision of what Reto Hofmann has dubbed “imperial self-determination” entailed the marginalization or replacement of existing empires by their own new system of quasi-autarkic regional blocs, in which the economic and cultural deficiencies of capitalism and modernity would be countered by state-directed forms of economic development and corporatism. Universal values would be replaced by cults of national and racial 9 10 11

John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 9 and ch. 8. Jeremy A. Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), ch. 1. On the relationship between liberal internationalism and liberal imperialism, see Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), Introduction and ch. 5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

8

Introduction

authenticity. The division of functions and resources among constituent elements of their freshly won empires would reflect in part each power’s preconceived conceptions of racial and/or cultural hierarchies.12 The context of global total war served to enhance the similarities between Axis occupation policies. Both Germany and Japan (along with Italy) had initially embarked on expansionist juggernauts that were designed to pay for themselves and secure the basis for future prosperity amidst the dawn of a new order. But, in fact, these efforts had brought about the onset of total war against a coalition of Allied powers in the face of whose resources and capacity for coordination the Axis could not hope to prevail. The ever greater demands of fighting a total war in the face of such odds led to a functional convergence between German and Japanese approaches to imperial rule, as each power strove to exploit the human and natural resources of occupied lands ever more ruthlessly. In a word, the brutal ideologies and temperaments of the Axis and Axisaligned regimes, combined with the material strains of globalized total war, were such that many of the occupations in question were exceptionally harsh, with drastic consquences for all aspects of life in conquered lands. That said, the degree and nature of these transformations varied widely, as will be seen in the pages that follow. The variety of forms occupation took could create new political divisions in society, accentuate preexisting ones, and/or bridge others. It could provoke the creation of patriotic coalitions and spark the outbreak of civil wars. It could raise hitherto obscure personalities and marginalized movements to new prominence, while shattering the power of others. Each country’s, and indeed each individual’s, experience was unique; yet many responses were also shaped by globally diffused conceptions of, and conflicts about, political self-determination, ethno-racial identity, and patriotic obligation, as well as by various warring visions of internationalism. The legacy of those responses and the ways in which they have been remembered and commemorated continue to shape domestic and international politics across much of Eurasia to this very day. The classic analytical prism through which this subject has been studied is that of collaboration, resistance, and the grey zone in between.13 12

13

Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 107. On the Second World War as a clash of imperialisms, see also Richard Overy’s magisterial new book, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2021), esp. xiii, 32–68, 184–217. Variations upon this approach are particularly well developed in the historiography on Vichy France, which has (as Timothy Brook has pointed out; see note 14) – by virtue of this scholarship’s pioneering role and conceptual sophistication – been

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

9

Yet the flourishing monographic, case-study literature on the histories of occupied territories in the Second World War has in recent years highlighted just how loaded, ambiguous, and problematic the contradistinction between collaboration and resistance can be. Tim Brook has suggested that an automatic identification of collaboration with treachery is based on the assumption that the nation-state is the only legitimate object of political loyalty; but, in fact, national identity is no less a social construct than any other form of group belonging.14 For his part, in his controversial history of the East European borderlands in the Second World War, Timothy Snyder has highlighted how these territories’ repeated changes of hands between Soviet and Nazi occupations rendered it practically impossible for any inhabitant not to have been coopted to some extent by at least one of the successive occupying powers.15 Any analytical approach has its strengths and limitations, and it is not my intention to discard the concepts of collaboration and resistance. Rather, this book takes a series of alternative analytical perspectives as its points of departure. Inspired by Brook’s critique, I ask how were patriotic, ethno-national, and internationalist identities manipulated, exploited, reconstructed, and reinvented under the extraordinary circumstances of Axis occupations?16 To what degree were behavioral choices (such as decisions to collaborate or resist) conditioned by evolving conceptions of patriotic, ethno-racial, and transnational identities or loyalties, and to what extent were they functions of short-term cost– benefit calculations, opportunism, or sheer coercion? Conversely, how were political identities or ideological rationales used to legitimize decisions to work with or against occupying powers? How did awareness

14 15 16

disproportionately influential on the study of responses to Second World War-era occupations in other countries. See Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972); H. R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France: A Study of Ideas and Motivation in the Southern Zone, 1940–42 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer; rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). For recent approaches that question the relative neatness of some of the early typological distinctions between collaboration and resistance, see Sarah Fishman, Robert Zaretsky, and Ioannis Sinanoglu, eds., France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford: Berg, 2000). Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). In a very loose sense, this approach can be seen as a sequel to my earlier work on the evolution of ethno-national identities in multinational empires during the First World War and its aftermath. Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, the Middle East and Russia, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2001).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

10

Introduction

among the occupied in any given country of broader, regional, and global patterns of collaboration and resistance shape their responses to occupation? How important was the element of path dependency; that is, how deep and long-lasting an impact did political leaders’ initial responses to foreign conquest have on the subsequent course of relations between occupiers and occupied? These are not questions to which there are conclusive or uniformly applicable answers. But they are among the fundamental problems that drive this book’s comparative analysis. Exploring shifting loyalties, choices, and identities under occupation can not only illuminate the impact of this wartime experience, but also contribute to a broader understanding of modern political forces such as ethno-nationalism, patriotism, and competing forms of internationalism.17 The wholesale dismantling of states and redrawing of borders across wide swaths of Eurasia during the war years created a sort of laboratory of horrors for the study of political behavior, as conventional notions about law, authority, and sovereignty were suspended. Ordinary people and elites alike were compelled to make fundamental judgments about which ties of identity could maximize their chances of physical survival or (in some cases) economic and political advancement, and which loyalties should form the basis for their personal and political commitments. The very constraints imposed by enemy occupation elicited a remarkable variety of responses. By suspending the banality of ordinary political life,18 wartime occupations tested conventional notions of loyalty and obligation in a way that few other circumstances could have done. By the same token, it is important to distinguish these circumstances from longer-lasting forms of imperial rule: the sudden onset and relatively short duration of Axis conquests, along with the fact that Axis rule ran concurrently with an ever more demanding and destructive set of war efforts, made for a distinctive set of relational dynamics between occupiers and occupied, as well as among the occupied – as will be seen in the chapters that follow. Moreover, the radical violence associated with many of these occupations was exceptional, without even taking into account the Nazi effort to exterminate European Jewry and to commit mass murder on a genocidal scale against the Romani people, among other targeted groups. So, on the one hand, a study of this nature may afford some broader insights. But, on the other, a latter-day distance from the 17

18

On ethnic and national identities as “field[s] of … competing positions,” see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8. See Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

11

extreme nature of wartime conditions may distort one’s understanding of the choices the occupied made. Desperate people resort to desperate measures, and one should try to avoid any simplistic conflation of their justifications for their actions with the underlying motives for choices made under the impact of heavy duress, extraordinary provocation, and/ or singularly tempting opportunities. The range of cases studied here also constitutes both a hurdle and an opportunity. Finding coherent frameworks for discussing these histories comparatively has been a challenge. My approach has been, first of all, selective: I have undertaken to examine eleven cases rather than attempt universal coverage of all the countries that fell under Axis occupation. That said, I have endeavored to include examples from a wide array of geographical locations as well as from a variety of forms of occupation (ranging from formal to informal, harsh to relatively less harsh, etc.). I have divided the case studies into three groups, reflected in the book’s three parts, defined by distinctive patterns or contexts. Part I looks at countries that had been sovereign prior to Axis invasion and of which the state administrations continued to function in place, at least to some degree, under German or Japanese domination. Part II focuses on societies in which internal divisions in the face of invasion and occupation boiled over into civil war. Part III compares responses to occupation among societies that had not existed as sovereign polities before the war, but had already been colonized by other powers or had otherwise constituted parts of larger sovereign entities. Each of the three, thematically defined parts of the book will compare and contrast three or four case studies, always including at least one Asian country. Each part will be divided into two or three chapters, the first offering the general background and narrative history of the cases, followed by more thematically defined and analytically oriented discussions of selected aspects of occupation experiences. These thematic divisions are intended to present alternative analytical perspectives rather than fixed typological assignments. In fact, many of these cases could readily be switched between the three parts of the book. Yugoslavia falls here under the category of occupied societies engulfed by civil war, but I could have chosen to include Croatia in Part III, devoted to the study of societies that had not been sovereign entities prior to the war. France falls under Part I, but conditions in parts of the country during the course of its liberation in 1944 approximated civil war closely enough that it might have been equally productive to place it in comparison with the other examples in Part II. As an American colony prior to the war, the Philippines has been placed in Part III, but given the American promise of independence by 1946 and the existence of an

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

12

Introduction

autonomous government under American oversight in Manila, a case could be made for including it in Part I instead. In other words, the categories I have developed are heuristic tools, intended to raise particular sets of analytical questions. They should not be taken as denoting hard-and-fast, mutually exclusive designations. This book relies heavily upon the rich, multilingual, monographic literature on the various countries it encompasses. I have made use of published materials in German, Dutch, French, Italian, and Russian as well as English. I have also employed some primary sources such as Office of Strategic Services (OSS) records on occupied countries and microfilms of captured German documents, both available at the US National Archives in College Park; materials from the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; the wartime propaganda-pamphlet and foreign-newspaper collections at the Library of Congress; and digitized materials (e.g. Dutch and French wartime newspapers, both legal and underground) available online. For East Asia, I rely on European-language secondary literature and (in the case of Thailand and the Philippines) on American intelligence reports. That said, I don’t pretend to have uncovered new information about any individual country. It is in the juxtaposition of diverse cases and their comparative analysis that any value this book may have is to be found.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Part I

Patriotisms under Occupation (the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Thailand) Where is my home? Where is my home? First verse of Czech national anthem

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part I

To be patriotic can be defined as placing one’s country’s interests above one’s own.1 Yet behind this disarmingly simple formulation lies a welter of complications. For one thing, the matter of what constitutes a country’s interests and who can best determine that is an inherently contested issue. Moreover, even as self-sacrifice is esteemed as the highest expression of patriotism, the rhetoric of political leaders and publicists tends to hold forth the promise of what one might term a patriotic version of theodicy, whereby those who defend their nation’s collective security and dignity will duly find their material recompense – or at least will help secure it for their surviving families and compatriots in the event they make the ultimate sacrifice on the field of battle. The longer an allegedly patriotic agenda is manifestly at odds with the welfare of a large proportion of a country’s citizens, the harder it becomes to sustain the claim that it is in fact patriotic. During periods of relative peace and prosperity, such inherent tensions and contradictions may not be fully exposed; at such times, the price of behaving in what is conventionally seen as a patriotic manner is low and the reward potentially high. In a decently run polity, one pays one’s taxes (or finds loopholes to avoid them), obeys the law, perhaps waves a flag or watches a parade during national holidays, and in return enjoys relative security and the opportunity to pursue one’s own and one’s family’s wellbeing. By the same token, at the onset of war, ordinary citizens are likely to perceive a significant overlap between national interest and individual security. Much more may now be expected of them, but there initially tends to be little questioning of those expectations, for the alternative to accepting the burdens of war is – many fear – to acquiesce in the endangerment of all they hold dear. However, in a protracted conflict, with 1

For a much more restrictive definition, which seeks to link patriotism to a project of emotionally particularistic yet politically progressive and inclusive republicanism, see Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Introduction and passim.

15

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

16

Patriotisms under Occupation

losses mounting ever higher and the promise of reward growing ever dimmer, the strain can begin to show, as the gap between patriotic duty and personal recompense, the call of honor and the pursuit of material betterment, grows ever wider. One of the gravest potential challenges to any stable notion of patriotism comes under conditions of outright military defeat followed by enemy occupation. Under such circumstances, it may become difficult even for the most law-abiding members of society to discern just where legitimate political authority actually lies. Elites and ordinary citizens alike find themselves hard-put to calculate what the relationship between short-term sacrifices and long-term gains is likely to be. Identifying where one’s material interests may lie is hard enough in such an environment, let alone trying to reconcile personal interests with patriotic values. The range of plausible responses to foreign occupation or domination can appear extremely broad. This makes the task of preserving some semblance of overarching national unity – a shared understanding of what constitutes patriotic conduct – particularly daunting. This assessment may appear surprising. On the face of it, occupation should radically simplify the question of what constitutes patriotism: it means to resist the occupier.2 Yet patriotic values tend to be invoked by resisters and collaborators alike in justifying their seemingly incompatible positions. This was certainly the case across the occupied zones of Eurasia during the Second World War. As the case studies in Part I illustrate, starkly and sometimes violently opposed conceptions of patriotism divided many occupied societies during the war years. If nationalist and patriotic rationales were employed to validate opposite reactions to enemy occupation, then perhaps, some have suggested, patriotism is devoid of substance – at least as a motive or explanation for the choices made in the face of the intense pressures, difficult dilemmas, and powerful temptations associated with such extreme circumstances.3 Indeed, even at the best of times, patriotism serves as a reflexive justification for a broad variety of choices and policies, many of which may serve the interests of particular subsets of society at the expense of others. Yet, even if an examination of patriotism under occupation suggests that the notion is meaningless, the exercise will not have been in vain, for such a determination would itself be fairly significant. Conversely, it may 2

3

On nationalism as a prime motive for resistance to occupation, see David M. Edelstein, Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Matthew A. Kocher, Adria K. Lawrence, and Nuno P. Monteiro, “Nationalism, Collaboration, and Resistance: France under Nazi Occupation,” International Security, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2019), 117–50.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part I

17

be that a comparative and diachronic approach to the topic will facilitate the discernment of patterns that reflect, not only how elastic patriotism can be, but also what the limits of that flexibility are. That is to say, it may lead to the delineation of certain parameters of the credibly patriotic; it may also help chart how those parameters shift in the face of evolving conditions, contexts, and experiences. To leave oneself open to such a possibility does not require reverting to a naı¨ve understanding of patriotism. It does require taking seriously the question of how effective or not patriotic arguments made by competing movements were in winning them acquiescence, acceptance, or support among significant crosssections of society. It also requires exploring how patriotic and nationalist themes were varyingly selected, massaged, manipulated, and deployed to fit diverse agendas under volatile and fast-changing conditions. Finally, precisely because patriotism was invoked on behalf of a remarkably diverse array of ideological positions and in the service of a kaleidoscopic variety of political causes and interests, it constituted a rhetorical common denominator that can serve as a point of departure for the comparative analysis of responses to occupation. The cases selected for this section are the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Thailand. What they have in common is that they all involve countries where governments and/or senior administrators remained at least initially in place under Axis hegemony, establishing a potential institutional locus for the definition and dissemination – or alienation – of patriotic attitudes and values under the circumstances of occupation. Particularly during the early period after military defeat, these leaders were left with at least some limited measure of autonomy in their interactions with the occupiers as well as in their relationship with their own citizenry. What choices did they make under those circumstances, to what extent and in what ways did they seek to legitimize them in patriotic terms, and to what degree did their publics appear to accept or reject such justifications?4 Addressing these questions comparatively may help identify general patterns that transcended national differences. By the same token, I am interested in exploring how variations among political cultures, as well as among contingent choices and initial conditions of occupation, may have contributed to differences in the ways debates and conflicts about the meaning of patriotism played out in each case.

4

For an excellent comparative analysis of contestations over political legitimacy in wartime Europe, see Martin Conway and Peter Romijn, eds., The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture, 1938–1948 (New York: Berg, 2004).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

1

Initial Choices and Conditions

The Netherlands The German invasion of the Netherlands commenced on May 10, 1940 and ended with the Dutch armed forces’ capitulation four days later.1 Rapid and decisive though this defeat may have been, the Dutch military did manage to extract a political silver lining from its encounter with the Wehrmacht’s overwhelming power: German airborne troops sent behind the lines to capture the royal family in The Hague were held off long enough to allow the escape of Queen Wilhelmina’s daughter Juliana and son-in-law Prince Bernhard, along with their children, on May 12, followed by the queen herself on the 13th. The monarch’s initial plan of having the British destroyer on which she had embarked take her to join Dutch forces in the country’s southwest was overtaken by the rapid advance of German forces; all the royals ended up conveyed to London, with Princess Juliana eventually being sent on to Canada as a hedge against the contingency of a German invasion of the British Isles. The members of the Dutch cabinet, backed by a coalition of most of the country’s major political parties, also departed for Britain at the urging of several outspoken ministers, who overrode the hesitations of a somewhat shell-shocked prime minister, Dirk Jan de Geer. In London, they joined two ministers already visiting the UK for the coordination of military efforts. Queen and cabinet together constituted a government-in-exile for the duration of their country’s occupation by the enemy. During the weeks that followed, the prime minister’s inclination to negotiate some sort of compromise with a Germany whose victories seemed irreversible were overridden by a defiant queen, backed by a majority of the cabinet; Wilhelmina accepted de Geer’s resignation in August. His place was taken by Pieter Gerbrandy, a maverick member of the Anti-

1

This narrative draws on Louis de Jong, The Netherlands and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 53–75; see also M. R. D. Foot, ed., Holland at War against Hitler: Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1940–1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1990), ch. 1.

18

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

19

Revolutionary Party – a conservative Calvinist party supportive of strong central government and historically more open than de Geer’s Christian Historical Union to working across sectarian lines with Catholic parties. Gerbrandy’s voice had been critical in the cabinet’s original decision to decamp to the United Kingdom. A mix of both highly contingent and structural factors had combined to produce this outcome. Among the contingent elements were the contrasting personalities of Queen Wilhelmina and Prime Minister de Geer. The former was a forceful person whose determination to evade German capture and persistent refusal to contemplate a compromise with the invader was tied to her belief that the monarch was the embodiment of the nation’s sovereignty. Ordinarily finding herself marginalized by the parliamentary system and sidelined from any active role in politics, the crisis of May 1940 created a situation in which her decisions could suddenly have a powerful impact both symbolically and substantively. Not only did she seize that opportunity by the horns, but she hoped to parlay this novel constellation of forces into long-term constitutional reforms that would enhance the executive role of the monarch in postwar Netherlands. These hopes were disappointed, but for the duration of the war, as Louis de Jong has pointed out, the suspension of parliament and the unusual circumstance of politics in exile gave Wilhelmina – in partnership with Prime Minister Gerbrandy – a brief yet decisive position of very substantial influence over governmental decision-making. By the same token, de Geer’s personal loss of nerves in May 1940 allowed Gerbrandy’s arguments in favor of the cabinet’s departure from the country to prevail. Significant as such personal factors and eleventh-hour decisions were, one of the remarkable aspects of the Dutch response to German occupation was that just such a scenario had been the subject of contingency planning well before the outbreak of war.2 Enemy occupation was an ordeal the country’s Belgian neighbor had undergone in the First World War, during which the Netherlands had succeeded in maintaining its neutrality. As Hitler’s shadow grew longer over Europe, the Dutch leadership had grown increasingly concerned that their country might not be so fortunate in the event of renewed great-power conflict. In 1937–38, under the premiership of Hendrikus Colijn (the long-time head of the Anti-Revolutionary Party), the government had adopted a set of guidelines – Aanwijzingen in Dutch – for the country’s leadership and 2

On the Aanwijzingen resulting from this planning, see Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (New York: Berg, 1988), ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

20

Patriotisms under Occupation

civil service in the event the still-neutral Netherlands fell under enemy control. Under such a scenario, the Aanwijzingen called for the relocation of the royal head of state and cabinet to a location in exile, where – just as the Belgian king and cabinet had done from beyond German reach during the First World War – the government’s senior leadership could remain free to conduct diplomacy and cultivate alliance relationships, while also administering the overseas empire in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. At the same time, the civil service under the leadership of the secretaries-general – the top functionaries in the various ministries – was to remain in place and “in the interests of the population [original italics], strive to ensure that the administration, even under the altered conditions, continue to fulfill its task as well as possible.” The italicized phrase introduced a crucial element of conditionality: the framework essentially left it to the bureaucrats to judge at what point their continuation in office was doing more harm than good to the population they were charged with serving.3 This approach was based on the formal provisions of international law.4 Article 43 of the 1907 Hague Convention’s regulations governing wartime occupations stipulated that, “[t]he authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.”5 As Eyal Benvenisti has pointed out, the principle underpinning Article 43 was that of military occupation as a sort of stewardship, under the terms of which the official sovereignty of a country’s government would remain intact, while functional authority would be exercised by the occupying forces. The latter would be obliged to enforce the country’s laws subject to the limitations imposed by their own military exigencies. In such circumstances, it made perfect sense for the indigenous civil service, municipal leaders, judges, police officers, etc. to remain on the job while their government continued to defy the invader from exile, pending a final settlement of the conflict. Yet, Benvenisti clarifies, this legal framework assumed the

3

4 5

From the text of the Aanwijzingen, as quoted in Paul Bronzwaer, Maastricht en Luik bezet: een comparatief onderzoek naar vijf aspecten van de Duitse bezetting van Maastricht en Luik tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Hilversum: Verloren, 2010), 97–98. My translation. Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule, 140–41. Article 43 of “Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its Annex: Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land,” The Hague, October 18, 1907, as posted on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) website, www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId= 3741EAB8E36E9274C12563CD00516894 (accessed June 30, 2015).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

21

possibility of quite sharply distinguishing the sphere of military interests from the daily functioning of society and economy. This, in turn, was premised on a classically liberal vision of civil society’s relative freedom from intrusive governmental intervention and regulation: “The assumption was that the separation of governments from civilians, of public from private interests, would also hold true in times of war.” It is questionable whether there ever had been a time or a place in which such clear-cut demarcations between the interests of an occupying army and the rights of a civilian population could have been implemented. In a twentiethcentury era of total warfare, the blueprint laid out by Article 43 was aspirational at best.6 That said, it had the virtue of laying out a potential course of action, recognized as legitimate under international law, to be followed by the governments of small countries vulnerable to wartime occupation by greater powers – hence the logic of the Aanwijzingen of 1937. Thus, while there was a great deal of haphazard, last-minute decisionmaking that went into the relocation of queen and cabinet to London amidst the chaotic conditions of May 1940, the Aanwijzingen constituted a preexisting structural element that helped determine the outcome. Insofar as flight into exile was the default option, the burden fell upon any actual or would-be naysayers to persuade their colleagues that circumstances called for a different response. The fact that most of the country’s influential political parties were represented in or at least supported the coalition government meant that there were few credible extragovernmental figures or movements to whom doubters within the cabinet might have turned for support. There was a Dutch Nazi party (NSB – National Socialist Movement), but it was a marginal political force and had been subject to a police crackdown following the outbreak of war in Europe. Finally, the very fact that the small country’s conquest proceeded at lightning speed meant that there was no time for second guessing of the government’s initial impulse to remove its operations to foreign soil. By the time de Geer did formally seek to revisit the question, his colleagues and he were already in London; the psychological, political, and practical obstacles to reversing course and negotiating a return to the Nazioccupied Netherlands were all the greater in this context. A subsequent proposal, pushed particularly strongly by the minister of colonies, that the seat of government be transferred to the Dutch East Indies was also successfully resisted by the queen and her allies in the cabinet. By 1941, the government-in-exile’s long-term commitment to its wartime alliance 6

Eyal Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 4; quotation on p. 70.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

22

Patriotisms under Occupation

with Britain was hardening. When, in February of that year, de Geer slipped back into German-occupied Europe by way of neutral Portugal, he did so on his own; the government-in-exile immediately denounced his action as “a breach of loyalty and … an act detrimental to the national interest.”7 His subsequent effort to initiate the negotiation of a new modus vivendi between Dutch society and the occupiers was isolated, ill-timed, and came to nought.8 At the same time, the in-country arrangement loosely delineated in the Aanwijzingen was also implemented: the German occupation authorities were happy to coopt the secretaries-general of the Dutch ministries into the country’s administration, and these senior civil servants did initially choose to remain on the job. Insofar as this fell into line with the 1937 contingency plan, it did not constitute a formal inconsistency with the government’s departure. Rather, the resulting arrangement was supposed to reflect a patriotically coherent division of functions. On the one hand, the bureaucratic apparatus remained in place to coordinate the provision of vital services to the Dutch population amidst the strain of enemy occupation. This role, on the other hand, was complemented by that of a defiant monarch and cabinet responsible for upholding the nation’s honor, sovereignty, and long-term interests by remaining technically at war with Germany, commanding the loyalty of the Dutch overseas empire, coordinating the evolving alliance with Britain, and awaiting an eventual return to a place of honor in Europe following the hoped-for defeat of Germany.

France The German conquest of the Netherlands was, of course, the opening stage of a campaign of which the principal objective was the defeat of France (with Belgium and Luxembourg swallowed up en passant). And the Fall of France did indeed follow notoriously quickly – in the space of six weeks. Yet six weeks is a great deal longer than the four days of Dutch armed resistance. Moreover, as a great power that had – with the support of its British allies – succeeded in confining the German advance to the northeast of the country for the bulk of the First World War and that had subsequently invested significant resources in the construction of hightech defensive works in the form of the Maginot Line, France had not made political contingency plans for a military rout. Hence, as the military 7 8

“A Broken Pledge: Former Dutch Leader’s Return to Holland,” The Times (London), February 7, 1941, p. 3. Adrian F. Manning, “The Position of the Dutch Government in London up to 1942,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (January 1978), 117–35.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

23

situation deteriorated, the French government faced the prospect of a German occupation without a prearranged blueprint for action, yet with more time than their Dutch counterparts had had in which to debate the pros and cons of, and waver among, various possible scenarios.9 As the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, departed from Paris towards the southwest along with the rest of his cabinet on June 10, 1940, four days before the entry of German troops into the capital, the recent Dutch precedent actually figured among the various courses of action he was contemplating. With German forces moving relentlessly forward, millions of terrified French citizens had taken flight amidst chaotic and dangerous conditions. The roads were crammed with refugees, laden with all the belongings they could manage to pile into cars, or on to carts, or to carry on their persons. The long lines of desperate women, children, and old men, as well as retreating French soldiers, were the objects of periodic strafing attacks by German aircraft.10 Public services were in utter disarray. Organized military resistance had disintegrated. To the north, allied British forces had been evacuated from Dunkirk by June 4. For his part, the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, prudently refused to throw those elements of the Royal Air Force thus far held in reserve into a campaign that had already been lost. Under these dire circumstances, what course of action should France’s leaders – refugees themselves, having initially relocated just south of the Loire, then on to Bordeaux on June 14 – pursue? Reynaud’s personal inclination was to continue the retreat to a location beyond metropolitan France, whence the struggle could be resumed. Like the Netherlands, France had overseas colonies that, at least for the time being, remained well out of reach of German forces. France also had a large navy that could steam out of harm’s way to fight another day. Given the possibility of falling back on these resources, Reynaud argued, the military defeat in the Hexagon should be seen as the loss of a battle and not of the war. He cited the Dutch example as a precedent the French government could follow.11 9

10

11

The sources on which I draw for this narrative include: Philip Nord, France 1940: Defending the Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), ch. 5; Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 1996; first published 1993), ch. 1; Philip Charles Farwell Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil–Military Relations in Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), ch. 8. Nicole Dombrowski Risser, France under Fire: German Invasion, Civilian Flight, and Family Survival during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 124–32. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 122.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

24

Patriotisms under Occupation

Yet the personal and structural elements that had favored this outcome in the Dutch case were lacking in France. Unlike its Dutch counterpart, which was for all intents and purposes a national unity government, Reynaud’s recently formed cabinet was an incohesive, socialist-backed, centrist coalition – the latest in a series of formations cobbled together to replace the collapsed center-left Popular Front bloc, whose 1936 electoral victory had left the French right fuming.12 Seeking to fashion a broader basis for consensus amidst the nation’s existential crisis, Reynaud had, in the third week of May, appointed the right-wing hero of the 1916 Battle of Verdun – the octogenarian Marshal Philippe Pétain – as vice-premier. In light of the country’s catastrophic military setbacks, Reynaud also dismissed the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Maurice Gamelin – an officer who had maintained a reputation for being scrupulously apolitical. His 73-year-old replacement, General Maxime Weygand, had throughout his career – ever since his early days as an antiDreyfusard – been known for his ill-concealed hostility to liberaldemocratic values and institutions.13 Rather than helping bolster right-wing support for his position, Reynaud’s reshuffling of appointments only served to leave him politically exposed. For, instead of putting ideological differences aside and rallying behind the prime minister’s pro-war position, Weygand and Pétain proved strong advocates of seeking terms with the enemy. Weygand’s operational approach had effectively laid the ground for this startling development. After having vainly attempted, during his first week in command, to implement his predecessor’s latest plan for a counterattack, Weygand had gone on to pour resources into a last-ditch effort to establish and hold a defensive line north of Paris. He refused to plan, or hold forces in reserve for, a strategic withdrawal to North Africa. As this honorable-seeming yet futile stance came to nought and the government was compelled to flee its own capital, it was Weygand who emerged as the most forceful and vehement advocate of negotiating an armistice. When Reynaud proposed that the army in the field capitulate while the government moved out of the country, Weygand responded with outrage, choosing to take this as an assault on the honor of the military. In the cabinet’s June 16, 1940 deliberations, Pétain seconded this position, arguing that the patriotic duty of France’s leadership was to remain in place and do its best to negotiate an armistice that would alleviate the suffering of the French people. To depart the metropole 12 13

Jean-Pierre Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938–1944, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 29–30. Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand, passim.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

25

would, he suggested, constitute an act of desertion rather than an expression of patriotism.14 A majority of the French cabinet – including two notional political allies whom he had appointed as part of his reshuffle – had by now veered away from Reynaud’s approach. Rather than succeeding in coopting the Right, Reynaud had backed himself into a corner in his own government. At the June 16 meeting, cabinet members poured cold water on Reynaud’s enthusiasm for Whitehall’s last-minute offer (engineered by Jean Monnet and Charles de Gaulle in London) of a Franco-Britannic political union – intended as a mark of the United Kingdom’s commitment to the ultimate liberation of France. One minister (Jean Ybarnegaray) remarked that he preferred to see France transformed into a Nazi province than into a British dominion.15 The isolated prime minster resigned that very day. His recently appointed deputy – Marshal Pétain – took his place as prime minister and moved immediately to open armistice talks with the German armed forces. Contributing to this outcome was not just the fractious legacy of interwar France’s deep political divisions in general, but the longstanding politicization of many among the military’s officer corps in particular. The nominal political neutrality of figures such as Weygand and Pétain was belied by their sympathies and connections with networks and movements that had sought to undermine the French Republic during political flashpoints in the 1930s. More importantly, as Philip Bankwitz has argued, Maxime Weygand was among those who saw the army as the purest institutional distillation of the nation. The mass-conscription military, in this view, embodied a quality of national unity and discipline which stood in stark contrast to the ideological divisions and factionalized interest-group politics that characterized parliamentary democracy. Hence, for such officers, “conditional obedience … lay under the official edifice of unquestioning allegiance” to civilian authority.16 If forced to choose between deferring to the authority of a republican government and upholding the honor of the military, the latter would take precedence over the former. That is why Weygand chose to challenge Reynaud’s position rather than seek a way of implementing his policy in June 1940. From Weygand’s perspective, “the army was … the Nation,” as Bankwitz puts it. For the army to capitulate while the government relocated would serve, not to uphold the principle of national sovereignty, but to betray

14 15 16

Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 122–23. See also Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 101–6. William Fortescue, The Third Republic in France, 1870–1940: Conflicts and Continuities (London: Routledge, 2000), 235. Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand, 214.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

26

Patriotisms under Occupation

the nation on behalf of a regime whose inherent flaws – Weygand and Pétain were convinced – had brought the country to this pass in the first place. The possibility that the military’s own strategic and tactical shortcomings might have contributed to the debacle was, of course, not something the likes of a Weygand was willing to contemplate.17 The dynamics of the French civil–military relationship contrasted sharply with the Dutch case. Not only had the Netherlands’ pre-war politics been characterized by strong centrist coalitions, leaving far Left and Right relatively marginalized, but its officer corps was not alienated from the country’s constitutional order. At the decisive hour, the Dutch commander-in-chief, General Winkelman, was completely cooperative in the implementation of his government’s instructions, continuing military resistance for a couple of days following the queen and cabinet’s departure for London, and then capitulating once the situation became completely hopeless. One can also hypothesize that, along with the less troubled history of civil–military relations in the Netherlands, the fact that Holland was a tiny power compared with Germany made the reality of defeat and the prospect of capitulation less difficult to swallow for the Dutch officer corps than for their French counterparts. Perhaps if France had had a constitutional monarch pushing for a pursuit of the Dutch scenario, a politically reactionary military commander such as Weygand might have proved less obdurate. But as a mere prime minister – and a politically enfeebled one at that – Reynaud simply did not have the sacral aura of legitimacy that still surrounded royalty in the eyes of some French officers. (Nor, evidently, did the country’s formal head of state, President Albert Lebrun, who supported Reynaud’s position and was subsequently prevented by the Vichy regime from departing for North Africa.) In fact, according to Marc Ferro, Weygand made the contrast explicitly to Reynaud during a heated personal exchange on June 15: “What analogy can there be between the queen of the Netherlands who represents her country over which the dynasty reigns from father to son, and a prime minister, given that the Republic has known a hundred of them in the course of seventy years?”18

17

18

Ibid., chs. 6 and 8; quotation on p. 318. The commanders of the French navy and air force had been much more open to the idea of continuing the war from overseas, but their position was completely undercut by Pétain’s June 17, 1940 radio broadcast announcing that he had contacted the Germans with a request for “honorable” armistice terms and that the time for combat was over. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l’an 40, Vol. II: Ouvriers et soldats (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 681–82. Marc Ferro, Pétain (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 79–80. See also Burrin, France under the Germans, 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

27

In post-war retrospect, it is easy to paint Reynaud’s position as the nobly patriotic one, while decrying the armistice as an act of craven spinelessness at best or treacherous opportunism – in light of Pétain’s subsequent consolidation of authoritarian power – at worst. Yet, at the time, in a country that had undergone the horrendous bloodletting of the First World War only to win a Pyrrhic victory in 1918, there was a receptive audience for the argument that the most patriotic option under the circumstances of June 1940 was to cut an interim deal with the Germans. This would spare France the horrors of continued warfare, allow the horde of refugees crowding the country’s roads a chance to return home, and hopefully give the nation an opportunity to recover its strength under some form of continued political sovereignty in a German-dominated Europe. Pétain, Weygand, and their allies played these cards effectively, turning the tables on Reynaud’s patriotic rationale. As far as they were concerned, for France’s leaders to leave the country amidst the appalling crisis and impending occupation its citizens faced would constitute an abandonment of their posts and a betrayal of their patriotic duty. In the event, Pétain’s government was able, in a matter of days, to negotiate armistice terms that appeared on the surface to be surprisingly generous, all things being relative. Precisely because, at the time of their military defeat in the Hexagon, the French still held the card of their overseas colonies (and hence the option of deploying their colonial and naval resources in a continued war alongside Britain), the Germans had a strong incentive to grant Pétain terms that he could live with. It was in keen awareness of this leverage remaining in the hands of the French government that the Germans offered a peculiar arrangement, unparalleled during the Second World War, designed to meet Pétain’s minimal desiderata for an “honorable” armistice: the southeastern two-fifths of France were left unoccupied and under the direct control of the French government, which set up its headquarters and rehoused ministerial staffs in the hotel-rich spa town of Vichy. The Germans at this juncture made no bid for control or seizure of any part of the French empire or fleet. Technically, the Vichy government was also sovereign over the German-held threefifths of the country, apart from the region of Alsace-Lorraine, which was de facto annexed by Germany.19 This arrangement lasted precisely as long as France’s main, implicit bargaining chip – its North African colonies – remained out of Allied grasp, which is to say until November 1942. The immediate sense of material and psychological relief that the Franco-German armistice brought for millions of French citizens, for

19

Ferro, Pétain, 97–99.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

28

Patriotisms under Occupation

United Kingdom Belgium

Germany

Luxembourg

one yZ tar

ili

Area under Joint Military Administration with German-occupied Belgium

M

Paris

Coast al

Alsace & Moselle (de facto annexed by Germany)

Occupied Zone

Switzerland

Demarcation Line

Vichy Bordeaux

Un o c c u p i e d Zone

Marseille

100

200

Italian-occupied areas

Corsica

Andorra

Spain 0

Italy

300

400

km 500

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey

Occupied territory

Map 3 Vichy France, mid-1942.

whom the prospect of a war continued from overseas would have brought little solace amidst the relentless tramp of German boots, seemed to validate Pétain’s course. The marshal was able to claim success in having preserved a certain measure of French autonomy from direct German control in the unoccupied southeast, even as he arrogated extraordinary powers to himself on the French domestic stage. On July 10, 1940, the French Third Republic’s national assembly (minus the Communists, who had been banned in 1939, and more than two dozen deputies who had departed on board the Massilia for North Africa, where they were detained [see p. 30]) convened in Vichy for the first and last time, to vote in overwhelming numbers, 569 to 80 with 17 abstentions, in favor of granting Pétain special authority to draft a new constitution. It was fitting that the setting for this political wager was the Vichy casino.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

29

Pétain interpreted the law as immediately suspending the existing constitution. He adjourned the very national assembly that had empowered him and issued a series of acts that replaced the republic with a “French state” in which most powers were formally concentrated in his own person as head of state.20 Over the months and years that followed, the Vichy regime effected a paradigm shift away from the liberal-democratic norms of the Third Republic in favor of a repressive, antisemitic authoritarianism that seemed to straddle the boundary between pseudomonarchist reaction and fascism. To the extent that historians have been able to document public opinion during the early phases of the Vichy era, it seems to have ranged from enthusiastic support of Pétain to passive acquiescence, with only a small minority vehemently opposed to the new dispensation. Even the Communists adhered to a cautiously fence-sitting stance at this juncture, given the Soviet Union’s effective alliance with Nazi Germany. The most notable exception, of course, was Charles de Gaulle. Reynaud’s final cabinet reshuffle on June 5 had brought the recently promoted general into the government as undersecretary of war. De Gaulle’s opposition to an armistice had remained unwavering in the face of Reynaud’s political collapse; the day after Reynaud’s resignation, de Gaulle had flown from Bordeaux to London with a view to finding some way of continuing the fight in the name of a France whose government was negotiating armistice terms with Germany. In his second radio broadcast directed at his fellow citizens, carried by the BBC on June 22, 1940, the principles he invoked on behalf of his stance were those of “honor, good sense, and the higher interest [interȇt supérieure] of the fatherland.”21 In speaking of honor, he referred not – as Weygand had in his confrontations with Reynaud – to the military as an institution the dignity of which must be protected at all costs, but to the obligation of the entire nation, whose government had undertaken, in a mutual commitment with Britain, that neither party would break ranks with the other. (In fact, de Gaulle had played a key role in persuading the British cabinet to reject an initial June 15 request by the French cabinet for London’s acquiescence in a French exploration of armistice possibilities. The offer, instead, of a FrancoBritish union had been strongly encouraged by de Gaulle as a way of strengthening Reynaud’s hand.) Good sense, he argued, suggested that the war was actually far from lost, given the overseas and allied resources 20 21

Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 132–36. Charles de Gaulle, “L’appel du 22 juin 1940,” www.charles-de-gaulle.org/pages/lhomme/dossiers-thematiques/1940–1944-la-seconde-guerre-mondiale/l-appel-du-18juin/documents/l-appel-du-22-juin-1940.php (accessed July 28, 2015).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

30

Patriotisms under Occupation

still available to France over the longer haul. As to the higher interest of the fatherland, de Gaulle contended (presciently as it turned out) that this was but the beginning of a world war in which the combined resources of those countries that ended up ranged against Germany would ultimately prevail. It would ill-serve the national interest to respond to France’s continental defeat by detaching the country from the potential victors of a prospectively global conflict. He called on French people everywhere, of whatever background, but especially those with military experience, to affiliate themselves with his effort to continue the struggle over the long haul. He pointed to the examples of the other governments-in-exile in London (Polish, Dutch, etc.) by way of trying to shame his compatriots over their own government’s decision to accept defeat and strike a devil’s bargain with the enemy. Yet the fact was that at this early juncture, it was de Gaulle who did not have any credible claim to legitimacy as a representative of the French nation. Pétain’s regime denounced him as a traitor who was defying his sovereign government’s authority (and that, incidentally, of his erstwhile military superior and mentor – Pétain) and seeking to aggrandize himself at the cost of his nation’s interests. De Gaulle’s early radio broadcasts were, notoriously, heard by very few of his fellow citizens; fewer still had any inclination to embrace his rejectionist stance at that juncture. For the Vichy government, and likely for a majority of those citizens who were initially even aware of de Gaulle’s stance, it was the general’s rejectionism that constituted foolhardiness at best and betrayal at worst; support for Marshal Pétain represented the patriotic course to take under the tragic circumstances of the summer of 1940. Among the country’s new leadership, the belief was strongly avowed (perhaps with overtones of defensiveness?) that staying in France to negotiate an armistice and share in the suffering of the nation was the honorable and patriotic thing to do. Writing to his wife about the twenty-seven oppositionist parliamentarians who embarked aboard the Massilia on June 21 to sail for North Africa, Admiral Darlan – who had made arrangements for the parliamentarians’ voyage in the first place – poured scorn on them as cowards who were simply abandoning the French people in order to save their own skins.22 On July 3, the British government appeared to play into the hands of the newly established Vichy regime by attacking the French naval

22

Ferro, Pétain, 94–94. Following their arrival in North Africa, the parliamentarians were arrested and sent back to France for eventual trial, after a retroactive decision by Pétain and his government that their departure – which he had originally authorized – constituted desertion of duty. Richard J. Champoux, “The Massilia Affair,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 1975), 283–300.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

31

squadron at Mers el-Kebir, Algeria, after its commander refused to accept British demands that he, at the very least, remove his ships from the Mediterranean theater under British escort, lest they ultimately fall into German hands. Almost 1,300 French sailors perished at the hands of their recent allies, and Vichy was quick to seize upon the opportunity to wrap itself in the mantle of patriotic self-righteousness. The breaking of France’s commitments to Britain could be justified retroactively by pointing to the perfidy of Albion. And yet, Mers el-Kebir notwithstanding, the one potential advantage de Gaulle did have precisely by virtue of his immediate decision to reject the armistice, and which he would later parlay into a legitimization of his own position at the expense of Vichy’s, was that he could claim to have unswervingly adhered to the path of national honor. It is, after all, an ironic quality of honor that its course is best recognized when it diverges most starkly from the immediate, material interests of nation and individual alike, but that it is most widely followed when it appears to converge with that of physical or political self-preservation. Among the French, then, two rival claims to patriotic legitimacy emerged from the moment armistice talks began.23 Each of the claimants invoked similar values as foundational to their very different perceptions of where true patriotic north lay: it is striking that de Gaulle’s triad of honor, common sense, and higher interest of the fatherland was echoed (minus the common sense) by Weygand after the war, when he wrote that, for the French army, “‘honor’ and the ‘higher interest of the country’ form a ‘single word.’”24 But their understandings of what political choices honor dictated and what constituted the long-term national interest under the extreme circumstances of June 1940 were radically and irreconcilably different.25 That said, as will be discussed below, there was an initial period when this rift appeared marginal and inconsequential, in light of the overwhelming combination of French support for, and passivity or acquiescence in, Vichy’s version of patriotism. It is nonetheless worth underlining the contrast between France’s situation and that of the Netherlands, the national authorities of which – 23

24 25

See Denis Peschanski, “Legitimacy/Legitimation/Delegitimation: France in the Dark Years, a Textbook Case,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 2004), 409–23. Weygand as paraphrased and quoted in Bankwitz, Maxime Wegand, 210. Julian Jackson frames the dichotomy a little differently, contrasting Pétain’s “decision to remain on French soil to defend his compatriots, to defend French lives, while de Gaulle left France to defend what he later called his ‘idea of France’ … ‘Honour’ or ‘life’ – protecting an ‘idea’ of France or protecting (or believing that one was protecting) the French – that was the nub of the conflict between Pétain and de Gaulle in 1940.” Julian Jackson, De Gaulle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 120–21.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

32

Patriotisms under Occupation

queen and cabinet, on the one hand, and senior civil servants, on the other – were initially able to establish a division of functions that allowed the symbolic and institutional infrastructure of patriotic legitimacy to remain notionally intact by virtue of the very fact that its components were geographically redistributed. In setting about the business of establishing working relationships with the Germans, the Dutch secretariesgeneral were not flouting the authority of queen and government; for their part, in relocating to London and cementing the alliance with Britain, Wilhelmina and her cabinet were not calling into question the loyalty of the civil service in the occupied homeland. The Dutch approach assumed that the demands of patriotic honor and the higher interest of the fatherland could not, in the context of wartime occupation, be reduced to a single, undifferentiated political posture to be followed by all elements of government and society. This very embrace of, not just distinct and complementary, but radically different and seemingly contradictory, roles to be played by government and bureaucratic apparatus facilitated the survival, for the time being, of the myth of patriotic solidarity in the face of devastating military defeat and occupation. Denmark In Denmark, a country that had historically followed a course of neutrality and had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in May 1939, military resistance to the German invasion on April 9, 1940, took a token form that lasted just a few hours. For the Germans, Denmark was a stepping stone en route to their main target of Norway, and from the Danish government’s perspective, serious armed resistance in the face of overwhelming German superiority was quite pointless. The government was able to negotiate terms that left it with a substantive degree of autonomy under German occupation. For the Nazis, in whose racial classification system the Danes qualified as their equals and who did not perceive any immediate geo-strategic need for expending large amounts of resources and manpower on the country’s occupation, Danish autonomy was the path of least resistance (so to speak). By the same token, for Denmark’s political elite, accommodation (or “negotiation,” as they preferred to term it) was the obvious political choice to make, given the relatively liberal terms on offer from Berlin. Head of state (king), cabinet, and civil service alike accordingly remained in place, abiding by the terms of the armistice. This may not have been a heroic stance to adopt, but integration on comparatively favorable terms into the German-run European war economy certainly contributed to the country’s relative prosperity during the first couple of years of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

33

occupation, while ordinary citizens continued to have a national government representing them in their society’s interactions with the German occupation authorities.26

Thailand In the East and Southeast Asian theaters, it is Thailand that lends itself most readily to comparison with this part’s three Western European cases. Of all the countries that fell in their territorial entirety to Japanese control during the war, Thailand was the only one that had been a fully independent state before the war – the only one with national sovereignty to lose. The Kingdom of Siam, as it had until very recently been known, had remained free of European colonial rule thanks in part to its geographical position, wedged as it was between French-ruled Indochina to its east and British-controlled Burma to its west. The diplomatic agility of its late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century monarchs had enabled them to parlay this delicate situation to their advantage by playing the two European imperial powers off against one another, ultimately enabling their kingdom to take on the role of buffer zone between the British and French spheres of control. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Siamese kings also sought to shore up their nominally absolute authority by beginning to cultivate some of the infrastructural, institutional, educational, and political-cultural features of a modern state and society. These features included, of course, a sense of nationalism, which government initiatives sought to inculcate among the educated strata of the country’s population.27 As with many other countries experiencing transformative change amidst an intensely competitive and inherently perilous international environment, Siam’s fitful experiments with modernization led to internal crises of expectation and legitimacy, and generated bitter struggles over power and resources among social elites. As has so often been the case in the modern era, these conflicts tended to manifest themselves in the form of clashes over the nature, meaning, and political implications of national identity and patriotic sentiment. In a pattern familiar from other cases around the world, the Siamese monarchy’s 26 27

Henrik Dethlefsen, “Denmark and the German Occupation,” Scandinavian Journal of History, Vol. 15, no. 3 (1990), 193–206. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand (3rd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ch. 3; Ja Ian Chong, External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, and Thailand, 1893–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 8; Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

34

Patriotisms under Occupation

attempt to shore up its domestic and international power and authority by cultivating an educated elite, building up modern military and bureaucratic apparatuses, and encouraging a sense of national pride had left it vulnerable to challenges to its authority in the name of some of the very modernizing ideas and values it had sought to instill. A rising generation of military officers and civil servants, many of them educated abroad, chafed at the continued monopolization of substantive power and privileged access to choice positions by members of the traditional royal and aristocratic elites.28 In 1932, a coalition of these figures, organized into the People’s Party, seized power in a nearly bloodless coup. Consolidating its position and expanding its ranks in the face of royalist counter-coup attempts over the following few years, the People’s Party did not abolish the monarchy, but did away with royal absolutism in favor of a new constitutional order. The reigning monarch departed the country and abdicated in 1935. The new king was his nine-year-old nephew, who was at school in Switzerland and remained abroad for the following decade, apart from one visit to his homeland in 1938. A regency council was created to stand in for the new king during his absence.29 While the establishment of parliamentary democracy was nominally the People’s Party’s objective, during a “transitional” period the new national assembly remained half appointed by the government itself and half selected through indirect elections. Efforts to form competing political parties were blocked, trade-union activism was suppressed, and press freedoms were severely curtailed. In a country with a population that still consisted overwhelmingly of peasants, the newly empowered elite continued to resort to top-down methods in their efforts to accelerate the modernization which had been initiated by Siam’s absolutist rulers. In January 1939, the leading military figure in the People’s Party, known as Phibun Songkhram, who had recently risen from defence minister to the position of prime minister, further consolidated the new order’s power through a bloody purge of oppositional elements. At the same time, the People’s Party remained vulnerable to internal dissension. The most significant fracture divided those associated with Phibun and the military from the associates and followers of the leading civilian figure in the People’s Party, Pridi Banomyong. Phibun dominated the cabinet from 1939 until 1944, serving as prime minister while also usually holding other key portfolios such as foreign affairs and defence. Yet Pridi had enough of a following to retain a voice in public affairs in one capacity or another – be

28

Baker and Phongpaichit, History of Thailand, 95–98 and ch. 5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

29

Ibid., ch. 5.

Initial Choices and Conditions

35

it in the cabinet as finance minister or, from 1942, as member of the regency council.30 As discussed below, Phibun’s ideological outlook shifted towards a fascist orientation over the course of the late 1930s and early 1940s, as he cultivated closer ties with Japan. Pridi was generally seen as more liberal politically and more closely aligned with the British, who had long exercised considerable economic and political influence in the country. It was on Phibun’s initiative that Siam was officially renamed Thailand in 1938 – a change that reflected his regime’s efforts to identify the state with the ethno-national identity ascribed to its core population as well as to a variety of “related” ethnic groups in neighboring colonies – notably French-ruled Laos and Cambodia and British-controlled Burma – to which Siam had been forced to cede lands in earlier decades. During the period of October 1940 to January 1941, Phibun took advantage of the Fall of France and the Japanese occupation of northern Indochina in September 1940 to press territorial claims against Laos and Cambodia by attacking Vichy-affiliated French colonial forces. Following a setback at sea at the hands of French naval forces, he appealed to the Japanese (whose occupying forces in northern Indochina had kept the French administration intact under their aegis) for mediation. This resulted in the cession of some border provinces – a smaller gain than Phibun had hoped for, but one that he could still tout as a victory for Thai nationalism.31 As E. Bruce Reynolds has pointed out, this did not mean Phibun was entirely complacent over the prospect of unfettered Japanese regional domination. Rather, his diplomacy during 1941 can be seen as a variation on his predecessors’ tried-and-true approach of playing a delicate and adroit balancing act between rival regional hegemons. While he was happy to exploit Japan’s eagerness for political inroads in Thailand in the context of his border war with the French, this did not prevent him from repeatedly extending feelers to the British and the Americans over the possibility of some sort of security guarantee against an expansionist Japan. In the end, the British were too overstretched and the Americans too skeptical to oblige, leaving Phibun with little choice but to negotiate some sort of understanding with the Japanese, whose occupation of the remainder of French Indochina in July 1941 marked the 30 31

Ibid. This discussion of diplomatic history draws heavily on E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, 1940–1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), chs. 2–4; Judith A. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand: A Story of Intrigue (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), ch. 10. See also Jeremy A. Yellen, The Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 50–55.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

36

Patriotisms under Occupation

beginning of the final descent towards war in the Pacific and Southeast Asian theaters. Phibun ended up effectively acquiescing to the prospect of Japanese forces moving across Thai territory in the event they carried out their planned invasion of British-held Malaya and Burma, while vainly seeking reassurances that the incursion would be limited to peripheral provinces rather than moving directly into Bangkok itself.32 In the event, Phibun contrived to be away from the capital on December 7, 1941, as Japanese diplomats sought to present him with their formal demand for free military passage in the hours before the onset of the Pacific War. This left the Thai army in the position of following its standing orders to resist any violation of the country’s borders. The several hours of armed clashes that ensued could be used to establish – in the eyes of domestic and foreign audiences alike – that Thai soldiers had acted honorably on behalf of their nation, within the limits of their capabilities. The show of armed opposition might also leave open a path back to understanding with the British in case the Japanese proved unsuccessful in their overall campaign.33 By the morning of December 8, Phibun had reappeared in Bangkok, where he gained his cabinet’s approval for an acquiescence in the minimal option on offer from the Japanese: Thai authorities would accommodate the transit of Japanese troops through the country, while Tokyo continued to respect Thailand’s formal sovereignty and neutrality – and leave the Thai military intact and autonomous. For Phibun, the latter was a crucial point: not only was the military his central power base, but he also held it up as the institutional embodiment of national dignity. In this respect, his priorities bear comparison with those of Weygand and Pétain (in 1940), for whom the prospect of allowing the military – the distillation of all that was best in the nation, by their lights – to endure the humiliation of outright capitulation in metropolitan France as a consequence of a cabinet decision to continue the war from overseas would have constituted a betrayal rather than an affirmation of patriotic duty.34 Just three days later, following the stunning sinking by Japanese aircraft of the British warships Repulse and Prince of Wales near Singapore, Phibun took the personal decision to accept the Japanese offer of a formal alliance – a move for which approval by the assembly was facilitated by the promise of further territorial compensation to Thailand, this time at 32 33 34

Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, 78. Reynolds notes that Thai forces also fired on Burma-based British troops seeking to move across the border to take preemptive control of a Thai airfield. Ibid., 247. Ibid., ch. 4.; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 218–25; Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian, Thailand’s Durable Premier: Phibun through Three Decades, 1932–1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 47–49.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Initial Choices and Conditions

37

the expense of the British in Burma and Malaya. This was followed on January 25, 1942, by Thailand’s declaration of war against Britain and the United States, in conformity with the country’s new alliance obligations. (Washington chose to ignore the declaration rather than responding in kind.) The abandonment of Thailand’s traditional neutrality was much more controversial among the country’s elites than had been the terms of the initial ceasefire. The backlash led to the inception of a Free Thai (Seri Thai) movement among émigrés as well as in-country. Throughout this period, the king remained in Switzerland, where his person could serve as a source of potential legitimization for rival understandings of Thai patriotism and national interest. Thus, even as Phibun began an unprecedented effort to consolidate a radically uniform, militant conception of Thai patriotism that was notionally compatible with Japan’s vision for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, alternative loci of patriotic legitimacy lay in the wings, ready to be used as springboards for challenges to that vision in the event that Phibun’s bet on Japanese victory in the wider conflict failed to pay off.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

The myth of a patriotic closing of the ranks in shared resistance to foreign oppressors was central to the shaping of public memory of the war in much of formerly occupied parts of post-war Eurasia. The fact that significant cross-sections of societies – and not just handfuls of opportunistic “traitors” – may have accommodated, or even collaborated with, Axis occupiers to one degree or another was commonly swept under the carpet in the aftermath of the purge trials that followed liberation. It was only in later decades, if at all, that national historiographies began to contend systematically with the much more complicated historical realities and the uncomfortable moral and political ambiguities they presented.1 Yet, whereas narratives of mass resistance tend to be misleading, I would argue that one of the striking patterns to emerge from a comparison of this section’s four cases is that of the solidarist interval. This was not a solidarity of outright resistance. Rather, in each of these examples, the experience of the first year or so of occupation was characterized by the coalescence of a broad, patriotic consensus associated neither with a commitment to sacrifice everything for the sake of national liberation nor with a lapse into defeatist apathy. Instead, the predominant sense was that the war was – to all intents and purposes – over and that the victory and hegemony of the Axis powers was an irreversible fact. The nation, it was widely felt, would have to actively accommodate itself to that new reality if it were to have any hope of regaining some form of political self-determination in the future.2 A crucial role in the crystallization of this kind of accommodationist patriotism was played by the persistence and/or creation of one or more institutional loci for the expression or channeling of such sentiments. This included indigenous instruments of governance that remained in place under the initial terms of German and Japanese occupations. By 1 2

The classic work on this theme is Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome. For a similar argument, see Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators, ch. 3.

38

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

39

the same token, variations among the initial conditions of occupation – including both the structure and character of the occupation administration and the presence or absence of the occupied country’s head of state and cabinet – helped determine to what extent and along what ideological lines such forms of patriotic solidarism initially crystallized and subsequently fell apart. The legacy of pre-war divisions and alignments within each of these countries constituted another important variable in the equation. The Nederlandse Unie One of the prominent Dutch public figures who remained in his homeland following the German invasion was Hendrikus Colijn. A former leader of the Calvinist Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) who had twice served as the nation’s prime minister (1925–26 and 1933–39), the 71-year-old statesman was a household name in Dutch politics. Within the first two months of the occupation, he set his pen to paper to sketch out for his compatriots how he understood the situation and how he proposed that the nation move forward. The title of the resulting booklet, On the Boundary of Two Worlds,3 captured Colijn’s argument in a nutshell: in his estimation, the world of democracy and British-enforced balance of power was a thing of the past for the Netherlands. Along with the other peoples of the European mainland, the Dutch now stood at the frontier of a post-democratic, Germandominated era – a new world to which they would have to adapt if they hoped to regain any measure of self-determination and prosperity in the future. Colijn’s historical, political, and economic analyses were trite and shallow, his prescriptions inconsistent and self-contradictory. He blamed the Versailles Treaty of 1919 for the instability of interwar Europe and he accused the democratic system of having fostered political factionalization and of having undercut any possibility of strong leadership amidst the economic and geopolitical turmoil of the 1930s. He claimed that, like every political and ideological system, democracy had carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. Yet he argued that the Dutch should look forward to creating a reformed “healthy democracy” that would replace 3

Hendrikus Colijn, Op de Grens van Twee Werelden (Amsterdam: N.V. Dagblad en Drukkerij de Standaard, 1940). Colijn dated his foreword June 25, 1940. See also the discussion in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (New York: Berg, 1988), 57–61; Jennifer L. Foray, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 29–31.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

40

Patriotisms under Occupation

their now-defunct “modern democracy.”4 He categorically (and, as it turned out, prematurely) rejected what he saw as the naı¨ve belief of many that “one fine day, when the peace treaty has been signed, Her Majesty the Queen and her ministers in London will disembark at Hoek van Holland and the next day things will go back to the way they used to be.”5 Yet he did repeatedly assert that maintaining the link to the ruling House of Orange was crucial to the maintenance of the Dutch national spirit, provided a reformed constitutional order did away with the failings of the post-1848, liberal-democratic system. At the same time, he insisted that unspecified means were to be provided for the popular voice to be expressed in a way that would allow government to reflect the fundamental values of the Dutch people.6 He was critical of the deadlocked nature of Dutch coalition politics, yet he called for the leaders of the major political parties to come together in creating a national front that would have the moral basis to speak to the German authorities in the name of the overwhelming majority of the Dutch people. In the absence of the royal family, any more isolated initiative would, he feared, lack patriotic legitimacy and leave itself open to charges of treasonous activity.7 This mish-mash of assertions, assumptions, prognostications, prescriptions, and qualifications is of interest because it affords a glimpse into how things appeared from a well-informed, politically mainstream, and probably sincerely patriotic perspective in German-occupied Western Europe in the summer of 1940. This was a moment when it seemed reasonable to assume that an irreversible paradigm shift had occurred in European history. Colijn conceded that he could not foresee whether or not Britain would succumb to the German onslaught or succeed in holding out long enough to negotiate peace terms from a less than prostrate position. But it was clear to him that, at least for continental Europe, the decisive phase of the war was over, now that France had fallen. Whether one liked it or not, a German-dominated continent was the reality that had to be dealt with for the foreseeable future, and there was no point in holding out for a return to the status quo ante. By the same token, Colijn clearly had a political and ideological axe to grind. As the dominant Dutch political leader of the 1930s, he had long harbored skepticism over democracy, although he had also rejected antisemitism and successfully contained Anton Mussert’s upstart Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB).8 He was all too eager to lay the 4 7 8

5 6 Colijn, Op de Grens, 39. Ibid., 47. My translation. Ibid., 38–39. Ibid., 53. Friso Wielenga, A History of the Netherlands: From the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 214, 216.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

41

blame for the previous decade’s economic and political shortcomings at the feet of electoral democracy and to see in Germany’s newly established continental hegemony an opportunity for recasting Dutch politics along more authoritarian lines. His case is an illustration of how blurry the distinction could be in 1940 between what one might recognize as a genuine (if misguided) effort to assess the situation from a patriotic perspective and the exploitation of the circumstances of occupation to pursue a right-wing, economically corporatist, and politically authoritarian agenda in the name of patriotic realism. There appeared to be a very wide constituency for some such political undertaking among the Dutch public. Colijn’s specific initiative led to nothing, and he ended up dying in German captivity in 1944. But a nonparty political movement invoking a similar agenda rocketed to unprecedented success during the first year of the occupation, before finally being suppressed by the Germans. This was the Nederlandse Unie (Dutch Union). The Unie was formed and led by three men, Johannes Linthorst Homan, Jan de Quay, and Louis Einthoven – referred to in Unie circles as the Triumvirate – associated with the “Renewal” movement that had been active in Dutch public life throughout much of the 1930s.9 The Renewal movement had been an effort to form a coalition of nonparty organizations – including student unions, agrarian-reform associations, provincial organizations, regional-identity societies, and a number of outspoken public figures – around the notion that the political establishment had failed the nation amidst the economic crisis of the Depression years. The “Renewers” were critical of the liberal-capitalist system, but rejected Marxism, advocating the pursuit of a corporatist “third way.” Above all, they inveighed against the “pillarization” of Dutch politics and society. This term referred to the country’s post-1918 pattern of highly institutionalized, vertical, socio-political and cultural segmentation along Catholic, Protestant, social democratic, and liberal lines. Each of the Netherlands’ three to five major pillars (precisely what constituted a fullfledged “pillar” is a matter of interpretation and debate) seemed to form a separate society of its own, complete with political party, student and youth movement, trade unions (mostly linked to the Social Democrats), publically financed school system, newspapers, cultural organizations, sports clubs, radio service, etc. By the same token, because no single party could achieve more than a plurality in parliament, governments tended to take the form of broad inter-party coalitions, composition of which 9

The account that follows relies heavily on Wichert ten Have, De Nederlandse Unie: Aanpassing, vernieuwing en confrontatie in bezettingstijd, 1940–1941 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1999).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

42

Patriotisms under Occupation

Fig. 1 Anton Mussert posing with members of his Dutch National Socialist Movement’s paramilitary organization in Amsterdam, January 1934. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

changed little from one election to the next. The result was a politics of segmented patronage, each pillar taking care of “its own” with a share of the budgetary and institutional pie. This was combined with, and sustained by, a pursuit of the lowest common denominator as the basis for compromise and consensus among parliamentary elites. At a time when

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

43

the governing coalitions’ main response to the Depression was a rigid adherence to deflationary austerity policies, this politics of consensus came increasingly to seem like the politics of stalemate. A byproduct of the post-1918 shift to universal suffrage and proportional representation, pillarization came to be seen by its critics as belying the promise of the very democratization process that had brought it into being.10 In the summer of 1940, some of the leading Renewers thought they discerned a silver lining in the disaster of Dutch defeat and German occupation: a unique opportunity to realize their dream of fostering an organic, national sense of community free of the stultifying divisiveness of the country’s conventional party politics. Initially, in the wake of the Germans’ suspension of the Dutch parliament, Homan and de Quay joined with leaders of the six main political parties to negotiate with the occupation administration over the possibility of creating some sort of broad-based political forum that might give voice to the Dutch people’s interests in the context of a pragmatic politics of accommodation. The Nazi Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was eager to find some such mechanism for bringing the Netherlands into alignment with German hegemony. He recognized that the Dutch Nazis (NSB) did not likely represent an effective intermediary, given their history of weak electoral performances, and signaled this recognition by giving a speech in which he promised that the German occupation would be conducted in a way that respected the status of the Dutch as racial kinfolk of the Germans rather than as a population on whom Nazi ideology was to be imposed. His ultimate hope, as conveyed to Hitler, was that such a relatively restrained approach would induce the Dutch to “self-Nazify” over time.11 When the talks with Dutch leaders nevertheless failed over German refusal to countenance any public statements of continued loyalty to the self-exiled queen, Homan, de Quay, Einthoven, and a fourth colleague (Reinink) went behind the backs of the political parties to hold separate conversations with Fritz Schmidt, the German Commissioner-General in charge of “public opinion and Dutch politics.”12 The talks quickly led to 10

11

12

Wielenga, History of the Netherlands, 206–8; Piet de Rooy, A Tiny Spot on the Earth: The Political Culture of the Netherlands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), ch. 6. For an explanation of pillarization that simultaneously problematizes the concept, see ibid., 221–27. Foray, Visions of Empire, 22–23; Gerhard Hirschfeld, “Nazi Propaganda in Occupied Western Europe: The Case of the Netherlands,” in David Welch, ed., Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 143–46. Schmidt was one of a number of commissioner-generals, most of them in charge of overseeing the work of the Dutch secretaries-general in individual Dutch ministries, who were subject to the authority of Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart, head of the German

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

44

Patriotisms under Occupation

an agreement: Schmidt approved the creation in July 1940 of the Nederlandse Unie as a nationwide movement, on the understanding that all mention of the House of Orange would be left out of the Unie’s political platform. Having obtained this concession, the occupation administration cleared the way for the Nederlandse Unie to fill the void left by the Germans’ suspension of parliament and effective marginalization of the mainstream political parties, and to fashion itself into the new institutional expression of, and conduit for, Dutch identity, patriotic sentiment, and national interest.13 That is precisely what appeared to happen, for what followed was a mobilization of mass support on a scale that had no precedent in Dutch history and few parallels in any other part of Axis-occupied Eurasia. The first office the Unie opened in Amsterdam was virtually overwhelmed by the scale of the public’s immediate response to the organization’s initial membership drive. Within a few months, membership of the Unie had swelled to more than eight hundred thousand out of a total Dutch population of fewer than nine million people, making it by far the largest political movement in the country’s history.14 Local chapters dotted the land, and vendors hawked the movement’s weekly newspaper, De Unie, on the street corners of every town. In Vichy France, as will be discussed below, the personality cult surrounding Pétain arguably served as a form of patriotic legitimization for a widespread retreat from substantive political involvement. At a time when, across much of Western Europe, the predominant initial response to enemy occupation was a withdrawal from national politics into a preoccupation with the needs, intrigues, and solidarities of local community,15 the Dutch were streaming into the largest mass movement in their nation’s history and actively participating in a country-wide debate about how best to reorganize and reinvigorate the collective life of the nation. As M. I. Smith has pointed out, for this brief interval in their history, the Dutch did actually seem to transcend the pillarization that had been such a bugbear of the pre-war parliamentary

13 14

15

civil occupation administration in the Netherlands. From the point of view of the “feudal bureaucratic politics” of Nazi Germany, however, Schmidt’s effective role as Nazi Party representative undercut Seyss-Inquart’s authority over him. On the structure of the German occupation regime in the Netherlands, see Werner Warmbrunn, The Dutch under German Occupation. 1940–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 27–38; Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule, ch. 1. Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule, ch. 2. Louis de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Vol. IV (Mei ’40–Maart ’41), Part 2 (‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1972), 507–8; Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators, 73–78. See, for instance, Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (London: Macmillan, 2002).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

45

regime’s critics.16 For many in the Unie’s rank-and-file membership, it seems clear that this unprecedented upwelling of national solidarity was a reaction to the shock of defeat and occupation, when the differences of interest and ideology that normally divided people suddenly seemed insignificant compared to the plight they shared in common. But around what positive understanding of the nation’s interests did this apparent coalescence take place? Was this a form of Dutch fascism, a collective acceptance of German dominance, or the expression of a determination to resist the country’s conquerors? While scholars debate the nuances of these questions, they are unanimous in concluding that the movement as a whole cannot readily be pigeonholed into any single one of these categories. It is true that the Triumvirate had negotiated the terms of the movement’s programmatic manifesto with the Germans. That fact was unknown to the public at the time, but it did not require great discernment to note the document’s avoidance of any mention of the House of Orange and its explicit expression of a commitment to maintaining a loyal relationship with the occupying authorities.17 The program called for a restructuring of the country’s socio-economic system along vaguely corporatist-sounding principles, insisted on the primacy of society’s collective interests over those of the individual, and emphasized the need for a “strong and decisive authority” to undertake the “reconstruction of the commonwealth.”18 By the same token, in a statement published in mid-August 1940, the Triumvirate justified its call for socio-economic, cultural, and political “renewal” on the grounds that creating a new sense of shared purpose “resting on the principles of Christianity” was the sole means of securing the Dutch nation a meaningful future in a “new Europe.” Coming close 16 17

18

M. I. Smith, “Neither Resistance nor Collaboration: Historians and the Problem of the Nederlandse Unie,” History, Vol. 72, No. 235 (June 1987), 251–78, see esp. 259. Warmbrunn, Dutch under German Occupation, 27–38; Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule, ch. 1; “Programma der Nederlandsche Unie,” image of original poster available online courtesy of the Imperial War Museum (Great Britain), www.iwm.org.uk/collections/ item/object/28516. It is worth noting that behaving loyally towards occupation authorities, assuming that the latter comported themselves in accordance with the principles of the Hague Convention, was not deemed intrinsically dishonorable among Western European administrative establishments. In September 1940, in his capacity as a French departmental prefect who continued in his duties for the first five months of the German occupation (following an initial suicide attempt in the face of unacceptable demands), Jean Moulin – eventual leader and martyr of the resistance – ordered his subordinates to comport themselves towards the Germans with “a courteous and loyal collaboration, which should not exclude dignity and firmness when the circumstances require it.” Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 166–67. “Programma der Nederlandsche Unie.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

46

Patriotisms under Occupation

to articulating a claim to national self-determination in a Nazi-dominated continent, the Triumvirate wrote: “Only if we form a strong unity will we be able to express, with the force necessary for the task, what the Dutch nation wants and what it does not want; [only thus] can we defend ourselves against the danger that one would try to force an un-Dutch solution in the Netherlands, which would signify a disaster for our nation.”19 Such language was widely understood as a reference to a scenario in which the Germans would hand over control of the country’s institutions to the Dutch National Socialists (NSB), on the model of Norway, where Vidkun Quisling’s national-socialist Nasjonal Samling movement was being elevated by the German occupiers. In De Unie’s September 17, 1940 issue, this position was made explicit: the Triumvirate denounced the NSB as fundamentally un-Dutch in its values and tactics. Were the Germans to impose the NSB on the country, they contended, the organization would have to be maintained in power through the use of extreme compulsion, as it would never be able to gain popular legitimacy.20 Thus, as Wichert ten Have and others have emphasized, the Unie conveyed the sense that its openly professed loyalty to the occupation authorities was complemented and justified by its commitment to the preservation of what it termed traditional Dutch values, including a Christian-inspired toleration – values that stood in opposition to everything the NSB represented.21 In his classic, multi-volume study of the Netherlands in the war, Louis de Jong wondered how many among the thousands of Dutch men and women who flocked to Unie headquarters to join the organization in the very first days after the initial publication of its program had even bothered to read it in detail. In his interpretation, what moved people to join in such staggering numbers was the emotional satisfaction of involvement in a mass movement that appeared to be an authentic expression of Dutch patriotism in the face of defeat and occupation – and that constituted a critical buffer against the ambitions of the widely despised NSB.22 The effort to contain the NSB – support for which among the nation’s electorate had peaked at 8 percent of the vote in 1935 before falling back to around 4 percent just a couple of years later23 – rapidly took on a very 19

20 21 23

L. Einthoven, J. Linthorst Homan, and J. E. de Quay, “Wat wil De Nederlandsche Unie?” (What Does the Nederlandsche Unie Want?), De Unie, “Propaganda Number” (first issue), August 15, 1940, 1. L. Einthoven, J. Linthorst Homan, and J. E. de Quay, “Ons Standpunt over de NSB” (Our Position on the NSB), De Unie, No. 4 (September 17, 1940), 1. 22 Have, Nederlandse Unie, 230. Jong, Het Koninkrijk, Vol. IV, Part 2, 507. Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule, 261.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

47

tangible role in the activities of Unie members: vendors of De Unie jostled with NSB agitators on the streets of Amsterdam, The Hague, and other cities, where such incidents periodically escalated into serious street clashes.24 By the same token, at public gatherings where Unie speakers offered positive appraisals of Germany that seemed to go beyond obligatory lip service, audiences made their disaffection audible. De Jong concluded that the very success of the Unie’s membership drive had the unintended consequence of swamping the organization with hundreds of thousands of citizens who saw the Unie as a mechanism for the expression of patriotic resilience pure and simple. He points out that many former rank-and-file members went on to join resistance organizations.25 For the Unie’s founders, however, the movement was designed to advance their specific ideological and political agendas. They saw the crisis of the country’s defeat and occupation as a distinct opportunity for the reframing and reshaping of Dutch political life. Somewhat like the Vichy regime in France, the Triumvirate portrayed the country’s disaster as a symptom of the weak leadership and ineffective institutions of the old, parliamentary democracy and as a wake-up call for national renewal.26 As far as they were concerned, the Unie represented not just an emergency response to unusual circumstances, but an effort to seize the historical bull by the horns and steer the Netherlands away from the allegedly failed political culture of the past towards a more organic, corporatist form of national life. It was a question not just of preserving Dutch identity in the face of German conquest, but of rescuing it from the country’s own pre-war institutions. They called for a wartime transformation of the national spirit, in preparation for a political revolution

24 25

26

Have, Nederlandse Unie, 396–97. Jong, Het Koninkrijk, Vol. IV, Part 2, 510–11; Louis de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Vol. V (Maart ’41–Juli ’42), Part 1 (‘sGravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1974), 196–208. For an argument against pigeonholing the Unie, see Smith, “Neither Resistance nor Collaboration,” 251–78. Smith makes the point that the outlook of the Unie’s leadership was part of a European-wide phenomenon of the 1930s and 1940s which has been ex post facto mischaracterized as little more than a set of variations upon fascism, rather than as part of a spectrum of right-wing, corporatist critiques of liberal democracy. Indeed, he argues that it is precisely because the Unie fails to fit standard antinomies between collaborationism and resistance, or fascism and democracy, that historians have tended to pay little attention to it. Ibid., 252, 278. Hirschfeld also questions what he sees as de Jong’s overly simplistic contradistinction between an accommodationist, anti-democratic leadership and a staunchly resistanceminded rank-and-file membership. Gerhard Hirschfeld, “Collaboration and Attentism in the Netherlands, 1940–41,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 1981), 467–86. Have, Nederlandse Unie, 139–55.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

48

Patriotisms under Occupation

following a future end to the occupation. This was to take place in the context of a new European order that was supplanting the dysfunctional and discredited individualism of yesteryear. While acknowledging that any moves towards the creation of a new constitutional order or regime would be premature under the distorting pressures of foreign occupation, the Unie’s leaders were ready to flirt with the idea of creating a quasi-political “advisory college” (college van advies) as a political intermediary between the occupation authorities and the Dutch people, to be headed by a non-party figure capable of winning the trust of former and latter alike.27 Homan actually wanted to to go so far as to seek a cooperative understanding with the NSB, and pushed hard in this direction in early 1941, amidst the impact of violent NSB attacks on Unie offices and supporters and mounting pressure from the German authorities. He was finally deterred only by the resignation threat of his two partners in the Triumvirate, which sparked fears of a self-destructive split within the organization as a whole.28 Even if one leaves aside Homan’s proclivities, the Unie leadership’s shared eagerness to take advantage of Nazi occupation to move the country away from its liberal-democratic traditions smacks of a political opportunism that seems difficult to reconcile with a conventional notion of patriotism. But, as Colijn’s abortive move in a similar direction suggests, this kind of agenda resonated among elements of the old political establishment – even if some members of that establishment, such as a disgruntled Colijn himself, resented the Triumvirate’s circumvention of the leading political parties and its carving out of an autonomous and ambitious role for itself via a separate deal with the Nazis.29 Although they dubbed themselves Renewers, the leaders of the Triumvirate had deep roots in the country’s political, administrative, and/or cultural institutions. Einthoven had been police commissioner of Rotterdam. De Quay had been a professor at the Economics Higher School of Tilburg – a Roman Catholic institution of higher education. He had strong ties to the Catholic pillar; in 1939, he had played a leading role in the formation of the Nederlandse Gemeenschap (Dutch Community), a precursor of the Nederlandse Unie, the manifesto of which had drawn support from the queen (who harbored her own doubts over pure parliamentary democracy). De Quay would go on to serve as the country’s prime minister

27

28

Editorial by the Triumvirate, “Tot samenwerking bereid: ‘Mits er gewerkt wordt voor het Nederlandsche volk op Nederlandsche wijze’” (Ready for Collaboration: “Provided that it is Implemented for the Dutch People in a Dutch Way”), De Unie, No. 7 (October 5, 1940), 1. 29 Jong, Het Koninkrijk, Vol. IV, Part 2, 785–89. Have, Nederlandse Unie, 248–50.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

49

during 1959–63. Homan had been the Queen’s Commissioner for the province of Groningen, where his activities in fostering trans-pillar civic activism had led to a personal audience with the queen, who had encouraged him to transpose his activities to the national level.30 Moreover, a cooperative rapport existed between the Triumvirate and a number of the secretaries-general who had remained at their posts in order to serve Dutch society amidst the trials and tribulations of occupation. Many of the secretaries-general shared the Unie’s ambition to carry out a reform of Dutch social, political, and economic institutions along more authoritarian and corporatist lines. In other words, at that juncture in Dutch history, being anti-democratic and patriotic was evidently not – in the eyes of a broad cross-section of the country’s elite and, presumably, in the eyes of some among the hundreds of thousands of citizens who enrolled in the Unie – a contradiction in terms.31 It was only at a later stage of the war, and in its aftermath, that the rejection of multi-party, parliamentary democracy came to be widely identified with treasonous collaborationism. Yet there were obvious strains from the very first. A key advantage enjoyed by the movement was the German occupation administration’s agreement to permit its existence and to tolerate its activities. Yet this very advantage was also its Achilles’ heel, for it raised the question, at what price would this forbearance continue to be purchased? Readers of De Unie might have been forgiven if they thought the publication went a little overboard in its demonstration of the movement’s promised loyalty to the German administration. For example, in its November 16, 1940 issue, the paper’s front-page opinion piece urged its readers to move past their immediate sense of resentment over the country’s defeat and occupation, while acknowledging the authenticity of those sentiments. The Dutch people ought instead to take a long-term view of their country’s situation. Just as in the nineteenth century it had been impossible to escape the influence and legacy of the French Revolution, so now the prevalence of a new “concept of common good” could not be avoided by any country. The Dutch needed to find their own, nationally specific mode of adapting to the new Zeitgeist, but the key to success lay in developing the nation’s capacity to contribute to the larger, Germandominated European whole.32 30 31

32

Ibid., 52, 72; Warmbrunn, The Dutch under German Occupation, 134. Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule, ch. 4. On the question of what support for the Unie may have meant to the average rank-and-file member, see Hirschfeld, “Collaboration and Attentism in the Netherlands.” “De verhouding Nederland-Duitschland: De nuchtere feiten” (“The Dutch–German Relationship: The Sober Facts,” unsigned, front-page editorial, De Unie, No. 13 (November 16, 1940), 1–2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

50

Patriotisms under Occupation

Such calls for pragmatic realism could have substantive implications. They could, for instance, serve to legitimize cooperation with German war-manufacturing needs on the part of Dutch industry. The Unie’s mass membership might nonetheless read such editorials as gestures necessary to prevent the movement’s outright suppression. It was when the line was crossed from generic rhetoric to specific calls to collaborationist action that the Unie’s rank-and-file began to murmur audibly. This was notably the case with the Triumvirate’s decision to participate in the occupation administration’s launch of a Dutch offshoot (Winterhulp Nederland) of the Nazi Winter Relief campaign (Winterhilfswerk).33 Awareness of the public backlash against this move was clearly reflected in the pages of De Unie’s December 28 issue, where the Triumvirate called on the membership to lend its active support to the collection drive. Casting their appeal in defensive terms, the Unie’s three leaders acknowledged that there were those who would have preferred the organization to have arisen out of a purely Dutch initiative. They countered this by asking their members not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good: it would be unjust to let the nation’s needy go wanting merely because people did not like certain aspects of the relief organization. Perhaps more crucially, they went on to invoke what one might term party discipline: they did not expect blind acceptance of every dictate from the Unie’s leadership, but they did call on members either to avoid open challenges to important policy decisions by the Triumvirate or to withdraw from membership of the organization.34 Nonetheless, Winterhulp Nederland remained a deeply unpopular, and widely boycotted, program.35 But the most radical paradigm shift brought on by German pressure concerned the status of Jews in the organization. Having invoked the Dutch tradition of tolerance in its opening manifesto, the Nederlandse Unie had, at its founding, welcomed Dutch Jews into its fold. Indeed, the movement’s initial adherence to this principled stance had been a key distinguishing feature that set it apart from the NSB – defense of which feature was an expression of the organization’s claim to embody an autonomous Dutch national tradition. In autumn of 1940, in response to initial German pressure on this issue, the leadership asked one of the movement’s most fascistic members – Groeninx van Zoelen – to write a confidential report for the German authorities on the Netherlands’ lack of a Jewish problem. Van Zoelen did just that, emphasizing the foundational 33 34 35

Have, Nederlandse Unie, 341–44. L. Einthoven, J. Linthorst Homan, and J. E. de Quay, “Winterhulp Nederland: De tweede inzameling,” De Unie, No. 19 (December 28, 1940), 2. Warmbrunn, Dutch under German Occupation, 105.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

51

nature of tolerance in Dutch society, and the danger further antisemitic measures could pose for German–Dutch collaboration.36 When the secretaries-general passively acquiesced in German demands for an exclusion of Jews from the civil service, following their ineffectual voicing of objections to the inflexible German authorities, there were some within the Unie’s leadership who pushed for a public criticism of this alien imposition. Linthorst Homan, the most right-wing member of the Triumvirate, pulled an article along these lines from publication in De Unie, replacing it with a more mealy-mouthed response published in the name of all three leaders. It had been the Unie’s position all along, the essay affirmed, that the “question” of Jewish immigrants from other countries needed to be “regulated.” However, it went on, it was both unnecessary and undesirable to effect any change in the traditional Dutch attitude of tolerance towards those Jews who had been “living and working in the Netherlands for generations.” It was unnecessary because, unlike Jews in other European countries (sic), the Jews of the Netherlands did not constitute an influence at odds with the host nation. It was undesirable because the marginalization of a community living in the country would be out of keeping with the Christian tradition of tolerance which constituted a Dutch national core value. The article concluded by expressing the hope that this distinctive Dutch way of handling things would ultimately be respected by the German authorities.37 Such pleas for moderation made no impression on the Nazis, especially given their success in imposing their antisemitic agenda on the Dutch civil service without triggering mass resignations or any other significant form of opposition beyond initial verbal objections. Over time, the occupation authorities’ persistence was rewarded with further success. Indeed, the Unie had all along avoided appointing Jews to prominent administrative positions, for fear of directly provoking the Germans.38 The more pressure the Germans applied – including a January 1941 raid on Unie headquarters, and brief arrests and questionings of a number of the organization’s leaders – the more willing the Unie’s leadership became to cede further ground on the issue. The organization denounced as counterproductive the famous Amsterdam workers’ strike of February 1941, which had been organized by the underground Communist Party in protest over the Nazi authorities’ seizure (and subsequent deportation to Mauthausen

36 37

38

Have, Nederlandse Unie, 338. Ibid., 335–36; L. Einthoven, J. Linthorst Homan, and J. E. de Quay, “En openhartig woord: Het Driemanschap over de Joden in Nederland” (A Frank Word: The Triumvirate on the Jews in the Netherlands), De Unie, No. 8 (October 12, 1940), 3. Have, Nederlandse Unie, 335.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

52

Patriotisms under Occupation

concentration camp in Austria, where all but two died) of several hundred of the city’s young Jewish men.39 In June, plans were announced to create an elite inner corps of the Nederlandse Unie, to be known as the Working Membership (Werkend Lidmaatschap); enrollment was to be limited to those of Christian background. The idea was to find some sort of middle ground between tolerance and antisemitism, but such backsliding was the occasion of consternation among many rank-and-file members of the movement. To add insult to injury, the Unie’s leadership had sought to gain support for this move beforehand from leaders of the Jewish community, only to be rebuffed.40 By the beginning of November, the Unie’s leadership informed the organization’s chapters that new directives from the German authorities barred Jewish participation in any organization that included non-Jews.41 The Triumvirate’s decision to acquiesce in this rather than dissolve the organization came just as it was taking a firm stance against the occupation authorities’ demand that the Unie mobilize Dutch citizens to actively support and join the German war effort against the Soviet Union. On December 13, 1941, the Nazis banned the organization altogether, declaring the NSB, led by Anton Mussert, the only legal political movement in the country.42 The Triumvirate’s decision to abandon its stated principles on the issue of Jewish membership had failed to secure it any vestigial autonomy in the face of German authorities who were increasingly in thrall to the radicalizing demands of Nazi Party and SS leaders and their representatives within the occupation administration, and who were ever more insistent on the rapid assimilation of the Netherlands into the Nazi order. This trajectory closely paralleled that of the secretaries-general, whose compliance and/or non-interference with the incremental, Nazi-imposed discrimination against, registration, isolation, and eventual deportation of Dutch Jewry, was all done in the name of taking the path of “the lesser evil.” The worse evil, so the thinking went, would be to abandon their posts in protest and let the Nazis and their NSB stooges monopolize the country’s administrative leadership. By staying in office at this steep moral price, they were supposedly still serving the greater good of the Dutch population, in the spirit of the Aanwijzingen.43

39 42 43

40 41 Ibid., 432. Ibid., 463–67. Ibid., 482–83. Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration, 77–86. Peter Romijn, “The ‘Lesser Evil’: The Case of the Dutch Local Authorities and the Holocaust,” in Peter Romijn et al., The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers – University of Amsterdam Press, 2012); Ido de Haan, “Routines and Traditions: The Reactions of Non-Jews and Jews in the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

53

The irony here is striking. Intent as they were, not only on maintaining some vestige of national autonomy in the face of occupation, but on seizing the opportunity to forge some sort of new, de-pillarized form of integrated and cohesive national community, the Triumvirate and secretaries-general had allowed the German occupation authorities to maneuver them into one degree or another of complicity in the creation of a new, separate, and unequal pillar in Dutch society – one that was ultimately condemned to be dismantled and destroyed, not without the significant cooperation of Dutch officials and police personnel. Their very preoccupation with their vision of a renewed, broadly solidaristic form of Dutch nationhood, their very commitment to upholding what they conceived to be their patriotic duty under the trying circumstances of occupation, had allowed them to fall hostage to a Nazi agenda that flew in the face of their own avowed principles. The price of keeping the despised NSB out of power, it turned out, was to permit the occupation authorities to mobilize much of the formidable Dutch bureaucratic apparatus in the service of the most extreme and brutal element of the Nazis’ racist vision. Overall, the orders to round up Jews met with a mixed response from local mayors and police forces, with active cooperation in some instances (notoriously and devastatingly so in the case of the police force of Amsterdam, where the bulk of Dutch Jewry lived) and various degrees of non-cooperation in others. Over time, the Germans learned to rely more on their own personnel as well as on Dutch police officers who had been selected for special indoctrination and training on the Nazi model.44 At one and the same time, one cannot help but wonder what the response would have been had the Nazis demanded the ostracism, exclusion, or victimization of a subset of Dutch citizenry defined by some other ascriptive criterion. Suppose the occupation authorities insisted that the aged and the infirm be segregated from the rest of the population, or that those affiliated with one or another Christian denomination be dismissed from the civil service and denied membership in the Nederlandse Unie. Would the secretaries-general and the Triumvirate have gone along with such an initiative in the interests of the “greater good,” or would they have deemed such a proposition a direct assault on a core element of the Dutch people, and therefore an attack on the nation itself?45

44 45

Netherlands to War and Persecution,” in David Bankier and Israel Gutman, eds., Nazi Europe and the Final Solution (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), 447. Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (London: Arnold, 1997), 194–206. On the broader tendency towards ethnicizing circles of solidarity under the impact of Nazi occupation, see Fritzsche, Iron Wind, 244.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

54

Patriotisms under Occupation

Fig. 2 Amsterdam Jews being deported to concentration camps, c. 1943. Bettmann via Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

55

The heuristic value of counterfactual history is notoriously and obviously limited. But in this case, something like such an alternative scenario actually did play out in the spring of 1943, when wartime labor shortages led the occupiers to order the reinternment of Dutch prisoners of war (POWs) who had been released three years earlier, with a view to their deployment in Germany as an involuntary workforce. Whereas thousands of Dutch citizens had voluntarily taken up employment opportunities in German industry during the first years of occupation, this new policy – part of the Nazis’ European-wide turn to massive conscription of forced labor – marked a radical paradigm shift. It sparked a massive strike movement among Dutch workers, which the Nazis repressed brutally. Dutch public officials found themselves in an increasingly impossible position, such that most (but not all) of the original secretaries-general had resigned and been replaced by NSB members by the end of 1943. Passive resistance to the enforcement of labor conscription also spread among organs of municipal government and local police units, leading the Nazis to appoint ever more Dutch National Socialists as mayors and police commanders.46 Thus, more than any other single move by the Germans, it was the introduction of compulsory labor conscription that led to a breakdown in relations between the occupiers and the Dutch administration – a variation on a pattern characteristic of many West European countries under German occupation. To be sure, this does not represent a perfect control case. The introduction and incremental ratcheting-up of antisemitic measures had begun in 1940 and culminated in the massive deportations of 1942–44. The labor conscription began quite abruptly in 1943, at a time when Germany’s military disaster at Stalingrad was widely, and correctly, understood as a turning point in the Nazis’ military fortunes (although Hitler’s final downfall took much longer than many expected and hoped). Indeed, it was the very desperation of Germany’s strategic outlook in 1943 that had led Berlin to shift to a total-war footing that included the imposition of forced labor quotas across occupied Europe. The marked difference between Dutch leaders’ and officials’ responses to these two Nazi outrages can therefore be explained in part as a function of differential timing and geopolitical context: it made less sense to accommodate outrageous Nazi demands at a time when Germany’s eventual defeat was foreseeable than it had at an earlier juncture when their victory on the continent appeared almost complete and practically irreversible. Yet it remains difficult to escape the conclusion that non-Jewish workers and 46

Warmbrunn, Dutch under German Occupation, 121–27; Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration, ch. 4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

56

Patriotisms under Occupation

young men were seen as integral parts of the nation in a way that Jews, implicitly, were not. To make this inference is not to suggest that antisemitism played a significant role in Dutch national sentiment or civic culture. Indeed, there are very strong indications that this was not the case. On the contrary, the image of the Netherlands as a land of religious and political tolerance – and of the well-being of the country’s Jewish minority as a living testament to this historically rooted tradition – appears to have been a significant component of Dutch patriotism as understood by people across a broad political spectrum. Bart van der Boom’s recent study of wartime public opinion in the Netherlands, based on private diaries and similar documentation, suggests that revulsion over the maltreatment of Jews was prevalent across a broad cross-section of the population. By 1942, there was widespread awareness that the deportations were part of a Nazi program for the extermination of European Jewry – although the dominant notion seems to have been that this would take the form of a longdrawn-out campaign of attrition that would likely be cut short by Germany’s military defeat. Indeed, the Netherlands stands out as the only occupied country where a major protest – the Communist-orchestrated, but widely observed, February 1941 labor strike in Amsterdam – took place in response to Nazi round-ups of Jews. For many Dutch citizens, van der Boom contends, the Nazis’ flagrant violation of Dutch national values and norms through their persecution of the Jews only served to reinforce the sense that maintaining and expressing the national tradition of tolerance was a way of expressing patriotism – as in the cases of people pointedly giving up their seats to Jews on public transportation in silent protest over the Germans’ imposition of wearing of the yellow star in 1942.47 I have already noted that, among the leaders of the Nederlandse Unie, as among the original cohort of secretaries-general, there was a reluctance rather than an eagerness to embrace antisemitic measures, followed by a grudging accommodation of Nazi demands. Yet, to varying degrees, accommodate they did. Perhaps their conduct, and its gradual departure from norms that much of the public continued to embrace, can best be understood as connected to the complicated relationship between conceptions of a nation’s membership and its values. The very fact that tolerance of the Jewish minority was seen as emblematic of the nation’s values was a function of the fact that they were viewed as a minority and hence marked as different in the first place. As a local history of the town of Eibergen during 47

Bart van der Boom, “Ordinary Dutchmen and the Holocaust: A Summary of Findings,” in Romijn et al., The Persecution of the Jews.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

57

the war puts it, “a Jew was often still … seen in the first place as a Jew, and only then as a Dutch person.”48 The Nazis placed Dutch leaders and officials in a position where they imagined they had to choose between upholding the nation’s honor and values by defending its tradition of tolerance, and preserving their ability to intercede with the occupation authorities on behalf of what many of them saw as the nation’s core population – at the expense of a community which had been marked as in some sense extraneous to the nation by the very notion of being tolerated.49 The secretaries-general and the Triumvirate opted in favor of the latter option, while many Dutch citizens either passively or actively objected, and others – whether in the form of regular bureaucrats and police officers, Nazi-trained Dutch police, and/or NSB members – actively participated in the registration, marginalization, and round-ups of the country’s Jewish citizens. In retrospect, it was the very obscurity of the country’s prospects in summer 1940 that had allowed the mirage of an unprecedented, transcommunal, patriotic consensus to come briefly into view. Under those transitory conditions, at a juncture when the country had lost its independence but had been promised respect for its national culture by the Reich Commissioner, the Nederlandse Unie could be all things to all people. It could fulfill its leadership’s secret commitments to Commissioner-General Schmidt by not speaking of the House of Orange and by calling on all citizens to obey the German authorities, even as it drew hundreds of thousands of citizens into its ranks with its promise of national renewal and self-determination in the face of the threat posed by the Nazis’ NSB stooges. The secretaries-general could embrace the Unie while seeing themselves as loyal servants of the House of Orange who were looking after the interests of the Dutch people in the sovereign’s absence, in accordance with the Aanwijzingen. The Dutch overseas empire remained intact at this juncture, and could be looked to by the government-in-exile and the secretaries-general and Unie membership alike as both a foundation for, and symbol of, the nation’s continued and future role in the world.50 For their part, the colonial authorities in the Dutch East Indies upheld their loyalty to the House of Orange and the government-in-exile and fended off 48

49

50

E. H. Wesselink, Kom vanavond met verhalen: Eibergen in Oorlogstijd, Deel I: De Jodenvervolging (Come Tonight with Stories: Eibergen in Wartime, Vol. I: The Persecution of the Jews) (Eibergen: Historische Kring Eibergen, 1990), 13. My translation. It is telling that Dutch Christian-minority communities (be they Protestants in Catholicmajority areas or Catholics in predominantly Protestant regions) – members of which were particularly sensitized to the experience of not belonging to the locally dominant group – were disproportionately active in the rescue of Jews. Robert Braun, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Foray, Visions of Empire, Introduction and ch. 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

58

Patriotisms under Occupation

the secretaries-general’s attempts to influence their decision-making regarding their internment of German citizens, which had led to reprisal internments by the Nazis in the Netherlands.51 Yet at the same time they found guardedly positive things to say about the Nederlandse Unie’s commitment to holding the NSB at bay and to working towards the eventual restoration of the country’s independence.52 Within the Netherlands, perceptions of the new geopolitical reality on the continent reinforced preexisting critiques of parliamentary democracy and the vertical segmentation of society with which it was closely associated. This helped create an apparent opportunity for the Nederlandse Unie to forge a path towards a new Dutch political order built around a mass movement that promised – at one and the same time – to be more expressive of the nation’s collective interests than traditional democracy, remain true to the country’s national traditions, and prove compatible with the creation of a new, Nazi-dominated political order in Europe. For a short period of time, it looked to many as though it would be possible to be a good Dutch patriot by falling into line with the demands of a not overly intrusive occupation and by finding opportunity rather than despair in the crystallization of a new geopolitical reality in continental Europe. It did not take long for such hopes to fade. In the best of circumstances, attempting to realize self-determination under foreign hegemony would have proved a contradiction-laden political minefield. And German occupation during the Second World War was not the best of circumstances. Over time, things went from bad to worse. The Nazis radicalized their policies and betrayed their promises so steadily and in such extreme ways that the fragile patriotic consensus of 1940 rapidly gave way to sharply conflicting priorities, bitter dilemmas, and deep divisions – as will be described in Chapter 3. “Penser français”: The Patriotism of Inward Withdrawal under Pétain In France,53 as in the Netherlands, the initial months following military defeat were marked by the coalescence of a seemingly broad, if fragile, 51 52

53

Ibid., 51–52; Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration, 92. “De politieke ontwikkeling in Nederland” (The Political Evolution in the Netherlands), transcript of December 11, 1940 radio broadcast by J. H. Ritman, head of the Dutch East Indies administration’s Governmental Publicity Service, De Sumatra Post, December 16, 1940, Section 3. The phrase “penser français” (“to think French”) is taken from Pierre Laborie, L’opinion française sous Vichy: Les Français et la crise d’identité nationale, 1936–1944, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2001), 230.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

59

patriotic consensus premised on recognition of Germany’s newly won continental hegemony. By the same token, many of the features of French national solidarism in 1940 were markedly distinct. As in the Netherlands, in the immediate aftermath of defeat and (partial) occupation, France experienced a rapid convergence of national sentiment that stood in marked contrast to the sense of sharp division and fragmentation (along lines of class as well as ideology, in the French case) that had dominated the country’s political experience throughout the 1930s and had, arguably, hobbled its governmental and military institutions’ responses to the onset of war.54 Amidst defeat, humiliation, and radical regime change, an unlikely patriotic consensus briefly appeared to crystallize around the acceptance of a new geopolitical reality marked by German dominance and a transition to a non-parliamentary system of governance. Unlike the Dutch case, this consensus was expressed in relatively passive ways, through expressions of personal faith in the vision of the country’s new leader – Philippe Pétain. The idiosyncrasies of the French political dynamic were, in part, a function of the distinctive initial conditions established at the time of the June 1940 armistice. There was no government-in-exile: at that juncture, de Gaulle’s London-based Free French movement had no such element. The locus of national political authority remained firmly ensconced within the country, in the regime presided over by Marshal Pétain from the temporary seat of government in Vichy. With a head of state and cabinet operating out of an unoccupied sector of French national territory, and without an immediate rival to that government’s authority from a French equivalent of the NSB, there was less of an immediately apparent need for a mass movement on the model of the Nederlandse Unie to give public expression to patriotic sentiment. Pétain was, in any case, not interested in organizing such a movement.55

54

55

See Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 , trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Norton, 1999; first published 1946); Laborie, L’opinion française, 216–23. Pétain was opposed to the idea, broached by some of his advisors, of creating a mass political party as intermediary between state and society. Vichy’s Légion Française des Combattants was the closest equivalent to a mass movement under Vichy, but it never approached the rates (relative to population) of enrollment enjoyed by the Unie and did not succeed in fully evolving beyond its original function as a unified, state-sponsored, and pro-regime veterans’ association, limited to the unoccupied zone and the colonies. See also Denis Peschanski, “Le régime de Vichy a existé: Gouvernants et gouvernés dans la France de Vichy, juillet 1940–avril 1942,” in Denis Peschanski, ed., Vichy, 1940–1944: Archives de guerre d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1986), 7–8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

60

Patriotisms under Occupation

That the country even had an unoccupied zone, in addition to retaining its overseas colonial holdings, was a unique circumstance that distinguished it from all other states defeated by Nazi Germany. It lent credibility to the Vichy regime’s argument that it represented France’s best hope for continued and renewed independence in the aftermath of military defeat. At the same time, the shock and trauma of that defeat had been much more severe in the French case than in any of the other examples explored in this section: it had followed a demoralizing and divisive period of “phony war,” lasting from September 1939 to May 1940, followed by an intensive armed conflict lasting weeks, not days. The fighting had cost the country 92,000 dead, 200,000 injured, and more than 1.5 million POWs. All this had culminated in the massive social trauma of the civilian exodus from the north.56 As a great power that had successfully withstood the German onslaught for four brutal years during the Great War, France’s sense of disorientation and humiliation was arguably much greater than in the case of small countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, or Thailand, whose citizens could not have expected their armed forces to be able to hold out long against the onslaughts they faced ffrom Axis powers. Finally, the Vichy government was led by a figure to whom charismatic qualities were widely attributed and whose patriotic credentials as the hero of the Battle of Verdun (1916) seemed impeccable. It was around the person of Marshal Pétain that nationwide patriotic solidarity coalesced during at least the first months and up to a year following French defeat. By way of comparison, Anna von der Goltz has shown how Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s lionized First World War military commander, was able to twice win presidential elections in the Weimar Republic by drawing support from across the country’s notoriously fractured political spectrum, not just from the right wing. Hindenburg’s broad popularity was a function of his successful reinvention of himself as a national leader who transcended party politics and ideological splits, and whose record of patriotic service combined with his advanced age lent itself to the perception that his motive for taking high office could not possibly reflect any personal ambition or sectional interest.57 Pétain was able to cultivate a roughly analogous image upon taking power in a defeated France in 1940; he proceeded to use that power to do away with the cardinal features of political pluralism.58 56

57 58

Burrin, France under the Germans, 5, 12; Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944, 247. On the demoralizing and divisive impact of these events, see Laborie, L’opinion française, 216–23. Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The French socialist-turned-fascist Gustave Hervé had cited the precedent of Hindenburg when calling for the aged Pétain to take power at the head of an

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

61

“Thinking Pétain remained the sole and unique way of continuing to think French.”59 It is with this pithy formulation that Pierre Laborie summarizes the dominant state of mind in France during the weeks and months following the June 1940 armistice. Drawing on the extensive surveys and syntheses of public opinion by Vichy’s prefectural authorities, Laborie goes on to explain that, while there was obviously an inherently political aspect to the broad, initial public support for the Vichy regime’s supplanting of the republic, this sentiment was in some ways “foreign to the world of political ideas.”60 The (transitory) success of Vichy’s effort to portray itself as “restoring” a sense of unity to a longdivided and polarized nation did not hinge on its ability to mobilize the masses into political activism, as in the case of the Nederlandse Unie. Rather, the key may have lain in its legitimizing what Robert Gildea has depicted as the “narrowing of horizons” for ordinary French citizens. This refers to the widespread retreat by a traumatized and anxious public into the relative security of local mutual-support networks, as they contended with the daunting and immediate challenges of securing a livelihood under conditions of wartime economic disruption, separation from loved ones held by the Germans as POWs, and (in three-fifths of the country) enemy occupation.61 The slogan of the reactionary National Revolution that the Vichy government claimed to be undertaking corresponded quite neatly to this mood: in rejecting the French Revolution’s classic triptych of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” in favor of “Work, Family, Fatherland” (“Travail, Famille, Patrie”), Vichy sacralized discipline, domesticity, and patriarchy, rather than active engagement in public life, as the purest expressions of patriotic commitment. It held up a romanticized image of the stereotypical French peasant as a model of deeply rooted national authenticity that self-absorbed urban consumers and cosmopolitan intellectuals would do well to learn from. Under circumstances where heroism on the battlefield was no longer a viable means of demonstrating one’s love of country, true patriotism could be expressed by one’s personal mentality and conduct. This was supposed to entail an abandonment of the individualistic self-indulgence allegedly typical of the Third Republic in favor of a spirit of self-denial, penance, and sacrifice that would form the basis for the nation’s moral reform and rebirth. Thus, to

59 60 61

authoritarian regime in France following the electoral victory of the Popular Front in 1936. Gustave Hervé, C’est Pétain qu’il nous faut! (Paris: Éditions de “La Victoire,” 1936), 34–35. Laborie, L’opinion française, 230. My translation. Ibid., 234. These synopses of public opinion drew on extensive, surreptitious reading of domestic postal correspondence. Gildea, Marianne in Chains, 16.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

62

Patriotisms under Occupation

take one example out of many, the Jesuit author Albert Bessières called on French women to follow the teachings of the Pope by turning away from the tyranny of shameless and degrading tastes imposed by “Jewish fashion designers and ballerinas” in favor of modesty in dress. Such a cultivation of personal honor, would, he claimed, contribute to the moral betterment of the nation.62 These were values that needed to be inculcated from the very earliest stage of childhood – a childhood that must be sheltered from the corrosive influences of commercialism and individualism: “The havoc caused by Shirley Temple’s polished smile is incalculable,” wrote one singularly humorless elementary school teacher.63 In the world-according-toVichy, women and children could best serve their families and country alike by adhering to austere standards of conduct and leaving decisionmaking to the man of the house. Thus, too, could the French people as a whole fulfill their patriotic duty in their country’s hour of distress by tending to their domestic obligations while trusting in the experience, vision, and selfless leadership of the nation’s collective father (or grandfather) figure, Philippe Pétain.64 While one might wonder just how eagerly the population really embraced the prospect of deprivation and denial as an opportunity for personal and collective growth, Pétain’s approach initially had at least the benefit of making a patriotic virtue out of necessity by elevating the daily routine of caring for one’s family and carrying on in the face of hardship to the status of a noble service to the nation. Moreover, Pétain was able to retain the loyalty, or at least affection and respect, of a broad crosssection of society well past the point when faith in his government’s policies had begun to erode severely. Even in the circles of the resistance, there were some conservatives who persisted until November 1942 (when Germany moved its troops into the southeast of France) in searching for evidence of noble motives on Pétain’s part, while ascribing blame to his advisors.65 The marshal’s popularity was due in part to his 62

63

64

65

Albert Bessières, “Les femmes et la mode: Les enseignements du Pape,” ch. 6 of n.a., Refaire la France … Pour restaurer la famille française (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1941). From L’Instituteur et son rôle dans la restauration de la famille française – a text by an unnamed elementary school teacher, as quoted in Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender, trans. Kathleen A. Johnson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 187. On Vichy’s cult of the patriarchal family and preoccupation with the “feminine culture of renunciation” as expression of civic duty, see Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, esp. ch. 6 and p. 186. Olivier Wieviorka, Une certaine idée de la Résistance: Défense de la France, 1940–1949 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 43–46.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

63

Fig. 3 A mother telling her children about Marshal Pétain. Illustration by Pierre Rousseau from a December 1941 propagandist publication. Apic/Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

carefully cultivated image as a retired military hero devoid of personal ambition who had, as he put it in his initial radio address, “made a gift of my person” to the nation under the terrible conditions of defeat.66

66

On the longevity of positive feelings towards Pétain, see Laborie, L’opinion française, passim.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

64

Patriotisms under Occupation

The Vichy government validated society’s retreat into political apathy by describing the country as a victim, first and foremost, of its own past sins under a Godless, corrupt republic. The events of the first half of 1940 had given the nation an opportunity to contemplate and atone for its past transgressions, while its self-sacrificing leader set about finding a new path forward.67 Pétain pointed to the traumatic experience of the May–June 1940 exodus (l’exode) from northern France and Paris as an object lesson in the shortcomings of liberal individualism. That traumatic event had allowed millions of our fellow citizens to learn through cruel experience that man reduced to himself alone is the most miserable of creatures … May this great and terrible lesson serve them … The ordeal suffered by the French people should be branded on its spirit and its heart. What it must understand so as never to forget it is that the individualism of which it once boasted as a privilege, lies at the source of the evils of which it almost died.68

As Jean Guéhenno remarked of Vichy radio: “The miseries of France are bits of sherbet that melt in its mouth.”69 At one and the same time, the rhetoric and policies of the regime displaced responsibility for these alleged sins on to groups that it stigmatized as not truly part of the nation: leaders of the Third Republic such as the former political and military figures put on trial (inconclusively) at Riom in 1942, Communists, Freemasons, and, of course, Jews. The Vichy government, notoriously, took its own initiative in the introduction of antisemitic legislation, to be enforced by a Bureau of Jewish Affairs. Laborie’s study of patterns of public opinion suggests that the policies excluding Jews from the civil service and a variety of professions did not initially occasion widespread outrage or opposition in non-Jewish French society. The historically centrist French newspaper of record, Le Temps (which relocated to the Unoccupied Zone), put it thus on the occasion of an early, August 1940 decree barring most persons “not originally of French nationality” from practicing medicine, pharmacy, and dentistry: it was simply a matter of “continuing [the government’s] … work of 67 68

69

Ibid., 231–33. Philippe Pétain, “Individualisme et nation,” Revue Universelle, January 1, 1941, as reprinted in Paroles du Maréchal (Words of the Marshal), Vol. II (Hanoi, 1941; pamphlet with no editor or publisher indicated), quotations on pp. 11–12. My translation. Julian Jackson points out how tightly connected the trauma of the exodus from northern France was to the popular embrace of Pétain’s image as salvific leader. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 280. Jean Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, trans. David Ball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; first published 1947), entry for June 16, 1941, p. 94.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

65

national restoration and … reintegrating real French people into positions that were occupied by too many foreigners.”70 Even among the early resisters, there were figures of a reactionary socio-cultural bent who openly shared in Vichy’s Judeophobia. Thus, Philippe Viannay, a founder of the conservative and Catholic Défense de France resistance organization, criticized the racialized aspects of Pétain’s antisemitic legislation while casually conflating France’s Jews with the German occupiers: “That the problem of foreigners is a terrible problem, that France must defend itself against the invasion by Israel or any other invasion, we do not doubt.”71 It was only in 1942, when large-scale round-ups and deportations of Jewish families got under way in a highly visible manner, with the active participation of French police, that intercepted correspondence began to reflect a significant measure of discomfort and outrage.72 As to the regime itself, Vichy initially tried to concentrate its own efforts, in both unoccupied and occupied zones, on rounding up Jews who were not citizens, leaving the arrest and deportation of French Jews to the Nazis. This allowed Pétain and his cabinet members the pretense that they were not complicit in the undercutting of their own state’s vestigial sovereignty by freely handing over their own citizens to the occupying power. But as Pierre Laval, prime minister during the last two years of the Vichy regime, came under increasing pressure from the Germans, he and Pétain, who was to remain head of state even after ceding authority over ministerial appointments to Laval following the German occupation of the formerly unoccupied zone in late 1942, proved willing to denaturalize large classes of French Jews. Moreover, it was under their authority that French security forces participated in Nazi round-ups of French Jewish citizens – all in the vague and vain hope that cooperation in such matters would help induce Berlin to concede the trappings of sovereignty to France in other areas.73 70

71 72 73

“Une loi de protection,” n.a, Le Temps, August 22, 1940, front page; also cited on p. 726 of Alain-Gérard Slama, “Un quotidien républicain sous Vichy: Le Temps (juin 1940– novembre 1942),” Revue française de science politique , Vol. 22, No. 4 (1972), 719–49. Indomitus (pseudonym for Philippe Viannay), “Lettre au Maréchal,” Défense de la France, no. 9 (January 25, 1942), as quoted in Wieviorka, Une certain idée, 44. My translation. Laborie, L’opinion française, 274–83. Burrin, France under the Germans, 156–59, 466; Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), passim. The German authorities in France were also inclined to redirect the implementation of their officially mandated policy of massive reprisals for the killing of Germans by resistance forces. Rounding up and deporting Jews in large numbers was less likely to rip apart the delicate fabric of relations between occupiers and occupied than was the shooting of hundreds of non-Jewish, French hostages. Barbara Lambauer, “Contre ‘l’ennemi à arrière’: La répression allemande en Europe occupée, 1939–1945,” in James Connolly,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

66

Patriotisms under Occupation

It is true that, thanks in part to a relative decline in the intensity of French police arrests of Jews following the public-opinion backlash against the measures in 1942, a far higher proportion of Jews in France – roughly 75 percent – survived the war than did their counterparts in the Netherlands, where roughly the same proportion perished. But Julian Jackson has pointed out that the relative autonomy enjoyed for a time by the Vichy authorities under their own nominally sovereign government makes a comparison with occupied Denmark or even Fascist Italy more appropriate in this regard. These were countries where the regimes, although operating under German occupation in the former case and allied with Berlin in the latter, made active and effective use of whatever freedom of action they enjoyed to protect their Jewish populations from German deportation and extermination efforts. (The situation changed in northern Italy under the neo-fascist puppet republic of 1943–45.) In Vichy’s case, the government chose to employ its power to actively hunt down tens of thousands of Jews, including large numbers who were French citizens. At the same time, its ambivalence in the face of public outrage and its theoretical, if only haphazardly acted upon, reluctance to hand over its own citizens did ultimately contribute to the survival of most of the country’s Jewish population. So too, much more positively, did the active efforts of various Catholic, Protestant, and other rescue networks operating outside the framework of the state.74 The initial lack of broad outrage over – and even widespread welcoming of75 – Vichy’s antisemitic legislation in 1940 remains quite stunning, given how flagrantly this flew in the face of French republican tradition. It is an important reminder – and a more flagrant one than the Dutch case – that the sense of patriotic solidarity that sometimes emerges under conditions of wartime defeat and occupation can, ironically, be characterized by a shared willingness on the part of a subset of the population to redefine another subset as an out-group. That said, it should not be assumed that Pétain’s personal popularity was indicative of broad support for his regime’s ideological and political agendas. As Laborie points out, his image as standing above and beyond the political fray was crucial to his ability to serve as a symbol of

74

75

Emmanuel Debruyne, Élise Julien, and Matthias Meirlaen, eds., En territoire ennemi: Expériences d’occupation, transferts, héritages (1914–1949) (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2018), here 200–1. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 254, 374–81. For an update on the historiographical state of play on this topic, see Julia S. Torrie, “France’s Role in the Holocaust Revisited: Marrus and Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews,” American Historical Review, Vol. 126, No. 4 (December 2021), 1535–51. Peschanski, “Le régime de Vichy,” 44.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

67

transcendent national unity even as it redirected blame for specific policies away from his person. The supra-political characteristics attributed to him were underlined by the anodyne – to the point of being asinine – tone of the personality cult surrounding him. “La terre, elle, ne ment pas” (“the land, it does not lie”) was typical of the kind of vacuously unfalsifiable slogans emanating from the French head of state.76 The Auvergnat folklorist Henri Pourrat, who enjoyed close personal ties with Pétain and chronicled the marshal’s October 1940 visit to his native paper-mill town of Ambert, described him as embodying the “end of politics.” Under Pétain’s tutelage, it was now simply a matter of “working with everyone for the good of everyone” and of “bringing together men, rather than gathering ballots.”77 The very hollowness of such statements was crucial to their function as rallying cries meant to cut across longstanding divisions of class and ideology. Pétain’s personal popularity hinged on the public’s readiness to direct its resentments of some Vichy policies towards ministers such as Pierre Laval. And, from the regime’s very first months, according to the assessments of Vichy and German authorities, French public opinion continued to sympathize with Britain out of hope for an eventual setback to Germany, despite Vichy’s Anglophobic propaganda.78 As in the Netherlands, broad acceptance of the reality of German victory and of the patriotic legitimacy of political leaders’ efforts to work within the constraints of German occupation did not mean that a majority of the public embraced unstinting collaboration with the victors or unquestioning adoption of their values. Yet the choices Pétain and his followers made reflected a different set of priorities and led to a gradual but steady divergence between Vichy’s agenda and the general public’s conception of patriotism. The government itself was dominated by figures, starting with Pétain himself, whose hostility to the democratic Third Republic long preceded the Fall of France. Many had for years been speaking, writing, and/or mobilizing in favor of some sort of “renewal,” “reconstruction,” or “reform” of a French society that they perceived as having fallen into social and political division and moral decay. Most of these people hailed from various sectors (ranging from neo-monarchist to fascist) on the right wing of the 76

77 78

Philippe Pétain, radio broadcast from Bordeaux, June 25, 1940, in Philippe Pétain, Discours aux Français, 17 juin 1940–20 aoȗt 1944, ed. Jean-Claude Barbas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 63–66; quotation on 65. See also Gérard de Puymège, “Le soldat chauvin,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoires, Vol. II: La Nation, Part 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 71; Philippe Burrin, “Vichy,” in Nora, ed., Les lieux, Vol. III: Les France, Part 1: Conflits et partages (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 334–35. Henri Pourrat, Le chef français (Marseille: Robert Laffont, 1942), 29–30. Laborie, L’opinion française, 239–40.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

68

Patriotisms under Occupation

political spectrum, although a number had their roots in the Center or even the Left.79 As in the case of the Dutch Renewers who went on to be active in the formation of the Nederlandse Unie, various visions of corporatist utopianism were discussed among some of these circles as potential bases for an organic unification of society. Right-wing advocates of French “national reform” tended to identify the institutions and values of the republic as foreign to the historically rooted national traditions of France – however much they might disagree about what those traditions actually were.80 The inclusion of the Communist Party in the Popular Front government of 1936–37, along with the Jewish background of the Socialist prime minister in the Popular Front government, Léon Blum, lent itself readily to this polemical contradistinction between an authentic Frenchness and a parliamentary republic supposedly in the service of alien interests and forces. All this tended to be associated with foreign-policy agendas that involved one degree or another of accommodation with Germany on the basis of shared anti-Communism. “Better Hitler than Blum” had been a rallying cry of the radical Right during the 1936 parliamentary election campaign. A number of the key figures in the Vichy regime had actually mused during the mid- to late 1930s about the opportunities that collaboration with, or even defeat and occupation by, Germany might create for a much-needed “regeneration” of French society along anti-democratic lines.81 Clearly, many of these authoritarian and reactionary ideas gained amplified resonance among the French public under the traumatic circumstances of defeat and occupation, which seemed to vindicate the enemies and critics of the Third Republic (even though the French Right had contributed to the very patterns of division and indecision over which its various factions were prone to fulminate). However, the Vichy government’s decision to actively seek out a relationship of collaboration with Germany was, for many people, a step too far. It was one thing to have contemplated that on the basis of a relationship between sovereign equals in pre-1939 Europe. This seems to have been the kind of framework Pétain was alluding to when, following a widely publicized

79

80

81

On the search for non-fascist alternatives to class division and political-party-based democracy, see Emanuel Rota, A Pact with Vichy: Angelo Tasca from Italian Socialism to French Collaboration (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 98–101. French democracy, declared the French establishment’s newspaper, Le Temps, had allowed an abstract and universalistic patriotism to prevail at the expense of the real thing: “Even the Jacobin ideal of patriotism gradually faded away before this lifeless phantom of cosmopolitan internationalism.” “Ordre et autorité” (Part V), n.a., Le Temps, September 26, 1940, front page. My translation. Burrin, France under the Germans, ch 4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

69

October 1940 meeting with Hitler at Montoire, he declared his government’s intention to set out upon “a path of collaboration” with Germany.82 But under the circumstances of Germany’s occupation of three-fifths of France and its domination of the European continent, this could hardly be a collaboration of equals. Pétain’s calculation seems to have been that he would be able to negotiate his way to a restoration of some version of full French sovereignty and the end of occupation in exchange for active cooperation with a victorious, hegemonic Germany. The French navy and overseas colonies remained substantive attributes of power in Vichy’s hands, which lent some semblance of substance to Pétain’s offer to work with Germany in the mutual interest of both countries.83 Yet clearly, in so doing, his government would be contributing to the very German hegemony that was compromising French national self-determination in the first place. Moreover, in practice, it turned out that Hitler had little to no interest in elevating France to the status of ally. Instead, the Nazi authorities exploited Vichy’s eagerness for negotiation to extract far-reaching economic and geo-strategic (in the North African and Middle Eastern spheres of French imperial control) cooperation from Vichy in exchange for token rewards, such as slight reductions in French payments for the costs of German occupation or periodic, small-batch releases of some among the more than 1.5 million French soldiers who had fallen captive to the Germans.84 The vague and uncertain prospect of an eventual end to the occupation became a chain to which the Vichy government became tethered, and which dragged it ever further into actions that compromised and eroded the very freedom of action it aspired to regain. Furthermore, as Philippe Burrin has pointed out, Vichy’s embrace of collaboration reflected a ranking of priorities that departed radically from any conventional notion of patriotism: “[Collaboration] was, certainly, a policy adopted for reasons of state, based upon diplomatico-strategic arguments and inspired by a desire to restore national power. But, right from the start, it was also prompted and more and more constricted by concern for the regime itself.”85 Ultimately, insofar as German victory had been the catalyst for the destruction of democratic pluralism in France, it was not the worst of all possible evils in the convoluted logic

82 83 84 85

Philippe Pétain, radio broadcast of October 30, 1940, in Pétain, Pétain: Discours aux Français, 95. Burrin, France under the Germans, 65–66. Paxton, Vichy France, 168; Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 233. Burrin, France under the Germans, 66–67.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

70

Patriotisms under Occupation

that shaped the Vichy regime’s conception of patriotism. As Jean Guéhenno put it in his diary as early as August 4, 1940: The defeat of France is merely one episode in the European civil war … Each nation is so seriously divided within itself that one of the parties which composes it can think it has won when the country has lost. Thus, for one group of Frenchmen, the misfortune of France is the occasion of a victory it hardly dared imagine. The republic lost: so they won.86

It was not Vichy’s negotiation of an armistice, its demolition of democratic institutions, or its initiation of antisemitic legislation, but its open embrace of collaboration with the German enemy that led to the first clear rift between regime and public opinion. Laborie has noted that Pétain’s October 1940 meeting with Hitler at Montoire led to a dip in public confidence in the regime even among inhabitants of the Unoccupied Zone, where overall, Burrin points out, “opinion was divided over collaboration: rejection was neither general nor immediate.” German intelligence assessments in the Occupied Zone – where the Vichy regime’s ability to defend the interests of the population was by definition much reduced – indicated broader and deeper skepticism about, and hostility towards, the policy.87 Jean Guéhenno noted the sense of stupefaction expressed in conversations he overheard on the Paris metro and on the street.88 Such sentiments were alleviated for a time by the sacking of Laval – the governmental figure perceived as most eager to work with the Germans – from the government in December. (He was to return to power, at German insistence, in April 1942.) The regime’s own internal records indicate a clear recognition that its policy of actively seeking out collaboration with the Germans risked undercutting its patriotic credentials in the eyes of the public. In the longer term, simply recasting patriotism in terms of the familial and domestic – and of the suppression or expulsion of “alien” elements from the French national body – would not suffice to uphold Vichy’s legitimacy. This was particularly the case as long as the regime’s policies failed to bring appreciable improvement in the conditions of domestic life. Vichy’s ability to counter the growing perception of its relationship with Germany as degrading to itself and the nation would, some members of its own leadership seemed to recognize, ultimately prove crucial to its credibility and viability. In a June 1941 meeting with his departmental delegates, the newly appointed secretary general for information and propaganda – former Communist turned 86 87 88

Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, entry for August 4, 1940, p. 10. Laborie, L’opinion française, 244–52; Burrin, France under the Germans, ch. 12, quotation on p. 180. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, entry for October 16, 1940, p. 30.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

71

Fig. 4 A solicitous Hermann Göring steadies Philippe Pétain as the latter buttons his coat upon his arrival for their meeting at the SaintFlorentin-Vergigny train station (in France’s Occupied Zone), December 1, 1941. Admiral Darlan (then serving as the equivalent of prime minister) is on the far right. Agence France-Presse via Getty Images.

right-wing extremist Paul Marion – summed up his strategy by insisting that what he euphemistically termed “European” collaboration needed to be presented to the public as serving above all to advance French national interests. In phrases that seemed to confirm that which they denied, he insisted that any aspect of “European cooperation” that “might be construed as a form of abasement … before the victor … must be excluded from your thoughts as well as your comments. If I am an advocate of collaboration, it is as the marshal … and the members of his government are: from an exclusively patriotic point of view.”89 He went on to emphasize that, over and above the appeal to economic and humanitarian considerations, it was on the foundation of “the sacred interests of the fatherland” that the case for collaboration needed to be made. This was followed by a lengthy excursus about why active 89

Comments by Paul Marion in minutes of Monthly Conference of [Vichy] Departmental Propaganda Delegates, Session of June 13, 1941, in Denis Peschanski, ed., Vichy

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

72

Patriotisms under Occupation

collaboration with Germany was the best way of securing long-term French national interests no matter which side ended up prevailing in the war. By the same token, Marion fulminated over what he portrayed as the hypocrisy of those French people who eagerly followed Gaullist and British radio broadcasts while remaining functionally collaborationist in their daily lives. Yet, in the midst of this tirade, he made a curious aside: “I am speaking, obviously, of honorary Gaullists, who call themselves Gaullists but remain in France: but I doff my hat before a certain number of these young men, of generous heart, who, in my view, are lost in a historical impasse, but who know what it means to give their flesh and blood to the cause they have chosen.”90 This was a telling admission from one of Vichy’s keenest advocates of collaboration with Germany! His own words clearly reflected the ever-growing strain between stereotypical notions of honorable patriotic conduct and the situation in which Pétain’s regime increasingly found itself, by virtue of its attachment to the trappings of sovereignty at the price of ever more substantive concessions to, and cooperation with, the Nazi conquerors.91 On June 17, 1940, in his very first radio broadcast after coming to power, Pétain had laid down a marker for his own government by clarifying that the terms of the armistice he was seeking to negotiate would have to be honorable.92 He was subsequently able to claim that, onerous though the final terms proved, French honor had been salvaged by virtue of a portion of the country being left unoccupied, his government’s authority being recognized, the navy and empire being left intact, etc. But as the months and years passed and the impositions accepted by Vichy became ever more painful and humiliating, the insistence that acquiescence in these conditions reflected an honorable and patriotic spirit of self-sacrifice rang ever more hollow. In October 1940, following his meeting with Hitler at Montoire, Pétain improbably informed his radio audience that it was “with honor and in order to maintain French

90 91 92

1940–1944: Archives de guerre d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1986), 275–84; quotation on 275–76. My translation. In memoirs written in June 1944, but not published until after his death four decades later, Jacques BenoistMéchin, a young Vichy official who played an active role in seeking out an alliance with Germany in 1941–1942, blamed the failure of his “European and nationalist” vision partly on the lack of patriotic courage and resolution among his own compatriots, reluctant as they were to undertake a full commitment to the military defense of the French empire against the British! Jacques Benoist-Méchin, De la défaite au désastre, Vol. I: Les occasions manquées, juillet 1940–avril 1942 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), 21–22. Paul Marion in Peschanski, ed., Vichy 1940–1944, 276–77. On this theme, see Burrin, France under the Germans, 143, 466. This point is emphasized in Jean-Michel Adam, La linguistique textuelle: Introduction à l’analyse textuelle des discours, 3rd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), ch. 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

73

unity in the framework of an active construction of the new European order that I enter today on the path of collaboration.” (My italics.) Yet the idea of collaboration as an honorable project between mutually respectful equals was undercut in the very following lines, where Pétain spoke of the likely immediate consequences of collaboration as nothing more than a slight easing of some of the burdens of occupation – such as the severe limits on communication across the internal demarcation line, the occupation costs charged to the French government, and conditions under which French POWs were held.93 The strain was clearly apparent in 1941 in the hysterically over-compensatory words of the head of the North African branch of Vichy’s highly politicized veterans organization, the Légion Française des Combattants, who insisted on blind faith in the marshal as the path to true honor for French patriots.94 Evidently, the picture that would greet open eyes was unlikely to conform to any standard conception of patriotic dignity. As the regime’s internal reporting continued to indicate widespread public aversion to the policy of collaboration, and as radio broadcasts from London relentlessly questioned the patriotism of Pétain’s government, Vichy propaganda assumed an ever more defensive tone. One pamphlet, consisting largely of quotations from prominent public figures in support of collaboration, concluded with a series of rhetorical questions asking its readers how illustrious leaders and military commanders such as Marshal Pétain, Admiral Darlan, General Weygand – each of whom had at one point endorsed collaboration – could possibly be considered traitors.95 And in a speech delivered in June 1941, Pétain countered Gaullist and British charges against his regime’s patriotic credentials with a similarly hollow-sounding riposte that might well have done more to remind his audience of the accusation than convince them of its falseness: “You are neither betrayed, nor sold, nor abandoned. Those who tell you this are lying to you and pushing you into the arms of Communism.”96 That Vichy’s claim to the patriotic high ground was being expressed through fervent denials of treachery was symptomatic of

93 94

95

96

Philippe Pétain, “Message du 30 octobre 1940,” in Pétain, Discours aux français, 94–96; quotation on 95. My translation. Général Paquin, “Préface,” in Théophile D’Apery, Pétain: Histoire actuelle à l’occasion du 1er anniversaire de la Légion Française des Combattants (Algiers: Imprimerie Baconnier, 1941). Paroles françaises, paroles d’espoir (n.a., n.d.) (Clermont-Ferrand: Imprimerie Spéciale, 1942?), DC 397 [Vichy government era pamphlets], #97, Collection Level Cataloguing [CLC], Library of Congress (hereafter referred to as LC), Washington, DC. Philippe Pétain, speech of June 17, 1941, in Pétain, Discours aux français, 145. My translation.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

74

Patriotisms under Occupation

how significantly the political terrain was in fact shifting under the regime’s feet. The more onerous and intrusive the experience of occupation grew, the more questionable became the Vichy regime’s identification of patriotic honor with a policy which was ever more manifestly one of progressive capitulation. By late 1942, Vichy propaganda was resorting to condescension in its call for continued confidence in the marshal: “Are you more French than him? Do you know the problems of the hour better than he does?” were the rhetorical questions framing a pamphlet published in anticipation of a difficult winter ahead that year.97 By the same token, the Free French and resistance organizations’ more conventional identification of patriotism with resistance to the occupiers gradually gained traction, as evolving circumstances made it seem less radically at odds with the basic instincts of self-preservation to which Pétain had successfully appealed in the early aftermath of the defeat.

Denmark: Patriotism as the Art of the Possible At the time the Nederlandse Unie was stretching its political wings in Holland, an equivalently named, and ideologically roughly analogous, movement was seeking to assert itself in occupied Denmark. Arne Sørensen’s Danish Unity (Dansk Samling) organization, founded in 1936, was preoccupied with ideas of national reform and renaissance through a transcendence of class conflict, party politics, parliamentary democracy, and urban/cosmopolitan rationalism and secularism. It shared many ideas with right-wing critics of the Third Republic in France and members of the Renewal movement in the Netherlands. If anything, before the war, Danish Unity had leaned more sharply in the direction of fascism: Sørensen took part in a “Nordic Unity” conference hosted in Lübeck (in Nazi Germany) in 1938.98 But there was a sharp difference between the trajectories of Nederlandse Unie and Danish Unity. Whereas the former briefly became the largest political movement in Dutch history, Danish Unity remained a tiny political grouping completely marginal to the country’s politics, until it eventually succeeded in gaining some small degree of public recognition by virtue of aligning itself with resistance to German occupation. 97 98

Français gardez votre confiance dans le maréchal (n.a., n.d.), pamphlet apparently published in the second half of 1942, DC 397, #46, CLC, LC. Henrik Lundbak, Danish Unity: A Political Party between Fascism and Resistance, 1936–1947, trans. from the Danish by the Language Center, Copenhagen Business School (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), chs. 1–10 and 26.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

75

One of the cardinal reasons for the divergence between these two cases had to do with the different set of conditions prevailing in the two countries at the onset of German control. In Denmark, during the first three years of the German presence, king, cabinet, and parliament remained in place and intact as elements of a sovereign government under the auspices of a distinctly light (all things being relative!) form of Nazi rule. As the Germans defined it, Denmark remained sovereign under German protection during 1940–43, rather than falling under formal occupation. Until November 1942, Germany’s chief representative in the country retained the official role of ambassador (or plenipotentiary, in German parlance).99 Major political parties (other than the Communists, who were banned in 1941) were not suppressed, and the country was actually allowed to hold fairly free elections in the spring of 1943. Hence, in Denmark, there was no political vacuum available to be filled, as was created in the Netherlands by the departure into exile of the Dutch monarch and cabinet. King Christian himself rejected out of hand a proposal put forward by a group of right-wing businessmen to the effect that he seize the moment to replace the left-of-center Social Democraticled cabinet with an appointed government of conservative technocrats led by his cousin. For their part, the Germans had clearly made a choice, for the time being, to seek the continued cooperation of the Danish political establishment so long as its leaders were willing to comply with Berlin’s basic economic and diplomatic desiderata.100 Indeed, from a functional perspective, it was, M. I. Smith suggests, the Danish government whose role ended up paralleling that of the Nederlandse Unie in certain ways.101 The key move here was the broadening of the cabinet in June 1940 to encompass members of all the major political parties in a grand, national-unity coalition. This was intended, among other things, to deter German divide-and-conquer tactics and to help stave off any effort to install the Danish National Socialists in power as a puppet government. But the inclusion in the government of the two major right-of-center parties (the Conservatives and Liberal Agrarians), along with a few non-party figures with business connections, allowed them to push their socio-economic agenda more aggressively than had been 99

100

101

Fritz Petrick, “Dänemark, das ‘Musterprotektorat’?” in Robert Bohn, ed., Die deutsche Herrschaft in den “germanischen” Ländern, 1940–1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), esp. 121–27. Niels Wium Olesen, “The Obsession with Sovereignty: Cohabitation and Resistance in Denmark, 1940–45,” in John Gilmour and Jill Stephenson, eds., Hitler’s Scandinavian Legacy: The Consequences of the German Invasion for the Scandinavian Countries, Then and Now (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 50–52; Lundbak, Danish Unity, ch. 11. Smith, “Neither Resistance nor Collaboration.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

76

Patriotisms under Occupation

possible prior to Germany’s hegemony. The left-of-center Socialists and Social Liberals were ill-equipped to resist their coalition partners’ economically conservative inclinations, given an environment where trade-union activism would have provoked a German crackdown and where the whole field of political discourse and debate, and the general sense of the possible, had been skewed to the right by the Nazis’ continent-wide ascendance.102 This atmosphere was epitomized by the notorious press release issued on July 8/9, 1940, by the country’s new foreign minister, Erik Scavenius. Although he had once served as a Social Liberal member of the upper house of parliament, at this juncture Scavenius was effectively unaffiliated. An experienced diplomat, who had led Denmark’s German-leaning neutrality policy during the First World War, Scavenius quickly emerged as the dominant figure in the cabinets of 1940–43 by virtue of serving as the government’s key interlocutor with the German authorities. (He took on the additional role of prime minister during 1942–43.) In his official statement, delivered on the occasion of the new cabinet’s formation, the minister recognized that: Through the great German victories, which have awakened the astonishment and wonderment of the world, a new era has begun in Europe, which will give rise to a new political and economic order under German leadership. It will be Denmark’s task to find its place in a necessary and mutual collaboration with Greater Germany. The Danish people is convinced that in the new European order, its independence will be preserved, and it hopes to find understanding for its own distinctiveness and for its traditional, peaceful, political and social development.103

Delivered in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of France, Scavenius’ text bears superficial similarities to the rhetoric employed in other occupied countries at this juncture – for instance, in Colijn’s and the Nederlandse Unie’s publications of 1940. Yet the circumstances surrounding Scavenius’ remarks were very different: he was speaking under the constraints of having just become the government’s chief point of contact with the German authorities, and his words were intended for release to the German as well as the Danish press. Their context as well as their content suggests that his remarks were meant to lay the basis for a 102 103

Dethlefsen, “Denmark and the German Occupation”; Olesen, “Obsession with Sovereignty,” 50–52; Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators, 61–62. Scavenius’ press release of July 8/9, 1940, as quoted in Gustav Meissner, Dänemark unterm Hakenkreuz: Die Nord-Invasion und die Besetzung Dänemarks, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1990), 126. My translation from the German version of the statement. (Meissner, a Nazi Party member, played a politically outsized role in his capacity as German press attaché in Denmark during 1940–42.) See also Dethlefsen, “Denmark and the German Occupation.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

77

careful, mutual understanding with the Nazi regime rather than to take advantage of the crisis situation to try and reinvent the institutional and constitutional bases for Danish national life.104 Indeed, Denmark’s solidarist interval under occupation was characterized by much less of a break with pre-war values and institutions, and, arguably, much less of a departure from conventional conceptions of patriotic conduct, than was the case in the other major European state whose government stayed put after German military victory – Vichy France.105 The right-of-center Danish political parties may have pressed their domestic political and economic agendas rather indecorously within the framework of the national-unity coalition, but they did not seek to take advantage of Germany’s ascendance to do away with the country’s democratic and parliamentary institutions. On the contrary, their actions were geared towards preserving these institutions. In fact, it has been argued that the formation of the national-unity coalition served to contain and roll back anti-democratic, quasi-fascistic tendencies within the political mainstream – for example, among militantly antisocialist elements of the Conservative Party’s youth organization.106 The political and moral price for what the Danish establishment termed a policy of negotiation – rather than collaboration – was indirect support for Germany’s war effort by virtue of extensive cooperation in the economic realm as well as in certain aspects of diplomacy. Examples of the latter included the country’s departure from the League of Nations in July 1940 and its compromising of its formal neutrality by joining the anti-Comintern Pact at the end of November 1941.107 If the result of this approach was to maintain a relatively high standard of living for the population, thanks to strong German demand for Danish products, that was all for the good, as far as the country’s leadership was concerned. As Henning Poulsen puts is, this was not a heroic patriotism geared towards all-out resistance. It was, rather, a carefully calibrated form of 104 105

106

107

See Olesen, “The Obsession with Sovereignty,” 51–52. Danish historiography since 1979 has tended towards a more harshly critical perspective on a policy characterized by Hans Kirchhof as one of state collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. See Karl Christian Lammers, “Die deutsche Besatzungspolitik und ihre dänischen Partner,” in Bohn, ed., Die deutsche Herrschaft, esp. 141. Steven Borish, “Hal Koch, Grundtvig and the Rescue of the Danish Jews: A Case Study in the Democratic Mobilisation for Non-Violent Resistance,” unpublished and undated paper held by the Royal Danish Library and posted at ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/ grs/article/download/16541/14334 (accessed March 13, 2017). Ingo Ossendorff, “Den Krieg kennen wir nur aus der Zeitung.” Zwischen Kollaboration und Widerstand: Dänemark im II. Weltkrieg (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990), 44–52; Barbara Lambauer, “Un engagement pour l’Europe allemande: La collaboration,” in Alya Aglan and Robert Frank, eds., 1937–1947: La guerre-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 1109–78.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

78

Patriotisms under Occupation

accommodation and collaboration designed to forestall any German inclination to install the tiny Danish National Socialist Party under Frits Clausen in power or to have the German military-industrial complex assume direct control of the Danish economy.108 On the face of it, this rationale does not seem radically different from that of Philippe Pétain in Vichy France. But a significant difference, again, is that there was no right-wing assumption of dictatorial powers in occupied Denmark – no attempt to take advantage of the country’s military defeat to dismantle the preexisting constitutional order. (Military defeat for a small neutral country like Denmark did not, of course, constitute the kind of unthinkable humiliation that it did for France; hence preexisting institutions did not appear as discredited.) Of course, a significant element here was the fact that the Nazi authorities chose to treat a traditionally neutral and “racially Aryan” Denmark with kid gloves during the early phases of their rule – even permitting free, multi-party elections to proceed in March 1943. By the same token, the Danish response to German ascendancy reflected the far less fractured nature of pre-war Danish politics.109 All this allowed a broad and relatively genuine patriotic consensus to crystallize around the accommodation of German economic demands as a means of preserving Denmark’s political institutions, blocking the aspirations of Clausen’s National Socialists, and maximizing the country’s potential for self-determination in a German-dominated Europe. This consensus lasted for the greater part of three years, and initially encompassed not only the main political parties but also institutions such as the military, the police, the press, the leadership of the Socialist-affiliated sector of the trade-union movement, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church.110 While the general public seems to have largely accepted the government’s policy of “negotiation” and avoidance of open provocation during the first two or three years of the German troop presence, this did not mean that the de facto occupiers were made to feel welcome. German assessments of Danish public opinion indicated an initial period of cold standoffishness in the immediate wake of the invasion, followed by a

108

109 110

Henning Poulsen, “Dänemark unter deutscher Besetzung,” in Eberhard Jäckel, Henning Poulsen, and Johan Frieswijk, Dänemark und die Niederlande unter deutscher Besetzung (Bräist/Bredstedt, Nordfriesland, Germany: Verlag Nordfriisk Instituut, 1991). See also Hans Kirchhoff, “Die dänische Staatskollaboration,” in Werner Röhr, ed., Okkupation und Kollaboration (1938–1945): Beiträge zu Konzepten und Praxis der Kollaboration in der deutschen Okkupationspolitik (Berlin: Hüthig Verlagsgemeinschaft, 1994), 104–5. See Olesen, “Obsession with Sovereignty,” 45. Kirchhoff, “Die dänische Staatskollaboration,” 107–8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

79

Fig. 5 Erik Scavenius, Danish foreign minister (in the second row and to the right of Adolf Hitler), attends a November 1941 reception at the German Reich Chancellery in Berlin on the occasion of the renewal of, and adhesion of additional signatories to, the Anti-Comintern Pact. Ullstein bild Dtl. via Getty Images.

relatively brief interval during which the Nazi authorities thought they discerned a greater acceptance of the situation. This was attributed in part to the generally “correct” conduct of German soldiers and partly to the impact of Germany’s victory over France, which allegedly gave people a sense of the occupation’s inevitability and a feeling of relief that at least in Denmark’s case, the unavoidable had taken place with the barest minimum of bloodshed or destruction.111 Yet as early as September 1940, a general staff officer of the Wehrmacht’s 269th Division, stationed in Denmark at the time, reported that the Danish urban population resented the economic dislocation brought on by the rupture of economic ties with Britain, continued to follow and lend credence to London’s radio broadcasts, and remained firmly convinced of, and eager for, Britain’s ultimate victory. The sudden surge of folk music sing-alongs in communities across the entire country was to be understood as a “demonstrative expression of the Danes’ political will” and a manifestation of national solidarity (nationale Zusammengehörigkeit) in the face of the German presence. By the same token, support for the Danish government’s policy of accommodation was

111

Draft of joint report from German plenipotentiary in Denmark (Cécil von Renthe-Fink) and Representative for Internal Administration of Denmark (Paul Kanstein) to German Foreign Ministry, June 17, 1940, National Archives Microfilm Publication (NAMP) T501, Roll 301, frames 1066–68, RG 242, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

80

Patriotisms under Occupation

based on the purely rational calculus that this was a necessary temporizing measure designed to alleviate conditions pending Britain’s eventual victory. It was not to be mistaken for genuine sympathy towards the German people, for whose “existential struggle and ideals” the Danes evinced little to no understanding, the officer reported plaintively.112 One year later, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the German military was reporting a further, marked downturn in the Danish public’s attitude. The formation in July–August 1941 of a corps of Danish volunteers for the Waffen-SS (see following chapter), to be assigned to the Eastern Front, was viewed negatively by most people, according to the German military’s own assessment. Danish-language radio broadcasts from London and reports about the “sharp measures” taken by the German authorities in response to resistance activity in Norway also contributed to the Nazis’ public-relations problems, according to the summary report of the German military commander in Denmark.113 In the course of the following year, reports came in regularly from German garrisons stationed all over the country of increasing hostility on the part of the general population. The German military headquarters in the seaport of Kolding reported in November 1942 about apparently organized efforts to boycott local commercial establishments that did business with German troops or whose owners were even seen chatting with German personnel.114 In March 1942, the officer in charge of the German garrison in the seaport of Esbjerg had to turn to the local Danish police commander for help in persuading a local hotel owner to stop ordering his staff not to serve German soldiers.115 Provincial newspapers were described as highlighting local-interest stories over important war news such as word of Japanese battlefield successes, while devising headlines that lent a negative spin to the accounts of Axis military activity they did cover.116 112

113

114 115 116

General Staff officer of the 269th Infantry Division, “Stimmungsbericht” (public opinion assessment), September 7, 1940, NAMP T501, Roll 310, frames 781–83, RG 242, NARA. A penciled comment in the margin of this document indicated that access to such (presumably demoralizing) reports was to be limited exclusively to the Commander of German Troops in Denmark. Commander of German Troops in Denmark, “Tätigkeitsbericht” (progress report) for the period from August 1 to September 30, 1941, September 30, 1941, NAMP T501, Roll 298, RG 242, NARA. Wehrmacht HQ in Kolding to Commander of German Troops in Denmark, November 18, 1942, NAMP T501, Roll 309, RG 242, NARA. Correspondence of German garrison commander in Esbjerg, February–March 1942, NAMP T501, Roll 302, frames 212 ff., RG 242, NARA. Commander of German Troops in Denmark to the plenipotentiary of the German Reich (Renthe-Fink), February 4, 1942; attached January 23, 1942 report from garrison commander in Aalborg; March 13, 1942, response by Renthe-Fink to Commander of German Troops in Denmark, NAMP T501, Roll 302, RG 242, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

81

The combination of opposition to provocative acts of disorder or sabotage with a commitment to an inward spirit of resistance and the cultivation of what were seen as characteristically democratic and Christian Danish national values was embraced and actively cultivated by the Union of Danish Youth. This was a broadly inclusive organization created in the wake of the German invasion to bring the youth movements of the main political parties together under a common roof, complementing the formation of the national-unity coalition. The Union of Danish Youth was chaired and mentored by the theologian Hal Koch, who looked back in turn to the nineteenth-century cultural nationalism of the religious and educational reformer, and anti-establishmentarian Lutheran pastor, N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). Gundtvigian nationalism had championed the cause of popular enlightenment of the rural masses, based on an appreciation for – and commitment to preserve – what Grundtvig understood to be the folkloric essence of the nation’s rural tradition. The movement was intended as an antidote to the ills of modernity as well as a source of spiritual and national strength in the face of Denmark’s nineteenth-century losses of territory (Norway to Sweden in 1814 and Schleswig-Holstein to AustroPrussian forces in 1864). After an early commitment to monarchic absolutism, Grundtvig had come to embrace the country’s post-1849 parliamentary constitutionalism.117 Grundtvigian cultural nationalism had helped sustain the spirit of resistance among the ethnic Danes of German-annexed Schleswig in the years between 1864 and northern Schleswig’s retrocession following the First World War. Now, under the shadow of Nazi German occupation, Gundtvigianism enjoyed a popular revival thanks to a series of hugely popular public lectures delivered by Hal Koch, who insisted on the authentically indigenous roots of Danish democracy and drew barely camouflaged analogies between the country’s existing predicament and earlier threats from Germany in the face of which the Danish people had successfully persisted and ultimately prevailed.118 It was in the course of 1943 that the tenuous balancing act keeping the government in the Germans’ good graces while civil society explored how far it could take patriotic self-expression began to break down. As in so

117

118

Uffe Østergård, “The Nation as Event: The Dissolution of the Oldenburg Monarchy and Grundtvig’s Nationalism,” in John A. Hall, Over Korsgaard, and Ove K. Petersen, eds, Building the Nation: N. F. S. Grundtvig and Danish National Identity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, trans. Morris Gradel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 36–41; Andrew Buckser, “Rescue and Cultural Context during the Holocaust: Grundtvigian Nationalism and the Rescue of the Danish Jews,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter 2001), 1–25; Borish, “Hal Koch.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

82

Patriotisms under Occupation

many other occupied countries, the combination of bad news for the Axis on the battlefronts and the concomitant increase in demands placed on populations by the occupiers helped provoke a wave of unrest, protest, and increased sabotage activity by Danish resistance organizations. All this placed the Danish cabinet in an increasingly untenable situation: ministers found themselves unable to contain the upsurge of resistance activity through conventional appeals to the public, yet reluctant to alienate the population by acceding to German demands for a ruthless crackdown. Unlike the Vichy government, when push came to shove, the Danish cabinet finally decided to resign in August 1943 rather than undercut the government’s patriotic and ethical legitimacy by taking orders from the Nazis.119 While it is true that Scavenius’ unwavering eagerness to maintain a working relationship with the Germans120 had raised eyebrows even among his own colleagues and that the government’s 1943 resignation was something of a reluctant move in the face of overwhelming public pressure, the strength of that pressure itself speaks volumes about the distinctive conditions and characteristics shaping conceptions of patriotism and national interest in wartime Denmark. Moreover, while the political leadership maintained elements of its collaborationist policy behind the façade of the ministerial permanent secretaries (the equivalents of the Dutch secretaries-general), who now took on formal responsibility for the country’s administration, this development was accompanied by an unusual response to a new Nazi initiative. I am referring to the famous rescue of the great majority of the country’s (admittedly tiny) Jewish population from deportation and mass murder. These events will be addressed in Chapter 3. Pretending to be Free in Thailand For Thailand, 1942 was loosely analogous to 1940 in Western Europe: this was the first year of the country’s de facto occupation by Japanese forces, and it was the period during which the possibility of a new patriotism adapted to the ideological and geopolitical context of Axis 119 120

Kirchhoff, “Die dänische Staatskollaboration,” 110–11. It is striking how much cordial, mutual regard is expressed in the post-war exchange of letters between Scavenius and German Plenipotentiary Best, in which Scavenius expressed his regret over Best’s having been imprisoned for several years by sentence of a Danish court and in which he endorsed Best’s manuscript account of the Danish– German relationship under the occupation. Siegfried Matlok, “Vorwort des Herausgebers” (Editor’s Foreword), in Werner Best, Dänemark in Hitlers Hand: Der Bericht des Reichsbevollmächtigten Werner Best über seine Besatzungspolitik in Dänemark mit Studien über Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Canaris u. a., ed. Siegfried Matlok (Husum: Husum Verlag, 1988) 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

83

hegemony seemed most plausible to some. As in Denmark, the preexisting government remained in place, although in Thailand’s case, this was not a genuinely pluralistic regime; Phibun might be characterized as a sort of Thai Pétain, except that he had already been prime minister for more than two years at the time of the Japanese incursion. Unlike in Denmark, there was a preexisting fissure between monarchy and cabinet, with many members of the royal family – including the boy-king himself – remaining overseas for the duration of the war. The monarch did not respond to Phibun’s wartime request that he return to his homeland in order to study Japanese.121 Unlike any of the other cases in this part of the book, Thailand moved within weeks from a position of neutrality to an alliance with its occupiers. (The Vichy government did intermittently explore the possibility of more active involvement in support of Germany’s war effort in return for a substantive change in the conditions of the occupation, only to be rebuffed by an uninterested Hitler.) As with Vichy, the legitimacy of Phibun’s government and of his decision to accede to Japanese demands did not immediately face serious challenges: the Thai ambassador in Washington broke with Bangkok over Phibun’s moves, but he initially had little more substantive power or influence than did General de Gaulle during his early weeks and months in London. For their part, the Japanese did not come to Thailand with past defeat and humiliation to compensate for, as did the Germans to France. Japan’s military presence and financial and economic exactions – including the demand that Thailand finance the expenses of the Japanese troop presence – did spark localized clashes and widespread resentment. Yet, overall, Thailand’s economy fared much less poorly during the war than did that of some other Japanese-occupied locations such as Java and northern Vietnam, where massive rural famines killed millions of people in 1943–45.122 The Japanese also made a consistent effort to preserve the outward appearance of respecting Thai sovereignty and to maintain the pretense that the relationship between the two countries was one of alliance and of cultural and economic exchange rather than domination and subservience. As the former American Third Secretary at the Bangkok Legation assessed the situation following his June 1942 release from detention and departure from the country, these fictions had a crucial role to play in Japan’s broader propaganda campaign in support of the independence movements in India and Burma (prior to the success of Japan’s initial Burma campaign), as well as on behalf of the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing. As the only already121 122

Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 238. Huff, World War II and Southeast Asia, 248–73, 291–95.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

84

Patriotisms under Occupation

independent country to be fully incorporated into the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Thailand was to serve as a living validation of Japanese claims that their vision for Asia was genuinely anti-colonial rather than neo-imperialist. Hence it was that in June 1942, Bangkok served as the venue for a conference bringing together representatives of émigré Indian nationalist organizations.123 Phibun’s regime initially sought to make the most of the opportunities afforded by this situation to pursue and intensify preexisting nationalist projects in the foreign policy and domestic arenas alike. The decision to embrace a formal alliance with Japan was followed by an intense lobbying effort on behalf of Japanese approval for Thai involvement in the military effort against the British. The Japanese eventually gave their grudging consent to the limited engagement of Thai troops against British-allied Chinese forces (loyal to the nationalist Kuomintang government in Chungking) operating in a Burmese border region (the Shan States). Thai soldiers were also allowed to occupy some slivers of territory in Malaya, which Tokyo allowed Thailand to annex in 1943. These developments were very much in line with Phibun’s Japanese-facilitated gains in Indochina in 1941. By playing a token role in, and gaining a marginal benefit from, Japan’s war on the British empire, Phibun could hope to reconcile his increasingly vitriolic brand of integral nationalism with the awkward reality that he had placed his country in league with the very power that was effectively occupying it. If the occupied could themselves be occupiers, then perhaps the Japanese government’s claims that its vision of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would ensure dignity for all the nations of Southeast Asia would really hold true in Thailand’s case. As the one country in the region that had retained its independence in the face of Western imperial expansion, Thailand might now have an equally distinctive role to play as Japan’s partner in the dismantling of European colonialism there. Putting up with a Japanese military presence – which never fell to fewer than fifty thousand troops – for the duration of the war would be a small price to pay if the ultimate outcome was a place of pride in the new Asian order and an opportunity to unite 123

Harlan B. Clark, Third Secretary and Vice Consul, American Legation, Bangkok, “Report on Japanese Wartime Propaganda in Thailand,” August 21, 1942, RG 165, Entry 77, Box 3013 (Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs. Military Intelligence Division “Regional” File. 1922–44. Thailand), Folder 2930, NARA. On the December 1941–June 1942 detention of all American legation staff on the premises of the legation, see Secretary of State (Hull) to the Chargé in Switzerland (Huddle), January 26, 1942, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1942, General; the British Commonwealth; the Far East, Vol. I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 923–24; ibid., editor’s note, 934.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

85

the various regional minorities and ethnic groups identified as “Thai” under the auspices of a revitalized, expansionist, and assimilationist nation-state.124 Within the country, Phibun’s government had embarked on a heady agenda of national-cultural transformation from the time of the January 1939 political purge. In obvious imitation of European fascist examples, state-sponsored propaganda acclaimed Phibun as Phunam – the Leader of the Thai nation and personal embodiment of its people’s sovereignty. The regime embraced as its mission the country’s rapid modernization along Western lines, while simultaneously cultivating its citizens’ distinctive sense of “Thai-ness.” Government initiatives strove to effect a paradigm shift in people’s everyday habits and behavior in conformity with certain rigid conceptions of modern hygiene, dress, and comportment. Radio broadcasts and educational programs sought to inculcate pride in the country’s history and respect for a version of Buddhism packaged as a national religion, the practice of which was portrayed as an essential aspect of acting patriotically. The military was lauded as a repository of the nation’s noblest values and as the instrument of gaining the country respect on the world stage, defending its security and honor, and realizing its irredentist claims. The regime-sponsored youth movement – the Yuwachon (short for Yuwachon Thahan, or “Junior Soldiers”) – was increasingly militarized, and influenced in its practices by the example of the Hitler Youth.125 Thai national identity was defined in strongly ethno-centric terms, at the expense of toleration or respect for regional and minority communities and cultures. The Muslim, ethnic Malay population in the country’s south was profoundly alienated by the aggressive propagation of

124

125

Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, ch. 5; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, ch. 10; Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 151; Craig J. Reynolds, “Introduction,” in Craig J. Reynolds, ed., National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today, rev. ed. (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002), 16–17. E. Bruce Reynolds, “Phibun Songkhram and Thai Nationalism in the Fascist Era,” European Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2004), 99–134; Michael Kelly Connors, Democracy and National Identity in Thailand (London: Routledge, 2003), 40–41; Suwannathat-Pian, Thailand’s Durable Premier, ch. 3. It should be noted that Suwannathat-Pian’s somewhat apologetic account contests the equation of Phibun’s practices with those of European fascists. For his part, Thak Chaloemitiarana contends that “the phunam’s authority [was] grounded in the traditional absolutism of the Thai monarchs,” yet describes Phibun’s rule as evoking “the specter of a non-royal and secular authoritarian style of leadership which in its fundamental essence approximated, but yet was alien to, traditional Thai political values.” Thak Chaloemitiarana, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2007), 8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

86

Patriotisms under Occupation R. of China

Saharat Thai Doem (Portion of Shan State) ann. 1943, ret. 1945 Claimed, but not annexed

Lan Chang Province (Portions of Luang Prabang and Xaignabouli provinces) ann. 1941, ret. 1946

Chiang Mai

Bu rma

(F

na o c h i ised) I n ds e - s u pe rv c h pa n e e n ; Ja F rr a nce

(UK; Japaneseoccupied)

Thai l a n d*

Thanbyuzayat Moulmein Ye

Nakhon Ratchasima

Thai–Burma Railroad Bangkok

Battambang

Phra Tabong, Phibunsonkhram, and Nakhon Champassak provinces (Meluprey, Thala Barivat, and cis-Mekong Champasak provinces) ann. 1941, ret. 1946

Surat Thani Si Rat Malai (Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Terengganu states) ann. 1943, ret. 1945

(UK; Japaneseoccupied)

(N

c u t rl D ethe

Fe de r at e d M a l ay S tat e s

an

0

100

200

400

h

ds

Ea

;J

ap

st

an

600

es

In

e-o

di

cc

up

es

ied

Singapore

)

800

km 1,000

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

* Thailand was technically allied with Japan, but was de facto Japanese-occupied Territory annexed by Thailand

Map 4 Wartime Thailand, c. 1943.

Buddhism as the national religion. The country’s roughly three million ethnic Chinese, whose numbers had steadily swelled ever since Siam had begun developing elements of an urban market economy and started widening its international commercial connections in the late nineteenth century, were vilified and scapegoated. The fact that most Chinese had

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

87

not been naturalized made it possible to discriminate against them without flagrantly infringing on the principle of equal rights for all Thai citizens. Even among the tiny minority who were naturalized, restrictions and/or special-qualification requirements continued to set apart Thai nationals whose fathers were aliens.126 Not only was the perceived lack of assimilation across a broad cross-section of the ethnic Chinese community portrayed as incompatible with the nation’s alleged need for cultural uniformity and cohesion, but the influential Chinese Chamber of Commerce’s 1937 orchestration of a mass boycott of Japanese goods in protest over Japan’s invasion of China was viewed as an intolerable encroachment upon the realm of Thailand’s increasingly pro-Japanese foreign policy. Updating an analogy that had first been drawn by King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) in 1914, the Phibun regime’s chief ideologue and propagandist, Wichit Wathakan, had described the Chinese as Thailand’s Jews, urging that they be repressed along lines similar to those of contemporaneous (as of 1938) Nazi policies.127 It was in the framework of the alliance with, and effective occupation by, Japan that the Phibun regime’s program of nationalizing the masses reached its apogee.128 From 1942 until Phibun’s resignation in 1944, a veritable avalanche of linguistic and cultural reforms came raining down on the population from on high. An orthographic reform was introduced in May 1942 with a view to spreading literacy via a simplification and standardization of the Thai written language. This particular effort proved unpopular and was reversed by Phibun’s successor in 1944.129 The use of pronouns was to be simplified, with an elimination of statusrelated distinctions in favor of a more egalitarian language. Traditional titles were to be dropped in favor of unadorned names across the entire population. At the same time, the government mandated the disambiguation of gender-neutral names by compiling officially sanctioned lists of names divided into exclusively male and female categories. The image of the Phunam (Leader) was to be projected on the screens of movie theaters prior to every show and film audiences were required to 126 127 128

129

Richard J. Coughlin, Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 173–78. Reynolds, “Phibun Songkhram and Thai Nationalism,” 110. The details that follow on the intensified national reform programs of 1942–44 are drawn from Thamsook Numnonda, Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 1941–45 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies [Research Notes and Discussions Series, No. 6], 1977), 27–41; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, ch. 10; SuwannathatPian, Thailand’s Durable Premier, 110–35. Thomas John Hudak, “Spelling Reforms of Field Marshall [sic] Pibulsongkram,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1986), 123–33.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

88

Patriotisms under Occupation

stand up and bow in his honor. The government’s zeal to modernize the Thai nation overnight reached extremes of micro-managerial absurdity: the traditional chewing of betel nuts (a habit typically accompanied by spitting) was outlawed; the citizenry was instructed to use forks and knives (rather than fingers) at table; traditional forms of dress were outlawed in favor of Western norms for males and females, respectively – including the mandatory wearing of hats in public by all Thai men: the operative slogan was “Hats Lead a Nation to Power.” Husbands were urged to kiss their wives before leaving for work, and the ideal division of time among sleep, work, and family life was delineated in governmentissued pamphlets.130 Again, the general character of these reform efforts were of a piece with Phibun’s orientation from 1939 onwards. As many observers have noted, his agenda was also obviously influenced by a variety of earlier, external models, including Japan’s nineteenth-century “self-strengthening movement” and Atatürk’s reforms in interwar Turkey.131 What changed in the wake of Japan’s military incursion was the pace and intensity of the regime’s efforts, including a shift from promotion to mandating of prescribed behaviors on pain of penalty. On the face of it, it seems difficult to see the connection between the Phibun government’s heightened commitment to an ever more intrusive cultural-reform agenda and the circumstances of war and de facto occupation. But then, what did the Pétainist cults of family and peasantry have to do with the realities of France’s predicament in 1940? It may have been precisely the lack of connection between these preoccupations and the country’s immediate situation that made such forms of patriotic activism – with their focus on socio-cultural norms, home life, and personal conduct – so appealing to regimes whose freedom of action in more conventional areas of policy-making was so narrowly circumscribed by the intrusive presence of a foreign power. On the one hand, Thailand’s formal entry into the war gave Phibun an opportunity to exploit concerns over national security to deploy more coercive measures in support of his “cultural mandates” (ratthaniyom – literally, state customs). On the other hand, it seems plausible that the humiliating circumstances of an increasingly heavy-handed Japanese military presence, the financial burdens placed on the state budget by the Japanese forces’ loan “requests,” and 130

131

Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, ch. 10; Maurizio Peleggi, “Refashioning Civilization: Dress and Bodily Practice in Thai Nation-Building,” in Mina Roces and Louise Edwards, eds., The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2007), 72–76. On the influence of the Turkish example, see Sulak Sivaraksa, “The Crisis of Siamese Identity,” in Reynolds, ed., National Identity and its Defenders, 40.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

89

the economic costs of cutting Thailand off from its primary foreign markets and sources of key imports in the British empire, served to motivate an over-compensatory intensification of the top-down, behaviour-modification campaign. The cultural sphere was, essentially, the one arena where the government really could act autonomously at a time when other, more substantive forms of national self-determination were radically curtailed by virtue of the country’s de facto occupation.132 As in the case of many European countries under occupation, the criteria for membership in the national community became more restrictive in wartime Thailand. The Phibun regime’s strident insistence that Buddhism – as defined and shaped by a set of religious institutions over which the government was consolidating its control – constituted an intrinsic and defining aspect of Thai national culture served to marginalize Muslims in the country’s south, among other minorities.133 At the same time, the government sought to continue its repression of the country’s sizable and economically influential Chinese minority through further legislative measures designed to break the dominance of, or stop inroads into, various sectors of the economy by non-citizens (a proxy category – as noted above – for the many ethnic Chinese who remained resident aliens). Twenty-seven professions (ranging from practicing law to vending noodles) were reserved for Thai citizens only.134 The government sought to place Thais in charge of commerce in key commodities, in an effort to ethno-nationalize the country’s economy; the result was only to create opportunities for corruption and to disrupt the flow of goods at a time when wartime conditions were already contributing to inflation and shortages. In January 1943, six northern provinces of the country were declared a “restricted zone” that would be off-limits to foreign nationals. This led to the expulsion from the region of tens of thousands of non-naturalized Chinese. Yet, if the idea was to create economic opportunity for Thai citizens, the result was only to manufacture a labor shortage.135 Phibun also responded to Japanese demands in 132

133 134 135

After 1945, Phibun was to claim that his wartime reform program had been designed to head off the possibility of a Japanese intrusion into the cultural and ideological realms of Thailand’s national life. This was essentially to characterize his policy as one of cultural resistance, which smacks of ex post facto justification, especially when retroactively projected into the context of 1942. (See Numnonda, Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 38–39.) By 1943, however, Phibun was in fact beginning to hedge his bets as Japan’s prospects in the Pacific War started to grow dim. Suwannathat-Pian, Thailand’s Durable Premier, 129–33. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 237. Eiji Murashima, “The Thai–Japanese Alliance and the Chinese of Thailand,” in Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Milton Park, UK: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 203–4. The evaluation of the economic

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

90

Patriotisms under Occupation

March 1943 for Thai labor on the construction of the Thailand–Burma Railroad by outsourcing the task to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which was made responsible for the recruitment (to use a euphemistic term) of Chinese coolies for the grueling work. Ethnic Chinese were allowed to reenter the northern restricted zone for purposes of this nightmarish undertaking, which was associated with a notoriously high death toll among its workforce.136 This allowed Phibun to limit the depth of the patriotic pitfall faced by collaborationist leaders in Western Europe who did not have on hand an equivalently large ethnic minority population to offer up to the Germans when the latter began to conscript labor in occupied countries around the same time. Conversely, the prospect of naturalization was left open to some of the most economically influential members of Thailand’s Chinese community, provided they were willing to break their ties with the old royalists in favor of regime-affiliated power brokers.137 The pattern of regime-sponsored anti-Chinese policy and propaganda appears eerily reminiscent of the treatment of Jews by the authorities of many occupied countries in Europe. And in fact, as indicated earlier, the Thai regime’s chief nationalist ideologue, Wichit Wathakan, had explicitly revived the analogy between Thailand’s ethnic Chinese minority and the allegedly parasitical Jews of Europe. The anti-Chinese measures and rhetoric may have been one of the most popular elements of the government’s policy and rhetoric; certainly, within the circle of the People’s Party leadership, ethnic Thai economic nationalism had also been actively promoted by Pridi as minister of finance following the party’s 1939 consolidation of power.138 Yet the analogy remains a limited one. For one thing, as E. Bruce Reynolds has pointed out, the antiChinese policies had nothing to do with racist ideology; in fact, it was widely known that the regime’s top leaders and the policy’s key architects, including Pridi, Wichit, and Phibun himself, were at least partially of Chinese descent.139 Technically, citizenship status rather than ethnoracial heritage was the key factor determining whether or not one fell

136 137 138 139

repercussions of the nationalization campaign is found in a copy of an unattributed and undated French-language intelligence assessment, presumably authored by Vichy colonial officials in Japanese-occupied Indochina, and apparently composed in the second half of 1943, found in RG 226 (OSS), Entry 190, Box 744, Folder 61473, NARA. See also G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), 275–76. Murashima, “Thai–Japanese Alliance,” 204–7. Suwannathat-Pian, Thailand’s Durable Premier, 147–49. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 102–3, 118–20, 237; Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan, 153. Reynolds, “Phibun Songkhram and Thai Nationalism,” 110–11.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

91

under the various legal and economic restrictions and special taxes imposed upon the Chinese community during these years. Most crucially, Japan’s attitude towards Thailand’s Chinese minority was very different from that of Germany towards the Jews. Japan was, of course, engaged in a horrific military campaign in China, where atrocities against civilians took place on a wholesale basis that defied the imagination with respect to both their scale and their brutality. In some of the Southeast Asian countries that came under Japanese occupation, this pattern carried over into the violent and repressive targeting of overseas Chinese populations suspected of constituting a potential fifth column in Japan’s expanding empire – most notoriously in Malaya (including Singapore), where several tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese were massacred in early 1942.140 But in Thailand, the Japanese commanders actually pursued a policy of enlightened self-interest towards the Chinese, whose Chamber of Commerce proved willing to work with them by helping negotiate contracts and organize labor recruitment for high-priority infrastructure projects. Hence, the Japanese actually tended to exert a moderating influence on the Phibun regime’s anti-Chinese proclivities, rather than fanning the flames of persecution. It was the proAllied Free Thai exiles and underground (see p. 93) who now began to direct their rhetorical fire at what they portrayed as shameless profiteering by members of Thailand’s Chinese community.141 In the bigger picture, the Thai state’s wartime efforts to sponsor and support the growth of a de-Sinicized, ethnic-Thai-dominated manufacturing sector could not, ironically enough, succeed without drawing on the managerial skills of members of the ethnic Chinese business community. This complementarity of functions was to become further enhanced in the postwar years.142 Gauging popular reception of Phibun’s wartime brand of patriotism is even more difficult than is the task of assessing public opinion in occupied West European countries. Hostility to the regime on the part of most members of the royal family and their hangers-on could practically be taken for granted, given the adversarial nature of the relationship between the People’s Party and the monarchy over the course of the decade since the 1932 coup. As to the masses, in the 1940s, the bulk of Thailand’s population still consisted of peasants, among whom illiteracy

140 141 142

Cheah Boon Kheng, “Japanese Army Policy toward the Chinese and Malay–Chinese Relations in Wartime Malaya,” in Kratoska, ed., Southeast Asian Minorities. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 237; Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, 178. Huff, World War II and Southeast Asia, 211–12, 417–18.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

92

Patriotisms under Occupation

was widespread and exposure to radio transmissions (favored by Phibun as a vector of propaganda and indoctrination) was still limited,143 and whose notions of, and attitudes towards, government-propagated conceptions of national identity remain largely in the realm of speculation. It was a little easier for outsiders to gain an impressionistic sense of sentiments among the urban populace, whether it be through conversations with servants, exchanges overheard in the marketplace, or public displays of emotion. Thus, the United Press correspondent stationed in Bangkok during the entry of Japanese soldiers into the capital reported that “the Thailanders … wept as they stood dazed in the streets or watched a Japanese bomber circle ominously overhead.”144 But when foreign observers and intelligence agencies discussed Thai public opinion in more substantive terms, what they usually had in mind was attitudes among institutional personnel and social strata such as the officer corps of the armed services, government officials and civil servants, members of the national assembly, the intelligentsia (e.g. journalists, academics, and university students), and other relatively educated segments of the urban population. By the same token, barring any massive outbreak of rural unrest, it was precisely among these circles that shifting political loyalties, identities, and attitudes had the greatest potential to affect the complexion and policies of the regime. Within the top echelon of the government, there appears to have been a consensus in favor of acquiescing in Japan’s initial, December 7 and 8, 1941, demands for military transit rights through Thailand. To continue firing on the invading Japanese forces would clearly have been a very costly gesture for the regime and for the country as a whole. By the same token, Phibun’s absence from the capital at the crucial hour had, by default, led to several hours of armed resistance that provided the Thai political leadership and military alike with at least a figleaf of patriotic honor behind which to negotiate a quick cessation of hostilities. Japan’s apparent eagerness to leave Thailand’s sovereignty officially intact, as well as to avoid the formal juridical and administrative apparatus of an occupation regime, seemed to obviate any need for the government to go into exile rather than remaining in place to preserve as much as it could of the substance of national sovereignty in the context of the new geopolitical reality.

143

144

A post-war study reported that “except in a few villages near Bangkok, Thai peasants do not own radios and are likely to hear them only by chance in a market town or a city.” John E. De Young, Village Life in Modern Thailand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 173. Darrell Berrigan, as quoted in Numnonda, Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 44.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

93

Accordingly, Phibun had little trouble winning over the support of Pridi and other “liberal” cabinet members for the most minimalist option among the menu of possible agreements initially proposed by the Japanese – which ranged from military transit rights combined with continued Thai neutrality, to the formal alignment of Thai foreign and military policy with that of Japan. The terms of this initial arrangement with Japan represented the lowest common denominator among the country’s ruling elite. As Pridi saw it, this approach could be seen and justified as analogous to the position which Denmark had adopted in the face of Germany’s invasion.145 Indeed, in Thailand’s case, as in that of Denmark until 1943, the passage and stationing of the invader’s troops was not even formally described as an occupation, although, in fact, the Japanese military presence was to prove heavy-handed and ended up lasting for the duration of the war. The Japanese armed forces in the country were officially there as “guests” of the Thai nation. The fact that the preexisting Thai government remained intact and functioning certainly did buffer much of the population from routine direct contact with and abuse by Japanese forces. This stood in stark contrast to the situation in other occupied regions of Southeast Asia, where the face-slapping of civilians perceived as insufficiently deferential towards Japanese soldiers was the least among the various outrages and humiliations people commonly suffered.146 That said, Phibun’s moves in December–January 1941–42 to ally the country with Japan and declare war on Britain and the United States raised widespread concern among the country’s elites. Overseas, the Thai minister to Washington (Seni Pramoj – a member of the royal family) publicly repudiated his government’s actions and initiated the organization of Thai exiles into a Free Thai movement, its name inspired by the example of de Gaulle’s Free French. On the home front, Pridi – who had, in the meantime, been reassigned from the cabinet to the regency council as a result of Japanese pressure – discreetly began to distance himself from Phibun’s strategic choices.147 Borrowing a page out of Phibun’s book, Pridi managed to be out of town at the time the 145

146

147

Thawi Bunyaket, “Additional Facts on the Situation in Thailand during World War II,” in Direk Jayanama, Thailand and World War II, trans. Jane Keyes (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2008; original Thai ed., 1967), 140. Benjamin A. Batson, “Siam and Japan: The Perils of Independence,” in Alfred W. McCoy, ed., Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1980), 236–37. Pridi Banomyong, “Establishment of the Anti-Japanese Resistance Movement and Seri Thai” (essay first published in 1981), in Pridi Banomyong, Pridi by Pridi: Selected Writings on Life, Politics, and Economy, trans. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2000), 201–2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

94

Patriotisms under Occupation

other two members of the three-man regency council signed off on the declarations of war on the Allies, leaving him untainted by the decision to abandon neutrality. Pridi soon began to quietly assemble a network of Free Thai supporters within the country. Precisely how early he became actively committed to the anti-Japanese cause is a matter of some debate. At least one scholar has contended that his main objective in aligning himself with the Free Thai movement was the undermining of his rival Phibun’s power, for which an anti-Japanese brand of patriotism (which created the possible prospect of eventual Allied support for a change of leadership in Bangkok) proved a ready-to-hand instrument.148 Suffice it to say that, especially in the context of a shifting tide of war from 1943 onwards, it is almost pointless to postulate a clear-cut distinction between means and ends in a situation where patriotic honor (in the face of an increasingly resented, economically disruptive, and financially draining Japanese troop presence), long-term national interest (in the event of an eventual Allied victory), and the internal settling of political accounts could all potentially converge. There is some evidence to suggest that Pridi’s growing skepticism over Phibun’s decision to embrace, and take part in, Japan’s pursuit of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was in line with sentiments among broader cross-sections of Thai society. In the aftermath of the Japanese incursion, anti-war leaflets were reported to have been distributed in Bangkok.149 The following month, a number of Thai journalists were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the production of these pamphlets, as were a group of ethnic Chinese community leaders accused of anti-regime and/or anti-Japanese activities.150 In his December 12, 1941 broadcast announcement of the conclusion of the Thai–Japanese Offensive and Defensive Alliance, Phibun himself implicitly acknowledged the hostility of Thai public opinion to such an alignment. According to one of the country’s leading English-language newspapers, the Bangkok Chronicle, Phibun “attributed the bad feeling towards the Japanese people among some sections of the Thais recently to personal affairs and foreign propaganda.” He went on to insist that “[t]he government cannot follow only public opinion in forming the nation’s policy, nor can the public act independently from the government’s views.”151 148 149 150 151

Nigel J. Brailey, Thailand and the Fall of Singapore: A Frustrated Asian Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 99, 111–14. Numnonda, Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 17; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 230. Murashima, “Thai–Japanese Alliance,” 201; Brailey, Thailand and the Fall of Singapore, 113. “Premier in Radio Address Explains Why Thailand Signed New Alliance Pact,” Bangkok Chronicle, December 13, 1941, p. 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

95

Subsequently, US intelligence continued to note evidence of public disaffection – and not only among well-educated elites. Thus, in June 1942, a Thai newspaper editorial called on bicycle-rickshaw (trishaw) drivers to “do their duty for the betterment of the nation” – which the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) interpreted as an indirect reference to violence being directed against Japanese citizens in Bangkok by the notoriously rough trishaw operators, who had apparently made a habit of beating up “arrogant” Japanese visitors during the period preceding the country’s invasion.152 In November of that year, US military intelligence debriefed a number from among the several dozen American residents of Thailand who had been detained in Bangkok for half a year following the Japanese incursion, before being allowed to depart the country at the end of June. The relatively lenient terms of their internment having left them in contact with a number of Thai citizens, they reported a general attitude of passive and attentiste hostility towards the Japanese among their local interlocutors. By the same token, they suggested that many politically informed Thais were also disinclined to take risks on behalf of the Allied cause in the absence of clear indications about what Thailand’s status would be in the aftermath of an Axis defeat. As Leon Von Haverbeck (an American film importer who had been based in Bangkok for eight years) put it, “they figure it costs nothing to hold out, and who knows, they might get something out of it at somebody else’s expense.” Haverbeck went on to indicate that hostility towards Britain (given, presumably, its history of economic hegemony over, and unequal treaty relationship with, Thailand) ran very high, whereas the United States was viewed more favorably.153 These and other reports also tended to distinguish between figures such as the regime’s main ideologue and propagandist, Wichit, who was viewed as a stooge of the Japanese, and Phibun, who was widely seen as having at the very least spared Thailand the horror and destruction of a full-fledged Japanese military conquest. Phibun’s inclusion in the cabinet of figures viewed as more extreme in their pro-Axis and fascistic tendencies clearly allowed him to position himself as a true patriot – avoiding the risks of resistance in the face of overwhelming Japanese superiority, on the one hand, while not as enthusiastic in his support for the Japanese worldview as some of his colleagues, on the other. In the latter period of his wartime 152

153

“Review of Developments in Siam during June 1942,” OSS (Washington, DC), Intelligence Reports (“Regular Series”) 1941–45, RG 226, Entry 190, Box 162, Folder 21710, NARA. OSS copies of G–2 Report Thailand, No. 881 (Source: Mr. Harry Dougherty), November 12, 1942 and G–2 Report Thailand, No. 890 (Source: Mr. Leon Von Haverbeck), November 13, 1942, Military Intelligence Division, War Department General Staff, RG 226, Entry 190, Box 465, Folder 41058, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

96

Patriotisms under Occupation

rule, Phibun edged ever further away from close identification with Japanese interests. He sent a deputy to the November 1943 Greater East Asia Conference (see Part II) rather than attending himself and began secretly exploring the possibility of switching sides in the war (on the Italian model). For its part, Japan sought to retain Bangkok’s goodwill by ceding some patches of Burmese and Malayan territory to Thailand in August 1943.154 The cooling of Phibun’s stance towards the Japanese reflected both their darker long-term military prospects and the spread of dissatisfaction within Thailand. In November 1943, US intelligence debriefed the recently freed Sarah Davies, an American instructor at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University and English-language tutor to members of the Thai elite. Davies was fluent in Thai and had had access to local newspapers as well as to many members of Thai society during her internment in her own home in Bangkok. She reported that “such Thais as sided with the Japanese in the beginning now have turned against them,” and suggested that, by extension, unhappiness with Phibun was spreading.155 Around the same time, though, a defecting Thai foreign ministry official and law school professor, Daeng Guna Tilaka, whose general impressions of Thai sentiment towards Japan tallied with those of Sarah Davies, advised that Allied propaganda not focus its attacks on Phibun personally, given that there were “elements in the country” who still credited him with having spared Thailand the devastation that a fullblown, extended Japanese military campaign against it would have entailed.156 In fact, given the circumstances of Japan’s overwhelming regional power at this juncture, Phibun’s collaboration with his country’s de facto occupiers seems to have been less of a liability to him in the court of public opinion than were his regime’s autonomous moves to force through the rapid modernization and national homogenization of Thai 154 155

156

Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, chs. 6–7; David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale, 2003), 248. Reports on interviews of Sarah Davies, dated November 24 and 29, 1943, OSS, Intelligence Reports (“Regular Series”) 1941–45, RG 226, Entry 190, Box 601, Folder 50415, NARA; “Report on Bangkok” based on interview of Sarah Davies by US military intelligence following her December 1, 1943 repatriation to the USA, RG 165, Entry 77, Box 3013 (Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Military Intelligence Division “Regional” File. 1922–44. Thailand), Folder 3020, NARA. “Interview with Mr. Daeng Guna Tilaka” (conducted by US military intelligence in New Delhi, as facilitated by Tilaka’s OSS contacts), November 18, 1943, RG 165, Entry 77, Box 3013, Folder 2900, NARA. On the group with which Daeng defected, see E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War: The Free Thai, OSS, and SOE during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 123–24.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Patriotic Solidarity in the First Flush of Defeat

97

social mores and culture. Tilaka characterized the government’s dictates on matters of personal dress and conduct as ranging from “irksome” to “merely stupid,” and claimed that the National Institute of Culture (set up to disseminate the Phibun regime’s cultural-reform agenda) was “regarded as a joke.”157 Sarah Davies pointed out the utter contradiction between the growing wartime shortages of basic commodities, including fabric, and the government’s rigid insistence that even the most destitute peasants be required to wear Western-style clothing, “including hat and shoes,” as a condition for being allowed “to enter a public market, to travel in a public conveyance (train or bus), or to enter a government office.”158 It is no surprise that, in rural settings, the officially mandated dress codes were met with widespread derision and were very difficult to enforce, notwithstanding the government’s propagation of the sartorial reform campaign through a scripted radio-dialogue series and despite the zealous efforts of the National Institute of Culture’s roving propaganda and education squads.159 Perhaps all one can safely say is that Japan’s functional occupation of the country created a situation in which open opposition to Phibun and his brand of nationalism initially seemed pointless and self-destructive, allowing Phibun and his ideological and political allies to seize the occasion to push through their vision of Thai national rebirth combined with their own personal self-aggrandizement. Given the strong elements of continuity with his pre-war (1939–41) initiatives, it would appear that Phibun’s modus operandi was not simply to employ the cultural-reform program as a means of diverting attention from his regime’s subservience to the Japanese (as suggested by the former Third Secretary of the American Legation in Bangkok).160 It was also – as in the cases of Pétain and of the Dutch secretaries-general and Nederlandse Unie’s Triumvirate – to treat occupation as an unparalleled opportunity to be exploited for the vigorous implementation of a preexisting, right-wing agenda under the guise of meeting the patriotic need for unity in the face of alien hegemony and ongoing global conflict. By the same token, most of the leaders involved in these efforts had likely persuaded themselves that their agendas were inherently patriotic in the first place. In all four of this section’s cases, public responses to these visions of patriotism initially ranged from active embrace to passive acceptance.

157 158 159 160

“Interview with Tilaka.” “Report on Bangkok,” RG 165, Entry 77, Box 3013, Folder 3020, NARA. Peleggi, “Refashioning Civilization,” 75. “Report on Japanese Wartime Propaganda in Thailand,” August 21, 1942, RG 165, Entry 77, Box 3013, Folder 2930, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

98

Patriotisms under Occupation

But such attitudes remained dominant only so long as the new status quo was seen as minimizing the “core population’s” exposure to the ravages of war and to the roughest edges of occupation, while simultaneously maximizing the potential for retaining or eventually regaining a modicum of national independence and self-determination. The next chapter will explore how the patriotic credibility of accommodationist stances and collaborationist regimes began to erode in the face of shifts in the conditions of occupation and in the expectations about the war’s outcome alike.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

3

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

The Erosion of Initial Solidarities On August 12, 1941, Philippe Pétain took to the airwaves to speak to his compatriots of an “evil wind” he sensed rising across the land. Among the factors he blamed for what he described as a growing public mood of disquiet and a questioning of his government’s authority were the forces of the “ancien régime” (i.e. the Third Republic) – the Freemasons chief among them! But, after first claiming that the partisans of the defunct system and of the corporate “trusts” were somehow interposing themselves between “the people” and him – between whom, otherwise, a mutual understanding existed – he went on to imply that it was precisely the French people who were at fault. Insisting that authority no longer flowed from the bottom up but rather from his own person, he described the solution to the problem as lying in a more energetic and forceful use of that authority to implement the principles of the National Revolution. The marshal cited his past record of restoring order out of chaos during the military mutinies of 1917 as well as the rout of 1940, concluding that “today, it is from yourselves that I wish to save you.” The alternative, he warned, was a civil war on the Spanish model.1 Clearly, Pétain was being briefed on the shifting currents of public opinion, with which the Vichy state’s surveillance apparatus was so deeply preoccupied. Although his proposed solution – more repressive policies – would only prove counterproductive, the problem of an increasingly disaffected nation was quite real. Indeed, in all of the countries under examination in this part of the book, the broad consensus that had crystallized around accommodationist forms of patriotism during the first months under occupation soon began to suffer erosion. This was a multi-causal and overdetermined phenomenon. The German and Japanese occupation regimes were inherently prone to ever 1

Philippe Pétain, “Message du 12 aoȗt 1941,” in Pétain, Discours aux Français. My translations. See also Laborie, L’opinion française, 255–57.

99

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

100

Patriotisms under Occupation

more intrusive, repressive, violent, and exploitative practices. In the European cases, this was partly a function of the extremist nature of Nazi ideology combined with the competitive chaos typical of Hitler’s regime as a whole and of Germany’s occupation administrations in particular: multiple state, party, and security organizations vied with one another for influence in occupied lands in a political environment that often seemed to reward radicalism over pragmatism.2 In the case of both Germany and Japan, the ever-growing economic strain of engaging in total war (following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941) created pressures on occupation regimes to impose increasingly inequitable and exploitative terms of trade and to extract material and labor resources ever more ruthlessly. And, by 1943 at the latest, the fact that the Axis powers were clearly failing to prevail in the global conflict was leading to a fundamental shift of expectations across the occupied lands of Eurasia: even had the modi vivendi between occupiers and occupied remained static throughout the course of the war years, the assumption that the Axis had achieved a decisive and long-term victory, on which the patriotic credibility of some of those arrangements had rested, was no longer plausible. Given this concatenation of circumstances all driving towards the same result – growing hostility to the Axis forces and those working with them – it seems very difficult to disentangle the role of patriotism from the multiple other material, ideological, moral, personal, and communal factors shaping the rapidly evolving political dynamics in occupied countries. But it would be all too facile to jump to the conclusion that patriotic sentiment played no substantive role in shaping how people conceived of their interests and in determining how their political sympathies evolved. To be sure, most people were not patriots in a heroic, romanticized manner. That is, they were not inclined to risk everything they held personally dear for the sake of freeing their country from occupation, no matter the odds. But by the same token, most people do not appear to have remained indifferent to, or unaware of, a certain patriotic calculus. This calculus established the rough parameters of what might be termed the patriotically plausible under a given set of conditions. As conditions were continually shifting, the parameters of the patriotically plausible were likewise in constant flux, albeit in a generally directional way: that 2

On the phenomenon of Nazi “bureaucratic feudalism” and the competition among agencies and individuals “working towards the Führer,” see Ian Kershaw, “‘Working towards the Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 1993), 103–18.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

101

is, the fulcrum of the spectrum of opinion tended to shift over time towards greater resentment of the alien occupiers. This, in turn, placed political elites between a rock and a hard place, as they struggled to maneuver between the ever more onerous demands of the occupying powers and the ever greater discontent of the populations on whose behalf they claimed to act. A variety of factors, ranging from the degree of internal polarization characteristic of the country’s pre-war history, to the initial conditions set in place at the onset of occupation, to the choices subsequently made by all parties, helped to determine whether a political or administrative regime that had struck an understanding with the occupiers would succeed in navigating its way through to continued legitimacy or would eventually fall victim to an external challenge (typically, from a resistance movement). In either case, I would argue, the parameters of patriotic plausibility helped determine the locus of political legitimacy. Examples of this dynamic have already been seen in earlier chapters – for instance, in the case of the broad initial public acceptance of the Vichy regime in association with Pétain’s negotiation of an armistice that left a portion of French territory unoccupied and that left intact a sovereign government which promised to buffer the French population against the harshest edges of enemy occupation. At that juncture, de Gaulle’s patriotic purism had little traction because it seemed so utterly implausible – and because of the nature of the situation, in which Pétain and de Gaulle rejected one another’s legitimacy, requiring that people make an either/or choice of where to direct their loyalty. For most French citizens at that point, it seemed apparent that Pétain’s regime was struggling to retain as much freedom of action for itself and on behalf of the French people as it could under the circumstances. This necessarily entailed accommodating the victors in their partial occupation of the country. But to accommodate was one thing, to collaborate another – or, at least, so many people seem to have imagined. Hence the widely reported disaffection with Pétain’s October 1940 announcement that he was pursuing collaboration with Germany. In effect, the majority of the public appears to have realized what Pétain and many of his key associates did not: that seeking out some sort of active partnership with Germany in the context of the existing, radically unequal relationship between the two countries could only serve to institutionalize, rather than mitigate, that inequality. Moreover, the regime’s own postal-intercept surveys indicated that a majority of opinion continued to hope for an eventual British victory in the war, even after the British attack on French naval forces at Mers elKebir, which Vichy propaganda exploited to the full. Ridding the country of its German occupiers was apparently a much more compelling issue in

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

102

Patriotisms under Occupation

the minds of most French citizens.3 Even as Vichy cultivated the religiopatriotic cult of Joan of Arc, highlighting her confrontation with and martyrdom at the hands of the English, in the long run the adoption by the Free French of Joan’s Cross of Lorraine as its symbol spoke to a more compelling understanding of who, five hundred years on, France’s oppressors were.4 After November 1942, when German forces moved into the hitherto unoccupied southeast of the country in the wake of the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, the entire rationale underpinning Vichy policy was fatally undermined. By the same token, the array of forces opposed to Vichy, ranging from de Gaulle’s Free French movement – which, in joint operations with the British, had been gaining footholds in French-controlled parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East – to the domestic resistance organizations, were becoming more credible in their claims to the patriotic high ground. These were claims that had always been much more straightforward to make on a principled basis, as the defensive tone in Vichy’s propaganda (see the previous chapter) had suggested; what they gained now was greater plausibility. Vichy responded by trying to depict its defense of imperial holdings against British-backed, Gaullist challengers – and its vain aspiration to reconquer those that had been lost – as an expression of its historical legitimacy and as crucial to the preservation of French sovereignty.5 In January 1941, a publication (based on a series of radio programs broadcast to France and the empire during September 1940) chronicling the heroism of various French military units in defense of French soil during 1940 pointedly included accounts concerning the successful defense of Dakar in West Africa against British and Free French assault, alongside stories of the honorable fight that had been

3 4

5

Laborie, L’opinion française, 244–47. Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 154–65; Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France, 122, 133; Alexander Werth, De Gaulle: A Political Biography, new ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 101, 160; Roger Caratini, Jeanne d’Arc: De Domrémy à Orléans et du bûcher à la légende (Paris: l’Archipel, 1999), 362; Dominique Rossignol, Histoire de la propagande en France de 1940 à 1944: L’utopie Pétain (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), 84–87; Philippe Pétain, speech delivered in his name on May 10, 1942, in Philippe Pétain, Actes et écrits, ed. Jacques Isorni (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 230–32; Nadia Margolis, “The ‘Joan Phenomenon’ and the French Right,” in Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood, eds., Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc (New York: Garland, 1996), 275; Michel Winock, “Jeanne d’Arc,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. III: Les France, Part 3: De l’archive à l’emblème (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 722; René Rémond, “La fille aînée de l’église,” in Nora, ed., De l’archive à l’emblème, 578. Burrin, France under the Germans, ch. 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

103

waged against German forces during the Battle of France.6 During the battle over Syria and Lebanon in May–June 1941, Pétain depicted the Free French as collaborators with a British imperialism that was undertaking an assault on French imperial unity and sovereignty, while he minimized the significance of German use of Vichy French-controlled Syrian airbases, which had precipitated the assault.7 The resistance countered these kinds of arguments by pointing to Vichy’s passive acquiescence in Japan’s de facto occupation of French-administered Indochina.8 The overarching reality was that Vichy’s losses in Africa and the Middle East were part of a global trend that held forth the potential prospect of eventual Axis defeat and that thereby undercut the geopolitical premise of the Vichy regime’s claim to patriotic legitimacy. At the same time, it was the loss of most of French North Africa to Anglo-American forces in November 1942 that precipitated the German move into the unoccupied zone of metropolitan France. By 1943, when the Vichy authorities began drafting French labor for obligatory service in Germany, it had become painfully apparent that the regime was being reduced to a proxy for German power rather than an effective buffer against it. To be sure, only a tiny fraction of the population was ever actively involved in organized resistance, and the Communists’ powerful role in the movement from June 1941 on put many people off (even though Moscow’s directives at this juncture ensured that Communists across occupied Eurasia cast their resistance efforts as predominantly patriotic rather than revolutionary in orientation). In many people’s eyes, resistance fighters were still outlaws, whose violence against German forces only created the risk of horrific reprisals against French civilians. Marcel Ophuls’ famous documentary film, The Sorrow and the Pity,9 showed how reflexively – a quarter-century later – people would still refer to members of the underground by the Germans’ and Vichy’s preferred term: terrorists. But the problem for Vichy was that it was digging itself into a hole. Rather than resigning in the face of Germany’s violation of the armistice

6

7

8 9

André-Paul Antoine, ed., Mémorial de France: Faits d’armes de la campagne, 1939–1940 (Paris [this publication printed in unoccupied Toulouse]: Sequana Éditeur; Édition speciale de la Légion, January 14, 1941). Philippe Pétain, “Message du 8 juin 1941,” in Pétain, Discours aux français, 140–41. On Syria and Lebanon, see Aviel Roshwald, Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). “Vichy defend l’empire,” Combat, May 1942. Marcel Ophuls, Le chagrin et la pitié: Chronique d’une ville française sous l’occupation (Milestone Films, 1969).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

104

Patriotisms under Occupation

terms in November 1942, Pétain and company stubbornly remained in office, clinging to the outward trappings of sovereignty as it became inescapably clear that its substance had been thoroughly hollowed out. In so doing, they necessarily eliminated any realistic possibility of retaining their patriotic credentials in the eyes of the public they claimed to serve. As the resistance newspaper Combat put it in December 1942, contrasting the shameful situation in which Vichy placed France with the dignified position the publication attributed to smaller countries under occupation (by implication, those that had governments in exile, such as the Netherlands or Poland): “Next to the small, vanquished but unbroken nations, closely bound in their resistance around their government or their sovereign, France alone will have had to endure this scandal, go up this Calvary.”10 The injury Combat was concerned with was to the nation’s honor. As the human suffering associated with the material deprivations and violence of wartime occupation grew more acute, this version of patriotism gained in social resonance, while the logical contortions of Vichy’s case for its brand of patriotism became ever harder to follow. Pétain did continue to command considerable affection from many of his compatriots, as reflected in the large crowds that flocked to greet him during his visit to Paris in late April 1944 – just four months before de Gaulle was greeted by delirious throngs following the city’s liberation. But, as Pierre Laborie has argued, and as the regime’s own public opinion assessments indicated, this is best understood as an expression of attachment to Pétain’s person as a symbol of once and future sovereignty rather than as a manifestation of continued faith in the regime over which he presided.11 Indeed, one of the most telling indications of the collapse of the patriotic rationale for the Vichy government’s continued existence during the regime’s final stages was the degree to which it became dependent on, and dominated by, personalities and movements openly and explicitly committed to what might be termed a fascist internationalist agenda. The institutionalization of Joseph Darnand’s pro-Nazi militia – the Milice – as a security arm of the Vichy government and Darnand’s appointment as secretary of the interior in December 1943 was a case in point; Darnand joined the Waffen-SS as a lieutenant in August of that year.12 Fascist internationalism is a phenomenon that will be explored

10 11

12

“1940–1942: Inventaire de Faillite,” Combat, December 1942. My translation. Laborie, L’opinion française, 11–12, 264, 300–1. See also John Sweets, Choice in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 152–53. Burrin, France under the Germans, 72, chs. 27–28.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

105

more fully in a later chapter, but the thing to note here is that Vichy’s final descent into it can be taken as a marker of the limits of patriotic plausibility. By this point in its trajectory, the regime had to rely on such elements precisely because the rationale for its collaborationist patriotism had been stretched beyond the breaking point. The experiences of the other three countries examined in this part of the book can serve to illustrate this concept by virtue of both the parallels and the differences in their trajectories. In each of these cases, the indigenous political authorities displayed greater flexibility and adaptability than did Vichy in their efforts to hold on to patriotic credibility. In Denmark and Thailand, this was partly a function of the relatively more accommodating policies of the occupiers, which left the local elites somewhat greater room for maneuver. But in all three cases, it was also related to the different initial choices made by the national political authorities: of our four cases, France was the only one that experienced a domestic regime change in connection with the onset of occupation. Although his assumption of the power to draft a new constitution was notoriously approved by the Third Republic’s national assembly, Pétain then abused his position to effect a radical juridical and ideological break with republican values and to institute a right-wing dictatorship. The very existence of that regime and of its so-called National Revolution was intimately associated with, and predicated upon, Germany’s military victory and political hegemony. The Vichy government therefore had a fundamental stake, if not in an outright German victory, then at least in the Allies failing to decisively prevail in the world war. The circumstances and choices surrounding the establishment of the Vichy regime set it on a path-dependent course that left it incapable of responding effectively to the geopolitical and ideological paradigm shift of German defeat. In the Netherlands, as suggested earlier, the initial arrangements were characterized by formal constitutional continuity. The queen and cabinet’s flight to London fell into line with pre-war plans for the contingency of enemy occupation, creating a division of labor: the monarch and her government maintained the principle of unbroken sovereignty from exile, where they remained untainted by any hint of collusion with the occupier. The secretaries-general who stayed behind were supposed to play the role of functionaries responsible simply for maximizing the welfare of the Dutch population under difficult circumstances. Unlike the case of Vichy, this institutional set-up did not constitute a gamble on the longterm survival of German hegemony. That said, it did not take long for a variety of conservative and right-wing forces to begin questioning the premises and substance of this arrangement. The founding of the Nederlandse Unie was the clearest and most influential move in the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

106

Patriotisms under Occupation

direction of a new, post-democratic, solidarist vision of Dutch nationhood. And yet, as Louis de Jong has shown (see Chapter 2), the very success of the Unie at mass mobilization created internal tensions that its leadership was hard-put to contain and that contributed to the German authorities’ decision to shut it down within a year of its founding. For their part, the Dutch secretaries-general’s role did take on certain resemblances to that of the Vichy government: in their case, too, cooperation with the German occupation authorities proved to be a slippery slope. Given the Nazis’ continually escalating demands, it became progressively harder for the secretaries-general and the bureaucracies they oversaw to placate their German overlords without violating their commitment to serving the interests of the Dutch people. This became apparent early on in the case of the first antisemitic measures, to which the Dutch authorities acquiesced under protest. The breaking point came in 1943 with the institution of compulsory labor service in Germany. As in France and other countries, this proved to be a red line for much of the population because it impinged on the freedom of young men from across a broad spectrum of society; that is to say, it was no longer “just” the Jews who were affected. The result was a dramatic upswing in acts of protest, sabotage, and resistance. It also brought on a formal and public break between the secretaries-general and the Dutch government-in-exile, which issued a revised set of guidelines, broadcast by radio from London, to Dutch public servants in May 1943. These directives marked a paradigm shift away from the original Aanwijzingen. They placed the onus of individual responsibility on civil servants choosing to remain in office for any complicity in actions, such as conscription of workers and deportation of Jews, that violated rather than served the interests of the public.13 (The government-in-exile notably lagged behind the major mouthpieces of the Dutch resistance, which had called on the secretaries-general to resign in protest over the deportations of Jews the previous year.14) Yet it should also be noted that by 1943, most of the original secretaries-general (one significant exception being the head of the interior ministry, who held on until September 1944) had in fact resigned from their posts or been removed from them and replaced by members of the NSB – the tiny Dutch Nazi party.15 A similar pattern 13 14

15

Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators, 86–87. Roni Hershkovitz, “The Persecution of the Jews, as Reflected in Dutch Underground Newspapers,” in Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan, eds., Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Nico Wouters, “The Impact of the German Occupation (1940–1944) on the Belgian and Dutch Mayoralty,” in John Garrard, ed., Heads of the Local State: Mayors, Provosts and Burgomasters since 1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 122.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

107

unfolded steadily at the level of local government: by the end of the German occupation, approximately 55 percent of the population lived in the almost three hundred municipalities where pre-war mayors had been replaced by German-appointed, NSB mayors.16 Remaining in office under the oversight of the Germans had originally been seen by most members of the political and administrative establishment as perfectly patriotic by virtue of its congruence with pre-war contingency planning and hence of its compatibility with continued loyalty to the Dutch crown. The crown had indeed sanctioned this approach from its place of exile in London. But by 1943, the intrusive and violent demands of the Nazis had dragged Dutch public servants into roles that lay beyond the limits of patriotic plausibility. At this juncture, the queen and cabinet’s original decision to continue the fight from abroad paid off, as their safe haven in Britain gave them the freedom to make a formal and public break in May 1943 with what had evolved into a collaborationist and heavily Nazified Dutch administrative apparatus, and to take up the cause of the growing Dutch resistance movement instead. In the post-war years, the fact that the formal representatives of Dutch sovereignty had thus remained removed from, and unsullied by, the unsavory compromises that were the inevitable byproduct of remaining in place under the Nazis served not only to leave the Dutch government’s patriotic credentials intact. It also lent itself, by extension as it were, to the ascription of a heroically patriotic role to the Dutch people as a whole. France, too, developed its myth of resistance, as fostered by Charles de Gaulle.17 But the fact that the country’s most plausible claimant to legitimate governmental authority during the war – the regime in Vichy – had remained in place beyond the threshold of patriotic plausibility was to weigh on French political identity in a way that remained a distinctive function of the initial choices made by Weygand, Pétain, and their associates during the Fall of France in 1940. By 1943–44, in a pattern reminiscent of aspects of our Western European examples, Axis setbacks in the global war were undercutting the geopolitical premises of Phibun’s brand of Thai patriotism. Although the king remained fairly aloof from politics from his place of residence in Switzerland, his continued voluntary absence from the country may, arguably, have lent itself to the contestation of the legitimacy of Phibun’s government by elements of the political and social elites who chose to 16

17

Louis de Jong as cited in Nico Wouters, Mayoral Collaboration under Nazi Occupation in Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, 1938–46 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 96. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

108

Patriotisms under Occupation

throw their lot in with the Allied cause. The leading overseas figure among the emergent “Free Thai” movement was the Thai ambassador to the United States, who – much like his Danish counterpart18 – contested the validity of any political decisions by a Bangkok regime operating under the shadow of the Japanese military presence. (This included Thailand’s declaration of war against Britain and the United States, which the US, in fact, chose not to acknowledge.19) Within Thailand, it was Pridi who took a leading role in the organization of an internal network of Free Thai operatives. Although their appellation obviously suggested that they were counterparts to de Gaulle’s Free French,20 the Free Thai operated under rather different circumstances. The Free Thai groups working in-country tended to focus their efforts on lending logistical support to British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and American OSS agents and their Free Thai expatriate trainees who made their way into Thailand, and on assisting Allied intelligence-gathering efforts directed at the Japanese.21 The movement remained relatively small in scale (numbering roughly eight thousand personnel)22 and less diverse in its ideological currents than the larger and more heterogeneous internal French resistance of 1943–44, over which de Gaulle’s representatives were hard pressed to assert their nominal authority.23 The ideological differences between regime and resistance seemed to become more indistinct over time, as Japanese prospects grew sour and their economic and financial exactions more insufferable. On the one hand, it remains a matter of scholarly dispute whether Pridi’s original motivations in organizing the Free Thai movement had to do more with a genuine patriotic and ideological commitment to throwing off the Japanese yoke or with the personal grudge he bore against Phibun for sacking him from the cabinet. His early supporters were also drawn mostly from figures with preexisting personal and political resentments against Phibun’s regime.24 One historian has gone so far as to impugn the entire Free Thai movement as little more than a political fraud designed for American consumption, in 18 20 21 23

24

19 Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 13. Ibid., 19–21. Minister to the United States Seni liked to think of himself as a Thai counterpart to de Gaulle. Ibid., 15. 22 Ibid., chs. 6–9. Ibid., 430. The Thai Communist Party was only established (clandestinely, of course) in 1942 and remained closely associated with the then-separate Chinese Communist Party of Thailand, which recruited among the ethnic Chinese minority and hence had little appeal among the ethnic Thai population. Martin Stuart-Fox, “Factors Influencing Relations between the Communist Parties of Thailand and Laos,” Asian Survey, Vol. 19, No. 4 (April 1979), 333–52. Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 82–84.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

109

anticipation of a transformed, post-war geopolitical constellation and based on the hunch that the United States could be induced to buffer Thailand against a resentful British attempt to penalize the country for Phibun’s proJapanese gambit.25 That assessment likely underestimates the patriotic sentiments that motivated many Free Thai volunteers to commit themselves to perilous missions infiltrating their homeland in search of intelligence and contacts. But the movement’s émigré leaders certainly were afflicted by mutual suspicions born of rival ambitions, as indeed were their sponsoring American and British (as well as Nationalist Chinese) intelligence agencies, whose capacity to act in support of the Free Thai was long impaired by their determination to out-maneuver one another in the competition for influence in post-war Southeast Asia.26 On the other hand, stalwarts of the Phibun regime themselves began to hedge their bets as the war dragged on. The security chief, Adun, made sure that, whenever possible, captured Allied personnel and SOE- and OSS-trained Free Thai agents remained in the benign custody of Thai forces rather than being turned over to the Japanese. By late 1944, Adun was tentatively open to facilitating communication between OSS agents in Thailand and their contacts abroad, while he outwardly maintained a show of loyalty to Thailand’s Japanese allies.27 As noted above, Phibun himself, sensing which way the winds were blowing, chose to snub the Greater East Asia Conference convened in Tokyo in 1943 – a particularly unpleasant diplomatic blow for the Japanese, given their interest in showcasing their alliance with Thailand as an example of the mutual respect between Japan and other East Asian peoples that supposedly distinguished their “Co-Prosperity Sphere” from European imperialism. Yet, precisely because they did not want to shatter the façade of mutual friendship between the two countries and certainly did not want to reallocate greater military resources to the de facto occupation of Thailand at a time when they were increasingly hard-pressed elsewhere, the Japanese chose to turn a blind eye to some of the fairly obvious double-dealing of the Bangkok authorities. Nonetheless, their faith in Phibun was undermined. All of this helped smooth the way to a fairly peaceful transition in July–August 1944, as Pridi’s allies in the national 25 26

27

Brailey, Thailand and the Fall of Singapore, 113–14. The hunch proved correct. Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, ch. 2 and passim; Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 216–17. Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 211–14, 247–49; Bob Bergin, “War of a Different Kind: OSS and Free Thai Operations in World War II,” Studies in Intelligence (US Central Intelligence Agency publication), Vol. 55, No. 4 (Unclassified Extracts, December 2011), 11–22.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

110

Patriotisms under Occupation

assembly were able to muster enough votes to block Phibun’s legislative proposals and ease him out of power. The Japanese authorities did not stand in the way of this change, and indeed acquiesced in the appointment of a cabinet led by a placeholder prime minister named Khuang Aphaiwong and including a number of figures associated with Pridi’s circle. Pridi’s status was further enhanced by parliament’s confirming him as sole regent following the resignation of his surviving colleague on the regency council.28 In May 1945, in his communications with American and British intelligence agencies, Pridi expressed an interest in orchestrating an antiJapanese uprising by Thai military and police forces, as a way of securing the country’s own liberation, erasing the stigma of having been a Japanese ally, and establishing its credentials as a prospective member of the United Nations Organization. The Western allies persuaded him to hold his fire, however, for fear that a premature uprising might only precipitate a formal Japanese occupation – expecially in the wake of Japan’s supplanting of the last façade of French authority in Indochina in March 1945.29 In the end, the transition to the post-war era occurred remarkably seamlessly in Thailand, thanks in part to Tokyo’s sudden decision to accept Allied surrender terms in August 1945, following the dropping of the two atomic bombs and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan. Thailand was spared being transformed into a battleground between Allied and Japanese ground forces as Japanese commander Nakamura overrode the objections of some rebellious officers and peacefully fell into line with Emperor Hirohito’s decision to terminate hostilities.30 Japan’s military presence thus came to an end without the Free Thai forces ever having engaged in combat; indeed, they had lost only two of their number in the course of the entire war. Yet their professed readiness to take up arms against the Japanese, along with the replacement of Phibun’s rule by a Pridi-backed regime in 1944, lent a measure of moral and political legitimacy to Bangkok’s successful post-war efforts to muster American diplomatic support against the British desire to penalize Thailand for its wartime alliance with Japan. In subsequent years, political and periodically violent infighting among Phibun, Pridi, and the royalist opposition would resume, with Phibun and the Thai military ultimately emerging in the ascendant and the Free Thai veterans left marginalized at best and stigmatized as pro-Communist at worst. But in the course of the war, the interplay among these factions had taken on the functional quality 28 29

Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 227; Pridi Banyomyong, “What Happened inside the Regency Council” (essay first published in 1972), in Pridi, Pridi by Pridi, 224–26. 30 Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, ch. 8. Ibid., ch. 10.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

111

Fig. 6 Disarmed Japanese soldiers await rail transport to POW camps outside Bangkok, September 1945. The armed figure in front is a Nepalese Gurkha soldier from British-commanded forces. Imperial War Museums via Getty Images.

(partly unintentional though it may have been) of a carefully choreographed dance that served to maximize Thailand’s national sovereignty amidst tectonic shifts in the geopolitical environment while minimizing the country’s exposure to the violence of the global conflict. The rival ambitions of its political elites can thus be said to have played out in a way that rather consistently served patriotic interests – in the sense of preserving the government’s freedom of action and thus, notionally, the principle of national self-determination to the greatest extent possible under enormous exogenous pressures. It is a point of interest that – as in the Netherlands, albeit in different ways and for different reasons – the physical absence of the symbolic sovereign, the monarch, during wartime served to enhance the versatility and adaptability of the Thai political elite’s evolving responses to Japan’s military presence. It was, after all, Pridi’s position on the regency council that gave him a relatively safe institutional cover behind which he could launch the Free Thai movement in 1942. Subsequently, his role as sole remaining regent allowed him to

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

112

Patriotisms under Occupation

orchestrate the realignment of Thai politics in 1944 and to virtually institutionalize the cultivation of secret relations with the Allies, while his front-man Khuang as prime minister continued to placate and appease the Japanese. If some of the Thai politicians who played crucial roles in this political dance stand accused of opportunism, that is all the more reason to infer that being seen to serve patriotic interests (be it by taking advantage of Japanese ascendancy to seize territory from French Indochina and Britishcontrolled Malaya under Phibun or by later playing up the role of the Free Thai in securing a stable diplomatic bridge to self-determination in the context of Anglo-American triumph) was consistently a crucial element in the legitimization of claims to power.

Denmark Finds Patriotic True North To the extent that a pattern can be discerned, the middle years of our four occupations were characterized, to varying degrees, by a certain unmooring of political legitimacy. The solidarist intervals of the early months gave way to increased levels of political disorientation and/or turmoil as one premise after another on which those sentiments of patriotic togetherness had rested were undercut by the lived experience of ever harsher and more intrusive occupations and a growing awareness of the dramatic shifts under way in the continental and global balances of forces. Resistance movements gained political traction as their claim to the patriotic high ground grew more credible, even though only small minorities of the populations became actively involved in them. Accommodationist regimes were obliged to try and navigate their way between suppressing opposition and winking and nodding at resistance forces. Where they refused or failed to build bridges to the resistance, they tended to end their days in ignominy, humiliation, or worse, as they were swept aside by a new wave of patriotic solidarism – this time colored by the slogans and symbols of the resistance – which typically engulfed countries upon their liberation from Axis occupation. As one historian has written about Danish society in 1945, “the resistance struggle had caused a situation in which patriotic, communityfocused values took the seat of honour and, at the same time, normal political life with its interest struggles was suspended for a while. Thus, an illusion was created that the ideologies of the community-oriented antiFascist movements could have a political role to play in the post-war society.”31 It is noteworthy that the widespread, if short-lived, notion that 31

Lundbak, Danish Unity, 298.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

113

the resistance movements might come to power alongside or even in place of the traditional political parties32 was in some ways a mirror image of certain right-wing collaborationist ideas about a post-parliamentary, postfactionalized state and society that had predominated in many cases during the solidarist intervals at the outset of occupations. If the Danish case is paradigmatic of some of these patterns in certain respects, it is unusual in others. The country’s accommodationist solidarism of 1940 gave way to increasing tensions, as the government’s acquiescence in a sequence of German economic, political, and diplomatic demands (notably Denmark’s joining the Anti-Comintern Pact in late 1941) motivated the rise of a growing number of resistance organizations. The government’s efforts, in turn, to prevent and penalize active resistance to the Germans were designed to forestall more brutal intervention on the part of the Nazis, but also served to blur the line between Copenhagen’s “negotiation policy” and outright collaboration. For example, the internment of some 250 Danish Communists in 1941 likely saved some of them from a worse fate at German hands, but also called into question the government’s ability to continue upholding the country’s basic democratic and pluralistic norms. Moreover, in October 1943, following the formal occupation of Denmark, 150 of those interned Communists were deported by the Germans after all, along with the small number of Danish Jews who fell into their hands.33 In 1943, as in so many other parts of occupied Eurasia, the combination of Axis strategic setbacks with the occupying power’s greater extractive demands contributed to a rise in Danish labor unrest and more overt political activism among university students, along with an increase in acts of resistance. This situation came to a head in August 1943, when the Germans demanded that the Danish government undertake a massive crackdown on the growing strike movement and accompanying street protests. At this moment of truth, however, the Danish political authorities took an exceptional decision. Rather than continuing to slide down the slippery slope that led their counterparts elsewhere into ever deeper complicity in, and collaboration with, the repressive proclivities of the occupiers, the Danish cabinet refused to comply and submitted its resignation instead. (Admittedly, this decision was taken reluctantly and

32

33

For instance, there was widespread reluctance to accommodate de Gaulle’s insistence that political parties be included on the National Council of the Resistance. Nord, France 1940, 163. Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 399.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

114

Patriotisms under Occupation

partly out of fear that a failure to do so might strengthen the hand of the Communists in the resistance.34) The Germans responded by proclaiming a state of emergency (which lasted until October 6) and gave up the fiction of Denmark’s being a protectorate rather than an occupied state. These developments, in turn, sparked an outburst of demonstrations which were violently suppressed; the twenty-three Danes killed on August 29, 1943, exceeded by seven the number killed during the initial German military incursion into the country in April 1940.35 This political and juridical rupture was not quite as decisive as it appeared on the surface. The new status quo in Denmark resembled that which had obtained initially in the Netherlands, with the permanent secretaries (the Danish equivalent of the Dutch secretaries-general) continuing to administer the country’s ministries under German oversight. Behind this technocratic façade, the Danish political leadership continued to “negotiate” policy issues with the Germans, using the permanent secretaries as intermediaries. For his part, the German Reich plenipotentiary, Werner Best (appointed in November 1942), continued to appreciate the comparative advantages of minimizing Danish opposition by cultivating a modus vivendi with the country’s political establishment, while keeping the Danish National Socialists marginalized and seeking to contain the counterproductively extremist proclivities of his own institutional rivals within the hydra of the Nazi apparatus.36 It was at this juncture that Denmark experienced a moment of patriotic solidarity unusual both in its timing and in the form that it took. Precisely at the point at which the institutional loci of political legitimacy appeared to be at their least well-defined, a cross-section of the country’s political and social sectors meshed effectively and decisively in the rescue of Danish Jews from deportation at the hands of the German occupiers. This is a well-known and oft-told story, which need not be recounted in more than schematic form here. Among the key players were Werner Best, whose September 1943 request to Berlin for authorization to commence the round-up of Denmark’s population of some 7,500 Jews set events in motion; Best’s maritime-affairs aide, Georg Duckwitz, in whom he confided about the forthcoming move, and who passed the word on, in turn, 34 35 36

Carsten Holbraad, Danish Reactions to German Occupation (London: UCL Press, 2017), 162–64. Olesen, “Obsession with Sovereignty,” 48, 66. For Best’s own (obviously self-serving) account, see Werner Best, “Die Deutsche Politik in Dänemark während der letzten 2½ Kriegsjahre,” in Best, Dänemark in Hitlers Hand. On Best’s touting of Germany’s “associative” rule in Denmark as one of the most costefficient variants among the long-term models for maintaining German imperial hegemony over Europe, see Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 236–47.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

115

to Danish political and administrative leaders; the leaders of the major Danish political parties, the Union of Danish Youth, the trade union association, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, who combined forces after a largely unsuccessful initial German round-up effort and succeeded in orchestrating the ferrying of almost the entire Jewish community to safe refuge in neutral Sweden; and rank-and-file members of these organizations and institutions along with the many unaffiliated members of the general public who lent their hands to the effort to hide Jews from German eyes and smuggle them out of the country.37 In recent decades, in line with a broader historiographical turn towards the revisiting and questioning of accepted myths and stereotypes associated with societies’ responses to occupation during the Second World War, there has been a strong tendency to downplay the heroic aspects of these events and/or to place them in the context of a more problematic big picture of the Danish wartime record.38 Scholars have highlighted the readiness of Denmark’s government and economic elites to integrate their country’s economy into the German sphere, despite the fact that this was of direct and indirect benefit to the Nazis’ military efforts. They have called into question the Danish authorities’ discouragement of active resistance, especially prior to 1943, and have argued that leaders such as Erik Scavenius seemed a little too comfortable with the country’s sudden subservience to, and in many respects complicity with, Nazi Germany. The Danish authorities even agreed to the recruitment of members of the Danish armed forces into the Frikorps Danmark formation of the Waffen-SS, which comprised almost six thousand men.39 This served, effectively, as compensation for Copenhagen’s unwillingness to breach its formal neutrality by sending Danish-uniformed troops to fight alongside Germany on the Eastern Front. At the eleventh hour for Danish Jewry, the permanent secretaries who remained to administer the country after the government’s resignation even floated an abortive plan for the internment and ransoming of the Jewish community as an alternative to deportation – a scenario that the head of the Jewish 37

38

39

The classic work on this topic remains Yahil, Rescue of Danish Jewry. See also Jørgen Hæstrup, “The Danish Jews and the German Occupation,” in Leo Goldberger, ed., The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage under Stress (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 27. See, for example, Dethlefsen, “Denmark and the German Occupation” and some of the contributions to Mette Bastholm Jensen and Steven L. B. Jensen, eds., Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen: Institute for International Studies, Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003). Peter Scharff Smith, Niels Bo Poulsen, and Claus Bundgård Christensen, “The Danish Volunteers in the Waffen SS and German Warfare at the Eastern Front,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (March 1999), 73–96.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

116

Patriotisms under Occupation Norway

Gillelje Rageleje

Helsingborg

Sweden

Humlebaek Helsingør

Sweden

Hillerød

D en m a rk

Aalborg

Copenhagen Malmö

Roskilde

Aarhus

Koge Skanor

Isl. of Zealand

Trelleborg

Odense

Møn

The Netherlands Groningen

UK

Westerbork The Hague

Amsterdam

Germany

Rotterdam Eindhoven

Belgium France 0

50

100

200

300

400

km 500

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

Inset: Flight of Jewish refugees from Denmark in October 1943

Map 5 Occupied Denmark and the Netherlands.

community, C. B. Henriques, rejected as incompatible with the principles of civic equality. Henriques, in turn, received a firm negative when he asked the permanent secretaries whether they would resign in protest over Nazi deportation plans.40 It was not the administrative chiefs, but the leaders of the now-suspended political parties and of the underground Freedom Council who ended up playing key roles in the successful rescue effort that ensued. In light of these complexities, some 40

Sofie Bak, “Between Tradition and New Departure: The Dilemmas of Collaboration in Denmark,” in Roni Stauber, ed., Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse after the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2010); Yahil, Rescue of Danish Jewry, 207–12.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

117

revisionist historians – Danes among them – have altogether rejected the traditional, heroic version of the story, decrying it as little more than a convenient figleaf with which to cover the shame of Denmark’s deeply collaborationist role in the Nazis’ imperial realm. In so doing, they have in a sense breathed new life into the line taken by the early – at that point, still quite isolated – resistance activists in wartime Denmark, who felt dishonored by their government’s initial unwillingness to take an open stance against the Nazis. Furthermore, it is indisputable that the exceptional nature of the rescue of Danish Jewry was not exclusively a function of ordinary Danes’ extraordinary virtue. The country’s Jewish community was miniscule and largely concentrated in the capital; neutral Sweden was conveniently located a short boat trip away from the Danish coast; at this point in the war, Sweden, in turn, was more willing to risk annoying the Germans (while simultaneously trying to compensate in Allied eyes for their economic collaboration with the Reich) than it might have been when they were at the apogee of their continental power. In other words, there were factors that made the very idea of a mass rescue exceptionally feasible in Denmark’s case. Moreover, Duckwitz’s decision to forewarn Danish political leaders about the impending deportation effort did not occur in a vacuum. The self-serving nature of his post-war testimony notwithstanding, there is reason to believe that Best himself may have been playing a complicated double-game – requesting Berlin’s authorization and provision of logistical support for the deportation effort as a means of outflanking challenges to his position, while at the same time leaving the door open to a Jewish escape in order to avoid an irreparable breach in his relationship with the Danish political and administrative establishments. SS officers and German military commanders appear to have cooperated with this approach, effectively expediting rather than blocking the flight of Jews: German police forces conducting overnight raids on Jewish homes on October 1/2, 1943, were under instructions not to force their way in if no one responded to their knocks, and there was a widespread pattern of German military personnel turning a blind eye to the passage of Jewish escapees on their way to the coast and beyond.41 It is also noteworthy that the 481 Danish Jews who were nonetheless caught in the German dragnet and transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp were allowed to stay in this showcase facility for the duration of the war, thanks to an agreement between Werner Best and Adolf Eichmann, reinforced by the 41

Gunnar S. Paulsson, “The ‘Bridge over the Øresund’: The Historiography on the Expulsion of the Jews from Nazi-Occupied Denmark,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 1995), 431–64.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

118

Patriotisms under Occupation

vigorous lobbying of the Danish authorities and Danish Red Cross, which successfully insisted on limited but significant access to the Danish Jewish prisoners. All but around fifty of them were therefore able to survive.42 The norm for inmates of Theresienstadt – the Potemkin village of German concentration camps – was to be shipped on to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yet, by the same token, this remarkably self-sabotaging approach on the part of the normally ruthless and systematically exterminationist Nazi authorities was itself a response to the unusually firm stance taken by all major socio-political currents in Danish society over the status of the country’s Jews.43 Germany’s successive wartime representatives in Denmark consistently reported that any infringement on the status of Jews would cross a red line in the eyes of the Danish authorities. Insofar as Berlin wished to maintain its relationship with Copenhagen as a showcase for the potential delights of German continental hegemony, it would have to tread cautiously when it came to this matter. The leaders of Denmark’s political establishment voiced this position clearly and firmly whenever the topic came up. Indeed, at the time of a November 1942 cabinet reshuffle designed to resolve a crisis in relations with Berlin, the leaders of the major political parties questioned Erik Scavenius closely to make sure, as a condition of their support for his appointment as prime minister, that he would refuse to introduce any antisemitic legislation at the Germans’ behest.44 By holding their ground on this issue, they were able to prevent the introduction of discriminatory and persecutory measures such as mandatory wearing of the yellow star, which contributed to the progressive marginalization and stigmatization of Jewish communities elsewhere in occupied Europe. (Scavenius did indicate his opposition to “the promotion of Jews or public appearances by them.”45) As Leni Yahil pointed out, this, in turn, meant that when the Nazis did finally embark on their deportation effort in 1943, Danish

42

43

44 45

Hans Kirchhoff, “The Rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943,” in Bankier and Gutman, Nazi Europe and the Final Solution, 539; Kirchhoff, “Denmark: A Light in the Darkness. A Reply to Gunnar S. Paulsson,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 1995), 465–79; Holbraad, Danish Reactions, 86; Best, Dänemark in Hitlers Hand, 48. Paulsson rejects this view altogether, arguing instead that the flight of Danish Jewry should be understood as a successful expulsion drive authorized by Himmler as an effective substitute for a deportation to concentration and extermination camps that was not, for various logistical reasons, practically feasible at that juncture. Paulsson, “The ‘Bridge over the Øresund’.” Kirchhoff scoffs at what he sees as Paulsson’s overly elaborate, conspiratorial hypothesis, insisting that all the concrete evidence points to Best as the pivotal figure on the German side and ascribing his conduct in part to concern over his future relationship with the Danish administrative chiefs. Kirchhof, “Reply to Paulsson.” Olesen, “The Obsession with Sovereignty,” 64. Paulsson, “The ‘Bridge over the Øresund’,” 459.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

119

society’s response was all the sharper because its capacity for outrage had not been eroded.46 On the contrary, in fact, the firm stance taken by Denmark’s political establishment was linked to a strong popular groundswell of opposition to any antisemitic measures. Obviously there was, virtually by definition, a vital ethical component to this stance. At the same time, part of the strength of the response arose from its grounding in a distinctive strain of Danish patriotism.47 Danes were not taking a stand on behalf of Jews and persecuted minorities throughout the world. As a matter of fact, during the late 1930s, Denmark had refused to admit more than a very small number of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Hitler’s Third Reich.48 But the revival, in response to the German occupation, of Grundtvigian cultural nationalism (see p. 81) found its expression, among other ways, in the articulation and dissemination of a vision of Danish identity as inextricably linked to principles of democracy, pluralism, and tolerance. People persecuted in other countries may not have been welcome to enter the country in significant numbers, but whoever already had legal residence in Denmark would enjoy the protection of Danish law, occupation or no occupation. The iniquities visited upon Jews across much of the rest of Europe were an alien phenomenon to be guarded against, rather than a new paradigm to be acquiesced in. Thus, German military authorities had reported with frustration on negative coverage in the Danish press of Romanian antisemitic measures under the headline of “Where Jews Are Not Considered Human.”49 In early 1942, rumors had swirled that the then foreign minister, Scavenius, was under German pressure to find a way of introducing legislation in the style of the Nuremberg Laws to Denmark – a prospect viewed as a fearful one that the king’s personal opposition would hopefully avert.50 In the final analysis, as none other than Werner Best had put it to his superiors in the German Foreign Office in April 1943, on the Danish side, the Jewish question is seen in the first place as a constitutional and legal matter. If the German side were to demand an exceptional treatment of unquestionably Danish citizens – that is, Jews of Danish nationality – the Danes

46 47 48 49 50

Yahil, Rescue of Danish Jewry, 222. Ibid., 41–61; Buckser, “Rescue and Cultural Context.” Lone Rünitz, “The Politics of Asylum in Denmark in the Wake of the Kristallnacht: A Case Study,” in Jensen and Jensen, eds., Denmark and the Holocaust. Garrison commander in Aalborg to Commander of German Troops in Denmark, January 23, 1942, NAMP, T501, Roll 302, RG 242, NARA. Abwehr station Denmark to German diplomatic and military authorities in Denmark, January 20, 1942, contents of informant’s report on Danish political conditions and rumors, NAMP, T501, Roll 309, RG 242, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

120

Patriotisms under Occupation

would see in this first and foremost an attack on their constitution, which guarantees the equality of all Danish citizens before the law.

He went on to explain that the Danish authorities would see any such move as the potential start of a slippery slope towards the dismantlement of constitutional protections for all Danish citizens. Consequently: The raising of the Jewish question would, on account of all the constitutional factors, run up against the resistance of the Danish state and – as Prime Minister von [sic] Scavenius has … made clear – result in the resignation of the government and the impossibility of setting up a new constitutional government.51

The fact that the majority of the country’s tiny Jewish population was thoroughly assimilated into Danish culture undoubtedly reinforced the tendency to treat Jews the same as any other Danes. However, the community included a significant number of early twentieth-century Eastern European refugees and their offspring, who tended to remain much more recognizably foreign in origin. This did not stand in the way of the remarkably broad consensus across the spectrum of Danish political and civic associations in favor of a resolute stance against the introduction of antisemitic measures. Perhaps it was precisely the fact that Copenhagen had held the gates closed against the refugee pressures of the 1930s that helped cement the perception of those several thousand Jews who already possessed Danish citizenship as incontrovertibly Danish, in contrast to, say, France, where resentments over the presence of large numbers of Jewish non-citizens may have created a slippery-slope effect that contributed to the marginalization and victimization of Jewish citizens and non-citizens alike under Vichy. In any case, time and again, the chief figures of Denmark’s state, church, and civil society made it crystal clear to the German authorities that an attack on the country’s Jews marked a red line beyond which the Danish political and social establishment, and the society in whose support their power lay, would not be prepared to continue in their accommodation of German political and economic interests. Indeed, this stance applied equally to the roughly 1,400 German-Jewish refugees who had taken up residency in

51

Cable from Werner Best (Copenhagen) to German Foreign Ministry, April 24, 1943, as reproduced in Best, Dänemark in Hitlers Hand, 279. My translation. Following the resignation of the Danish cabinet and the suspension of parliamentary government in August 1943, Best continued to express equivalent concerns regarding the impact of Jewish deportation on the prospects of collaboration with the Danish state secretaries – even as he formally set in motion the machinery of the Final Solution. His finessing of the deportation in ways that were conducive to the saving of Danish Jewish lives allowed him to maintain the cooperation of the Danish administrative authorities. Kirchhof, “Rescue of the Danish Jews,” 547–48.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

121

Denmark.52 (Again, many more Jews seeking to flee Nazi persecution had been turned away by Danish authorities in the 1930s.) This ethos was reflected in the direct or indirect involvement of a broad spectrum of voluntary organizations as well as institutions in the rescue of the Jewish community. These included the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church, whose bishops issued a statement condemning any persecution of Danish Jews, and officers in the Danish coast guard, some of whom not only turned a blind eye to the ferrying of Jews across to Sweden, but took a hand in facilitating the operation.53 The undertaking involved the participation of thousands of people from across most major divides in politics and society. This particularly substantive manifestation of Danish wartime patriotic solidarity came just at the time when other occupied societies were at their most deeply riven over the meaning of patriotism. It constitutes a case in which a specific conception of patriotism led to social acceptance of, and widespread involvement in, a non-violent form of resistance that conferred no material advantages on the majority of participants (with exceptions such as some of the boatmen who extracted a high price for their ferrying services) but did present them with significant risks. This version of patriotism did not mask other motives; rather, it was synergistically intertwined with a set of ethical, political, and religious concerns. The small size and – ironically – relative ethno-religious uniformity of Denmark lent itself to this unusual manifestation of patriotic solidarity under occupation.54 Overwhelmingly Lutheran Denmark was much more religiously homogeneous than pillarized Holland. The Grundtvigian Lutheran reform movement, as institutionalized in a nationwide network of “folk high-schools” and as rearticulated and reinvigorated by Professor Hal Koch during the war, actively synthesized religious and national identities, seeking to ground the practice of Christian principles in a sense of distinctive Danishness, while using religious teachings to articulate a vision of spiritual and cultural resilience in the face of raw power.55 Antisemitism was not unknown in Denmark, but it had tended to take generic, non-violent, and essentially unpoliticized forms. This was

52

53 54 55

Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators, 196. It is true that, in the end, Danish collaboration with Germany did continue through the vector of the permanent secretaries following the safe flight to Sweden of the bulk of the Jewish community, which allowed Werner Best to declare the country Judenrein while permitting Danish leaders to feel that they had taken the most honorable avenue available to them. Michael Mogensen, “October 1943: The Rescue of the Danish Jews,” in Jensen and Jensen, eds., Denmark and the Holocaust. My thanks go to Alene Moyer for suggesting this point to me. Jaroslav Pelikan, “Grundtvig’s Influence,” in Goldberger, ed., Rescue of the Danish Jews.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

122

Patriotisms under Occupation

undoubtedly due in part to the tiny size of the Jewish community, which hardly impinged on the country’s overall cultural homogeneity; diversity, after all, is much easier to tolerate when it comes in small doses. Denmark also had not experienced the kind of bitter political polarization seen in France of the 1930s. It was this polarization that had – from the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s to the 1936 anti-Popular Front campaign slogan of “Better Hitler than Blum” – repeatedly led to right-wing attempts to depict the Left as intrinsically alien by associating it with hostile images of “the Jew.” In Denmark, by contrast, this kind of political antisemitism was largely confined to the country’s tiny National Socialist movement and other extremist formations that remained very much on the fringe of politics. It should also be noted that the unusual circumstances of the first three years of the occupation, under which the mainstream political parties – supported by the monarch – had governed the country by acquiescing in German economic and diplomatic demands while resisting threats to the country’s constitutional order, had served to expand and reinforce, rather than erode, the identification of patriotic solidarity with the affirmation of pluralistic and democratic principles. Among what one might anachronistically term the “early adopters” of resistance in Denmark were not only a number of patriotically minded political conservatives, but also members of anti-democratic, right-wing currents (other than the Danish Nazis and their ilk, obviously). Most notable among these groups was the Danish Unity organization described earlier.56 This right-wing embrace of resistance may have been partly due precisely to the fact that what might be termed the collaborationist niche was occupied, not by an insurgent reactionary coalition as in Vichy France, but by the political mainstream, including the Social Democratic Party, whose leader remained prime minister until his death in 1942. At one and the same time, because the defense of Danish parliamentary democracy and rule of law was the main sphere in which the government did manifest a patriotically honorable spirit of defiance rather than passivity and compliance in the face of German pressure, Danish Unity’s leader, Arne Sørensen, himself came to embrace democratic principles in the course of his involvement in the resistance movement. He rationalized this shift by contending that, flawed though it might be, the Danish constitution at least had the virtue of having originated as part of an indigenous nationalist response to Prussian aggression during 1848–49. Although it once 56

On Danish conservatives’ inclination to pursue resistance, see Kirchhoff, “Die dänische Staatskollaboration,” 109; Olesen, “Obsession with Sovereignty,” 56–60; Lundbak, Danish Unity, passim.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

123

Fig. 7 Danish Jews being ferried to safety in Sweden, October 1943. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

124

Patriotisms under Occupation

again performed weakly in the parliamentary elections that the Germans permitted to be held in March 1943, the Danish Unity movement was rewarded for its active involvement in the resistance movement by being given a seat on the umbrella directorate of the resistance, the Freedom Council, where they found themselves working alongside Communists, among others. Its persistently small membership and lackluster votegetting ability kept Danish Unity substantively insignificant. Yet its distinctive ideological trajectory can be seen as symptomatic of how powerful and broadly pervasive was the coalescence of Danish patriotic sentiments around the defense of what the accommodationists in the government and the resistance activists in the underground alike insisted (disingenuously in the case of the Communists, to be sure) was the country’s traditional democratic and tolerant political culture.57 These sentiments contributed to, found expression in, and were further spurred by the shared effort on behalf of the Jewish minority. Denmark’s rescue of its Jews was an emergent phenomenon arising from the confluence of all these factors. As Leni Yahil argued, not only was it an expression of grassroots Danish patriotic solidarity in the midst of a worsening occupation experience and in the aftermath of the government’s resignation; it also served as a catalyst for the further consolidation and legitimization of the resistance movement as an alternative locus of patriotic legitimacy with which the permanent secretaries who continued to work with the Germans maintained ties and to which they secretly offered assistance. (They were, to be sure, motivated in part by a self-interested political calculus.) Having played an important role in the orchestration of the rescue effort, the Danish Freedom Council rapidly gained authority as the coordinating body and mouthpiece of a resistance movement that had gained coherent form and was now making significant progress in establishing a web of communication and cooperation with a broad array of social and political institutions. These accomplishments, in turn, helped bridge the transition to post-war governance, as the Freedom Council and the major political parties reached a power-sharing agreement in the framework of the provisional government that reasserted Danish sovereignty in the aftermath of the country’s liberation in 1945.58 Denmark’s exceptionally clear and coherent expression of patriotic solidarity at the mid-point of its wartime occupation, in defiance of the

57

58

Lundbak, Danish Unity, chs. 13–16; Niels Wium Olesen, “Change or Continuity in the Danish Elites? Social Movements and the Transition from War to Peace in Denmark, 1945–1947,” in Stefan Berger and Marcel Boldorf, eds., Social Movements and the Change of Economic Elites in Europe after 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Yahil, Rescue of Danish Jewry, 280–82; Olesen, “Change or Continuity.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

125

German authorities and in support of the Jewish community, came about in part as a result of a set of circumstances – chief among them the Germans’ inclination to showcase Denmark as their “model protectorate” – that were notably absent in the other two European examples featured in Part I of this book. The Thai case presents the closest parallel in terms of the country’s relationship with the regional Axis hegemon. There, however, a different set of demographic and historical circumstances led to a reverse dynamic, such that active discrimination against Thailand’s ethnic Chinese could serve as a policy that reinforced Phibun’s nationalist credentials in the face of the Japanese forces’ selfinterested role as protectors of the politically marginalized minority. It was only as Japan’s star faded and Phibun surreptitiously began to explore the possibilities of an eventual strategic repositioning (which would entail cooperation with the Kuomintang regime in Chungking, China) that his attitude towards the ethnic Chinese began to improve.59 Thailand did come closest to Denmark in its relative continuity of governance over the course of the war years and in the comparative seamlessness of its political establishment’s transition from cooperation with the Axis hegemon to realignment with pro-Allied resistance. Thailand’s role as what one might term Japan’s model protectorate (or, technically, ally) was undoubtedly an important factor here, insofar as it left Bangkok with a certain amount of wiggle room during the dangerous wartime shifts in the geopolitical environment. For its part, France came closest to Denmark in the survival rate – 75 percent – of its Jewish population. Vichy’s sovereign status and (prior to November 1942) autonomy in southeastern France was undoubtedly a factor in this outcome, as Griffioen and Zeller have argued.60 These factors made a difference to Jewish survival rates despite the fact that Pétain’s regime not only initiated its own antisemitic legislation but also took an active role in the round-up and deportation of Jews – especially, but by no means exclusively, Jews without French citizenship. The fact that French public opinion shifted towards greater sympathy for the Jews in light of the brutality of 1942’s mass raids by French police led to a moderate decrease in the efficiency with which the Vichy authorities cooperated in implementing the “Final Solution.” The belated arrival of German forces in southeastern France also gave those Jews who resided in that region or who had managed to make their way into it something of a 59 60

Murashima, “Thai–Japanese Alliance,” 207–17. Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, “Comparing the Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, France and Belgium, 1940–1945: Similarities, Differences, Causes,” in Romijn et al., Persecution of the Jews, 75–76.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

126

Patriotisms under Occupation

head-start in escaping the genocidal campaign against them. The other side of the coin here is that the Vichy government contributed in very substantive and significant ways to the persecution and murder of tens of thousands of Jewish citizens and residents of France. It did this in part because its own, anti-republican vision of French patriotism excluded Jews from the nation rather than seeing the protection of their civic rights as integral to what defined France as a nation. Did the Dutch geographical separation of functions between serving as custodian of national honor (the job of the offshore government-in-exile) and engaging in pragmatic cooperation with the Germans (the role of the secretaries-general) contribute to the Netherlands ending up with one of the lowest Jewish survival rates (25 percent) in German-occupied Western Europe? It is certainly striking that this was the outcome despite the fact that, as discussed earlier, the country’s population was generally sympathetic towards the persecuted minority and that Amsterdam was the site, in February 1941, of a virtually unparalleled public display of solidarity with the Jews in a Nazi-occupied land. It is also noteworthy that in Denmark, following the resignation of the government, the permanent secretaries proved almost as ineffectual as their Dutch counterparts when it came to the plight of Denmark’s Jews (see p. 116). It was the political party leaders still operating in the background (with the strong moral support of the king) who contributed essential leadership to Denmark’s rescue effort. The fact that the Dutch secretaries-general were in charge and free from ministerial oversight from the very start of the occupation set that country’s administration on the slippery slope of complying with Nazi antisemitic policies early on, albeit under rhetorical protest. This certainly helped pave the way for the widespread complicity and cooperation of some Dutch police forces and bureaucrats in the round-up of the Jews, whereas Dutch resistance to the conscription of non-Jewish Dutch labor led to the resignation or dismissal of most of the original secretaries-general and a large percentage of the country’s mayors, and their replacement by German-appointed members of the NSB. Meanwhile, it was precisely the self-exile of the Dutch queen and cabinet that allowed the exercise of Dutch sovereign power to appear untainted by association with collaboration in any form, which in turn contributed to the overly simplistic post-war image of the Netherlands as a country that had held true to its patriotic principles throughout the occupation.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part I

Amidst this variety of fluid, evolving, and conflicting responses to occupation, most of which were justified by appeals to patriotism, it is tempting to conclude that patriotism per se actually had no impact on political choices – at least not under extreme conditions such as wartime occupation by totalitarian powers. And certainly, be it at the best of times or the worst of times, the indivisible national solidarity towards which patriotism strives can never be more than a mirage that glimmers on the horizon of popular anticipation. Yet it is just that pursuit of unattainable visions – be they of national unity, of social equality, or of “freedom and justice for all” – that fashions so much of political debate and public opinion. And on closer examination, what the comparative analysis of this part’s four cases reveals is how evolving military, economic, and geopolitical conditions helped define the ever-shifting parameters of the patriotically plausible. What was patriotically plausible depended heavily on exogenous circumstances, as the powerful tides of global war repeatedly reshaped the landscape of expectations. But it also, in turn, helped determine the relative viability at any given time of competing political agendas and ambitions within the occupied lands. Patriotic plausibility can be understood as lying in the area of overlap between honor (both individual and collective) and self-interest (both personal and national). Or, to think about it slightly differently, it can denote the set of personal and political choices that are seen as defending or promoting the independent standing of the nation without flagrantly violating broadly accepted standards of feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and utility. Thus, the shooting by the French resistance of a German soldier in 1942 or 1943 could be seen by ordinary French people as an irresponsible act of terrorism if its only practical consequence was likely to be massive retaliation against uninvolved French civilians. It had a much better chance of being applauded as an act of patriotism in the context of the liberation of Paris in 1944, when Anglo-American forces were on the outskirts of the city and, with the Germans clearly on the retreat, firing on 127

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

128

Patriotisms under Occupation

them could be understood as a form of participation in the honorable and imminently attainable auto-emancipation of the nation’s capital. Popular perceptions of the patriotically plausible also typically rest on a tacit assumption about the division of functions and responsibilities, such that specific figures and institutions – notably, governmental authorities and the military – are expected to take the lead in defending the nation’s honor and sovereignty, while “ordinary citizens” are to remain shielded against the dangers potentially associated with this stance. The diverse political configurations during wartime occupation variously led to the fulfillment or failure of such expectations. In the cases of Denmark and Thailand, the Axis occupiers’ willingness to grant relatively broad autonomy to national governments (and, in Thailand’s case, even to reward Phibun’s regime by permitting it to annex strips of territory from its immediate neighbors) may have legitimized accommodationist and even collaborationist political choices in the eyes of a broad swath of informed public opinion for a fairly extensive period of time. Conversely, the Dutch queen and cabinet took the position that they could best continue to play their roles as upholders of Dutch sovereignty by placing themselves beyond the Germans’ reach. Yet this risked being perceived as abandoning their people to suffer the consequences of the government’s patriotically honorable refusal to negotiate political terms. This problem was mitigated by the arrangement that kept a certain element of governmental continuity in place by leaving the secretariesgeneral in charge of the ministries. But that, in turn, led to a slippery slope of ever greater Dutch administrative complicity in the increasingly intrusive and brutal German policy initiatives. In many ways, indeed, this arrangement proved to be a Faustian bargain. Hitler’s decision to remove his own military from administrative authority in the Netherlands, in favor of civilian oversight by Nazi officials, was the first in a series of ever more radical departures from the norms of the 1907 Hague Land Warfare Convention, the observance of which by a prospective occupier had served as the basis for the 1937 Dutch contingency plan.1 It is true that in 1940, the Nazis commenced their Dutch, Belgian, and French occupations on a note of relative correctness that appeared to contrast favorably with the opening phases of the occupation of Belgium in the previous conflict.2 Thanks to the peculiar racial hierarchy that informed 1 2

Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule, 141. Marnix Beyen and Svenja Weers, “Écrire l’histoire comme pratique d’occupation: L’administration militaire allemande en Belgique d’une occupation à l’autre,” in Connolly et al., eds., En territoire ennemi. On Germany’s violation of international legal norms in the opening phases of its occupation of Belgium during the First World War, see John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven:

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part I

129

the Nazi worldview, the non-Jewish populations of Northern and Western European countries were spared the massive atrocities committed by German forces in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, German abuses of power increased in severity and frequency the longer the war dragged on. At the same time, an underground resistance movement began to engage in acts of sabotage against the German occupation, while the Germans began tightening their oversight by replacing many of the Dutch mayors with their own hand-picked appointees. Under these circumstances, the notion of administrative continuity began to take on the character of the absurd. Many of the same civil servants who had run the country in the 1930s remained in place, performing the same functions they had in yesteryear, but the ends to which those means were being utilized diverged ever more blatantly from any reasonable conception of the public interest. Moreover, the very absence of the country’s top political authorities made it more difficult for members of the civil service to offer resistance to Nazi demands, by contrast with some of their counterparts in Denmark, and even in Belgium and France.3 By 1943, with the onset of the German labor draft amidst the growing prospects of an eventual German defeat, the patriotic plausibility of the division of functions between defiant government-in-exile and compliant civil service had reached the limits of its elasticity, leading to the former’s renunciation of the secretariesgeneral and its embrace instead of the resistance movement. In France, one of Pétain’s main arguments for his government staying in-country and negotiating an armistice rather than continuing the fight from overseas was that, as his nation’s new leader, it was his obligation to bear the burden of defending whatever could be salvaged of its sovereignty while sharing in his people’s suffering and sacrificing his own wellbeing in an effort to spare the nation the worst. But the Vichy government’s stubborn clinging to the appurtenances of power while the substance of its autonomy and its ability to shield the French population against the ever more onerous qualities of the occupation were steadily eroded, served to undercut the persuasiveness of its patriotic posturing – to the growing advantage of the Free French and the internal resistance. Indeed, as discussed before, as early as late 1940, public opinion was taken aback by Pétain’s embrace of collaboration with, as distinct from

3

Yale University Press, 2002); Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), chs. 9–10. See the comparative analyses in Bruno de Wever, Herman van Goethem, and Nico Wouters, Local Government in Occupied Europe (1939–1945) (Ghent: Academia Press, 2006), passim.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

130

Patriotisms under Occupation

accommodation of, the Germans. What this suggests is that, even as people were reluctant to embrace a still-fragmented, isolated, and seemingly foolhardy resistance movement, they did expect their government to stand as firmly as it could for the eventual restoration of French independence – something that many still perceived as contingent on the frustration of Germany’s long-term ambitions rather than attainable by working in concert with Berlin. There may have been a nationwide tendency to retreat into the shell of one’s own family and narrowly defined community amidst the traumas and trials of defeat and isolation. But people still expected their political leaders to conduct themselves differently in the name of the nation. Hence, rather than dismissing ideas about patriotism as lacking all substance in the context of the occupations simply because the circumstances did not allow for the emergence of a static patriotic consensus, it makes more sense to think of the patriotically plausible as a spectrum of possibilities, the parameters of which shifted in the face of changing conditions and evolving experience. It seems significant that most rival claimants to legitimate national leadership tended to pitch their appeals in patriotic terms. To resonate with a broad cross-section of the public, such appeals had to fall somewhere in the middle ground, or zone of intersection, between the ideals of a purist patriotism and people’s desire to live to see better days. When regarded through this analytical lens, the solidarist intervals of the early months of occupation in our four cases can be understood in patriotic terms. To varying degrees, they can be seen as arising from a political convergence between conservative, reactionary, and/or authoritarian political and administrative leaders, who saw in their country’s defeat and occupation an opportunity to advance their political agendas, and a broad cross-section of the population which initially accepted these public figures and institutional arrangements as the ones best positioned to buffer the nation against the occupying forces and against the ambitions of radical, ideological collaborationists such as the Dutch and Danish National Socialists, who were widely perceived as treacherous fifth columns. What constituted a patriotic policy in many people’s eyes, it seems, was one that appeared to maximize the nation’s realistic prospects of self-determination under any given set of (ever-shifting) circumstances. Which political movements and figures were seen as most likely to further this aim, and what degree of self-determination appeared attainable without incurring unreasonable risks of yet further damage to the welfare of society, were questions the answers to which were colored by a variety of changing factors. The question of who actually belonged to

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part I

131

the “core element” (my formulation) of the nation was likewise fluid and changeable. What the solidarist intervals of 1940/1941 examined in this part of the book had in common was that they were all premised on Europe and Asia having fallen under a new geopolitical and ideological order for the foreseeable future.4 In the war’s aftermath, it would be a triumphant liberal-democratic and liberal-technocratic order that would frame patriotic expectations and debates. But in the opening months of Axis occupation, it was an anti-democratic, neo-imperial order that many understood to constitute the new Eurasian paradigm, to which defeated and occupied countries must accommodate themselves as best they could in the hope of preserving or regaining some modicum of national autonomy and well-being under the new world-historical dispensation.5 At least among the better-informed and politically active segments of populations, there was also an active interest in drawing lessons from the experiences and responses of other occupied countries. The French cabinet debates about whether or not to sue for an armistice were marked by disagreements over whether to see a positive or negative precedent in the Dutch government’s decision to remove itself to London. Danish and Dutch patriots alike were very concerned about finding ways of avoiding the equivalent of Quisling’s rise to power in occupied Norway. Both Phibun and the Free Thai were concerned to avoid letting their country become another Manchukuo. Denmark’s sovereign status under the first three years of German occupation, conversely, was seen as a relatively positive example by Thai leaders.6 The differences between our cases are at least as striking as the similarities. To recapitulate just one example, in some instances the 4

5

6

Even neutral Switzerland was not entirely immune to these tendencies. See Fritzsche, Iron Wind, ch. 3. On Reinhard Koselleck’s concept of the “horizon of expectation” as applied to patriotic culture under occupation, see Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “No Country for Young Men: Patriotism and its Paradoxes in German-Occupied Belgium, 1914–18,” in Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Quincy Cloet, and Alex Dowdall, eds., Breaking Empires, Making Nations: The First World War and the Reforging of Europe (Warsaw: College of Europe at Natolin, 2018), 124–53, here 135. In the case of France (as well as Belgium, which falls outside the scope of Part I’s investigation), Sophie De Schaepdrijver has pointed out, the contrast with the circumstances of the First World War was quite stark. The persistence of a war front on French and Belgian territory throughout 1914–18 had given citizens in the Germanoccupied portions of those countries clear loci of patriotic loyalty in the sovereign zones beyond the enemy’s control, resulting in a stronger initial set of social pressures in favor of non-violent forms of resistance against the occupier. De Schaepdrijver, “Préface,” in Connolly et al., eds., En territoire ennemi. Nicholas Tarling, A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, 1941–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 206; Suwannathat-Pian, Thailand’s Durable Premier, 293, n. 26.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

132

Patriotisms under Occupation

occupation-era constraints that undercut a country’s independence on the world stage were compensated for by asserting a domestic politics of negative self-determination: that is, by targeting minorities for exclusion and persecution, as in Vichy France’s antisemitic legislation and collusion with Nazi genocide and Thailand’s anti-Chinese campaign. In Denmark, by contrast, it was precisely in the embrace of the country’s tiny Jewish community that wartime patriotic solidarity rather eccentrically found its apotheosis. Sadly, in surveying the broad trends across occupied Eurasia, one is forced to conclude that it was the former rather than the latter paradigm that was most typical. Regardless of how sincere or cynical, well intentioned or opportunistic, some of the leaders of accommodationist patriotism may have been, the point is that the support, or at least acquiescence, of a critical mass of their compatriots depended in part on popular perceptions of the patriotic plausibility of their approaches. As that plausibility declined in the face of changing policies and responses by occupiers and occupied, and in the face of the transformation of the global balance of warring forces, occupied societies faced the risk of flying apart under the strains of dissension over what constituted national loyalty and which policies, persons, and movements should be denounced as treacherous. The societies studied in Part I managed to avoid full-fledged civil wars and navigate their way to liberation even as the needles on their patriotic compasses gyrated wildly. Those that form the subjects of Part II were less fortunate.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Part II

Fractured Societies and Fractal Identities: Civil Wars under Occupation (Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, and China)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part II

On February 22, 1943, in the course of the Battle of the Neretva, the Fourth Brigade of the Communist-led Yugoslav partisans took the town of Jablanica from an Italian battalion, capturing the commander in the process. On learning that their prisoner was a proud veteran of the proFranco Italian contingent in the Spanish Civil War, his counterparts among the partisans demanded his immediate execution. The Italian officer returned the salutation in a manner of speaking, requesting that his shooting be carried out by one of those former volunteers for the Spanish Republic. The request was denied, and he was shot by military couriers instead.1 Did the Italian commander die in a global conflict, in an internecine Yugoslav struggle, or on one of the multiple fronts of a transnational civil war? One could truthfully answer yes to each of these questions. His final battle was certainly an episode in the Second World War. It could also be construed as part of a Yugoslav civil war, insofar as Serb Chetnik units fought alongside the Italian and German forces arrayed against their shared Yugoslav Communist foe on the Neretva River.2 Clearly, in his 1 2

Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 223. In this context, the Chetniks directly coordinated their movements only with the Italians; in fact, Nazi leaders and the German commander-in-chief in Southeastern Europe had urged in vain that their Italian allies disarm the Chetniks and help suppress them. Walter R. Roberts, Tito, Mihailović and the Allies, 1941–1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 101; Srdjan Trifković, “Rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia, 1942–1943,” Historical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4 (December 1993), 879–904. The Germans were quick to blame the Chetniks’ incompetence for the offensive’s failure to wipe out the retreating partisan forces. Alexander Prusin, Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 118. A year or two earlier, the German Plenipotentiary General in Croatia had complained sardonically that the Italian military was so chummy with the Chetniks in its occupation zone, and so reluctant to venture beyond the limits of major towns and the roads between them, that the chief of the Italian military mission to Croatia could proudly report that complete quiet had been restored to the sector. Undated draft of report (evidently from 1941 or 1942) by Edmund Glaise-Horstenau (Plenipotentiary General in Croatia), on the “Situation in Croatia,” National Archives Microfilm Publication (NAMP) series T501, Roll 267, frames 648 and ff., Foreign Records Seized Collection, RG 242, NARA. That

135

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

136

Civil Wars under Occupation

own mind – and possibly in the minds of his adversaries – his death in Bosnia also constituted some sort of coda to the Spanish Civil War that had raged several years earlier at the other end of the Mediterranean. The very denial of his request for a “Spanish” executioner may have constituted a symbolic rejection of any pretense of equality or mutual respect between veterans of the opposing sides in that conflict, rather than a denial that the current encounter was connected to that earlier struggle. Conversely, perhaps it did indicate a rejection of the notion that the war between foreign occupiers and Yugoslav resisters could be understood as a legitimate sequel to the clash between foreign participants in the Spanish Civil War. The ambiguous, multi-layered nature of this incident is a reminder of how potentially problematic any simplistic use of the term “civil war” can be in the context of the twentieth century’s greatest international and global conflict and its immediate aftermath. On the one hand, the term could be applied to almost every country that fell under Axis control: wherever occupation took place, societies were unavoidably divided in their responses, and these divisions frequently led to bloodshed. On the other hand, the term can be seen as inappropriate in most such cases, insofar as these confrontations really pitted collaborators against resisters. To label these fights civil wars may seem to imply that the fundamental source of conflict was internal to the society in question rather than exogenous (in the form of foreign conquest by Germany or its allies). Such an implication is certainly bound to be controversial in most cases; it may also prove misleading in many. Nonetheless, it is Part II’s premise that there is analytical utility in advised use of the term in the context of wartime occupation, with the understanding that it should not be employed to the exclusion of other frames of reference, such as the more conventional pairing of collaboration and resistance.3 After all, there is no single label that can conceivably do justice to the complexity of such conflicts. Just as “civil war” has its limitations, so too does the phrase “resistance and collaboration,” which risks reducing the complex and fluid mixes of motives that colored the ever-shifting responses to occupation to an overly simplistic binary

3

said, it must also be pointed out that, in the field, German military commanders frustrated with the excesses and ineffectiveness of the Ustaša regime often cooperated with Chetnik formations, especially after Italy’s withdrawal from the war in 1943 left the Chetniks bereft of Italian support. Mario Jareb, “The NDH’s Relations with Italy and Germany,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 7, No. 4 (December 2006), 459–72. On the “conceptually generative” qualities of civil war as an analytical prism, see David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Knopf, 2017), 12.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part II

137

opposition between noble patriotism and treacherous service of foreign interests.4 A flexible terminological approach that includes the concept of civil war can help in exploring the interplay of exogenous and endogenous factors in shaping the violent conflicts that racked occupied European societies during the Second World War (and, in some cases, into the early Cold War).5 For the purposes of this discussion, a civil war is defined as a significantly violent internal struggle for political control of a state in its territorial entirety. Having stated that, I must immediately issue a disclaimer: this is an ideal-type definition the criteria of which are not fully met even by many “classic” civil wars, let alone any of those discussed here. In practice, some conflicts more closely approximate this ideal-type of civil war than do others. It is the mapping of these gradations that holds analytical interest, rather than the reductive assignment of cases to one category of conflict or another. In the European context, the term “civil war” has quite commonly been applied in a metaphorical or figurative way to the two cataclysmic twentieth-century conflicts between the continent’s great powers.6 The usual intention has been to suggest that, although divided into multiple polities, Europeans all partake of a shared civilization, rendering any conflict between them a civil war. The image has been employed in the service of radically divergent political and ideological agendas. During the first months of the First World War, the handful of intellectuals resisting their societies’ overnight plunge into mindless chauvinism propagated the designation “European civil war” in the hope of bringing the continent back to its senses. The unity of European civilization, they argued, must ultimately prevail in the face of this fratricidal slaughter.7 But even as the likes of Romain Rolland took up this cry, German artist Franz Marc embraced the violence precisely in its capacity as part of a “European civil war, a war against the inner, invisible enemy of the European spirit.”8 In 4 5 6 7

8

For a succinct critique of the traditional collaboration/resistance model, see Brook, Collaboration, 4. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 32–35. See Armitage, Civil Wars, 227–28. “Manifesto of the Friends of the Moral Unity of Europe,” dated Barcelona, November 27, 1914 and first published in Journal de Genève, January 9, 1915, reproduced in English translation (from the original Spanish) in Romain Rolland, Above the Battle (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1916), 123–26. See also Rolland’s original essay, “Au-dessus de la mêlée,” Supplement au Journal de Genève, September 22–23, 1914. Franz Marc as quoted in Otto Karl Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13. See also Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge, trans. William Templer and Joel Golb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 25.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

138

Civil Wars under Occupation

Marc’s view, Otto Werckmeister has suggested, this characterization of the war served to project it onto an elevated, transnational plane that could justify the artist’s participation in it, in a way that crude patriotism could not. For his part, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno drily rejected the term altogether on the grounds that its use implied both parties to the war partook of the qualities of a civil society, which Germany, in his estimation, did not.9 During the Second World War, it was the Germans who seemed most inclined to resort to the notion of civil war. Ernst Jünger responded to the November 1942 entry of the United States into the Mediterranean sector of the conflict by declaring that this was now a “world civil war” (Weltbürgerkrieg).10 For their part, the grimmer Germany’s prospects became, the more eager Nazi propagandists were to persuade the world that what was at stake in the struggle was far more than their own country’s particular interests. This was, they claimed, a European civil war between Bolshevism and its enemies. It was under this ideological framework that thousands of volunteers were recruited from all over Europe to join Waffen-SS divisions and other auxiliary formations fighting alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front.11 Elements of this propaganda line found their way into the historian Ernst Nolte’s revival of the idea of the European civil war at the tail end of the Historikerstreit of the 1980s.12 Yet, as Dan Diner has reminded us, propaganda is really all this amounted to, for the Nazis’ war began in quasi-alliance with the Soviet Union and, even after 1941, their racist worldview remained inherently at odds with any effort at creating a true coalition transcending ethnic and national distinctions (beyond the sphere of the so-called Nordic peoples, among whom Nazism held little appeal anyway). For his part, Stalin shied away from the idea of continental civil war, reminiscent as it was of the Leninist concept of revolutionary war that he was at pains to avoid, as will be discussed below.13 Enzo Traverso depicts the entire 1914–45 period as a European civil war between autocracy and democracy, but his application of this 9 10

11 12 13

Anne Kraume, Das Europa der Literatur: Schriftsteller blicken auf den Kontinent, 1815–1945 (Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 105–6. Diner, Cataclysms, 11; Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (New York: Verso, 1994), 94, n. 48; Elliot Y. Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 96; Jeffrey K. Olick, In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 301. Jürgen Elvert, Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918–1945) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 330. Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1987). Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile: Saggio storico sulla moralità nella resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 307.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part II

139

vision to the Second World War hinges on a problematic effort to revive the image of the anti-fascist grand coalition as something more substantive than a temporary alliance of convenience between liberal democracy and Communism.14 For Diner, the Second World War actually represents a pause in the twentieth century’s global civil war, as its two main protagonists – Communism and liberal democracy – joined forces to defeat a common, anti-universalist, enemy before returning in 1945 to the struggle between their two rival visions of internationalism.15 During the Second World War, some anti-fascist activists depicted their nation-by-nation struggles as parts of a larger European and global civil war in which each society was divided between fascism and its opponents. In his diary entry for August 4, 1940, Jean Guéhenno wrote: “The defeat of France is merely one episode in the European civil war. The conflict of nations hides a deeper social conflict. Each nation is so seriously divided within itself that one of the parties which composes it can think it has won when the country has lost.”16 A few years later, a pamphlet put out by the armed wing of the social-democratically inclined Italian Action Party fighting Mussolini’s Salò Republic insisted that: “Groups of Italians, of Chinese, of Frenchmen, and of Russians are today fighting in both [global] camps … Today, we, partisans, recognize a brother in the anti-Hitlerian German, a mortal enemy in the Italian fascist.”17 Yet the idea that even in wartime Germany a serious struggle was under way between the Nazis and their opponents was an example of wishful thinking rather than informed analysis. Leaving aside the pros and cons of using the expression “European civil war” or “global civil war” to describe the overarching conflict, the fact is that internal struggles of one sort or another were very common in societies that fell under enemy occupation. The following discussion will focus on a selection of these individual cases that rose to a level of violence that can be described as civil war. By the same token, although each of these clashes featured particular characteristics arising from local conditions, participants were usually acutely aware of their connection to the continental and global theaters of warfare as well as to analogous internal conflicts in other

14

15 17

Enzo Traverso, A ferro e fuoco: La guerra civile europea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008). See also Romain Ducoulombier’s overly dismissive review of the French edition of Traverso’s book in Fragments sur les temps présents: Marges politiques et radicalités sociales, posted October 5, 2008, http://tempspresents.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/a-feu-et-asang/ (accessed August 24, 2012). 16 Diner, Cataclysms, 25, 57–58, 196. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 10. My translation of quotation from pamphlet by Massimo Mila in Pavone, Guerra civile, 305. Pavone does not provide a citation for this quotation, which appears to date to 1943 or 1944.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

140

Civil Wars under Occupation

Fig. 8 Italian Action Party (Partito d’Azione) partisan fighters during the liberation of Milan, late April 1945. Keystone/Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

occupied countries. One can therefore speak of a sort of archipelago of loosely analogous, temporally overlapping (though not necessarily synchronous), and at least indirectly interconnected civil wars fought across a wide array of lands (during their occupation, in the course of their liberation, and in some cases in its aftermath as well) amidst the overarching global conflict. Indeed, this archipelago extended well beyond Europe, as will be seen in the discussion of the Chinese case, below. Civil war under occupation merits examination as a distinctive phenomenon, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a distillation or extreme version of a wider pattern – the powerful, polarizing impact of wartime occupations on conceptions of interest, identity, and loyalty within societies. Two overarching sets of questions surrounding the dynamics of these conflicts will inform the discussion in the analytical and comparative chapters (chapters 5 and 6) of Part II: 1 How much continuity and/or rupture was there between pre-war rivalries and wartime divisions in these countries? Did the alignments and enmities of these civil wars arise largely from preexisting tensions or from the highly contingent and distorting impact of enemy occupation?

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part II

141

2 Which forms of identity were most salient in shaping the behavior of participants? Did local, ethno-national, patriotic, and internationalist attachments play mutually complementary, contradictory, or exclusive roles? How did the experience of occupation and civil war change and reconfigure such identities? These issues will be explored through the comparative analysis of the four Second World War-era cases that seem to fit the civil war mold most closely, given the intensity and duration of fighting among fellow citizens. The three, geographically proximate (and substantively partly overlapping) European cases are Greece (where internecine fighting flared up in 1943, once again at the end of 1944, and most intensely during 1946–49), Yugoslavia (1941–45), and central/northern Italy (1943–45). China will serve as the fourth, Asian, example. Although civil war between Chinese Nationalists and Communists was suspended rather than ignited by Japan’s invasion and partial occupation, the country’s internal divisions remained very deep, levels of Chinese-on-Chinese violence remained high, and the conflict with Japan changed the domestic balance of political forces in ways that tipped the scale in the Communists’ favor as full-scale civil war resumed following Japan’s defeat.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

4

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell: Historical Overview

Southern Europe as Civil War Zone It is striking that all three full-on European civil wars of the 1940s took place in southern European countries, following in the wake of the region’s last such conflict – the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). There is a suggestive echo here of the 1820–21 revolutions, which had begun in Spain and spread to Italy and Greece.1 In that earlier sequence, the unrest had followed the upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic occupations of Spain and Italy. In the twentieth-century instance, the outbreaks either preceded continental-scale warfare (in Spain’s case) or began in the very midst of brutal foreign occupations. Even in the case of Spain, the country’s civil war very rapidly became intertwined with the broader, continental and global rivalries between Communism, fascism/Nazism, and liberal democracy. Why was southern Europe the locus of these civil wars amidst the Second World War? Such civil wars tended to occur in the context of armed resistance movements, and Yugoslavia, Greece, and central/ northern Italy all became sites of particularly intense resistance activity. This arose partly from factors specific to each country, which will be delineated below. As to shared characteristics, the most obvious is that of German and Italian military occupation (and de facto German occupation of central and northern Italy as of 1943) combined with geographical proximity to Anglo-American-controlled territory in North Africa (British-controlled Egypt throughout the war, and the rest of North Africa from 1942/43 on) and, from 1943, southern Italy. This meant that the British and Americans were in a position to fly across open water (rather than over enemy anti-aircraft installations) to airdrop advisors and supplies over Greece and Yugoslavia (or transport key figures via submarine) from departure points across the Mediterranean and, 1

See Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

142

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

143

eventually, across the Adriatic. In the Greek case, this was supplemented by the cooptation of Aegean smuggling networks: Allied materiel and agents were conveyed into the country aboard fishing boats (caı¨ques) from neutral Turkey, where officials were readier to turn a blind eye to such operations the more evident Nazi Germany’s ultimate fate became. In Italy’s case, the Anglo-American Allies were already consolidating control of the south of the peninsula as the battle against German occupation of the center and north got under way, giving the anti-Nazi resistance a relatively secure rear and ensuring comparative ease of communication between Allied- and German-occupied areas. All this meant that the Anglo-Americans were not only particularly well placed to help sustain these resistance movements, but were also in a position to influence the balance of forces within each of them. To an extent, so was the Soviet Union, by dint of its political influence over the Communist parties that figured large in each of these movements. The geography of Yugoslavia and Greece themselves was also a major factor. Both countries included extensive areas of difficult, mountainous terrain that overstretched occupation forces were hard put to secure in the face of determined guerrilla action. Both countries also had significant peasant populations with a tradition of engaging in irregular warfare that stretched back to nineteenth-century rebellions against the Ottomans as well as the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century. In the 1940s as today, urban intellectuals and activists might play key leadership and organizational roles in guerrilla movements, but the crucial scene of action was usually the countryside, and rural populations tended to supply the bulk of the personnel involved as well as playing a critical logistical role (whether willingly or under duress).2 Of necessity, partisans fought in, and lived off, the countryside. Italy does not quite fit this pattern. Certainly, the support (be it voluntary or coerced) of peasant communities played an important role in the ability of resistance groups to operate in significant portions of the central and northern countryside, but it was the distinctive post-1943 combination of occupation by Allies in the south and Germans in the north that created the geopolitical context and opportunity for a largescale resistance movement in the first place and that determined its overarching geographical distribution. Why did intensive, armed resistance against occupation give rise to civil-war-like conditions? Firstly, there was the matter of indigenous collaboration with the occupiers. Given the latter’s perennial personnel 2

See Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

144

Civil Wars under Occupation

shortages, collaborationist forces and officials were often tasked with responsibility for holding and policing territory, managing low-level administration, etc. This made them easily accessible targets for resistance attacks, against which they would seek to retaliate. Insofar as collaborators represented significant interest groups within the country, rather than just constituting a handful of bad apples (as subsequent myths of the resistance would have had people believe), such fighting can be characterized as civil war. Secondly, resistance movements were generally loose coalitions (at best) of parties, organizations, and ideological factions that had little in common beyond a shared belief that the Axis powers would eventually lose the war. The key question, then, was that of who among them would inherit power at war’s end. Indeed, this was the outcome that the activities of resistance movements were likeliest to play a significant role in determining, given that Axis defeat was ultimately a function of the shifting strategic balance among the great powers. The issue was felt most acutely in those countries where armed resistance movements were successful in seizing and administering significant swaths of territory in the midst of the war. In all three of our European cases, as well as across many other occupied zones of Eurasia, it was Communist-led formations that constituted the most militarily and politically effective element among resistance forces and that therefore seemed primed to reap the greatest political rewards upon liberation. (A variation upon this theme, as will be seen below, also played out in China.) In both Yugoslavia and Greece, the resultant competitive jockeying for power led to fighting between pro- and anti-Communist resistance groups. Indeed, particularly in the Yugoslav case, so all-consuming did such civil wars within the resistance become that the entire distinction between resistance and collaboration could be blurred beyond recognition, especially when anti-Communist formations struck tactical deals with the occupation forces that freed their hands against their Communist enemies. Greece The irony of Greece’s wartime ordeal is that, since 1936, the country had been in the hands of General Metaxas’ right-wing dictatorship, which ruled under a state of emergency that suspended democratic institutions and processes and banned the Communist Party. Metaxas had consolidated power under the aegis of the country’s (newly restored as of 1935) monarchy, in an arrangement loosely reminiscent of Mussolini’s cohabitation with the Italian king. That said, in the case of the Greek dictatorship, there was no equivalent to a mass political movement like Italy’s

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

145

Fascist Party. Metaxas’ alignment with the British in the Second World War was forced upon him by Mussolini’s territorial demands followed by the October 1940 Italian invasion, launched from Italian-controlled Albania. Metaxas died in late January 1941 amidst a Greek counteroffensive which was so successful that it obliged Germany to enter the fray in support of its ally in April 1941. This quickly led to the defeat of Greek forces and the precipitate withdrawal of British supporting troops. The country was placed under a triple Italian–German–Bulgarian occupation (the Bulgarians annexed their zone) until September 1943. At that point, Italy’s defection from the Axis camp led to a German takeover of the country’s Italian-administered sectors. Some leading politicians remaining in Greece were initially willing to lend quiet support to the succession of collaborationist governments established under German and Italian auspices, and the last collaborationist premier was Ioannis Rallis, a fairly prominent pre-war monarchist politician.3 However, the monarch, his ministers, and some elements of the Greek army and navy found refuge in British-ruled Egypt, with monarch and ministers proceeding onward to London in September 1941 before returning to Cairo in March 1943. Under British pressure, and in an effort to bolster its claim to represent the interests of all Greeks at a time of profound crisis, the government-in-exile’s cabinet was reshaped to include representatives of a number of political parties the activities of which had been suppressed under the Metaxas regime. Yet relations between republicans (known as Venizelists after former Prime Minister Venizelos), monarchists, former members of the Metaxas regime, and other parties and factions remained strained. These tensions periodically manifested themselves in open confrontations, including a March–April 1944 mutiny by sympathizers of the homeland’s Communist-led EAM (National Liberation Front) resistance movement among exiled, Middle East-based Greek military formations.4 Among the critical elements that played a role in the rise of a significant resistance movement and subsequent outbreak of civil war in Greece was the country’s large peasantry. This population consisted mostly of small landholders whose chances of economic betterment were subject to the vagaries of global commodity prices in an era of deflation and depression, 3

4

Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 322–23. Mazower’s book is the best English-language work on Greece under the occupation. This summary draws on it extensively. See also André Gerolymatos, An International Civil War: Greece, 1943–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), chs. 1–4. Richard Clogg, “The Greek Government in Exile, 1941–4,” International History Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 1979), 376–98.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

146

Civil Wars under Occupation (a)

Austria

USSR

Hungary

Romania

Belgrade

B LACK S EA

Yugoslavia Bulgaria Italy AL

Greece

Turkey

Athens

M EDITERRANEAN S EA AL = Albania

(b)

B LACK S EA

Bulgaria Annexed by Bulgaria

Thessaloniki

Albania

S EA OF M ARMARA

Alexandroupoli

NI

I O ORM Y I T F B ( IN

Larissa

IS AN LLY A A

A EGEAN S EA

Volos

LA N LY AN DS ) NEX ED

I ONIAN S EA

Turkey

Athens (Germanoccupied)

Patras

Ermoupoli DO DE CA

(I

N

ES AL E I Y) SL

T

M EDITERRANEAN S EA Crete Iraklion

0

50 100

200

Italian-occupied

300

400

AN

DS

km © G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace 500

German-occupied

Annexed territory

Map 6 (a) Greece and Yugoslavia, c. 1937. (b) Occupied Greece, June 1943.

and who saw little benefit from the activities of politicians, parties, and ideologies that catered to the interests of urban elites. The longstanding division of the country’s political classes between republicans (Venizelists) and monarchists had little to do with the lived experience of the rural masses and offered scant reason for hope to the roughly one million (give

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

147

or take several hundred thousand) Greek Orthodox refugees from Asia Minor and their descendants who had arrived in the wake of the GrecoTurkish war of 1920–22 and remained disproportionately represented among the country’s destitute two decades later. This is where the Communists found their richest recruiting grounds.5 At the same time, it is worth noting that the origins of the division between Venizelists and monarchists were intertwined with the geopolitics of the First World War. In the course of that conflict, the then prime minister, Venizelos, had supported a pro-Allied Greek intervention in the conflict, whereas the king of the time and his supporters had sought to keep the country neutral. In this respect, there were parallels in the political realignments and new divisions that tore the country apart in the 1940s, for they too were intimately connected to the country’s submergence in a broader, global conflict. The urban population of Greece suffered disproportionately from the 1941–42 famine, which was brought on by factors including plunder and requisitions at the hands of German occupiers and the disruptions to commerce caused by the country’s division into multiple occupation zones. But the rural economy also underwent significant hardships through much of the occupation and the civil war that grew out of it, as the cycle of guerrilla activity followed by disproportionate reprisals devastated farmlands and livestock and destroyed thousands of villages – particularly in the mountainous northwest.6 As Mark Mazower has argued, the conditions of military occupation widened the gap between the old politicians (be they collaborators, fence-sitters, or members of the government-in-exile) and the rural population, for whom the patronage networks of traditional Greek political life no longer functioned in any meaningful sense.7 It was the Communists who stood ready to break out of their isolated pre-war pockets of rural support8 to fill this vacuum. They found the wartime peasantry to be the richest recruitment pool for EAM/ELAS (National Liberation Front/National Popular Liberation Army) – the 5

6

7 8

John O. Iatrides, “Greece at the Crossroads, 1944–1950,” in John O. Iatrides and Linda Wrigley, eds., Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and Its Legacy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 18; Gerolymatos, An International Civil War, ch. 1. Violetta Hionidou, Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), passim; J. R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 276–78. Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, passim. Seraphim Seferiades, “Small Rural Landownership, Subsistence Agriculture, and Peasant Protest in Interwar Greece: The Agrarian Question Recast,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (October 1999), 277–323.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

148

Civil Wars under Occupation

Fig. 9 ELAS fighters circa 1944. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

ostensibly supra-party national liberation movement and associated fighting organization which the Communists not-so-secretly built and ran.9 By the time of Italy’s 1943 withdrawal from the conflict, EAM/ELAS controlled an extensive patchwork of mountainous territory across the country. In some regions, the Germans and their collaborationist auxiliaries were essentially confined to key urban nodes of control and the road networks that linked them. It was this very success on the part of EAM/ ELAS that lay at the origins of the civil war. Britain’s Cairo-based Special Operations Executive (SOE) operatives had taken the lead in parachuting personnel and supplies to EAM/ELAS, with the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) eventually following suit in coordination with them. But by late 1943, Whitehall had become very concerned that Greece, which His Majesty’s Government regarded as a critically important element in Britain’s post-war, Mediterranean sphere of influence, would fall completely under Communist control once the Germans had been defeated. It was with a view to containing this threat that the British 9

Gerolymatos, An International Civil War, 75–76.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

149

Fig. 10 EAM/ELAS banner welcoming British troops to Athens, October 1944. Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

began shifting more of their support to the much smaller and less effective EDES resistance organization. EDES had been founded by a former Greek army officer, Col. Napoleon Zervas. Zervas identified nominally with the Venizelist tradition, but lacked a solid popular base of support and did not even enjoy the endorsement of Venizelist political leaders. It was a combination of bankrolling, cajoling, and blackmail on the part of SOE agents that had induced him to take the plunge into active resistance in the first place. Leaders of EDES had a propensity for avoiding conflict with the Germans, whose military at times undertook maneuvers designed to strengthen the organization’s position vis-à-vis ELAS. The main redeeming quality of EDES in the eyes of its British supporters was precisely its resolute anti-Communism.10

10

Ibid., ch. 3; C. M. Woodehouse, The Struggle for Greece, 1941–1949 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002; first published 1976), 29–30, 44.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

150

Civil Wars under Occupation

Fig. 11 Pro-EAM demonstrators struck by police gunfire at the start of the clashes in Athens, December 3, 1944. Bettmann via Getty Images.

The first round of the Greek civil war commenced in the fall of 1943, when ELAS units attacked EDES forces in their main base of operations in Epirus (in northwestern Greece), leading to widespread fighting between the two organizations and to secret dealings between EDES and the German military. This outbreak of inter-Greek violence came to an uneasy close in early 1944 through British mediation. But when British forces entered Athens in October 1944, with the government-in-exile in tow, relations between the British and the Greek Communists rapidly deteriorated. In December, the firing of shots by Greek police on an EAM demonstration in Athens led to the eruption of full-scale urban warfare between the British military and EAM/ELAS.11 The fighting also 11

The Greek police claimed that they were responding to attacks initiated by the demonstrators, but contemporaneous accounts by journalists on the scene tend not to substantiate this. Panagiotis Delis, “The British Intervention in Greece: The Battle of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

151

involved former members of the Greek Security Battalions – an occupation-era collaborationist militia which the British had hastily reorganized and rebranded as the National Guard. By February 1945, the British and Greek government forces had prevailed, obliging EAM/ ELAS to accept an uneasy truce with the Greek government, under the terms of which they promised to disarm their forces.12 However, they retained a skeletal organization in the countryside, and regrouped as the Democratic Army of Greece, which responded to the National Guard’s “White Terror” of 1945–46 by making a bid for power in a full-scale civil war that ravaged the country from 1946 to 1949 at the cost of more than fifty thousand lives.13 This time, it was American support – in the context of the Cold War, British financial exhaustion, and the 1947 declaration of the Truman Doctrine – that ultimately helped the monarchy’s forces prevail.

Yugoslavia Yugoslavia’s situation was complicated by the country’s ethnic heterogeneity and by attempts by its German and Italian occupiers to use differences of nationality, religion, and ideology to their advantage. The country’s rapid conquest at the hands of the Germans in April 1941 – in the context of the German attack on Greece – was followed by its partition. The ethnic hierarchy of interwar Yugoslavia – a state which had been established after the First World War under the auspices of the Serbian monarchy and the political and military institutions of which had been dominated by Serbs – was reversed by its occupiers. A Greater Croatia (incorporating multiethnic and multi-confessional Bosnia and Herzegovina, while effectively ceding control of the Dalmatian coast to Italy) was now established as a nominally independent, fascist-style state headed by Ante Pavelić’s nationalist extremist organization – the Ustaša. The Ustaša had previously operated underground against the Yugoslav state, and its leaders had spent recent years in Italian exile. It was the returned exiles – i.e. those least accustomed to operating within the socio-ethnic reality of a multiethnic Yugoslavia – who dominated the Ustaša regime,14 which

12 13 14

Athens, December 1944,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies Vol. 35, No. 1 (May 2017), 211–37; John O. Iatrides, Revolt in Athens: The Greek Communist Secound Round, 1944–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 190–91. Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, chs. 22–23; Gerolymatos, An International Civil War, chs. 3–4. David H. Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War (London: Longman, 1995), ch. 6. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 344.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

152

Civil Wars under Occupation

proceeded to unleash a ferocious wave of terror and mass atrocities against Croatia’s Serb and Jewish minority populations. Formally, under Italian pressure, Croatia was constituted as a monarchy, with a member of the Italian royal family as the designated king. But Italy’s troop presence in the west of Croatia came alongside German deployments in the east. Over time, Italy’s efforts to turn the Independent State of Croatia into a quiescent client regime were frustrated by the Ustaša’s violent extremism and the steady growth of German influence.15 Occupied Serbia was placed under German military administration with a puppet government under Milan Nedić, whose regime had far less autonomous scope than its Croatian counterpart. The Germans viewed the Serbs as a hostile nation, given the role rebellious Serb army officers had played in reversing the Yugoslav government’s initial capitulation to Berlin’s demand that it sign on to the Axis Powers’ Tripartite Pact during the Nazi invasion of Greece. German and Italian zones of troop presence – along with varyingly formal or de facto territorial annexations carved out by Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and even the Italian-controlled Albanian state – turned the map of the former Yugoslavia into a bewildering, multi-layered patchwork of political, administrative, and military jurisdictions. As with Greece, there was a royalist Yugoslav governmentin-exile (based in London for the duration of the war) that hoped to return to power at war’s end on the backs of the British and in coordination with non-Communist resistance forces. The Ustaša regime’s orchestrated brutality against its Serb minority population, in addition to the harsh exactions of the Germans, turned many Serbs towards resistance, as they sought refuge from their oppressors in mountain fastnesses. Nedić’s Serbian puppet government was powerless to act on behalf of ethnic Serbs beyond its borders, even had it been inclined to do so. Instead, Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović, an officer of the Yugoslav armed forces who had rejected the country’s military capitulation, initially emerged as the most promising leader of such a resistance movement. The British soon began funneling aid towards Mihailović and his so-called Chetniks (the traditional designation of irregular peasant forces participating in Serbia’s armed conflicts), and the Yugoslav government-in-exile named him its minister of defense. Yet Mihailović was never able to establish a reliable and cohesive system of command and control over the far-flung, self-styled Chetnik formations 15

Trifković, “Rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia”; Rory Yeomans, “The Adventures of an Ustasha Youth Leader in the Adriatic: Transnational Fascism and the Travel Polemics of Dragutin Gjurić,” Journal of Tourism History, Vol. 6, Nos. 2–3 (2014), 158–73.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

Germany

153

Budapest

De facto annexed by Germany

Hungary

Annexed by Hungary

Ljubljana Zagreb

Romania

Jasenovac Conc. Camp

Novi Sad

Croatia*

Annexed by Italy

B

Belgrade

ia

Serbian Residual State

Sarajevo Jablanica

ADRIATIC SEA

Neretva River

Annexed by Italy

Annexed by Bulgaria

Banja Luka

osn

Montenegro

Pristina Sofia

Bulgaria

Cetinje

Italy

Skopje

Annexed by Albania

Tirana

Albania

(Italian Protectorate)

Greece

0

50 100

200

300

400

km 500

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

* The Independent State of Croatia (as it was officially called) was nominally independent but de facto divided into Italian and German areas of troop deployment. Italian-occupied

German-occupied

Annexed territory

Map 7 Occupied and partitioned Yugoslavia, c. June 1943.

that sprang up across the crazy quilt of occupation zones and puppet principalities of the former Yugoslavia. Leaders of many of these militias formally recognized his authority while pursuing their own ambitions in practice. Some functioned as authorized militias in the Italian occupation zone, even while maintaining nominal allegiance to, and intermittent

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

154

Civil Wars under Occupation

communications with, Mihailović – effectively hedging their bets amidst the uncertain fortunes of war. Kosta Pećanac led one formation, henceforward dubbed the “legal Chetniks,” directly into the service of the Nedić regime and its German sponsors. Finally, Mihailović and the formations under his direct command themselves soon began entering into opportunistic, onagain/off-again cooperative arrangements with the Italians, with Nedić’s collaborationist regime in German-occupied Serbia, and at times – especially after Italy’s withdrawal from the war – even with the Germans (with a wink and a nod from Mihailović albeit without his formal authorization), in pursuit of their common struggle against the Communist-led partisans.16 For, as in Greece, so too in Yugoslavia, the collapse of state and army under the German onslaught, combined with the economic and physical violence of occupation, created a political vacuum in the countryside that the Communists proved best adapted to fill. Like their Greek counterparts, the Yugoslav Communists had been a relatively small but disciplined organization before the war, accustomed to operating underground thanks to their party’s illegal status. A recent Stalinist political purge had left the Yugoslav party particularly cohesive under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito.17 Its leaders tended to be urban intellectuals, but many of them had either been born to peasant families or were only a generation or so removed from their rural origins, and retained deep family and clan ties in the countryside. It was to the countryside that they repaired as soon as the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union led the Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International) to call on Communist movements throughout occupied Europe to organize national resistance fronts against the Germans and their allies. The bewildering kaleidoscope of ethno-cultural differences, jurisdictional complexities, and shifting loyalties in wartime Yugoslavia almost defies description. Jozo Tomasevich devoted more than three decades of his professional life to the Herculean task, but passed away before he could get beyond the 1,350 pages of the first two volumes of his planned trilogy.18 Suffice it to say here that, as the multi-ethnic Communist 16

17 18

Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 104–14; Prusin, Serbia under the Swastika, ch. 1 and pp. 115–20; report issued by the chief of the German military’s (no longer operational) Southeastern Command to the Supreme Command of the Army, summarizing the history of Germany’s occupation of the region, Vienna, April 10, 1945, NAMP, T501/264/ 196–394, esp. frames 240–41, RG 242, NARA. Djilas, Wartime, 60. Of course, Tito was to break spectacularly with Stalin during the early part of the Cold War. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) and the second volume of the series, cited earlier, with the subtitle Occupation and Collaboration.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

155

resistance movement rose to military prominence as the most effective internal challenge to German power in the country – and indeed, in all of occupied Europe – Mihailović came to fear being sidelined. His fears were self-fulfilling: his forces’ increasingly flagrant cooperation with Italian and – at least indirectly – German forces in joint offensives against the Communist partisans persuaded even that lion of British antiCommunism, Winston Churchill, that Mihailović was an unworthy ally.19 As far as Whitehall was concerned, Tito – whose forces were disproportionately responsible for Germany’s stationing of up to seventeen divisions across the occupied zones of the Balkans by November 1943 – had proved himself the Yugoslav resistance leader to bet on.20 (It should be noted that in March 1943 Tito had made an attempt of his own at a tactical truce with the Germans, with a view to freeing his hand against the Chetniks. Limited prisoner exchanges between Germans and partisans were carried out on a number of occasions, but Hitler and Ribbentrop vetoed any broader understandings.21) In an apparent irony, London’s decision to withdraw all personnel attached to Mihailović’s forces and redirect their support exclusively to the partisans came around the time in late 1943 when the British made the strategic decision to shift the emphasis of their support operations in Greece away from EAM/ELAS in favor of its antiCommunist rivals. Apart from the stark contrast between partisan effectiveness and Chetnik fecklessness, part of the context for this rather coldblooded and seemingly incongruous combination of chess moves was the progress of negotiations with the Kremlin about a possible agreement on post-war spheres of influence that would leave Greece in the British sphere, while sharing influence in Yugoslavia with the Soviets.22 Thus it was that the Yugoslav Communists emerged militarily and politically 19 20

21

22

It should be noted that the Germans also periodically launched offensives designed to wipe out Mihailović’s forces. For a balanced and convincing response to the heated and heavily politicized historiographical debates about Britain’s abandonment of Mihailović, see Ann Lane, “Perfidious Albion? Britain and the Struggle for Mastery of Yugoslavia, 1941–44: A Reexamination in the Light of ‘New’ Evidence,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 1996), 345–77. Djilas, Wartime, 229–45; Peter Broucek, “Einleitung [Introduction],” in Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, Ein General im Zwielicht: Die Erinnerungen Edmund Glaises von Horstenau, Vol. III: Deutscher Bevollmächtigter General in Kroatien und Zeuge des Untergangs des “Tausendjährigen Reiches”, ed. Peter Broucek (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1988), 34–35. American OSS operatives working alongside their SOE counterparts in Greece were naı¨vely shocked when they were made privy to a May 2, 1944, SOE memorandum unabashedly affirming London’s intent to maintain Greece in its sphere of influence after the war. Within four years, the Americans would be occupying the very niche in Greece vacated by a suddenly crumbling British empire. Undated, typed history of SO–ME (Special Operations–Middle East), by Percy S. Wood, Lt. USNR, Chief, SO (Special Operations), Entry 144, Box 100, Folder 1045, OSS Papers, RG 226, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

156

Civil Wars under Occupation

triumphant at the end of a struggle against the Germans that had become entangled with a ruthless, atrocity-ridden civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. (The country’s overall wartime casualties came to more than one million.)

Fig. 12 British Royal Air Force planes dropping supplies to Yugoslav resistance forces, circa 1942. Pen & Sword/SSPL via Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

157

Italy Italy’s involvement in the Second World War began not as an occupied country but as an invader and occupier of others, in the context of Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler. The consistent failure of the Fascist regime’s military campaigns, the profound demoralization of its armed forces, the ever more obviously self-destructive implications of remaining tethered to the German alliance – all combined to undercut support for Il Duce even within the inner circles of the Fascist Party (which had in many respects become rather marginalized by Mussolini during the latter years of his dictatorship). The 1943 Allied landings in Sicily precipitated the political crisis of July 1943, when the Fascist Grand Council voted its nonconfidence in Mussolini’s leadership. The king took this as his cue to dismiss Mussolini as head of government, have him arrested, and appoint Marshal Badoglio as head of a non-party government.23 After dithering for over a month, Badoglio’s government, which had dissolved the Fascist Party, finally negotiated its way into an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, followed by a formal reentry into the war on their side. Given the protracted lead-up to this defection, German forces had had plenty of time to prepare for this predictable sequel to the Fascist regime’s demise. They rapidly moved down from the north to occupy as much as possible of the Italian peninsula, while Anglo-American forces assumed control of the south. A September 1943 German commando raid rescued Mussolini from imprisonment, whisking him away to be established as head of a neo-fascist puppet state headquartered in the northern town of Salò. Il Duce’s new statelet called itself the Italian Social Republic (RSI). While the Italian state’s active contribution to the Allied war effort remained negligible, the German-controlled regions became the scene of fighting between German troops and their RSI allies, on the one hand, and a quickly organized anti-fascist resistance, on the other. The resistance – whose numbers swelled in the wake of the RSI’s own unpopular military-recruitment drives24 – consisted of formations affiliated with a variety of left-of-center political movements, along with some politically unaffiliated, autonomous units, all loosely coordinated under the umbrella of a Committee of National Liberation (CLN) and its subgroup responsible for the liberation of the north (CLNAI). Once again, the Communists, long accustomed to operating as an underground network

23 24

Philip Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 1. Roberto Chiarini, L’ultimo fascismo: Storia e memoria della Repubblica di Salò (Venice: Marislio, 2009), 53–64.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

158

Civil Wars under Occupation

Germany Hungary Switzerland Vichy France

Salò

Milan

Venice

Ind. State of Croatia

Bologna

Genoa

Zara (ISR-controlled)

S. Marino

Florence

Montenegro

Italian Social Republic* CORSICA (VICHY FRANCE)

Serbian RS

ADRIATIC SEA

Rome

Monte Cassino Naples Salerno

Albania

Brindisi

Taranto

SARDINIA TYRRHENIAN SEA

M

0

E

Palermo

D

I

Algeria

Tunisia

(Free French)

(Free French)

50 100

200

300

T

E

SICILY

R R A N E A N

km 400

IONIAN SEA

Catania

S E A

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

* The Italian SR was officially independent, but de facto German-occupied. German-occupied Italy (effectively integrated into Germany) Allied-occupied Italy Map 8 The Italian peninsula, late November to early December 1943.

under Fascist repression, led the most significant of these forces – the Garibaldi Brigades. Officially (and in accordance with the national-liberation front strategy prescribed by Moscow), the Garibaldi Brigades

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

159

transcended any specific party affiliation and eschewed any revolutionary goals beyond the overthrow of Nazi/Fascist rule, just as EAM/ELAS was supposed to represent a broad, supra-party coalition of patriotic forces in Greece. But EAM/ELAS did not really include any significant political movements apart from the Communists, and Communist-led forces ended up fighting anti-Communist resistance groups in the Greek countryside. Unlike its Yugoslav and (except for a brief interlude) Greek counterparts, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) accepted the political authority of the country’s royal government and worked in tandem with independent non-Communist resistance forces, thus allowing the Italian resistance movement to avoid a civil-war-within-a-civil-war of the sort that beset its Balkan counterparts.25 By the same token, this further reduced any chance the Italian Communists had to dominate their country’s postliberation politics. In any case, the most decisive fighting in Italy took place between Allied and German armies, and it was the British and Americans who brought the long and hard campaign to a close in April 1945 when they accepted the official surrender of the German commander in northern Italy. The Garibaldi Brigades were thus in no position to seize power anywhere on the peninsula, even had it been their ambition to do so. The Italian monarchy, deeply tarnished by its association with Mussolini and the disaster of the war, was terminated by referendum in June 1946. But the new Italian Republic was marked by considerable continuity of its civil-service personnel and social elites with those of the Badoglio regime and of the Fascist era preceding it. Thus, with the onset of the Cold War and the American-influenced exclusion of the Communist Party from Italian governing coalitions starting in 1947, the ideological legacy of the resistance movement became a special preserve of its veterans, of the Communist Party, and of leftist intellectuals. And for these guardians of the “values of the resistance,” to borrow Christopher Duggan’s words, it was anathema to speak of the fight

25

This partly reflected Stalin’s tendency to differentiate between the hegemonic tactics to be adopted by Communist parties in the prospective Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the need to pursue influence more cautiously through coalitionbuilding in countries to be liberated by Anglo-American forces. See the discussion in Silvio Pons, “Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 2001), 3–27. On the general contrast between Communist tactics in Western and Eastern Europe, see also Martin Conway and Robert Gerwarth, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution,” in Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 158–62.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

160

Civil Wars under Occupation

against the RSI as a civil war.26 That term was deemed poisonous in part because it was championed by neo-fascists seeking to legitimize their role in what they sought to portray as a war among Italians over the country’s political future.27 For the resistance fighters and their ideological heirs, the RSI’s rebranded Republican Fascist Party had brought together a pack of delusional traitors clinging to a doomed Nazi cause; there was no reason to dignify them with the status of combatants in a civil war of their own invention. Here was one point on which the Christian Democratic-led governments of Cold War Italy could agree with the Communists, for the myth of an Italian national-liberation struggle against the Germans, as distinct from a civil war between leftist forces and neo-fascists, lent itself to the promotion of national unity and to the obscuring of any continuities between the Fascist state and the post-war liberal democracy. Only in the 1990s did the historian Claudio Pavone, himself a veteran of the resistance movement, lead a scholarly challenge to this consensus by arguing that neo-fascists should not be allowed to monopolize the use of a term – civil war – that could be of analytical value in understanding just how deeply divided Italian society really was in the years 1943–45 and beyond.28 The fact that the fighting cost the partisans roughly forty-five thousand dead and that at least twelve thousand Fascists were killed in the immediate aftermath of the conflict certainly lends weight to the portrayal of the conflict as an Italian civil war.29 China Prefatory Comments On the face of it, the Chinese case30 does not belong in this part of the book at all, for the full-scale onset of the Japanese invasion in 1937 was 26

27

28 30

Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 420–26; quotation on 425. For a much more nuanced dissection of the various phases in the evolution of post-war Italian historical memory, see Claudio Fogu, “Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory,” in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). During the actual conflict, Mussolini’s right-hand man Alessandro Pavolini rejected the notion that this was a civil war, preferring instead to denounce the resistance fighters either as actual foreigners or as Italians who had turned into foreign others by virtue of supposedly renouncing the national family. Daniella Gagliani, Brigate nere: Mussolini e la militarizzazione del Partito fascista repubblicano (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), 119. 29 Pavone, Guerra civile. Morgan, Fall of Mussolini, 166–67. In writing about China I have generally favored latter-day pinyin transliterations over the Wade-Giles or other conventional usages of the wartime era (thus Beijing instead of Peking, Nanjing rather than Nanking), except in cases where doing so risks making

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

161

associated with the suspension, rather than unleashing, of armed conflict between the ruling Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party (KMT) and its Chinese Communist Party (CCP) foes. Just a year earlier, as tensions mounted with the Japanese (who already were in control of Manchuria and other areas of northern China), KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek had agreed to the conclusion of a United Front with the CCP. The further negotiation and implementation of this agreement was spurred by the escalation of hostilities with Japan to the level of all-out warfare in 1937. For that matter, the bulk of China’s territory remained unoccupied throughout the war, as its internationally recognized government relocated to the interior and continued the fight from within the country throughout 1937–45 rather than negotiating an understanding with the invader as in Vichy France or withdrawing into exile as with the Greek and Dutch cases. Yet much of China most certainly did experience a long and extremely onerous occupation, which encompassed the bulk of the coastline, including the country’s great urban, political, cultural, and commercial centers, and extended well into significant portions of the interior along a fluctuating line over the course of the war years. The Japanese advance turned close to 100 million Chinese into “internal” refugees. More than 20 million – a majority of them civilians – were likely killed in the course of the massive violence that engulfed the country as a whole, be it in the occupied zones, the unoccupied areas, or the shifting and ill-defined frontiers among and within these sectors.31 As to the Chinese civil war, while the political response of 1937–38 was indeed one of closing ranks in patriotic solidarity,32 the subsequent course of events reopened and sharpened old divisions among the country’s rival political forces and set the stage for the resumption of full-scale combat between the KMT and CCP after Japan’s defeat, culminating in Communist victory on the mainland and the retreat of Chiang’s regime to Taiwan in 1949.33 As in Yugoslavia, the impact of occupation and of the varied responses to it on the part of the country’s rival political elements shifted the balance of forces decisively in favor of the

31

32 33

familiar names, place-names, or terms unfamiliar (hence Chiang Kai-shek rather than Jiang Jieshi, Chungking instead of Chongqing, Kuomintang rather than Guomindang). Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–2; Stephen R. MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–3, ch. 4. Lary, Chinese People at War, 38–40. On the conflicts of this period as “Nested Wars: A Civil War within a Regional War within a Global War,” see the title (and contents) of Part II of S. C. M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

162

Civil Wars under Occupation

Soviet Union TT

Manchukuo

Mongolia

Urumchi

(Japanese Puppet State)

Xinjiang

Xinjing

(Warlord Sheng Shicai)

Beijing

Areas of CCP control or activity (approx.)

KR

Yenan Qingdao

Tibet NP

Nanjing

Republic of China

Japan

(Nationalist/Kuomintang)

Lhasa

Shanghai Chungking (Chongqing)

BT

India

Kunming

New Fourth Army Incident (Jan. 1941)

Burma

Hong Kong

FIC

INDIAN OCEAN

Fuzhou Xiamen Shantou Taiwan (Japan)

Philippines

Thailand 0

500

1,000

2,000

km 3,000

Abbreviations BT CCP FIC KR NP RNGRC TT

PACIFIC OCEAN

Hainan

Bhutan Chinese Communist Party French Indochina Korea (Japan) Nepal Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China (collaborationist regime) Tannu Tuva (Soviet Union-affiliated)

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

Areas of CCP control or activity (approx.) Japanese-occupied Zone of RNGRC authority (Japanese-occupied) Claimed by the Republic of China

Map 9 The Republic of China, mid- to late 1942.

Communists. As in Greece, the decisive round of civil war was fought in the aftermath of liberation from Axis occupation. Moreover, the United Front between the rival movements began very visibly falling apart with the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

163

when KMT forces virtually wiped out one of Mao Zedong’s military formations (on which more below). More significantly, to define the Chinese civil war in narrow terms as a bilateral conflict between the KMT and CCP is to retro-project the outcome of events in the late 1940s on to the extraordinarily complex and ever-shifting pattern of political factions, military formations, zones of hybrid authority, fragile alignments, and brutal conflicts that tore at the fabric of Chinese society throughout the nearly four decades between the republican revolution of 1911–12 and 1949’s Communist victory on the mainland. Leaving aside the increasing frequency of clashes between CCP and KMT forces,34 the years of Japanese invasion and partial occupation were also marked by bloody clashes between Chinese government forces (be they KMT or CCP elements) and the armed formations of various Chinese “puppet” regimes operating under overarching Japanese command. And in 1940, Wang Jingwei, a former Chinese head of government and long-time rival of Chiang Kai-shek within the KMT, formed a collaborationist government in Chiang’s old capital of Nanjing and deployed key elements of the KMT’s stock nationalist rhetoric and symbolic vocabulary in an attempt to contest Chiang’s claim to embody the true spirit of national identity. In other words, China was a deeply and violently divided society, where some internal rifts were temporarily bridged in the face of foreign invasion and occupation, while others were opened up or deepened. Perhaps most crucially and notoriously, the war with Japan had a very differential impact on the fortunes and standing of the KMT and CCP, leaving the former in a drastically weakened position vis-à-vis its rival once the war with Japan had ended, and paving the way for the Communist victory a few years later.

Historical Overview Patterns of continuity and discontinuity among our cases will be explored as a theme in the comparative analysis that lies at the heart of Part II. But it must be understood from the outset that China’s transition into war with Japan was marked by particularly strong elements of continuity. It is conventional to retrospectively view the onset of all-out war between Chinese and Japanese forces in 1937, in the wake of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, as marking the beginning of what was to become the East Asian theater of the Second World War. And there is no 34

Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 115, 122, 132–36.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

164

Civil Wars under Occupation

question that this marked a decisive and dramatic historical watershed. But it came against the background of longstanding and ever-growing friction and conflict between Japanese imperialism and Chinese anticolonial nationalism. Japan’s entry on to the world stage as an imperial great power had begun with the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and continued with the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War, which was fought, in part, over competing efforts to stake out spheres of influence in China’s northeastern region of Manchuria. Since that time, Japan had been seen by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries both as a model of what an Asian “self-strengthening movement” could achieve in the face of Western imperial encroachment and as a mortal foe whose eagerness to participate in the carving up of China into spheres of influence must be resisted at all costs. The widespread demonstrations initiated on May 4, 1919 by students and political activists in the face of Japan’s pressing of its quasi-imperial claims in China (the notorious Twenty-One Demands) at the Paris Peace Conference constituted a springboard for more sustained efforts at mass mobilization on the part of Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist movement (the Kuomintang – KMT) and the newly formed Chinese Communist Party alike.35 In a China that had fallen into the grip of regional warlords in the years since the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912, and whose formal sovereignty remained compromised by unequal treaties with imperial powers which had carved out spheres of influence in some of the country’s richest ports and regions, political initiative and momentum appeared to lie with the KMT. Receiving financial, military, and political aid, along with military advice, from agents of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), the KMT agreed in 1924 to the formation of a Comintern-sponsored United Front with the CCP, with which it shared the ambition of freeing China from its humiliating imperialist encumbrances. The first step in this direction was to rid the country of its internal scourge of warlordism, which lent itself to the foreign powers’ techniques of divide-and-rule. To this end, the commander of the KMT military forces, Chiang Kai-shek, was tasked with responsibility for preparation of a great Northern Expedition which was to embark on the country’s forceful unification from the Kuomintang’s base in the southern region of Guangdong. Following Sun Yat-sen’s untimely death in early 1925, Chiang pressed ahead with plans for the military campaign, as the succession to the movement’s political leadership remained contested. 35

See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chs. 5 and 9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

165

The very manner in which Chiang achieved some of his notable military and political successes sowed the seeds of new problems. In breaking violently with his party’s Communist partners in 1927, he forced the CCP underground in the country’s great urban centers and deprived the KMT’s left-wing faction, associated at that juncture with Chiang’s perennial rival Wang Jingwei, of the political leverage the United Front had given it within the Nationalist movement. Yet in the long run, by forcing the Communists to move the heart of their operations to the countryside, Chiang motivated them to reconfigure their strategy around the cultivation of a peasant base – an approach which proved crucial to their survival and eventual victory. At the same time, in pursuing his ambitious campaign to bring the entire country under a centralized authority, Chiang relied increasingly on coopting the forces of some warlords against others, given the inadequate numbers of troops under his direct command in the KMT’s National Revolutionary Army. Although this allowed him to declare the success of the Northern Expedition amidst the nominal unification of much of the country by 1928, the reality was that significant portions of China remained under the effective control of proxies – warlords who formally acknowledged the authority of the KMT government on condition of being left to their own devices. This situation, in turn, allowed his rivals within the KMT to play similar games – forging their own alliances with warlords willing to challenge the coalition of forces associated with Chiang. The fluid and unpredictable dynamics of this situation degenerated into a major flare-up of fighting in 1930 between Chiang’s forces and a coalition of warlords supporting his rival Wang Jingwei. This episode alone cost 240,000 casualties and resulted in nothing more than a return to the uneasy status quo ante.36 At the same time, Chiang’s relative success brought him into growing confrontation with Japan’s expanding ambitions in northern China. In 1931–32, Japan’s Kwantung Army – a presence on Manchurian soil safeguarding Japanese interests ever since 1906 – seized control of the entire region, driving out its young warlord, Zhang Xueliang, and establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo under the nominal rule of the last Qing emperor.37 Chiang responded cautiously, whereas Zhang (who had fled Manchuria) sought to rally Chinese nationalist sentiment on behalf of an effort to reverse Japan’s gains. While Zhang had nominally 36 37

Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011; first published 2009), 89. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

166

Civil Wars under Occupation

recognized the authority of the KMT government in Nanjing, his fiefdom had never been directly under Chiang’s sway; at the same time, Chiang faced more pressing challenges from both the CCP and KMT rivals to his control over core regions. He therefore chose to avoid direct confrontation with the Japanese, resorting to defiant rhetoric while at the same time negotiating a modus vivendi with them for the time being. “First internal pacification, then external resistance” was his motto during the first half of the 1930s. The pieces of this complex puzzle began to shift significantly from the middle of the decade. In 1935, Stalin’s growing concern over Nazi Germany’s potential menace led to the famous change in the Comintern’s ideological line: instead of lumping fascism, social democracy, and democratic liberalism together as enemies of the proletariat, Moscow now called on Communist parties to prioritize the fight against fascism and Nazism. Wherever possible, “popular fronts” were to be created, joining Communists with socialists and democrats in a common struggle against the far Right. China was no exception, given the direct threat Japanese expansion posed to Soviet interests and security in the Far East; in 1936, the Comintern began urging Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong to explore the possibility of burying the hatchet and forming a second United Front with the KMT, with a view to readying and rallying the Chinese people for a war of resistance against the Japanese. For its part, the Japanese military had been growing ever more aggressive in its conduct, as it continued to push outward from its base in Manchuria to bring neighboring regions in north China under its de facto control through the proxy of local “autonomous governments.” Chiang Kai-shek authorized his negotiators to acquiesce in one humiliating withdrawal after another, while refusing to formalize any of the agreements by putting his signature to anything.38 He also endeavored to shift perceptions of responsibility to Wang Jingwei, his perpetual rival and occasional uneasy political partner, who during 1932–35 was serving as prime minister (technically, President of the Executive Yuan) of the Republic of China.39 Nonetheless, every negotiated settlement that left the Japanese in effective control of an additional swath of Chinese territory further eroded Chiang’s reputation as a nationalist and his legitimacy as a leader. The situation played into the hands of the Communists and the left wing of 38 39

Taylor, Generalissimo, 113–14. Wang Ke-wen, “Wang Jingwei and the Policy Origins of the ‘Peace Movement,’ 1932–1937,” in David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

167

Fig. 13 Mao Zedong (left) and Chiang Kai-shek (right) toast one another at a banquet held during inconclusive, American-mediated talks between the two in Chungking, August 1945. Bettman via Getty Images.

the KMT, as student-led anti-Japanese demonstrations rocked Chinese urban centers, culminating in a major wave of protests across dozens of cities in December 1935.40 It was against this backdrop that talks about a second United Front got under way. The final agreement was concluded in the aftermath of the notorious Xian incident of December 1936, in which the former Manchurian warlord and would-be nationalist in his own right, Zhang Xueliang, kidnapped and held Chiang for nearly two weeks in order to press him to forge a pact with the Communists. The first United Front had taken the form of a partial merger of the two parties, with CCP members also becoming members of the KMT; the terms of the new agreement created a coalition of sorts between the two political parties, although Chiang’s government stopped short of formally recognizing the CCP. Under the terms of this awkward and uneasy accord, the Communists’ armed units were to be brought under the overall command 40

Marjorie Dryburgh, North China and Japanese Expansion, 1933–1937: Regional Power and the National Interest (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 87.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

168

Civil Wars under Occupation

of Chiang’s National Revolutionary Army while retaining their corporate distinctiveness. Not least among Chiang’s calculations was the anticipation of Soviet aid as quid pro quo for the formation of the United Front.41 The outbreak of full-scale hostilities between Japan and the National Revolutionary Army following July 1937’s Marco Polo Bridge Incident outside Beijing appeared to solidify the closing of patriotic ranks among China’s major power players. Chiang’s decision to finally suit his actions to his defiant words was greeted with enthusiasm by the left-wing press, which had been bitterly critical of Nanjing’s appeasement of the Japanese over the previous half-decade (and which Chiang had intermittently sought to stifle). Amidst the mood of patriotic exuberance, even illconceived military gambits ending in disastrous losses were celebrated by some of the country’s most notable war reporters as triumphs of a newly awakened Chinese national spirit. At the same time, and rather curiously from the latter-day perspective of an era when victimhood is regarded as a badge of honor, the nationalist press underplayed the extent of the Japanese army’s horrific massacres in Nanjing, where possibly as many as, if not more than, two hundred thousand civilians were butchered in cold blood over the initial weeks following the retreat of KMT forces from the capital. Such news was deemed demoralizing and demeaning to the sense of dignity the press and KMT propaganda were seeking to instill in the armed forces and among the suffering masses.42 As one military defeat followed another, and Chiang’s forces retreated ever further inland, this political climate may have helped enable Chiang’s decision to unleash a massive flood to block the Japanese advance in Henan province by destroying the dikes along the Yellow River. Enemy progress in that sector was indeed halted for the time being, but at the cost of the lives of several hundred thousand Chinese peasants who died in the inundation and humanitarian disaster that ensued, not to speak of the millions of new refugees added to the massive stream of desperate civilians already fleeing the Japanese.43 The KMT 41

42

43

Taylor, Generalissimo, ch. 3; Lyman P. Van Slyke, ed., The Chinese Communist Movement: A Report of the United States War Department, July 1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 42–43. Parks M. Coble, China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). On the highly politicized debate over casualty estimates in Nanjing, see also the essays in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The estimate of two hundred thousand fatalities was made by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Micah Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), ch. 1; Lary, Chinese People at War, 61–62.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

169

was not so brazenly honest as to acknowledge its responsibility for the cataclysm; its propaganda claimed Japanese aircraft had bombed the dikes. But the United Front with the Communists and the rallying of the left-wing press provided Chiang with a measure of political cover that he would not otherwise have had – for both the decision to flood the province and the false attribution of blame to the enemy. The irony is profound: the very suspension of civil war in the face of foreign invasion had facilitated a horrifically cold-blooded act of Chinese-on-Chinese violence undertaken in the service of resistance. That said, Chiang’s November 1938 order that the town of Changsha be incinerated before it was taken by the Japanese served as the occasion for Wang Jingwei’s renewed challenge not only to Chiang’s leadership but to the very continuation of the resistance struggle. Chiang sought to shift the blame for the horrendous civilian casualties caused by the premature implementation of his command by executing some of the officers who had overseen the city’s destruction. But, as rumors circulated that none other than Wang Jingwei – ever Chiang’s favorite fallguy – had had a hand in the botched operation, Wang, who had been in indirect contact with the Japanese, made his break with the government.44 In December 1938, a handful of his associates joined him on board a plane that flew them from Chiang’s wartime, inland capital of Chungking to British-ruled Hong Kong, whence they proceeded to Hanoi in French Indochina. Here they entered into direct talks with Japanese representatives, leading in April–May 1939 to their passage aboard a Japanese ship to Shanghai, where their negotiations continued for the better part of a year.45 Wang’s political trajectory during his final years was a classic example of drift from a seemingly pragmatic and accommodationist patriotism, to collaboration, to political marginalization and humiliation, cut short in Wang’s case by his untimely (or should one say well-timed?) death in 1944. The initial, indirect contacts he and a small group of associates (the so-called Low Key Club) had established with the Japanese had been okayed by Chiang, who did not mind having a plausibly deniable, backchannel of communication with the enemy as a way of keeping his own options open and as a potential mechanism for pressuring the United States into providing him with stronger support. But Wang’s role took on a life of its own as he expressed dismay over the enormous damage the 44 45

Lary, Chinese People at War, 62–64. John Hunter Boyle, China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), chs. 11–12; Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), ch. 11.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

170

Civil Wars under Occupation

seemingly unwinnable war was inflicting on China and as he saw a path to coming out at long last from under Chiang’s shadow and establishing himself as the crucial arbiter of China’s future. Wang’s initial idea, at the time of his break with Chungking, was to secure a foothold in a nonoccupied sector of the Chinese southwest by persuading a number of Chiang-affiliated warlords to change their loyalties. To this end, he also hoped to persuade the Japanese to offer him terms that would signal their intention of eventually restoring full sovereignty to a friendly China under his leadership. This would, he hoped, demonstrate his ability to achieve a convincing simulacrum of Chinese nationalist goals within the context of an alliance with Japan against the Chinese Communists, whose patriotic commitment to the United Front he denounced as a sham and whose true loyalties, he alleged, were owed to Moscow. This characterization of the CCP as unquestioningly loyal to the Soviet Union was to prove wrong. In 1942, Mao deployed Stalinist-style political terror techniques in his “Rectification Movement,” which rooted out Soviet-trained personnel (among other suspect elements) in the party leadership, consolidated his own control over the party apparatus, and laid the groundwork for transforming the CCP into an instrument of exercising uncontested power over a future, unified and independent China.46 However, Wang certainly was accurate in predicting that Chiang’s path of endless resistance to the Japanese would only play to the long-term advantage of the Communists, who would emerge as the ultimate victors in the event Japan ever really was defeated. In the meantime, Wang argued, the war had turned into a futile, selfdestructive undertaking in the face of Japan’s military superiority and occupation of the country’s most important commercial, political, and cultural centers. That occupation, he contended, would be terminated more rapidly through the accommodation and acceptance of Japanese regional hegemony than through a protracted armed struggle in which Chiang Kai-shek’s forces treated the Chinese civilian population as a legitimate target of military operations. His choice, Wang contended, was the truly patriotic one because it constituted the least among various evil scenarios faced by the Chinese people.47 As it turned out, however, none of Chiang’s major warlord allies defected at this juncture, and the Japanese proved just as unwilling to concede the substance of political and economic autonomy – let alone partial termination of military occupation – to Wang as they had been to the two “puppet” governments he was seeking to supersede, in Beijing 46 47

Mitter, Forgotten Ally, 290–95. Ibid., ch. 11; Boyle, China and Japan at War, chs. 10–13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

171

Fig. 14 Survivors of Japanese bombing in Chungking, circa 1939 or 1940. Central Press/Stringer via Getty Images.

and Nanjing respectively. But, having gambled his political reputation on his defection from Chungking, Wang proved unwilling to face the reality of his failure. Even after two disillusioned aides got themselves smuggled out to British-ruled Hong Kong at the eleventh hour, Wang went ahead in March 1940 with the formation of a new “Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China” that replaced the previous Nanjing-based collaborationist administration and whose writ would ostensibly extend to Beijing as well. In his person, he brought the new regime nationalist credentials and a degree of name recognition that could only be rivaled by Chiang Kai-shek himself. Indeed, Wang had been prominent on the political scene since 1910, when, as a young devotee of Sun Yat-sen, he had organized the attempted assassination of the Manchu prince regent. But he now found himself “governing” territory that remained under occupation, on terms that left the Japanese with an iron grip on every significant aspect of public life and with special exclusion zones where even the semblance of Chinese autonomy did not obtain.48 48

Boyle, China and Japan at War, chs. 12–14.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

172

Civil Wars under Occupation

Fig. 15 March in Guangzhou in celebration of Wang Jingwei’s newly established regime, April 1940. Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images.

Like many of the other political leaders across occupied zones in wartime Eurasia who had adapted their conceptions of patriotic legitimacy to their anticipation of long-term Axis supremacy, Wang found himself sliding towards an ever falser position. The launch of the Pacific War in December 1941 linked China’s fate to what had become a fully global conflict – a scenario Chiang had long banked upon. Rather than granting Wang’s regime any genuine power, the Japanese occupation became increasingly onerous as the war against Chiang and the CCP dragged on and as Japanese resources became ever more thinly stretched across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Compounding Wang’s problems, rival commands within the Japanese military cultivated different clients across the vast expanses of occupied China. The area around Beijing, for example, remained under the authority of another puppet government which remained distinct even after Nanjing’s nominal authority had been extended over it in 1940. The gap between Wang’s pretense of leading a genuine nationalist regime and the reality of his government’s serving as a figleaf for a ruthless Japanese imperialism had thus grown extremely wide by the time of his death from a combination of chronic ailments in a

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

173

University of Nagoya hospital in November 1944.49 By the same token, the existence of his and other collaborationist regimes in the occupied zones contributed to a situation in which countless Chinese died at one another’s hands, as Mao’s guerrillas and, to some extent, Chiang’s armies clashed with collaborationist formations used as auxiliaries by the Japanese. (It should be noted that forces directly answerable to Wang’s government tended to be much more actively involved in antiCommunist counterinsurgency drives than in conventional fighting against armies under Chungking’s central command; Wang had made avoidance of such direct military confrontation with Chungking a condition of his forming a government under continued Japanese occcupation.50) If the fighting between resistance and RSI forces in Germanoccupied northern Italy can be considered a civil war, perhaps the term is not inapplicable to the clashes between Japanese-sponsored and antiJapanese Chinese forces. Complicating the picture even further, relations between the KMT and CCP deteriorated steadily over the course of this period. Implementation of the second United Front remained tenuous in the best of circumstances as each party continued to eye the other with deep and well-founded mistrust. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 and its spread to include the Soviet Union and the United States in the course of 1941 made it clear that the ultimate outcome of the military stalemate in China would hinge on developments in other theaters of combat. That gave the members of the anti-Japanese coalition reason for hope and an incentive to continue steadfastly holding out in their inland zones of control. But, at the same time, it reduced their incentive to initiate risky counteroffensives against the Japanese. The heavy losses which, experience suggested, they would be likely to sustain would only undercut their future ability to confront one another in the event of a renewed KMT–CCP civil war. As with so many other resistance forces in Axis-occupied (or partially occupied) countries, the later years of the Second World War were a period when maneuvering effectively vis-à-vis domestic rivals on either side of the divide between collaboration and resistance held potentially far greater long-term political implications then did this or that engagement with the forces of the occupying power, whose bleak ultimate fate in the world war grew ever more apparent. That said, a resistance movement’s ability to convincingly claim an effective role in fighting the occupation was clearly vital to its legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of audiences domestic and foreign alike.

49

Ibid., 322–23.

50

Ibid., 233.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

174

Civil Wars under Occupation

This is the overarching picture against which the evolution of the war in China unfolded. The CCP’s only major conventional offensive against the Japanese occurred in the fall of 1940, ending with significant casualties and no net territorial gains, and provoking an eliminationist Japanese rural counterinsurgency campaign.51 In subsequent years, the Communists focused largely on supporting and expanding their networks of insurgents operating behind Japanese lines. This was a form of guerrilla warfare for which their organizational structure and ideological discipline made them much better suited than the KMT, although the latter also undertook guerrilla-style operations.52 For his part, Chiang’s loss of key grain and recruitment zones to the steadily encroaching Japanese led him, by 1941, to rely ever more heavily on coercive and corrupt means of obtaining supplies and personnel, and securing the loyalty of allied warlords.53 This alienated the hard-pressed peasant population, while Chiang still struggled to maintain the troop strength needed to hold on to his remaining territory while also supplying forces to the Allied command fighting the Japanese in Burma. Chiang’s notoriously bad relationship with Joseph Stillwell, the American lieutenant-general assigned to the China–India–Burma theater who also took up the position of chief of staff to Chiang in March 1942, was a reflection, among other things, of the insuperable dilemmas the KMT government faced in trying to persuade Washington it was pulling its weight in the war while endeavoring to minimize the further erosion of its material and political resources.54 And in 1944, it was Chiang’s forces that bore the brunt of Japan’s final push in China, the Ichigo offensive, leaving the KMT even further weakened relative to the CCP. Precisely because it was Chiang who served as overall military commander under the United Front and who bore responsibility for demonstrating to the Americans that China remained in the war as a territorial power, the Communists faced less of an onus to initiate risky conventional offensives against the Japanese or even to hold extensive territory rather than to withdraw tactically as needed. The result was a more effective guerrilla campaign which ended up impressing US observers (as well as Japanese adversaries) as superior in quality to what Chiang’s troops seemed able to do.55 The Communists were seen as undertaking a 51 53 54 55

52 Taylor, Generalissimo, 173–74. Paine, Wars for Asia, 150–51. Hans J. van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), ch. 7. Mitter, Forgotten Ally, chs. 13 and 18. See Yang Kuisong, “Nationalist and Communist Guerrilla Warfare in North China,” in Mark Peattie, Edward J. Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

175

disciplined effort to mobilize peasant support by redistributing land and instituting some semblance of justice in their areas of control, while the KMT and its military command structure seemed ever more bogged down by corruption and abusive practices. The KMT also failed to deliver on the kind of major counteroffensives the coordination of which lay within its sphere of principal responsibility.56 The 1941 New Fourth Army Incident made matters all the worse. This major clash marked the culmination of a growing pattern of confrontations between CCP and KMT formations as they jostled for control of the countryside across wide stretches of northern China where the overstretched Japanese military was unable to maintain a permanent presence. Under the terms of an understanding negotiated with the KMT authorities in late 1940, Communist forces south of a certain line were supposed to redeploy northwards in phases. But – be it in response to Japanese deployments, as an act of willful provocation, or for some other reason – after the December 31, 1940 deadline for the entire New Fourth Army’s retreat north of the Yangtze had passed, that formation’s headquarters detachment was, Chiang’s forces learned, moving southwest rather than northward. Nationalist forces responded by attacking and largely destroying it in January 1941, killing (as well as losing) several thousand men in the process. The government in Chungking accused the Communists of having provoked the fight by deliberately violating the redeployment agreement. But, by the harshness of their response, KMT forces had painted themselves as the aggressors, who seemed more interested in containing their supposed United Front partners at the price of renewed civil war than in taking on the common Japanese foe. Although full-scale hostilities between Communists and Nationalists did not ensue prior to 1946, meaningful cooperation between the partners to the United Front was effectively at an end.57

56

57

Press, 2011). For early reports on the potential promise of Communist-led, antiJapanese guerrilla efforts, see Peck (American chargé in Beijing) to Secretary of State, February 6, 1939, and Peck (now reporting from Chungking) to Secretary of State, February 23, 1939, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1939, Vol. III: The Far East (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955), 137–39, 142–43, respectively. To be sure, some US diplomats warned against taking at face value the starry-eyed reports of journalist Edgar Snow on his experiences with Mao in Yenan, and worried about the Communists “shirking their military responsibilities vis-à-vis the Japanese.” Johnson (US Ambassador to China) to Secretary of State, January 23, 1941, and Drumright (Second Secretary of US Embassy in China) to Secretary of State, May 15, 1941, Department of State, FRUS, 1941, Vol. V: The Far East (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 469–73, 502–3, respectively; quotation on 502. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 136–40.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

176

Civil Wars under Occupation

In brief, to the extent that Chiang Kai-shek pursued the war against Japan, it was by means of massive violence against his own country’s population. His retreat to the country’s interior and establishment of a wartime capital in Chungking, in Sichuan province, brought the rule of the Kuomintang government for the first time to regions that had largely been ruled by proxy during the KMT’s heyday in Nanjing. But the wartime circumstances were such that Chiang’s governance, accompanied as it was by an influx of tens of millions of refugees (including a disproportionate number from among the more educated and reformistminded classes of society) was at best disruptive in its fitful efforts at social and cultural modernization. At worst, it was experienced as a corrupt, ruthlessly extractive, and abusive occupation in its own right.58 For many refugees, the experience of being uprooted from their home provinces and encountering other populations and regions undergoing a shared trauma may have helped concretize and personalize the concept of a Chinese national identity. The convergence of flight and fight in the context of the odds-defying, protracted defense of refugee-swollen Wuhan, on the Yangtze River, during 1938 had marked a particularly significant galvanizing moment in the mobilization of popular patriotic sentiment and was the high point of the second United Front.59 But the subsequent, long-drawn-out military stalemate following the United Front government’s further retreat up the Yangtze, the United Front’s 1941 breakup in all but name, and the Chiang regime’s growing corruption and increasing resort to requisitions and brutal dragooning of men into the military, created an enormous gulf between the peasantry and the regime. During Japan’s rapid advance into KMT-held territory during the Ichigo campaign of 1944, desperate peasants in western Henan province, a region that had never had a chance to recover from the devastation of Chiang’s artificial flood of 1938 and a subsequent famine which claimed some three million fatalities in 1942, were reported to have attacked retreating KMT units.60 Conversely, to the extent that Chiang sought to spare his regime’s and the population’s resources by avoiding set battles with the Japanese, he undermined his government’s credibility in the eyes of his US advisors and interlocutors, many of whom saw the Communists as more 58

59

60

Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig, “Introduction,” in Isabel Brown Crook and Christina Kelley Gilmartin with Yu Xiji, Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 3–9. Mitter, Forgotten Ally, 120–21; MacKinnon, Wuhan, chs. 4–6 and passim. MacKinnon highlights the tenuous and uneasy relationship between the KMT leadership and the popular activism of the Wuhan moment. Mitter, Forgotten Ally, ch. 14 and 320–23.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Civil Wars in a Nutshell

177

straightforward, reliable, and effective. American diplomats regularly turned to the circle around Zhou Enlai, the CCP representative in Chungking, for insights into the factional dynamics and varying degrees of fascist and pro-German proclivities within the KMT. They reported with dismay on the growing, KMT-sponsored propaganda effort against the Communists, to which at least as much effort seemed devoted as it was to the discrediting of the collaborationist Wang Jingwei regime.61 As to the Communists, they found the strategic situation to be playing increasingly in their favor. The combination of a beleaguered KMT regime and an overstretched Japanese military that relied on a pointand-line system62 of controlling major urban centers and the communications between them while staying out of much of the countryside allowed the CCP to steadily expand its territorial sphere of activity and control across extensive areas of northern China, far beyond Mao’s stronghold in Yan’an. American military intelligence estimated that, as of late 1943, the Japanese really only controlled approximately 82,000 square miles of the 345,000 square miles of Chinese territory that lay behind their front lines. Roughly 60 percent of the remainder was thought to be held by the Communists, while the other 40 percent was divided among Chungking loyalists and various unaligned or weakly aligned armed elements. The corresponding demographic breakdown was thought to leave the Japanese with direct power over only some 70 million of the 183 million Chinese in the notionally occupied part of the country.63 The over-compensatory brutality of Japanese antiCommunist counterinsurgency efforts pushed a beleaguered peasantry into the arms of the very forces they sought to suppress.64 Meanwhile, radical activists and students who had embraced the United Front against Japan as a fulfillment of their nationalist idealism and had retreated with Chiang’s forces to the southwest interior, were profoundly shaken by the utter ineffectiveness of Chiang’s forces in the face of Japan’s dramatic inroads on government-held territory during the Ichigo offensive (April–December 1944). Students at relocated wartime universities who had initially acquiesced in the consolidation of campus power by Kuomintang activists following the flight of left-wing students 61

62 63 64

See, for example, memo from Davies (Second Secretary of US Embassy in China) to Stilwell (Commanding General, American Army Forces, China, Burma and India), July 10, 1942, and Gauss (Ambassador to China) to Secretary of State, June 22, 1942, FRUS, 1942 China (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 207–11, 200–1, respectively. Paine, Wars for Asia, 151. Van Slyke, ed., The Chinese Communist Movement, 116–17. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 55–56.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

178

Civil Wars under Occupation

from KMT-held areas at the time of the New Fourth Army Incident, were themselves now drawn to the CCP as a more convincing embodiment of China’s will to take the fight to the Japanese.65 The upshot was that the Japanese partial occupation of China had unleashed a cascade of events that ended up shifting the balance of power decisively in the Communists’ favor by the time of Japan’s defeat in August 1945. Chiang sought to arrange the Japanese surrender on Chinese territory in ways that would facilitate the rapid hand-off of control back to KMT forces, and the Americans embarked on their famous, ill-fated effort to mediate between Mao and Chiang in the months following the war’s end. But, in the full-scale civil war that broke out once again in 1946, the Communists were in possession of a much stronger set of cards than they had held a decade earlier. Their 1949 victory on the mainland was inextricably connected to the complex redistribution of material, political, and mobilizational resources that had taken place under the impact of the invasion and partial occupation of China during 1937–45.

65

John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), chs. 14–15.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

5

Continuities and Ruptures

Continuities, Real and Invented: The Chinese Case Debates over whether or not violent conflicts in occupied societies should be considered civil wars tend to be politically loaded and are very hard to settle based on any objective standard. So is the related problem of assessing historical continuities and ruptures in countries that fell under enemy control in wartime. There certainly are some striking ways in which the struggles of the war years appear to be variations upon and exacerbations of long-standing divisions in these societies. France constitutes one of the best-known examples of this phenomenon, insofar as the Vichy regime and its supporters drew upon various strands of a home-grown illiberal tradition that could be traced not only to the country’s polarized politics of the 1930s, but to the anti-Dreyfusard movement of the 1890s and perhaps even as far back as the counter-revolutionary reaction of the early nineteenth-century Bourbon Restoration.1 For their part, some of the main currents of the French resistance could be linked directly to the Popular Front of the 1930s, and could also be seen as incarnating certain elements of the French republican/revolutionary tradition writ large. Among Part II’s four case studies, in Italy the RSI claimed legitimacy by virtue of its connection to the Fascist regime that had been overthrown a few months earlier. But, more fundamentally, the Social Republic’s leaders and activists claimed that they were recapturing and implementing the uncompromising, purist, transformative idealism of the early Fascist movement, before it had been eroded by Mussolini’s pragmatic compromises with the established institutions of the monarchy, the military, the church, industry, and civil service. It was in the name of this uncompromising “return” to first principles that Party Secretary Pavolini militarized the Republican Fascist Party and authorized the perpetration of atrocities against civilians by way of Nazi-style reprisals for resistance 1

See René Rémond, The Right Wing in France: From 1815 to De Gaulle, trans. James M. Laux (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).

179

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

180

Civil Wars under Occupation

activity.2 Yet in many crucial respects, such as the RSI’s subjection to Nazi dominance and its collaboration in the deportation of Italian Jews to German concentration and death camps, the regime’s policies can more accurately be seen as the culmination of a continuous trajectory marked by such watershed moments as the passage of the Fascist regime’s antisemitic laws in 1938.3 In Yugoslavia, the inter-ethnic tensions that created political deadlock and periodic violence in the interwar years (such as the assassination in Marseille of King Alexander alongside French Foreign Minister Barthou by Ustaša operatives in 1934) clearly served as a significant backdrop to the massive violence of 1941–45. In Greece, interwar political life had been deeply divided between monarchists and republicans (Venizelists) – a split that itself originated as a division over how the country should respond to the opportunities and pitfalls of the First World War and its aftermath. Both monarchists and Venizelists, in turn, had remained wedded to clientelist forms of politics that – post-First World War land reforms notwithstanding – failed adequately to address the income compression of the smallholding peasantry amidst global economic depression.4 Political turmoil associated with ideological differences, and rural unrest arising from socio-economic tensions, had been typical features of pre-Second World War Greece. Having noted these antecedents to occupation-era struggles, it is important to remain on guard against accepting at face value the invented continuities5 propagated by participants in these conflicts. After all, it was crucial to most indigenous political actors to portray themselves as being fully in line with one element or another of their societies’ political traditions, all the more so precisely if there was little real precedent for their positions and actions. Thus, the Croatian Ustaša authorities made a point of convening a political council (Sabor) composed of various surviving members of pre-Yugoslav Croatian assemblies, dragged out of mothballs in an unconvincing effort to patch together a mantle of historical legitimacy for the extremist new regime.6 This reconstituted Sabor had no real power or authority; the Pavelić government was actually dominated by figures whose political praxis of assassination and terrorism had crystallized in interwar exile, under the sponsorship and protection of Italy and Hungary.

2 4 5 6

3 Pavone, Guerra civile, ch. 5. Gagliani, Brigate nere, 8–9. Seferiades, “Small Rural Landownership.” I am, of course, adapting the title phrase of E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder, 132–33

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

181

In central and northern Italy, the resistance movement of 1943–45 could find little inspiration in the haplessness of the suppressed Italian Left during the immediately preceding two decades of Fascist political hegemony. But a sense of what one might term punctuated historical continuity could be cultivated instead. For some resistance activists, the fight they were in was round two of the 1919–21 industrial-strike movement, lockouts, and running confrontations between socialists and Fascists that had divided much of the country, had been concentrated in the industrialized north, and had led to Mussolini’s assumption of power in 1922. And, of course, the name of the Garibaldi Brigades harked back to the mid-nineteenth-century Risorgimento. This point of reference underscored the Communists’ claim to be at the forefront of a broad-based liberation movement that was designed not merely to drive out the enemy, but to foster a substantive, mass-based national cohesiveness that had eluded the original architects of Italy’s political-territorial unification.7 For some members of the Italian resistance, the opportunity to redeem their country from Fascism inspired a newly rediscovered emotion of patriotism of a sort they had not imagined possible throughout the years when Mussolini and his henchmen had channeled the language and symbols of Italianness into the exclusive service of his regime.8 For its part, Il Duce’s refounded Fascist state in the Germanoccupied north made grand, if far-fetched, claims to the ideological legacy of Giuseppe Mazzini (Garibaldi’s erstwhile political mentor who became estranged from him in the 1860s).9 In Greece, the monarchists could obviously claim institutional continuity with the immediate, pre-war past. But by the same token, they sought to distance themselves from the Metaxas dictatorship that had been established with the recently restored king’s blessing in 1936. As for the country’s Communists, they sought to portray the EAM/ELAS movement as an expression of deep-rooted national traditions by referring to its fighters as andartes, after the Greek peasant warriors who had (like Serbia’s Chetniks) formed irregular fighting units in the country’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century uprisings and wars against the Ottomans.

7 9

8 Pavone, Guerra civile, ch. 5. Viroli, For Love of Country, 166–67. See, for example, remarks by Pavolini in “Il verbale del congresso,” in Marino Viganò, Il congresso di Verona (14 novembre 1943): Una antologia di documenti e testimonianze (Rome: Settimo Sigillo, 1994), 197. Pavolini found in Mazzini’s non-socialist critique of capitalism a useful historical peg on which to hang his own advocacy of corporatism. Renzo de Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, 1940–1945, Vol. II: La guerra civile, 1943–1945 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1997), 399–400.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

182

Civil Wars under Occupation

But it was in China, as suggested earlier, that continuities appeared most stark and obvious, given that the country had been afflicted by inner strife, often rising to the level of civil war, more or less continuously since the 1911 revolution. That revolution had been precipitated in part by frustration over the imperial regime’s inability to fend off the depredations of imperialist powers, and the turmoil of subsequent decades had continued to be associated with ever more intrusive and invasive conduct on the part of foreign powers – in particular, the Japanese. China’s political history throughout this era seemed composed of a multiplicity of moving parts that were constantly repositioning themselves relative to one another. It was the very fluidity of relations among movements and factions, both domestic and foreign, which constituted one of the notable constants over time. Chiang’s 1927 turn against the CCP and establishment of a regime in Nanjing had marked a break with the KMT–CCP left-wing coalition government in Wuhan headed by Wang Jingwei. Wang had quickly sought to undercut Chiang’s Nanjing-based government’s military support by also breaking off ties with the CCP, which earned him an alliance with southern warlords, leading to Chiang’s melodramatic resignation and departure from the country, ostensibly as a personal sacrifice in the interests of national unity. Wang’s victory proved Pyrrhic, however, as he found himself weak and isolated in the newly unified government in Nanjing and as clashes among rival generals threatened to nullify all the gains won by Chiang’s northern expedition. Wang was forced out of power upon Chiang’s return to the military command in 1928. The seesaw between the two continued through Wang’s association with the failed 1930 warlord revolt. The upshot was a 1932 compromise that created a fragile and unstable coalition between Chiang and Wang, with the latter in the role of prime minister until his injury in a 1935 assassination attempt.10 (He held a number of other offices in the wartime government in Chungking prior to his defection.) As discussed in the previous chapter, in the aftermath of the (Japanese) Kwantung Army’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931–32, Chiang had chosen to avoid serious military confrontation with Japan with a view to finishing off the Communists first. Wang Jingwei supported him in this policy, only to have Chiang maneuver to make him appear as the primary appeaser. For their part, the Japanese were continually in search of local collaborators who could serve as agents of their influence and figleaves of legitimacy. It was precisely the chronically contested nature of political legitimacy in China that they seized upon as their opening, as they tried 10

Suisheng Zhao, Power by Design: Constitution-Making in Nationalist China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 94–132.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

183

to argue that the “restored” emperor in Manchukuo or the warlords whom they cultivated as clients in other parts of northern China in the early 1930s were more authentic embodiments of genuinely “Asian” and Chinese versions of modernity than were the KMT, the CCP, and their respective allies.11 Relations between Chinese power players and other foreign interests were equally changeable. Following his break with the Comintern in 1927, Chiang had come to rely increasingly on German military advisors and equipment. Japan’s signing of the Nazi-promoted Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 hastened the realignment of domestic and international forces that culminated in Chiang’s reprioritization of resistance to Japan over crushing the Communists, the forging of the second United Front between the KMT and the CCP, the renewal of Soviet support for Chiang’s regime amidst the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Germany’s withdrawal of support from the KMT in 1938.12 During the period of all-out war with Japan, Chiang was willing at least to play intermittently with the possibility of negotiation. In June 1945, the CCP appears to have been willing to engage tentatively in secret talks with the Japanese about the possibility of a truce that would allow the Japanese to concentrate on a planned offensive against the KMT while allowing the Communists to expand their de facto area of control in northern Jiangsu province. (This is very reminiscent of how Tito’s partisans had, two years earlier, explored the possibility of negotiating a respite from hostilities with the Germans in order to free their own hands against the Chetniks.) As things turned out, it was Chiang who succeeded in securing the cooperation of surrendering Japanese forces and their regional Chinese collaborators in August 1945, at a time when the KMT and CCP were jostling to fill the sudden vacuum created by Tokyo’s surrender to the Allies. Indeed, tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers as well as former collaborationist formations ended up fighting alongside Chiang’s troops during the full-fledged Chinese civil war that ensued. A much smaller number wound up on the Communist side.13 11 12 13

Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Taylor, Generalissimo, ch. 3; Mitter, Forgotten Ally, ch. 12. Mitter, Forgotten Ally, 352; Joseph Yick, “Communist-Puppet Collaboration in Japanese-Occupied China: Pan Hannian and Li Shiqun, 1939–43,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2001), 61–88, esp. 77–78; Rotem Kowner, “The Repatriation of Surrendered Japanese Troops, 1945–1947,” in Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis, eds., In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020), 130–32. On openness among some figures within the Japanese military and foreign ministry during 1944 towards the possibility of some sort

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

184

Civil Wars under Occupation

From the perspective of political alliances and hostilities, then, one could depict the period of 1937–45 in China as being of a piece with the pattern of seemingly endless, opportunistic repositioning that had been characteristic of the country’s chaotic political history for decades. Yet, in this instance, as in our other cases, it would be glibly reductionist and misleading to leave it at that. For every aspect of continuity with the preoccupation era, there were multiple elements of radical rupture. Indeed, the very importance of what I have termed invented continuities among some of the contending elements in these struggles is a symptom of how deep the ruptures ran – for it is precisely the purpose of an invented continuity to paper over and conceal the radical nature of a political paradigm shift. Wang Jingwei’s regime can serve as a case in point. There was an element of desperation to its effort to replicate the symbols, rhetoric, and organizational apparatus of the KMT under Japanese occupation. Wang claimed to be heading the orthodox Kuomintang, trying to depict Chiang’s government as the entity that had diverged from Nationalist norms. In this respect, as David Barrett has pointed out, his case was quite different from that of many of the European collaborationist regimes, which tended to represent themselves as ideological alternatives to the pre-occupation status quo, rather than as replications thereof.14 In August 1939, Wang organized a makeshift and rather lackluster political congress in Shanghai intended to mark the KMT’s rebirth under his leadership. Failing to secure substantive concessions from the Japanese, he expended intense efforts talking them into letting him use the same flag as that of Chiang’s Nationalist government, rather than the pre-1927 Chinese republic’s flag, as the emblem of his Reorganized National Government. (Until 1943, the Japanese insisted on its being accompanied by a small pennant – nicknamed a “pigtail” by political wags who thus associated it with the Manchu-era hairstyle discarded under the republic – carrying the slogans “peace and national reconstruction” and “antiCommunism” to mark it apart from its otherwise identical Chungking counterpart.)15 The foundational slogans trumpeted forth by the propaganda services of Wang’s regime were essentially interpretations of, and elaborations upon, Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles (nationalism, democracy, and livelihood) in ways that linked them to Sun’s interest (under

14 15

of de facto relationship with the CCP’s “Yenan regime,” see Yukiko Koshiro, Imperial Eclipse: Japan’s Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 115–23. David P. Barrett, “The Wang Jingwei Regime, 1940–1945: Continuities and Disjunctures with Nationalist China,” in Barrett and Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration. Boyle, China and Japan at War, 246–48.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

185

completely different circumstances, over a decade and a half earlier) in realizing his nationalist aspirations through Sino-Japanese cooperation and pan-Asianism.16 Wang’s New Citizens Movement, designed to draw in mass participation and inculcate an ethos of civic duty and patriotic devotion among the population, was to all appearances an attempted reconstitution of Chiang’s New Life Movement (founded in 1934).17 These moves bespoke a stubborn insistence on pretending Wang was leading his country back to the path laid out for it in the original platform of Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang – this amidst a Japanese occupation that flew in the face of any notion of substantive Chinese self-determination. In his selfless devotion to the country’s well-being and his supposed commitment to serving as its constitutional leader, Wang, the propagators of his personality cult insisted, was proving himself to be the true disciple of Sun Yat-sen. It was the authoritarian Chiang, who had thrown in his lot with the Communists and proved willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians on the altar of his own egoism, who embodied a rupture in the Chinese nationalist tradition. It was his regime in Chungking that had sold out to the real imperialism – Western imperialism. “Wang Jingwei-ism,” by contrast, was based on the recognition that promoting the self-determination of the nations of greater East Asia via cooperation with Japan constituted the true path towards the Chinese people’s own collective freedom.18 To encounter these fevered attempts at self-legitimization through claims to continuity with an earlier period’s mythologized purism is to 16

17

18

Torsten Weber, “Nanjing’s Greater Asianism: Wang Jingwei and Zhou Huaren, 1940” and Roger H. Brown, “Sun Yat-sen: ‘Pan-Asianism,’ 1924,” in Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Vol. II: 1920– Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). Barrett, “The Wang Jingwei Regime”; Wai Chor So, “Race, Culture, and the AngloAmerican Powers: The Views of Chinese Collaborators,” Modern China, Vol. 37, No. 1 (January 2011), 69–103. Jeremy E. Taylor, “Republican Personality Culture in Wartime China: Contradistinction and Collaboration,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 57, No. 3 (July 2015), 665–93; Andrew Cheung, “Slogans, Symbols, and Legitimacy: The Case of Wang Jingwei’s Nanjing Regime,” Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China, No. 6, July 1995, www .indiana.edu/~easc/publications/doc/working_papers/Issue%206%201995%20July% 20IUEAWPS%20Cheung,%20Strauss.pdf (accessed August 8, 2017); Jeremy E. Taylor, Iconographies of Occupation: Visual Cultures in Wang Jingwei’s China, 1939–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021), 25–28 and ch. 3; Wang Jingwei, “Outline of the New Citizens’ Movement” (first published January 1, 1942) and Yuan Shu, “Wang Jingwei-ism” (first published in Xin Zhongguo bao (New China) on December 21, 1941), as translated and edited in Craig A. Smith, “The New Citizens’ Movement and Wang Jingwei-ism,” in Jonathan Henshaw, Craig A. Smith, and Norman Smith, eds., Translating the Occupation: The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931–45 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

186

Civil Wars under Occupation

Fig. 16 Wang Jingwei as head of the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, posing in front of an image of Sun Yat-sen, 1940. Popperfoto via Getty Images.

realize that the Wang Jingwei regime “doth protest too much.” To be sure, there were elements of continuity with the opportunistic politics of earlier years; this was hardly the first time there had been a rift between Wang and Chiang associated with different policies towards third parties. In 1927, it had been Wang’s left-wing faction in Wuhan that had initially objected to Chiang’s bloody assault upon the CCP. In 1930, Wang had aligned with one set of warlords to try and take on Chiang and his warlord allies. On the face of it, one could say the situation in 1940 was just a variation on the theme, with Chiang aligned with the Communists this time, while Wang turned to the Japanese for support. In 1932–35, it was Chiang who had sought to appease the Japanese in order to prioritize his effort to eradicate the Communists from their remaining refuges. So what was so different about Wang turning to the Japanese from 1938 onward in his latest bid to supplant Chiang? The difference was that, this time, the Japanese were doing more than carving out a sphere of influence in the northeast; they were attempting a complete subjugation of the entire country by means of total war – a war of which the human

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

187

and economic toll dwarfed that of China’s earlier twentieth-century conflicts, destructive as those were. When Chiang appeased the Japanese in the early 1930s, it was at the cost of acquiescing in their expansion into provinces that his Nanjing government had never effectively controlled in the first place. It was a price he was willing to pay so long as it allowed him to continue governing the country’s key coastal zones southwards of Beijing. Wang and his associates may have initially persuaded themselves that what they were seeking to negotiate between 1938 and 1940 was simply a path back to some such situation, whereby they would now be in control of the country’s major ports and cities in exchange for their acceptance of an overarching Japanese hegemony in what Tokyo was to call the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” But the reality of their situation proved far different. The Japanese military remained in full control over the limited region which Wang’s new Nanjing regime nominally governed as of 1940. Once he had thrown his lot in with the Japanese, Wang really was little more than a political puppet in their hands rather than an independent player whose interests happened to be aligned with theirs. Whereas he had hoped to extract Japanese promises of an early end to their military occupation, no such thing was forthcoming – especially as their campaign against Chiang and his allies continued to drag them ever deeper into a quagmire of their own making. At least Marshal Pétain could – until November 1942 – point to the unoccupied status of southeastern France as a mark of his country’s supposed independence and sovereignty under his regime. Wang never had even such a figleaf to hold on to.19 Further undermining his aspirations to patriotic legitimacy was the fact that the Japanese North China Area Army continued to sponsor a separate collaborationist “government” in Beijing throughout the war years. After 1940, the Beijing apparatus was technically reduced to autonomous status under the Nanjing government’s authority. This paralleled the nominal unification (in September 1939) of Japan’s North and Central Chinese armies under a unified command (the China Expeditionary Army – CEA). But it remained one of the downfalls of the Japanese military’s policy in occupied China that its regional commands continued to compete rather than coordinate with one another politically. Japan’s North China Area Army thus protected its client regime from substantive intrusion by Wang’s government. Particularly in the areas under the North China Area Army’s control, the Japanese military’s approach to the structuring of Chinese 19

For a now somewhat dated comparison of Pétain’s and Laval’s roles with that of Wang, see Boyle, China and Japan at War, 352–58.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

188

Civil Wars under Occupation

collaborationist institutions also tended to be characterized by continuity with its pre-1937 pattern of creating regional collaborationist governments in those parts of north China in which it had established its authority piecemeal, starting with Manchuria. Despite Tokyo’s urgings, the Japanese military in China never fully or systematically reconceptualized their approach once they were engaged in a long-term struggle to gain control over the country as a whole.20 True, in 1943, Wang’s regime was able to extract the promise of a Japanese renunciation of special control zones in China in the context of the Nanjing government’s declaration of war on the United States and United Kingdom; the accession to belligerent status had itself been actively sought after by Nanjing as an ostensible mark of the regime’s emergence into full independence and as a basis for claiming more rights from Japan. Tokyo did follow up with paper concessions to the fiction of an equality of relations between China and Japan. A number of Japanese-expropriated Shanghai industrial plants were returned to Chinese ownership at this time (while, at the same time, the Japanese-dominated Commerce Control Commission continued to ensure the Japanese military’s preferential access to resources). But such gestures were “too little and too late”21 – readily recognizable as marks of Tokyo’s increasing desperation to shore up support for a war effort the prospects of which were growing ever grimmer.22 (They may have also been designed to draw Chiang Kaishek’s government back into negotiation, by demonstrating Japan’s apparent willingness to concede some of the attributes of sovereignty to a Chinese government.23) The chronic thinness of the post-1940 Nanjing regime’s veneer of legitimacy was a byproduct, not only of its own leadership’s grievous shortcomings, but of a lack of imagination, slowness to adapt politically, and weakness of internal political coordination on the part of the Japanese military command.24

20

21 22

23 24

Timothy Brook, “The Creation of the Reformed Government in Central China, 1938,” in Barrett and Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration; Boyle, China and Japan at War, 84, 91–3, 106–7. Boyle, China and Japan at War, 309. Ibid., 308–9; Parks Coble, “Japan’s New Order and the Shanghai Capitalists: Conflict and Collaboration, 1937–1945,” in Barrett and Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration; Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 98–99; E. Bruce Reynolds, “Anomaly or Model? Independent Thailand’s Role in Japan’s Asian Strategy, 1941–1943,” in Peter Duus. Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 264, n. 60. Jeremy A. Yellen, “Wartime Wilsonianism and the Crisis of Empire, 1941–43,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2019), 1278–311, here 1294. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 41–48, 53, 61.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

189

Pointing out the politically shallow foundations of Wang’s regime serves as a reminder of the conceptual hazards involved in the very application of the civil war paradigm to conflicts between resisters and collaborators under occupation. Its analytical utility lies in taking those conflicts seriously as expressions of substantive and/or longstanding differences within the occupied country, rather than reducing them to a clash between patriotic and opportunistic responses to the enemy. In his writings on wartime China, Timothy Brook has highlighted how analytically constraining and distorting it can be to consign all who cooperated at one time or another, to one degree or another, with the Japanese occupiers to the unidimensional status of “hanjian” – traitors to the Han (Chinese) – as they were labeled by their wartime foes and in Chinese patriotic historiography.25 But there are converse dangers associated with completely discarding the collaboration/resistance model. The fact is that the choices Wang Jingwei made led him to collude with an onerous Japanese occupation regime that was animated by a hierarchical vision of Japan’s imperial supremacy in a post-war “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and that carried out horrific mass atrocities against Chinese populations in the course of the war. It is hard to see how this position could be made consistent with his own professed espousal of Chinese national interest as an animating principle. It is true that atrocities committed by antiJapanese forces – such as Chiang’s flooding of Henan province – do not stand up to moral scrutiny either. But to the extent that one imagines national self-determination to be a greater good in principle than colonial subjugation (a view that Wang’s regime itself pretended to espouse), the use of the civil war paradigm in such a context instead of the collaboration/ resistance paradigm risks obscuring significant (if complex) political and even moral distinctions. It is telling that, as Brooks himself points out, the early efforts by teams of Japanese technocrats to establish political and socio-economic stability in newly conquered areas of China by employing the politics of cooptation that had served them well in Manchuria were hindered by the very murderous destructiveness that had characterized the Japanese military’s operations just a few weeks earlier and that had sent much of the population in administrative and commercial centers fleeing into the countryside. At that stage, the occupiers really were forced to rely disproportionately on the cooptation of local criminal elements into their

25

Brook, “Creation of the Reformed Government”; Brook, Collaboration, 4 and passim. On the codification of hanjian status into criminal law by the KMT government in 1937, and the subsequent unfolding of the anti-hanjian campaign, see Yun Xia, Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

190

Civil Wars under Occupation

structures of local governance (Peace Maintenance Committees, which evolved into county governments under the Japanese). Much of the population simply remained afraid to return to recently ravaged towns. Moreover, many among those members of local elites who did eventually return were reluctant to run the risks of social opprobrium (and, with the rise of Communist and other insurgencies, physical retaliation) associated with openly working with ruthless alien overseers.26 Japanese efforts to draw Chinese youth in cities such as Shanghai into the organization and running of the baojia system (of traditional, neighborhood-level, collective-security-and-responsibility associations revived by the Japanese and their collaborators as building blocks of pacification and local governance) ended up foundering by 1942, partly on account of underground KMT and CCP activists’ successful infiltration of the collaborationist youth association (the China Youth Corps or CYC).27 This is not to say that the civil war model should be jettisoned in the midst of this book’s section devoted to the subject. Again, every analytical perspective provides distinctive insights even as it suffers from unique limitations and blind spots. It is precisely by forcing one to think through these advantages and liabilities that the juxtaposition of diverse interpretive frameworks may bear its richest fruit. In the Chinese context, on the one hand, it may indeed be ascribing too much credibility to Wang Jingwei’s regime to assign it the role of combatant in a civil war, given the shallowness of its autonomy and what appears to have been the limited extent of its popular support. To the extent that it and other collaborationist entities did gain active cooperation among significant social or political sectors, it was not so much among former adherents of the Kuomintang – to whom Wang regime’s cloning of KMTstyle symbols and ideological rhetoric might have been expected to appeal. Rather, in many cases it was politically marginalized Qing-era officials as well as members of post-1911, warlord-affiliated, socio-political circles who in many instances served as key operatives at local levels of governance under Wang’s regime.28 This was particularly the case in northern China, where the autonomous collaborationist administration originally set up by the North China Area Army – and only nominally subjected to 26

27 28

Brook, Collaboration, chs. 2–3 and passim. See also Odoric Y. K. Wou, “Food Shortage and Japanese Grain Extraction in Henan,” in Stephen R. MacKinnon, Diana Lary, and Ezra F. Fogel., eds., China at War: Regions of China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), esp. 180–81. Kristin Mulready-Stone, Mobilizing Shanghai Youth: CCP Internationalism, GMD Nationalism and Japanese Collaboration (London: Routledge, 2015), ch. 7. Lo Jiu-Jung, “Survival as Justification for Collaboration, 1937–1945,” in Barrett and Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

191

the overarching authority of Wang’s Nanjing-based regime as of 1940 – had explicitly disavowed KMT founding father Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist and popular-rights-focused Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy, and livelihood) in favor of neo-Confucian slogans and the creation of a political-mobilizing and propagandist association (the New People’s Society) that sought to inculcate north China’s population with a pseudo-traditional veneration for socio-political hierarchy.29 But even in many regions ostensibly more directly subject to Nanjing’s writ from 1940 on, the capacity of Wang’s regime to project political influence could be quite minimal, and the inauguration of his government could look rather like the creation of a thin, new, outer shell of quasi-patriotic legitimacy to cover the nexus of often corrupt and self-serving local interests associated with collaborationism since 1938. (Of course, that is how many critics of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime would have described his government.) On the other hand, insofar as some of these tensions between older and newer social and political elites antedated the Japanese invasion and were rooted in the preexisting structures and struggles of Chinese society, occupation-era splits and clashes associated with such divisions do have the air of civil war about them. That is, Wang’s efforts to portray his government as that of China’s genuine nationalists may have fallen flat, but across much of occupied and contested wartime China, this did not necessarily mean the existence of collaborationist structures had no basis for support in the crucial context of local politics. Rival factions – be they competing bandit formations, members of property-owners’ self-defense associations such as the Red Spear societies, former KMT officers and officials, or impoverished peasants – variously aligned themselves with pro-Nanjing, pro-Chungking, or Communist causes in order to seek comparative advantage in their own internecine struggles. It is precisely at the local level of analysis that the continuities between pre- and post1937 patterns of political behavior may be most striking. As David Barrett

29

Boyle, China and Japan at War, 91–95. The discursive boundary separating Sun Yatsen’s ideology from that of the Japanese-propagated “kingly way” (wangdao) concept that served as the ideological scaffolding for the puppet regimes in Manchuria and north China was not quite as clear-cut as this contradistinction suggests. In the context of his own, Sinicized version of pan-Asianism, Sun Yat-sen had himself suggested (most notably in a 1924 speech delivered in Kobe, Japan) that the Confucian ideal of a morally inflected “kingly way” distinguished Asian political culture from that of an amoral, materialistic, and power-hungry West. His intention had been, in part, to impress upon an ascendant Japan the importance of treating China fraternally rather than high-handedly. Little did he anticipate that the concept would be placed in the service of Japanese imperialism in China a decade later. Brown, “Sun Yat-sen,” 76–77; Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War, 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

192

Civil Wars under Occupation

points out, Chiang’s KMT – both before and after 1937 – was also chronically dependent on the cooptation of fickle and self-interested regional and local potentates.30 It should also be pointed out that, given how reliant the thinly stretched Japanese occupation forces were on the cooptation of indigenous manpower (in the form of militias, bandit groups, and warlord formations, as well as Wang Jingwei’s military) for the pursuit of anti-Communist “rural pacification” campaigns, there were plenty of situations in the course of the 1937–45 conflict in which most of the actual killing taking place was intra-Chinese.31 If one pans back to take a broader perspective on China during these years, one can see the country as containing within itself a fractal pattern of civil wars, beset as it was by clashes between rival local factions (loosely affiliated with “national”-level movements and regimes) in individual counties, battlefield confrontations between United Front troops and collaborationist forces fighting alongside the Japanese, and the constant maneuvering for comparative advantage – periodically degenerating into outright shooting matches – between the ostensible partners in the so-called United Front itself. To make this point should not in any way be seen as diminishing the role of the Japanese in precipitating and perpetuating this orgy of violence or as downplaying the massive suffering associated directly with the atrocity culture32 of the Japanese military in China and with the overarching and grueling international war between the Japanese and their opponents. As will be suggested in the next chapter, this fractal quality of China’s internal struggles constitutes a particularly vivid illustration of a characteristic that inhered in our European cases as well – and that may, as Stathis Kalyvas has argued, be usefully considered as a quintessential feature of civil wars in general.33

Paradigm Shifts: Communist Adaptations to Transformed Environments If the major Chinese figures, movements, and factions involved in the warfare of 1937–45 were familiar players from earlier years, in others 30 31 32

33

Barrett, “The Wang Jingwei Regime.” Peter J. Seybolt, “The War within a War: A Case Study of a Country on the North China Plain,” in Barrett and Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration. This seems like a fair term to describe the institutional mentality cultivated by a military that carried out the Nanjing Massacre, the murderous counterinsurgency campaign in north China, and the vivisectionist, biological-warfare experiments of Unit 731 among other examples. See the perpetrator testimonies in Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), 145–67. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, ch. 11.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

193

among our cases, the occupation-era break with previous political patterns was starker. As Kalyvas has pointed out, political polarization can be the result, more than the cause, of the violence associated with civil wars. Even if the leaders of rival forces in a civil war had staked out their positions well in advance of the conflict, most of the country’s population would likely have remained uncommitted until the outbreak of the conflict forced ordinary people to choose sides.34 In the case of Greece, the traditional division of the political elite and officer corps between monarchists and Venizelists took on the quality of an anachronistic feud in the face of enemy occupation, on the one hand, and the threat posed by the growth of a Communist-dominated EAM/ELAS resistance movement, on the other. Rather than simply exacerbating traditional tensions, occupation brought about a fundamental realignment of Greek politics and a polarization of society along novel lines.35 As for Greece, so for the other parts of Eurasia that fell to the Axis during the war: it would stretch credulity to contend that nothing fundamentally changed in societies that came under occupation by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and their allies. Intriguing elements of continuity notwithstanding, the experience necessarily constituted a shattering rupture that wrought drastic changes in the geopolitical, economic, and ideological environments of the defeated. Elites and masses alike had to scramble to adapt to rapidly shifting and extraordinarily dangerous conditions. The alternative was to perish, politically and/or literally. It is to the comparative patterns of adaptation and maladaptation to the challenges, pressures, and opportunities of enemy occupation that this section turns, focusing in particular on the roles (often unintended and unforeseen) played by preexisting networks of affiliation, patterns of identity, and ideological commitments among Communists and their supporters in shaping responses to fast-transforming wartime circumstances. A loose analogy from neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology may be useful here. The concept of punctuated equilibrium proposed by Eldredge and Gould36 suggests that long periods of slow, incremental evolution give way to dramatic cascades of change in the face of sudden, exogenously precipitated alterations in environmental conditions. Many species cannot adapt to a suddenly inhospitable environment, while a few happen to include individuals with preexisting features – “exaptations,”

34 36

35 Ibid., 74–76. See Gerolymatos, An International Civil War, chs. 2–3, esp. p. 58. For an early version of this theory, see Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Thomas J. M. Shopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co., 1972), 82–115.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

194

Civil Wars under Occupation

Gould and Eldridge dubbed them – that lend themselves to survival in the short term and that can further evolve, over generations, in “unanticipated” directions that permit new ways of thriving in a transformed world. The mass extinction of the dinosaurs and adaptive radiation of the mammals in the wake of the massive meteorite impact 66 million years ago is a classic case in point. An observer of Yugoslavia, Greece, China, and possibly Italy in 1944 might well conclude that if the unleashing of war by the Axis powers was the meteorite the impact of which had cast the Eurasian world into sudden darkness, the four countries’ conservative establishments (notably the monarchies and officer corps in the European cases and the landowning and industrial elites in China’s case) were duly playing out the role of the dinosaurs, while the Communists stood poised to inherit the earth. Now, this would actually be a distorted and overly simplistic conclusion: the conservative establishments were to prove far from done for in Greece and Italy – although the exogenous factor of British and then American support for anti-Communist forces played a critical role in determining the outcome of the Greek civil war. Even in post-war Yugoslavia, the triumph of Communism and Communist-promoted inter-ethnic “brotherhood and unity” was ultimately to prove more superficial37 and transient than the reign of the mammals. Nonetheless, the analogy is useful in drawing our attention to how certain preexisting qualities – exaptations, so to speak – of the Communists lent themselves to their bearers’ success amidst the catastrophically altered socio-political landscape of wartime occupation. Indeed, it should be noted that in all four countries, the Communists had constituted a much less significant political force prior to the onset of wartime occupation. By the same token, in all three they had been persecuted and suppressed. It was precisely their experience of operating, per force, largely underground and conspiratorially that prepared them to take the lead in organizing resistance against occupation. Their pre-war experience combined with their belief in the historically inevitable ultimate triumph of their cause also prepared them to endure and tenaciously rally and reorganize in the face of repeated and often catastrophic setbacks – most notably and dramatically in the case of the remarkably resilient Yugoslav partisan movement. As Mark Mazower has pointed out in the case of Greece, the Communists enjoyed a particularly acute advantage in countries and 37

On the repeated outbursts of inter-ethnic hostility linked to wartime memories in Bosnia of the 1960s, see Max Bergholz, “Sudden Nationhood: The Microdynamics of Intercommunal Relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina after World War II,” American Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 3 (June 2013), 679–707.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

195

regions where other parties’ social penetration of the countryside remained largely limited to clientelist networks that came under severe strain or broke down altogether amidst the dislocation of occupation and the Germans’ rapacious economic exactions and ruthless counterinsurgency tactics. The Communists’ techniques of mass mobilization through the creation of dense associational and institutional networks at grassroots level (e.g. improvised school systems, youth organizations, jerry-rigged judicial systems, as well as ruthless internal-security/political-terror services) gave them a comparative advantage in the exploitation of the very niches in the rural socio-political environment into which enemy occupation had suddenly thrust them. Resistance activities also provoked massive reprisals by the Germans, which in turn drove more of the rural population into the arms of Communist-led forces. Of course, the fecklessness of collaborationist authorities in the face of harsh occupation conditions could also provoke townsfolk into joining underground resistance networks, as was the case in the wake of the massive 1941–42 famine in Greece’s urban centers.38 But it was in the countryside that the diffuseness of population across broad expanses of often difficult terrain made policing a challenge for overstretched occupation forces and their indigenous collaborators, affording the resistance a potential territorial foothold. In some of the lands that composed Yugoslavia, from the late nineteenth century on, nationalist parties had arguably sunk deeper organizational roots among portions of the rural population than had their Greek counterparts. But parliamentary politics had been suspended in favor of monarchic dictatorship for most of the dozen years preceding the Axis invasion. Moreover, the mutually antagonistic agendas of mainstream Serb, Croat, and other ethno-national movements – whose clashes had helped provoke the king’s 1929 coup-from-above in the first place – undercut any potential for a concerted response to the Axis powers’ divide-and-rule tactics. For its part, the military’s rapid collapse in the face of German armed might (in stark contrast to Serbia’s protracted resistance to the Austro-Hungarian invasion in 1914–15) was a severe blow to the credibility of the monarchist ancien régime and the elites associated with it. Once again, this left openings for the Communists to exploit, especially as the economic and physical ravages of wartime occupation and the inability of either collaborationist regimes or old-school nationalist movements to offer any protection against German violence and rapacity served to alienate ever broader swaths of the population.

38

Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, ch. 3 and pp. 112–13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

196

Civil Wars under Occupation

And so it was that – as had been the case with Russia in 1917, so too in Greece and Yugoslavia of the 1940s – the conditions arising from total warfare had created particularly fertile ground for Communist mobilization precisely in those parts of Europe that were relatively underindustrialized and where a large proportion of the population still consisted of peasants. Enemy and collaborationist control of the cities meant that it was to the peasantry rather than the urban proletariat that Communist-led resistance movements had to turn for recruitment and logistical support. This was not a scenario the Communists had planned for. But it was one to which their previous experiences and preexisting qualities and capabilities (which included a Leninist tactical flexibility in the pursuit of ostensibly fixed strategic-ideological goals) allowed them to adapt remarkably effectively.39 A strikingly similar dynamic played out in China,40 where Chiang’s ruthless 1927 crackdown on the Communists’ urban presence had already forced the CCP to retreat to the countryside, first in Jiangxi province, and then to the more remote Yan’an (by way of the famous Long March of 1934–35). The Japanese hub-and-spoke pattern of occupying cities and lines of communication between them while leaving much of the countryside sparsely policed created a rural power vacuum across much of the country, which the CCP was able to exploit – particularly across much of north China. The Communists combined a relatively moderate wartime social- and land-reform program with an opportunistic policy of coopting local elites, disaffected peasants, “social” bandits, and stranded soldiers cut off from their KMT or warlord commanders in the haste of retreat. As in German-occupied Europe, the intensification of Japanese labor-conscription efforts amidst the total war of 1942–45 spurred the flight of Chinese youth to the predominantly Communist-led resistance organizations in the countryside.41 One of the key factors in the Chinese Communists’ success was their ability to adapt their political tactics to the shifting constraints and opportunities of war and occupation. Their overarching wartime 39

40 41

The Communists were adept at hitching traditional insurgent traditions among peasant populations to the engine of their own more disciplined and systematic mode of operation. Ann Lane makes the interesting suggestion that Yugoslavia’s partisans could draw on many of their leaders’ personal experience with the relentless, roundthe-year conduct of military operations in the Spanish Civil War, whereas their Chetnik counterparts were more constrained by the rural “tradition of resistance to Ottoman domination in which there was a closed season during the winter months when the guerrillas fraternized with the occupiers.” Lane, “Perfidious Albion?,” 348. For an early comparison of peasant mobilization by Yugoslav and Chinese Communists, see Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, viii, 7–9, 45–46, ch. 6, and passim. Lary, Chinese People at War, 148–52.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Continuities and Ruptures

197

rhetorical stance, like that of their counterparts in Europe from 1941 on, emphasized the patriotic struggle against the invader/occupier as taking priority over social revolution. That said, their rural united-front strategy was designed to win over the poorest classes of peasants through the reformist redistribution of resources, while simultaneously seeking to coopt local elites by persuading them that they stood to benefit more through cooperation with the CCP than by collaboration with the Japanese. As Dagfinn Gatu has shown, threading this needle was a highly improvised and unstable undertaking, implementation of which took diverse forms across the loosely linked enclaves of Communist insurrectionist control behind Japanese lines in northern China. But the CCP’s adaptive skills and perseverance at the task paid high dividends in the form of the mobilizational resources they were able to deploy once fullscale civil war with the KMT resumed in 1946.42 As I have argued, a key element in the interplay of continuities and ruptures in these conflicts was the evolution and manipulation of social and political identities. Ethnicity and or rival conceptions of patriotism and nationalism were among the categories of loyalty and collective interest in play. But I would be remiss if I did not also take into account the parts played by trans-national influences and internationalist ideas in shaping, legitimizing, and/or rationalizing political choices among the parties to these conflicts. It is to this theme that Chapter 6 turns.

42

Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press and Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), Introduction. For a classic study that posits a more direct link between Japanese abuses and the responsiveness of northern Chinese peasants to the CCP’s nationalist mobilization efforts, see Johnson, Peasant Nationalism.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

6

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions: The Fractal Structures of Political Identity in Civil Wars

As Robert Gildea has noted, and as was mentioned in Part I, wartime occupation often had the effect of drastically curtailing the scope of social networks and political frameworks, as people struggled to survive within the narrow sphere of their own immediate communities and families.1 Yet the experience of occupation also had a transnational dimension. Occupations redrew, redefined, or did away with political and national boundaries across much of Eurasia and beyond. Occupying powers fashioned ideological rationales for their imperial expansion, some of which were designed to engage the support of various sectors within the occupied populations. In some cases, pre-war networks of transnational affinity and exchange were activated or exploited under the transformed circumstances of occupation. By the same token, resistance to occupation was often informed by ideals as well as organizational and experiential connections that transcended political and ethno-national boundaries. Moreover, in many countries, those who did not fully “belong” to the nation – notably, members of marginalized minorities as well as foreign nationals, who were particularly vulnerable to repression and violence on the part of occupation authorities and collaborationist regimes – were disproportionately represented among the ranks of resistance movements. Examples include the many Jews, Spanish Republican refugees, and other “others” who joined the ranks of the French resistance, the Macedonian Slavs who contributed significantly to the rank-and-file of Communist forces in Greece (particularly in the 1946–49 phase of that country’s civil war), and the Italian soldiers who joined the ranks of the (already multi-ethnic) Yugoslav partisans as well as the Greek resistance rather than fall captive to the Germans after September 1943.2

1 2

Gildea, Marianne in Chains, 143–44. Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3, 6; Gerolymatos, An International Civil War,

198

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

199

What roles did local/regional, ethnic, national, and/or internationalist identities play in shaping the alignments, orientations, and agendas of warring parties in Eurasia’s civil wars of the 1940s? On the face of it, cases such as Yugoslavia seem to indicate a sharp bifurcation between the forces of internationalism as represented by the Communists and champions of ethnic and national chauvinism as in the examples of the Ustašas and Chetniks. Yet the history of Soviet-orchestrated transfers of ethnic populations in Eastern Europe in the mid- to late 1940s is a reminder that such cut-and-dried distinctions often become blurry upon closer investigation. Overall, an examination of the civil wars of the 1940s suggests that it is a mistake to think of familial, communal, ethnic, patriotic, and/or internationalist identities and commitments as necessarily being mutually exclusive. It is more productive to think in terms of context-driven shifts of emphasis and priority among the multiple dimensions of identity available to any given population, amidst attempts by rival political movements and military forces to align those identities with their own agendas. The convulsive upheavals of societies caught up in civil wars amidst wartime occupation, and the rapidly changing fortunes of the parties to those struggles, created an environment in which the ability to recognize and exploit the fluidity of affective ties and political commitments became an essential survival skill for political leaders and ordinary civilians alike. An awareness (be it perceptive or distorted) of the broader, transnational and/or global context could have a significant impact on the behavior of actors in seemingly localized contexts. By the same token, advocates of avowedly internationalist agendas could not hope to succeed without linking their programs to local interests, identities, and concerns. Channeling Loyalties into Communism On the face of it, the relationship between Communism and internationalism should be straightforward, given the stereotypical image of Communism as an ideologically rigid movement wedded to the concept of social class as the irreducible unit of historical analysis and political agency and to the idea of internationalism as the credo of the revolutionary working class. This had been fundamental to Lenin’s attack on what he described as the ideological hypocrisy of the major European socialist parties that (apart from the Italian case) had lent their support to their respective countries’ war efforts during the First World War. His radical ch. 6; Marcia Kurapovna, Shadows on the Mountains: The Allies, the Resistance and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 187.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

200

Civil Wars under Occupation

revolutionary alternative was to encourage the oppressed classes of all belligerent nations to recognize that they were being treated as cannon fodder by their own socio-political elites and to turn their bayonets away from one another and against the class enemies within their own lands. “The only way to end this war is by a workers’ revolution in several countries,” he insisted.3 (Lenin later went on to try and coopt the power of national identity through the institution of a façade of ethnofederalism within the USSR.4) A little more than two decades later, as Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Moscow’s approach to the Second World War was inverted overnight into the polar opposite of Lenin’s stance in 1917–18. (The context, obviously, was in many ways different.) This time, rather than calling for the war among nations to be converted into a civil war between classes, Communists were instructed to form coalitions with other anti-fascist movements in pursuit of the shared goal of national liberation from enemy occupation. The approach was a reversion, in broad outlines, to the Popular Front strategy of 1935–39. Patriotism was to be emphasized rather than internationalism, national liberation rather than social revolution. To the extent that the Yugoslav and Greek Communists did experiment with, or discuss the possibility of, social revolution in the areas they controlled during the war, it was in the face of countervailing pressures from Moscow rather than with Stalin’s blessing. In 1943, Stalin dismantled the Communist International altogether, transferring its functions to the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Stalin’s concern was to avoid any provocative revolutionary rhetoric or action that might alienate his British and American allies at a time when the rollback and defeat of Nazi Germany was Moscow’s number-one priority. He also appears to have been perennially concerned about the threat to his own legitimacy that might be posed by any autonomous Communist revolution unfolding beyond the sphere of Soviet control.5 3

4

5

V. I. Lenin, “War and Revolution,” a lecture delivered May 14 (May 27 by Western calendar) 1917, first published April 23, 1929 in Pravda, trans. Isaacs Bernard and reprinted in V. I. Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. XXIV, 398–421. Online version www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14 .htm (accessed November 21, 2018). Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Geoffrey Roberts contends that the Comintern’s dissolution had more to do with Stalin’s emphasis on patriotic posturing as the best propagandist tactic for Communist parties in

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

201

That said, in the Yugoslav case, even at a time when Tito’s forces were formally downplaying the internationalist aspects of Communism, they constituted the only major insurgent force in the Yugoslav lands to make a concerted and systematic attempt to widen their base of support beyond one ethnic group. Reaching out beyond their core wartime recruitment pool among the persecuted Serbs of the Independent State of Croatia (the NDH), they sought to draw members of other communities into their forces in line with their slogan calling for brotherhood and unity among the South Slav nationalities as the basis for a reborn Yugoslavia. Tito himself was of mixed Croat and Slovene parentage. At a time when Leninist internationalism was placed on the propagandist backburner, what one might term inter-ethnicism remained integral to the Yugoslav Communists’ formal program throughout the war years. They certainly went further in their wartime attempts to create a movement cutting across ethnic lines of division than Mihailović’s Chetniks ever did. As Communist Party leaderships across occupied Eurasia undertook the convoluted task of conforming to their internationalist obligations by adopting patriotic stances, they found themselves hard put at times to persuade, not only themselves, but also their rank-and-file resistance fighters to adapt themselves to the official line. For it would be a mistake to assume that internationalist and transnational perspectives were the monopoly of sophisticated political elites, raised on the milk of Marxist– Leninist internationalism, while personal interests, localist concerns, or ethno-national loyalties were all that mattered to the regular combatants in partisan formations. There are certainly plenty of examples of that kind of stereotypical contrast, as in the case of the Yugoslav peasant who thanked Milovan Djilas for explaining the struggle to him in terms of Serbian historical myth instead of the incomprehensible phrases about anti-fascist organizations he had heard from other party operatives.6 But there are also some striking reversals of this trope: it was sometimes the rank-and-file membership of Communist-led resistance movements who sought to express internationalist and revolutionary sentiments in defiance of the authorized position. Claudio Pavone notes that many members of the Garibaldi Brigades who were not well versed in the niceties of Marxist dialectical thinking, and were not necessarily even members of the Communist Party, demanded that they be allowed to don Communist and Soviet-style insignia such as red stars on their caps as a way of expressing their identification with a Soviet Union whose Red

6

Axis-occupied Europe. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War II to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 172–74. Djilas, Wartime, 321.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

202

Civil Wars under Occupation

Fig. 17 Josip Broz Tito with his arm in a sling after being wounded during the Battle of Sutjeska in June 1943. On the left is Ivan Ribar, a Croat commander in the partisan forces. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

203

Army was heroically driving the Nazis back towards Berlin and (as they imagined) bringing victory and liberation to all freedom-loving peoples. Some Italians associated with the resistance speculated eagerly about the prospects for a post-war, Soviet-led European federation of nations on the model of the USSR, even though the party leadership might formally frown upon such musings as a left-wing deviation from the patriotic official line.7 Among Yugoslav supporters of the partisans, identification with the Soviet Union could take forms associated not only with revolutionary utopianism but also (or alternatively) with more traditional pan-Slavic and (among the ethnic Serbs who formed the early base of the partisans’ support) Eastern Orthodox sentiments, as in the case of the peasant who spoke to Milovan Djilas in awed terms about the fall of holy “Kievo” (Kiev) to the Germans.8 In China, the CCP’s rapid territorial expansion in the course of the war years presented not only opportunities but also serious command-and-control challenges, given poor communications between far-flung enclaves in front-line zones and behind Japanese lines, and on account of the rapid recruitment of new cadres. Among the resultant challenges was the tendency of some local CCP cadres to push social-reform efforts much more aggressively than called for by the party’s leadership, with its wartime emphasis on patriotic solidarity, cross-class rural coalitions, and the striking of a balance between ameliorating conditions for the poorest peasants and avoiding the complete alienation of local elites.9 Just as the rank-and-file’s internationalist and/or revolutionary spirit could run ahead of the official party line, there were, conversely, cases of ostensibly ideological choices being determined by very parochial and even personal factors such as family loyalties and inter-clan feuds. An earlier section has already discussed how rival factions in Chinese communities could opportunistically align themselves with national-level movements and regimes. Chalmers Johnson has shown that the formation of guerrilla forces behind Japanese lines could originate on a very local and 7

8

Pavone, Guerra civile, 384–403, 410–12. A typical example of the Garibaldi Brigades’ emphasis on the patriotic theme can be seen in the February 15, 1945 issue of a “newspaper” (in the form of a broadsheet) published by the Garibaldi Brigades of the Reggio Emilia region. In response to RSI propaganda denouncing the Garibaldini as rebels, the paper proudly accepted the epithet, affirming that the resistance formations were indeed rebelling against “Nazi-fascist despotism.” But “more than ‘rebels’, we are patriots, we are Garibaldini, we are soldiers who fight and know how to die for a supremely patriotic idea.” (My translation from the Italian.) Issue of the “Garibaldino” found in folder of similar clippings, Entry 110, Box 2, Folder 26, OSS Papers, RG 226, NARA. 9 Djilas, Wartime, 73. Gatu, Village China, Introduction.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

204

Civil Wars under Occupation

regional basis, as rapidly advancing yet thinly stretched Japanese forces left rural power vacuums and numerous stranded and desperate KMT soldiers in their wake. Rival groups that emerged to fill and/or exploit these situations might variously choose to affiliate themselves with the CCP, the KMT, or collaborationist entities, depending on who was able to provide them with the most assistance and who seemed to hold the strategic upper hand at any given point in time. Johnson documented the checkered history of one of the armed formations that arose under these conditions in a portion of Jiangsu province (north of Shanghai) – the “Loyal National Salvation Army” (LNSA). The LNSA initially identified itself with the KMT, whose support it used to concentrate rather more on fighting off local CCP-affiliated formations than on attacking the Japanese. When the KMT’s support appeared insufficient to prevent a Communist resurgence in 1940, the LNSA’s command opportunistically switched its loyalty to Wang Jingwei’s regime.10 In the Yugoslav case, Djilas noted that neighboring villages in Montenegro and Bosnia might be pro-partisan or proChetnik based on the affiliation of a key family in each one and/or on intervillage rivalries that long antedated the war. There were instances of families divided between brothers who joined the ranks of Mihailović’s and Tito’s forces, respectively. Clashes that constituted parts of a national and global conflict could at one and the same time be strangely intimate, as in the case of Djilas’ brother Aleksa, who was shot and killed by members of a collaborationist militia who recognized him personally.11 Stathis Kalyvas has documented how the keeping of personal scores of gratitude and revenge could shape villagers’ decisions to shelter or denounce EAM operatives in occupied Greece.12 As he pithily puts it, “the intimate character of violence in civil war is puzzling only because we tend to assume the inherent goodness of intimate relations.”13 Amidst the micro-dynamics of personal or familial bonds and resentments playing out across hundreds of thousands of local communities, one key element shaping the ability of rival forces to gain grassroots support was their relative ability to be seen as responsive to people’s material needs and concerns, even as they deterred potential informers and defectors through the violent penalization of oppositional behavior. The stick was most effective when accompanied by at least a few carrots. One of the exceptional strengths of Communist resistance movements was their relative effectiveness at tapping into social discontents as a source of mobilizational strength. Tito’s partisans tended to exceed formal 10 11 12

Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 129–30. Djilas, Warime, 78, 120; Prusin, Serbia under the Swastika, 153. 13 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 307–9. Ibid., 331.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

205

Comintern guidelines in their experimentation with social-revolutionary restructuring of the agrarian economy in the territories they were able to control for extended periods of time during the war. Yet they also responded adaptively to the fears of expropriation occasioned by their initial rhetorical emphasis on class struggle and some actual instances of land seizures from – along with some summary executions of – those deemed disloyal or hostile to Communism. Instead, from early 1942 onwards, they focused on winning the support of peasants through policies designed to lessen their dependence on debtors and secure their claims to property ownership. Reframing the struggle in patriotic rather than narrowly ideological terms, the Yugoslav partisans now directed expropriations against collaborators with the enemy occupiers and their puppet regimes rather than “class enemies,” redistributing some of the property among poor peasants rather than reserving it all for collectivization and/or eventual nationalization.14 EAM/ELAS formations in Greece won peasant support by helping reconstitute rural institutions of local selfgovernment that had been suppressed under the Metaxas dictatorship and by supporting the interests of smallholders, while following Moscow’s line in avoiding any disruptive attacks on private property per se.15 Mao’s CCP tried, as mentioned, to win rather than alienate the support of local elites during the anti-Japanese struggle, but at the same time, the Communists undertook a concerted effort to alleviate the economic situation of the poorest peasants in areas under their control through locally variable initiatives in village-level administrative reform combined with the alleviation of tax, rent, and credit burdens. There is every indication that, for many among China’s hundreds of millions of peasants, ideas about the nation-state and internationalism alike were extremely remote. To some extent, the viciousness of Japanese military atrocities against civilian populations served as a motive in and of itself for taking up arms against the invader. But the introduction of policies that offered at least the prospect of a significant redistribution of socio-economic burdens and opportunities at the village level appears to have played a significant role in effecting the long-term mobilization of the peasant population for a drawn-out struggle of endurance against the occupier (and, eventually, against the KMT). At the same time the CCP’s leadership strove to contain the potential their policies had for unleashing full-fledged class

14

15

Melissa Bokovoy, Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), ch. 1 and p. 38; Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 36–37. Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, 96, 270–71, and ch. 21.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

206

Civil Wars under Occupation

warfare between poor peasants and the landowning social strata, in keeping with their wartime “rural united front” strategy.16 The social revolution was to come later. Thus, under conditions of occupation and civil war that forced them to fight for their very survival, Communist movements in Europe and Asia alike cultivated a crucial knack for bringing into tenuous alignment with one another diverse elements and levels of loyalty, identity, and interest – ranging from the internationalist to the patriotic to the parochial and personal.17 Their rivals tended to be much clumsier at this task, as in the case of the KMT leadership, whose very success in the interwar period had hinged on Chiang’s willingness to forgo continued social mobilization in favor of cultivating power centers and elites: coopting and forging alliances with warlords, criminal organizations, and powerful financial interests. Once the Japanese invasion had leveled the playing field between Chiang and Mao by driving the KMT forces into the country’s southwest interior, Chiang’s continued dependence on such horizontal cooptation and coalition-building tactics played to the long-term comparative advantage of the CCP. The CCP tended to be more selective and context-sensitive in the kinds of organizations and associations it was willing to support and/or coopt (ranging from secret societies and village self-help formations to bandits).18 Communist cooptation also often took the form of recruiting and reorganizing the scattered rank-and-file elements of local armed formations that had suffered defeats at Japanese or collaborationist hands, rather than gaining the formal loyalty of effectively autonomous warlords (as more frequently tended to be the case with the KMT).19 The KMT’s reliance on winning and retaining the support of corrupt and abusive elites left the alienating use of brute force as the only method for recruiting and disciplining military personnel and extracting the resources needed to sustain them. The vertical sociopolitical integration and mobilization efforts of the CCP – beset by contradictions and backlashes though they were – lent themselves better to the demands of a long-term war of rural resistance. Somewhat analogous dynamics manifested themselves in the relative trajectories of Tito’s and Mihailović’s movements in Yugoslavia, as well as in the relationship between EAM/ELAS and its rivals in Greece – where British, and later American, interventions were required to contain the threat of a post-war Communist takeover. 16 17 18

Gatu, Village China, ch. 2 and passim. For an incisive theoretical analysis of the relationship between micro- and macro-levels of action in civil wars, see Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, ch. 11. 19 Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 88–89. Ibid., 112–13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

207

All this is not to say that right-wing movements in these civil wars made no efforts of their own to align the parochial and patriotic with the international and transnational. Quite the contrary, as the next section suggests. Right-Wing Internationalism It will come as no surprise to learn that right-wing movements and militias were prone to take advantage of the opportunities and incentives that occupation opened up for them by indulging in extreme forms of violence against compatriots they designated as their enemies, be it on grounds of ethnicity or political orientation. But it would be a mistake to imagine that such conduct can be understood exclusively within the siloed analytical paradigms of local enmities and nationalist frames of reference. As Philippe Burrin has written of the French fascist groups that operated under the auspices of the German occupation, there was a phenomenon at work here that can be described as “the internationalization of nationalism,” insofar as they were willing to “put the struggle against a common foe [notably Communism] before the salvation of a nation [which they regarded as] too degenerate to oppose it successfully.”20 Across much of occupied Europe – as in the earlier context of German and Italian intervention on behalf of Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War – hatred and fear of the propagandistically linked images of Communism and Jewry formed the core element of a fascist-internationalist ideological front and propagandist style that contributed significantly to shaping the dynamics of conflict and violence at international, national, and local levels alike Precursors of the Judeo-Communist myth, and of its incongruous fraternal twin – the notion that global capitalism was an instrument of Jewish exploitation – antedated the First World War, as did the spread of such ideas among radical right-wing circles in Europe and beyond. The infamous Russian antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, originally published in the first decade of the twentieth century, can – as Steven Marks has argued – be seen as a founding document of what was to evolve into a worldwide web of fascist discourse.21 Widely disseminated by White Russian exiles during the interwar period, it quickly caught on among a wide variety of radical authoritarian movements in the Euro-Atlantic sphere, including the nascent Nazi Party. The Nazis, of course, eagerly propagated racialized conspiracy theories about the 20 21

Burrin, France under the Germans, 56. Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), ch. 5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

208

Civil Wars under Occupation

Jews throughout occupied Europe, at times linking their commitment to the eradication of Jewry to efforts to repackage Hitler’s empire as a supranational framework for harmonious coexistence among Europe’s peoples. A shared commitment to the destruction of the internal/external enemy of “Judeo-Communism” was to serve as a common bond within a German-led community of European nations.22 As one German academic put it, in a laudatory blurb he contributed to a French antisemitic publication (The Jews and Us), “[this book] – the work of two young Frenchmen – is a striking manifestation of the fact that nationalists of all countries, having decided no longer to suffer under the yoke of Israel, share in the faith that the socialist nationalism of the popular community [presumably a translation of Volksgemeinschaft], triumphing over the rationalist imperialism of the state, will create the conditions of a supranational peaceful order.”23 Across much of Eastern Europe, where the Nazis generally did not offer the prospect of any form of national selfdetermination in their new order, the idea of a war against the “JudeoCommunist” enemy nonetheless had significant appeal and could be used to justify the denunciation or direct murder of Jews by their nonJewish neighbors.24 One can conjecture that associating one’s neighbors with a global conspiracy of evil helped dehumanize them, making it easier to murder them.25 The more intimate the form of violence, the more emotionally satisfying or reassuring it may have been for 22

23

24 25

On shared antisemitism and anti-Communism as the key binding element of a fascist internationalism, see Raul Cârstocea, “Native Fascists, Transnational Anti-Semites: The International Activity of Legionary Leader Ion I. Mot¸a,” in Arnd Bauerkämpfer and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, eds., Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2017). “‘Les Juifs et Nous’ – oeuvre de deux jeunes Français – est la manifestation éclatante que des nationalistes de tous les pays, décidés à ne plus subir le joug d’Israël, communient dans la foi que le nationalisme socialiste de la communauté populaire, l’emportant sur l’impérialisme rationaliste de l’Etat, créera les conditions d’un ordre de paix supranational.” Testimonial blurb by Hans. Kel. Keller (Doctor of Law at Universities of Bordeaux and Kiel and of Political Science at University of Munich) in André Chaumet and H.-R. Bellanger, Les juifs et nous (Paris: Éditions Jean Renard, 1941). On the history of this potent antisemitic myth, see Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Non-Jews who had in fact collaborated with Soviet occupiers in the areas of Eastern Europe incorporated into the USSR during 1939–41 may have been particularly eager to project their own deeds on to vulnerable Jewish scapegoats in the aftermath of Germany’s June 1941 invasion. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002), 33, 109; Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter 2004), 95–118. My thanks to Joseph Hood for pointing to the dehumanizing potential of globalizing the identities of one’s targeted neighbors.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

209

perpetrators of atrocities to frame their actions in terms that transcended their immediate surroundings. Nazi Germany’s portrayal of its war effort against a supposedly Judaized Soviet Union as a defensive campaign on behalf of European civilization was also a dominant theme in the recruitment propaganda of the WaffenSS, the non-German divisions of which drew thousands of volunteers from across German-occupied and German-allied Europe into active duty not only in their own regions (as in the former and future Yugoslavia, where several thousand Bosnian Muslims – recruited with the assistance of the exiled Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini of Jerusalem – were organized into a Waffen-SS division that was pitted against the Communist partisans), but also on the Eastern Front against the Red Army.26 Contributing to this international anti-Soviet and/or anti-partisan war effort through the Waffen-SS was a way for collaborationist movements to stake a claim in the making of a new fascist order in Europe, as well as to try and sway Nazi overlords in their favor at the expense of their political rivals on their home ground. In a word, Communists had no monopoly on internationalist or transnational modes of thought, rhetoric, and action. Indeed, the sheer continental scale of occupations by Axis powers was such that collaborationist movements and governments in individual countries arose and operated within a matrix of transnational influences and force fields. In the following exploration of the Italian Social Republic, the Croatian Ustaša regime, and Wang Jingwei’s government, the focus will be on the ways in which these regimes were shaped by, or employed, forms of propaganda, modes of self-identification, and conceptions of purpose that transcended bounded notions of national interest. The Italian Social Republic (RSI) In Italy, of course, Fascists had been in power for more than two decades by the time Mussolini was overthrown, rescued by the Nazis, and then allowed to establish a neo-fascist Italian Social Republic (RSI) on territory in northern and central Italy now de facto occupied by German troops.27 (The RSI is often referred to informally as the Republic of Salò, after the town on Lake Garda which served as its seat of government.) 26

27

Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 373–75; Marko Attila Hoare, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 53–55, 194–96. Two zones in the north and northeast of Italy were incorporated administratively into Germany, although their annexation was not formalized. Gianmarco Bresadola, “The Legitimising Strategies of the Nazi Administration in Northern Italy: Propaganda in the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

210

Civil Wars under Occupation

The RSI was led by a refounded Facsist movement calling itself the Republican Fascist Party (PFR after its Italian initials). Why would the PFR succeed where its predecessor had not? Because, its leaders claimed, Fascism’s past failures had been born of the compromises it had negotiated with the monarchy, the army, and the big industrial cartels over the course of Mussolini’s first two decades in power. All this could, supposedly, be cast aside now and a fresh start made from first principles. Rejecting the monarchy which had betrayed it, the PFR rhetorically embraced a supposedly purist brand of Fascism that harked back to the movement’s early days of street-fighting and violent militia activity (squadrismo), as well as to its early aspiration to chart a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism based on a corporatist reform of the political economy. What all of this would mean in practice was a hotly contested question. The PFR’s leadership was a motley crew, and amidst the fluid and violent conditions of its founding, the party was plagued by the same sort of rivalries between regional bosses that had been characteristic of Italian Fascism from its early days. Some figures within the refounded movement were initially interested in exploring the possibility of bridgebuilding with Communists. Others, who prevailed, were virulently opposed to this. Some advocated in favor of some sort of serious attempt to reach out to the industrial proletariat and/or peasantry, while others remained reluctant to antagonize capitalist and propertied interests. Mussolini did authorize moves towards greater state involvement (to the point of nationalization in certain vital sectors) in the running of major industries. Of course, under the pressure of German demands for maximal production, such moves only meant more ruthless exploitation of labor in practice, in the face of Communist-organized strike efforts. There is certainly no indication that the regime achieved any significant popularity among a war-weary population struggling to survive amidst the upheaval and oppression of Nazi occupation, the unpredictable violence of the Republican Fascist militias’ vicious reprisals against resistance attacks, and the slow but inexorable northwards advance of the battle lines between German and Allied forces.28 The cacophonous mix of voices within the PFR is apparent from the transcript of the movement’s national assembly at Verona, held on November 14, 1943. This congress brought together the provincial

28

Adriatisches Küstenland,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 2004), 425–51. Frederick William Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Fall of Italian Fascism (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 582–83, chs. 5 and 8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

211

Fig. 18 Benito Mussolini (left) and Alessandro Pavolini in Milan, December 16, 1944. Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

leadership of the PFR with figures from the central party organization and a handful of cabinet ministers, under the chairmanship of the reborn movement’s newly appointed secretary, Alessandro Pavolini.29 Mussolini himself chose not to attend, merely having a statement read on his behalf (a decision that led to one or two uncomfortable questions at the assembly). Il Duce seemed to prefer letting rival factions in the new/old movement compete with one another while he stayed above the fray, ready to call the shots over time as circumstances evolved. The detailed stenographic record of the meeting, prepared by order of Mussolini so that he could gain a finely textured sense of what had transpired at the assembly, bears witness to the rather remarkable heterogeneity of opinions, perspectives, expectations, and agendas among the participants. Both of Pavolini’s speeches were followed by a fairly spontaneous-sounding – if not chaotic – give-and-take among provincial party leaders, who variously shouted one another down or cheered each other on, as the spirit moved them. The party boss from Perugia complained about his lack of police resources and his consequent difficulties 29

Viganò, Il congresso di Verona, 27–29.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

212

Civil Wars under Occupation

in expelling Jews from his region (perhaps seeking to leverage the regime’s now fervent antisemitism in order to obtain the personnel he wanted). Others yelled at him to stick to national issues rather than focusing on his own province’s affairs.30 When the Florentine chief accused Italian youth of failing to enlist in the armed formations of the RSI, describing them as a great disappointment, an uproar ensued, with some shouting that the finger of blame should be pointed at party cadres. The speaker won the audience back by reminding it of a very recent incident in which fascist militia members seeking to hijack the proceedings at the ceremonial opening of the University of Padua’s academic year had been summarily put in their place by the Rector and then whistled and booed off the premises by a hostile student body. This elicited cries of “shoot the scoundrels.”31 Campus anti-fascists, unsurprisingly, constituted a much more satisfying target of hostility than the nation’s youth as an abstract category. Much of the debate effectively revolved around the question of what I would paraphrase as how far the party should veer towards the “socialism” in “national socialism.” Some speakers stressed the need to favor labor over big capital in order to redress mistakes of the past. The 26year-old representative from Bologna called for a general redistribution of wealth, declaring that “we have no more need for millionaires in Italy.”32 Aldo Buffa, the new regime’s Commissioner of the General Confederation of Agriculture, spoke of the need to limit agricultural property rights to those directly involved in working the land with their families and/or to those who managed their property in a way that redounded to the benefit of sharecroppers and farm laborers, allowing them enough income to save up money to acquire their own property in due course. This elicited hostile murmurs from the audience and ironic calls of “We’re implementing Communism! This is Communism!”33 Yet when another speaker droned on grandiloquently about the importance of not confusing Fascism with Communism, he was met with derisive laughter from members of the audience who questioned why that would even need to be pointed out.34 How did the PFR situate itself in relation to the broader international sphere? Here the ironies rain down particularly heavily, given Mussolini’s original role as a source of inspiration for Hitler and in light of Fascist 30 31 32 33 34

Remarks by Bucci in “Il verbale del congresso,” in Viganò, Il congresso di Verona, 143–44. Remarks by Meschiari, “Il verbale del congresso,” 146–47. Remarks by Aristide Sarti, ibid., 186–87. My translations of all these quotations from the Verona Congress transcript. Remarks by Buffa, ibid., 200–1. Remarks by Padovani and audience responses, ibid., 181–82.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

213

Italy’s pre-war embrace (particularly from 1930 on) of a broader European and international cultural and ideological mission.35 The pretense of bearing a global message had remained propagandistically and perhaps psychologically important to the regime throughout much of the 1930s and 1940s, as it struggled to maintain the appearance of at least parity with Germany in the field of fascist international cultural exchange, at a time when the Nazi regime was becoming by far the more powerful of the two politically and militarily. Benjamin Martin has shown how, in the course of the 1930s, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had cooperated in the creation of new international cultural institutions in spheres such as music and film, with a view to competing with, and undercutting, organizations and associations connected to the League of Nations and to liberal or socialist brands of internationalism. Martin dubs the far-right worldview propagated by these initiatives as “inter-nationalism.” That is, Rome and Berlin advertised themselves as champions of a neo-Herderian vision of Europe in which each nation would cultivate music, cinema, literature, and art rooted in its own folk traditions and expressive of its own national identity, rather than allowing its culture to be eroded by a twentieth-century tidal wave of modernist artistic forms, cosmopolitan and “Jewish” values, and American-style commercialism. Cultural inter-nationalism would supposedly foster mutual respect among countries through the medium of international festivals and exchange programs, as well as cooperation in the subsidization of approved artists and art forms and in the negotiation and implementation of effective international copyright protection. At the same time, it would draw clear boundaries between distinctive modes of national being.36 Although Fascist Italy had formerly been much more open than Nazi Germany ever was to certain forms of modernist artistic experimentation as well as to engagement with preexisting institutions of international 35

36

Benjamin G. Martin, The Nazi–Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 16; Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). On the sense of a shared set of animosities among right-wing and antisemitic paramilitary movements in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, see Robert Gerwarth, “Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe,” in Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 65–66. Martin, Nazi–Fascist New Order, ch. 4 and passim. On Berlin’s wartime show of support and hospitality for right-wing and/or opportunistic anti-colonial nationalist émigrés from the British empire and Soviet Transcaucasus and Central Asia, see David Motadel, “The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire,” American Historical Review, Vol. 124, No. 3 (June 2019), 843–77.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

214

Civil Wars under Occupation

cultural cooperation, its diplomatic realignment with a revisionist Germany during the second half of the 1930s had been accompanied by a clear shift in the direction of a more narrow-mindedly Nazi version of cultural inter-nationalism.37 Italy’s adoption of racialized antisemitic legislation in 1938 was the most notorious, and obviously one-sided, ideological manifestation of the newly forged Rome–Berlin Axis.38 At the same time, the country’s long-held standing as a titan of European cultural innovation and production, dating back to the Renaissance, gave its leaders the hope that, through joint efforts with Nazi Germany and with like-minded regimes or movements across the continent, Italy could continue to play a prominent role in the shaping of a new Europe of fatherlands (to anachronistically deploy de Gaulle’s post-war phrase).39 And it was none other than Alessandro Pavolini who had played a key role in the orchestration of this Fascist inter-nationalism from 1938, in his capacity as president of the country’s National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations and (as of 1939) as minister of popular culture (i.e. minister of propaganda). A former (and future) leader of Fascist militias, Pavolini came from an academic family and had literary credentials in his own right. As Martin pithily puts it, “Pavolini represented the ideal of the fascist intellectual – as ready with a pistol as with a pen.”40 Speaking grandiosely about the Rome–Berlin relationship as “the spine of the renewed Europe, the ray of light towards its spiritual reinvigoration, [and] the bulwark for the defense of its culture,”41 Pavolini energetically enforced the new regulations banning Jews from representing Italy in any international conferences or forums of cultural exchange.42 Five years later, it was the supreme irony of Pavolini’s and Mussolini’s PFR that it made so much of the alleged blank slate opportunely created by its breach with the institutional fetters of the monarchy and preFascist establishment, even as the neo-fascist regime over which it presided lay utterly at the mercy of the newly installed German occupiers to 37

38

39

40 42

Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), ch. 3; Martin, Nazi–Fascist New Order, p. 35 and ch. 4. Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes the case for continuities between Fascism’s pre-1938 racist proclivities (notably in the context of the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–36) and the adoption of Nazi-style anti-Jewish legislation in 1938. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On Italian Fascists’ continued wartime efforts to compensate for their relative subordination to Germany by distinguishing their alleged vision for a Europe of nations from the Nazis’ racialized imperialism, see David D. Roberts, Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 140–48. 41 Martin, Nazi–Fascist New Order, 115. Pavolini quoted by Martin, ibid., 115. Ibid., 116.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

215

whom it owed its very existence. The fundamental inequality between the two Axis partners, which had grown steadily more apparent in the course of the war, had quite literally come home to roost in a way that no amount of talk about shared cultural or ideological missions could effectively obscure. The reality was that the RSI faced very limited geographic and temporal horizons, reduced as it was to the role of a virtual puppet government confined to a portion of northern Italian territory, formed at a juncture of the war when the eventual defeat of the Axis powers had become practically a foregone conclusion. And yet, the more absurd the talk of an inter-national partnership in pursuit of a common European vision became, the more compulsively Pavolini seemed to engage in it. Casting the relationship between the two regimes as one between allies rather than patron and client, Pavolini highlighted what he described as personal relationships of mutual fidelity between the two nations’ leaders as a way of diverting attention from the grotesque structural imbalance which was staring everyone in the face. The talk of reorienting the Fascist Republic away from the unholy alliance with capitalism that had allegedly led it astray over the previous two decades was accompanied by highflown words about how this new “proletarian” orientation was supposedly shared in common with National Socialist Germany and would serve as an ideological inspiration for European renovation. Pavolini put it as follows to the party’s regional leaders gathered in Verona, to their vociferous acclamations: I insist on this point, which is fundamental: Fascism’s social program is in large measure the very same as the program of our German friends’ National Socialism, and is the program towards which, in the light of Mussolinian thought, the other peoples of Europe are setting forth. It is necessary to feel the reality of this Europe – proletarian in the internal social sense and proletarian in the international sense. Our anti-plutocratic battle is internal and external at the same time. That is the foundation of our foreign policy, of our position as revolutionaries of our own country, and in the European community, and in the world.43

All this smacked of desperate rhetorical over-compensation. The new regime was casting about for discursive devices with which to salvage its erstwhile claims to a wider European cultural and ideological mission while countering the growing popular appeal of Communist internationalism.44 In reality, the paths along which fascist transnational influences now ran were very much unidirectional: from Berlin to Salò. The PFR’s 43 44

Pavolini’s remarks, “Il verbale del congress,” 199. My translation. On earlier, wartime antecedents of this fantasy of carving out a role for Italy as vanguard of Fascist cultural inter-nationalism in the context of a German-conquered continent,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

216

Civil Wars under Occupation

leaders spoke in disingenuously naı¨ve terms about the unfolding civil war in northern Italy as a refreshing return to the supposed glory days of Fascism’s youth, when its squadristi had fought it out with socialists and Communists on the streets of Italian towns and cities, as yet untrammeled by any shabby compromises with the monarchy, the military, or big business. Italian Fascism’s corporatist Third Way between capitalism and socialism was idealized as the path not taken after Mussolini’s original seizure of power; the establishment of the RSI, its defenders loudly insisted, represented a chance to rewrite history in the true spirit of Il Duce’s original worldview. Yet, in practice, beleaguered as it was by resistance fighters, alienated as it was from the working-class constituency that it dreamed of winning over, and dependent as it was on raw German power, it was to the SS rather than to a distinctly Italian vision of corporatist utopianism that an increasingly influential subset of the RSI’s leadership turned as a model for its own conduct. One of the most obvious manifestations of the Nazification of mentalities among the RSI’s hardline extremists was the regime’s embrace of active collaboration in the implementation of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Mussolini’s government, to be sure, had introduced racialized antisemitism in the form of official, discriminatory legislation in 1938. Yet, until 1943, Italian Fascists had not cooperated in massive deportations of Jews to Germany, be it from the Italian homeland or from Italian-held occupation zones around the Mediterranean. In fact, thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution had found refuge behind Italian lines. The authorities of the RSI broke with this pattern by taking active part in the round-up of both foreign and Italian Jews for transfer to the German concentration and extermination camps. Nine thousand Jews, or roughly 19 percent of the country’s Jewish population, were deported to German camps, often after an interim detention at the Fossoli transit camp. Many of these arrests were undertaken directly by Italian uniformed personnel (mostly conventional “law and order” forces such as the police) acting in compliance with – in some cases even in anticipation of – formal orders issued by the Salò government.45

45

see Martin, Nazi–Fascist New Order, 11 and ch. 5. Taking his cues from Hitler, the German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was happy to indulge, exploit, and manipulate the notion of sharing responsibility for the cultural “renovation” of Europe with like-minded regimes, so long as this facilitated rather than constrained Germany’s political and economic dominance over the continent. Ibid., ch. 6. Chiarini, L’ultimo fascismo, 78–82; Simon Levis Sullam, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy, trans. Oona Smyth with Claudia Patane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 41–58, 138, and passim; Rossella Ropa, L’antisemitismo nella Repubblica sociale italiana: Repertorio delle fonti conservate all’Archivio centrale dello Stato (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 2000), 45; H. James Burgwyn

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

217

Amidst the muddle of contradictory signals, inconsistent policies, opportunistic maneuvering, and factional differences that characterized the PFR during its short-lived existence, the current that arguably had the most significant impact on people’s lives and on the dynamics of the civil war between the RSI and the Italian resistance forces was that embodied by the militant extremists led by Pavolini. For he was not only PFR party secretary, but in the summer of 1944 went on to found the movement’s most brutal militia formation: the Black Brigades (Brigate Nere). This move came in response to an increasingly dire military situation, marked by the fall of Rome to the Allies, the erosion of Germany’s defensive position astride the peninsula on the so-called Gustav Line, the ineffectiveness of the RSI’s conventional armed forces under Marshal Graziani (the only officer of his rank to rally to the Salò Republic), and the mounting internal challenge from the resistance. For figures such as Pavolini, the silver lining in the new circumstances was that they presented an opportunity to live out fascism’s totalitarian fantasy to a fuller extent than had been possible during the years when the Fascist Party itself had effectively become sidelined by a regime based on cooptation of, and compromise with, institutions of the pre-Fascist establishment. The creation of the Black Brigades, on orders from Mussolini, was supposed to mark the transformation of the Republican Fascist Party into a fighting organization for the duration of the war. In principle, all able-bodied male party members between ages eighteen and sixty who were not already enrolled in some other armed formation were to constitute the Brigate Nere. In practice, the leaders of the Black Brigades saw themselves as a sort of Italian SS, the ideologically pure avant-garde of the Fascist movement, responsible for pushing it to new extremes of militant intransigence in the face of overwhelming military odds. The advocates of the PFR’s militarization expressed scorn for an Italian population that had, as they saw it, lost its will to fight.46 Thus, the author of an article published in a Republican Fascist newspaper in June 1944 called for a coldly determined revolutionary initiative by “the minority of the Italian people, that which has always believed,

46

(with Amedeo Guerrazzi), Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 1943–1945: The Failure of a Puppet Regime (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), ch. 8; Gagliani, Brigate nere, 209–11. On the widespread alienation between the RSI authorities and the general population, and on the complication this presented for German occupation forces focused on extracting economic resources in as seamless a manner as possible, see Alessandro Salvador and Jacopo Calussi, “The German Occupation of Italy, 1943–45: Conflicting Authorities and Contrasting Strategies in the Management of Resources and Supplies,” in Raffael Scheck, Fabien Théofilakis, and Julia Torrie, eds., German-Occupied Europe in the Second World War (London: Routledge, 2019).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

218

Civil Wars under Occupation

believes, and will believe until the supreme sacrifice, that [minority] which does not want to survive if Italy must die.” He denounced as a traitor anyone who did not believe in this conception of a national rebirth and was not willing to work for it. By the same token, the author admired the German forces occupying northern Italy, describing them as allies who were generously shedding their blood on behalf of Italy.47 In his correspondence with Mussolini, Pavolini carped about the tendency of other RSI forces to fall apart in the face of the enemy and fulminated over the disrespect this earned them in the eyes of the Germans. In this context, he made light of the mass reprisals and atrocities German forces were committing against Italian civilians – a sentiment that Mussolini echoed in some of his correspondence and statements, while he expressed misgivings in others.48 By the same token, with the Germans primarily responsible for conducting conventional war against the Allies, the task at hand for Italian Fascist forces was to strike at the “Vendée,” as they termed it – the rebellious northern Italian countryside that they likened to the counter-revolutionary region where the architects of the French republican terror of 1793 had not hesitated to slaughter thousands in the name of a radical ideal.49 The Black Brigades, then, were to demonstrate that at least some Italians could throw themselves into a fight to the death as fearlessly, ruthlessly, and fanatically as their Nazi allies. “Our every effort is directed at becoming ever more worthy of our German comrades,” veteran party leader-turned-publicist Roberto Farinacci asserted in January 1945.50 The idea, ostensibly, was to establish Italy as deserving of autonomy in a post-war, German-ruled Europe. But this form of collaborationism appears to have been more than a matter of political calculation; indeed, the likelihood that it would pay off became ever dimmer as time went on. And, from the start, Pavolini distanced his militia’s mission from any conventional conception of patriotism:

47 48

49 50

E. d’Elia, “Riscossa” (Reconquest), La Repubblica Fascista, June 30, 1944, as quoted in Gagliani, Brigate nere, 122–23. Gagliani, Brigate nere, 31, 42–43, 49, 122–23, 209–11. On Mussolini’s defense of German mass reprisals as supposedly justified by international law, along with his periodic misgivings, see Burgwyn, Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 176–79, 188. For a depiction of Mussolini as deeply chagrined by his transformation into a German puppet and interested in salvaging his legacy by vainly trying to foster the development of some sort of socialist variant of fascism, see Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, passim. Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Storia della Repubblica sociale italiana (Rome: Carocci Editore, 2012), 180–90; Gagliani, Brigate nere, 124. Roberto Farinacci, “Manovre troppo cretine,” in Il Regime Fascista, January 7, 1945, as quoted in Gagliani, Brigate nere, 219. My translation.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

219

The word Patria is a grand word as is the word mother: but everyone can invoke it and it is not enough to profess oneself for Italy when there is also an Italy of Badoglio and of Palmiro Togliatti [the Communist Party leader]. Our divisions … carry a political idea on their bayonets. It could not be otherwise at this time, during this war which Mussolini has defined as one of religion.51

He went on to cite events across the border – Hitler’s “providential” escape five days earlier from attempted assassination – as a further reason for accentuating the politicization of the RSI’s armed struggle (an apparent rebuke to Marshal Graziani, head of the RSI’s ineffectual, conventional army).52 Clearly, Pavolini’s frame of reference was shifting away from that of the narrowly national, in favor of a broader, transnational fascist vision that took its cues from Germany. A similar note was struck in a political testament written in the form of a series of letters to his mother by the commander of a detachment of the Brigades – a veteran of the Fascists’ 1922 March on Rome – who made a point of referencing his continued faith in a German victory as inspiring his determination to remain in the fight no matter how adverse his prospects might appear: “I have absolute faith in the justice of the Cause for which we fight and the certainty that in the end, Victory must favor Germany.”53 There seems little to distinguish this perspective from that of compatriots (including some who had originally been taken prisoner and transported to Germany at the time of the Italian armistice with the Allies in September 1943) who had simply joined the Italian Legion of the Waffen-SS, one of whom wrote home as follows: “You should know that I am happy to have enrolled in the SS, and that I can’t wait to be able to make my tangible contribution to the cause of the New Europe: the only hope that Europe can have of life and well-being tomorrow.”54 The Black Brigades’ adoption of brutal reprisals against villagers and townsfolk in areas where resistance forces were operating served to estrange them ever more from a population which they fundamentally despised in the first place. It did not help that, in their thirst for 51

52 53

54

July 25, 1944 radio broadcast by Pavolini, announcing the formation of the Black Brigades, as quoted in Giovanni Teodori, Alessandro Pavolini: La vita, le imprese e la morte dell’uomo che inventò la propaganda fascista (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2011), 212. Ibid., 213. Letter from Umberto Scaramelli to his mother, October 28, 1944, in L’Associazione nazionale delle famiglie dei caduti e dispersi della RSI, ed., Lettere dei caduti della RSI (Rome: Edizioni B e C, 1975), 167–68. Scaramelli did conclude his letter with some references to having done everything for the sake of the Patria. He was killed in February 1945. Letter from Arrago Gasparini Casari to his brother Benito, January 11, 1944, in La RSI nelle lettere dei suoi caduti (Rome: Rivista Romana, 1963), 55.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

220

Civil Wars under Occupation

personnel, the Brigades turned increasingly to the recruitment of criminals into their ranks. German commanders themselves grew disillusioned with the militarily ineffective militia, which seemed adept only at driving people into the arms of the partisans.55 As in the case of the Ustaša forces in Croatia discussed in the following section, the more isolated the Black Brigades’ leaders felt, the more hopeless their prospects of long-term survival grew, and, additionally, the more tenuous seemed the notion that their actions could serve to advance any conceivable form of Italian national interest, the more indiscriminately violent they became. To the extent that they still managed to persuade themselves they were fighting in the name of an Italian ideal, it was by imagining themselves to be the kernel of a new, tougher, and more intransigent version of Italianness, shaped in the image of the Nazi demi-gods whom they worshipped. The actually existing people of Italy were so much dross to be cast off as the pure metal of this new, selfselected elite emerged from the smelter of war. Indeed, by the last months of the conflict, when the German military became primarily focused – in its relations with Italian civilians – on cajoling and/or forcing Italian laborers into work on building fortifications and extracting resources, the Black Brigades’ obsessive focus on revenging themselves against internal enemies and compensating for their inability to bring the partisans to heel by resorting to increasingly indiscriminate reprisal killings may have posed the more dangerous of two evils faced by northern Italy’s population. (This is not to ignore the atrocities that German forces certainly continued to carry out from time to time).56 As Daniella Gagliani has pointed out, the Black Brigades’ estrangement from their own compatriots was further deepened by the prospect (never realized) of eventually retreating with German forces across the Brenner Pass to continue the fight from beyond Italy’s borders. As they were forced into an ever smaller corner of their fatherland, their link to any recognizable form of patriotism gave way to increasingly strident efforts to identify themselves with some sort of transcendent, European fascist ideal.57 “Misleading appearances notwithstanding, the future belongs to us, because we belong to a heroic Europe whose lights, necessary for the world, cannot be extinguished,” Pavolini insisted in a July 1944 radio address, just nine months before joining Mussolini and other captured RSI leaders in front of a partisan firing squad.58 In 55 56 57 58

Burgwyn, Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 189. Gagliani, Brigate nere, 237; Guerrazzi, Storia della Repubblica, 180–90. Gagliani, Brigate nere, 211–16. See also Pavone, Guerra civile, 309–11. Gagliani, Brigate nere, 217.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

221

December, Enzo Pezzato – the ideologically extremist editor of one of Milan’s major Republican Fascist dailies, La Repubblica Fascista – delivered a speech in Germany to “The Congress of the Union of National Federations of Journalists” in which he sought to draw a distinction between the First World War as a war of conflicting nationalisms and the Second World War as one between supranational ideological currents that transcended political borders. In his effort to reframe the conflict in a way that diminished the significance of the RSI’s effective collusion in the undermining of Italian national self-determination, he insisted on keeping his eyes fixed on the big picture: this was, he claimed, a conflict fought on behalf of a European “New Order” (as the Nazis liked to refer to it59), a struggle that would resolve the question of which of the two alternatives would prevail, “Fascism or Bolshevism, Europe or Asia.” “We want our sons,” he continued, “to be able to say ‘I am European,” with the same fierce pride, the same intimate joy, the same force, even the same chauvinism with which today we say ‘I am German’ or ‘I am Italian.’”60 It was with such uncritical mimicry of Goebbels’ propagandist line that the most die-hard fanatics of the RSI appear to have coped with the realization even they must have had that their actions no longer had so much as a vestigial connection to any remotely plausible conception of national interest. While the RSI’s propaganda outlets continued, to the very last days of the regime, to speak of the dedication of its remaining formations of intransigent fighters to the future of a “new patria” – a reborn Italy – such words rang ever more hollow.61 For the more unrealistic their own personal chances of political or physical survival became, the less the most ardent militants of the Black Brigades had to lose and the freer they became to immerse themselves in the transnational cult of violence for violence’s sake, inflicted on an Italian civilian population that they depicted as having betrayed the “higher ideals” which Republican Fascists purported to embody.62

59

60 61 62

Raimund Bauer, “National Socialist Notions of Europe and their Implementation during the Second World War,” doctoral diss., Loughborough University, submitted September 21, 2015. Enzo Pezzato, “Vittoria Europea e bolscevismo,” La Repubblica Fascista, December 17, 1944 (morning ed.), 3. Adriano Bolzoni, “Armi nuove e Patria nuova” (“New Weapons and New Patria”), La Repubblica Fascista, April 3, 1945 (morning ed.), 1. Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, “Italians at War: War and Experience in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 5 (2017), 587–603. On the centrality of violence as an end unto itself in fascist ideology, see Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 73–81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

222

Civil Wars under Occupation

To be sure, every major civil war takes a horrific toll on civilians caught between rival factions, and some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed in the name of the very people being brutalized. In that respect, the atrocities committed by the Black Brigades against fellow Italians do not, sadly, seem so unusual. For that matter, civil wars almost invariably create an opportunity for intervention by rival foreign powers, whose support the warring parties eagerly cultivate in their desperate efforts to gain any possible advantage over one another. But, in this case, the cart came before the horse. That is to say, it was Germany’ occupation of northern Italy that created the essential opportunity for a resurrection of the Fascist regime, and it was therefore impossible for the men of Salò to escape the recognition that their political and personal fates were much more closely bound up with that of the Nazi regime and its continued hegemony over northern Italy than with any prospect of substantive independence for their own state. Moreover, the perverse logic of the situation led them to emulate the radical religion of mass murder that animated the occupying power’s own ideological elite. It was in this context that their original conceptions of nationalism and patriotism seemed less and less relevant even to themselves, and that some among them turned instead to what might be termed the internationalism of the damned. The Croatian Ustaša In its final spurt of radicalization amidst impending defeat, the trajectory of the RSI, and of the Black Brigades in particular, finds a striking parallel in that of the Croatian Ustaša regime. Indeed, wartime Yugoslavia as a whole offers a particularly rich source of material for a discussion of how international and transnational influences, experiences, and conceptions may have contributed to the radicalization of right-wing, collaborationist parties to civil wars. In occupied Serbia, Milan Nedić sought to pattern his collaborationist regime’s ersatz ideology on Pétain’s reactionary patriarchal model and on Vichy’s vacuous idealization of “traditional” peasant life. Nedić found himself frustrated and hamstrung by Nazi unwillingness to give his government any token territorial or institutional concession that would help validate his claim to be advancing Serbian national interests within the reality of a Germandominated “new Europe.” It was Dimitrije Ljotić – the head of Zbor, Serbia’s small and fanatical religio-monarchist-fascist movement – and his followers who seemed to cast all vestiges of conventional territorial nationalism aside in their exultation over the opportunity presented by German occupation to take their fight to the international and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

223

transnational spheres where Serbia’s true enemies allegedly existed. The several thousand youths who gathered under the banners of Zbor’s new, occupation-era paramilitary formation, the SDK, eagerly threw themselves into the fray against the Communist partisans, whom they identified with the other two borderless enemies haunting the fascist imagination: the Jews and the Freemasons.63 But amidst the fragmented pieces of wartime Yugoslavia, it is the Croatian case that lends itself best to this discussion, given the much greater degree of agency afforded this German puppet state. The most influential political movement in interwar Croatia had been not the Ustaša but Vladko Maček’s Croatian Peasant Party (HSS), which had advanced a moderate nationalist agenda: the party demanded substantive autonomy for Croatia within a federalized Yugoslavia – an aim that was briefly realized in the country’s grand but eleventh-hour political bargain of 1939.64 The HSS had generally sought to operate within democratic, parliamentary norms and in cooperation with the leaders of Croatia’s Serb minority during the intervals when this was possible under the periodically repressive, Serb-dominated Yugoslav monarchy. On the eve of the German takeover in April 1941, Maček declined the opportunity Berlin offered him to collaborate in the creation of a nominally independent Croatian state under German protection. This left the field open to Ante Pavelić’s Ustaša, which was given the go-ahead to create a territorially expansive Independent State of Croatia (referred to as the NDH after its Croatian acronym).65 This initially pleased Mussolini’s regime, which had effectively sponsored Pavelić’s activities during his exile and which anticipated that an Ustaša-ruled Croatia would accept a member of Italy’s ruling family as a monarch (which it nominally did) and become part of the Italian sphere of influence. However, Croatia was divided between German and Italian occupation zones, with the former controlling the most economically significant territories. Relations between Zagreb and Rome rapidly soured as the Ustaša regime turned to the Germans as a hedge against Italian hegemony, leading to the marginalization of Italian influence over the Ustaša regime. This, in turn, contributed to the Italian army’s increasing tendency to look to cooperation with ethnic Serb Chetniks in the fight

63 64

65

Prusin, Serbia under the Swastika, 15–16, 56–58, 61–62. On the steady interwar drift of the HSS away from the socio-economic issues of peasant life to a predominant preoccupation with ethno-national issues, see George D. Jackson, Jr., “Peasant Political Movements in Eastern Europe,” in Henry A. Landsberger, ed., Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1974), 294–95. Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 49–52.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

224

Civil Wars under Occupation

against the Communist partisans in Italy’s western zone of occupation, even though the Chetniks were also, naturally, hostile to the Ustaša regime.66 The Germans themselves grew frustrated with the Ustaša’s proclivity for brutal extremism, and the polarizing and destabilizing impact its rule had on regional politics. Given that Maček avoided active resistance to the occupation or to Pavelić’s collaborationist regime, his movement was effectively sidelined by the circumstances of the war, with many of its members joining the Ustaša and some the partisans. Political moderation was left with no grounding and little in the way of reference points in what rapidly became a violently radicalized political environment. Although the Ustaša could trace its origins to an influential, right-wing, anti-Serb current in early twentieth-century Croatian nationalism, its rejection of the Yugoslav idea in any shape or form had led it down a relatively marginalized path of assassination and terrorism in the 1930s. Its leadership and part of its rank-and-file had operated from exile in Italy and Hungary, and had been precipitously installed in power over a territorially expansive Croatia by virtue of Germany’s lightning military victory over Yugoslavia. Within Croatia, their strongest base of pre-1941 support had been among right-wing segments of the university student population – young men and women often of peasant background (as, indeed, were many young Communist student activists). Such recruits tended to feel alienated from aspects of “cosmopolitan” urban life, on the one hand, yet were not interested in returning to a hardscrabble farming existence, on the other. Frustrated by the shortage of prospective postgraduate employment amidst the economic dislocation of the 1930s, they were eager to embrace an underground organization willing to take the fight to the “external” and “alien” forces (the Serb-dominated government in Belgrade, the Communists, the Jews) that were blamed for all of Croatia’s troubles. Even as they swore to make war on advocates of international working-class solidarity, they found inspiration and common cause with like-minded ultra-chauvinists in other countries – not only Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the victorious forces of Franco in Spain, but also interlocutors from far-right political movements and student organizations in other East European countries, such as Poland and Romania.67

66

67

Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; first published 2003), 93–98, 303–4, 308–21. Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), ch. 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

225

It was, arguably, the Pavelić regime’s pre-war experience as a foreignbacked terrorist organization that had predisposed it to violently abuse its new-found power in the context of wartime occupation, as it pursued its purist vision of a Croatian nation-state. These were not people accustomed to being held accountable to a constituency or to accepting the need for compromise amidst the give-and-take of politics. They were radicals who had nourished their dystopian dreams within the echo chamber of a small conspiratorial organization reliant on foreign financial and logistical support, without being encumbered by the responsibility of governance. Rory Yeomans notes that, insofar as domestic Ustaša activists during the interwar years had tended to eschew outright terrorism – although by no means being pacifist in their methods – the émigré Ustašas had scoffed at them “as dilettantes and flaneurs.” The Ustašas in exile had distinguished themselves by undertaking a program of assassinations and bombings targeting Yugoslav officials, public sites, and events both within Yugoslavia and abroad (most notoriously with the 1934 double-assassination in Marseille).68 In 1941, having been parachuted into a position of sudden authority, the Ustaša moved immediately to articulate and act upon an eliminationist and exterminationist logic directed uncompromisingly towards the consolidation of an ethnically homogeneous Croatian nation-state in a Nazi-dominated Europe. The targets of the mass violence that ensued were, overwhelmingly, members of Greater Croatia’s ethnic Serb minority, along with Jews and Roma.69 Pavelić styled himself the Poglavnik (chief or supreme leader) of the Ustaša, which monopolized official political power in the NDH. This was in obvious imitation of foreign models such as Il Duce’s Fascism or Der Führer’s Nazism. A militant brand of chauvinistic Croatian Catholicism constituted a distinctive feature of Ustaša ideology (reminiscent of Franco’s political and ideological cooptation of Catholicism in Spain); the local church hierarchy played an ambiguous role in both legitimizing and, eventually, venturing some cautious criticism of Pavelić’s murderous regime. The fundamental, existential challenge the regime created for itself lay in its insistence on a mono-ethnic vision for a state with borders encompassing territory (including all of Bosnia) in which only about half of the population was composed of Croats. Muslims in

68 69

Ibid., 7–8. The crucial English-language work on the Ustaša in power is Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, on which I draw extensively in this section. On the correlation between émigré-activist background and extremism among members of the regime, see ibid., 12–13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

226

Civil Wars under Occupation

Croatian-claimed Bosnia, who were deemed natural allies against the region’s Serbs, were categorized as ancestrally Croat and hence legitimate members of the nation. The Ustaša leadership perceived most of the NDH’s Orthodox Christians (initially comprising about 30 percent of the newly created state’s population) as ethno-racially alien Serbs. Two concentrated waves of genocidal assault and expulsion efforts were directed against ethnic Serbs, first in 1941 and then again in 1944. Along with the Ustaša’s ongoing violence and sporadic atrocities throughout the war years and the cycling of tens of thousands of inmates through the notoriously homicidal conditions of the regime’s Jasenovac concentration camp complex, these policies resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, with countless others fleeing as refugees (many of them to Nedić’s Serbia).70 Jews and Roma were also murderously targeted by the Ustaša, both directly and by means of rounding them up and handing them over to the Germans for transportation to Auschwitz. The dystopian vision animating this massive bloodshed was that of a reborn nation, liberated from not only the political but also the cultural and psychological heritage of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav state and the bourgeois, liberal values and self-indulgent individualism, materialism, and corruption which were attributed to its influence and to that of the Jews. (This case highlights how readily the transnational vocabulary of antisemitism lent itself to adaptive redeployment against regionally specific, non-Jewish targets.) The activist core of the Ustaša youth organization was dominated by some of the most ardent advocates of this extreme, if substantively vacuous, vision for a right-wing, hypermasculine, nationalist revolution, and it was from among their ranks that some of the most zealous perpetrators of mass violence against minorities emerged.71 The initiative for this ethnic warfare came very clearly, explicitly, and unabashedly from the Ustaša leadership, which relied on the movement’s uniformed militia to act as the leading edge of the genocidal and ethniccleansing campaigns, while giving local commanders considerable leeway in how they chose to conduct operations. The NDH’s 70

71

Tomasevich, The Chetniks, 106; Prusin, Serbia under the Swastika, ch. 3; Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, 15–19; David B. MacDonald, “From Jasenovac to Srebrenica: Subaltern Genocide and the Serbs,” in Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones, eds., Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 106–7. On forced religious conversion of ethnic Serbs from Orthodoxy to Catholicism as an alternative, failed attempt at ostensible ethno-national homogenization, see Mark Biondich, “Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942,” Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 83, No. 1 (January 2005), 71–116. Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

227

conventional military forces tended to be skeptical, sharing some of the Germans’ concerns about the wisdom of this profoundly destabilizing policy from a security standpoint. It is misleading to treat the bloodletting as a straightforward expression of long-suppressed popular sentiments. However, as is all too typical of such outbreaks of mass violence, once unleashed, the twisted logic of ethnic warfare quickly set in motion an escalatory dynamic among significant portions of the population, particularly in the towns and rural communities of multi-ethnic Bosnia. Max Bergholz’s superb microhistory of these events and their aftermath in one small corner of Bosnia painstakingly documents the intricate causal pathways and feedback loops that led rural communities over the cliff into a horrific sequence of ethnically framed massacres and countermassacres. (Bergholz estimates that as much as 20 percent of the population in the region of his study perished in the violent conflicts of the period.) One key step was the installation of regional Ustaša militia commanders who were accountable only to their movement’s central leadership rather than to any locally existing or surviving legal, police, or political institutions, and who effectively enjoyed a license to kill (or to unleash killing). In their efforts to draw recruits into local Ustaša forces from among Catholics (Catholicism being regarded as a mark of Croat ethnicity) or Muslims (who were categorized by the Ustaša as racially Croat), they did not initially succeed in finding many volunteers from outside relatively marginalized segments of society. It is not that the categories of Serb, Croat, and Muslim had not had any ethno-political significance whatsoever in the context of interwar Yugoslavia. But Bergholz argues that ethnicity had been just one among various categories of identity and/or axes of political and social division that did not necessarily line up with one another prior to 1941. The notion that all Serbs were enemies of Croats or Muslims, or vice versa, was not a commonplace assumption. Those who were most eager to join the ranks of the Ustaša militia in the first instance tended to be characters with criminal backgrounds or proclivities. People with personal grudges or disputes to settle against ethnically Serb (Orthodox) neighbors also seem to have been disproportionately represented among the first wave of local recruits. The freshly minted militiamen exploited their sudden monopoly on violence, and the opportunity created by the official designation of Serbs as dangerous aliens, to seize property from, and/or carry out personal vendettas against, their Orthodox neighbors. In some cases they also acted vindictively or exploitatively towards fellow Croats who tried to stand in their way or could otherwise be labeled as politically hostile. Their murders and expulsions of Serbs were accompanied by massive theft and looting of property which naturally went into their own pockets

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

228

Civil Wars under Occupation

rather than into the coffers of the Ustaša state. But, if the initial motivation for some of these crimes was the promise of personal gain and score-settling, the result was a rapid escalation of violence and polarization of relations between Serbs and non-Serbs in Ustaša-terrorized Bosnia. As survivors of Serb atrocities fled, some of them found refuge among Chetnik and partisan formations. Members of some of these groups subsequently carried out massacres of Croat communities in revenge for the earlier loss of their own loved ones. For their part, many ethnic Croats who had initially kept their distance from the Ustaša ended up turning to it for fear of being overrun by vengeful Serbs.72 In this perverse fashion, local relations between individuals, families, and communities ended up becoming roughly aligned with the selffulfilling, racialized, and genocidal ideology of Ustaša leaders. The latter’s hypernationalist worldview had been shaped by visions that had more in common with the fascist and right-wing governments that had given them shelter during their years of exile, and with the precedents being set by the Nazis in Eastern Europe, than with the lived experience of ordinary folk in the ethnically and religiously diverse communities dotting the ruggedly mountainous Bosnian countryside. The Ustaša’s immediate aims were ultimately frustrated and reversed by the Communists’ creation of a multiethnic Yugoslavia in the aftermath of German defeat. And yet the explosions of violence set off by the Ustaša reshaped the ethno-political environment down to the local level, and local memories of the mass murders of the Pavelić era had long-term consequences for Yugoslav ethnic politics, down to the present day.73 Having noted the correlation between Fascist and Nazi extremism and the Ustaša’s initiation of mass violence against minority groups on its territory, one must also acknowledge one of the ironies of the Ustaša’s eager embrace of a Nazi-style mania for ethno-racial “purification”: the dismay, if not horror, with which it was regarded by German military forces stationed in the region. As mentioned earlier, for the German occupiers, the Ustaša actually represented a fallback option, as they would have preferred to find a more mainstream party to set up a collaborationist government. This approach conformed to a broader pattern in the German approach to puppet governments, wherein the more pragmatic advocates of coopting movements with strong claims to popular support

72 73

Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), chs. 1–6. Ibid., ch. 7. For a study that calls into question the close link between local memories of past atrocities and latter-day ethnic violence in Bosnia, see H. Zeynep Bulutgil, The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), ch. 4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

229

tended to prevail – at least initially – over radical Nazis eager to install Nazi-style radicals in power. In any case, although the Ustaša did secure German support, the enthusiastic extremism of their ethnic-cleansing program struck the German military authorities as being utterly selfdefeating and counterproductive. With a few possible exceptions, such as the case of Edmund GlaiseHorstenau, the Plenipotentiary General in Croatia, German officers’ criticisms did not appear to arise from genuine moral qualms, given the coldblooded brutality and undiscriminating mass violence with which they themselves undertook “clearing operations” designed to wipe out guerrillas and potentially supportive civilian populations alike. Rather, they took issue with the fact that the Ustaša’s mass violence was directed at an ethnically designated subset of the population regardless of existing security conditions in any given territory. This struck them as counterproductive and self-defeating from a tactical point of view. By terrorizing Serbs qua Serbs across the length and breadth of the NDH’s territory, the Ustaša were undermining rather than enhancing security, as they left survivors among the victimized population little option but to retreat into the hills to take up arms as insurgents.74 In September 1942, the German military command in Serbia complained that renewed massacres by the Ustaša were further alienating not only ethnic Serbs, but also “all those who expect the state to provide law and security for persons and property.”75 Glaise wrote acerbically of a four-hour-long, Ustaša-organized parade in Zagreb, held as part of the festivities marking the regime’s first anniversary, that, if not for the band music, it would have looked for all the world like the ghost march at a carnival. Some of the participants, he reported, ostentatiously turned their faces away from the NDH leadership on the reviewing stand.76 In brief, the ethno-racial purification of Germany, and establishment of a racial hierarchy in its new empire, may have been the raison d’être of Nazism, but in the context of an overstretched German military at a time of total war, the Germans could ill afford to waste resources helping a 74

75 76

Jonathan E. Gumz, “Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia, 1941–42,” Historical Journal, Vol. 44, No. 4 (December 2001), 1015–38; Trifković, “Germany and Italy in Croatia.” Situation report issued by Chief of Staff on behalf of German Commanding General in Serbia, September 20, 1942, NAMP, T501/352/128–141, RG 242, NARA. Presumably with a view to covering himself politically – and/or perhaps in order to heighten the tone of sarcasm – Glaise went on to describe the following, final day’s festivities in tritely positive terms, concluding that the conduct of the celebration reflected well on the regime. Telex from the German General in Agram (Zagreb) to the High Command of the Wehrmacht, April 13, 1942, NAMP, T501/268/440–441, RG242, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

230

Civil Wars under Occupation

Slavic people achieve a similar objective. Transnationally influential though the Nazi model was as a source of inspiration for like-minded mass murderers across Europe, the German military had little patience for the problems created by such offshoots of Hitlerism. Glaise was particularly consistent and vocal in his criticisms of the Ustaša regime that he found himself stuck with. A former Habsburg General Staff officer who had been in charge of the Supreme Command’s Press Department during the First World War and had gone on to direct the interwar Austrian Republic’s War Archives, Glaise had joined the Austrian Nazi Party in the 1930s and as such had played a role in undermining the Schuschnigg government from within prior to the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria) of 1938. Yet, in the context of the wartime Balkans, Glaise seemed to look back to Habsburg precedents in his attempt to make sense of the chaos which he confronted. In the often sardonically toned reports he sent to his military superiors, Glaise went to the core of the issue by pointing out the folly of the NDH’s central pretense – that it could establish a governable Greater Croatia on the basis of ethno-national exclusivism. This, he pointed out in a December 1941 memorandum, had been the fundamental mistake of the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy, whose pursuit of Magyar dominance in a multi-ethnic Hungary had been so bitterly contested by none other than Croat activists. At its founding in April 1941, Glaise argued, the new Croatian government had faced a challenge similar to that confronted by the newly established Yugoslav state in 1918 – which was to say, he implied, the task of fostering coexistence among a multiplicity of nationalities. So far, the Poglavnik’s government was failing more quickly than the Yugoslav state had. His regime had caused greater – by orders of magnitude – bloodshed among its own citizens in its one and a half years of rule than had the interwar kingdom of Yugoslavia during its entire two decades of existence.77 As Jonathan Gumz has pointed out, it is striking that the frame of reference informing Glaise’s relatively enlightened (for a Nazi) conception of successful governance in the Balkans appeared to be the Habsburg model (meaning the ideal of supranational impartiality striven for by the Austrian half of the former empire, rather than the national chauvinism of the Hungarian political establishment).78 Nothing could have been further in spirit from the Nazi vision: Hitler had routinely derided Habsburg Austria as a multinational abomination standing in the way of German 77

78

Glaise von Horstenau, “Die Lage in Kroatien Mitte December 1941” (The Situation in Croatia in mid-December 1941), NAMP, T501/267/610 ff., RG 242, NARA. See also Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 323–24. Gumz, “Wehrmacht Perceptions,” 1027–28.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

231

ethno-racial destiny.79 Did Glaise’s sustained critique of the Ustaša’s ethno-nationalism reflect and/or lead him towards a conscious or unconscious self-distancing from the ethno-racial-purification obsession of Hitler’s Germany? After all, the horrors committed by the Ustaša regime were, ultimately, an extension of the Nazi vision, however reluctant the Nazis themselves might have been to inspire imitators among “lesser races” (leaving aside the mass murder of Jews, which the Nazis certainly did encourage among occupied populations throughout Eastern Europe). It must have been difficult not to draw the connection. As a practical matter, Glaise certainly regarded the interventions of the SS in Croatian affairs with a jaundiced eye, and depicted Himmler’s creation in 1943 of a Bosnian Muslim SS division as a farcical undertaking that served only to complicate the security situation in the region.80 As he reflected on how much more effectively the Habsburg state had handled relations between nationalities than the Nazi regime seemed capable of doing, he also used his journal entries to lash out in frustration over eleventh-hour efforts by Hitler and the Wehrmacht Supreme Command to reorganize Croatian security affairs in a vain effort to fix a situation that had been allowed to degenerate into an irreparable state. In a mocking journal entry, Glaise depicted the policy failures in his region as an encapsulation of everything that was wrong with Nazi rule throughout the occupied continent: “This, however, is the essence of Hitler’s policy: first let the reins drag on the ground and then suddenly take them up again only once the most valuable capital has already been squandered. This fine method, [employed] throughout the entire, freedom-anticipating ‘New Europe,’ was now apparently to be applied to Croatia at the worst possible moment.”81 Other, circumstantial, evidence also suggests that Glaise’s disgust and frustration with the course of events in Croatia may have led him to question the Nazi regime into the service of which he had once eagerly plunged. One report indicates that, in the wake of the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, he unsuccessfully sought to use communications channels with Tito’s partisans to try and arrange the escape of an Abwehr officer stationed in Zagreb with whom he had been close and who was wanted by the SD for his ties to members of the conspiracy.82 79 80 81 82

Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (New York: Basic Books, 2017), xvi. Journal entry for July–August 1943 in Glaise von Horstenau, Deutscher Bevollmächtigter General, 241. Glaise von Horstenau, journal entry for May 1944 in ibid., 380–83; quotation on 383. My translation. Maria Theodora von dem Bottlenberg-Landsberg, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, 1902–1945: Ein Lebensbild (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2003), 248; Broucek, “Einleitung,” in Glaise von Horstenau, Deutscher Bevollmächtigter General, 40–41.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

232

Civil Wars under Occupation

Glaise was eventually compromised by his ties to members of a failed plot organized by the Ustaša regime’s interior minister, Mladen Lorković, and minister of armed forces, Ante Vokić. Their plan was to seize power in order to forge a coalition with leaders of the old Croatian Peasant Party (some of whom Glaise had been protecting) and realign the regime with the Allies in anticipation of an imagined Allied landing on the Dalmatian coast. Pavelić’s foiling of the conspiracy at the end of August 1944 gave him and the pro-Ustaša German ambassador the opportunity to force Glaise’s resignation and reassignment away from the Balkans.83 (Glaise subsequently committed suicide while in Allied captivity in 1946, in order to avoid being sent back to Yugoslavia for trial.) One cannot build a theory based on indirect evidence in one individual case. Nonetheless, this story is a reminder that transnational influences in the Axis empires flowed in multiple directions, notwithstanding the disparities in power between occupiers and occupied. It does not seem farfetched to imagine that lessons learned by witnessing (and trying to contain) the destructive and self-destructive impulses of Nazi emulators in occupied countries may have jarred a tiny minority among the occupiers into seeing their own murderously self-defeating government in a new light. Having entertained this conjecture, it is important not to lose sight of how much against the grain any such moderating tendencies were in the context of Nazi Germany’s occupations. Moreover, in the context of a region where the Wehrmacht’s conception of pragmatism was to murder massive numbers of Jewish civilians instead of ethnic Serbs in fulfillment of Hitler’s orders that a hundred locals be shot in retaliation for every single German killed by a resistance organization, one needs to take the very concept of “moderation” with a very large grain of salt.84 Finally, it is interesting (albeit disturbing) to note Rory Yeomans’ observation that the Ustaša’s own trajectory did not proceed in linear fashion over time from wild-eyed extremism to more sober pragmatism. There was such a shift initially, when the first half-year or so of mass slaughter and consequent upheaval gave way in 1942 to a willingness to redefine some Serbs as racial kin rather than aliens. (This led to an illconceived, counterproductive, and short-lived campaign to try and integrate surviving members of the Serb minority into Croatian ethnonationhood by way of forced conversions from Orthodoxy to Catholicism.) The step back from the chaos initiated by the so-called 83 84

Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 328–29; Broucek, “Einleitung,” in Glaise von Horstenau, Deutscher Bevollmächtigter General, 39–40. Prusin, Serbia under the Swastika, 94, 104–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

233

“wild Ustaša” – the hastily assembled bands of armed hoodlums and sadists who had run amok in regions such as Bosnia – correlated with the cooptation into the Ustaša movement and regime of former members of Maček’s Croatian Peasant Party among other more mainstream elements of society. Yet atrocities continued to occur on a less systematic basis amidst the ongoing fighting that the Ustaša’s own reckless bloodletting had provoked, as well as away from combat zones in prisons and concentration camps such as the notorious Jasenovac facility. Again, in all, the Ustaša regime is estimated to have murdered at least three hundred thousand Serbs, as well as thousands of Jews, Roma, and others.85 In the very last months of the existence of the NDH, the movement once again unleashed widespread killing sprees against ethnic Serbs in a manner reminiscent of its first months in power. This came in the wake of the uncovering and suppression of the aforementioned Lorković–Vokić plot. The ensuing backlash seems to have become all the more violent and reckless for the very reason that the writing was so clearly on the wall for the Germans and their allies. Precisely because it felt it was losing support among a battered, war-weary population and that it had nothing left to lose, the regime flung caution to the wind and indulged itself in the perverse luxury of acting on its “purest” ideological impulses, untrammeled by the burdens and restraints of responsible governance. It is noteworthy that during this final ultra-radical phase, it was once again the former émigrés among the Ustaša leadership – those whose outlook had been most deeply shaped by their immersion in an international fascist environment – who dominated policy-making in the doomed NDH.86 And it is striking how convergent – in both its structural context and key characteristics – this trajectory seems to have been with that of the radicalization, violent extremism, and ideological internationalization of the Republican Fascists across the Adriatic in northern Italy.

Anti-Communism and Pan-Asianism in Occupied China In the occupied regions of China, anti-Communism played a significant role in justifying collaboration with Japan. Yet, as Tokyo managed to avoid hostilities with the USSR prior to August 1945, anti-Communism was not the only or even the main source of legitimation Japanese propaganda drew upon in its attempts to mobilize support behind its 85 86

Michelle Frucht Levy, “‘The Last Bullet for the Last Serb’: The Ustaša Genocide against Serbs, 1941–1945,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 37, No. 6 (November 2009), 807–37. Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, 345–46.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

234

Civil Wars under Occupation

war effort across the diverse countries and peoples it had conquered. Pan-Asianism constituted a more positive vision for a post-war, Japanese-dominated region. Tokyo’s wartime propaganda sought to reconcile its critique of Western imperialism with the country’s own aggressive expansionism by claiming that the Pacific War was being fought to liberate the region from European and American control, with a view to creating a new, Japanese-led, yet mutually beneficial, community of Asian peoples. Freed of the shackles of formal and informal Western colonialism and brought under the protective umbrella of Japanese power in accordance with the pseudo-universalistic, utopian image of “Eight Corners of the World under One Roof,” the Asian nations would forge a new, internationally cooperative, superior form of modernity based on a synthesis between the distinctive spiritual and moral strengths of Eastern culture and the material benefits of twentiethcentury technology and industry.87 Particularly after the launch of the Pacific War in December 1941, the Nanjing government made efforts to persuade its Japanese and domestic audiences alike that this vision was entirely concordant with the animating principles of Kuomintang ideology. In advocating for this position, Wang Jingwei and his followers leaned heavily on speeches Sun Yat-sen had given decades earlier, under completely different circumstances, in favor of Sino-Japanese cooperation and pan-Asianist solidarity against imperialism. Insofar as Chinese nationalists had indeed long resented the extraterritorial rights and special economic and legal privileges claimed by foreign powers through the system of unequal treaties forced on the country under the late Qing dynasty, there was undoubtedly a sincere element to the calls by Wang and his propagandists for the liberation of all Asian peoples from the colonial yoke. And in their formal gestures, the Japanese were increasingly prepared to demonstrate that their projection of power took an entirely different form from that of Western imperialists. On January 9, 1943, they stole a march on the Anglo-American powers by signing a treaty with the Nanjing regime formally renouncing their extraterritorial privileges; the British and US governments, whose scheduling of an equivalent move had leaked to Tokyo, were left scrambling to follow suit vis-à-vis Chiang’s regime two days later.88 But, as noted elsewhere in this volume, the gap between

87 88

Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War, chs. 5–7; Dower, War without Mercy, 20, 223, 274. Xiaohua Ma, “China, Japan, and the United States in World War II: The Relinquishment of Unequal Treaties in 1943,” Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations (Kaohsiung), Vol. 1, No. 2 (August 2015), 451–88.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

235

Japan’s protestations of fraternal solidarity and the extortionate nature of its neo-imperialist, wartime occupation policies remained all too painfully apparent. Even some of the Nanjing regime’s publicists felt obliged to concede that the Japanese considered themselves superior to their fellow Asians and that Chinese relations with them were plagued by chronic mutual distrust.89 Japan’s pan-Asianist propaganda campaign reached its climax with the November 5–6, 1943 convening of the Assembly of the Greater East Asiatic Nations (more commonly referred to as the Greater East Asia Conference) in Tokyo. It is worth recalling that, at this point in the war, prospects were already looking so grim for Japan that Thailand’s Phibun chose to send a delegate to represent his country instead of attending himself. In his speech to his colleagues from other Japanese-created or Japanese-approved governments, including the leaders of Manchukuo, the Philippines, Burma, and the so-called Provisional Government of Free India (formed in exile by anti-British activist Subhas Chandra Bose), Wang Jingwei fell back yet again on platitudinous reiterations of decontextualized references to Sun Yat-sen’s pan-Asianist pronouncements.90 One wonders whether he and others could possibly have been unaware of the irony that English was the conference’s language of business and the one in which the original version of its Joint Declaration was released. As a practical matter, it was the only common tongue among a majority of those present; the Japanese also designed the statement partly for global consumption, as a pan-Asianist response – or, indeed, counterpart – to the Atlantic Charter.91 However, a capacity for recognizing the absurd was never the strong suit of the Axis regimes and their collaborators. It should probably not surprise us, therefore, that, in its eagerness to echo Axis propaganda themes and redirect popular resentments towards vulnerable scapegoats, Wang’s regime fell right into step not only with Tokyo’s pan-Asian platitudes but even with the antisemitism of Japan’s ally, Nazi Germany. In 1942, Wang himself denounced the Jews “as ‘accomplices of the Anglo-American imperialists’ and progenitor[s] of Communism and anarchism.”92 Wang’s regime supported the Japanese authorities in 89 91

92

90 So, “Race, Culture,” 93; Iriye, Power and Culture, ch. 3. So, “Race, Culture,” 80. Ibid., n. 6; Reynolds, “Anomaly or Model?,” 267; Iriye, Power and Culture, 117–21. For the text of the “Joint Declaration of Greater East Asiatic Nations” (November 6, 1943), see Saaler and Szpilman, eds., Pan-Asianism, 248. Jeremy Yellen describes the new, liberal-internationalist-sounding tone of Japanese imperialism as designed “both to rally Asian nations to make war and to convince the Allied powers to make peace.” Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, ch. 5 (here p. 143). So, “Race, Culture,” 87.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

236

Civil Wars under Occupation

Fig. 19 Assembly of the Greater East Asiatic Nations, Tokyo, November 5–6, 1943. Front row, left to right: Ba Maw (Burma), Zhang Jinghui (Manchukuo), Wang Jingwei (China), Hideki Tojo (Japan), Wan Waithayakon (Thailand), Jose P. Laurel (Philippines), Subhas Chandra Bose (Indian National Army). Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

their mounting restrictions on, and persecution of, Jewish residents and refugees in Shanghai. The head of the Wang regime’s International Propaganda Bureau, Tang Liangli, published articles in which he depicted Jews as spearheads and linchpins of British and American intrusions into Chinese affairs since the 1830s.93 “Although the Jews,” he wrote, “do not look extraordinary from the outside, their ambitions are overwhelming. They are like parasites, once they settle in a place, they grow massively underground and suck everybody’s blood. The European Jews are like this! The American Jews are like this! Now, the Jewish immigrants in China are also like this!”94 In the final analysis, in China as in many parts of occupied Europe, it was the negative internationalism of anti-Communism that constituted one of the most potent elements of the Wang regime’s efforts at self-legitimization. Nanjing’s leaders and propagandists portrayed Communist internationalism as the antithesis of patriotism. Whereas the pan-Asianist version of 93

94

Ibid., 98–88; Xun Zhou, Chinese Perceptions of the ‘Jews’ and Judaism: A History of the Youtai (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001), 144–51; Shuge Wei, News under Fire: China’s Propaganda against Japan in the English-Language Press, 1928–1941 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), 243. Quotation in Zhou, Chinese Perceptions, 150.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

237

internationalism was ostensibly designed to foster the development of a mutually respectful system of cooperation among independent Asian nation-states (a loose parallel to European fascist “inter-nationalism”), Communism at its core rejected the idea of national sovereignty in favor of a vision of class warfare that respected no borders, tore nations apart, and served only to advance the interests of the Soviet Union at the expense of other societies. Nanjing’s propagandists projected a caricature of Mao’s CCP as nothing but a cat’s paw for Moscow. While it is hard to imagine the incorporation of antisemitic tropes as having had any significant appeal in China beyond a small handful of intellectual hacks with a taste for the recondite, among significant sectors of Chinese society the fear of Communism was real and well-founded. The posture of Wang’s government as a bulwark against the CCP and the regime’s military focus on antiCommunist counterinsurgency campaigns allowed its apologists to argue that Chiang, who accused Wang Jingwei of being a hanjian, was in fact the one undercutting China’s national interests as long as he remained allied with the Communists in the United Front.95 Among the many contortions of logic shaping Wang’s rhetoric and actions, one of the most tragically ironic was his refusal to acknowledge that his own decision to throw in his lot with the Japanese occupiers had contributed to the country’s profound and multiple internal divisions. His unwillingness to commit his forces formally to the military effort against Chungking was an expression of his attempt to distance himself from the taint of having unleashed civil war in a nation to the liberation and unity of which he had supposedly devoted his political career. The counterinsurgency campaign against the CCP, by contrast, “did not count” as civil war by his reckoning, given the inherently alien character he attributed to Communism. Yet, in the final reckoning, by virtue of their own relentless guerrilla struggle against the Japanese and their collaborators – and, of course, thanks to Japan’s defeat at the hands of the United States – it was precisely Mao’s Communists who emerged from the maelstrom with the image of having been more consistently and sincerely committed to the patriotic struggle than Chiang Kai-shek, let alone Wang Jingwei.

95

On the role of anti-Communism in Wang Jingwei’s propaganda, ideological outlook, and practice, see Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 204–5; Cheung, “Slogans, Symbols, and Legitimacy,” 15–16, 21–22. See also Shaoqian Zhang, “Combat and Collaboration: The Clash of Propaganda Prints between the Chinese Guomindang and the Japanese Empire in the 1930s–1940s,” Transcultural Studies, No. 1 (2014), 95–133, esp. 110.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

238

Civil Wars under Occupation

An Archipelago of Civil Wars Before leaving the realm of the international and transnational, it is important to note the mutual influences and points of overlap among the European civil wars and resistance struggles themselves. The incident with which this part of the book began draws our attention to the powerful role that memories of the Spanish Civil War continued to play in the minds of its veterans across the Mediterranean (and beyond). The Spanish legacy also played a broader role as a source of ideological inspiration and political iconography as well as combat experience for the Communist-led resistance movements. The Yugoslav partisans pointedly adopted the Spanish Republic’s clenched-fist salute and favored experienced veterans of the Spanish conflict for key military appointments.96 For that matter, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, when what would come to be part of the Second World War was already under way in China, the second United Front’s defense of the tri-city conurbation of Wuhan against the Japanese in 1938 was directly compared – by Chinese students and political activists and foreign observers alike – to the Republican defense of Madrid against Franco’s forces. The association was reinforced by the arrival in Wuhan of the likes of famed Spanish Civil War photographer Robert Capa to cover the fight.97 Yet the very invocation of this theme was a double-edged sword that exposed a crack in the façade of KMT–CCP unity: in the last stages before the final withdrawal from Wuhan, the CCP called for the city’s populace to be armed on the model of Republican practice in Madrid. Chiang Kaishek turned down the proposal, which would have played to the CCP’s mobilizational advantage.98 (To be fair, it is unlikely the results would have amounted to anything more than a romantic gesture made at the cost of even more lives.) In 1943, the very circumstances that placed Italy on the path to civil war also had an indirect but substantive impact on the civil wars already under way in Greece and Yugoslavia. As soon as word arrived of the Badoglio regime’s reversal of alliances, Italian occupation forces in the Balkans found themselves stranded and facing an uncertain future. The occupiers became the occupied, as German troops competed with resistance forces to fill the local vacuums created by the Italian armistice.

96

97

Djilas, Wartime, 77; Prusin, Serbia under the Swastika, 77. On the myths and realities of left-wing internationalism in the context and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, see Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 98 MacKinnon, Wuhan, ch. 7. Ibid., 113; Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 37–38.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

239

Given the Italian forces’ logistical limitations and the generally chaotic circumstances of the political-diplomatic realignment, few Italians abroad were fortunate enough to be immediately repatriated. The majority fell into German captivity, while many Italian soldiers – eager to evade the Germans, but desperate for access to food, shelter, and a modicum of security – sought to join the resistance movements in fighting the Germans. EAM/ELAS and the Yugoslav partisans were happy to seize whatever Italian arms and supplies they could get their hands on. But they were ambivalent over the utilization of Italian manpower, viewing the ideological conversion of Italian officers, in particular, with suspicion.99 Nonetheless, thousands of rank-and-file Italian soldiers ended up participating in the Greek and Yugoslav resistance campaigns instead of their own country’s civil war and war of liberation.100 Albania’s smallscale civil war between Communist partisans and various collaborationist elements also got under way in the wake of Italian collapse and German takeover.101 Whereas mutual isolation had been the initial experience of resistance movements, the steady retreat of their enemies allowed some of those movements to establish direct links with one another. The opportunity this presented to act on their internationalist proclivities came at longterm political cost to the Communists in some cases. Notably, Italian Communist fighters in northeastern Italy joined up with Tito’s forces in the ethnically mixed, Yugoslav-claimed border region (eastern Friuli, Venezia Giulia, and Istria), on the future disposition of which the Italian Communist Party’s position was highly ambiguous. The Communists’ openness to eventual border changes and to the Yugoslav partisans’ occupation in the meantime of the city of Trieste put them at odds with the rest of the Italian resistance coalition, some of whose elements ended up fighting Tito’s forces in an effort to keep the disputed territories in Italian hands.102 In the most notorious incident associated with these intra-Italian differences, on February 7, 1945, Italian Communist forces summarily executed (on charges of collaboration with Fascists) twenty-one members of a Catholic-affiliated Italian resistance

99

100 101 102

“Report of Captain Winston W. Ehrgott on Greece” (undated, but apparently from early 1944), Entry 154, Box 39, Folder 564, OSS Papers, RG 226, NARA; Woodehouse, Struggle for Greece, 57. Kurapovna, Shadows on the Mountains, 187. Bernd J. Fischer, Albania at War, 1939–1945 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1999), 198–237. Gaia Baracetti, “Foibe: Nationalism, Revenge and Ideology in Venezia Giulia and Istria, 1943–5,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 2009), 657–74.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

240

Civil Wars under Occupation

outpost in an Alpine pasturage known as Porzûs.103 This came against the background of the massacre of several thousand ethnic Italians (formally targeted as Fascists rather than on explicitly ethnic grounds, but amidst conditions that made the distinction very blurry) in the Trieste region during a brief Yugoslav partisan takeover in 1943 (to be followed by additional massacres in the wake of Tito’s occupation of the contested territory in May 1945). Under these circumstances, association with Tito’s forces obviously risked undercutting the Italian Communists’ patriotic credentials. By September 1945, PCI leader Togliatti was already realigning himself with the Italian nationalist mainstream in opposition to Yugoslav annexationist demands over Trieste and Venezia Giulia.104 Somewhat analogously, during the 1946–49 round of the Greek civil war, Communist forces increasingly relied on logistical support from Tito’s newly established government in Yugoslavia. For personnel and local support in this post-liberation phase of the fighting, the Greek Communists looked increasingly to members of the country’s Slavic minority in Greek Macedonia, on the border with Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (where Tito had recently carved out a Macedonian Republic as one of the country’s new federal units). By the end of the Greek civil war in 1949, half the Communists’ military personnel consisted of Macedonian Slavic-identified recruits.105 The Greek Communist Party’s renewed stance in support of Macedonian demands for autonomy (reprising the position they had held in line with the Comintern’s position on the Macedonian question in the 1930s) was consistent with a certain Communist-internationalist perspective on national-minority rights, but it served to isolate them from the mainstream of Greek national opinion.106

103 104

105 106

Tommaso Piffer, ed., Porzûs: Violenza e resistenza sul confine orientale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012). Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 122. The ethnicization of violence in the region and the eventual post-war award of Istria to Yugoslavia led to the mass flight of between 200,000 and 300,000 Italian speakers from Istria in the course of 1943–54. On these events and the politically charged ways in which they have been remembered and commemorated, see Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). John S. Koliopoulos, Greece: The Modern Sequel: From 1821 to the Present, 2nd ed. (London: Hurst, 2007), 94–101. In 1943, EAM/ELAS had resisted Yugoslav Communist suggestions that they allow Slavic Macedonians to establish an autonomous resistance force under the ELAS umbrella. Woodehouse, Struggle for Greece, 46–47.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

From Parochial Interests to Internationalist Visions

241

These exceptional examples of internationalist commitments as hindrances to Communist parties’ broader domestic popularity at the tail ends of the Italian and Greek civil wars only serve to highlight how effective the Communists’ general adherence to patriotic themes (as dictated to them by Moscow) was in generating and maintaining their mass followings during the critical years of the Second World War. Acknowledging the complex, multi-level, fractal frames of reference that colored the perceptions and actions of participants on all sides of Europe’s civil wars should not obscure the importance of patriotism and/or nationalism as legitimizing frameworks invoked by virtually all parties to these conflicts.107 As noted in Part I, it has been argued that if both collaborators and resisters, Right and Left alike, claimed to be fighting on behalf of the nation, their claims effectively cancel one another out, making it difficult to point to nationalism as an explanation for people’s political choices under occupation.108 But the point is that the idea of the nation-state defined the core terrain(s) over which competing factions fought. Where they strayed from this, as in the case of the Black Brigades, it both reflected and reinforced the hopelessness of their position. Multiple combatant forces might share a roughly common conception of the nation-state’s basic territorial configuration, as in Greece or China. They might have radically different pictures of the national “geo-body,”109 as in Yugoslavia, where the partisans took up the tarnished banner of supra-ethnic Yugoslavism that had once been brandished by members of now-marginalized liberal-nationalist elites,110 whereas the Ustaša defended a narrowly ethnic vision of Croatian separatism (and expansionism), and the Chetniks fell between the stools of Greater Serbian nationalism and a no-longer-sustainable brand of Serbdominated, monarchist Yugoslavism.111 Or they might represent two rival nationalisms each claiming the same territory for their own wouldbe nation-state, as in the case of Poles and Ukrainians in wartime Eastern Galicia and Volhynia (see Part III).112 One way or another, the idea of the nation-state was a fundamental factor in shaping the contours of these conflicts, even as the clashing armies of the world war swept across and reconfigured the very geopolitical and ethnic spaces in which the 107 108 109 111 112

On the centrality of nationalism to resistance against foreign occupation, see Edelstein, Occupational Hazards, 10–12. Kocher, Lawrence, and Monteiro, “Nationalism, Collaboration, and Resistance.” 110 See Winichakul, Siam Mapped. Djilas, Wartime, 335. On the Chetniks’ incoherent political vision for Yugoslavia, see Tomasevich, The Chetniks, 172–76. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, new ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), ch. 8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

242

Civil Wars under Occupation

era’s civil wars were fought. Ultimately, it is only against the backdrop of the nation-state that concepts such as transnationalism and internationalism – and civil war, for that matter – take on their meaning. Conversely, our cases highlight in particularly dramatic terms just how pervasive global and international factors can be in constituting conceptions of the national and in shaping struggles over the institutional, ideological, and/or ethno-demographic (not to say territorial) make-up of the nationstate.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part II

If one pans one’s camera back from the intricate details of this chapter’s cases, one common feature that comes into view – at least among China, Yugoslavia, and Greece – is that the relative weakness, brittleness, and/or instability of the pre-war states in each of these countries may have lent itself to the rise of strong resistance movements. Taking over these states was a greater challenge for the occupiers than seizing control of countries pre-equipped with relatively effective and socio-geographically pervasive political and civil-service institutions, such as the Netherlands or France. That is to say, the occupiers found themselves with less of a cooptable set of instruments at their disposal: the weaker the governing infrastructure of the defeated state, the more challenging the occupier’s task of assuming the reins of power.1 The relative isolation of broad swaths of countryside from the systematic reach of centralized power – most notably in China – was conducive to the emergence, survival, and growth over time of significant movements of armed opposition to the occupiers and their indigenous allies or collaborators. These very conditions also lent themselves to civil wars between those who resisted and those who opted to work under the aegis of the occupiers, as well as, in most of these cases, among rival currents of the resistance movements. Even the most effective among the armed resistance forces in these conflicts could not aspire to a strategic defeat of the Axis great powers. What they could do was challenge the legitimacy and control of the occupiers and their local allies and collaborators, with a view to maintaining an alternative vision of, and for, their nation – one that could potentially emerge triumphant in the aftermath of a global defeat of the Axis at the hands of the Allies. Indeed, as Part II has emphasized, not all of the fighting in the Yugoslav, Greek, and Chinese civil wars took place between forces of resistance and collaboration; a good deal of it pitted against one another rival forces that presented themselves (with varying 1

My thanks to Greg Brew for making this point in the context of a graduate seminar session devoted to the essays in Barrett and Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan.

243

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

244

Civil Wars under Occupation

degrees of credibility) as resisters. For its part, Italy was a locus of tensions, rival aspirations, and occasional violence among the constituent elements of the resistance coalition, as well as between that coalition and the Italian government in the Allied-held south. Who came out on top following liberation and what sort of society and government emerged from occupation and civil war depended partly on factors internal to the movements and the societies in which they struggled, but was also shaped to a significant extent by the larger geopolitical context and the evolution of relations between the Allied great powers. Where British and American troops liberated countries from German occupation, Communists had little hope of establishing their political hegemony by dint of armed might. In Italy, the Communists recognized this, and modulated their conduct accordingly. They remained within the larger resistance coalition, not challenging the authority of the Royal Italian Government (or the government of the Italian Republic as of 1946) directly, but focusing instead on gaining influence through electoral and coalition politics, as well as by infiltrating the official police forces that assumed security responsibility throughout the country following the demobilization of resistance formations and the surrender (or concealment) of their arms.2 From 1947 on, American political pressure contributed to the exclusion of the Communists from Italian governing coalitions. In Greece, the matter of post-war political supremacy was only resolved by two more rounds of fighting, first between EAM/ELAS and the British in 1944, and then through renewed civil war between Communist forces and the British- and American-backed constitutional monarchy in 1946–49. It should be noted that secret contacts between the outgoing collaborationist Rallis administration and the incoming government under Georgios Papandreou helped facilitate a relatively smooth transition during the initial British liberation of Athens, as did the British recruitment of the veterans of the Rallis regime’s anti-Communist Security Battalions into the new National Guard.3 In Yugoslavia, the partisans’ direct control of significant chunks of territory and their clear military superiority over all rival formations by 2 3

Pavone, Guerra civile, 587–88. An unsigned August 1944 report to American military intelligence in the Middle East referred to “a verbal message recently arrived in the Middle East to PAPANDREOU from RALLIS. The latter says that he thinks he can hold Athens for three days against EAM, perhaps PATRAS and TRIPOLI too – but that British troops must be sent in early.” Unsigned report dated August 20, 1944 to G-2-USAFIME [Military Intelligence – US Army Force in the Middle East], Entry 120, Box 29, Folder 199, OSS Papers, RG 226, NARA. See also Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, chs. 22–23.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part II

245

1944, along with the advance of the Soviet Red Army through a swath of the country, helped ensure Communist victory – as did Britain’s 1943 decision to abandon the fickle and ineffectual Mihailović in favor of Tito’s movement. The pattern of events in China bore some resemblances to the Yugoslav case, as Mao’s Communists emerged from the war strengthened relative to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces and grudgingly admired by American observers, even as they also derived a boost from the eleventh-hour Soviet declaration of war on Japan and occupation of Manchuria in August 1945. But Soviet support proved half-hearted and, in this theater, as in Greece, it would take three more years of fighting between 1946 and 1949 to settle the question of who would fill the vacuum created by the end of Axis occupation, with the notable difference that in China it was the Communists who won. The broader geopolitical context of these civil wars’ outcomes is also highlighted in an argument Philip Minehan has made about the significance of timing: the Spanish Civil War raged during the height (or depth) of Anglo-French appeasement policy, which undercut any inclination they might have had to support the Republic. The Yugoslav conflict reached its climax at the height of the East–West alliance against Nazism, when even such a staunch anti-Communist as Winston Churchill was prepared to do business with Communists if they offered the best shot at defeating Nazism. The Greek civil war’s decisive round took place during the early Cold War, when the Anglo-Americans were once again preoccupied with the containment of Communism as their top priority, while Stalin still appeared willing to abide by his 1944 agreement to leave Greece to the British sphere of influence.4 China, which does not fall within the parameters of Minehan’s study, does not fit his paradigm perfectly, as here the Communists ultimately prevailed over a gravely weakened KMT regime in the context of larger geopolitical odds that did not seem decisively weighted in their favor: the (admittedly somewhat grudging and inconsistent) support the Nationalist regime received from the United States, combined with the fact that Stalin actually seems to have harbored significant misgivings over the emergence of a new independent Communist regime in charge of the entirety of China, even as he also furnished arms to Mao’s forces.5

4

5

Philip B. Minehan, Civil War and World War in Europe: Spain, Yugoslavia, and Greece, 1936–1949 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Introduction; Albert Resis, “The Churchill–Stalin ‘Percentages’ Agreement on the Balkans, Moscow, October 1944,” American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 (April 1978), 368–87. Bryan Murray, “Stalin, the Cold War, and the Division of China: A Multi-Archival Mystery,” Working Paper No. 12, The Cold War International History Project, June

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

246

Civil Wars under Occupation

The Italian case also falls outside Minehan’s discussion, but actually fits his formula quite nicely: commencing two years after the start of the Yugoslav conflict and at least a year after the beginning of armed resistance in Greece, the Italian civil war took place while the Anglo-Americans were already beginning their long, hard advance from the south. The combination of timing and geopolitics was such that the Italian Communists were never tempted to imagine they could seize power as long as Allied forces controlled the country – a prudence reinforced by the object lesson of the Greek Communists’ abortive struggle against British forces in Athens in 1944. This, along with Moscow’s restraining influence with regard to a country Stalin recognized to be in the Anglo-American sphere of control, helps account for the Italian Communists’ generally cautious conduct as members of a broader resistance alliance, their participation in the Badoglio government in the south, and their avoidance of any action in the northern conflict zone that might provoke a military confrontation with Allied forces.6 That said, Tito’s success in Yugoslavia was a source of inspiration to Italian Communists, and their relations with non-Communist resistance partners were certainly not completely conflict-free, even outside the Yugoslav border zones where the PCI made common cause with Tito’s forces against other Italian resistance forces as discussed earlier.7 If political power could not be seized through direct military action in Italy, participation in the electoral process did show some long-term promise for the PCI, which remained a force to be contended with in the country’s politics well into the 1980s, thanks in part to their legacy as the leading force in the wartime resistance. Similar prestige was long enjoyed by French Communists, whose electoral support during the decades of the Cold War correlated quite closely to the regions that had witnessed the most active French-on-French (resistance vs. collaborationist) violence in the course of liberation and its immediate aftermath.8 By the same token,

6 7 8

1995, www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFB69.PDF (accessed December 1, 2018); Hans van de Ven, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, 1937–1952 (London: Profile Books, 2017), chs. 12–13. The United States had tried in vain to mediate a renewed agreement between the CCP and KMT following the end of the Second World War. Pons, “Stalin, Togliatti.” Paolo Pezzino, “Un termine di paragone: Casi di conflitti interni alla Resistenza Toscana,” in Piffer, ed., Porzûs, esp. 151–54. Philippe Buton, “Experiences of War, Memories of War, and Political Behavior: The Example of the French Communist Party,” in Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens, eds., Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2010), esp. 178.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part II

247

this linkage speaks to a long-term weakness: as memory of the war faded, the strength of Communist support was liable to erode. If, on the one hand, each of our four main case studies is sui generis, on the other hand, the just-mentioned French example is a reminder that aspects of the civil-war paradigm may be applicable to many more locations in wartime Eurasia. Mention has already been made of comparable cases such as the internecine ethnic warfare between Poles and Ukrainians on the former territory of the interwar Polish republic and the episodes of postSeptember 1943 violence in German-occupied Albania between Communist partisans (who ultimately enjoyed some British support on the model of the Yugoslav case) and collaborationist factions. For that matter, after 1945, there was not only a resurgence of civil war in Greece and China, but also low-level fighting between Ukrainian nationalist formations and Soviet authorities, as well as between remnants of Poland’s anti-Nazi Home Army and that country’s newly installed Communist regime. There was even some sporadic renewal of insurgent activity in Franco’s Spain into the early 1950s.9 Stretching the notion of civil war yet further, Neal Ascherson has suggested that the externally imposed, postwar division of Europe took on a life of its own within the Germanies, such that one could speak semi-figuratively of a German “cold civil war” as a subset of the larger Cold War.10 Having said that, one should also be careful not to fall into the Noltean trap of making such indiscriminate use of the term “civil war” as to lose sight of the centrality of Axis-power aggression and inter-state warfare to the history of this period.11 It was the lived reality of invasion and occupation – and the resultant crises over the legitimate sources of political authority – that gave rise to violent conflicts within defeated nation-states, both by reviving and radicalizing preexisting enmities and by creating new divisions (be they substantive or opportunistic) over how best to ensure the nation’s survival under radically altered and unpredictable circumstances.

9 10

11

E. J. Hobsbawm, Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1959), 17. Neal Ascherson, “Hanging on to Mutti,” London Review of Books, June 6, 2013, 6–8. See also Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Alfred Rieber has argued that domestic conflicts between Communists and their opponents throughout the buffer zone Stalin sought to create around a post-war Soviet Union drew Moscow into decisive interventions on behalf of Communists. In Rieber’s view, the resultant unplanned reconfiguration of the Soviet sphere of interest, in turn, helped spark the Cold War. Alfred Rieber, “The Cold War as Civil War,” Final Report to National Council for Soviet and East European Research, November 1987, www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/ 1987–801–7-Rieber.pdf (accessed August 14, 2013). See the reference to Ernst Nolte in the prologue to this part of the book.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

248

Civil Wars under Occupation

Across much of Europe, liberation in 1944–45 was followed by quick yet relatively superficial purges of leading collaborators (and/or losers in the civil wars, depending on the case and on one’s analytical perspective). This was followed – especially in the West – by the wholesale reintegration of collaborationist sectors of society and the marginalization of troublesomely utopian resistance movements.12 In the context of postwar economic recovery, this actually proved an effective, if cynical and morally hollow, formula for transcending or burying the divisions of the recent past. In China, the post-1949 People’s Republic actually tended to play down the legacy of anti-Japanese resistance for several decades, as this story was uncomfortably closely associated with the United Front with the KMT.13 Most of the second half of the century was defined by a Cold War that – though one can think of it figuratively as a European and German civil war – divided the European continent into territorially demarcated, rival geopolitical blocs, while contributing to hot civil wars and associated international conflicts across much of East and Southeast Asia. The radical scaling down in levels of military conflict within post-1949 Europe (just as some European countries became involved in violent colonial and post-colonial conflicts overseas) was due in part to the wonders of nuclear deterrence, but also to the all too horrific effectiveness of wartime and post-war ethnic disaggregation campaigns and related redrawings of borders that, in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe, had virtually eliminated the presence of minorities who could serve as either the targets of continued violence or the sources of secessionist rebellion and territorial disputes between neighboring states.14 In this context, it is worth noting once again the disconcerting exception that proves the rule: the legacy of the civil wars of the 1940s was most easily revived in Yugoslavia – the country where the Second

12

13 14

One of the most extreme examples of quick-and-dirty burials of the wartime past is Greece, where for up to two decades after the end of the civil war, many Communist veterans of the resistance languished in prison or exile on account of their roles in the 1946–49 phase of the conflict, while many former Second World War-era collaborators and fence-sitters rose to institutional and political prominence. See Mark Mazower, “The Cold War and the Appropriation of Memory: Greece after Liberation,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Coble, China’s War Reporters, ch. 6. On the “unmixing of peoples,” see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, ch. 6. See also Jerry Z. Muller, “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 2 (March–April 2008), 18–35.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part II

249

World War’s violent campaigns of ethnic disaggregation and separation had been reversed by the post-war regime.15 The relative domestic cohesion of European countries during the Cold War is, of course, also related to the prosperity associated with the rise of American-style consumer societies across much of Western and even Southern Europe, thanks partly to the Marshall Plan and European economic integration. In Eastern Europe, the Soviets’ success in imposing Communist hegemony contained the seeds of the ideology’s own undoing, as Communism itself came to be associated with the taint of collaboration with an external occupier – the very sin it had once pinned on its enemies. The ethnically homogenized societies of Eastern Europe came to achieve a remarkable degree of underground cohesion around a shared, nationalist resentment of Soviet domination/Communist rule and a common yearning for the just-out-of-reach material delights of the West. The post-war association of Communism with an imperialist Soviet Union also helped contain the electoral appeal of Communist parties in Western Europe, the Euro-Communist movement of the 1970s and 1980s notwithstanding. The spillover effect of the collapse of Communism in the Warsaw Pact countries, including the Soviet Union itself, carried over into the two Southeast European states – Yugoslavia and Albania – where Communists had essentially won power for themselves rather than on the treads of Soviet tanks. In the final analysis, the internationalism that succeeded in reshaping post-war Europe was not that of Lenin and Stalin, but that of Adenauer and Monnet. Conversely, the anti-immigrant, chauvinist-authoritarian internationalism of the present day, which often draws implicitly or explicitly on precedents from the 1940s, threatens to open deep new rifts within societies that have enjoyed the benefits of internal peace (relatively speaking) and external security for so long that they may have come to take them for granted.

15

Belgium offers another, albeit so far non-violent, example of ethnic difference as the longest-lasting line of division associated, though certainly not originating, with wartime occupation. Under German rule, Flemish secessionists figured prominently among the country’s active collaborationists. In recent years, Flemish nationalist activists have demanded ex post facto recognition of some of these figures as victims of persecution in the context of the post-war punishment of collaborators. Chantal Kesteloot, “The Role of the War in National Societies: The Examples of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands,” in Echternkamp and Martens, eds., Experience and Memory, 25.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Part III

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation (the Philippines, Indonesia, and Ukraine)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part III

Up to this point, the major units of analysis in this book have, predominantly, been countries that were internationally recognized as independent prior to their invasion by Axis powers in the early stages of the Second World War. Yet, when one casts one’s eyes upon Japan’s wartime conquests, one quickly realizes that, apart from China and Thailand, all the lands that fell under the sway of the Rising Sun during the Second World War had previously been held by overseas colonial powers – notably, the French in Indochina, the British in Burma and Malaya, the Dutch in what was later to be called Indonesia,1 and the Americans in the Philippines. In other words, these countries were occupied in the first place, which allowed Japanese propagandists to present their seizure as blows struck against Western imperialism rather than as assaults on the peoples of these lands. Regardless of the sincerity or lack of it in Japanese claims to be acting as liberators rather than conquerors of their fellow Asians, the context of prior colonization seems, at first sight, to preclude useful comparison with any cases in Europe, where the Habsburg and Romanov empires had collapsed some two decades prior to the onset of the Second World War. Yet, upon closer examination, a categorical contradistinction between a pre-war Europe of sovereign nations and a Southeast Asia of colonized peoples may prove somewhat facile. For one thing, it assumes that polities’ claims to constitute nation-states should be taken at face value. In fact, 1

I use the term Indonesia somewhat anachronistically in this book, given that the independence of a country with that name was not declared until the very end of the war. But to describe the archipelago as the Dutch East Indies during the years of Japanese occupation seems inappropriate, and the nationalists who interacted with the new occupiers and whose story dominates my narrative and discussion defined themselves as Indonesians and the archipelago as Indonesia. To be sure, Java was the site of the most intense and consistent interactions between the nationalists and the Japanese, and the latter appeared keen to treat it very much separately from other parts of the archipelago. But even though most of the events and activities discussed here indeed took place on Java, it would seem odd to describe it as the unit of analysis given that the future of Indonesia as a whole is what the nationalists saw as being at stake.

253

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

254

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

when one digs just beneath the surface of such claims, the picture almost invariably proves more complicated. This was notoriously the case for some of the newly created, recreated, or expanded polities of East Central Europe between the world wars. This book has already discussed how Croatia’s ambiguous place in Yugoslavia lent itself to exploitation by the Nazis and their Ustaša allies. Nazi Germany took similar advantage of Slovaks’ discontent with their perceived second-class status in interwar Czechoslovakia to create a Slovak puppet state in 1939 after Hitler ripped up the previous year’s Munich Agreement (which itself had ostensibly been designed to address the self-determination rights of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland). As suggested by cases such as the contested status of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, Muslims in French-ruled Algeria (whose territory Paris treated administratively as an integral part of the French Republic rather than a colony), or Basques and Catalans in Spain, the complications multi-ethnicity posed to the seamless implementation of national self-determination were not limited to countries lying on one side of a supposed East/West European dividing line between ethnic and civic nationalisms.2 In light of this, the prospect of finding a European example of wartime occupation that lends itself to useful comparison with counterparts among the colonized societies of Southeast Asia may not be so bleak after all. For the purposes of this section, the European case I have chosen is that of Ukraine, which was, along with Byelorussia (latter-day Belarus) and the Baltic states, one of the Soviet territories that fell mostly or entirely into the hands of the Germans and their allies for three or more years following the June 1941 launch of Operation Barbarossa. Ukraine lends itself better to this topic than Belarus because the sentiments of nationalism among some Ukrainians led to more significant organizational and military expressions than was the case with their Belarusian counterparts.3 Conversely, unlike the Baltic states, Ukraine had not experienced independence during the greater part of the interwar period; hence it allows for a more meaningful comparison with this chapter’s Southeast Asian examples. As to the latter, the cases I have chosen are the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and the Philippines. There is no inherent analytic advantage to these examples over, say, Burma and Indochina. But in the interests of completing this book in my own 2

3

Taras Kuzio, “The Myth of the Civic State: A Critical Survey of Hans Kohn’s Framework for Understanding Nationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (January 2002), 20–39; Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 5. On the Belarusian case, see Leonid Rein, The Kings and the Pawns: Collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II (New York: Berghahn, 2011).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Prologue to Part III

255

lifetime, I have had to restrict the scope of the inquiry. Having said that, I was curious to compare a former colony that was granted formal independence by Tokyo in the midst of the war with one where expectations of official self-determination were left frustrated longer. The Philippines meets the former criterion, whereas Indonesian independence was granted by the Japanese only at the eleventh hour, at the time of Tokyo’s final defeat in the war. The main focus in the case of the Dutch East Indies (the future Indonesia) will be on Java, which was by far the most populated island of the vast archipelago and which the Japanese governed separately from other parts of the island chain. The overwhelming majority of the available scholarship on wartime Indonesia focuses on Java, and it was here that the most decisive wartime political developments with eventual repercussions for the rest of the archipelago took place. Just as black-and-white contrasts between colonized countries and independent nation-states may constitute an obstacle to analysis, so too does lumping colonial cases together with one another. The three cases in this section fall along a spectrum of varied relationships with the prewar metropoles that governed them. Ukraine as of June 1941 was a fully integrated constituent republic of a territorially contiguous Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was Nazi Germany that sought to colonize it. Yet Ukraine’s recent history complicated the picture significantly, as will be discussed below. And the initial German invasion was misread by certain Ukrainian nationalists as an opportunity for national liberation. The Philippines and the Dutch East Indies were both subject to governance by distant, overseas imperial metropoles, and their indigenous populations did not, by and large, have US or Dutch citizenship, respectively. However, in the case of the Philippines, an elected government functioned semi-autonomously in the capital Manila, and in the mid1930s a firm deadline of 1946 had been agreed upon for the termination of American rule and the granting of formal political independence to the country. The Dutch government had no such plans to relinquish control over the East Indies. Rather than constituting a problem, such variation among our cases may lend itself rather well to the task of comparative analysis, for it leads to the fundamental question: how did different histories of subjugation and differing horizons of expectation condition these societies’ varied responses to Axis occupations? Related questions (forming the focus of Chapter 8) include: How significantly did the pre-war colonial/imperial history of these countries serve to distinguish their experiences of, and responses to, wartime occupation from those of the earlier cases in this study? How did different

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

256

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

occupation policies affect the evolution of political identities among the occupied? Specifically, how significant was the occupiers’ decision whether or not to grant formal independence in shaping (and reflecting) relations between occupiers and occupied? What impact did the activities and decisions of self-selected nationalist “vanguard” movements have on these dynamics? How did these events shape the development of ideas and practices about who constituted an integral part of “the nation” and who did not?

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

7

Colonial Histories

The Philippines Among the countries constituting case studies in this section, the Philippines had arguably been shaped most profoundly by its colonial experience. This was in part a function of the extended duration of that experience, which had begun with Spain’s incursion into, and consolidation of power over most of, the archipelago in the course of the second half of the sixteenth century. (Most of Muslim-minority Mindanao remained beyond Spain’s effective control well into the late nineteenth century.) Unlike the Dutch East Indies, across much of which Islam had become a dominant religion by the time of European colonization, most of the islands north of Mindanao had not yet been converted to a “religion of the book” at the time of Spanish colonization. This gave Catholic missionaries an opportunity to spread their faith across the population. Successful Christianization created forms of cultural hybridity and connection that linked much of Philippine society to “the West” in ways that were no less durable for being contradiction-ridden and paradoxical. The fact that, prior to Spanish colonization, most of the island chain’s societies had been organized around relatively small, clan-based structures, rather than more demographically and territorially extensive states (with the exception of some budding Muslim sultanates), meant that there was little in the way of a “usable past” for latter-day anti-colonial activists to latch on to as a point of reference for the construction of a national identity unconnected to the legacy of Western rule. The country’s very name – chosen to honor the crown prince of the 1540s who became King Philip II of Spain in 1556 – was a relic of its conquest by Europeans. And while nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists promoted the adoption of a standardized form of Tagalog – one of the languages spoken on the island of Luzon – as a national language for the entire archipelago, this could and did raise hackles among speakers of some of the from-120-to-186 (depending on definition) other languages (nearly all of them also in the MalayoPolynesian language family) used across the archipelago. First Spanish 257

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

258

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

and later English were hard to displace as the Philippines’ ethnically “neutral,” culturally prestigious, lingue franche.1 One of the distinguishing features of the Philippines’ political experience during the roughly four decades of American rule immediately preceding the Japanese invasion had to do with its new imperial overlords’ reluctance to acknowledge their own role as colonialists. In that particular respect, in fact, the Americans had something in common with the Japanese conquerors who briefly replaced them. The United States had won control of the archipelago as a result of the Spanish–American War of 1898 and the ensuing counterinsurgency campaign waged over the course of 1899–1902 by US forces against the Filipino independence movement led by Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964). This Philippine–American War took the lives of at least 250,000 and perhaps as many as 775,000 Filipino civilians (most of them indirect casualties by way of war-induced disease and malnutrition) in addition to 16,000–20,000 of Aguinaldo’s combatants. American deaths totalled fewer than 4,200, most of them due to disease. The counterinsurgency operations conducted under US General Pershing’s command were characterized – especially in the face of persistent resistance following Aguinaldo’s personal surrender and recognition of American suzerainty in March 1901 – by the escalating use of brutal “punitive” measures that collectively targeted civilian communities suspected of harboring or supporting guerrillas. A variety of atrocities, ranging from the torching of villages, to mass murder, to the use of torture in interrogations, constituted the unofficial side of this grim “pacification” campaign.2 Despite the brutality with which American forces had repressed the very movement that had challenged Spanish colonialism in the Philippines in the first place, the American political establishment was at pains to try and distinguish the country’s role in its new possession from that of European powers in their overseas imperial holdings. The United States, after all, owed its own independence to a revolt against an overseas imperial metropole and prided itself on its belief in the universal applicability of its commitment to government with “the consent of the governed.”3 Given 1 2

3

Luis H. Francia, A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos (New York: Overlook Press, 2014), Introduction and chs. 1–2. Stanley Karnow, In our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989), 194–95; Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 96–103. For an apologetic account of American military conduct, which nonetheless grudgingly acknowledges the facts of the matter, see Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 219–24, 327–28, ch. 14. American “Declaration of Independence,” July 4, 1776, www.archives.gov/foundingdocs/declaration-transcript.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

259

their categorization as non-Whites, Filipinos could, in the age of Jim Crow, be readily depicted as unprepared to take up the responsibilities of self-government. But, from early on, the feeling prevailed in Washington that it was incumbent on the USA to make some show of undertaking the “tutelage” necessary to prepare the Philippines for the eventual prospect of self-rule. (The extension of American citizenship to the archipelago’s population, though sought after by one Filipino political party, was not a remotely palatable prospect to most American politicians, given the factor of race.) As early as 1907, therefore, elections based on an extremely narrow suffrage were held for a Philippine assembly. Subsequent years witnessed a steady evolution towards the establishment of an autonomous Philippine government under the continued supervision of an American governorgeneral. This process culminated in the declaration of a Commonwealth in 1935, which marked the beginning of what might be termed a qualified form of home rule for the islands. This was accompanied by a firm commitment on Washington’s part to formal independence for the Philippines in 1946. In the meantime, the post of governor-general was eliminated and the chief US representative in the country was now called a high commissioner. Lest one jump to the conclusion that the role of the United States in the archipelago had become wholly altruistic, it should be clarified that much of the push for early independence came from American business interests that wished to limit the free entry of Philippine commodities into the continental USA, as well as from politicians responding to racist backlashes against Filipino migrants – tensions which were aggravated amidst the travails of the Great Depression. From these perspectives, it was high time to be rid of formal responsibility for a possession that could be portrayed as having become more of a liability than an asset. The limits on immigration were imposed as soon as the Philippine Independence Act (also known as the Tydings–McDuffie Act) had been signed into law by President Roosevelt and ratified by the Philippine Senate. Conversely, when independence did come, on schedule in 1946, it was accompanied by agreements that left the USA in charge of major military bases in the Philippines and that maintained a preferential trade relationship, perpetuating the Philippine agricultural economy’s dependence on an American industrial hub.4

4

Karnow, In our Image, chs. 8–9 and 12; Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 183–88. For an architectural-history allegory about the ironies and ambiguities of the Philippines’ experience as an American colony, see Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire, ch. 8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

260

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Beneath the surface of these ruptures and transitions – from Spanish colonial government, to American control, to steadily increasing selfgovernment – lay some significant continuities. Most notable among these was the persistence in positions of social, economic, and political power of the country’s educated, landed elite. Known as the ilustrados, the members of this ruling class typically came from families that controlled huge swaths of agricultural land worked by tenant or share-cropping peasants. The ilustrados tended to be racially and culturally distinct: they were often mestizos – that is to say, of mixed Spanish–Filipino or Chinese–Filipino ancestry – and they had access to higher education, often overseas in Europe or the United States, but also at the University of the Philippines in Manila, which was modeled on American state schools.5 This lent them a cosmopolitan polish and a fluency in Western languages and global discourses that marked them apart from the overwhelming majority of their compatriots, although American educators flocked to the Philippines in an effort to spread basic literacy and instill “American values” among the broader masses. American rule ultimately reinforced rather than undercut the privileged position of the ilustrado families, to whom US governor-generals looked to maintain order and authority in the face of challenges from peasant-based radical or revolutionary organizations. As is typical of such elites, the ilustrados, in turn, conceived of their own position as one of natural leadership exercised on behalf of the Philippine nation as a whole. Their main political party, the Partido Nacionalista, which dominated the country’s politics during the interwar years, made a public show of pushing for full independence as early as possible. Yet its leaders displayed a great deal of private diffidence over the prospect of a “premature” severance of ties with a United States whose economic market was crucial to their export of commodities and whose military protection seemed vital in view of the potential dangers of Japan’s rising power in the Pacific. Meanwhile, although a slowly but steadily expanding suffrage seemed to create the prospect of a genuine democratization of the country’s politics, the patron–client relationships and associated patterns of vertical socio-political segmentation that undergirded ilustrado power remained more structurally significant than the formal mechanisms of elections and party labels.6 The major domestic challenges to the socio-political status quo came from worker and peasant unions that looked not only to electoral politics 5 6

Napoleon J. Casambre, “The Impact of American Education in the Philippines,” Educational Perspectives, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter 1982), 7–14. David Joel Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration in World War II (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House [by arrangement with the Michigan University Press], 1967), 7–8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

261

but to grassroots organizing, strikes, and protests to seek redress for lower-class grievances amidst the economic turmoil and uncertainties of an economy dependent on commodity exports in the years of the Great Depression. The small, urban-based Philippine Communist Party (PKP) was among the more radical urban-based political movements seeking to coordinate, and place itself at the head of, such efforts.7 At the same time, in the context of the Comintern’s Popular Front policy of the second half of the 1930s, the Communists distanced themselves from any immediate ideas of armed insurrection – an approach that had been tried by the right-wing agrarian populist organization known as the Sakdal movement in May 1935 and that had ended in very rapid defeat.8 The immediate background to the Japanese invasion, then, was marked by a close relationship between the Nacionalista-led Commonwealth government, headed by President Manuel Quezon (1878–1944), and the American authorities, among whom the most famous and charismatic personage was General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was a retired former Chief of Staff of the US army and son of a former governorgeneral of the islands who had become chief military advisor to, and field marshal of, the fledgling Philippine army following the inauguration of the Commonwealth. In the course of 1941, in light of rising tensions with Japan, MacArthur brought the Philippine army back under direct American command through its merger with locally based American forces. The new formation, whose rank-and-file remained overwhelmingly Filipino, was known as the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). Quezon’s strong personal connection with MacArthur, whose child was his godson, encapsulated the widely disseminated notion that ties of sentiment and interest linked the Philippine nation to, rather than pitted it against, a beneficent United States.9 This conception was sorely tried by ensuing developments. The relative ease and speed with which much of the archipelago, including its capital, Manila, fell to the Japanese in the weeks following the onset of hostilities in the Pacific reflected in part the lack of military resources Washington had allocated to the defense of the Philippines. The United States, it turned out, had higher priorities elsewhere. However, MacArthur’s forces did, famously, hold out for several months on the island of Corregidor in 7 8

9

Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), ch. 2. Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration, 24. The Philippine Communist Party was banned by the pre-Commonwealth Supreme Court in 1931 and relegalized by President Quezon in 1939. Theodore Friend, The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 47. Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, 276–78.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

262

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Manila Bay and for almost as long on the Bataan peninsula just to the north. The shared suffering of American and Filipino men, both in combat and during the notoriously brutal Bataan March that followed their surrender, contributed an evocative emotional and symbolic element to the myth of the two peoples being linked by filial bonds, mutual obligations, and convergent interests.10 Key leaders such as President Quezon threw in their lot with the Americans, first retreating with MacArthur to Corregidor, and later continuing on, by submarine, to eventual refuge in the United States, where they maintained the formal existence of the Commonwealth government from exile. However, among the multitude of prominent Filipino politicians and public figures who remained behind, there were a great many who quickly proved willing (or, as many of them were later to claim, felt coerced) to serve in the new, Japanese-appointed Executive Commission under the chairmanship of Jorge Vargas, and in Jose Laurel’s nominally independent government that succeeded it in October 1943. Vargas’ most recent position had been as executive secretary to none other than the nowexiled President Quezon, and Laurel’s last pre-war appointment had been to the Philippine Supreme Court.11 Laurel did resist Japanese pressure to declare war on the United States until finally obliging them in September 1944, albeit with the understanding that this was to remain a mere formality. In place of the now banned political parties, the Japanese sponsored the creation of the Kalibapi, the abbreviated Tagalog name for the “Association for Service in the New Philippines,” which was designed to

10 11

Karnow, In our Image, 342. Vargas was to claim that Quezon, with MacArthur’s approval, had given him clear instructions to maintain continuity of governance in the country under the Japanese. This has never been fully documented, and the details of what Quezon and MacArthur instructed Vargas as well as Laurel to do remain disputed. Before departing the capital with MacArthur, Quezon certainly did appoint Vargas as mayor of a “Greater Manila,” responsible for running the capital and its immediate environs as the Japanese took occupation of the region. In late January 1942, while still on Corregidor with MacArthur, Quezon cabled a message to US President Roosevelt in which he spoke on behalf of the Filipino members of the Executive Commission just created by the Japanese, defending them as doing the best for the public under the circumstances. In early February, with MacArthur’s support, he actually went on to propose that the Philippines be permitted to declare independence and neutrality forthwith, in the interest of sparing further loss of life among the Filipino men helping defend the Bataan peninsula. The request was declined amidst promises of an eventual American military liberation of the Philippines, and Quezon accepted the prospect of leading a government-in-exile instead. Nakano Satoshi, “Appeasement and Coercion,” in Ikehata Setsuho and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999), 38–39; Teodoro A. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941–45, 2 vols. (Quezon City: R. P. Garcia Publishing Company, 1965), Vol. I, 261–74, 302–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

263

Fig. 20 USAFFE forces surrender to the Japanese on Corregidor, May 1942. Bettmann via Getty Images.

mobilize and discipline officialdom and society and to disseminate the official propaganda line, much along the lines of Japan’s own Japanese Imperial Rule Assistance Association (formed in 1940).12 The constitution of the new Philippine Republic, declared in October 1943, was superficially modeled on that of the pre-war Commonwealth (and thus, ultimately, on the US Constitution), but concentrated power in the hands 12

Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration, ch. 3; David Joel Steinberg, “Jose P. Laurel: A ‘Collaborator’ Misunderstood,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (August 1965), 651–65; Karnow, In our Image, 308.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

264

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

of the president. The Kalibapi remained the only legal political movement in the republic. A simultaneous treaty of alliance essentially obliged the Philippines to leave its natural and economic resources at the disposal of the ever more ravenous Japanese war machine, and Japanese troops of the 14th Army remained functionally in occupation of the country, despite the formal dissolution of the Japanese military administration.13 In a manner now all too familiar to this book’s readers from many of its other cases, the gap between the rhetorical framing and actual implementation of the occupying power’s policy was enormous. The initial encounter between Japanese forces and Philippine communities was marked by indiscriminate brutality on the part of the invaders. Across much of the countryside, notably in the rural areas of the most populous island, Luzon, peasants fled their homes and sought refuge in mountainous and/or forested regions for months at a time in the face of the initial onslaught. After the chaos and random violence of the initial invasion wave had died down and the Japanese had secured the cooperation of indigenous officials and elites in establishing a semblance of public order and normal governance, the conduct of Japanese uniformed forces and military police (Kenpeitai) continued to instill fear and provoke resentment. The broadly prevalent practice of face-slapping by Japanese troops in response to any perceived lack of deference on the part of Filipino peasants was the most ubiquitous form in which an experience of personal humiliation was effectively nationalized by virtue of its direct association with occupation by foreigners. Moreover, ordinary Filipino villagers were much more likely to encounter this set of alien rulers on a regular basis than had been the case with the Americans, who had long since withdrawn from the micro-managerial oversight of local administration across the country. The only silver lining for peasants was the fact that many landlords had 13

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Research and Analysis Branch, Washington, DC, Report No. 1752: “The Government of the ‘New Philippines’ (A Study of the Present Puppet Government in the Philippines),” May 5, 1944 (revised September 25, 1944), included in “Documents Relating to the Fall and the Liberation of the Philippines in World War II,” Box 1, Folder 2, Library of Congress (LC), Rare Book Collection; J. L. Vellut, “Foreign Relations of the Second Republic of the Philippines, 1943–1945,” Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 1964), 126–42. See also the contemporaneous reflections in Juan Labrador, A Diary of the Japanese Occupation, December 7, 1941–May 7, 1945, trans. from Spanish (translator not named) (Manila: Santo Tomas University Press, 1989), September 5, 1943 entry, pp. 168–69. Whereas American observers attacked the authoritarian tendencies in the constitution, Japanese commentators were concerned over the democratic-sounding aspects of its language. Takeuchi Tatsuji, “Manila Diary, December 1942–October 1943,” Appendix A in Royama Masamichi and Takeuchi Tatsuji, The Philippine Polity: A Japanese View, trans. Takeuchi Tatsuji, ed. Theodore Friend (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1967), September 8, 1943 entry, p. 276.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

265

0 50 100

200

300

km 500

400

SOUTH CHINA SEA

PHILIPPINE SEA

Laoag LUZON

Baguio

G ROUP

Manila Tagaytay SAMAR

ZO

N

I SL

AN

D

VISAYAS ISLAND GROUP

MINDORO

LU

Iloilo

PANAY

NEGROS PALAWAN

MINDANAO

SULU SEA

A

Zamboanga

i Ra

lr

o

ad

San Fernando

ND

G

UP RO

Davao

I SL

Capas

Camp O’Donnell

LEYTE

Cebu

MIN

DA

NA

O

CELEBES SEA © G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

The Bataan Death March (April 1942)

BATAAN PENINSULA

Marileves Corregidor Is. 0

25

50

km 100

Map 10 The Philippines under Japanese occupation.

fled to urban centers amidst the chaos and tended to stay there for the duration of the war, given the rise in rural insurgencies (of which more below). This made it marginally easier to evade onerous demands for disproportionately large shares of harvests of the sort that had been aggravating landlord–peasant relations over previous years. This was offset by the economic costs of Japan’s occupation, both direct in the form of exorbitant wartime demands on material and human resources and indirect in the form of cutting the country off from its chief export market in the United States. Outright looting accompanied by conspicuous displays of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

266

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

self-indulgent spending on the part of the Japanese military’s field command in the midst of widespread material deprivation among the ordinary population did nothing to endear the new rulers to the Philippine masses. The willingness of the country’s elites to cater to the demands of the occupiers as a way of protecting or enhancing their own positions of privilege further aggravated social and political tensions and gave the lie to the celebration of the country’s so-called independence in 1943.14 These conditions contributed to the rise of widespread rural, guerrillastyle resistance to the occupation as well as to collaborationist officials. One of the major sites of conflict was the agricultural hinterland of Manila, in central Luzon. The most concerted challenge to the Japanese in this sector came from the Hukbalahap (an abbreviation of the Tagalog words for “People’s Anti-Japanese Army”), commonly known simply as the Huks. The Huks’ core recruitment base was among activists of the peasant unions that had operated in the region during the 1930s and among kinfolk and close friends and associates (both male and female) of those activists. The overarching coordinating initiative came from urban-based Communist Party leaders who recognized – as did their counterparts across so much of occupied Eurasia – that the cooptation of the peasantry was crucial to the launching of any kind of sustained armed opposition to occupation.15 The other major forces operating in Luzon consisted of diverse armed formations answering at least nominally to the authority of MacArthur’s relocated headquarters in Brisbane, Australia. These guerrilla organizations were formally recognized in February 1943 as parts of a reconstituted USAFFE. A number of American and Filipino officers who had evaded or escaped Japanese capture worked clandestinely to organize and lead these forces in remote locations across the archipelago. Radio communications and occasional supply drops by submarine were used to try and maintain ongoing links to United States military authorities, although in practice, local USAFFE forces – be they led by American or Filipino commanders – had to act with considerable autonomy pending the return of MacArthur’s army.16 Functionally, then, one might loosely compare USAFFE guerrillas to the partisans operating behind German lines in the occupied regions of the Soviet Union, insofar as both sets of fighters constituted 14 15

16

Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration, chs. 4–5; Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, ch. 3. Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, ch. 3; Vina A. Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender, Sex, and Revolution in the Philippines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 40–49, 68–69. James A. Villanueva, “Awaiting the Allies’ Return: The Guerrilla Resistance against the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2019, ch. 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

267

irregular forces that ultimately answered to the orders of the conventional military commands in their respective metropoles. In principle, USAFFE and Huk guerrillas recognized one another as allies. In practice, however, tensions between the two mounted over the course of the occupation, as the Huks suspected some USAFFE formations of being in cahoots with landlord interests and saw them as content to gather and transmit intelligence to US forces overseas rather than willing to take the risk of active confrontation with the Japanese and their Filipino auxiliaries. Following MacArthur’s 1944 return to the Philippines, members of the collaborationist Philippine Constabulary (PC) were allowed to defect to USAFFE formations and clashes with Huks became more frequent – a pattern reminiscent of the British rapid recruitment of former members of the collaborationist Security Battalions into the new National Guard so they could fight the Communists following Greece’s liberation. (See Part II.) At the same time, Huk personnel were bypassed in favor of former collaborators in the appointment of local officials by American officers, who had been warned by their military intelligence that the Huks represented a Communist menace. At least one major massacre of disarmed Huk fighters was carried out by USAFFE commanders with the tacit approval of an American officer, amidst a much wider pattern of detentions of Huk personnel. Such incidents were dwarfed at the time by the enormity of the destruction associated with Japanese forces’ tenacious resistance and the overwhelming force deployed by the Americans to overcome it. In Manila alone, a hundred thousand Filipino civilians are estimated to have died amidst the fighting, and the capital was left in a state of devastation second only to that of Warsaw among major cities ravaged by the war. The country as a whole suffered more than one million casualties (out of a pre-war population of around 17 million) in the course of the entire war and occupation.17 Following war’s end, MacArthur found ways of replicating at the national political level what his forces had effected in the field against the Huks. Commonwealth President Sergio Osmeña, who, as vicepresident of the government-in-exile, had succeeded to the office of president upon Quezon’s death in August 1944 and had returned to the Philippines alongside MacArthur just two months later, proved too open to compromise with a political Left which MacArthur was determined to marginalize. MacArthur threw his weight behind the rival electoral bid of Manuel Roxas – a prominent establishment politician 17

Ikehata Setsuho, “Introduction: The Japanese Occupation Period in Philippine History,” in Ikehata and Jose, eds., Philippines under Japan; Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire, 205–12.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

268

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

who had taken part in the collaborationist government under Japanese occupation, but whose claims to have secretly assisted the resistance were now endorsed by the celebrated American general. It was Roxas who won the presidential elections held in April 1946, shortly before the country’s formal independence from the United States on July 4 of that year (just as originally scheduled). His government excluded former Huks and their political allies, leaving the former resistance in the cold while former collaborators seemed to be thriving. These events, along with the lack of an effective land-reform program, contributed to the subsequent outbreak of the Huk Rebellion, the spread and eventual suppression of which during the early years of the Cold War ended up reinforcing some of the stark, long-term continuities in the interdependence of the external power (be it Spain, Japan, or the United States) and Filipino elites in the face of radical demands for redistributive justice and socio-political change.18

Indonesia Like the Philippines, parts of the Indonesian archipelago had been under the rule of overseas colonialists for roughly four hundred years at the time of Japan’s invasion in early 1942. Competing with the Portuguese, who had seized the Malayan port of Malacca in the sixteenth century as part of their effort to dominate the spice trade, the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) gained regional dominance in the seventeenth century, with western Java as the base from which it gradually extended control across the archipelago. This was a very incremental process, involving wars and alliance diplomacy with the variety of often mutually antagonistic polities that controlled territories and populations across the island chain. It was not until 1830 that Java itself came fully under Dutch control (with formal, vestigial forms of autonomy still granted to the vassal sultanates of Yogyakarta and Surakarta), and not until the second half of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth that formal Dutch rule in some of the outer islands reached its fullest extent. (It should be noted that in 1800, following the VOC’s dissolution, the Dutch government had assumed direct control over the company’s overseas holdings.)19 18

19

Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, chs. 5–7; Michael Burleigh, Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945–1965 (London: Macmillan, 2013), ch. 7. M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), chs. 1–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

269

The Dutch shaped the evolution of political economies across the archipelago by coopting dominant, landowning elites, enhancing their power to extract resources from peasants, while simultaneously eroding their autonomy as political actors vis-à-vis the colonial administration. Members of the ethnic Chinese population (which numbered roughly 1.2 million people, or some 2 per cent of the archipelago’s population in 193020) were encouraged to act as intermediaries in the Dutch commercial and tax-collection systems. This intensified the indigenous population’s perception of the non-Muslim Chinese as aliens, much as the filling of certain middleman niches by Jews in pre-1914 Russian Poland had helped channel popular socio-economic resentments into an antisemitism that also drew on a long tradition of religious prejudice. As lateninteenth- and twentieth-century colonial administrative reforms stripped niche roles such as tax-farming away from members of the Chinese community, education in the Dutch language became an alternative path to upward mobility for many of them, which once again reinforced their popular perception as outsiders dependent upon, and supportive of, European imperial authority. At the same time, to the extent that diasporic Chinese communities were responsive to attempts by China’s Kuomintang government to cultivate financial and political support among them during the 1930s, the perception of them as fundamentally “other” in the eyes of the Dutch East Indies’ Muslim sociopolitical elites and popular opinion alike was reinforced.21 If religious difference was among the factors distinguishing overseas Chinese (even those whose families’ histories on the archipelago went back many generations) from “indigenous” populations in the Dutch East Indies, it also, of course, set the great majority of the East Indies’ population apart from their European colonizers. Unlike the Spanish in the Philippines, the Dutch had not engaged in extensive missionary work among the indigenous population, most of whom – like the peoples of the Philippines – spoke a variety of Malayo-Polynesian languages, but among whom the predominant religion was Islam. (Islam had begun its gradual penetration of the East Indies in the fourteenth century, although elements of pre-Islamic, heavily Hindu- and Buddhist-inflected traditions remained culturally influential across much of the archipelago, with 20

21

Mary Somers Heidhues, “Anti-Chinese Violence in Java during the Indonesian Revolution, 1945–49,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 14, Nos. 3–4 (September– November 2012), 381–401, here 382. George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952), ch. 1; Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 154–57, 265–70, 286–91.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

270

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Hinduism still dominant on the island of Bali in the present day). Perhaps by virtue of this lack of missionary activity, the Dutch language had not penetrated far among the indigenous population. Instead, a creolized form of Malay had served as the commercial and (alongside Dutch) administrative lingua franca on these linguistically diverse islands. In the late 1920s, Indonesian nationalists adopted it as the basis for a shared, standard tongue that would serve as a common medium of communication among the people of the ethnically diverse, geographically far-flung island chain, dubbing the language Bahasa Indonesia.22 The Dutch authorities, however, restricted instruction in schools to regional languages, in furtherance of their divide-and-rule approach.23 In the case of the Philippines, as discussed earlier, there was little in the way of a pre-Spanish conquest, continuous oral or written tradition or early history of territorially extensive state building that might allow its latter-day nationalists to identify with a pre-colonial political or cultural past. By contrast, extensive parts of the archipelago known today as Indonesia had been incorporated into two major indigenous empires, both of them predominantly Buddhist or Hindu–Buddhist, antedating as they did the full permeation of Islam across much of the region: that of Sumatra-based Srivijaya in the eighth to twelfth century CE, and Javabased Majapahit from the late thirteenth to late fifteenth century.24 The decades prior to the Second World War had been marked by half-hearted Dutch efforts (the so-called ethical policy) to introduce progressive reforms to their rule, but unlike the United States in the Philippines, they held out no promise of full independence for the archipelago. The changes they made remained essentially cosmetic, with the granting in 1927 of co-legislative powers (alongside the governorgeneral) to a notionally representative assembly – the Volksraad – that included indirectly elected indigenous representatives while reserving fixed numbers of seats for Dutch and mixed-race delegates who could be counted on to toe the official line. The Volksraad could in any case be overruled by the Dutch-appointed governor-general. The rise of organized political dissent and nationalist movements in the interwar period was countered by active repression on the part of the colonial political police. Nationalist activists and leaders tended to hail from the ranks of those sons of the lower aristocracy in Java and Sumatra who had been

22 23 24

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 132–33. (Bahasa means language.) Ethan Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 105. Ricklefs, Modern Indonesia, ch. 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

271

educated in Dutch-style schools (and often also in universities located in the Netherlands).25 The most significant division that arose among nationalists in the 1930s was that between members of the Parindra Party (the “cooperating nationalists”), who were willing to work within the framework of the Volksraad (even as they began to cultivate friendly ties with Japan), and the “non-cooperating nationalists” (known as pergerakan), who held out for genuine political independence. The most prominent non-cooperators were Sukarno (who went by just the one name) and Mohammad Hatta. These two men were associated with different currents and organizational manifestations of Indonesian nationalism over the course of the late 1920s and early 1930s; at times, these currents converged, at others not. Sukarno cultivated a populist style of charismatic leadership which was aided by his ability to address crowds in Java in his native Javanese – the island’s dominant language – rather than just in the less accessible lingua franca of Bahasa Indonesia. Hatta, who hailed from West Sumatra and had spent years as a student and budding political activist in the Netherlands during the previous decade, espoused a more Western-oriented democratic nationalism. He was more skeptical about the potential rewards of mass mobilization without said masses having first undergone some substantive form of political education. Hatta, who had forged close connections with progressive Dutch thinkers and political activists during his years in the Netherlands, was more deeply committed to anti-fascism than Sukarno, who paid lipservice to such ideological concerns while seeing them as fundamentally immaterial to the anti-colonial cause. This, by many accounts, would lead the more thoughtful Hatta to experience a deeper crisis of conscience than Sukarno did during their wartime period of collaboration with the Japanese occupation authorities.26 During 1933–34, the Dutch authorities cracked down on the noncooperating nationalists, eventually sending Sukarno – whom they had released from an earlier imprisonment less than two years before – into protracted exile in remote parts of the archipelago (first in Flores, later on 25 26

Rudolf Mrázek, Sjahrir, Politics and Exile in Indonesia (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994), 73. J. D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography (New York: Prager, 1972), chs. 5 and 7. Sutan Sjahrir, long a close colleague of Hatta’s on the social-democratic end of the Indonesian nationalist spectrum, continued to vouch for his sincerity of purpose while collaborating with the Japanese. Soetan Sjahrir, Out of Exile, trans. Charles Wolf, Jr. (New York: John Day, 1949), 242. On the fermentation of pre-war and wartime Indonesian nationalist sentiment beyond Java, and on the roles of native Sumatrans such as Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir in the nationalist politics of Java, see Audrey Kahin, Rebellion to Independence: West Sumatra and the Indonesian Polity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 95.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

272

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Sumatra), away from the island chain’s demographic and political center of gravity in Java. Other major figures from that camp, such as Hatta, were exiled under initially much harsher circumstances at a notorious prison camp in New Guinea, although Hatta’s conditions were alleviated as he briefly came to espouse a strongly anti-Japanese position following the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941. It is retrospectively either fitting, ironic, or both, that the Dutch prime minister and minister for the colonies at the time of the crackdown on the non-cooperating Indonesian nationalists was none other than the hard-nosed Hendrikus Colijn, who was to pen a pamphlet advocating some form of Dutch accommodation, in turn, to the seemingly irreversible reality of German imperial hegemony over Western Europe in 1940.27 Both at the time and later, there were those who wondered whether the relatively comfortable locations and conditions of Sukarno’s exile were a reward for gestures of moderation on his part. Notably, three months following his arrest, he had resigned from the non-cooperating nationalist political party (Partindo), which he had led, on the grounds that he no longer shared its principles. This produced a wave of disillusionment with him in nationalist circles. Yet, over the long run, Sukarno’s popular reputation as a selfless nationalist nevertheless grew once more in light of his long exile, which was marked in its final year and a half by his refusal to endorse active support for, or cooperation with, the Dutch even in the face of the global fascist threat, the German occupation of the Netherlands, and the growing likelihood of a Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies.28 Japan’s swift conquest of the archipelago in March 1942 precipitated a dramatic shift in the nationalists’ horizon of expectations. Unlike the Philippines, there was no indigenous army to fight alongside the underprepared Dutch forces, nor was any part of Indonesia the site of a protracted, myth-generating, last-ditch effort to hold off the enemy such as the Battle of Bataan. Dutch domination of the islands simply collapsed like a house of cards, and the triumphant Japanese forces presented themselves as having come to liberate their fellow Asians from the humiliating and exploitative rule of Western imperialism. The Japanese military divided the archipelago into three administrative spheres: the 25th Army ran Sumatra (for the first year, jointly with occupied Malaya);

27

28

Bernhard Dahm, Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, trans. Mary F. Somers Heidhues (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 163–65. On Colijn’s 1940 pamphlet, see Chapter 2 of this volume. Legge, Sukarno, 135–38; Dahm, Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 166–73.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

273

the Japanese navy ran the formerly Dutch portion of Borneo and the resource-rich eastern islands; and Java and adjacent Madura came under the jurisdiction of the 16th Army. It was in Java that the bulk of the Dutch East Indies’ population was concentrated: as of 1940, some 48.4 million people lived there out of a total of 70.4 million across the entire archipelago.29 The 16th Army’s commander during the first eight months of the occupation, General Imamura, took the occasion of his first public decree to describe the purpose of the new military administration as “promoting the welfare of the people of the East Indies, with whom we share a common ancestry.”30 Imamura went on to arrange for the return to Java of key figures such as Sukarno and Hatta, and he empowered his army’s Propaganda Squad of civilian intellectuals and area specialists to find ways of engaging the interest and cooperation of Indonesian nationalists with a view to gaining the trust and cooperation of the population at large.31 The Japanese banned all political parties, but leaders of the movement associated with the pre-war “cooperating nationalists,” the Parindra Party, competed with the former “non-cooperating nationalists” for access to power under the Japanese. Indeed, in their frustration at Dutch rebuffing of their efforts at negotiating Indonesian selfgovernment within the context of a union with the Netherlands, a number of Parindra’s leaders had developed close ties to Japan in the late 1930s and had been involved in the abortive efforts to create a network of independence committees across Java in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese invasion. (The Japanese had dissolved those committees and reinstated Indonesian, and even a few Dutch, civil servants displaced by this early attempt at a socio-political revolution.) It was former leaders of Parindra who dominated the short-lived Three-A Movement that the occupiers created in an effort to mobilize popular support for the idea of a Greater Asia under Japan’s leadership. (The three As stood for Japan’s supposed role as Asia’s light, Asia’s mother, and Asia’s leader).32 The Japanese occupation also created opportunities for Indonesian upward mobility within the administrative bureaucracy, from which most of the Dutch civil servants were soon dismissed, usually 29 30

31

Widjojo Nitisastro, Population Trends in Indonesia (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 1970), 116–17. From Article I of Military Government Decree No. 1, March 7, 1942, as quoted in Matsuki Hidemitsu, The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, War History Series, Vol. 3, compiled by the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan, ed. and trans. Willem Remmelink (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015; first published 1967), 586. 32 The key work on this topic is Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java. Ibid., 163.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

0

Medan

SU

25

TH

AR

M

Y

RA

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

H

1,500

16T

Blitar

Banjarmasin

2,000

A RM Y

S U L AW E S I K I

S L

TIMOR SEA

N

D S

ARAFURA SEA

A

Australia

Portuguese Timor (Port.)

BANDA SEA

U

HALMAHERA

N

Y AV

Map 11 Japanese occupation and administration of the Dutch East Indies, c. 1944.

km 2,500

N AV Y

NUSA TENGGARA

MADURA

J AVA SEA

CELEBES SEA

Philippines (USA)

Makassar

BORNEO Balikpapan

Surabaya

J AVA

Jakarta

Singapore

British Borneo (UK)

Brunei (UK)

J APANESE A DMINISTRATIVE D IVISIONS

1,000

M U

500

d L

INDIAN OCEAN

an

AT A

250

ail Th

Malaya (UK)

SOUTH CHINA SEA

French Indochina (Fr.)

M

u

ine Ter a (A r. o us. ) (Au f Pap s.) ua

NE Ne wG

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

NEW GUINEA

Hollandia (Jayapura)

PAC I F I C OCEAN

Colonial Histories

275

joining the roughly one hundred thousand Dutch internees consigned to wartime detention camps from April 1942 on. The Japanese brought in their own experts to take the very top positions in the administration, but indigenous officials, widely scorned by Indonesian nationalists as colonial collaborators, did now have access to higher positions than they could have held under Dutch rule. For a brief period, an indigenous Indonesian was even appointed mayor of the capital, formerly known as Batavia and now renamed Jakarta – a modification of the site’s precolonial name, Jayakarta. Bahasa Indonesia (still referred to by the Japanese simply as Malay) was introduced as a language of instruction in schools.33 But if such early changes raised some Indonesians’ hopes for a historical pivot towards national uplift under the aegis of a Japanese-led Greater Asia, the harsh reality of the new order proved far different. As early as March 12, 1942, an anonymous commentator in the Propaganda Squad’s Japanese-language newspaper warned that: “If the Indonesians think that just because the Japanese have arrived, they can eat without working for it, they’ve got another thing coming.”34 The immediate context for these ominous words was the explosion of looting that targeted Dutch- and ethnic-Chinese-owned shops, businesses, and homes in towns and cities across Java, as people took the arrival of the Japanese as a green light to do what they liked to those they viewed as alien exploiters and/or suddenly easy targets. Japanese authorities were dismayed by the chaos, and very quickly took harsh steps to impose order. But, viewed retrospectively, the warning that Indonesians “have got another thing coming” takes on a deeper and darker meaning. For on Java alone, some three million Indonesians were to become casualties of the increasingly brutal and rapacious Japanese exploitation of the archipelago’s material and human resources, at a time when the economy was already struggling with the loss of access to the country’s export-commodity markets in Europe and North America.35 On the level of high politics, the situation was also not all cherryblossoms and cream. As in the Philippines, the basic policy of the Japanese military was informed by a November 1941 military planning conference where the decision had been taken to maximize the efficiency of administering, and exploiting the resources of, newly occupied 33

34 35

Ibid., chs. 4–5; Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, “The Indonesian Nationalists and the Japanese ‘Liberation’ of Indonesia: Visions and Reactions,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 1996), 1–18. Unknown author writing in Sekidōhō, March 12, 1942, p. 1, as quoted in Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 81. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, Introduction, 114.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

276

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Fig. 21 Japanese bicycle-mounted troops ride through Jakarta, March 10, 1942. The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images.

territories by maintaining a large measure of continuity with the institutions and indigenous personnel of the Western colonial administrations. Popular sentiment was also to be cultivated, but only insofar as it could be channeled into support for Japanese hegemony. In the Philippines, this had, as discussed earlier, led to the appointment of leading figures among the preexisting, ilustrado, nationalist elite to positions of authority under the new occupation administration. In Indonesia, indigenous members of the bureaucracy were, as mentioned above, given the opportunity for

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

277

some upward mobility amidst the wholesale vacating of hitherto Dutchmonopolized higher-level administrative slots. But whereas in the Philippines, the preexisting American promise of political independence effectively compelled the Japanese to make (and nominally act upon) a similar commitment, in Indonesia, the status quo ante had been characterized by open-ended subjugation to the Netherlands. The Japanese authorities therefore felt much less need to make any early promises other than the negative one of keeping the archipelago free of Western imperialism. Portions of Indonesia were much richer in natural resources (such as rubber and petroleum) than the Philippines were, giving the Japanese an additional incentive to keep their long-term options open. The fact that the archipelago was divided into three military-administration zones, one of which included for a time Malaya, both reflected and reinforced the lack of a coherent, long-range plan regarding the islands’ status, both severally and in relation to one another.36 In their ideological rationalizations, Japanese administrators tended to adopt a condescending paternalism that looked upon the people of the East Indies as sucked spiritually dry by European colonialism and in need of schooling by their Japanese betters, rather than as capable of a rapid transition to self-governance.37 It was particularly galling for Indonesian nationalists to be passed by in 1943 when both Japanese-occupied Burma and the Philippines were granted nominal independence within two months of one another, followed by their leaders’ attendance at the November 1943 Greater East Asia Conference. Being invited to Tokyo in the immediate aftermath of the conference was more humiliating than reassuring for Sukarno and Hatta at a time when the Japanese were still maintaining a ban they had introduced on so much as displaying the Indonesian flag or singing the national anthem.38 Earlier that year, the two had been teamed up by the Japanese with Ki Hadjar Dewantoro, the renowned founder of a secular 36

37 38

Ibid., chs. 3 and 5; William H. Frederick, “Introduction,” in Mohammad Hatta, The Putera Reports: Problems in Indonesian–Japanese Wartime Cooperation, trans. and ed. William H. Frederick (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1971); Shigeru Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants; Java under the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), chs. 1–2. Dower, War without Mercy, 24–25. Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, chs. 5–6; Friend, The Blue-Eyed Enemy, ch. 5. Theodore Friend notes that, during a sojourn in Manila in the course of the trip that took them to Tokyo, the Indonesian nationalist leaders could still see the bunting from the recent Philippine independence celebrations adorning buildings and the national flags flying all over the city. Ethan Mark suggests that the brief initial period of encouraging or tolerating display of the Indonesian flag was likely just the byproduct of Japanese anticipation of possible protracted Dutch resistance which they would have needed indigenous support to defeat. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 56–57.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

278

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

and nationalist-oriented school network, and Mas Mansur, the former chairman of the Muhammadiyah, Java’s influential Islamic modernistreformist association. Together, the four now headed a new organization known as Putera (short for Poesat Tenaga Rakjat, or Center of People’s Power), which effectively supplanted the Three-A Movement.39 Yet, even though it was dominated by the former non-cooperating nationalists, Putera was not given significantly more leeway than its predecessor to function as anything but a mechanism for the amplification of Japanese propaganda at a time when the occupation was shifting into its most brutally exploitative phase. Its formal remit was to serve as “a native movement whose objective shall be to create a powerful new Java as a link in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”40 The most substantive Japanese concession to nationalist sentiments was a telling one: unlike the Three-A Movement, Putera was allowed to exclude ethnic Chinese from the association. Within a year of its launch, Putera, in turn, had been replaced by yet another organization, known as Jawa Hokokai (the Java Patriotic Service Association), which (somewhat like the Kalibapi in the Philippines as well as an equivalent body in Japan itself ) functioned as an even more transparent mechanism for the mobilization and disciplining of bodies and minds on behalf of the ever more desperate Japanese total-war effort.41 As in the Philippines, Japanese forces supplemented their large-scale brutalization of the indigenous Indonesian population with a variety of petty humiliations that stung all the more for their arbitrariness and gratuitousness. The face-slapping meted out to those viewed as insufficiently respectful of Japanese soldiers was particularly galling in the Indonesian setting, given how disrespectful so much as touching another person’s head was considered in the local culture. (Face-slapping was a routine form of on-the-spot disciplining/penalizing of subordinates within the Japanese military, although one can hardly imagine that these recipients of the treatment appreciated it even if it was deemed culturally normative.) Devout Muslims were offended by Japanese attempts to force 39

40

41

Sukarno, Hatta, Dewantoro, and Mansur were known collectively as the Empat Serangkai (the four-leafed clover), and their co-leadership of Putera was supposed to signal the coalescence of Java’s major socio-religious and political currents under the aegis of the Japanese and with a view to the mass mobilization of society. Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1958), 47–51, 74–75, 117. “Constitution of the Movement for the Total Mobilization of the People of Java,” as printed in Jawa Shimbun, March 10, 1943, trans. James Irikura, in Harry J. Benda, James K. Irikura, and Kōichi Kishi, eds., Japanese Military Administration in Indonesia; Selected Documents (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1965), 136. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, ch. 9; Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, ch. 3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

279

Indonesians in various public institutions to bow towards the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, which was seen as indirectly undermining or relativizing the practice of bowing towards Mecca during prayers.42 Among the variety of seemingly arbitrary daily outrages against popular sentiment, possibly most stunning in its sheer self-defeating stupidity was a forced hair-cutting incident at the Medical College in Jakarta. This was the only Dutch-era institution of higher learning allowed to reopen under the Japanese occupation. Its elite group of indigenous students were among the most politically self-conscious, nationalist youths in the country, and, along with students at a number of other institutions, had been encouraged or allowed to develop a corporate identity in the context of a residence hall (asrama). The idea was that they would form part of a corps of highly educated Indonesians ready to lead their society towards modernity under the aegis of a Japanese-controlled Greater Asia. But in practice, members of the asramas were drawn towards more explicitly and avowedly nationalist political agendas. They looked to Sukarno and Hatta for leadership, but also to Sutan Sjahrir, an influential socialist and nationalist leader who avoided being coopted by the Japanese army and cultivated a reputation as a dissenter while stopping short of provoking the Japanese authorities into detaining him.43 The more time passed, the more these students chafed under the strict limitations the Japanese imposed on their activity. They were also unhappy with the quality of instruction by Japanese instructors who had replaced Dutch faculty at the Medical College. It was against this background of frustration that students refused demands that they conform to Japanese notions of disciplined propriety by cutting their hair short. (One’s hair and head were seen as central to one’s dignity in Javanese culture, whereas the Japanese saw a shaved male head as a mark of militarized discipline in service to the empire.)44 In response, in October 1943, Japanese soldiers burst into classrooms without warning and forced students to have their heads shorn by military barbers, literally at gunpoint. Sukarno personally intervened to persuade students to terminate a boycott of classes they organized in response to this incident. But the experience left them bitterly antagonized and politically 42

43

44

Ibid., 255–56. It was only in late 1943 that the Japanese relieved participants in religious meetings of the obligation to perform this ritual. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun, 126. Sjahrir did end up lecturing at the political training school for Indonesians set up by Admiral Maeda’s naval liaison office after the September 1944 Japanese promise of eventual independence. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 44; Mrázek, Sjahrir, 248–51. Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, 187–88.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

280

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

radicalized, rather than miraculously reborn as dutiful, buzz-cut subjects of the Japanese emperor.45 Yet, unlike in the Philippines, no sustained, armed resistance movement arose to challenge the Japanese or those who worked with them or for them. An early effort – pre-equipped by the Dutch – by left-wing Indonesian political activists to form an active underground resistance movement had been nipped in the bud by the Japanese. In later years, there were various minor clashes and some localized, rapidly and ruthlessly suppressed, peasant uprisings in the face of the extraordinarily onerous exactions the Japanese imposed. The most significant armed revolt was initiated in February 1945 by a battalion of the Japanese-trained military force, PETA (short for Pembela Tanah Air – Defenders of the Homeland), stationed in the East Java town of Blitar. The Japanese crushed it rapidly. As to Sjahrir’s devotees, they called themselves an underground, but did not engage in an active campaign of resistance to the occupation, focusing instead on intellectual and political discussions among themselves and networking among like-minded groups in different urban centers.46 It was only at the eleventh hour before Japan’s final defeat in the Pacific War that a substantive shift in the occupiers’ approach began to manifest itself. On September 7, 1944, desperate to mobilize the Indonesian population behind an anticipated campaign to defend the archipelago against an Allied invasion that never materialized, Tojo’s recent replacement as prime minister, Kuniaki Koiso, delivered a speech promising future independence to an Indonesia comprising the entire former Dutch East Indies. The Japanese navy was obliged to abandon its plans for the long-term integration of the eastern islands into Japanese imperial rule, and the 25th Army was in due course brought around to abandoning the idea some of its officers had briefly entertained of eventual separate self-government for a Japanese-dominated Sumatra. These were partition scenarios that Indonesian nationalists such as Sukarno and Hatta had regarded with enormous trepidation, as they flew in the face of their insistence on the fundamental national unity of the linguistically and culturally diverse indigenous inhabitants of the entire archipelago as it had been defined by Dutch colonialists.47 Now, at last, Indonesians were authorized to fly 45 46

47

Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 256–58. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944–1946 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 37–39; Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, 175–77. Anthony Reid and Oki Akira, “Introduction,” in Anthony Reid and Oki Akira, eds., The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected Memoirs of 1942–1945 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 2–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

281

their flag and sing their anthem. While the Japanese continued to drag their feet in practice, they authorized the convening of an Investigating Committee for the Preparation for Independence, in which Sukarno and Hatta took leading roles. The slight opening now created for more open political meetings and deliberation led to contentious and divisive debates between Sukarno and leaders of the nationalist youth. (Pemuda is the Indonesian term for “youth” that took on politicized meaning in this context.) The most immediate issue concerned what sorts of unilateral initiatives were worth taking in the effort to push the matter of independence forward rapidly towards a decisive outcome.48 At one juncture immediately following Japan’s August 15, 1945 surrender to the Allies, pemuda leaders briefly kidnapped Sukarno and Hatta in an effort to push them towards a unilateral declaration of independence. Sukarno finally declared Indonesia an independent republic two days later.49 The Republic of Indonesia thus came into being amidst a highly volatile state of political uncertainty. Sukarno and Hatta’s newly formed cabinet initially governed in name only. The Pacific War had ended, but Indonesia, which had only seen some nine days of major fighting during the entire conflict, now stood on the brink of what was to stretch out into four years of destructive warfare between Indonesians and external forces seeking to determine the archipelago’s political fate, as well as among Indonesians divided over their country’s future. The anomaly of its situation in August 1945 was that, for several months to come, the Japanese were to remain the major foreign armed presence in the country amidst a broader geopolitical context that had been turned inside out and upside down. The terms of the surrender transformed the role of Japanese occupation forces (now designated Japanese Surrendered Personnel) overnight into that of proxies for the very powers they had been fighting to the death, responsible for maintaining order until British forces could arrive to seize control of the archipelago on behalf of the Dutch. By the same token, this transformed framework changed the political calculus for some Japanese officers. Whereas just a few days earlier they had been preparing for a grudging cession of nominal 48

49

Koichi Kawamura, “The Origins of the 1945 Indonesian Constitution,” in Kevin Y. L. Tan and Bui Ngoc Son, eds., Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2019); Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 107–8; Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, ch.1 Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, chs. 3–4. For an intricately detailed attempt to assess the relative importance of Sukarno and Hatta, the nationalist youth (pemuda), and rival Japanese power centers in shaping the course of events during this pivotal moment, see Han Bing Siong, “Sukarno–Hatta Versus the Pemuda in the First Months after the Surrender of Japan (August–November 1945),” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 156, No. 2 (2000), 233–73.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

282

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

independence to an Indonesia whose resources they still looked to mobilize for defense against an Allied invasion, now the prospect of a fully independent Indonesian Republic capable of rebuffing Dutch recolonization efforts must have seemed like the best possible outcome of a generally grim situation. If the dream of a Japanese-led Greater Asia had been lost for the time being, at least the Japanese occupation could then be said to have paved the way for the expulsion of Western imperialism from the East Indies. This set of calculations had – along with the pemuda’s kidnapping gambit – in fact been the backdrop to Sukarno’s declaration of independence. Rear-Admiral Maeda, the head of the Japanese naval-liaison office in Java, who had for some time been working to cultivate cooperative relations with a number of Indonesian nationalists, had made his house available as a safe place (away from the prying eyes of the feared Japanese military police, the Kenpeitai) for Sukarno and his colleagues to draft the declaration of independence. The proclamation was subsequently broadcast over the radio network controlled by the official Japanese news agency, Domei.50 While some Japanese officers thus sought to quietly enable the crystallization of a defiantly anti-colonial Indonesian Republic, others conformed more closely to Allied expectations of them. At the same time, Japanese commanders were obviously reluctant to place their men’s lives at risk merely in order to pave the way for an eventual Dutch reoccupation of Indonesia. The result was a highly ambiguous situation, as the nationalist youth movements eager for an immediate, revolutionary transformation of the status quo organized protests and demonstrations that created the risk of violent confrontation with Japanese forces. Over the weeks that followed, in many locations, Japanese commanders ordered their soldiers to step aside as members of the local populace raised the Indonesian flag over public buildings and seized control of key institutions, whereas in some towns, armed clashes broke out between the two sides. The situation grew yet more fraught when British forces, soon followed by the first Dutch troops, began to arrive, and as Dutch internees freed from captivity began to show up to reclaim their property, in some instances provoking Indonesians by trying to raise the Dutch flag. The worst of the initial wave of violence took place in the city of 50

Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, ch. 10; Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution, ch. 5; Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, ch. 4; translated excerpt from Nishijima Shigetada, Shōgen: Indonesia Dokuritsu Kakumei – Aru Kakumeika No Hanshō [Testimony: Indonesian Independence and Revolution – A Half Life History of a Revolutionary] (Tokyo: Shin Kimbusu ‑Ōrai-sha, 1975) in Reid and Oki, eds., Japanese Experience in Indonesia; Han Bing Siong, “Sukarno–Hatta Versus the Pemuda.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

283

Surabaya, where British-commanded Indian forces ended up fighting a pitched battle to secure control from local nationalists, resulting in thousands of Indonesian casualties and almost two hundred among the British-led troops. In this context, with hot spots flaring up across Java, thousands of Japanese soldiers were obliged to comply with Allied demands that they take an active part in combat operations. At least one set of mutual massacres between Japanese and Indonesian forces took place in the town of Semarang, and Japanese losses in the autumn of 1945 may have slightly exceeded the 627 killed and 300 missing among the mostly Indian, British-led troops.51 The anomalous circumstances of the immediate post-war months in the archipelago thus lent themselves to indigenous resistance to the Japanese on a scale that exceeded any wartime rebellions and may have reflected, among other things, a desire to compensate for the often humiliating experience of wartime subjection to, and both passive and active acquiescence in, Japanese rule. In the final analysis, the British were not really interested in mounting the kind of full-on military campaign that would have been required to crush the independence movement. It ultimately fell to the returning Dutch forces to decide whether to heed British and United Nations calls for negotiation and compromise or to seek to resolve the issue through force of arms. The result was a protracted armed conflict interrupted by periodic truces and attempts at diplomacy. The Dutch objective was to circumscribe and undermine Sukarno’s republic by cultivating local political autonomy under their protection in the parts of Indonesia that lay outside the republic’s areas of immediate control in portions of Java.52 The Dutch political establishment seemed oblivious to the irony of this stubborn effort to reimpose its will on Indonesia just after the Netherlands had been freed from German rule in the name of democracy and national self-determination. As a matter of fact, throughout the Nazi occupation, in its underground publications, the Dutch resistance movement had expressed ongoing commitment to the eventual reassertion of some version of the kingdom’s historic role in the overseas colonies. This was seen as a vital aspect of the Netherlands’ post-war recovery, global standing, and well-being. Substantive debates had revolved over what form that role should take and how reforming the empire into a more egalitarian commonwealth might more effectively serve the interests of metropole and

51

52

John Newsinger, “A Forgotten War: British Intervention in Indonesia,” Race and Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation, Vol. 30, No. 4 (April/June 1989), 51–66, here 60; Han Bing Siong, “Sukarno–Hatta Versus the Pemuda”; Kowner, “The Repatriation of Surrendered Japanese Troops,” 126–29. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution, chs. 6–8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

284

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

periphery alike, rather than over whether colonies should be allowed to go entirely their own way after war’s end. Echoing resistance voices advocating progressive change, the Dutch queen had delivered a radio broadcast in December 1942 from exile in London, in which she expressed her government’s openness to convening a post-war conference devoted to imperial reform, potentially to include some form of self-government for overseas territories in the framework of an overarching commonwealth under the Dutch crown. But this message, delivered from an obvious place of weakness, was far too little and too late from the perspective of most Indonesian nationalists, who had already seen Dutch power on their archipelago collapse ignominiously under Japanese assault.53 For many Dutch at the time, the irony of their position was not as obvious as it might appear to latter-day readers, because so many Indonesian nationalists, Sukarno chief among them, were seen as having shamelessly and enthusiastically collaborated with the Japanese. Their demands for national independence on the basis of democratic principles could therefore be dismissed as hypocritical and opportunistic. In the end, though, yet another level of irony was at play in this situation, for it was precisely the obstinate Dutch effort to break the Indonesian Republic through force of arms that ultimately allowed Sukarno to play the role of courageous fighter for his people’s independence. This retroactively validated his wartime choice to work with the Japanese as the strategically brilliant decision of a far-seeing statesman, a decision that had ended up creating the political foundation for this final battle against Dutch colonizers. Ultimately, the United States’ concern that radical youth movements and Communists posed a worse threat to Western interests than Sukarno’s nationalist revolution proved critical in undermining the credibility and viability of the Dutch military campaign. This led, in December 1949, to a negotiated outcome based on the withdrawal of Dutch forces and international recognition of a federated, independent, Indonesian state. Just a few months later, Sukarno jettisoned the framework of federation in favor of centralized government.54 The political gamble Sukarno had taken in collaborating with the Japanese thus finally paid off. But this was the byproduct of Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War under circumstances which Sukarno is unlikely (despite his retroactive claims to the contrary) to have foreseen. The question of how to understand the political choices made by Indonesian nationalists during the occupation, from their perspectives at the time, will be explored in the following chapter. 53 54

Foray, Visions of Empire, ch. 5 and passim. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution, chs. 11–13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

285

Ukraine The very inclusion of Ukraine55 in the section of this book devoted to wartime occupations in imperial and colonial settings is nothing if not freighted. Describing non-Russian Soviet populations’ relationship with the USSR as that of captive colonial nations with their imperial overlords was a stock feature of the political discourse and ideological claims propagated by right-wing nationalists among Cold War-era émigré populations from the western reaches of the Soviet Union. Many features of such narratives became influential elements of institutionally sanctioned historical accounts in their respective national homelands following the independence of the former constituent republics of the Soviet federation in 1991. The claim that wartime nationalist formations in the region should simply be understood as East European counterparts to the anticolonial liberation movements of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa served to excuse whatever collaboration with the Nazis these organizations may have engaged in. The association of their wartime activities with the fight for decolonization – a cause which the United Nations General Assembly formally embraced in 1960 as foundational for the establishment of a legitimate world order based on self-determination56 – was used to try and downplay the significance of some of these movements’ ideological affinity with, and implication in some of the war crimes of, Nazi occupation forces.57 Having made note of this ideological baggage, surely one can explore the analytical possibilities and limitations of the national-liberation model as applied to political movements in wartime Ukraine without falling into 55

56 57

The rendition of place-names in much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is a notoriously political issue, insofar as different versions reflect the claims of different states and nationalist movements to any given location. I have chosen to be inconsistent in how I approach this, given that consistency in this matter lends itself to favoritism and anachronism. In the cases of some names of geographical features, cities, and regions, I have adopted transliterations reflecting the Russian rather than Ukrainian spelling, given that this was the prevalent way in which those names were rendered at the time and the way many English-language publications until recent years would have referred to these places. Thus: Dnieper, Dniester, and Dniepropetrovsk. In the cases of some other locations, particularly if their symbolic significance to rival claimants was particularly great, I have alternated between two versions. Thus: Kiev/Kyiv (reflecting Russian and Ukrainian pronunciations, respectively) and Lwów/Lviv (reflecting Polish and Ukrainian versions). In the case of the region of Volhynia, the name reflects general usage in English. Mazower, Governing the World, ch. 9. On the propagation of self-justifying and mendacious myths about the wartime activities of the most active Ukrainian nationalist factions, see Per A. Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

286

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

the trap of reproducing their own self-serving propaganda. Indeed, one of the purposes of such an examination – as in the case of Sukarno’s collaborationist nationalism – is to highlight some of the contradictions and paradoxes associated with the embrace of an anti-imperial stance by nationalists whose chances of success hinged on their ability to seize opportunities created by the aggressive expansion of a new imperial hegemon. Describing a movement as anti-colonial in orientation should not be seen as sanctifying it or its choices any more than Claudio Pavone’s adoption of the civil-war paradigm as an instrument for analyzing the 1943–45 conflict in northern Italy legitimizes a neo-fascist understanding of the events in question.58 It is also of cardinal importance, here as in other cases, not to accept uncritically any claim nationalist organizations made to speak for the interests and desires of an entire population, nor to ascribe to such a population collective responsibility for any atrocities committed ostensibly on its behalf. The utility of making the story of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists the narrative thread here lies precisely in the opportunity it creates to highlight the tension between the reductionist claims they made about the nation and the complex and diverse set of conditions, identities, and attitudes they encountered on the ground in the course of their wartime activity. As will be shown in the following chapter, one of the most significant variables affecting the relative popular resonance of their message was the division of the lands they claimed for Ukraine along the lines of past imperial partitions of the region. Although its history of rule by imperial regimes gives wartime Ukraine something in common with these chapters’ Southeast Asian cases, one particularly obvious and major difference should be noted from the outset: that of geographical contiguity between the territory nationalists claimed for Ukraine and the rest of the lands of the neighboring powers (Tsarist Russia/ the Soviet Union and Poland) against which the nationalists pitted themselves. There is a large body of literature that has found value in comparing the territorially contiguous, multinational empires of pre-1914 East Central Europe and the Middle East with the overseas colonial empires carved out by Western powers.59 The former are all commonly referred to as empires on the grounds that they functioned as large, culturally and linguistically highly diverse assemblages of territories and/or populations whose structures of governance and relationships with the central ruling authorities 58 59

See Chapter 4 in this volume. See, for example, Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen, eds., Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

287

were heterogeneous. That said, good comparative history serves to highlight important differences, and one of the most fundamental ones in this instance was that the distinctions between governing cores and territorial peripheries tended to be less clear-cut than in the case of overseas colonial empires. France and Britain could have their metropolitan nationalisms and eat their overseas imperial cakes too; they functioned as nation-states that held overseas colonies. In the cases of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires, the geographical propinquity and, in some cases, cultural connections between “core” and “peripheral” regions and populations were such that gradations and shadings of difference rather than sharp cutoffs had characterized relations and distinctions between them.60 Ukraine constituted a textbook case of such ambiguities. Indeed, prior to 1918, there had never existed a self-described Ukrainian state. In this sense, Ukrainian nationalists had something in common with their Filipino counterparts, who lacked a plausible pre-modern history of unified statehood to serve as a historical scaffolding upon which to construct an archipelago-wide sense of identity. Yet, for all their internal diversity, the indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as a group were geographically far removed, and both linguistically and phenotypically easily distinguishable, from their Spanish and American conquerors, whereas Ukrainian history, religion, and/or language could all be seen, to varying degrees, as parts of a continuum with those of the “core populations” of the Tsarist/Soviet and Polish hegemons that had exercised dominion over most of the region for much of its history. The historic relationship between Ukraine and Russia was particularly closely interwoven. The progenitor of East Slavic statehood in the region was Rus’ – a medieval polity of the tenth to thirteenth century CE with its political and cultural center at Kiev – a city that lay in the heart of what is today known as Ukraine. In the fifteenth century, towards the end of the Mongol–Tatar interregnum, the Grand Duchy of Moscow – located in the northern reaches of the old Kievan state – began to emerge as an increasingly powerful contender for the role of successor to the defunct polity of Rus’, as well as champion of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in the wake of Constantinople’s fall to the Ottomans in 1453. Muscovy’s Grand Duke Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) began using the title of Tsar (derived ultimately from Caesar) to describe himself and started referring to his realm as

60

See Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires, ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

288

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

“all Rus’,” with the Tsardom of Russia then becoming an increasingly common term for the polity.61 Yet extensive swaths of medieval Rus’, including its heartland in latterday Ukraine, long remained outside Muscovite Russia’s control, largely falling instead to the Polish and Lithuanian states which were linked with one another, first through personal union (1385/86) conditional on the Lithuanian elite’s conversion to Catholic Christianity, and eventually in a constitutional union (1569) which produced the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish and Lithuanian components of the Commonwealth came to divide their zones of authority in the east along a boundary roughly corresponding to the border between what are known today as Ukraine and Belarus, respectively. The population was generally referred to as Ruthenian – a name that, like that of Russia, was derived from Rus’. The predominant spoken languages fell along an East Slavic dialect continuum roughly corresponding to that which exists to this day between Ukrainian and Belarusian.62 (Russian is the third major language in the East Slavic grouping.) The portion of this territory held by the Polish kingdom was sometimes referred to as Ukraine, a word derived from the word for frontier, although that term did not become common until the eighteenth century. The population in these eastern territories was predominantly Eastern Orthodox, and the local Rus’ nobility long retained some measure of autonomous authority in their local domains. But in 1596, part of the clergy accepted the Union of Brest, which provided for their church’s reconciliation with the predominant Roman Catholicism of the Commonwealth, on a basis that left much of Eastern Orthodox liturgy and practices (including the marriageability of priests) intact, while the followers of the new Uniate Church (known in modern times as the Greek Catholic Church) recognized the primacy of the Pope in Rome. Tensions between the Uniate and Orthodox churches and their followers became linked to regional differences that have persisted until recently between a predominantly Greek Catholic West Ukraine and largely Orthodox East Ukraine.63 The political and cultural significance of this split was magnified in the course of the region’s seventeenth-century political upheavals, wars, and boundary changes. A key set of players in this turmoil were the Cossacks – quasi-democratic/egalitarian communities of warriors, 61

62

This schematic overview of the region’s pre-modern history draws heavily on Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015), chs. 1–13. See also Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations. 63 Plokhy, Gates of Europe, 67–71. Ibid., ch. 9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

289

freebooters, and farmers or livestock-raisers, many of them escapees (and their descendants) from serfdom, concentrated in the southern steppe zones of what are today Ukraine and southwestern Russia. The Cossack lifestyle may have been influenced by that of the Tatar societies on whose frontiers they dwelled, although their language and culture were predominantly East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox. Their military prowess had the potential to foment chaos even as rival regional powers looked to coopt it on behalf of their own ambitions.64 In 1648, years of encroachment on traditional Cossack autonomies by the Polish–Lithuanian state led to a massive uprising under the leadership of the elected head, or Hetman, of the powerful Zaporozhian Cossacks, Bohdan Khmelnytsky. As he won a series of battles against Polish forces, Khmelnytsky’s advancing armies were supported by a widespread peasant revolt across much of the southeastern Commonwealth. Among the immediate targets of these rebellions were members of the region’s Polish and Polonized nobility, who had consolidated their grip on vast agrarian estates while reducing the peasant population to onerous forms of serfdom and dependence. But it was the region’s Jewish population that Khmelnytsky’s supporters subjected to a particularly murderous rampage, resulting in destruction on a massive scale and the deaths of tens of thousands. As a community and corporate element of society that was by and large barred from owning land or tilling it, Jews figured disproportionately among those who found their economic niche as estate managers for Polish magnates, middlemen between landlords and serfs, and the like. They thus constituted a minority community that was particularly hated by the peasantry for constituting the face, so to speak, of their oppression at the hands of the landowning elite. Jewish communities were relatively defenseless in a situation of state collapse, and the long tradition of Christian antisemitism furnished an element of xenophobic zeal and religious fervor that undoubtedly aggravated the brutality with which Cossacks and peasants turned upon them.65 All of this was to have reverberations far beyond the chaos of the midto late seventeenth century, for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalists romanticized Khmelnytsky’s briefly triumphant Hetmanate, integrating it into a historical narrative in which it was retroactively portrayed as an early manifestation of the Ukrainian national spirit and the first attempt at the creation of a Ukrainian state. In Jewish collective memory, by contrast, his revolt numbered, along 64 65

Shane O’Rourke, The Cossacks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 3–58. Ibid., ch. 2; Plokhy, Gates of Europe, ch. 10.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

290

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

with the massacres of the Crusades and the expulsion from Spain, among the great horrors of Jewish history prior to the Holocaust. From a Jewish perspective, Ukrainian nationalism was thus tinged with antisemitism from its very inception. For their part, Ukrainian nationalists were motivated to play down Khmelnystsky’s responsibility for the massacres, minimize the numbers of Jews murdered, and/or blame the Jews for having brought the disaster upon themselves by collaborating in the oppression of a peasant population retroactively defined as the “Ukrainian people.”66 The success of Khmelnytsky’s uprising was short-lived, as divisions arose among the Cossacks and as Tsarist Russia looked for ways to gain advantage from the Polish–Lithuanian setback. The upshot, after a great deal of further regional warfare, was that the Hetmanate turned to Moscow for protection against a potentially resurgent Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth in exchange for a commitment to place Cossack troops in the service of the Tsar as needed. Over the decades that followed, the Russian government chipped steadily away at the traditional liberties the Cossacks had hoped to retain, ruthlessly suppressing periodic Cossack revolts. From the perspective of longer-term Ukrainian history, the critical element here was the region’s partition into a zone east of the Dnieper river that was incorporated into the Russian state and a western portion that reverted to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.67 In the Russian areas, Russian Orthodoxy naturally prevailed, whereas the Uniate (or Greek Catholic) Church remained dominant among the peasantry of western Ukraine. Following the late eighteenth-century partitions of Poland among the Russian, Prussian, and Habsburg monarchies, the line of division moved yet further west, with what came to be known as Eastern Galicia (in the southwest of today’s Ukraine) becoming the largest chunk of predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, Greek Catholic-populated territory incorporated into the Habsburg state, while most of the rest fell to Russia. It was also in the late eighteenth century that the Russian empire extended its control all along the Black Sea littoral and into Crimea, areas that had until then been held by Tatar polities under the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan.68 In later years, Ukrainian nationalists were to see these as natural extensions of Ukrainian territory, whereas from a Russian 66

67

Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, eds., Ukrainian–Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (Toronto: CIUS Press, 1990). Russian nationalists have also claimed the Cossack legacy as their own, with particular reference to Cossack hosts based in territories such as the Don river basin and points further east. O’Rourke, The Cossacks, Epilogue. 68 Plokhy, Gates of Europe, chs. 10–11. Ibid., ch. 13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

291

imperial and nationalist perspective, they constituted a new, southern portion of Russia. Different portions of Ukraine thus experienced long periods of rule by different regional hegemons, with far-reaching, differential consequences for the development of religious identities, historical memories, political consciousness, and patterns of language dominance. The political and cultural establishment of Tsarist Russia viewed the region that came to be known as Ukraine as an integral part of Russia’s national/imperial heritage, control over which was in fact rather central to the historical legitimacy of the Tsarist regime. The majority of the population in the historically Russian-controlled portions of Ukraine adhered to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the local language was part of an East Slavic linguistic continuum, bearing a close affinity to Russian while also having some features that were borrowed from, or cognate with, Polish, alongside idiosyncratic characteristics of its own. Whether the difference between Russian and Ukrainian was that between standard language and dialect, co-equal dialects, or two distinct national tongues was a matter of subjective perception and elective identity rather than an issue that could be determined on the basis of some objective criterion. From a paternalistic, Moscow-centric perspective, the peasants of Ukraine were “Little Russians,” who, along with their “White Russian” (Belarusian) neighbors to their north, should look to the “Great Russian” culture of the imperial metropole as the defining center of a shared civilization. Over the course of years, plenty of advocates for this approach arose from within the ranks of the educated classes of Ukraine. Others, especially from the mid-nineteenth century onward, worked towards the creation of a literary standard for a distinct Ukrainian language as the medium of expression for what they saw as a separate Ukrainian nation. The ethnodemographic landscape was rendered even more complicated by the influx of millions of Russian speakers into eastern Ukraine as parts of the region were transformed by a fast-developing coal- and iron-based industrialization process from the late nineteenth century on.69 For its part, Habsburg Eastern Galicia remained divided between a largely Ukrainian-speaking, Greek Catholic rural population and towns where ethnic Poles and/or Jews predominated. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Habsburgs tended to favor Galicia’s Polish elites in their aspiration to dominate the region’s politics and administration, but in the later years of their rule, they began to offset Polish influence by making some concessions to the rising demands of a new generation of

69

Plokhy, Gates of Europe, ch. 16.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

292

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Ukrainian nationalists. As John Armstrong has pointed out, the distinctiveness of Ukrainian language and identity was more clear-cut in the context of Habsburg Galicia than in the Russian-controlled Ukrainian lands, in part because (West Slavic) Polish and (East Slavic) Ukrainian are much more sharply different from one another than Ukrainian is from Russian.70 The prevalence of Cyrillic script to write Ukrainian was a further distinction, as was the Uniate or Greek Catholic faith that predominated. Again, however, that denomination also distinguished Habsburg Ukrainians (also known as Ruthenians) from the predominantly Russian Orthodox population across the border in Russian-ruled lands; Russian cultural influence was particularly strong east of the old Dnieper line that had formerly constituted the border between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia.71 It was in the face of these commonalities as well as differences that nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalists began their intellectual, literary, and political activism. In line with similar movements of national “awakening” across nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and beyond, the predominant motifs in their program included the centrality to national identity and consciousness of a distinct language, the idealization of a peasant “folk culture,” the narration of a shared history, and calls for their nation’s socio-economic uplift and political self-determination. Activists on both sides of the Russian–Habsburg border moved back and forth across it and strove towards the creation of a popular consciousness that would straddle the historically arbitrary political frontier. Yet, by virtue of that frontier and its history, they also operated within radically different political and ethnographic environments. East Galician Ukrainian activists saw the region’s Polish elite and urban majority as their main rivals and looked to the Habsburg government to redress their grievances about institutional and administrative arrangements that locked in Polish political and cultural hegemony in Galicia. Ukrainian elites under Russian governance were divided between those who upheld the concept of a separate Ukrainian nation and others who embraced the notion of Ukraine as Little Russia, the history, culture, and fate of which were bound up with those of the Russian empire. Tsarist policies, of course, were directed at the repression of the former school and the reward 70 71

John Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 3rd ed. (Englewood, CO: Ukrainian Academic Press, 1990), ch. 1. On the Tsarist regime’s late-nineteenth-century efforts to suppress the Greek Catholic Church and the influence of Polish landowning elites in territories west of the Dnieper including the eastern part of the Russian partition of Poland, see Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

293

and encouragement of the latter. A number of Ukrainian nationalist activists from the Romanov empire found a welcome refuge in Habsburg Eastern Galicia during the years prior to 1914. On the eve of the First World War, it was this region that many Ukrainian nationalists regarded as their nation’s Piedmont – the equivalent of the northwestern Italian kingdom that had succeeded in unifying Italy under its rule in the 1860s and 1870s. The onset of the First World War set in motion a particularly intense and destructive sequence of occupations of, chaotic fighting in, and regime-imposition upon Ukrainian-populated lands. Indeed, Ukraine forms part of a broader swath of Eastern Europe that has been aptly described as constituting in this period a “shatterzone of empires” (or, even more disturbingly, “the bloodlands.”)72 The designation evokes the repeated experience of these ethnically diverse imperial borderlands as sites of breakdowns in social and political order as a consequence of retreats or collapses of warring hegemonic authorities. The number of regimes and movements that laid claim to parts or all of these territories between 1914 and 1945 is mind-boggling, as is the ever-increasing scale of violence (be it state-directed, military, popular, or inter-communal) that accompanied these waves of conquest and counter-conquest (or liberation, depending on the eye of the beholder). The short version of this history is as follows: Russian forces occupied Habsburg Eastern Galicia in 1914–15 before being forced back by a German-led offensive that pushed deep into Russian imperial territory. In 1917, amidst revolutionary turmoil in Russia, a group of predominantly socially progressive and democratically oriented Ukrainian nationalists organized a government (the Central Rada – Ukrainian for Council) in Kyiv. (Kyiv is the transliteration of the Ukrainian form of Kiev and the version I will largely shift to from this point on). The Rada went from claiming Ukrainian autonomy in 1917 to declaring independence in the face of increasing hostility from the new Bolshevik regime in early 1918. It then negotiated a separate peace and alliance with advancing German forces, only to be deposed by the latter a few weeks after the conclusion of the March 1918 German–Bolshevik Peace of Brest-Litovsk. The Germans

72

Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, “Introduction” in Gerwarth and Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the First World War (reprint ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4; Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Snyder, Bloodlands.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

294

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

replaced the Rada with a military dictatorship under a self-styled Hetman and former Tsarist army officer, General Pavlo Skoropadsky.73 Although Skoropadsky’s regime obviously served as a puppet government for the German military, which was focused on extracting maximal grain resources from the region, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had created a precedent by formalizing the independence of Ukraine (alongside some of its neighbors) with Berlin’s support and the nominal agreement of Bolshevik Moscow. This was an early example of what was to become a twentieth- and twenty-first-century commonplace whereby an expansionist power extended its sphere of control by ostensibly sponsoring the selfdetermination of a nation rather than by outright territorial annexation. The fact that Germany was defeated in the west within eight months of its victory in the east, and consequently obliged to withdraw from all the lands it had occupied, meant that negative memories of the German military’s intrusive, perfidious, and hypocritical approach to Ukrainian “independence” could be readily overshadowed by other considerations. In retrospect, what latter-day advocates of Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Germany could choose to highlight was the fact that it was the context of German victory in 1918 that had temporarily forestalled a Bolshevik advance from the east and allowed for the brief persistence of an officially sovereign Ukrainian nation-state. The withdrawal of Germany and its allies from the region in the wake of the western armistice created an opening for a resurgence of the Rada’s progressive nationalists, who deposed Skoropadsky and organized themselves in a government calling itself the Directory. Given the ongoing state of warfare with the Bolsheviks, as well as growing hostilities with antiBolshevik forces led by former Tsarist officers, the Directory’s authority soon came to be overshadowed by the role of its military commander, Symon Petliura. Petliura was ultimately named head of state of a Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR according to its Ukrainian acronym). His forces committed a notorious series of massacres of Jewish communities, often targeted on the notion that Jews were all Bolsheviks and Bolshevism was led by “the Jews.” The atrocities flew in the face of Petliura’s public opposition to antisemitism and his government’s formal embrace of minority rights, including some form of Jewish national autonomy, and its inclusion of Jewish ministers. Yet Petliura did little to intervene in real time with the officers under his command in order to prevent or halt the widespread bloodshed. Roughly a hundred thousand Jews are estimated to have perished as a result of the violence directed at them by various Ukrainian, Polish, anti-Bolshevik Russian, and even Bolshevik armies and 73

Plokhy, Gates of Europe, ch. 18; John Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), chs. 2–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

295

militias – as well as opportunistic civilian mobs – contesting control of the territories of what is today Ukraine during 1918–21.74 In Eastern Galicia, Ukrainian nationalists declared a West Ukrainian People’s Republic, which they attempted to defend against the hostile forces of the newly independent Polish republic by a pro forma merger with Petliura’s republic. Petliura ultimately cut a deal with Poland at the West Ukrainians’ expense, ceding Eastern Galicia to Warsaw in return for a Polish military alliance against the Bolsheviks advancing from the east. Nothing could have highlighted more dramatically the divergent priorities and interests that separated formerly Habsburg Ukrainian nationalists from those who hailed from the Russian empire. In the event, Petliura’s gamble failed to pay off. The Soviet Red Army advanced against joint Ukrainian–Polish forces, briefly threatening to take Poland’s capital, Warsaw, before a resurgent, French-advised Polish military regained the initiative. The 1921 Treaty of Riga which ended the Polish–Soviet war left both formerly Habsburg Eastern Galicia and formerly Tsarist-held Volhynia (as well as mostly Belarusian-populated areas further north) in Polish hands, while the Bolsheviks emerged as masters of the remainder of formerly Russian-controlled Ukrainian lands.75 Was interwar Ukraine a nation that was repartitioned and colonized by two rival imperial powers? That is one way of looking at it, but any one characterization carries with it a great deal of ideological baggage and inevitably obscures all manner of ambiguities and complexities. For one thing, the extent to which the concept of Ukrainian nationhood had gained mass support among the region’s predominantly rural masses remained unclear throughout this period. Petliura’s regime had depended heavily on regional warlords, its authority contested by Ukrainians who flocked to the standards of Nestor Makhno’s anarchist insurgents, Bolsheviks, or others. For most peasants, promises of land reform were far more compelling than visions of national selfdetermination, the only question being which movement or regime was likeliest to deliver on any such promises. The Bolsheviks’ victory allowed them to actually follow through on the commitment to land reform more fully and systematically than had been possible for the Central Rada or the Directory. To be sure, the Soviet regime later went on to wage brutal war on the peasantry in the form of the violent agricultural collectivization drive of the early 1930s and the devastating famine it caused. (See p. 301.) But in so doing, it did battle against Russian peasants as well as 74 75

Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt, 2021), 5, 93–181, 238–43. Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations, ch. 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

296

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Ukrainian ones. In the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the Stalinist machine devoured its own elites. The totalitarian ambitions and selfconsuming dynamics of the Stalinist state were such that it was hard to say who constituted its ruling core and who its colonized subalterns beyond any frozen moment in time. Although it hardly exonerates them from accusations of imperialism, it must be noted that neither the Polish nor the Soviet state described itself as an empire; rather, each of them in its own way claimed to be its opposite. Poland was a republic which presented itself as the embodiment of the Polish nation’s right to self-determination. The major urban centers of Eastern Galicia were, as noted earlier, predominantly populated by people who were marked by language and (Roman Catholic) religion as Polish, with large Jewish minorities and smaller Ukrainianspeaking, Greek Catholic minorities. Ukrainians, however, constituted the overwhelming majority of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia’s rural populations and thus an overall majority of the population in the southeastern and central-eastern lands of Poland as a whole. The fact that the Polish republic was based on the concepts of national self-determination and popular sovereignty actually served to undercut Ukrainian activists’ aspirations to some form of self-governance or at least a significant degree of control over institutional mechanisms of cultural production and linguistic perpetuation. The government in Warsaw, which effectively became autocratic from 1926 on, disregarded many aspects of the commitments it had made to Allied governments in the aftermath of the First World War regarding minority rights. These had included promises to guarantee language and cultural rights (along with full civil rights) for the roughly 30 percent of its population who did not identify as Polish, as well as to grant regional autonomy to Eastern Galicia in exchange for international recognition of its eastern borders. The regime’s actual policies in the Kresy (the “Borderlands,” as the eastern swath of the country’s territory was known) included the manipulation of land-reform efforts in ways that favored ethnically Polish settlers from elsewhere in the country – much as Wilhelmine Germany had once encouraged German colonization of that country’s Polish-majority borderlands. Ukrainian-language schools were starved of resources to the advantage of Polish-language schools. In these and other ways, Warsaw’s governance of the Ukrainian-populated central and southern portions of the Kresy was clearly aimed at undermining the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building efforts.76 Those efforts had flourished much more freely 76

Plokhy, Gates of Europe, 241. A qualified exception to this pattern was a more culturally tolerant approach in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Volhynia. This was part of the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

297

in Eastern Galicia under the auspices of the supranational Habsburg imperial authorities. As in the case of some other Habsburg successor states, the fact that Poland defined itself as a nation-state thus actually compromised the situation of minorities who were not seen, or did not choose to identify themselves, as members of the nation-state’s dominant or core ethnic group. The inability of legal, socially, and politically progressive Ukrainian political parties such as the Ukrainian National Democratic Association (Ukrainian acronym: UNDO) to gain substantive redress for grievances strengthened the hand of illegal nationalist organizations. Notable among these was the Ukrainian Military Organization (known by its Ukrainian acronym of UVO), a group founded by veterans of the military formations of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), which carried out sporadic acts of violence and assassinations of Polish officials in the 1920s. In 1929, UVO merged with a number of other movements, forming the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The OUN sought to sideline the exiled government of the short-lived UNR of 1918–20 and to claim the mantle of nationalist leadership with an ultimate view to creating an independent Ukraine across all the territories (encompassing parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Soviet Union) where ethnic Ukrainians formed a majority of the population. Moreover, it set out to do so on the basis of a fascist-style commitment to authoritarian politics and integral nationalism in which the ends justified the means. As an underground formation, the OUN could not contest elections and it remained a far smaller organization than those parties and institutions dedicated to advancing Ukrainian interests through legal and democratic means. But by resorting to sensational attacks, including the assassination of Poland’s interior minister in 1934 as well as the targeting of moderate Ukrainian educators and public figures, it was able to have a disproportionate impact on politics in ethnically diverse Eastern Galicia, provoking repressive countermeasures by the Polish state and contributing to a classic dynamic of escalating conflict and inter-ethnic polarization.77 There are some parallels here

77

Polish state’s and provincial governor’s attempt to reduce the appeal in the region of Galician-based Ukrainian nationalists by fostering a Volhynian regional identity that embraced the multiple ethnic traditions of its population, including that of the majority Ukrainians, while trying to frame the dynamics of inter-ethnic relations in the province as a local variation on the theme of an inclusive yet actively “civilizing” Polish national state. Kathryn Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), ch. 6. Myroslav Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), ch. 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

298

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation EE

SE

N ORTH S EA

DK

LV

Borders c.1925

LT

Soviet Union

dz

Germany

BE

Pol and

LU

France

Ukrainian SSR

CS

CH

Austria

HU

I ta ly

S EA OF A ZOV

Romania Yu g o s l av i a

FR

B LACK S EA

Bulgaria IT

AL

M EDITERRANEAN S EA

Tu r k e y

GR

Warsaw

Abbreviations: AL: Albania BE: Belgium CH: Switzerland CS: Czechoslovakia DE: Denmark DK: Germany DZ: Danzig EE: Estonia FR: France GR: Greece HU: Hungary IT: Italy LT: Lithuania LU: Luxembourg LV: Latvia NL: Netherlands SE: Sweden

DE

NL

Byelorussian SSR

Poland

i

Ukrainian SSR

Kiev/ Zhytomyr/ Kyiv Zhitomir

Kraków Lwów/Lviv

Soviet Union

ii

Czechoslovakia

iii

iv

Hungary

Cernăuți/ Chernivtsi/ Chernovtsy

Romania 0

50

100

200

300

400

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

km 500

I: Polish-ruled Volhynia (Wołyń Voivodeship) II: Eastern Galicia (Lwów, Stanisławów, and

III: Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia IV: Northern Bukovina

Tarnopil Voivodeships)

Map 12 Heavily Ukrainian-populated borderlands in interwar East Central Europe.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

299

with the position and role of Croatia’s Ustaša before the war (see Part II of this book), although in the OUN’s case, the regional leadership in Eastern Galicia tended to be even more radical and extremist than the older, top-level leaders of the organization operating from places of exile such as Italy and Germany. Leaders of the OUN and Ustaša were, in fact, in friendly communication with one another during the 1930s, and members of both organizations participated jointly in paramilitary training in Fascist Italy.78 By the time of Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland, the OUN’s leadership had aligned itself quite closely with Nazi Germany, whose authorities allowed it over the following two years to engage in some organizational and planning activities on the territory of German-occupied Poland (known as the Generalgouvernement). In 1940, a political impasse between two rival leaders, Andrii Mel’nyk (from what had been the OUN’s exiled leadership) and Stepan Bandera (a leader of the Eastern Galician “Homeland Executive” who had, from 1934 until shortly after the onset of the war, been imprisoned for his involvement in the assassination of Poland’s interior minister), led to the OUN’s split into two factions, known as OUN-M and OUN-B after their leaders’ initials. Bandera’s group, which reestablished its dominance in Eastern Galicia following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, espoused a radical doctrine of political voluntarism and commitment to action on behalf of national liberation at any cost. Mel’nyk’s OUN-M adopted a more gradualist approach, based on the hope that patient accommodation to German policy would serve Ukrainian nationalist interests in the medium to long term, even if aspirations to immediate independence were frustrated. The two factions were to compete with one another, often quite ruthlessly and violently, in the course of the German occupation of Soviet Ukraine. For their part, the Nazis soon banned OUN-B, forcing it underground, later going on to severely curtail public activities on the part of OUN-M.79 The status of Ukrainians in the Soviet sphere presents an even more complex and confusing situation than that prevailing in Poland. For the Soviet Union, of course, did not define itself as an empire any more than Poland did. But it also did not present itself as a nation-state.80 It was 78 79 80

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist – Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2014), 71–76. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 4–5; David R. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), 120. For a useful comparative analysis, see Peter Blitstein, “Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in its Comparative Context,” Slavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer 2006), 273–91. Blitstein argues that by 1938, when

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

300

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

precisely in order to counter the threat that nationalist separatism potentially posed that, in the wake of the monstrously destructive Russian Civil War, Lenin had pushed in favor of formally framing the world’s first Communist state as a federation of self-governing national republics – a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This constitutional set-up was designed to defuse suspicions among the non-Russian nationalities, which constituted just under half of the country’s population according to the 1926 census,81 that the Moscow-based regime was a new incarnation of the old Russian empire. In the course of the 1920s, Soviet authorities had actively promoted the teaching and official use of nonRussian indigenous languages and favored members of each republic’s (or smaller administrative unit’s) eponymous nationality for ascent up that unit’s ladder of socio-economic and administrative opportunity. The policy was premised on the notion that a diversity of national forms could all serve as effective vectors for the communication of homogeneous socialist content; moreover, the Soviet government’s notional ethnofederalism was offset by the Communist Party’s monopoly on legitimate political power and its ruthless exercise of centralized, top-down political authority over the entire country.82 Nonetheless, in this context, Ukrainian cultural and educational institutions flourished in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (renamed as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic [SSR] in 1937) of the 1920s, with the active encouragement and support of the republic-level Communist Party leadership. By promoting use of Ukrainian as the language of instruction in school, and as a medium of journalistic and literary production and administrative communication, Soviet policy in the 1920s served to advance key cultural features of any Ukrainian nationalist agenda more than any nonCommunist Ukrainian political movement had ever managed to do. Part of the intention here was not just to undercut resentful perceptions of the Bolsheviks as practitioners of a revamped version of chauvinistic Russian imperial nationalism; it was also to advertise the virtues of the Soviet system abroad to communities of co-ethnics beyond the USSR’s borders – notably in Poland’s Kresy, where the contrast between a seemingly progressive and nurturing Soviet nationalities policy and the

81 82

Stalin’s regime made the study of Russian (promoted as a lingua franca for the USSR) a universal requirement in schools, the Soviet Union was beginning to approximate the model of the East European nationalizing state. Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946), 55. Hirsch, Empire of Nations; Martin, The Affirmative-Action Empire; Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), 414–52.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

301

Polish government’s marginalization of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnolinguistic identities appeared quite stark. Stalin pivoted away from the substance of this policy, while preserving its outward shell, in the course of the 1930s. Suspicious of the long-term, separatist potential of Ukrainianization efforts spearheaded by the Communist leadership of the Ukrainian SSR, he reversed course and set in motion a purge of the local party and administrative apparatus. This dynamic came to a head in the context of the massive violence and artificial famine associated with the ruthless Soviet drive to collectivize agriculture in the early 1930s, in the course of which the rural population of Ukraine suffered disproportionately. This was partly due to the fact that the Ukrainian SSR’s “black-earth” soil constituted the Soviet Union’s agricultural heartland, exports from which were vital to the accumulation of the foreign currency needed to help drive the frantic industrialization campaign of the First Five Year Plan (1928–32). Horrendous fatality rates associated with the artificial famine also beset Russian-populated agricultural lands, while estimates of the proportion of ethnic Kazakhs who died of famine-related causes in the course of their forced conversion from a pastoral-nomadic to agricultural lifestyle during these years range as high as 40 percent and more.83 Yet there is reason to think that Stalin’s particular preoccupation with the political dangers he saw as latent in the Ukrainianization policies of the 1920s may have reinforced the brutality of Soviet policies in Ukraine. Some historians see the Soviet regime’s conduct as having been intentionally genocidal towards Ukrainians. The famine that is estimated to have taken as many as 3.9 million lives in the Ukrainian SSR, out of a population of more than 31 million, has come to be commemorated in Ukrainian nationalist historiography as the Holodomor – the “death by hunger” that functions in Ukrainian national historical memory as a counterpart to the Holocaust.84 Stalinist atrocities were certainly grist for the OUN’s propaganda mill, validating their contention that the Ukrainian SSR’s formal autonomy had never been anything more than a transparent façade for the reestablishment of oppressive “Muscovite” imperial rule in new form. The OUN looked to fascist ideologies as an attractive model for the fashioning of a ruthless, new nationalist vanguard that would be better able than

83 84

Nazira Nurtazina, “Great Famine of 1931–1933 in Kazakhstan: A Contemporary’s Reminiscences,” Acta Slavica Japonica, Vol. 32 (2012), 105–29. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Anchor, 2017), 333; Snyder, Bloodlands, ch. 1; Plokhy, Gates of Europe, ch. 21. Estimates of the number of famine victims remain very rough and subject to contestation and revision.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

302

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

the post–First World War generation of activists to follow through on the potential of Ukrainian national liberation. And it came to see in Nazi Germany a potential ally in the pursuit of the OUN’s ambitions in the face of Polish and Soviet power. The period 1917–20 had been the unsuccessful trial run for Ukrainian nationalism. The next time would be different. The initial phase of the Second World War in Europe flew in the face of such scenarios. Germany’s rapid victory over Poland in 1939 was a welcome development, but of course it came in the context of the Nazi– Soviet Non-Aggression Pact which provided for the country’s partition between the ideological foes who had unexpectedly turned into de facto allies. The agreement allowed Stalin to incorporate Poland’s Kresy into the Soviet Union. Moscow presented its conquests as victories for the self-determination of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples. For the Stalinist regime, it was important to follow through performatively on the claim that its expansion was not imperialist in nature, somewhat analogously to the Japanese authorities’ preoccupation with persuading the world and themselves that they were building, not just another empire, but a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Considerable resources were accordingly spent on mobilizing and compelling mass participation in the rigged October 1939 elections of two regional assemblies which duly voted in favor of formal unification with the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs, respectively. (Romania was also forced to cede the northern part of Bukovina – to the south of Eastern Galicia – to Soviet Ukraine at this time.) The local Polish population – whose loyalties were assumed to lie disproportionately with the freshly obliterated Polish republic – was subjected to a particularly harsh regime of surveillance, repression, forced relocation, and – in the notorious case of thousands of captured military officers – mass, extra-judicial execution. The overwhelmingly Ukrainian peasant population was told their Soviet brethren had arrived to liberate them from their historic yoke of oppression at the hands of Polish landlords. Yet whatever favorable impression this approach may have made on certain segments of East Galician or Volhynian society was offset by the initiation of agricultural collectivization efforts and the use of Stalinist police-state methods to identify and suppress any autonomous expressions of Ukrainian national or political identity.85 By the time of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, tens of thousands of western Ukrainian political 85

Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002; first published 1988), 112–13 and passim. Collectivization was still in its initial stages by the time Germany

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

303

prisoners were languishing in Soviet prisons – many of them to be murdered at the last moment before the Soviet retreat. Germany’s rapid 1941 conquest and occupation of most of Ukraine (alongside Romanian occupation of a southern strip extending to the Black Sea port of Odessa86) was therefore initially greeted with open arms by many Ukrainians. Leaders and activists of the OUN-B and OUN-M based in German-occupied Poland quickly fanned out across Ukrainian cities and towns, setting up local offices and gaining control of some municipal organizations. On June 30, 1941, finding inspiration in the Germans’ welcoming of the creation of Slovak and Croatian client states, OUN-B leader Iaroslav Stetsko organized a meeting in Lviv which issued a declaration of Ukrainian independence. This move received the public support of the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop, Andrey Sheptytskyi. (Sheptytskyi was eventually to express concern – although generally not in public – about the mass murders of Jews and, later, Poles by nationalist extremists.87) In Ukraine’s case, however, national independence actually went far beyond anything Nazi occupation authorities were willing to condone, and the OUN-B was outlawed a couple of months later. OUN-M, characterized by greater caution and gradualism in its approach, was permitted to operate openly for some months further, but its public activities were also finally suppressed in November 1941. Moreover, as in the case of Indonesia under the Japanese, the lands claimed by Ukrainian nationalists were not even integrated under one cohesive structure of authority. Instead, Eastern Galicia was incorporated into the Generalgouvernement – the Nazi civil administration that ran the parts of Poland not directly annexed into Germany; most of the rest of Ukraine came under a separate Nazi civil administration known as Reichskommissariat Ukraine; areas in the east that lay closer to the front lines for much of the war remained under the direct control of the German military; the “Transnistrian” (beyond the river Dniester) coastal

86 87

occupied the region in 1941, which was consequential for relations with the new occupiers, whose preservation of kolkhozes and other forms of collective agriculture in much of pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine contributed to the alienation of that region’s rural population. Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 63. See Vladimir Solonari, A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). Tarik Cyril Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 123–24.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

304

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

strip running from the old Romanian border to Odessa stayed under Romanian occupation.88 Some German authorities (particularly among the more pragmatic elements in the Wehrmacht and in Alfred Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) would have liked to explore the possibility of working towards the creation of a Ukrainian nationalist puppet state, much as had been experimented with during Germany’s earlier occupation of the region in 1918. This was opposed by Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, who was more excited by the prospect of colonizing the region with German settlers who would exploit those Ukrainian peasants who had not been starved to death by the end of the war as a modern-day population of helots. And while the head of the Ukrainian Reichskommissariat, Erich Koch, technically reported to Rosenberg’s ministry, he was an old East Prussian Gauleiter (Nazi Party regional leader) who was accustomed to report directly to the Führer, aligned himself with Himmler’s position, and in fact succeeded in securing Hitler’s support against Rosenberg.89 Koch’s attitude to the Ukrainians was summed up in the notorious sentence attributed to him: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.”90 In contrast to the more culturally accommodationist policies towards Ukrainians in the Generalgouvernement (including, as of late 1941, Eastern Galicia), Koch’s administration shut down Ukrainian educational institutions other than four-year primary schools and certain technical schools and university-level departments of medicine, agriculture, and the like. Ukrainians were allowed to play administrative roles only at the most local level, although this did include the office of mayor in many towns and major cities.91 The uncompromising implementation of Nazi racial ideology thus undercut the possibility of playing effectively on widespread resentment of the Soviet regime in the wake of the 1932–33 famine and the brutality of the collectivization campaign. Indeed, much as their propaganda held forth the promise of reversing Stalinist brutality against the Ukrainian peasantry, in practice, the Germans tended to leave Soviet collective

88

89 90 91

Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 4–5; Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 196–200. On SS activities in organizing ethnic German communities and murdering Jews in Romanian-occupied Transnistria, see Eric C. Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (London: Macmillan, 1957), ch. 8. Ibid., 167; Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 37. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 5 and 9; Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 158–60.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

305

Abbreviations: R e i c h s k o m m i s s a r i at Ostland

Lokot' Autonomy

Lokot'

Germany

BG: Bulgaria SA: Serbia SK: Slovakia

Warsaw

Soviet Union

R

h

c

Lviv/Lwów

ei

General G ov e r n m e n t ( Po l a n d )

Rivne

sk

Kyiv/Kiev

om

Incorporated into Gen. Govt.

SK

mi

Zhytomyr/ Zhitomir

ss Tr a

ns

ni

iat

s

pro/

Dni

eper

R.

Dnipro/Dniepropetrovsk

Ukraine

tr

ia

H u n g a ry

Cernăuți/ Chernivtsi/ Chernovtsy

ar

Kharkiv/Kharkov

Dni

*

Chișinău/ Kishinev

Odessa

S EA OF A ZOV

Romania SA 0

B LACK S EA

BG 100

200

400

km 600

© G. Wallace Cartography & GIS, 2022 Map by Geoffrey Wallace

Area under German military administration The area overlaid in dark gray indicates the borders of the Ukrainian SSR in late 1940, after Poland’s partition between Germany and the Soviet Union, the creation of the Moldavian SSR, and the Soviet annexation of territory from Romania (which also included areas not incorporated into Ukraine and therefore not marked on this map). * Transnistria (or the Transnistria Governorate) was composed of parts of the Moldavian and Ukrainian SSRs. It was administered and occupied by Romania, but never formally annexed.

Map 13 Occupied Ukraine, mid-1942.

farms intact, simply coopting them into their own system of rapacious exploitation. The fact that the manpower-strapped Germans were less efficient than the Soviets had been in their system of surveillance and control of the agricultural sector may have contributed to a slight overall

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

306

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

improvement in nutrition levels among the peasantry – a marginal advantage offset by the ever-increasing dragooning of the population into forced labor in Germany. In a reversal of the pattern prevalent during the famine of the early 1930s, it was urban centers – Kiev/Kyiv in particular – that suffered from lethal levels of malnutrition under Nazi policies that redirected agricultural surpluses to German needs while deliberately starving the “racially undesirable” locals.92 In this part of the world, inhabited by Slavs whom Nazi ideologues despised as racially inferior, the policies adopted by German occupiers were thus very different from those they pursued in Western European countries (as well as Germans’ approach to the same region during the First World War). The Ukrainian case also seems to stand in stark contrast to Japan’s willingness to play with the creation of “independent” client states, or at least to cultivate the support of nationalists, in parts of Southeast Asia. That said, though, as with the rivalry between the Japanese army and navy in Indonesia, intra-German rivalries and differences created some potential room for maneuver for Ukrainian nationalists – as did the Germans’ need for native-language speakers to aid in translation, communication, and local policing and administration.93 Even as millions of Ukrainians fought as members of the Soviet armed forces (and of Soviet partisan formations fighting behind German lines) against the Nazi invaders, Ukrainian collaboration with the German occupation took a variety of forms. Most notoriously, Ukrainian volunteers were readily drawn into German-organized auxiliary police formations that took a major hand in the implementation of the Naziorchestrated genocide against the region’s large Jewish population.94 Two armed volunteer formations, the Nachtigall and Roland battalions, drawn mostly from the OUN, fought alongside German forces during the invasion of this region of the Soviet Union. Here too, as will be discussed in the next chapter, there was a connection to ethnic violence.95 Some members of the OUN, especially of its Mel’nyk faction, were able to attain and retain positions of administrative authority in local and municipal government and to gain positions with newspapers in

92

93 94

Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, chs. 5–7. Areas beyond the Reichskommissariat under military control did not necessarily fare better in this respect: in the military-run city of Kharkov/Kharkiv, for instance, the annual mortality rate increased more than fivefold under Wehrmacht administration. Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2011), 199. On the “bureaucratic feudalism” that beset Nazi governance of occupied European lands, see Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, ch. 8. 95 Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 69. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 190.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Colonial Histories

307

some regions and cities well after the suppression of their organization as such. And as the fortunes of war began to turn against the Germans in 1943, the German military and even the SS became open in practice to renewed cooperation with OUN activists. At this stage, Heinrich Himmler himself approved of the creation of an ethnic Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS. It is also telling that even after the repression of the OUN-B, its leader, Stepan Bandera, was initially placed only under house arrest in Berlin, then released, then detained once again and placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but under special conditions that ensured his survival in relative comfort until his release in the autumn of 1944.96 All this belies the alternative narrative that the OUN-B itself began to create, starting with its Third Extraordinary Grand Assembly, held underground in August 1943. With an eye to currying favor with the Western Allies who appeared likely to emerge from the war as its victors, the organization now officially distanced itself from the fascist ideological orientation it had earlier espoused, and began to downplay its hostility towards Ukraine’s Jews.97 There is no question that, following their suppression of the OUN-B and OUN-M, the Nazis arrested and executed significant numbers of the organizations’ activists. But even though OUN pamphlets at times described the organization as now committed to the liberation of Ukraine from Soviets and Nazis alike, the leaders of 96 97

Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 7 and 9. Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism, 65; Rudling, “The OUN,” 14; Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussions about Jews, 1929–1947,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 39, No. 3 (May 2011), 315–52, here 344. At its Second Congress, held in Cracow in April 1941, the OUN-B had taken a public stance that accused the Soviets of cynically exploiting popular antisemitism among Ukrainians and encouraging pogroms against Jews in order to divert attention from the central evil of the “Muscovite–Bolshevik” regime. But in virtually the same breath, the statement described Soviet Jews as “the most faithful prop of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine.” It went on to say that “the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists combats the Jews as a prop of the Muscovite–Bolshevik regime, while simultaneously making the masses conscious of the fact that Moscow is the principal enemy.” The quotation from the April 1941 OUN-B Congress resolution is taken from Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl, “Introduction,” in Kiebuzinski and Motyl, eds., The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 58, n. 97. Kiebuzinski and Motyl make much of the claim that this language indicates “violence [against Jews] was not part of … [the OUN-B’s] declared program.” Ibid., 58–59. I find this a baffling inference; in my own reading of it, the passage quoted above effectively justified violence against Jews in words that can hardly even be considered coded, only making the fine rhetorical distinction that “combating” the Jews should function as an expression or extension of, rather than diversion from, the struggle against Soviet Communism. For a similarly skeptical take on the Second Congress’s resolution, see Amar, Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, 100, n. 71.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

308

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

both OUN factions clearly continued throughout to see a Soviet victory as by far the worst of possible evils. And though they periodically engaged in armed clashes with German forces, the OUN-B and its military arm – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA by its Ukrainian initials – were consistently much more committed to fighting Soviet partisans and armed forces, and to engaging in ethnic warfare with Polish resistance organizations. This culminated in an orchestrated campaign of massacres and ethnic cleansing directed against the Polish civilian population in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. UPA forces were also implicated in a variety of antisemitic atrocities.98 In the end, of course, Soviet victory over the German invaders was absolute, and the UPA insurgency that continued to simmer in remote parts of western Ukraine after the war was completely extinguished by the early 1950s. The territorially expansive Soviet Ukraine of 1939–41 was reinstated as a constituent member of the USSR, and national independence did not materialize until the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991. But this seemingly straightforward narrative of the restoration, in 1945, of the status quo ante of 1940–41 (with the further incorporation of formerly Czechoslovak-ruled Transcarpathia into Soviet Ukraine) papers over important questions to be addressed in the next chapter. How did Ukraine’s regionally divergent legacies of exogenous rule shape popular responses to the German invaders (and to the OUN’s ideology and propaganda)? And what impact did the extraordinarily turbulent and violent sequence of wartime occupations have on the dynamics of interethnic relations in Ukraine and, ultimately, on its very ethno-demographic composition?

98

For a relatively early example of an English-language scholarly work that portrayed the OUN factions and the UPA as national-liberation movements pure and simple, avoiding all mention of their involvement in persecutions and atrocities and even claiming that UPA enjoyed significant Jewish support, see Ihor Kamenetsky and Roman Smal-Stocki, Hitler’s Occupation of Ukraine, 1941–1944: A Study of Totalitarian Imperialism (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1956), esp. 69–71.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

8

The Ghosts of Colonialisms Past and the Weight of Occupations Present

Introduction The selection of July 4 as the date for the Philippines’ official transition to independence in 1946 speaks volumes about the ambiguity of that event. The deliberate synchronization of independence days, agreed upon more than a decade ahead of time, was a reflection of the officially amicable basis for the Americans’ surrender of their sovereignty over the islands. (Indeed, as noted in Chapter 7, the previous decade’s push to set a firm timetable for the separation had been initiated by Washington.) The successful culmination of this process could serve to retroactively validate the United States’ portrayal of its role in the Philippines as sincerely benevolent, in keeping with the myth of American exceptionalism and in supposed contrast to the more exploitative and repressive conduct of other colonial powers. And just as the Philippines struck out on its own, the auspicious calendrical convergence between the two countries’ major secular holidays could serve as a reminder that their political separation did not constitute a parting of ways. Whenever Filipinos would celebrate their own independence day, they would effectively be reaffirming their ongoing historic connection to a United States to which they “owed” their own constitutional principles, political culture, and ideological values. As it turned out, the subservient overtones of this awkwardly intimate celebratory overlap led the Philippine government to effect a change less than two decades later: in 1964, the Philippine government designated June 12 – the anniversary of Aguinaldo’s 1898 declaration of independence from Spain – as the new Independence Day. It was more difficult to erase the hard realities underlying the niceties of the Washington–Manila relationship. To paraphrase the observations of Ikehata Setsuho, the devastation of war and Japanese occupation had left the Philippines sorely in need of reconstruction funding and Washington used that leverage to extract significant concessions in the trade agreement (the Bell Act), acceptance of which by the Philippine Congress immediately preceded independence in 1946. Although the country gained all the formal 309

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

310

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

attributes of full sovereignty and self-determination, it was left in a position of structural economic dependence on the United States thanks to the Bell Act’s preferential tariff arrangements and provisions for exceptional access to resource exploitation and public-utility ownership for American citizens. A separate military agreement the following year left the USA in control of twenty-three bases in the Philippines.1 There was no question as to who was the patron and who the client in this relationship. My broader point is that the haze of contradictions, complications, and inconsistencies that seem to obscure any clear-cut contrast between colonial subservience and national self-determination in the case of the post-war Philippines is hardly exceptional. To be sure, no two cases are alike. But in general, as countless scholars have observed, there is an inescapable disjuncture between the formal equality and mutually recognized sovereignty of states in the post-colonial global order and the far messier reality in which even the governments of the most powerful polities do not have a completely free hand in shaping their people’s destinies. A very broad spectrum exists, such that most states find themselves in varying degrees and forms of dependence on, and vulnerability to, the power of external forces (be they other states, global economic structures, non-governmental organizations, international institutions, etc.).2 Formal empire is no longer in vogue, but various manifestations of informal imperialism – arguably a much more effective mechanism for power projection than the direct seizure of territorial control, with all its unavoidable costs and liabilities – inevitably persist.3 By the same token, just as there is in practice a great deal of variation beneath the superficial uniformity of national self-determination as it has evolved over the course of post-1945 history, so too imperialism during the first half of the twentieth century took a wide variety of forms – as did anti-imperial conceptions and movements. Relationships between metropoles and subject populations varied dramatically, both in substance and in the juridical forms they took. The significance of these diverse institutional frameworks and historical relationships was in certain aspects highlighted by the ways in which imperial subjects responded to the sudden takeovers by new masters in the form of German and 1

2 3

Ikehata, “Introduction,” in Ikehata and Jose, eds., Philippines under Japan, 19; Stephen Shalom, “Philippine Acceptance of the Bell Trade Act of 1946: A Study of Manipulatory Diplomacy,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 49, No. 3 (August 1980), 499–517. See, for example, the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, summarized in World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). On informal empire as the most dynamic and successful type of imperialism, see Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), 279–80, 470–72.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

311

Japanese occupiers. Conversely, the varied experiences of subjection to Axis powers could have significant impacts on attitudes towards former imperial overlords and on conceptions of what national selfdetermination could and should look like. How did previous colonial experiences shape responses to Axis occupations? How did those occupations in turn mold nationalist agendas? These are the questions that inform the comparative discussion in this chapter. The Philippines Wherever their armies invaded in the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese presented their campaign as one fought on behalf of the liberation of Asian peoples from the oppression – be it formal or informal – of Western imperialism. This claim obviously tended to gain the greatest initial purchase in countries where that imperialism had manifested itself in the most humiliating and obnoxious forms. In this respect, the Philippines offered the least fertile ground for Japanese liberationist and pan-Asianist propaganda, for the country already had an autonomous Commonwealth government and a scheduled date for its independence from the United States. In certain respects, then, the situation of the Philippines more closely resembled that of the formally independent countries subjected to Axis occupations than that of a colony like the future Indonesia, where Dutch government policy and public rhetoric alike had seemed to leave the door to independence closed for the foreseeable future. By all accounts, certainly, the Japanese encountered wider and deeper suspicion and resistance in the Philippines than they did in any other Southeast Asian country that fell to their power during these years. This became a classic vicious circle, as the more brutal the counterinsurgency methods the Japanese military employed, the more alienated and hostile the Philippine population became. This, combined with the intensity of fighting between US-led and Japanese forces during 1942 and again in 1944–45, contributed to the country suffering more death and destruction in the war than any other Japanese-invaded land apart from China. Yet to point out that the pre-war Philippines already being on the path to independence distinguished its case from that of other Southeast Asian colonies is not to say that the country’s colonial history was irrelevant to its experience of the Japanese occupation. Far from it. Among supporters and opponents of the Japanese alike, the background (and potential future prospect) of an American presence in the country unavoidably played a significant role in how they framed their evolving political positions. As in the cases examined in Part I, the wartime

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

312

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

occupation of the Philippines raised the question of what constituted patriotic behavior in the face of an armed alien presence. But anyone seeking to address this question also had to grapple with the issue of what the relationship between Philippine and American national interests had been and might one day become.

The Political Establishment The Japanese, of course, wanted to present themselves as liberators. Given that the USA had already promised the Philippines independence by 1946, the Japanese felt obliged to one-up Washington by offering assurances of an even more rapid move in that direction under their own auspices. At the same time, they tried to present themselves as undertaking the more fundamental task of liberating the Philippines from the Western false consciousness that had permeated society, particularly its educated elites, and estranged the country from its authentic Asian spiritual and cultural heritage. This propaganda message was directed not just at the Philippine population but at Japanese troops embarking for the archipelago. So saturated was the rank-and-file of the Japanese military with this messaging about its allegedly altruistic mission that, if the record of one soldier’s wartime diary is to be believed, some of them were convinced that Filipino military resistance could only be understood as the manifestation of a subservient colonial mentality corrupted by jazz music and marked by a lack of racial pride.4 Yet the reality was that Japanese military planners as well as the Japanese Military Administration (JMA) of the Philippines recognized that the path of least resistance in governing the country was to operate through the existing establishment rather than by empowering advocates of more radical change.5 Typical members of the archipelago’s elites had received their higher education in American or American-modelled institutions and had spent many years working within a system set up by, and cooperative with, American hegemony. Many of them had formerly served in the Quezon–Osmeña administration, prior to the departure of the president and vice-president for Corregidor and beyond. Apart from a few notable exceptions, members of this ilustrado establishment quickly fell into line with Japanese demands that they resume administration of 4

5

March 29, 1942 entry in captured diary of Sub-Lieutenant Kumataro Kubota, translated into English by Office of Strategic Services in September 1944, Entry 92, Box 568, Folder 30, OSS Papers, RG 226, NARA. On the minimally disruptive, cost-effective vision Japanese military planners had mapped out for an occupation of the Philippines, see Yellen, Greater East Asia, 116–17.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

Fig. 22 Japanese troops celebrate victory. Philippines, April 1942. Bettmann by way of Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

313

314

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

the country under the direction of the JMA. Thirty leading political figures signed their names to a document promising to work with the Japanese in enforcing law and order and helping run the country. The signatories were then constituted into an Executive Commission (chaired by Quezon’s former executive secretary, Jorge Vargas). The Japanese gave assurances of their intention to move towards the granting of formal independence – which indeed they did in October 1943 (under the presidency of Jose Laurel, who had served on the country’s Supreme Court prior to the war).6 In public fora and official pronouncements, Filipino collaborationist leaders and officials were, of course, obliged to parrot Tokyo’s official line, waxing eloquent about the eagerness with which their nation would realign its economy, values, and fate to those of fraternal Asian peoples in the Japanese-led Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet the occupying authorities themselves knew better than to take such expressions of new-found zeal for Japanese-inspired pan-Asianism at face value. Among the broader urban public, there was a widespread appetite for thinly veiled mocking of Japanese authority, as manifested, for example, in the popularity of a comic stage act that spoofed the stereotypical Japanese soldier as wearing multiple wristwatches. This was an immediately recognizable allusion to the unsophisticated rank-and-file occupiers’ predilection for stealing possessions from POWs and/or looting combined with ostentatious display.7 It was to US culture that many Filipinos tended to look as an attractive, globally influential example of modernity.8 Many of the internal reports by officers of the JMA reflected a clear understanding that the elites with whom they were obliged to work had been shaped by the American higher-education system, and were unlikely to be genuinely won over in a flash to a radically new, Japanese-inspired way of thinking. By the same token, they recognized the material stakes at play for the landowning upper crust and recognized that there lay the key to gaining their practical cooperation. The tendency within the JMA was therefore to try and coopt the socio-political establishment by assuring it of its continued access to the perquisites of power in return for its cooperation with the Japanese in the pacification of insurgencies and in the extraction of natural and labor resources on behalf of Tokyo’s total-war effort (an undertaking that, of course, was fundamentally at odds with the security 6 7

8

Nakano, “Appeasement and Coercion.” Ricardo T. Jose, “Accord and Discord: Japanese Cultural Policy and Philippine National Identity during the Japanese Occupation (1942–1945),” in Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb, eds., Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 262. My thanks to Jordan Sand for emphasizing this point to me.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

315

agenda insofar as it drove the population into the arms of resistance movements). Some of the more uncompromisingly militant Japanese field officers and the radical Philippine nationalists they sponsored (on which more below) viewed the JMA’s approach as a shameful course of appeasement of corrupt, Americanized elites. But theirs remained a minority view.9 At the same time, the Japanese occupiers’ cooptation of the dominant stratum of Philippine society did not tend to play well in the countryside, where polarization between landowners and increasingly better organized peasants had grown starker over the decade or so preceding the war. Japanese army propaganda units sent into rural settings found their efforts to win over the population undercut both by the brutality of their own military’s and collaborationist forces’ counterinsurgency tactics and by the preexisting local cleavages along lines of class and/or political faction. These local feuds tended to boil over into armed clashes amidst the radicalizing and polarizing conditions of wartime scarcities and the occupation’s potential for precipitating sudden shifts in power among rival groupings. In such settings, tiresome official perorations about the imperative of fighting a “holy war” on behalf of East Asian freedom, the transformative promise of pan-Asian solidarity, or the qualities required to strengthen a nation’s moral fiber were, if possible, even less relevant to the lived experience and immediate interests of the population than they were to those of better-educated audiences in urban environments. In one humorously symptomatic case, the Japanese-educated member of a local landowning family in southern Luzon who served as interpreter for a visiting Japanese propaganda officer opted not to translate the latter’s ideologically abstruse speech to a public gathering. Instead, while pretending to be interpreting, he succeeded in winning an enthusiastic response from the audience by telling them in Tagalog about the favorable impression he had gained of Japanese integrity and trustworthiness by virtue of his positive personal experiences with the reliability of lost-andfound services in Nagoya department stores.10 Learning from such incidents, the leader of one Japanese military propaganda unit stationed first in northern Luzon and later on the island of Panay in the course of 1942–43 took it upon himself to jettison the official pan-Asianist message, which, he realized, was meaningless to the peasants he was seeking to pacify. Instead, at least according to his own 9

10

Nakano, “Appeasement and Coercion,” 39 and passim; Terami-Wada Motoe, Sakdalistas’ Struggle for Philippine Independence, 1930–1945 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014), ch. 8. Nakano, “Appeasement and Coercion,” 45.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

316

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

post-war account, he tried preaching in favor of a more cynically pragmatic, attentiste approach: the outcome of the war, he allegedly told his audiences, hinged on global forces far beyond the control of anyone in this or that province; local rebel activity would hardly contribute to an Allied victory, but it would unquestionably lead to harsh reprisals. Therefore, a wait-and-see attitude was the one that made most sense. However, even in this particular case, the propaganda officer’s moderate-sounding rhetorical stance was, in fact, designed to be accompanied by the escalating application of ruthless counterinsurgency tactics by armed units. Such combinations of pragmatic tone and sharp stick could sometimes be effective in the short run, but the ultimate reliance on indiscriminate retaliatory violence in response to insurgent attacks inevitably extracted a higher toll on the civilian population than on the armed rebels awaiting their opportunity to strike again.11 In this context, it was the prospect of the return of American-led forces that held forth the best hope for liberation in a meaningful sense of the term, regardless of the formal declaration of an independent Philippines under continued Japanese occupation. If much of the population viewed the former colonial power as a benevolent ally by comparison with the intrusive, disruptive, humiliating, and violent role played by the current occupation regime, how did the collaborationist establishment rationalize its stance? As with their counterparts in Amsterdam, Athens, Vichy, or Nanjing, they could justify their position by presenting themselves as buffers between the alien presence and their compatriots, and as facilitators of relative stability and security amidst an unpredictable and perilous situation. They could (and, in post-war years, did) claim that they had been coerced into reassuming governmental roles and that they used those positions to try and moderate the behavior of the Japanese. Like many of their counterparts elsewhere, some of them did begin to cultivate contacts with resistance forces (in particular those affiliated with the USAFFE) as the fortunes of war shifted and the inevitability of Japan’s eventual defeat became ever more apparent. Through it all, they, by and large, proved remarkably successful in maintaining the continuity of their position at the apex of their country’s socio-economic and political pyramid across the violent shifts from American to Japanese to American rule again, and on beyond independence. As seen above, the main potential challenge to these norms came from the Huk movement based in central Luzon. But even here, the immediate

11

Ibid., esp. 42–56.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

317

danger of a socio-political paradigm shift was contained by the Communist movement’s wartime adherence to anti-fascist united-front tactics. In other regions of the archipelago, as Alfred McCoy has observed, the disruption of war and occupation tended to manifest itself not so much in the radicalization of the politics of social class as in the militarization of preexisting frictions between rival political factions that had long vied with one another for control of power and resources at the local level. For instance, McCoy’s study of wartime politics in the islands of the Western Visayas region has traced how members of two competing political coalitions (led by the prominent USAFFE commander Macario Peralta and the head of a provincial underground civil administration Tomás Confesor, respectively) distributed themselves between collaborationist appointments in local government and involvement in antiJapanese resistance organizations as they maneuvered for position in their longstanding struggle with one another for local ascendancy. A similar pattern has been documented in the Ilocos Norte region of northwest Luzon, where two longstanding factions, each one operating under the nominal aegis of the USAFFE resistance forces, intermittently fought one another in the course of the occupation.12 It is conceivable that the combination of historical and personal experience of colonialism equipped the Philippine elites particularly well for the complicated political dances that facilitated their persistence in power amidst the tectonic geopolitical upheavals of the war years. An earlier generation of ilustrados had succeeded in navigating their way to continued power a little more than four decades earlier, amidst the withdrawal of Spanish imperial rule and the brutal imposition of American control in the face of Aguinaldo’s war of resistance. As imperial powers displaced one another, the upper stratum of Philippine society had learned how to sway like reeds before a wind. They legitimized their 12

Alfred W. McCoy, “‘Politics by Other Means’: World War II in the Western Visayas, Philippines,” in Alfred W. McCoy, ed., Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1980); Terami-Wada Motoe, “The Filipino Volunteer Armies,” in Ikehata and Jose, eds., Philippines under Japan, 51. US commanders were hard-pressed to arbitrate and contain the escalating feud between Confesor and Peralta as the Americans struggled to maintain a unified front against the Japanese. See the reports and correspondence contained in the file labeled “Peralta – Confesor (Controversy)” in RG 407, Entry 1094 (Philippine Archives Collection), Box 257, NARA. It should be noted that there were times and places where, amidst extreme hardship and poor communication, American regional commanders also clashed (though not, it appears, violently) over rival claims to authority and jurisdiction. See, for instance, “United States Philippine Islands Forces, Ball Division Headquarters, In the Field: Guerrilla Activities in Luzon as Related by Capt. Alejo S. Santos to Col. G. Atkinson,” January 20, 1945, RG 407, Entry 1094, Box 258, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

318

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

claim to national leadership by asserting their country’s right to selfdetermination as boldly as circumstances allowed, while less conspicuously accommodating the external power’s demands in ways that made them indispensable intermediaries between imperial masters and indigenous subjects.13 The political establishment had a particularly taut rhetorical tightrope to walk under Japanese occupation, not least because that very same establishment had committed the Commonwealth’s troops to fight under US command and alongside American forces on the Bataan peninsula during the months of hard-fought conventional military resistance to the Japanese invasion in early 1942. The Japanese military authorities were willing to grant Laurel’s regime a little discursive room for maneuver on this issue, as illustrated in the formal statement given by the Philippine Republic’s foreign minister, Claro Recto, on April 11, 1944, on the second anniversary of Bataan’s fall. Recto recognized the heroism and sincere patriotism that animated what he termed the Filipino heroes of Bataan, and went on to acknowledge what “a staggering blow” the fall of the peninsula to the Japanese was for “the vast majority of the Filipino people at the time.” He then went on to reframe the experience by arguing that Japan’s readiness to grant the country full independence cast the events on Bataan retrospectively in a completely different light, as marking the beginning of the country’s rebirth rather than the humiliation of defeat. Perhaps reflexively falling back on the internalized imagery of European holy wars against Muslims, Recto contended that “the logic of events has conferred upon the heroes of Bataan not merely the honor of crusaders for Philippine independence and builders of the republic, but the glory of martyrs for the liberation of Asia and builders of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Recto’s convoluted reasoning about the “logic of events” must have reflected tacit recognition of widespread cognitive dissonance among the public. After all, if the fall of Bataan had marked “the end of a régime [sic] of domination and exploitation of one country by another, and of the vicious policy of racial discrimination of which … [Filipinos] have been helpless victim [sic] for many centuries,” then what was the point of so many Filipino men having suffered and died fighting under the command of those very forces of oppression?14 The USAFFE movements’ approach to the legacy of the 13

14

For a sustained analysis and indictment of Philippine elites as long-term agents of the country’s persistent subservience to imperial powers, see Renato Constantino and Letizia R. Constantino, The Philippines: The Continuing Past (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1978). “‘A Day of National Pride’ by the Minister for Foreign Affairs [Statement by the Honorable Claro M. Recto on the second anniversary of the Fall of Bataan, April 11,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

319

military struggle was much more straightforward: the sacrifices of Bataan had not been undertaken on behalf of a lost cause, because MacArthur would return one day to help liberate the islands from the Japanese. Amidst the swift succession of regimes, members of the Philippine political establishment had to work hard to keep the rationalizations of their evolving positions up to date. As the country’s ambassador to Japan in 1944, Jorge Vargas, who had been a close confidante of Quezon before heading the interim Executive Commission under Japanese occupation, sought to assure his hosts of his bona fides by telling them that at the time of the evacuation from Manila, President Quezon himself had only departed the capital because the Americans had “forced” him to do so in order to spare them embarrassment. In other words, the Commonwealth leader’s collaboration with MacArthur at that juncture had been unwilling and should therefore not besmirch the patriotic reputation of Quezon himself or of those who had long been associated with him. Vargas sought to excuse the overarching history of collaboration with the United States by explaining how deeply rooted in the Philippine psyche American perspectives had become, and how fearful all the Western propaganda had made Filipinos about the threat Japan posed to their “national existence and independence.”15 And as president of the “independent” republic in 1943, Jose Laurel was to use the image of his country’s history of excessive Westernization as an excuse for his unwillingness to authorize the conscription of Philippine labor for the Japanese war effort, explaining that he would merely be undermining national acceptance of his government if he were to take such an alienating step.16 By the same token, after 1945, former wartime collaborationists looked to their country’s long historical experience of colonialism to justify their decision to work with the Japanese, and to relativize the stark distinctions between patriotism and treachery that their critics on the formerly resistance-minded Left used to attack them. In his post-war memoirs,

15

16

1944, prepared upon request of the Domei News Agency],” Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bulletin (Republic of the Philippines), Vol. 1, No. 3 (April 1944), 129. “‘Before and after the Fall of Manila – In Retrospect’ by the Philippine Ambassador to Tokyo [Address of the Honorable Jorge B. Vargas before the Federation of South Seas Associations, Tokyo, on March 17, 1944],” Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 3 (April 1944), 118–21. To his credit, Vargas also gave speeches in which he tactfully yet clearly indicated to his Japanese audiences the importance of lending economic and political substance to the talk of cooperation and mutual respect among sovereign nations associated with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. “‘Three Requirements of Economic Cooperation’ [Address of … Vargas, before the Seiwakai, March 10, 1944],” ibid., 121–23. Yellen, Greater East Asia, 184.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

320

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Claro Recto pointed to the ability of wartime collaborators in countries such as Greece and Denmark to explain their conduct as their way of serving their countries under conditions of extreme duress – explanations that evidently sufficed to keep many of them in positions of power and authority in their liberated homelands. But in addition to citing the precedent of European models, he argued that the Philippines’ particular history made it all the more absurd and arbitrary to accuse his cohort of unpatriotic conduct. After all, the very leaders who had helped place the country on course towards autonomy from the United States and eventual independence, the very men who had claimed the mantle of Philippine nationalism, had originally made a very conscious choice to disavow Aguinaldo’s revolt – the fighters of which would have been feted as national heroes had they won the day. In other words, the leadership of the pre-war Nacionalista Party could be said to have started their political careers as the “collaborators of 1901.”17 (Indeed, he might have added that, while Quezon had briefly fought in the armed resistance to the Americans during the Philippine–American War, he had earlier supported the Spanish against the rebels, who killed both his father and his younger brother as the latter were engaged in trying to funnel supplies to Spanish colonial forces!18) Recto granted that Japanese rule had been much more destructive and oppressive than the form into which US administration had evolved by 1941. But his point was that if one looked back far enough into any politician’s record in a country subject to so many successive colonizations, one was bound to find a record of compromise and accommodation in the face of overwhelming external force.19 In the event, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the great majority of prominent figures charged with treason for their collaborationist conduct during the war were in fact amnestied and politically rehabilitated within a few years of war’s end. Indeed, the Philippines’ continued, treaty-bound dependence on the USA following its formal independence could serve to lend ex post facto legitimacy to the relativistic arguments of men such as Claro Recto, further easing their return to political life. In the 1949 elections, Recto himself was elected to the Senate (where he had earlier served under the Commonwealth in the 1930s), and he later ran unsuccessfully for president as a critic of the country’s persistent client–patron relationship with the United States. (Jose Laurel himself

17 18

Claro M. Recto, Three Years of Enemy Occupation: The Issue of Political Collaboration in the Philippines (Manila: People’s Publishers, 1946), 99. 19 Karnow, In our Image, 234–35. Recto, Three Years, 99–101, 195–96.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

321

was also elected to the Philippine Senate in 1951, following a failed 1949 bid for the presidency.)20 Having acknowledged the long-term continuities and opportunistic, if not cynical, adaptations that shaped much of the political establishment’s response to the country’s wartime situation, one must also recognize that in some instances, preexisting ideological factors played a role in those choices and that in many more cases, the experience of working under the aegis of the Japanese could not fail to shape people’s political outlooks. The fact that the mainstream of the country’s elite was “Americanized” could certainly manifest itself in strong bonds of loyalty to, and identification with, the United States even in the face of wartime disaster. By the same token, it could render people vulnerable to feeling that perhaps there was a grain of truth in the occupiers’ accusation that was less than subtly summarized as follows by the Japanese propaganda chief in the archipelago (the head of the JMA’s Department of Information), Lt. Col. T. Katuya: “[T]he Philippine culture and civilization of the past have been a [sic] little more than an ape-like mimicking of Occidental culture and civilizations, and the natural results of this were superficiality, emphasis on trivialities, and a host of other racially and spiritually unhealthy defects.”21 In their public statements, members of the Philippine leadership under the Japanese echoed their occupiers’ calls for a break with past dependence on American-influenced cultural values and political-institutional models. The raising of Tagalog to the status of an official language was highlighted as particularly expressive of this paradigm shift. This was, for example, the theme of an address (delivered in English) by Jorge Vargas, chairman of the Philippine Executive Commission, spoken a few months before the transition to formal independence, on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of the Tagalog-language poet Francisco Baltazar (1788–1862). It was thanks to Baltazar, Vargas said, that Tagalog has acquired a deathless permanence which has successfully defied … the perpetual subordination in the past to the alien languages of our Western colonizers … Enshrined in his verses … our native soul remained alive and vigorous even when our educational system was pervaded with a spirit of

20

21

Konrad Lawson, “Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937–1953,” doctoral diss., Harvard University, 2012, 170–71; Entry for “Claro Recto,” http://legacy.senate.gov.ph/senators/former_senators/claro_recto.htm (accessed December 24, 2020); Yuko Kawato, Protests against US Military Base Policy in Asia: Persuasion and its Limits (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 161. “Filipinos Asked to Revive Old Culture,” The Tribune (Manila) (September 12, 1942), as cited in Marcelino A. Foronda, Jr., Cultural Life in the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (Manila: Philippine National Historical Society, 1975), 9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

322

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

intense imitation of Western materialism and individualism. Fortunately, that era in our history has passed away forever with the liberation of the Philippines from Western imperialism and ideological domination.

Vargas went on to insist that the elevation of Tagalog itself was but a means to an end: It would have been plain folly to disseminate the use of a native tongue if it were afterward to be used only to express foreign sentiments and ideals. Consequently, the Philippine Executive Commission, following the lead of the Commander-inChief of the Imperial Japanese Forces in the Philippines, has taken all the steps to rediscover and revitalize that native system of ethics, that Filipino way of life, which Balagtas [Baltazar’s Tagalog name] consecrated and preserved in his immortal works.

Tagalog was to be embraced as a means of expressing “our finest instincts, our noblest sentiments, our highest ambitions, as an Oriental people.”22 It would be foolish to take public conformity to Tokyo’s pan-Asian rhetoric as an expression of deeply held beliefs. Moreover, in cases such as Vargas’ speech, the mouthing of platitudes about Japan’s beneficent role served as a means of safely packaging the contents of an address focused chiefly on the cultivation of a Philippine national lingua franca. But David Steinberg has made a case for the view that Jose Laurel, president of the nominally independent republic proclaimed a few months after Vargas’ address, did regard Japan’s image as a highly disciplined, authoritarian society as an example to be emulated. Such a view may also have had some purchase among those Philippine student organizations that had organized mutual visits and conferences with their Japanese counterparts in the pre-war years. (Jose Laurel’s son, Sotero, led one such student delegation to Japan in 1939, and Jose Laurel – as a Supreme Court justice at the time – encouraged these contacts.)23 Laurel may have justified in his own mind the decision to serve as president under the Japanese on the grounds that this constituted an opportunity to reconfigure Philippine society along such lines, the better to equip the nation to stand up to American influence once Japan had been defeated 22

23

“Address by His Excellency, Jorge B. Vargas … at a Program Held on the Occasion of the Birthday Anniversary of Francisco Baltazar, Manila, April 2, 1943,” in Philippine Executive Commission, Official Gazette, Vol. 2, No. 4 (April 1943), 399–400. On Philippine–Japanese student exchanges in the 1930s, see Grant K. Goodman, Four Aspects of Philippine–Japanese Relations, 1930–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1967), 62–132. Goodman notes that, although Philippine students came away impressed by their encounters with Japanese universities and students, they also sometimes commented with some distaste on the austerity and sexual segregation among their Japanese counterparts, and often seemed unconvinced by Japanese assurances that Tokyo harbored no imperial designs on the Philippines.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

323

(which he imagined would take more years than it did).24 At the same time, it is noteworthy that after declaring independence in October 1943, Laurel issued a statement addressed to the United States, demanding recognition of the country’s new status, as though tacitly conceding that without American recognition, Philippine independence could not be a fully settled matter. He may also have been hedging his bets a little in anticipation of an eventual American military victory.25 If the combination of wartime constraints and post-war apologetics makes it difficult to reliably discern Laurel’s motivations between the lines of his statements and writings, perhaps a more telling indicator of the complexity of perceptions and ambivalence of sentiments associated with the occupation experience may be found in the classic two-volume work on this period published two decades after the war by Philippine historian Teodoro Agoncillo. Self-described as having been hostile during the war towards Laurel and his associates “as traitors or collaborators,” Agoncillo ended up viewing them in retrospect in such a favorable light that he dedicated the second volume of his work to Laurel’s foreign minister, Claro Recto, and the first volume to Laurel himself, whom he described as a “Nationalist, Statesman, Jurist, Educator, and Patriot whose invincible courage and dedication to his country and people, during a time of crisis, saved the Philippines from complete destruction.”26 In the author’s retrospective estimation, Laurel had been no less heroic than the resistance. By placing themselves in the vulnerable position of running the country under the Japanese, the members of Laurel’s government were, he argued, trying to buffer the population against the ravages of the occupation as best they could. (Laurel resisted Japanese efforts to conscript Filipinos into a Japanese-allied military force.)27 Agoncillo concluded his work by applauding the commitment of ordinary Filipinos to the resistance struggle led by the USAFFE, attributing their loyalty in part to what he described as the relative benevolence of American colonialism which supposedly marked it apart from all other 24

25

26

Steinberg, “Jose P. Laurel”. For a sympathetic interpretation of Laurel’s motivations on the part of a well-informed observer whose animus against the Japanese occupation ran deep, see Marcial P. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam”: A Diary of the War in the Philippines ([Manila]: n.p., 1949), entry for September 25, 1943, p. 124. See also the concept of “patriotic collaborators” as applied to wartime Philippine and Burmese leaders in Yellen, Greater East Asia, ch. 4. “Laurel Demands US Recognition,” The Tribune (Manila), October 15, 1943, p. 1 (and 12). An OSS report remarked that Laurel and Recto “must have had their tongues in their cheeks” when making their request for American recognition. OSS, “The Govt. of the ‘New Philippines,’” May 5, 1944 (revised September 25, 1944), 70, LC Rare Book Collection as cited earlier. 27 Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, Vol. I, iii. Ibid., Vol. II, 911–17.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

324

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

imperial powers.28 Yet he also argued that the Japanese claim that Philippine culture had been corrupted by American materialism had struck a resonant chord: Doubtless, the Japanese, in yelling at the top of their voice that the Filipinos give up their “Americanism,” were not exactly driven by virtuous motives … But, on the other hand, it is also true that their observation about the Filipinos – at least the sophisticated ones – had a genuine ring of validity.29

And in his assessment of the literary culture of the occupation years, Agoncillo suggested that the Japanese effort to encourage a turn away from English in favor of Tagalog as the basis for an authentically Filipino national culture had – again, despite the cynically self-interested motivations that animated the occupiers – helped spur developments that would bear fruit in the post-war years.30 Agoncillo’s retrospective perspective is strongly reminiscent of efforts by some in post-war France to depict Pétain as the nation’s shield and de Gaulle as its sword during the war – in other words, to concoct (out of genuine belief, for the sake of national pride and unity, or both) an ex post facto complementarity of patriotic roles between forces that had in fact been bitterly opposed to one another during the occupation.31 But, even if one takes much of this with a grain of salt, it remains easy to imagine how opportunism and constraint might have combined with real doubts about the Philippines’ political culture and institutions in shaping the decisions of those members of the elite who were prepared to work with the Japanese authorities. There was a very blurry line between the obligatory parroting of Japanese slogans and the sense that there could be some kernels of truth to that propaganda, given the country’s long and ultimately humiliating history of accommodation to first Spanish, then American power – an American power that had let its client Commonwealth down by allowing an under-defended Philippines to fall prey to this latest conquest. Zealous Collaborationists The Japanese military-occupation authorities were by and large content to work with the “Americanized” elites as long as they conformed to the broad lines of rhetoric and policy demanded of them. But there were factions within the Japanese military who were intensely dissatisfied with what they saw as a path of shameful compromise. One such zealot was 28 30 31

29 Ibid., Vol. II, 921–23. Ibid., Vol. I, 451. Ibid., Vol. II, 641–44. See also Jose, “Accord and Discord.” The sword-and-shield image was introduced, for obviously self-exculpatory reasons, by Pétain himself at his post-war treason trial. Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 20.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

325

Lieutenant Shigenobu Mochizuki, a propaganda officer who, in 1943, founded the New Philippine Cultural Institute in Tagaytay (south of Manila) as a youth training and indoctrination camp. Students were taught a brand of Philippine nationalism modeled on the supposed spiritual and anti-individualist core principles of Japan. They were exhorted to think of themselves as the selfless vanguard committed to the construction of a modern nation rooted in Asian values, capable of playing a dignified and constructive role in the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere.32 Graduates of the Cultural Institute’s three-month curriculum did not amount to more than a few hundred, many of whom may have applied for admission at least partly because of the attraction of the free room and board and small stipend at a time of harsh deprivation. But those who emerged true believers could find like-minded people among a number of radically nationalist organizations that called into question the credibility of political conversion to anti-American nationalism among the country’s established elites and looked to sympathetic, radical factions within the Japanese military for support. The most prominent of such movements was the Ganap. Founded in the 1930s as the Sakdal Party, before being reorganized as the Ganap, this movement was led by Benigno Ramos – a Tagalog poet who had become a Japanophile political activist. The Sakdalistas espoused a more radical, anti-colonial nationalism than the accommodating strain of Quezon’s Nacionalista Party and rejected the intermediate step of creating a Commonwealth with a ten-year waiting period before independence. Seeking to gain mass support against the established elites through advocacy of peasant rights and land reform, the Sakdalistas had initiated an abortive effort at popular rebellion in 1935 that had been suppressed within just twenty-four hours. Following some years in Japanese exile (beginning the year before the failed revolt), Ramos returned to his homeland in 1938 and attempted a brief reconciliation 32

Terami-Wade Motoe, “Lt. Shigenobu Mochizuki and the New Philippine Cultural Institute,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 1996), 104–23. On the general pattern of Japanese efforts to mobilize youth across Southeast Asia in ways that often defied both Western colonial and traditional, indigenous practices, see Harry J. Benda, “The Japanese Interregnum in Southeast Asia,” in Grant K. Goodman, ed., Imperial Japan and Asia: A Reassessment (New York: Occasional Papers of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 1967). On Japanese education policies more broadly in the Philippines, see Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, Vol. I, 445–51. For an approach to the history of Java under the occupation that highlights the synergies between Japanese-led youth mobilization and traditional patterns of thought and practice about youth as the bearer of an alternative, quasi-utopian social vision, see Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, ch. 1 and passim.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

326

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

with Quezon. This set off factional struggles within the Sakdal, leading to Ramos’ supporters breaking off to form the Ganap. A renewed falling out with the establishment in 1939 culminated in Ramos’ imprisonment at the outbreak of hostilities in December 1941.33 American military intelligence had continued to view Ramos’ organization as a threat in light of his pro-Japanese orientation, his potential ability to exploit peasant unrest and discontent, and the extensive reach of his Tagalog-language newspaper, Ganap, which purportedly “reaches the remotest barrios in the Tagalog Provinces.”34 Ramos was duly freed by invading Japanese forces as soon as they reached his place of confinement. Among other hitherto marginalized or exiled figures now elevated in the public eye by the Japanese, the two most illustrious were none other than Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the independence struggle against first Spain and then the United States four decades earlier, and one of his most famous commanders, Artemio Ricarte. The two aging heroes were trotted out on the occasion of public ceremonies, featured in newsreel footage, and feted as symbols of the redemption of the nation’s honor thanks to the benevolent intervention of its Asian elder brother. They had little in the way of active bases of political support in the country. Aguinaldo had lost an electoral bid for the presidency of the Commonwealth in 1935, and Ricarte had spent many years in exile, mostly in Japan. (Ricarte briefly explored the possibility of cooperating with Ramos in building a movement, before realizing their ambitions were incompatible.) But, as symbols of national pride, they could touch a resonant chord among their compatriots. The two were on stage on the occasion of the Philippines’ Japanese-authorized declaration of independence in October 1943; their presence created the sense of a tangible link to the history of the country’s failed but heroic independence struggle against the United States, such that even skeptical observers could feel momentarily moved.35

33

34

35

Setsuho Ikehata, “The Japanese Military Administration in the Philippines and the Tragedy of General Artemio Ricarte,” trans. Elipidio R. Sta. Romana, Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore, Papers in Japanese Studies: Research Paper No. 14 (1991), 12–14. Headquarters Philippine Department, Office of Assistant Chief of Staff for Military Intelligence, Manila, “Monthly Intelligence Report,” February 1939, RG 165 (Records of the War Dept. General and Special Staffs), Entry 77, Box 1853 (Military Intelligence Division “Regional File,” Philippine Islands, 1922–44), Folder 6900, NARA. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam”, 132–33; Ikehata, “Japanese Military Administration”; Terami-Wade, “Filipino Volunteer Armies”; Grant K. Goodman, “General Artemio Ricarte and Japan,” Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (September 1966), 48–60. The independence ceremony was also the first occasion in two years on which the Japanese authorized the raising of the Philippine flag – the same flag as that of the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

327

If Aguinaldo and Ricarte served as convenient nationalist figleaves for Japan’s violent imposition of its hegemony over the Philippines, the Ganap was more of a double-edged sword. In principle, its eager embrace of Japanese power and authoritarian values corresponded to the ideal response imagined by the JMA’s propagandists. In practice, Ramos and his several thousand followers presented a potential complication, as they called into question the legitimacy of Vargas’ Executive Commission. For Ramos, the whole point of throwing his lot in with the Japanese was to get rid of, not just the American imperium over the Philippines, but the entire ruling caste which had served as a proxy for American power and had in turn relied on that connection to retain its own throttlehold on the country’s political and economic life. He found it galling to see the JMA squandering the opportunity created by the ouster of the Americans by appointing Quezon’s old cronies right back into positions of authority, instead of turning to radical alternatives such as himself. The creation in December 1942 of the Kalibapi as the country’s sole authorized political movement enabled the JMA (among other purposes) to fold Ramos’ organization under a broader tent and to bring its members nominally into line with the authority of the Executive Commission. But Ramos, although placed on the Kalibapi’s executive council, correctly perceived that the new plan of organization was designed to contain rather than empower him. (Speaking with a JMA-appointed Japanese civilian factfinding commission a month before the October 1943 declaration of independence, the newly designated head of the Kalibapi, Camilo Osias, awkwardly admitted that he could not say much about a vision or mission for the organization, the future of which he considered tenuous at best.36) Chafing under these arrangements, Ramos found support among radically nationalist Japanese officers eager to promote a more fundamental paradigm shift in the country and ready to challenge the outlook of the JMA staff, which

36

Commonwealth. Labrador, Diary, October 14, 1943, 175–77. Labrador noted of the occasion that “it cannot be denied … that aside from the captive audience, many came on their own. Many of those who doubted and the recalcitrant saw in the ceremony a national glorification, not Japanese. And there was therefore a greater degree of spontaneity and enthusiasm than there had been in other celebrations in the past” (176). Takeuchi, “Manila Diary,” September 8, 1943 entry, pp. 274–75. For a description of the Kalibapi leadership’s subsequent, dutiful effort to articulate and disseminate a political message in line with Japanese-propagated notions about a new, disciplined form of Philippine nationalism that would align the country with the overarching vision of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, see Sven Matthiessen, Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Philippines from the Late 19th Century to the End of World War II: Going to the Philippines is Like Coming Home? (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 132–38; Sven Matthiessen, “Re-Orienting the Philippines: The KALIBAPI Party and the Application of Japanese Pan-Asianism, 1942–45,” Modern Asia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2019), 560–81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

328

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

had empowered the old “pro-American” elites.37 After a number of aborted coup attempts coordinated with Ramos, these factions finally saw their opportunity when General Yamashita assumed command of the 14th Army in November 1944, bringing with him a new outlook and a turnover in staff. The outcome was not the overthrow of Laurel, but rather the creation in December 1944 of the Makapili (League of Patriotic Filipinos) as a volunteer Filipino force dedicated to fighting the Americans alongside the Japanese. This came over initial objections by Laurel and his supporters in the Japanese military, who saw this move as detracting from Philippine sovereignty. (Laurel ended up having a nominal role as chief advisor of the Makapili.)38 At this extremely late juncture, of course, American forces had already begun their landings on the Philippine archipelago. In the end, somewhere between four thousand and eight thousand men were recruited into the Makapili, many from among the former Ganaps. Those who survived the ensuing armed conflict, in which they were employed as auxiliaries by the retreating Japanese, ended up abandoned in the mountains of Luzon, where they suffered horrifically, many of the former combatants going on to serve several years in jail after the war for treason, before being amnestied or having their sentences commuted.39 Marginalized and detested by a population they helped terrorize, the Ganap’s trajectory from ultra-nationalism to blind identification with a brutal occupier is strongly reminiscent of the path taken by the Black Shirts of northern Italy under the RSI.

The Colonial Legacy and the Resistance For more than three hundred years The Spanish ruled our land And under the Americans, we were denied freedom. Are we now going to bend to Japanese conquerors again?40

37

38 39

40

Terami-Wade, Sakdalistas’ Struggle, ch. 8. Friction and mutual distrust among rival factions in the Japanese military administrations of occupied territories was the norm rather than the exception. Benda, “The Japanese Interregnum.” Ikehata, “Japanese Military Administration”; Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, 173–74. Terami-Wade, “Filipino Volunteer Armies.” Japanese military intelligence described some former Ganaps as turning on the Japanese out of frustration over their party’s earlier dissolution, and planning support for the pro-American resistance effort in 1944. “Shobu Group Intelligence Report B No. 2,” August 1–10, 1944 in Enemy Publications, No. 359 (Part II): Guerrilla Warfare in the Philippines, April 28, 1945, Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS), South West Pacific Area, RG 407, Entry 1099 (Philippine Archives Collection), Box 538, NARA. Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk, 59.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

329

These lyrics from a wartime Huk propaganda song are a straightforward illustration of how the Philippines’ colonial legacy could be invoked to motivate resistance to the Japanese, even as figures such as Claro Recto used it to relativize the significance of their collaborationist choices. It is also a striking reminder of how deeply shaped by its long history of foreign occupation Philippine culture was, for the song in question comes from a repertoire of sarswelas performed by female political agitators in the small rural settlements (barrios) and towns of central Luzon.41 The sarswela was a late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century form of popular musical theater, often featuring stock types and explicit moral lessons, which was adapted from the Spanish tradition of the zarzuela.42 It had fallen into neglect under the impact of more modern forms of mass entertainment such as Hollywood films, but retained a vestigial role in some rural fiesta traditions. Wartime saw its revival, both on the Manila stage, as part of the search for a more authentically Philippine cultural medium, and in the barrios, where Huk guerrilla theater exploited it as a vector for anti-Japanese propaganda. These performances were sometimes staged right under the noses of occupying soldiers thanks to their ignorance of Tagalog and their assumption that the costumed dramas were just part of a standard village fiesta custom. In some cases, the productions fell back on the classic Spanish theme of war between noble Christians and evil Moors, repurposing the plot to depict the struggle of good and evil as fought out between valiant Filipinos and dastardly Japanese.43 A former colonial power’s centuries-old legacy of holy war against alien conquerors was thus adapted and redeployed as part of the mass-mobilization efforts of the colonized land’s Communist-led resistance movement struggling against the most recent effort to subjugate the country. As far as the Huk leadership was concerned, the United States was a wartime ally both for obvious practical reasons and because of the US– Soviet alliance against Hitler. But, as the lyrics above suggest, the Huks had no reason or inclination to romanticize the American role in Philippine history or to play up the mutual ties of loyalty and obligation that supposedly characterized the country’s relationship with General Douglas MacArthur and the US Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). Although – like their Communist counterparts in occupied 41

42 43

The term barrio in the Philippine context of the time could refer both to a sub-municipal unit of governance and to a rural settlement. John H. Romani, “The Philippine Barrio,” Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2 (February 1956), 229–37. Doreen G. Fernandez, “Zarzuela to Sarswela: Indigenization and Transformation,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1993), 320–43. Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk, 60, 295 n. 156; Foronda, Cultural Life, 4–5, 39, 47.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

330

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Europe – Huk leaders downplayed social-revolutionary rhetoric during wartime, they were ultimately committed to the overthrow of the sociopolitical elites whose persistence in power had been facilitated by the Americans (as well as Japanese). An assessment drawn up by US military intelligence depicted the Hukbalahap movement as “a semi-political, semi-bandit organization … It owes no allegiance to the US, the Philippine Commonwealth, or Japan and has constituted a problem not only to the Japanese but to loyal guerrilla organizations and intelligence nets.” The Communist affiliation of its leadership made the movement the object of deep suspicion. The report went on to complain of alleged Huk attacks on American-affiliated guerrilla forces and on “puppet office holders, rich Filipinos, and all others considered to be pro-American.”44 The conflation of puppet-government officials with pro-Americans is telling, and foreshadows MacArthur’s rapid pivot towards reconciliation with wartime collaborationists in the wake of the Japanese ouster from the Philippine Islands. What, then, of the sundry guerrilla forces, many affiliated to greater or lesser degrees with the USAFFE command, that the Americans did regard as “loyal” (to the USA and to the government-in-exile of the Philippine Commonwealth)? Was their political orientation reconcilable or incompatible with a conception of patriotism or anti-colonial nationalism? In the eyes of Philippine historians Renato and Letizia Constantino, the answer was essentially no. Sympathetic to the social-mobilization efforts undertaken by the Huk movement, the Constantinos portrayed USAFFE guerrillas, by contrast, as loyal to the USA rather than authentically patriotic. While conceding that some of the USAFFE-affiliated groups kept alive an image of “national courage and defiance,” they fundamentally saw them as almost pathetically subservient to MacArthur’s overarching command, which restrained them from a more active and sustained anti-Japanese effort than they might have undertaken prior to the return of regular US forces. Instead, in the Constantinos’ account, they focused on squabbling with one another over control of territory and supplies while treating ordinary villagers as objects of exploitation and abuse.45 There is certainly no question that major non-Communist resistance movements recognized General MacArthur’s ultimate authority, while 44

45

Philippine Subsection, G-2 (Military Intelligence), “The Guerrilla Resistance Movement in Central Luzon,” October 26, 1944, published as Chapter III of General Headquarters Southwest Pacific Area, Military Intelligence Section General Staff, “Guerrilla Movements in the Philippines,” March 1945, pp. 12–13, in Andres Soriano Papers, Box 2, Folder 1 (World War II, Guerrilla Resistance Movements, 1945), Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Constantino and Constantino, Continuing Past, 130–38; quotation on 131.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

331

pressing his headquarters for the shipment by submarine of urgently needed supplies. The most prominent and effective such guerrilla leader was Macario Peralta, Jr., who led USAFFE-affiliated forces against the Japanese on the island of Panay. In his recruitment efforts, Peralta went so far as to claim that “the members of the USAFFE in this district are entitled to all the benefits and privileges of any members of the Army of the United States” – an assurance which American military authorities noted had not been authorized by anyone higher up in the chain of command.46 (As mentioned earlier, while he pledged fealty to the USAFFE and fought the Japanese, Peralta pursued his own personal political ambitions, which put him bitterly at odds with the leader of the region’s underground civil administration, Tomás Confesor.47) Yet, given the United States’ promise of independence to the Philippines by 1946, figures who accepted the wartime subordination of Philippine military (and guerrilla) forces to American command portrayed their approach as entirely in keeping with the country’s nationalist aspirations. Beyond that, there was a kernel of truth to the Japanese accusation that Filipinos – particularly the socio-economic and intellectual elite – had developed an affinity for stereotypically American and/or more generically “Western” culture and values (not that a pejorative connotation need be attached to that, pace the Japanese propaganda line). It is striking that, in a story in its July 26, 1942 issue about a female Japanese dance troupe (the Syotiku Company) performing in the Philippines for the entertainment of Japanese troops, the Manila Tribune – which, to be sure, the Japanese had taken over and converted into a propaganda organ48 – made a point of highlighting how very Western some of the numbers performed by the female dancers were. The article went on to contend that: the prevailing opinion in the Philippines about Japanese music and stage is so misinformed that it actually shocked, though pleasantly, many Filipinos who were privileged to attend one of the Syotiku performances to see so many lovely Japanese girls stepping up smartly to Western dance music and singing Western songs with a quaint charm all their own. They have realized at last that Japanese culture would not be hard to understand after all.49 46

47 49

Copy of February 1, 1944 memorandum by Macario Peralta, “Proclamation of 6th MD Status,” Inclusion 2 in General Headquarters Southwest Pacific Area, Military Intelligence Section, General Staff G–2 Information Bulletin: “Status of Guerrilla Organizations and Guerrilla Commissions in the PI [Philippine Islands],” September 13, 1944, Soriano Papers, Box 2, Folder 2 (World War II: Guerrilla Resistance Movements), Library of Congress Manuscript Division. 48 McCoy, “‘Politics by Other Means.’” Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration, 35. “Glamour Girls from Japan Entertain Local Soldiers,” Sunday Tribune (Manila), July 26, 1942, 1 (and 4).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

332

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Clearly the propagandists thought that things Japanese had to be “sold” to the Manila reading public as compatible with Western tastes. Indeed, perusing the pages of the Manila Tribune from the war years creates a strong sense of cognitive dissonance, so replete is the paper with images, stories, and advertisements that bespeak a quasi-replica of a routine, everyday American lifestyle being pursued in a western Pacific country overrun by Axis soldiers. There is much that is illusory about this, naturally, for part of the paper’s propaganda mission was clearly to project a sense of the happy, relative normalcy of daily life under what was in fact a repressive and often brutal occupation and amidst increasingly difficult material and security conditions. But it is all the more striking that the conception of happy, relative normalcy attributed to the literate population of Manila was associated with activities such as a meeting – six days after the surrender of US-commanded forces on Bataan – of YWCA members to discuss over tea the home economics of wartime shortages.50 In this context, continued affinity for, and even a sense of loyalty towards, the United States could be seen as expressive of a distinctly Philippine brand of national sentiment rather than the mark of a deficiency in nationalist spirit. A more direct and compelling insight into the complexity of identities and perspectives among Filipinos from the well-educated social stratum comes from the wartime diary of the well-connected lawyer Marcial Primitivo Lichauco, which takes the form, tellingly enough, of a journal addressed to his “American mother” – the woman whose family had hosted him during his years as a student at Harvard University in the 1920s. (Lichauco was the first Filipino ever to graduate from Harvard.) Lichauco was emphatic in insisting that – thanks to centuries of Spanish influence, followed by exposure to American political culture – the Philippines was culturally Western, even if geographically and racially the country was categorized as Asian. That said, the racist color bar that various American institutions (such as officers’ clubs) in the islands had continued to impose even after the creation of the Commonwealth was a chronic source of humiliation and resentment which lent itself readily to exploitation by Japanese pan-Asian propaganda.51 And yet the Japanese mode of exercising power proved so onerous and demeaning that when, 50

51

“Home Economics Discussed at YWCA Tea Monday,” Tribune (Manila), April 15, 1942. Over time, to be sure, the Tribune started to try and transition away from American tropes and English-language dominance of high culture, as it featured a weekly Japanese corner devoted to lessons in the latter language. Victor Gosiengfiao, “The Japanese Occupation: ‘The Cultural Campaign,’” Philippine Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (April 1966), 228–42, here 234. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam”, March 22, 1942 entry, pp. 29–32.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

333

in August 1943, a Japanese propaganda film production (The Dawn of Freedom) brought American POWs into the heart of Manila to help reenact a scene depicting the retreat of US forces from the city nearly two years earlier, the American servicemen were rushed by crowds tossing cigarettes and food items to them and eager to express their solidarity.52 My point is that Philippine nationalism and a sense of attachment and loyalty to an idealized American way of life and even to the United States itself were not necessarily incompatible with one another.53 In the standard, idealized conception of nationhood, each people’s identity is selfcontained and sharply distinct from all others. In practice, scholars have shown how complicated the patterns of overlapping, tiered, and blurred identities can be, particularly among ethnic groups in multi-linguistic borderland regions.54 Many Filipinos found themselves living in what might be termed a virtual borderland – a zone of colonial hybridity in which being Filipino could manifest itself equally “authentically” in the observance of the Catholic faith that was a legacy of Spanish rule, the speaking of English, and embrace of American education as well as aspects of US popular culture, and the cultivation of Tagalog or other indigenous tongues and participation in the struggle against the shared Japanese enemy. Taking the fight to the Japanese could satisfy deeply personal desires for revenge against the occupiers for humiliations and atrocities committed by their forces, while at the same time presenting opportunities for carrying out personal or factional vendettas. But it also came against the background of a widespread sense among many Filipinos that precisely by virtue of being imbued with aspects of an American culture that 52

53

54

Ibid., August 20, 1943 entry, pp. 112–13; Theresa Kaminski, Angels of the Underground: The American Women who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 282–83. In the words of a clandestinely circulated wartime letter by the underground governor of Panay, Tomás Confesor, resistance to Japan was a response to Japan’s “trying to force us to accept their system of government and ways of life which are unacceptable to us … For as a people … during the last forty years … we have come to enjoy civil liberties.” Excerpts from Confesor letter in Pacita Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy: A Diary of the Japanese Occupation (Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 1999), October 10, 1943 entry, p. 183. Of course, Confesor himself was adept at advancing his own, factional political interests amidst the chaos of war, but regardless of how sincere his professed beliefs were, he clearly thought this way of framing the issue would appeal to educated strata of the population. McCoy, “Politics by Other Means.” See, for example, Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2010), 93–119; Pieter M. Judson Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

334

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

could be viewed as the epitome of twentieth-century modernity, they had little reason to feel overawed by their occupiers’ claims about the spiritual superiority and authenticity of Japan’s culture and about its importance as a model to be emulated across a pan-Asian sphere.55 This context makes it easier to understand how the acceptance by diverse guerrilla formations of ultimate American command under the auspices of the USAFFE-coordinated resistance campaign need not have been viewed by many Filipinos as incompatible with a sense of Philippine patriotism.56 On the contrary, the fact that so many of their compatriots had fought alongside the Americans, first on Bataan and then in the guerrilla struggle, may have been seen as contributing to a shift in the relationship between colonizer and colonized to something more closely resembling a bond between allies. It was viewed by some as having created an opportunity for Filipinos to fight for their own independence in the face of Japan’s invasion rather than passively waiting to receive it from their overseas patrons following war’s end. In the words of Marcial Lichauco: To our country as a whole, this war may prove to be a blessing in disguise after all. For although prior to the outbreak of hostilities we were already assured of independence in 1946, a large section of our populace awaited with dread and fear the advent of that great day. Even our leaders seemed to feel that we were not mentally ready and economically prepared for the serious responsibilities which lay ahead of us. A generation of easy living had made us soft. We were adhering to standards of living far beyond our means and enjoying luxuries which we could never hope to have after the loss of the American market … Now the situation is different. We have suffered and we have bled. We have learned that material comforts are nothing and that freedom is everything. Our boys in Bataan and our guerrillas in the mountains have proven to the world that our young men … can fight and die for their country.57 55

56 57

Ray C. Hunt and Bernard Norling, Behind Japanese Lines: An American Guerrilla in the Philippines (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 72–5, ch. 9; Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling, Lapham’s Raiders: Guerrillas in the Philippines, 1942–1945, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 121. My thanks to Jordan Sand for suggesting the final point about the sense of empowerment that could be associated with “Americanization.” For an example of pride in the political education in democracy that some members of the Philippine intellectual elite felt they had received from the United States, despite that country’s own abuse of its principles in the colonial context, see Lichauco,”Dear Mother Putnam”, March 22, 1942 entry, 30. On the broader phenomenon of Americanization and its associations with modernization and globalization in the twentieth century, see Richard F. Kuisel, “The End of Americanization: or Reinventing a Research Field for Historians of Europe,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 92, No. 3 (August 2020), 602–34. On the liberation of the Philippines as a “binational restoration,” see Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, ch. 11. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam”, February 24, 1945, pp. 217–19.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

335

This was the perspective of a worldly, well-connected, city-dwelling member of the country’s social elite. In practice, as the history of interwar social conflict and post-1945 civil war in the Luzon countryside suggests, the dreaded curse of “easy living” was not the first association many Filipinos were likely to make with the legacy of American colonialism. Moreover, the lived experience of guerrilla warfare had belied the romanticized image Lichauco painted of it. It had been characterized by cutthroat competition and armed clashes among rival units and formations (even those ostensibly sharing an affiliation with the USAFFE), as well as often ruthless extraction of support and resources from the beleaguered civilian population. To the average guerrilla fighter or commander, such highly personalized and localized forms of wartime politics, combined with a more generic hatred for the Japanese and those seen as collaborating with them, were likely much more salient than more abstract questions about the future relationship between a Philippine republic and its American patrons.58 The expectation of being able to claim compensation from the US military for services rendered during the war had made the idea of fighting under the general auspices of the USAFFE all the more appealing, while also offering the best prospect of being on the winning side when MacArthur returned and Japan was defeated. Claiming (whether accurately or not) to be working under the supervision of a highly ranked USAFFE officer could also boost a guerrilla commander’s claim to authority over rivals.59 On the southern island of Mindanao, local tensions and clashes between the Muslim “Moro” population and Christian Filipinos constituted a more immediately pertinent political context than any broader concerns with the future of Philippine nationalism writ large; the role of American guerrilla leader Wendell Fertig in his capacity as an outsider proved crucial here in reassuring Moro leaders that their interests would not be sacrificed to those of Christian communities amidst the anti-Japanese campaign.60 But, as the war came to a close, the messy politics, localized idiosyncrasies, and moral compromises of irregular warfare gave way to more streamlined narratives about how a broad cross-section of the population had either actively or passively supported the resistance against the brutal and humiliating Japanese occupation. And indeed, the reality was that, for all 58

59 60

See, for example, Russell Barros, “Brief History of Lt. Col. Russell D. Barros, Extended Sojourn in the Philippines [sic] Islands,” July 14, 1945, in RG 407, Entry 1094 (Philippine Archives Collection), Box 257, NARA. See also Constantino and Constantino, Continuing Past, 136–38. Barros, “Brief History,” 13. Kent Holmes, Wendell Fertig and his Guerrilla Forces in the Philippines: Fighting the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 173–74.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

336

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

their infighting, some of the Philippine guerrilla organizations had succeeded in making life difficult for the Japanese occupiers by dint of a tenacious and relentless campaign of attrition against them. As one Japanese report conceded, even as it referred to the insurgents by the required designation of bandits: “Resistance is stubborn and widespread. Even when flight is impossible because of our enveloping or surprise attacks, the bandits do not surrender but resist to the end.”61 And, as the above quotation from Lichauco suggests, the legacy of this struggle lent itself to the creation of a plausible myth about a Philippine nation that had helped liberate itself in an honorable partnership with the United States. At least in the short term, this created a peculiarly auspicious platform for the legitimization of an independent Philippine republic that was to remain subject to American informal imperialism for decades following the festivities of July 4, 1946, while the contrasting experience and perspective of the Huk movement led it to take up arms once again, this time against the American-sponsored social and political order.

Indonesia In David Lean’s 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai (based on the identically titled novel by Pierre Boulle), an English commanding officer in a POW camp in Japanese-occupied Burma bravely holds steadfast in the face of his captors’ vicious attempts to break him, only to later slip unwittingly into a moral grey zone after acquiescing in the use of his men’s labor on a bridge segment of the notorious Thai–Burma Railway. Having come to see work on the project as a healthy boost to the well-being and discipline of his fellow captives, he winds up identifying so closely with the undertaking that he alerts the Japanese upon discovering a British sabotage mission designed to demolish the bridge, only to set off the detonator himself as he falls dead under incoming fire. The tragedy of the story is that of a man whose very capacity for patriotic determination leads him down a path of collaboration and complicity.62 While the Japanese army did notoriously violate the Geneva Convention by forcing Allied POWs to help build the Thai–Burma 61

62

“Watari Group Intelligence Report B No. 152, 1–30 April 1944,” p. 7 in Enemy Publications, No. 359 (Part I), Guerrilla Warfare in the Philippines, April 28, 1945, ATIS, South West Pacific Area, RG 407, Entry 1099 (Philippine Archives Collection), Box 538, NARA. On former British POWs’ critical reaction to this fictionalized depiction of their experiences, see Frances Houghton, “‘To the Kwai and Back’: Myth, Memory and Memoirs of the ‘Death Railway,’ 1942–1943,” Journal of War and Culture Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 2014), 223–35.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

337

Railway, the majority of people toiling on this project – many of whom lost their lives under the intolerable conditions imposed upon them – were forced laborers from Southeast Asia, including many “recruits” from the romusha program started in Java (as well as Sumatra) in 1943. (Romusha is a Japanese term denoting an unskilled laborer.63) The launch of the romusha program was part of a concerted effort at total mobilization of human and natural resources on behalf of the island’s defense and in service to the broader Japanese war effort at a time when United States forces were gaining the upper hand. (It was anticipated – incorrectly, as it turned out – that an attack on Java might form a key element in an eventual Allied assault in the Southeast Asian theater.) A key role in this effort was played by Indonesian intermediaries. At the sub-regional level, Java’s governance was largely the responsibility of the same class of indigenous administrators that had run the lower levels of the bureaucracy under the Dutch. Members of this socio-political cohort were known as the pangrèh praja (“rulers of the realm”) – a term reflecting their origin as local potentates and/or aristocrats who had been coopted by the Dutch authorities as the latter had consolidated their control over the island in previous centuries.64 In keeping with their own policy of maintaining as much cost-effective continuity as possible with colonial administrative systems in their newly acquired territories, the Japanese had kept the pangrèh praja in place while at the same time raising the glass ceiling a few pegs by promoting some of them to positions of authority in local administration that had formerly been monopolized by the Dutch. The pangrèh praja were thus put fully in charge of territorial units known as regencies (whereas under the Dutch, the indigenous regents had exercised their functions alongside, and in advisory capacities to, Dutch officials). The residencies into each of which several regencies were grouped were generally manned by Japanese.65 The price of this elevation in status was ever deeper involvement in implementing whatever policies the Japanese military administration saw fit to impose. The most onerous of these was the recruitment of romusha labor as well as the forced purchase of rice at fixed prices in a misguided and self-defeating effort to, among other things, ensure sufficient amounts to feed the enormous number of romushas. At its height, the romusha program employed roughly 2.6 million people, and during its entire existence, as many as 12.5 million may have been caught up in it for 63 64 65

Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 258, n. 1. Heather Sutherland, “Notes on Java’s Regent Families, Part I,” Indonesia, No. 16 (October 1973), 112–47. Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 25.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

338

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

varying periods of time, from among Java’s total population of some 50 million. Although technically this was voluntary paid labor, in practice pay was extremely low amidst runaway inflation, and most romusha workers were dragooned into service by local administrators and village heads who were under enormous pressure to fulfill recruitment quotas imposed on them from above. The opportunities for abuse and corruption were legion, and the rates of morbidity and mortality among what amounted to an underfed, overworked, forced-labor force were extremely high. Among the hundreds of thousands sent beyond Java to work on projects such as the Burma–Thai Railway, more may have survived than once thought: Shigeru Sato’s analysis suggests “only” 15–20 percent may have perished. At the same time, Sato’s research has highlighted how horrific conditions were for, and how high the attrition rate among, the overwhelming majority of romusha workers who were put to backbreaking work on a variety of infrastructure projects on the island of Java itself.66 Between the brutality of forced labor and the famine and disease caused by the abuses and inefficiencies of the Japanese rice-requisition system, as many as three million inhabitants of Java are thought to have perished in the course of the occupation, in addition to another one million across the rest of the Indonesian archipelago.67 The pattern of indigenous authorities becoming complicit in the implementation of brutally exacting demands by occupiers is very familiar from other cases examined in this book. As in much of Germanoccupied Europe, so too in Japanese-held Southeast Asia, 1943 was the pivotal year when the Axis powers’ thirst for resources in the face of total war became so unquenchable that it overrode any fear they may earlier have had of provoking resistance. An earlier chapter has noted how the Vichy regime, among other European examples, complied with German demands by implementing a compulsory labor service – at a high cost to any lingering legitimacy it may still have had in the eyes of the French public. In Indonesia, there was no formally sovereign indigenous government, but not only did indigenous administrators continue their cooperative relationship with the Japanese throughout the occupation in the face of horrific abuses, so did the nationalist leadership that had formerly prided itself on its non-cooperative stance towards the Dutch and that continued to deride the pangrèh praja for their record of complicity under the former colonial government. Yet some of the very same nationalist leaders remained a force to be reckoned with following Japan’s defeat, and indeed went on to lead Indonesia to independence 66 67

Ibid., chs. 6–7. Dower, War without Mercy, 296; Huff, World War II and Southeast Asia, 248–73.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

339

Fig. 23 Survivors of the Japanese forced-labor program in Dutch New Guinea following Japan’s surrender. Bettmann via Getty Images.

from the Dutch in the years that followed. How did they manage to navigate these treacherous waters?

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

340

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

On the face of it, the conduct of Sukarno and Hatta during the final years of the wartime occupation seems as though it could at best be seen as a real-life version of the phenomenon depicted in David Lean’s film: the misguided pursuit of a narrowly defined objective (in their case, maximizing their chances of eventually leading Indonesia to some form of self-rule) at the cost of the very values that are supposed to inform that objective (in the case of self-rule, the right of a people to freedom from subordination and servitude to others). In Hatta’s case, the parallel seems particularly striking, given the outspoken position he had taken against the threat of Japanese militarism, authoritarianism, and expansionism just a few months before the fall of the Dutch East Indies.68 There certainly was no denying the nationalist leaders’ complicity in the propaganda campaign on behalf of romusha recruitment and mobilization, for one of their main roles in this regard was to be demonstratively public in their endorsement of the undertaking. Sukarno became notorious for giving fiery speeches calling on Indonesians to cooperate fully with the romusha program on the grounds that advancing Japanese victory against the Allies was the best path towards the defeat of Western colonialism: “Our sweat must become the poison for our enemy,” was the stock phrase with which he was associated.69 In September 1944, he led a public-relations stunt in which he joined with a couple of other leading nationalist figures in publicly enrolling as a romusha. The group spent several hours being seen and photographed engaged in hard labor (Sukarno was supposed to have been hammering away at some rocks) at the site of Japanese defensive works outside Jakarta.70 To behold such a widely respected figure, whose reputation as an unyielding advocate of Indonesian nationalist rights had been solidified by his apparent refusal to compromise with his Dutch persecutors,71 taking part in a photo-op designed to legitimize the new occupiers’ brutal forced-labor regime marked a moment of jarring cognitive dissonance for some. In his 1948 memoir, Tan Malaka, a non-Comintern-aligned Communist activist who was to be executed in 1949 by the Indonesian military, depicted Sukarno as a puffed-up posturer who had been willfully blind to the mass horrors visited upon the people of Indonesia by the 68 69 70 71

Ken’ichi Goto, “Returning to Asia”: Japan–Indonesia Relations, 1930s–1942 (Tokyo: Ryukei Shyosha, 1997), ch. 9. Tan Malaka, From Jail to Jail, Vol. II, trans. and ed. Helen Jarvis (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1991; first published 1948), 275, n. 90. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 268; Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 70–71. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the relatively moderate conditions of his exile did raise questions about what undertakings he might have made to the Dutch authorities in exchange. Legge, Sukarno, 135–38.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

341

Japanese labor-exploitation policies he had helped promote.72 Among the young generation of nationalist students in Jakarta’s Medical College, who had continued to look to Sukarno for support and guidance amidst their own clashes with the Japanese authorities, there were also many who were profoundly disturbed. In later years, Sukarno remained deeply defensive about the all-toopublic manifestation of how far he had been willing to go along with the Japanese. In his memoirs (transcribed in English and published for a Western audience), he described himself as having been torn over the issue, yet convinced that remaining in the occupiers’ good graces by lending a hand to their mobilization efforts was the best way of remaining in position to defend the country against the reimposition of Dutch rule following Japan’s defeat. Admitting that the romusha program was a form of slavery as well as a death sentence for many of its victims, he also freely acknowledged having played a leading role in promoting it: In fact, it was I – Sukarno – who sent them to work. Yes, it was I. I shipped them to their deaths. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I am the one. I made statements supporting the recruitment of romushas. I had pictures taken near Bogor with a tropical helmet on my head and a shovel in my hand showing how easy and glorious it was to be a romusha. With reporters, photographers, the Gunseikan – Commander-inChief – and Civil Authorities I made trips to Banten, the western tip of Java, to inspect the pitiable skeletons slaving on the home front down deep in the coal and gold mines. It was horrible. Hopeless.73

He went on to cast his apologia in the form of a reconstruction of an exchange he had had at the time with irate Medical College students, remonstrating with him over the choices he was making. (According to their own memory of the encounter, the students told Sukarno to his face that he reminded them of Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Horthy – an admiral “without a fleet,” who had aligned his country with Nazi Germany.74) Freely acknowledging that he was helping send fellow countrymen to their deaths, Sukarno insisted that these should be thought of as necessary sacrifices in a long-term struggle for Indonesian independence:

72

73 74

Malaka, From Jail to Jail, 172–76. Tan Malaka himself was not free of suspicion regarding his own wartime relations with the Japanese authorities. See W. F. Wertheim, review of From Jail to Jail, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (September 1992), 449–53. Cindy Adams, Sukarno: An Autobiography. As Told to Cindy Adams (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1965), 192. Mrázek, Sjahrir, 243–44.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

342

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

There are casualties in every war. A Commander-in-Chief’s job is to win the war even if it means losing a few battles on the way. If I must sacrifice thousands to save millions, I will. We are in a struggle for survival. As leader of this country I cannot afford the luxury of sensitivity.75

According to Sukarno, he proceeded to explain that giving the Japanese what they wanted in this regard was the price that needed to be paid in exchange for concessions the occupiers were making. These included the creation of a Central Advisory Council (devoid of any substantive autonomy) dominated by Indonesian nationalists such as Sukarno, and lifting the ban on singing the Indonesian anthem or flying the Indonesian flag. For him, above all, it was crucial to remain positioned to take over leadership of the country when the opportunity was ripe; a premature revolt would spell disaster. Sukarno claims to have pointed to the recent, brutal suppression of the PETA uprising in Blitar (in his native East Java) as an illustration of the heavy costs that impulsive resistance incurred. And yet, in recounting this argument, he seems to have been oblivious to having just (unconvincingly) claimed, a few pages earlier, to have secretly supported the PETA rebels and to have actually helped them plan their revolt while making it clear to them that he would have to disavow any knowledge of their intentions were their plans to be discovered or their uprising put down.76 Sukarno’s memoirs, written two decades after the end of the war, are replete with self-serving and cringe-worthily self-aggrandizing material. True to form, the narration of these particular events climaxes with the fervent yet naı¨ve nationalist youths apologetically acknowledging that it was Sukarno whose intercession with the occupation authorities had saved their hides a year earlier, at the time of their ill-considered resistance to the occupiers’ imposition of a new curriculum and the subsequent forcible shaving of their heads by Japanese soldiers. That nearcatastrophe, Sukarno claimed, had been the sorry result of the “so-called underground work” of his eventual political rival, the socialist Sjahrir.77 75 76

77

Adams, Sukarno, 193. Ibid., 190–91, 193. Gatot Mangkupraja, the nationalist activist entrusted by the Japanese with the task of formally asking them to create PETA, was highly skeptical about Sukarno’s claim to have been consulted by the Blitar rebels ahead of time. Raden Gatot Mangkupradja [sic], “The PETA and my Relations with the Japanese: A Correction of Sukarno’s Autobiography,” Indonesia, No. 5 (April 1968), 105–34, here 124. On the questionable reliability of Gatot’s overall account, in turn, see Shigeru Sato, “Gatot Mangkupraja, PETA, and the Origins of the Indonesian National Army,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 166, No. 2/3 (2010), 189–217. For his part, Sjahrir assessed the net outcome, from a nationalist point of view, of Sukarno’s collaboration policy as amounting to “nothing.” Sjahrir, Out of Exile, 247.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

343

The story ends with Sukarno vindicated in the superior quality of his farseeing vision, proudly telling the chastened students: With every hair on my body I care only for my country. And there is no need for me to unburden my heart to every youngster who walks in here. I have sacrificed my life for this soil. No matter who calls me collaborator I don’t have to prove to them or to the world what I’ve done. The pages of Indonesia’s Revolution will be written with the blood of Sukarno. History will vindicate me.78

The grandiose tone of these words, the quality and content of which are much more suggestive of Hollywood-style reenactment than a genuine attempt at historical reconstruction, suggests a lingering sense of unease and vulnerability to criticism, lying just beneath the outward veneer of patriotic bravado. That is not to say that there is reason to doubt the authenticity of Sukarno’s patriotic sentiments. But distinguishing one’s commitment to a political objective from personal ambition, and maintaining a clear distinction between taking the long view and rationalizing a slide down a slippery slope, was an insurmountable challenge for many a public figure involved in collaboration with German or Japanese occupiers. What made Sukarno’s situation different from that of a Pétain, and allowed him to go on to political success rather than marginalized obscurity after 1945, was the background of pre-war Dutch imperialism and the growing fear and anticipation of post-war reoccupation by the Netherlands – an immediate past and potential future between which the Japanese occupation was sandwiched. This context shaped relations between occupiers and indigenous nationalists in a variety of ways. Its most straightforward and obvious significance was that it allowed the Japanese to be widely seen as liberators by wide swaths of Indonesian society because they had kicked out the Dutch oppressors. There was frustration among the nationalist elite over the constant deferment of any concrete steps towards granting independence. Yet it was less easy for Indonesians than for Filipinos to conclude that they should therefore back the Allies, given that the Dutch had expressly squelched any hope of eventual independence in the 1930s, in contrast to the Americans, who had set a firm deadline for Philippine independence. By 1944–45, when Japanese rule had itself become more oppressive than ever, the very real threat of eventual Dutch return was still a factor, combined with the possibility that Japan would yet move in the direction of permitting Indonesia some sort of self-government under Sukarno’s leadership, on the model of the nominal sovereignty granted to Burma and the 78

Ibid., 194.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

344

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Philippines in 1943. Japanese propaganda constantly harped on antiDutch themes. They were also able to tailor their generic pan-Asianist sloganeering to the popular culture of Java by latching on to a specific folk tradition associated with the prophecies of perdition and salvation attributed to Prince Joyoboyo (also spelled Jayabaya), the twelfth-century Hindu “just king” of a realm in the east of the island. The earliest surviving textual version of these prophecies dates to an early nineteenth-century transcription of an eighteenth-century manuscript; versions of these prophecies were also transmitted orally. This was, then, a continually evolving tradition that could be updated in light of changing circumstances and agendas.79 In any case, the specific “prediction” which the Japanese, as well as Sukarno, propagated for obvious reasons told of the arrival from the north of a “yellow race” that would free Java from its oppressors. (Awkwardly for the Japanese, the prophecy also specified that the liberators would stick around only for a limited period of time.) Prophecies aside, the fact that the Japanese were indeed fellow Asians, who could be portrayed as sharing a common ancestry with the Malay peoples of Southeast Asia, constituted a significant form of racial capital in the context of a society long reduced to subjugation in a European-dominated socio-political system.80 Certain Japanese actions and policies reinforced awareness of, and satisfaction in, the reversal of the humiliating ethno-racial hierarchies of Dutch colonial rule. Whereas indigenous inhabitants had previously been at the bottom of the socio-ethnic totem pole, they now found themselves near the top of the new hierarchy, with only the Japanese above them. Chinese were required to register as aliens, the great majority of Dutch ended up out of sight in internment camps, and the population of several hundred thousand mixed-race “Eurasians,” who had enjoyed a privileged status vis-à-vis “full-blooded” Indonesians under Dutch rule, found themselves in a sort of limbo. Eurasians were encouraged by the Japanese to throw their lot in with the Greater East Asian cause. But at the same time, they were replaced, when possible, in civil-service positions by Indonesians and obliged to register with the Japanese authorities. In at least one city – Bandung – the registration scheme involved the classification of individuals into eight distinct categories based on different ratios and different parental combinations of European and indigenous descent, an approach reminiscent of the 79

80

Thomas Anton Reuter, “The Once and Future King: Utopianism as Political Practice in Indonesia,” in Pablo Guerra, ed., Utopía: 500 años (Monteria, Colombia: Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, 2016). Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

345

ethno-demographic preoccupations of the Nazis in annexed areas of Poland. The Kenpeitai regarded the retention of Eurasians in positions of managerial or bureaucratic responsibility as an unfortunate concession to pragmatism, viewing the “half-breeds,” as they referred to them, as the results of a maliciously deliberate Dutch colonial policy designed to create a caste of loyalists among the population.81 Indonesians who resented the high-handed and condescending treatment they commonly experienced from the Japanese could at least feel satisfaction in seeing the Eurasians, who had once enjoyed higher status and choice positions, reduced to a state of vulnerability. In the upheavals following the end of the war, they, along with Chinese communities, became favored objects of violent attack.82 The legacy of Dutch colonial power also shaped the dynamics of internal competition and conflict among Java’s elites, particularly with respect to relations between the nationalists and the pangrèh praja, whose very position was a function of their past complicity in Dutch rule. The fact that the Japanese had left the native collaborators with the Dutch in charge of local governance was a never-ending source of cognitive dissonance for nationalists such as Sukarno. In the reports that Sukarno’s right-hand man at the time, Mohammad Hatta, submitted to the Japanese military administration on the activities of the short-lived Putera organization of 1943–44, complaints about the pangrèh praja figured large. To be sure, this may have served in part as a safe way of expressing criticisms that also implicated the Japanese themselves. But the resentment over Japanese empowerment of the very class of administrators who had formerly worked so loyally on behalf of the Dutch was palpable in these documents, as was the fear that the new Jawa Hokokai organization replacing Putera would further entrench their position at the expense of the nationalist activists seeking to transform Indonesian society from the bottom up. Hatta complained that the nationalist-led Putera had never been given a fair chance to mobilize Java’s population on behalf of the war effort, as the Japanese had so narrowly limited its activities to anti-Allied propaganda and calls for increased agricultural

81

82

The Kenpeitai in Java and Sumatra: Selections from the Authentic History of the Japanese Kenpeitai (Nihon Kenpei Seishi) (by the National Federation of Kenpeitai Veterans’ Associations, Tokyo, 1976), trans. Barbara Gifford Shimer and Guy Hobbs (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1986), 26–40. On ethno-racial categorization schemes associated with the compilation of the German People’s List in annexed parts of Poland, see Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 193–98. Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, “Japanese Minority Policy: The Eurasians on Java and the Dilemma of Ethnic Loyalty,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Vokenkunde (1996), Vol. 152, No. 4, 553–72.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

346

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

production, without so much as allowing it to become a massmembership organization. For their part, the pangrèh praja had continued to issue commands to the peasant population from above, without any attempt at understanding their needs or engaging with them politically. The result, Hatta argued, was that “the Putera propagandists who went into the villages were constantly attacked with the same words: ‘We’re going to sacrifice our lives for our country all right, but it will be by starving to death.’”83 The nationalists were caught in quite the bind, while at the same time the situation offered them certain long-term advantages. They needed to propagandize on behalf of human and resource mobilization in order to maintain the goodwill of the Japanese, despite their awareness that these policies were alienating those among the peasants and the poor whom it was not simply killing off or leaving to walk the streets practically naked. (A severe shortage of textiles due to the cutoff of imported cotton and the failure of coercive import-substitution policies was among the many hardships to beset Java’s society during the last two years of the war.84) The furthest they ventured to go in their criticism was to suggest, in Hatta’s carefully worded understatement, that “here and there one hears talk that wages are not really in step with the rising cost of living” and that forcing peasants to work on agricultural projects far away from their own villages was among the things “which do not benefit the people but do exactly the opposite.”85 They tried to make themselves look better (or possibly feel better?) by pointing fingers at the pangrèh praja for being the harsh taskmasters most directly responsible for squeezing resources out of a desperate population (which they certainly were guilty of ). At the same time, the nationalists remained frustratingly aware that they were, time and again, being sidelined from anything resembling direct governing authority by Japanese occupiers who preferred to maintain structural continuity with the old Dutch system of coopting traditional elites. Yet, bringing the vicious circle to completion, this actually served to reinforce nationalist collaboration with the Japanese. This, they seem to have imagined, was the best way of proving to the Japanese that they were the only agents capable of transforming Indonesia and mobilizing its masses, the sole leaders committed to detaching their society from its 83

84

85

Mohammad Hatta, Former General Director of Putera, “Report to the Gunseikanbu [Japanese Military Administration] on One Year of Putera – March 9, 1943–Februrary 29, 1944”, dated March 25, 1944 in Hatta, The Putera Reports, 65–66. Shigeru Sato, “Japanization in Indonesia Re-Examined: The Problem of Self– Sufficiency in Clothing,” in Narangoa and Cribb, eds., Imperial Japan and National Identities. Hatta, “Report to the Gunseikanbu,” 111–12.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

347

centuries-long cultural and mental subjection to the West and its dependence on European forms of capitalism. If the Japanese authorities really believed in their own high-flown rhetoric about the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as an alternative, authentically Asian, path to modernization and empowerment, surely they would come to recognize the Indonesian nationalists as their natural partners in this undertaking.86 Trapped though the nationalists around Sukarno were in this seemingly no-win situation, they continued to see long-term value for their own agenda in some of the symbolic changes the Japanese were instituting, as well as concrete initiatives they were taking, for purposes of their own. Radio was transformed, with Bahasa Indonesia (Malay, as the Japanese tended to refer to it) replacing Dutch as the major broadcasting language and Western-style concerts largely displaced by indigenous musical styles.87 For L. F. Jansen, a Dutch official and secret wartime diarist whose knowledge of Japanese and English made him useful to the occupiers as a collaborator-under-duress in the radio section of the Japanese Propaganda Corps, the effect was jarringly alienating. He took what solace he could find in tuning in to the one remaining, hour-long, evening airing of European music. By the same token, it is easy to imagine how uplifting it must have been to many Indonesians to find themselves in such a radically altered audio environment, so starkly representative of an overturning of the old ethno-cultural hierarchy. Although the majority of Java’s vast rural population did not have access to individual receivers, during the Japanese occupation the marketplaces or other public areas of some towns were equipped with “singing trees” – loudspeakers wired to receivers and mounted on poles, extending the reach of broadcasters to a much wider audience than would otherwise have been possible. (Then again, Bahasa Indonesia/Malay would not have been easily comprehensible to many of the less educated people in Java and elsewhere in the former Dutch East Indies who would be likely to know only their own regional languages.)88 In Java’s big cities, such as the former administrative capital of Batavia now renamed Jakarta, the internment of most of the Dutch population, and the abasement of, and restrictions on, the few Dutch figures useful 86

87 88

Ibid.; Shigeru Sato, “The Pangrèh Praja in Java under Japanese Military Rule,” in Peter Post and Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, eds., Japan, Indonesia and the War: Myths and Realities (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997); Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 73, 79; Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun, 171. Sjahrir, Out of Exile, 250. G. J. Knaap, “De Jakarta Overseas Broadcasting Service en Mr Dr Leon Hansen, 1942–1945,” in L. F. Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis: Dagboek van mr dr L. F. Jansen, Batavia/Jakarta, 1942–1945 (Franeker: Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, 1988) and diary entry for July 28, 1942 in main text of Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis, 23–24; Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 106.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

348

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

enough to the Japanese to be retained in one or another administrative role, was a striking demonstration of the radical reversal the Japanese had brought about in the power relationship between indigenous Indonesians and their former colonial masters. Jansen’s diary naturally brought a Dutch colonial perspective to everything he witnessed, but there is no reason to question his impression that the elimination of the presence and interference of European colonial officialdom and its replacement by an Asian-led structure of governance left many people in Jakarta feeling more comfortably “among themselves,” all things being relative. The racialized dimension of European rule had been particularly galling, and the sudden turning of tables on the white rulers all the more satisfying for that. Humiliated and disappointed as they were by the Japanese, many members of Java’s politically engaged elites remained unwilling to imagine a return to Dutch governance as a lesser evil.89 Aware though they were of the stiff resistance the Japanese were encountering in the Philippines, wellinformed Indonesians recognized this as a function of the more liberal policy, complete with a firm promise of independence, that the United States had adopted during the latter years of its rule there, in stark contrast to the pre-war posture of the Dutch government.90 The December 1942 promise by the exiled queen of the Netherlands of post-war talks to facilitate some form of Indonesian self-determination did not have much credibility, given the desperate circumstances under which this change of course was made. Moreover, at least in the early period of the occupation, many nationalist activists (like some of their counterparts in the Philippines) may have been partly sincere in their professed belief that Japanese social cohesion and discipline offered an authentically Asian model for the revitalization of Indonesian society, which might therefore have something to gain from inclusion in a Japanese-led Greater Asian sphere.91 Sukarno himself was allowed to make public speeches, so long as he was careful to avoid open talk of independence and focused instead on national renewal within the context of a Japanese-led Greater East Asian sphere. He gave radio addresses, delivered lectures, and published newspaper articles in which he called on Indonesians to take their place alongside other proud Asian nations that had joined the great anti89 90

91

Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis, September 9, 1942 entry, pp. 38–39, October 14, 1942 entry, p. 53. Summary of conversational comments by Dr. Hoesein Djajadiningrat (who was to be appointed by the Japanese as head of religious affairs in Java a year later) in Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis, October 19, 1942, p. 59. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, chs. 6–7; Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis, September 7, 1942 entry, 36–37.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

349

Western-imperial struggle led by Japan. (In later years, he was to claim rather unconvincingly that his words would have been understood by his audience to be directed against Japanese imperialism as well.92) He had a major or leading role to play in most of the successive social-mobilization movements the Japanese experimented with (the Three-A Movement being a notable early exception), and was allowed to cultivate an activist youth following that looked to him as its charismatic leader before that relationship became strained in the final months of the occupation. Even after the Sukarno-led Putera was dissolved in favor of the more directly Japanese-controlled Jawa Hokokai, the latter organization included a new youth movement (the Barisan Pelopor) which created politically valuable opportunities for the better educated among urban young people to mobilize and propagandize among the disadvantaged of Jakarta’s poorer neighborhoods and slums.93 Japanese occupation thus gave Sukarno visibility and created what might be termed a communications infrastructure and some degree of organizational scaffolding that might readily be repurposed given a change in conditions – be it a Japanese move towards recognition of Indonesian independence or another geopolitical paradigm shift brought on by Allied victory. The Japanese formation in October 1943 of PETA – the armed auxiliary force that ended up enrolling some 37,500 men – created an opportunity for military training. Some of PETA’s veterans would later go on to establish the Indonesian military. (Indonesia’s later dictator, Suharto, received his early training as an ambitiously careerist officer in PETA, having served in Dutch-commanded forces prior to that.94) Horrific though the Japanese romusha and rice-requisition programs were, Mohammad Hatta recognized in them a dynamic of mobilizing resources with the potential to be rechanneled at some point into the nationalization of key economic sectors by an Indonesia determined to lift itself out of its historic dependence on Western-dominated global capitalism. However self-serving and inhumane its methods might be, Hatta and Sukarno persuaded themselves, Japanese rule was having the unintended effect of creating the institutional and economic “sinews of 92 93

94

John Nery, Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 177–81. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 30. In December 1942, Jansen reported hearing that some of Sukarno’s young acolytes greeted each other with outstretched arms and cries of “hidoep Soekarno” (long live Sukarno). Jansen, In deze halve gevangenis, December 7, 1942 entry, 85. David Jenkins, “Soeharto and the Japanese Occupation,” Indonesia, No. 88 (October 2009), 1–103. Former PETA officers generally played prominent roles in Suharto’s blood-stained, dictatorial regime, which was consolidated in 1967. Sato, “Gatot Mangkupraja,” 208.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

350

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

power” that Indonesian nationalists saw as necessary for the launch of a successful nation-building effort.95 For a person of Sukarno’s overweening ambition, it would have been very hard to risk sacrificing all these potential assets in the name of a principled stance on behalf of the millions of Indonesians being used and abused by a heartless Japanese occupation force.96 Personal contact with those Japanese officers and officials responsible for liaison with Indonesian nationalists also helped maintain the image of a well-intentioned side to Japanese policy. The Japanese military in Indonesia, as was the case in the Philippine context, was riven by internal differences and competing agendas. The Kenpeitai asserted control and inspired fear through its use of classic secret-police methods, while regular officers and soldiers were hardly known for restraint or cultural sensitivity in their treatment of the indigenous population. But the members of the Japanese Propaganda Corps with whom Sukarno and Hatta worked closely early on were intellectuals with a genuine interest in the country, even if their conception of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere into which it was to be integrated was ultimately imperialist. The chronic inter-service rivalry between the Japanese army and navy could also create some small openings for Indonesian nationalists, especially as Japan’s defeat grew nigh. This was the experience of Subardjo, a prominent nationalist who, as a student activist in the Netherlands, had joined with Mohammad Hatta in attending the 1927 founding meeting in Brussels of the Comintern-sponsored League against Imperialism. His release from imprisonment by the Kenpeitai and assignment to work in the Japanese navy’s liaison office in Jakarta put him in contact with the head of that office, Admiral Maeda. Maeda and his staff were much more open to the idea of Indonesian self-determination than the army administration in charge of Java. This allowed Subardjo to persuade himself that the Japanese navy would ultimately intervene on behalf of Indonesian independence in the face of an army that almost to the very end seemed reluctant to make substantive moves in that direction. As Ethan Mark points out, this was a misconception because, until the last year or so of the

95

96

Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 269–70; Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 141. On the importance of occupation-era institution building to post-war nation-states in Southeast Asia, see Yellen, Greater East Asia, 210. This use of the “sinews of power” metaphor is drawn from John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988). Sato argues that Parindra leaders appointed to the Central Advisory Council tended to be much more concerned about the abuse of peasants than were the former noncooperating nationalists, with Hatta as a notable exception in the latter category. Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 68–70.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

351

war, the Japanese navy was particularly opposed to any devolution of power that would entail the loss of its control over the less densely populated, resource-rich eastern islands of the Dutch East Indies, which it administered with a commitment to permanent, extractive occupation and integration into the Japanese empire.97 Yet Maeda himself ended up serving as an important ally amidst the chaotic situation in August 1945, as Sukarno and Hatta maneuvered their way towards a declaration of independence. A converse situational element was the fact that primary responsibility for actually carrying out the occupiers’ policies of ruthless rural exploitation lay with the pangrèh praja, which allowed the largely Jakarta-based nationalists to distance themselves from the nasty business of implementing policies on behalf of which they themselves propagandized as necessary measures for the defense of Java against an Allied incursion.98 Hence, as much as the nationalists resented the pangrèh praja, it was, in the long run, arguably convenient to have them in place as the parties to blame for being most intimately and immediately responsible for the wartime requisitioning of rice and forced recruitment of romusha. The way those policies were implemented, Hatta was already suggesting in his official wartime reports, was not a reflection of Putera’s nationalist leadership’s vision for the country.99 Moreover, in addition to finger-pointing at the pangrèh praja, there was an entire ethnic group to be blamed for the common people’s hardships: the Chinese. The hostility against ethnic Chinese shared by nationalist elites and non-Chinese masses alike was also in many ways a legacy of Dutch colonial rule. For it was under the Dutch that the disproportionate representation of ethnic Chinese in roles as economic middlemen between rice farmers and commodity markets flourished, earning them the animosity of those who suffered from the exploitative aspects of the colonial economy. Moreover, as a resented and vulnerable minority, the Chinese looked to the colonial authorities for protection. Like the pangrèh praja class, they were therefore seen by nationalists as collaborators with the European oppressors, with the aggravating factor that they were 97

98 99

Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 265–66; Ooi Keat Gin, The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941–1945 (London: Routledge, 2011), 39–40, 73–74; Mrázek, Sjahrir, 248–50; excerpt from Nishijima, Shōgen, in Reid and Oki, eds., Japanese Experience in Indonesia. In the formerly Dutch, southern zone of Borneo, local newspapers were forbidden to so much as mention the names of Sukarno and Hatta, until a late reversal of course following the September 1944 Japanese promise of independence to Indonesia. Ooi, Japanese Occupation, 81, 85–86. Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 73, 79. Hatta, “Report to the Gunseikanbu,” 111–12; Shigeru Sato, “The Pangrèh Praja”; Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 73, 79; Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun, 171.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

352

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

perceived as (non-Muslim) aliens in Indonesia whose presence and economic power had grown in tandem with the consolidation of Dutch power. The Japanese had intervened to stop widespread violence and looting directed at Chinese residents during the first weeks following the Dutch surrender, and did not want to interfere substantively with the important economic role played by Chinese merchants and businesspeople. But they were happy to play on prejudice against them by requiring them and other non-ethnically indigenous people to register as aliens – with ethnic-majority students placed in charge of the registration process.100 Chinese people were thus perfect scapegoats for the hardships inflicted by a Japanese occupation that the nationalists themselves saw as an opportunity for advancing their own agendas. Nationalists tended to represent the Chinese as “others” rather than as partaking in Indonesian nationhood, much as Jews were perceived as inherently alien to the nation in many European countries; indeed, one historian has played on the term “antisemitism” by referring to anti-Chinese prejudice across Southeast Asia as “anti-Sinitism.”101 One of the complaints made by the former non-cooperating nationalists (the pergerakan) about the first Japanesesponsored mass-mobilization organization, the Three-A Movement, was that many of its local branches and offshoots ended up coopting – or being coopted by – ethnic Chinese mercantile associations, in addition to including members of other minorities such as Arabs and Indians. It was a point of principle for the nationalists that Putera, the successor organization which they led, completely excluded Chinese from membership.102 In his official report to the Japanese authorities at the time of Putera’s dissolution in 1944, Hatta made a point of blaming the Chinese as major contributors to the mass suffering and resentment brought on by the occupation authorities’ rice-requisitioning policies in which Putera itself was implicated by virtue of its propaganda efforts. He accused Chinese rice-mill owners of hoarding (which was plausible enough, given that hoarding and black marketeering at every stage of the supply chain is a standard, widespread response to any wartime requisitioning of, and price-capping policy on, a high-demand agricultural commodity). He reported that “there is a general conviction that the Chinese are never short of food; whereas Indonesians living in the villages often eat rice but once a week.” (Note the exclusion of ethnic Chinese from the category of “Indonesian.”) And he concluded that the failure of Putera’s propaganda 100 101 102

Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 110–13. Kuhn, Chinese among Others, 254, 286–91, and passim. Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, 40–42, 52.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

353

efforts on behalf of increased rice production could be laid at the door of perceived Chinese abuses. Whether or not such things are true is not the problem. It is only necessary to say here that news and facts of this sort lower people’s morale and increase their reluctance to act on government appeals for increased agricultural production. Regardless of how intense the propaganda is, if what people see with their own eyes makes them reluctant to cooperate, the propaganda will have no effect.103

One way to understand this particular document is as an attempt to find indirect ways of questioning the policies of the Japanese themselves through criticism of their implementation by the pangrèh praja and Chinese merchants and rice-mill owners.104 But in another context, such arguments could readily lend themselves to a legitimization of the nationalists’ own activities under occupation, for here (they could claim) they were, nobly combating the influence of the Chinese socio-economic stratum which was itself a legacy of Dutch colonialism and Western-style capitalism. What could be better suited to diverting attention from the pergerakan’s own complicity in Japanese brutalization of Java’s peasant masses? Later in this chapter, comparable patterns will be noted in rightwing Ukrainian nationalists’ projection onto Jews of blame for the abuses associated with Soviet “imperial” oppression, amidst those nationalists’ initial embrace of Nazi German overlordship in 1941. Violence against ethnic Chinese in wartime and immediate post-war Indonesia did not rise to the level of the genocidal attacks experienced by Ukrainian Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their local collaborators. Yet Indonesian nationalists’ wartime cultivation of these scapegoating traditions must have contributed to an atmosphere conducive to the outbreak of murderous attacks against Chinese communities – as well as against mixed-race “Eurasians” – which did claim thousands of lives during the period following Japan’s defeat and in the context of the massive general bloodshed associated with the subsequent war of independence from the Dutch.105

103

104

105

Hatta, “One Year of Putera,” 66. In May 1945, during the build-up to his declaration of Indonesian independence, Sukarno issued public assurances that members of all communities would have equal status in the new republic. Touwen-Bouwsma, “Japanese Minority Policy,” 568. Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, ch. 9. On the role of rigidly misguided Japanese requisitioning and restrictive economic-management policies in disrupting the rice market, aggravating food shortages, and causing massive famine by 1943 in rural Java, see Huff, World War II and Southeast Asia, 268–69. Heidhues, “Anti-Chinese Violence.” The Chinese communities themselves were marked by a diversity of political sympathies and inclinations, with some among them actively joining the Indonesian independence struggle. Ibid., 391–92.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

354

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

The power of scapegoating notwithstanding, in some instances the material suffering brought on by the wartime policies of the Japanese and their collaborators led to localized peasant uprisings – and often brutal Japanese repressions thereof. A case in point was the series of rebellions that took place in parts of West Java in 1944 in response to the famine-producing fiasco that was the Japanese rice-requisition program, as implemented by the pangrèh praja and their subordinates all the way down to the village level. Yet, here again, the nationalists proved adept at distancing themselves from the problem while claiming to hold the key to the solution. Such revolts were sometimes led by wealthier peasants who had not expected to have to surrender their own crops at artificially low prices. The ideological framing of rural unrest tended to be that of traditional Islam as taught and practiced in villages rather than reflecting the secular-nationalist concepts (or the more modernist versions of Islam, for that matter) of urban intellectuals and activists. Given how remote these revolts were from the nationalists’ own ideological agenda or base of support, they did not pose an immediate political dilemma for them. By the same token, peasant revolts could create openings for the infiltration of rural communities by pergerakan in the wake of the uprisings’ suppression and the ensuing crisis in relations between pangrèh praja and rural communities.106 Disquiet and unruliness among nationalist students and youth activists in Jakarta itself was much trickier to handle, for these constituted the rank-and-file of Sukarno’s fledgling movement, upon whose support the legitimacy of his leadership depended. The period leading up to, and following, Japan’s surrender was fraught with political hazards for Sukarno and his associates, as this relationship was tested to its limits. Following the September 1944 promise by Tojo’s replacement as Japanese prime minister, Koiso Kuniaki, of future independence for the East Indies, expectations among nationalist student activists rose to a fever pitch. Sukarno had to maneuver in such a way as to placate the 106

Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun, 160; Sato, War, Nationalism and Peasants, ch. 6; Aiko Kurosawa, “Forced Delivery of Paddy and Peasant Uprisings in Indramayu, Indonesia: Japanese Occupation and Social Change,” Developing Economies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 1983), 52–72. On the influential role in Java’s village life played by Islamic teachers (kiyayi) who had not, prior to Japanese reforms, been part of any centralized religious bureaucracy, see Allan A. Samson, “Conceptions of Politics, Power, and Ideology in Contemporary Indonesian Islam,” in Karl D. Jackson and Lucian W. Pye, eds., Political Power and Communication in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 198. On the use of exemplary public beheadings to suppress rural unrest in Sumatra among impoverished peasants who had expected the Japanese to allow them to raise crops on land controlled by local potentates formerly allied with Dutch planters, see Inoue Tetsuro, “Reminiscences” (translation of ch. 5 of Inoue Tetsuro, Bapa Jango: Bapa Djanggut [Tokyo: Kōdan-sha, 1953]), in Reid and Oki, eds., Japanese Experience in Indonesia, 82–125.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

355

Japanese authorities, whose moves towards implementation of this promise were halting at best, without completely losing the trust of his followers. In June 1945, Sukarno delivered his famous speech to the Japaneseauthorized Independence Preparatory Committee in which he laid out the five principles – the Pancasila – that were supposedly to serve as foundations for an Indonesian republic. These included the archipelago’s national unity; an embrace of global internationalism (but an internationalism of distinctive nations, as distinct from cosmopolitanism); the creation of a vaguely described form of representative government; the promotion of prosperity and social justice via a classtranscendent spirit of cooperation; and the prospective nation-state’s establishment on generically God-fearing yet non-sectarian principles. Ethan Mark has interpreted this program as retaining some characteristic features of wartime Japanese ideological influence (notably in its insistence on an essentialist understanding of nationhood and in its assurance that modernization and development could take place without class conflict) at the same time that it could ostensibly be seen as distancing the nationalist movement from the explicitly Greater Asian themes of Japanese rhetoric.107 In the following month, youth representatives walked out of a conference that was supposed to mark the founding of a new political party led by Sukarno, after Sukarno put off their demands for a firm commitment to making Indonesia a republic. Such a decision was, awkwardly enough, supposed to be formally okayed by Emperor Hirohito rather than unilaterally made by Indonesians.108 The youth activists remained excluded from the delicate talks Sukarno held with Japanese regional commanders in Saigon in August, which resulted in the authorization of some further steps in the direction of imminent independence. The American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that month, and Tokyo’s consequent decision to surrender unexpectedly early, caught Java’s nationalist leaders off guard. As Benedict Anderson put it, “it was not so disappointing that the Japanese had been defeated as that the defeat should have occurred just as the transfer of power was about to be tidily arranged. The collapse of the Japanese appeared to set an immovable block across the path to independence.”109

107

108 109

Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 209–302; D. R. SarDesai, ed., Southeast Asian History: Essential Readings (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006), ch. 14; Michael B. Bishku, “Sukarno, Charismatic Leadership and Islam in Indonesia,” Journal of Third World Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 1992), 100–17. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, 56–60; Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 49–60. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution, 69.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

356

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

As mentioned in the previous chapter, amidst the intense political maneuvering that took place during these days of confusion, Sukarno and Hatta were briefly abducted by youth activists, who demanded the immediate declaration of a republic. Following their release, and under threat of insurrection, they were finally able to gain tacit acquiescence from the Japanese authorities in their declaration of an Indonesian republic on August 17 – two days after Japan’s surrender, and thus at a point when the formal obligation of Japanese forces was to maintain order in the archipelago pending its handover to Allied forces and Dutch authorities.110 Simply being in position to declare independence amidst the fortuitous circumstances under which Japan’s surrender had taken place – with British forces still weeks away from having any troops to spare for landings in the East Indies, and the recently repatriated Dutch government in no condition to take any immediate action of its own – allowed Sukarno’s new republic to begin a consolidation of de facto power. When British-commanded forces did finally arrive, they were loath to get caught up in a quagmire, and were open to dealing with Sukarno on an ad hoc basis, much to the chagrin and frustration of the Dutch government.111 This further strengthened the republic in its struggle for domestic and international legitimacy and recognition. From a nationalist ideological perspective, thanks in part to this unpredictable sequence of events, the case could be made that Sukarno and Hatta’s gamble had paid off richly. This in turn could go a long way towards retroactively justifying the moral and political compromises that working with the Japanese had entailed over the preceding years. Dutch forces did eventually return to the archipelago, resulting in years of bitter warfare prior to their final departure from an independent Indonesia. In their effort to portray their campaign as something other than a reactionary colonialist undertaking, the Dutch authorities emphasized their queen’s December 1942 radio broadcast holding forth the promise of negotiations over imperial reform.112 At the same time, they painted Sukarno as an unacceptable interlocutor, given the close relationship he had cultivated with the enemy. The fact that the pangrèh praja remained in their administrative posts during the occupation had, at least initially, been in conformity with their standing contingency instructions – a situation roughly equivalent to that of the civil servants in the Netherlands who had operated on the basis of the Aanwijzingen (see 110 111 112

Ibid., ch. 4. Herman Smit, Gezag is gezag … Kanttekeningen bij de houding van de gereformeerden in de Indonesische kwestie (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006), 192–94. Foray, Visions of Empire, ch. 5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

357

Fig. 24 Sukarno declares Indonesian independence, August 17, 1945. Mohammad Hatta appears on the right of the photo. Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Chapter 1).113 But Sukarno had gone so far as to accept a leading position in the Central Advisory Council created by the Japanese in the last phase of their occupation. Even the Dutch government and political establishment realized it would stretch credulity to paint Sukarno as the Indonesian equivalent of Anton Mussert, the leader of the NSB (Dutch National Socialist Movement) who had treacherously taken advantage of the country’s defeat and occupation to try and worm his way towards political power.114 The pre-war Dutch colonial regime had, after all, resisted Indonesian nationalists’ demands for autonomy (which it was now ostensibly open to negotiating), and it was against that background that some nationalists had initially looked to the Japanese for a better deal. As one newspaper column put it, to equate Sukarno with Mussert would be to fall back into the reductionist colonial mentality of the pre-war days.115 But the fact that Sukarno and Hatta had continued to strengthen their collaboration with 113 114 115

Frederick, “Introduction,” 23, n. 65. Radio address by J. H. A. Logemann (Dutch Minister for the Overseas Territories), October 5, 1945, Keesings Historisch Archief, No. 746, 6461. “Verwarring,” Veritas: Onafhankelijk Dagblad voor Delft en Omstreken, October 2, 1945, 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

358

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

the occupying forces even as the horrific nature of their rule became more evident, and adopted elements of what was termed the fascistic rhetoric and style of the Japanese, was deemed unforgivable – not only by the government of the Netherlands, but by many of the former Dutch resistance organizations. Even the weekly newspaper of the Association of Indonesian Students in the Netherlands, which had participated in the Dutch resistance and supported post-war self-government for Indonesia in the context of a democratized relationship with the Netherlands,116 published an article which described Sukarno as having slid down a slippery slope towards “Wang Jingwei-ism” (referring to the recently deceased head of the Chinese collaborationist regime in Nanjing). By abandoning democratic principles in favor of fascism, Sukarno and Hatta had chosen an ideological path that was inherently at odds with any genuine form of national self-determination.117 During the interim period between Japanese surrender and the arrival of Allied forces, Dutch news accounts based on reports from ethnic Chinese journalists in Java indicated Sukarno had been greeted with fascist salutes by cheering crowds assembling under the very noses of Japanese forces.118 Such arguments enabled the Dutch authorities to rationalize their effort to reclaim control of the East Indies as progressive in its political aims and not at all incongruous with the celebration of their own recent liberation from the Germans.119 Yet, while they were striving to paint 116 117

118

119

Foray, Visions of Empire, 258–80. I. A. Mochtar, “Het ‘Wang Ching Wei-isme in Indonesië: De Samenwerking van de Indonesiërs met Japan,” Indonesia (an offshoot of De Bevrijding: Weekblad uitgegeven door de Indonesische Vereniging Perhimpoenan Indonesia), May 15, 1945, 3–5. The student association (Perhimpoenan Indonesia) had been chaired by Mohammad Hatta in the late 1920s; Hatta was later expelled from the organization as it came under growing Communist influence. Mrázek, Sjahrir, ch. 3. “Rebellen op Java brachten den fascistengroet,” Provinciale Drentsche en Asser Courant, September 24, 1945, p. 1. An Australian correspondent who interviewed Sukarno during this period reported that the sentries outside his house stretched their arms out in the manner of the fascist salute. Special Correspondent in Batavia [Jakarta], “Pen Picture of Soekarno: Cool, Graceful, and Self-Possessed,” Argus (Melbourne), October 10, 1945, p. 20. In his semi-fictionalized memoir, a Japanese officer stationed on Sumatra during the war and its aftermath describes a nationalist speaker addressing youthful activists about the independent republic while “holding his right hand high like Adolf Hitler.” Takao Fusayama, A Japanese Memoir of Sumatra, 1945–1946: Love and Hatred in the Liberation War (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1993), 23. Prior to the Japanese invasion, it had actually been the “cooperating nationalists” of the Parindra Party who had taken to using a fascist-style salute. Yannick Lengkeek, “Staged Glory: The Impact of Fascism on ‘Cooperative’ Nationalist Circles in Late Colonial Indonesia, 1935–1942,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, Vol. 7 (2018), 109–31. On the widespread assumption among a fairly wide spectrum of progressive Dutch resistance organizations that the East Indies would return to some form of association

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

359

Sukarno as a feckless collaborationist, his fledgling government was framing its counternarrative by, for example, appointing as minister of the people’s security in absentia the missing leader (Supriyadi) of the doomed, February 1945 PETA battalion’s revolt in Blitar, which was already being made the romanticized symbol of a myth of national resistance.120 In any case, the more the Dutch resisted engaging with Sukarno, or recognizing his government once they had agreed to meet with him,121 the more they burnished his image as a committed anticolonial nationalist whose choice to work with the Japanese had constituted a prescient strategic choice which had catapulted him into position to resist the attempted reassertion of European control over the East Indies. By 1949, they were to be left with no viable choice but to negotiate their departure with a Sukarno whose role as nationalist hero was to serve as a legitimizing foundation of his rule for the next decade and a half.

Ukraine The OUN as Would-Be Liberator from Imperialism As the most active and visible wartime movements advocating Ukrainian independence, the OUN’s two factions constitute an obvious focal point for a discussion of the evolution of anti-imperial nationalism in Germanoccupied Ukraine. This should not be misread as implying that the OUN’s political ideology and practices can be assumed to be representative of “the Ukrainian people” any more than Sukarno’s priorities and choices ought to be simplistically read as expressive of an Indonesian national will. Indeed, as has already been seen in the Indonesian case, the conditions of wartime occupation often made for painful contradictions between the agendas of self-appointed and self-selected nationalist

120

121

with the Netherlands under a post-colonial or reformed imperial framework, see Foray, Visions of Empire, passim. Supriyadi is thought to have escaped Japanese capture by fleeing to West Java, only to end up dying of an illness. Sato, “Gatot Mangkupraja,” 206. On the latter-day mythologizing of the Blitar rebellion and of Supriyadi, see Boryano Rickum, Die japanische Besatzungszeit in der nationalen Erinnerungskultur Indonesiens (Berlin: Regiospectra Verlag, 2012), 37–62. The first meeting between Dutch Lieutenant Governor-General Hubertus J. van Mook and Sukarno took place without the Dutch government’s prior knowledge or sanction, and under the British military’s auspices, as early as October 23, 1945. Ide Anak Agung Gde Agung, From the Formation of the State of East Indonesia towards the Establishment of the United States of Indonesia, trans. Linda Owens (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1996), xviii–xx.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

360

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

vanguard movements and the most fundamental material needs and even survival prospects of millions among the ordinary people on behalf of whom they claimed to speak. (For that matter, several million Ukrainians served in the Soviet armed forces during the war.122) Yet, however representative or not these nationalist movements may have been of those they claimed as their co-nationals, the circumstances of wartime occupation allowed them to have a disproportionate impact (be it of the kind they intended or not) on the course of political or (especially in the Ukrainian case) ethno-demographic developments in their societies. “[A]t a time of chaos and confusion, liquidation of undesirable Polish, Muscovite, and Jewish activists is permitted, especially supporters of Bolshevik–Muscovite imperialism.”123 Thus read one sentence in a 75page set of guidelines drawn up in May 1941 by OUN-B planners for the benefit of the “expeditionary groups” (propaganda, mobilization, and organization squads) the movement planned on sending into Ukrainian population centers if and when a German invasion of the Soviet Union got under way. The substance and form of this message reflected a broad pattern of OUN propaganda and rhetoric, which in many cases escalated into even more explicitly exterminationist language as well as actions directed by OUN-B-affiliated personnel against Jews and ethnic Poles during the three to four nightmarish years of warfare that beset Ukrainian-populated lands following Germany’s launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. One may tend to take such extremist tendencies almost for granted in the context of ethno-national conflicts, let alone in the case of an organization aligned at the time with Nazi Germany. Yet there remains a great deal to unpack in those few words alone, reflective as they are of a complex set of historical framings and ideological agendas. As in the case of many Southeast Asian anti-colonial nationalists, OUN activists’ orientation in the world war was framed by a set of historical understandings and ideological orientations combined with a geopolitical context that led them to see collaboration with an expansionist Axis power

122

123

Ukrainians defected to the Germans from the Red Army in slightly higher than average proportions during the war, but most did so for reasons other than nationalist ones. Mark Edele, “Why did Ukrainian Red Army Men Go over to the Germans: The Case of Defectors to the Wehrmacht’s 296 Infantry Division, 1942–1943,” Ukraı¨ns’kij istoričnij žurnal (2019), 86–102. Quotation from May 1941 OUN-B expeditionary-group guidelines in Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Attitude toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3–4 (December 1999), 149–84, here 153.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

361

as the most likely path to the achievement of their nationalist aspirations. Even in the face of forced-labor impositions, ruthless resource extraction, and consequent widespread starvation, among all manner of abuses and atrocities visited by German occupation forces upon parts of the Ukrainian population in the course of the war, OUN-B and OUN-M leaders remained largely wedded to the view that Soviet victory represented by far the worse evil from a Ukrainian nationalist perspective. This approach was both informed by, and articulated in terms of, a historical perspective captured by the reference to “Bolshevik–Muscovite imperialism” – a compound term that characterizes the Soviet Union as the latterday incarnation of a centuries-old Russian empire against which Ukrainians must fight in order to gain their national freedom. The derisive term “Muscovite” rather than Russian was deployed because Ukrainian nationalists were fond of turning the tables on Tsarist-era Russian-imperial chauvinists who had referred to Ukrainians as “Little Russians” – quaintly primitive speakers of a Russian-derived dialect who needed to be integrated into a “Great Russian”-led civilization rather than recognized as a separate nation. Ukrainian nationalists contested this by arguing that Ukraine actually had a better claim to the legacy of Kievan (or Kyivan, to go by the transliteration from Ukrainian) Rus’ by virtue of that progenitor of East Slavic statehood and civilization having been based in Kiev/ Kyiv rather than the provincial backwater that Moscow had constituted in the Middle Ages. Needless to say, hostility to the Soviet Union was also rooted in the recent history of Bolshevik incorporation of a briefly independent Ukraine into the USSR, followed by the particularly brutal (some would say genocidal) way in which the man-made famine brought on by the Stalinist regime’s agricultural collectivization campaign of the early 1930s had affected Soviet Ukraine. As to Poland, its recent history of rule over the Ukrainian-majority countryside of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia had, as discussed in the previous chapter, formed the very framework within which the OUN had arisen in the first place. From a Ukrainian nationalist perspective, Poland and “Soviet Russia” were imperial and/or colonizing powers whose legacy of dominance over Ukraine needed to be reversed, be it by cleansing the country of populations that identified ethnically, culturally, or ideologically with those alien powers, or by reclaiming the identity and allegiance of “authentic” Ukrainians who may have fallen under the influence of the imperial hegemons.124 This raises the subject of the Jews. In the eyes of the OUN and the ideologues associated with it, Jews were seen as proxies for both Polish 124

Plokhy, Gates of Europe, chs. 5 and 18–22; Marples, Heroes and Villains, ch. 3; Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 1–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

362

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

colonialism and Soviet imperialism and as an inherently alien, unassimilable element whose continued presence in the midst of the Ukrainian nation was inimical to its interests.125 This was obviously not the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the horrors of the 1917–20 era in Ukraine. Indeed, during the 1930s, there were some within the OUN itself who contended that the direction of mass violence towards Jewish communities by forces under Petliura’s command had done nothing but damage the international reputation of Ukrainian nationalism and further alienate a Jewish population that already tended to gravitate towards the “high culture” and hoped-for protection of Ukraine’s traditional Russian and Polish oppressors. Jewish support for Ukrainian nationalism could be won, some argued, if only the door to participation in an inclusive Ukrainian nationalism were held open to them. But, as Nazi power grew and OUN leaders looked to align their movement with a potentially resurgent Germany, the hands of antisemites within the organization were strengthened – particularly within the leadership of the OUN’s influential Eastern Galician branch. These right-wing Ukrainian nationalists saw Eastern Galician Jews and Soviet Ukraine’s Jews as irredeemably loyal to Warsaw and Moscow, respectively, and as complicit in the Polish and Soviet colonial projects. (When these regions’ historically Yiddish-speaking Jews assimilated linguistically, their target languages tended to be Polish or Russian – the obvious linguistic paths to upward social mobility.) Petliura’s assassination in 1926 in Paris at the hands of Sholom Schwartzbard, a Jewish man seeking to avenge the murder of his family in the pogroms of 1919, had reinforced the image of Jews as existential enemies. Schwartzbard’s subsequent acquittal by a French jury that was moved by overwhelming evidence presented by the defense about the scale of atrocities that had been committed against Jews by Ukrainian forces further intensified the resentments of Ukrainian nationalists. Many of them now put aside the grudge they had long held against Petliura for having entered an anti-Bolshevik alliance with Polish leader Piłsudksi in 1920 at the price of ceding Eastern Galicia to Poland. Accusations that Schwartzbard was an agent of the Soviet secret police converged neatly with the political blood libel that depicted the Jews collectively as architects of Communism. This Judeo-Bolshevik or Judeo-Communist myth constituted an element of modern antisemitism that was widely prevalent on the political Right globally and that was cultivated with venomous intensity across much of Central and East Central Europe.126

125

Carynnyk, “Foes of our Rebirth.”

126

Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

363

The fascistic Ukrainian journalist and publicist Dmytro Dontsov, whose writings were very influential in OUN circles (even though he did not become a member himself, thus avoiding prosecution by the Polish authorities), turned on the Jews as an alien minority that he associated with what he saw as his country’s historic exploitation and oppression by Russian imperialism in both its Tsarist and Soviet Communist forms. In the wake of Petliura’s assassination, while in one breath Dontsov downplayed the extent and significance of the antisemitic violence that had occurred on Petliura’s watch, in another he decried what he saw as the weakness of the first Ukrainian republic’s official endorsement of cultural autonomy for Jews and its creation of a ministry for Jewish affairs. The lesson of this period, he insisted, was not about the importance of inclusiveness and tolerance; rather, it pointed to the need for an unforgiving campaign against Russian/Soviet imperialism and its supposedly Jewish advocates and enablers on Ukrainian soil.127 Dontsov’s writings fed into a growing readiness on the part of OUN leaders to adopt stances which, under the circumstances of the Second World War, quickly evolved into an exterminationist approach to the chronic “problem” of ethnically Polish and Jewish minority populations in western Ukraine.128 This formed a substantive expression of the broader pattern of thinking that depicted a lack of sufficient ruthlessness and an unwillingness to pursue the logic of nationalism to its ultimate conclusion as having been the bane of the earlier, failed attempt to create an independent Ukraine. At the same time, and rather ironically, popular memory of the massive shedding of Jewish blood in Ukraine during 1918–21 on the part of civilians and armed groups alike was to provide a familiar script for the renewed unleashing of mob violence against Jews once the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the arrival of accompanying OUN activists created the opportunity and incentive in the summer of 1941.129 As to the OUN’s alignment with Nazi Germany, shared hostility towards Poland and the Soviet Union was part of the operative logic here, as well as ideological sympathy on the part of an OUN leadership that had for years modeled itself on fascist examples in the articulation of its own conception of integral nationalism and its adoption of the leadership 127

128

129

Trevor Erlacher, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes: An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov (Cambridge: MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021), 237–44, 318–19. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 79. Petliura’s assassination by “the Jew Shvarsvart” (referring to Sholom Schwartzbard) was highlighted in a propaganda pamphlet distributed in parts of German-occupied Ukraine by OUN-M personnel in the fall of 1941. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 79, n. 28. Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, ch. 19.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

364

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

principle.130 Writers and publicists on the Ukrainian-nationalist far Right, such as the influential Dontsov, were both reinforced in their antisemitism by the example of Hitler’s regime and sympathetic towards the regime on account of its persecution of Jews. As Dontsov put it in 1934, not only were Nazis sworn foes of Communism, their regime had the potential “to put in order the everday Jewish problem [which is] irritating for us.”131 The expectation that Germany’s prospective war against the USSR could potentially create a scenario for the creation of some form of Ukrainian national sovereignty was suggested by relatively recent historical experience. As described in the previous chapter, during the First World War, German armies had plunged deep into Russian imperial territory, eventually forcing the nascent Bolshevik regime to accept the independence of a Ukrainian state under the harsh terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918.132 True, that Ukrainian regime functioned as little more than a puppet government in the service of German imperialism, but that experience proved evanescent, as Germany lost the war in the west before the end of 1918. A succession of Ukrainian governments, would-be governments, and armed formations had then struggled in vain to maintain an independent Ukraine, only to find the bulk of the region partitioned between a nominally autonomous Soviet Ukraine in the east and an expansive Polish state in the west. In the context of another world war, the leadership of both factions of the OUN were therefore convinced that historical logic favored an alliance with Germany which would pave a path towards a decisive break from Ukraine’s legacy of imperial domination, just as cooperation with Japan was to seem to some in Southeast Asia as the key to national liberation from Western colonial rule.133

130 131 133

Rossolinński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 77–89. 132 Erlacher, Ukrainian Nationalism, 314. Ibid., 361. Far-fetched though this analogy might appear, it actually seems to have actively shaped expectations among some Ukrainian nationalists as late as 1944. In March of that year, a detained Ukrainian nationalist fighter whose unit had defected from the Germancommanded auxiliary police described to his German military captors Ukrainian nationalists’ resentment over the conduct of the German civil administration in occupied Ukraine, against which they were committed to fighting. He went on to add that what his comrades and he aspired to was independence on the model of what Japan had granted to the Philippines “and the other liberated Southeast Asian countries.” Of course, the prisoner may have been telling German officers what he imagined they wanted to hear, but his awareness of the Southeast Asian analogy is quite interesting in and of itself. Apparently, his effort to emphasize that his commitment to fighting against all representatives of the German civil administration was completely unrelated to his embrace of the German army was successful, for the surviving members of his unit and he were set free and allowed to proceed on their own to the nearest German army post. Amt Ausland Abwehr report of March 3, 1944 summarizing interrogation conducted on February 2, 1944, Microfilm Series T78 (Records of Headquarters, German Army

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

365

These, then, were the attitudes, values, and agendas the OUN factions brought with them into Ukraine, as their agitators and organizers moved quickly to seize the sudden opportunity created by the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. So how did this play out in practice?

A Spectrum of Imperial Legacies and the Limitations of the AntiColonial Paradigm The ideologically driven activists of the OUN had to confront a highly variegated socio-political and ethnographic landscape and a very fluid set of evolving conditions, as they made their way east in the wake of advancing German armies. The complexity of the situations they encountered in Ukraine often belied the reductionist set of historical lessons and facile slogans with which they were equipped. Most obviously, the Germans soon turned on their would-be OUN allies and ruthlessly suppressed much of their activity, while some elements among the German forces left the door open to renewed cooperation in certain forms and at some levels.134 But, aside from the inherently unpredictable nature of German policy, activists in both factions of the OUN found that the popular resonance among Ukrainians of OUN understandings and prioritizations of friend and foe, and of the OUN’s brand of fascistic nationalism more broadly, varied not only by individual and social class, but also by region. To take the OUN as a proxy for Ukrainian identity and interests would be to fall into the trap of taking their own claims at face value. A crucial variable here was the different forms of external hegemony that had been exercised over the lands claimed for Ukraine. The OUN’s call for national liberation from imperial oppression and/or alien rule rang truer in some regions than in others, depending on linguistic, religious, cultural, and socio-economic factors as well as the diversity of past relationships with hegemonic states. In the Indonesian case, regardless of level of political literacy or ideological orientation, anyone could

134

High Command), Roll 565, frame 277, NARA. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, cites this report on 129. The formations answerable to SS chief Himmler were hostile to the self-determination aspirations and mobilizing activities of the OUN factions, and eager to repress them in late 1941 and 1942. “Tätigkeits- und Lagebericht No. 10 der Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD in der UdSSR,” report covering the month of February 1942, in Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion, 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitpolizei und des SD (Berlin: Publikationen der Gedenk- und Bildungsstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, 1997), 313. Himmler was to modulate his approach somewhat in 1943–44, as Germany’s military fortunes shifted.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

366

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

immediately grasp the notion that the Dutch constituted a racially different, foreign element from overseas that had imposed its rule over indigenous populations of the East Indies. The Slavic populations of Eastern Europe – “dominant” and “subaltern” groups alike – lived in territorial contiguity with one another. The religio-linguistic differences among them were characterized less by starkly drawn lines of distinction than by gradients (as well as patterns of overlap); in certain respects, one could almost as easily differentiate among Ukrainians on the basis of such criteria as one could draw sharp distinctions between all Ukrainians and their neighbors. Eastern Galicia: Jews as Stand-Ins for Soviet Imperialism. It was in Eastern Galicia, the historic core base of the OUN, that the movement predictably garnered the most active and visible support in the wake of the German military advance. Specifically, it was the OUN-B, the leadership of which had emerged from the Galician “Homeland Executive” of the OUN, which dominated the nationalist scene there. Bandera himself was prevented by the Germans from crossing over into formerly Soviet-held territory, so it was Iaroslav Stetsko who became leader of the movement in the “liberated” lands prior to his own July 1941 arrest and replacement by Mykola Lebed. And it was as a moment of national liberation that OUN-B activists and their supporters marked the change of power in the region as, implementing plans laid out prior to the German invasion, their “expeditionary groups” showed up in one town after another to disseminate word of Stetsko’s June 30 declaration of Ukrainian independence and to undertake the organization of local administrations. The independence proclamation was premature, of course: while the OUN-B leaders hoped to be rewarded for their loyalty to the Nazis with a client state comparable to the ones whose emergence the Germans had facilitated in Slovakia and Croatia, Hitler and Himmler proved dead set against the equivalent in Ukraine. They planned to transform the region into a zone of German colonial settlement and exploitation. Among German institutions, it was the military – and the Abwehr (military intelligence) in particular – which was most open to some pragmatic cooperation with local nationalists. During the early weeks of the invasion, before the administrative partitioning of Ukraine, it was the military that was still in charge throughout the newly captured territories. Therefore, even though German officials responded negatively to the declaration of independence, the OUN-B enjoyed a brief window of opportunity during which it had a relatively free hand in disseminating word of the proclamation and propagandizing and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

367

mobilizing on behalf of its cause, which it misrepresented to the population as fully aligned with that of the Nazis.135 Across the region, therefore, throughout much of July 1941, local communities were the sites of celebrations choreographed by OUN-B expeditionary groups. The script generally included greeting any incoming or transiting German troops or their Ukrainian auxiliaries with traditional offerings of bread and salt, public posting of placards and banners celebrating Ukrainian liberation and praising the leadership of Adolf Hitler and Stepan Bandera, and the convening of public meetings or assemblies at which news of the declaration of Ukrainian independence was shared amidst celebration and speech-giving.136 The OUN expeditionary groups also actively recruited local men into a new militia they were organizing. Even beyond West Ukraine, in the Zhytomyr region, veterans of Petliura’s forces were targeted for recruitment as local residents with military experience who were likely to be sympathetic to the organization’s cause.137 Following their suppression of the OUN-B, the Germans incorporated many of these militia members into the indigenous auxiliary-police formations they created.138 There is no definitive way of assessing just how successful the OUN-B was in winning genuine support among the West Ukrainian population at this juncture, given the obvious incentives for performative enthusiasm. One should also be cautious not to assume that manifestations of generic relief at the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the arrival of groups proclaiming national liberation should be interpreted as endorsement of the 135

136 137

138

Following his detention by the Nazis, Stetsko wrote a brief autobiographical sketch in which he articulated his vision for continued cooperation between Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi Germany, highlighting among other things their shared commitment to the eradication of the Jews. The circumstances under which this document was composed obviously make it impossible to treat it as an unfiltered expression of Stetsko’s views. That said, his very composition of it – and the Germans’ subsequent partial translation of it for their own records – is a reflection of the continued interest both OUN-B leaders and certain elements in the German military-political complex had in keeping the door open to renewed collaboration. Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” 149–84. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, ch. 4. German translation of two reports dated August 27, 1941 but reporting on the period July 22–25, 1941, written by someone going by the name of Kornienko, an OUN-B district leader in the Zhytomyr region, German records, State Archive of Zhytomyr Oblast, Fond Р–1151, Opis’ 1, Delo 2, as microfilmed and subsequently digitized by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) under the heading of Selected Records from the Zhytomyr State Oblast Archive, USHMM, Accession No. 1996.A.0269 | RG–31.096M, Reel 2, frames 302–5; see also September 25, 1941 report by Jaroslaw Salisnjak, district leader in Miropol [sic], frames 308–9. For more on Kornienko, see Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 39–40. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 200–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

368

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

OUN-B political platform per se. But there was one set of events which appeared to reflect a striking convergence between OUN-B propaganda and popular sentiment, and this was the series of violent attacks against Jews, which were instigated by the Nazis and OUN-B activists, but which involved the active participation of large mobs and the encouragement or apparent indifference of thousands of onlookers and eye-witnesses. The most murderous of these attacks, and the one that served as a model for others that were to follow in other towns across Eastern Galicia, was the massacre of Jews in Lviv in the first days of July 1941. This is a well-documented event that has been written about extensively, and that followed a very telling script.139 Instigated and encouraged though this pogrom was by the German occupiers, OUN-B-affiliated militiamen (many of whom would have been very freshly recruited) played a major role in this orgy of violence. They were joined by members of the ethnic-Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion (which came under the command of German military intelligence – the Abwehr) and by mostly Ukrainian members of the general public in raiding Jewish homes, dragging out their residents, and subjecting them to a range of gruesome horrors. These included a variety of ritualized humiliations, beating and bludgeoning people to death on the streets, and the stripping, raping, and murdering of women.140 Much of the violence was caught on camera by German soldiers-turned-atrocity-tourists whose surviving photographs, along with a silent film recording, bear witness to some of the brutalities undergone by the targets of this orchestrated onslaught.141 The central act of this blood-soaked street play took place 139 140

141

Ibid., ch. 4. Poles were still much more numerous than Ukrainians in Lviv at this juncture, and Jews actually briefly constituted the largest single ethno-religious group, owing to an influx of refugees from elsewhere in the region. But many accounts of the day’s events suggest Polish participation in the massacre was relatively marginal – which, if true, may be partly attributable to the history of antagonism between Ukrainian and Polish nationalisms. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 213–14. Ola Hnatiuk questions whether all the blame for public displays of enthusiastic welcome towards the Germans should be pinned on Lviv’s Ukrainian population. Hnatiuk wonders how the 16 percent of the city’s population who were Ukrainian at that time could have so dominated the streetscape and points out that, according to some contemporaneous accounts, many Poles felt relief if not joy at the replacement of Soviet power by German hegemony, seeing it as the lesser of two evils. Ola Hnatiuk, Courage and Fear, trans. Ewa Siwak (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 73–79. In late 1918, it had been Polish troops and civilians who had attacked Jews in Lwów/Lviv and other towns in Eastern Galicia, accusing them alternatively of pro-Ukrainian or pro-Bolshevik sentiments and killing scores of victims. Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, 84–88. On local German military commanders’ and administrators’ roles in encouraging celebrations of “liberation from the Jewish yoke,” see Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 138.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

Fig. 25 German propaganda photo showing a Wehrmacht soldier surrounded by young Ukrainians who have welcomed him with a traditional bread offering. MPI/Archive Photos via Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

369

370

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

in the prisons where Soviet NKVD forces had massacred many of the 10,000–40,000 political prisoners (some 70 percent of them ethnic Ukrainians, about 20 percent Poles, and many Jews among the remaining 10 percent) whom they had murdered across the region in the days just prior to Soviet withdrawal, rather than leaving them to potentially be set free by the invaders.142 Dragged to these prisonsturned-sites-of-mass-murder, the captive Jews were subjected to a succession of sadistic humiliations, in full view of onlookers from the public. The first Lviv massacre was followed by another bloody wave of violence at the end of July, leaving a total of some two thousand of the city’s Jews dead. The scenario was reenacted, often with a similar emphasis on dragging Jews to prison yards to disinter the corpses of NKVD victims, across other cities and towns in Eastern Galicia. Volhynia was also the scene of antisemitic massacres in which – as in Eastern Galicia – local, preponderantly Ukrainian, residents took part alongside German forces and Ukrainian auxiliaries. The very staging of the prison-yard massacres made their defining message crystal-clear: the Jews, as a collectivity, were to be identified with the Soviet authorities who had perpetrated the massacre of political prisoners. Compelling randomly abducted Jews to take direct responsibility for an atrocity that had been carried out by the Stalinist regime served as a perfect method of “demonstrating the truth” of the Judeo-Communist myth which was propagated by the Nazis and the OUN alike. How did things come to such a pass? Lashing out at a local ethnic minority identified with a relatively impersonal external oppressor is a tried-and-true staple of political mobilization in the course, or aftermath, of an anti-colonial struggle; the targeting of Chinese businesses in the Dutch East Indies during the first days following the Japanese landings is a case in point, as is the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda under Idi Amin during the 1970s. In the Ukrainian case, the popular animus against the Jews also built on a long tradition of religious antisemitism, on the historical legacy of Jews having functioned as middlemen between Polish landowners and Ukrainian peasants, and on the frustrations with the failure of the independence movement of 1918–19, partial blame for which, as mentioned earlier, the Ukrainian nationalist right-wing tried to pin on “the Jews.” And, again, the massive antisemitic violence during that period just over two decades earlier also constituted a precedent that must, by virtue of its recentness, have been very much alive in the memories and consciousness of a large segment of the population. It 142

Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl, “Introduction,” in Kiebuzinski and Motyl, eds., The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

371

could serve as a template for whom to blame for social ills, whom to target for “retributive” violence and looting, and how to go about it when the opportunity presented itself.143 Popular resentment of Jews appears to have reached new levels of intensity in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia during the all-too-recent experience of Soviet occupation. This was despite the fact that Jewish religious and cultural freedoms were at least as severely curtailed under the Stalinist regime as those of any other community, and that a disproportionate number of Jews had suffered deportation to prison camps or Siberian exile in response to their refusal to give up their Polish citizenship. As Jan Gross has pointed out, it was as individuals that Jews had new opportunities for upward social mobility opened up to them under Soviet rule, and some of them had availed themselves of them.144 Here, as elsewhere in territories from the Baltic to the Black Sea that had been seized by the Soviets under the terms of the 1939 German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, this pattern was perceived as upsetting the proper ethno-social hierarchy and fed the notion that Communism and Soviet power writ large could be understood as instruments of Jewish empowerment.145 All this made for a particularly virulent atmosphere of antisemitic prejudice. The writings of Dmytro Dontsov and of OUN policy-makers and agenda-setters had long emphasized that the “Muscovites” were to be seen as being in the first rank of Ukraine’s enemies, with Jews a notch below them on the list. But in the summer of 1941, Soviet forces and Communist activists had either departed from western Ukraine or gone underground. The region’s Jews were left behind as conveniently vulnerable symbols, in the delusionally prejudiced eyes of nationalist extremists, of the powerful “Muscovite” imperial oppressors, at a time when the German occupiers were themselves unleashing new waves of suffering on the local population.146 The Ukrainian nationalist right-wing’s antisemitic agenda was a local variation on the much more widespread and perniciously influential Judeo-Bolshevik myth propagated by right-wing and fascist movements throughout Europe and beyond; indeed, the Nazis themselves ended up 143 144 145

146

Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, passim. Gross, “Historiographical Supplement,” in Gross, Revolution from Abroad. On the role of perceived ethnic-hierarchy reversal in fueling Lithuanian nationalist violence against Jews following the Soviets’ 1941 retreat, see Roger D. Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92–94. Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 3–4. Apart from playing up the standard JudeoCommunist myth, Dontsov also accused eastern Ukraine’s more assimilated Jews of a preexisting tendency to seek out Russian culture and serve as agents of its diffusion. Ibid., 80–81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

372

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

claiming to be fighting for the liberation of Europe from the clutches of an imagined Jewish global-imperialist order.147 By actively participating in the persecution of the Jews, the OUN-B was not only finding something in common with the Nazis, amidst all their frustrations in that quarter, but aligning itself with what promised to be a continent-wide, new order of fascist nations.148 At the same time, it was the genius (if that is the appropriate term) of the OUN-B leadership and their Nazi facilitators to find a way of using mass violence against suddenly helpless Jews as a way of tapping into, and channeling, the witch’s brew of pent-up rage and resentment among a general population buffeted by a bewildering sequence of 147

148

See Overy, Blood and Ruins, 599–600. Dirk Moses makes the point that Nazi ideology cast Jews in the role of a global colonizing presence that was somehow responsible for all of Germany’s ills and whose extermination would constitute a liberation for Germans. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” in Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008). See also the discussion in Baranowski, Nazi Empire, 3–4. In their antisemitic propaganda, the Nazis disseminated a similar message in the countries they occupied; they were often preaching to the choir, particularly in Eastern Europe, where such images of the Jews as social parasites and as collaborators with traditional or feared oppressors (whoever those might be in any particular case) were particularly well established. I find Moses’ concept of the Holocaust as an exercise in “subaltern genocide,” in the sense that the Nazis cast Germans in the improbable role of subalterns to an invented Jewish global cabal, quite intriguing. I am less convinced by his contention that the Holocaust was also the manifestation of a classic colonial preoccupation with maximal security in the face of a hostile subaltern population. The Nazis certainly did choose to conflate the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe with anti-partisan campaigns and antiCommunism, but a more conventional logic of colonial rule would have led to their cultivation and exploitation of Jews as a potentially cooperative element of the ethnodemographic fabric, given their status as a vulnerable minority, their lack of aspiration to territorial self-determination in Europe, and their historic appreciation for German high culture. It was just such a tentative complementarity of interests that had characterized certain aspects of German–Jewish relations in parts of the Russian empire occupied by German forces during the First World War. The radical reversal of the Second World War defied any normal colonial logic. Cf. Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe during the Great War,” in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 89–126. Similar patterns of “revenge” against Jewish communities on the part of nationalists celebrating the withdrawal of Soviet forces played out, among other places, in the Baltic lands, in some rural regions of eastern Poland, and in Bessarabia following its “liberation” from its 1939–41 Soviet occupation by Romanian forces, which went on to commit massive atrocities against Jewish populations as they drove into southwestern Ukraine all the way to Odessa. See Hanebrink, Spectre Haunting Europe, ch. 4; Dov Levin, “On the Relations between the Baltic Peoples and their Jewish Neighbors before, during and after World War II,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1990), 53–66; Gross, Neighbors; Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: Norton, 2011), ch. 9; Alexander Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 6.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

373

ever harsher occupations.149 In regions such as Eastern Galicia and Volhynia that had been scenes of mass violence against Jews in the aftermath of the First World War, non-Jewish civilians appeared more readily inclined than elsewhere to take an active part in what to many of them must have been a familiar pattern of assaulting, humiliating, robbing, and murdering members of a once-again vulnerable Jewish population identified in the perpetrators’ eyes with all that was alien and oppressive.150 Ordinary Ukrainians were encouraged to feel that, in lashing out at defenseless Jews, they were taking an active part in an act of national liberation from the alleged agents of the former imperial power – the Muscovite–Jewish Commune, as the OUN-B’s expeditionary groups’ May 1941 propaganda guidelines branded the Soviet Union.151 By the same token, their participation in, or spectating of, antisemitic atrocities also made members of the general public complicit in crimes undertaken under the auspices of the new political order.152 In addition to murdering, or encouraging mob attacks upon, Jews, OUN-B militias also arrested thousands of Jews and handed them over to Nazi forces for summary killing. All told, roughly forty thousand Jews are estimated to have been murdered across western Ukraine in the course of these operations in July and August 1941.153 By the end of summer 1941, the honeymoon between the Germans and Bandera’s followers was over. In August, Eastern Galicia had been incorporated into the Generalgouvernement. (In this context, however, the policies favoring cultural Ukrainianization that had been initiated under the Soviets were continued with the Germans’ blessing.154) The following 149 150

151 152

153

154

On the psychological impact of rapidly succeeding totalitarian occupations, see Snyder, Bloodlands, Conclusion and passim. Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, 355–76. On German army and OUN terror against Jews in the Eastern Galician town of Buczacz during the early days of its occupation, see Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 167–69. From the May 1941 OUN-B planning document entitled “Borot’ba i diialnist’ OUN pid chas viiny,” as cited in Rudling, “The OUN,” 6. Snyder also points out that non-Jews who had collaborated with the Soviet occupation might well have been motivated to participate in a campaign that diverted attention from them by Judaizing the image of the traitor. Snyder, Bloodlands, 194–96. Jan Gross makes a similar argument in the context of the massacre of Jedwabne’s Jews by some of their Polish neighbors. Gross, Neighbors, 110–12. Amar, Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, 93–101; Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge, 229; John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2021), 13–14, 228–85. The Germans allowed a Ukrainian Central Committee, established in Cracow in April 1940, to take charge of diverse social services and educational initiatives for Ukrainians in the Generalgouvernement, including Eastern Galicia following its conquest in 1941.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

374

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

month, the bulk of eastern Ukraine came under the newly created Reichskommissariat Ukraine; there was to be no Ukrainian client state. Turning on the OUN-B, the German authorities banned it, arrested many of its members, and executed significant numbers of them over the course of the following years. One significant turning point for the Germans appears to have been the OUN-B’s late August 1941 assassination of OUN-M leaders in their eastern Ukrainian stronghold of Zhytomyr, which helped persuade the SS that Bandera’s followers were unpredictable trouble-makers from the occupiers’ point of view. Yet a significant number of OUN-B personnel remained embedded in local administration while the organization as such took its activities underground, and the Germans kept a line open to its forcibly exiled top leadership, holding Bandera and Stetsko alternately under very loose restrictions in Berlin or relatively privileged conditions in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (Of the roughly two hundred OUN-B members who ended up at Auschwitz, only thirty perished, although those included two of Stepan Bandera’s brothers.) Moreover, the militia created by the OUN-B served as the basis for the auxiliary-police formations set up by the Germans, and Bandera’s people continued to encourage enrollment in those forces, which played a significant participatory and logistical-support role in the Germans’ mass shootings of Jews – the opening phase of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet lands.155 Indeed, the suppression of their organization and the periodic arrests and shootings of OUN-B activists were not enough to permanently dissuade the movement’s leadership from the possibility of a renewed German alliance, although for a time the underground OUN-B was certainly described as hostile by German military intelligence (Abwehr). The fact that elements within the vertically segmented structures of German authority (particularly in the military and the Abwehr) themselves remained interested, or renewed an interest, in the cooptation

155

Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 33–35; Paweł Markiewicz, Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government during World War II (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2021). Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 242–60; Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 69; Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 4–5; “Tätigkeits- und Lagebericht No. 9 der Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD in der UdSSR,” report covering the month of January 1942, in Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen, 285–87. German guidelines for the indoctrination of Schutzmannschaft (Ukrainian auxiliary police force) formations focused almost exclusively on antisemitic themes such as the JudeoBolshevik myth and the need to eliminate the Jewish population. Olesya Khromeychuk, “Ukrainians in the German Armed Forces during the Second World War,” History, Vol. 100, No. 5 (December 2015), 704–24, here 716–17.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

375

of Ukrainian nationalism played a role in keeping open the possibility of an eventual return to cooperation. And even SS officers could display a remarkable willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to suspects arrested on suspicion of being low-ranking members or affiliates of OUN-B.156 Eastern Ukrainian Ambiguities. In the meantime, OUN-M expeditionary groups had been establishing themselves across a range of towns and cities in eastern Ukraine. Ideologically, the OUN-M was difficult to distinguish from its Banderist rivals; functionally, the organization operated less rashly and with a greater focus on establishing a presence in local administrations and cultural institutions with a view to disseminating its message and gaining influence over the long haul. This approach earned it slightly greater tolerance from the German authorities, who did not suppress some of the organization’s more public activities until November 1941 and did not systematically intervene to prevent the infiltration of municipal and other local administrative positions by its personnel thereafter. (They did, however, summarily execute some of these figures – including, in February 1942, the mayor of Kiev – when they perceived their activities as overly political or otherwise problematic.)157 That said, eastern Ukraine proved a more challenging socio-political and cultural environment than Eastern Galicia in which to disseminate the OUN’s fascist-style, right-wing nationalist message.158 Reports from eastern Ukraine by SS killing squads (the notorious Einsatzgruppe) complained of the local population’s lack of eagerness to actively engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of local Jews. (This is not to say that 156

157 158

A collection of interrogation records from March–May 1942 indicates that the office of the SD and Security Police commander (the form the SS’s authority took in occupied territories) in Zhytomyr made a practice of releasing such arrestees on the basis of a formulaic rationale that described them as “making a good impression” and that gave credence to their claims that they had been led astray by recruiters from West Ukraine and had ceased any association with Bandera’s organization the moment they realized that it was at odds with German authority. It is hard to imagine the SS making routine allowances for people suspected of links to an organization that it saw as profoundly inimical to German interests. German administrative records held at the State Archive of Zhytomyr Oblast, Fond Р–1151, Opis’ 1, Delo 16, USHMM, Accession No. 1996. A.0269 | RG–31.096M, Reel 2, frames 31–65. Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust, 215. There were also tensions between OUN activists who had spent the 1939–41 period in relative comfort and safety behind German lines in Western Galicia and members of the Lviv Ukrainian intelligentsia who had survived the harrowing experience of Soviet occupation. The latter did not appreciate the arrogance of their new would-be leaders, who had little understanding of, or interest in, what they had been through and tended instead to dismiss them as weak for having failed to stand up more boldly against the Soviet political apparatus. Hnatiuk, Courage and Fear, 356–62.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

376

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

antisemitism was not rife in the region.)159 OUN activists complained that local peasants perceived them as alien “Galicians” or “westerners.” In the linguistically Russified far east of Ukraine, they were sometimes even misidentified as Polish speakers.160 Even the anti-imperial framing of the OUN’s political program seemed to have less purchase here, despite the horrors that had been visited on the rural population during the famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33. Although the suffering of the Great Famine had been particularly intense in parts of Soviet Ukraine, it had afflicted rural society in other parts of the USSR as well, including areas predominantly inhabited by ethnic Russians. Ukrainian peasants tended to conceive of Soviet power and/or Communism rather than Russians per se as the culprits. And, to the extent that they thought of themselves as Ukrainian, they often saw that as complementary with Soviet identity.161 Regardless of how they perceived the Communist regime, the notion of a sharp line separating Ukrainian from Russian culture and population proved hard to push, not only in parts of Ukraine that were populated by large numbers of ethnic Russians, but also where, especially in towns and cities, even people whose Soviet-issued identity cards marked them as Ukrainian often spoke Russian better than their own “native” language. Multiple layers of past imperial experience distinguished these regions from those further west. To the extent that religious identities had survived attacks by the Soviet state, the majority of Ukrainians east of the old line separating Habsburg empire from Tsarist state were affiliated with the Orthodox Church (which split into two rival institutions under the occupation) rather than the Greek Catholic Church. It is interesting to note that church-going eastern Ukrainians expressed a marked preference during the occupation for services conducted in traditional Old Church Slavonic (the Latin equivalent of Russian Orthodoxy, as it were) rather than in the Ukrainian used by the new Ukrainian Autocephalous Church that was championed in East Ukraine by the OUN. This need not necessarily be read as expressive of a lack of Ukrainian national identity, but it did suggest a reluctance to subsume all sentiments and loyalties – be they religious, regional, local, or personal – under the totalizing brand of nationalism preached by OUN zealots.162 159 160 161 162

Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 236; Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, ch. 3. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 331–32. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 208–09; Weiner, Making Sense of War, ch. 6. The Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church had split off from what was known during the occupation as the Autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which still recognized the supremacy-in-principle (albeit suspended while under the boot of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

377

Conversely, as mentioned earlier, it was in fact under the Soviet regime during the 1920s that the most intensive and sustained, elite-driven effort to foster Ukrainian ethno-cultural consciousness had been undertaken by the since-purged leadership of the Ukrainian SSR. Hence, to the extent that Ukrainian national identity had gained traction with the population during this period, it would have been associated with state socialism and with ideological opposition to the kind of racialized and xenophobic chauvinism embraced by the OUN-M.163 To cultivate a broadly conceived Ukrainian national identity and to promote it using some of the approaches of the cultural Ukrainianization project of the Soviet 1920s was one thing; to define it in sharply anti-Russian terms was quite another for many residents of what John Armstrong has described as the more culturally hybridized eastern territories, be they classified as ethnic Ukrainians or Russians. Complicating matters even further was that subset of the local intelligentsia who subscribed to an actively Russophile version of Ukrainian consciousness, opposed though members of this milieu were to Communism. Some of these figures and their publications were cultivated by German authorities grown wary of the OUN’s aspirations.164 Thus, although activists from both factions of the OUN were obviously eager to channel whatever popular influence they did gain into a nationalist political current, one should beware of reflexively attributing any support they enjoyed to a shared conception of the Soviet Union as a Russian colonial power from which the Ukrainian nation needed to liberate itself. Again, this image made a great deal of sense from the perspective of a western Ukraine that had only recently suffered a disruptive and destructive occupation and annexation by the USSR; it was less obvious in parts of Ukraine that for centuries had been part of the Tsarist

163

164

Communism) of the Moscow patriarchate and which conducted its liturgy in Old Church Slavonic. For their part, Greek Catholics in western Ukraine employed Old Church Slavonic but pronounced it as though it were Ukrainian! Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, ch. 8; Karel C. Berkhoff, “Was There a Religious Revival in Soviet Ukraine under the Nazi Regime?” Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (July 2000), 536–67; Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 245–46. An SS report from February 1942 described East Ukrainians as alienated from West Ukrainians by virtue of OUN activism. “Tätigkeits- und Lagebericht No. 10 der Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD in der UdSSR,” report covering the month of February 1942, in Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen, 301. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 2, 5, and 9. See also Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, ch. 9. Even in areas not far east of the old Polish–Soviet border, it was only in urban centers that nationalist activists found an interested audience for anti-Russian, as distinct from anti-Soviet/Communist, propaganda. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 244–51.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

378

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

empire and then the Soviet Union.165 As German arms suffered major defeats while the occupiers simultaneously intensified their forced recruitment of laborers, a poll conducted by the German authorities in portions of eastern Ukraine in June 1943 suggested that a Tsarist restoration was the most popular imaginable political scenario in the eyes of the rural population. In the cities, by this point, people – particularly members of the younger, Soviet-raised, generation – were ready to welcome back the Red Army as the lesser of available evils.166 The Analytical Complication of Russian Collaborationism. Patterns of collaboration with German occupiers in ethnically Russian regions of the Soviet Union constitute a further caution against reflexively assuming that any Ukrainian collaboration reflected an “anti-colonial nationalist” agenda, as some historiographical currents have tended to do over the years. The view of the Ukrainian SSR as a Soviet colony was actively propagated by a wide range of Ukrainian activists and intellectuals during both the interwar and Cold War eras. During the first decades after Ukraine’s gaining of independence in 1991, the country’s professional historians tended to distance themselves from this characterization, preferring to highlight the hybridity and complexity of the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian identities and populations as well as the agency of Ukrainians in the Sovietization process. But over recent years, especially since the Maidan protest movement of 2014, anti-colonial framings of Ukrainian right-wing nationalists’ choices during the Second World War have gained new purchase among activist historians seeking to shape popular opinion.167 No doubt, the vicious, atrocity-ridden, and blatantly neo-imperialist invasion which Vladimir Putin’s Russia launched 165

166

167

Very different perspectives on the history and legacy of OUN activism continued to characterize western and eastern Ukraine well past the collapse of the Soviet Union. Marples, Heroes and Villains, 311. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 223–26. As early as the summer of 1941, an OUN-B district leader in the Zhytomyr region complained that the older generation which remembered the pre-Bolshevik and Petliura eras was more strongly predisposed to sympathize with the Ukrainian nationalist cause than were younger people, who did not “understand that the Russians are enemies of the Ukrainians.” At the same time, he noted that “the Jews and the Communists are beloved by no one.” Kornienko, August 27, 1941 report covering July 22–25, 1941, translated into German and found among German records held at the State Archive of Zhytomyr Oblast, Fond Р–1151, Opis’ 1, Delo 16, USHMM, Accession No. 1996.A.0269 | RG–31.096M, Reel 2, frame 304. Stephen Velychenko, “The Issue of Russian Colonialism in Ukrainian Thought, Dependency Identity and Development,” Ab Imperio, No. 1 (2002), 323–67; Velychenko, “Post-Colonialism and Ukrainian History,” Ab Imperio, No. 1 (2004), 391–404; Yuliya Yurchuk, “Historians as Activists: History Writing in Times of War. The Case of Ukraine in 2014–2018,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 49, No. 4 (July 2021), 691–709.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

379

against Ukraine in 2022 will further reinforce these reconceptualizations of the country’s past. Even in Belarus – the urban population of which was and is more heavily Russified than that of Ukraine – recent nationalist historiography has attempted to apply the lenses of colonial and postcolonial studies to an understanding of wartime patterns of indigenous collaboration with the Nazis. For instance, the discovery that an infamous massacre of Belarusian civilians at Khatyn (not to be confused with the better-known Soviet massacre of captured Polish officers at Katyń) was carried out by a Nazi auxiliary force that included many Belarusians and Ukrainians – rather than simply by Germans – has led to a historiographical effort to relativize the entire phenomenon. The approach has been to depict indigenous members of Nazi-commanded auxiliary forces and Belarusian members of Soviet partisan formations alike as tools of rival imperialisms – interchangeable symptoms of colonialist pathology rather than the evil collaborators and noble resistance fighters of the traditional Soviet narrative.168 Yet recent research has shown just how widespread collaboration also was in predominantly ethnically Russian regions of the German-occupied territories. This was true not only among hapless peasants or small handfuls of opportunistic officials, but, in some localities, among quite a significant cross-section of Soviet Russian society, sometimes even including a disproportionately large representation of former Soviet officials and Communist Party cadres.169 And this neceesarily complicates our understanding of the role nationalist or anti-imperialist identities and agendas may have played in shaping political choices across the region. Peasants – in Russia as elsewhere in German-occupied Soviet territory – tended to be trapped in impossible situations that seemed to make the notion of political choice meaningless, as they were buffeted by German impositions and atrocities, on the one hand, and rising pressure from Soviet partisan forces, on the other. But Johannes Enstad’s research has indicated two variables that did have a differential impact on Russian peasant attitudes towards the occupation, beyond the nearly universal one of having been alienated by the disastrous Stalinist collectivization campaign. One was the Germans’ permission in some regions for the reopening of many churches that had been shuttered by the Stalinist 168

169

Serguei Oushakine, “V poiskakh mesta mezhdu Stalinym i Gitlerom: O postkolonial’nykh istoriakh sotsializma” (In Search of a Place between Stalin and Hitler: On the Postcolonial Histories of Socialism), Ab Imperio, No. 1 (2011), 209–33. I. G. Ermolov, Pod znamenami Gitlera. Sovetskie grazhdane v soyuze s natsistami na okkupirovannykh territoriyakh RSFSR v 1941–1944 gg. (Under Hitler’s Banners: Soviet Citizens in Alliance with the Nazis in the Occupied Territories of the RSFSR during the Years 1941–1944) (Moscow: Veche, 2013), 367–68.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

380

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

regime; this appears to have represented a highly welcome development among a significant swath of the rural masses.170 Another factor was whether or not the Germans initiated a reversal of the deeply resented collectivization of agriculture undertaken by the Soviets in the early 1930s. By and large, the occupation forces tended not to tinker too much with the agricultural status quo, which actually lent itself rather well in the short term to ruthless exploitation by whatever authority was in charge of a region. Collectivization was not undone in most of Ukraine, for example. But in those places, such as the northwestern Russian region Enstad studies, where promises of redress were actually matched by the de-collectivization of agriculture and the redistribution of plots to individual peasant families, the Germans seemed to have gained significant goodwill from many members of peasant communities for a couple of years, before the growing pattern of exactions and atrocities, combined with the war’s shift in the Soviets’ favor, changed the political equation.171 Among administrative elites and local intelligentsia, collaboration with the Germans provided an opportunity not only to survive but to maintain a superior status and standard of living amidst the chaos and destruction of war, at least for as long as it seemed that Germany’s longer-term victory was assured. An important caveat here is that there was an element of selfselection at play among Russian collaborationist elites – and the same holds true for Ukraine, of course. Many Communist Party members, local officials, members of educated strata, etc. would have retreated along with Soviet armies, while among those left stranded, many were shot by German forces (both military and SS formations) early on in the occupation.172 Those who remained alive in German-held regions included, by definition, those most willing to renounce their loyalty to the Soviet Union and enter into cooperative relationships with the new Nazi-controlled order. Naturally, the Germans were also happy to coopt individuals who 170

171 172

The German military was more inclined to provide some latitude in this respect than the formations associated with the SS, which were under orders to allow the revival of religious activity on a highly localized level only and to obstruct efforts to create more centralized, national-level church institutions. Fragmentation of religious affiliations and practices rather than consolidation is what Himmler’s second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, instructed his subordinates to foster on occupied Soviet territory. “Einsatzbefehl Heydrichs Nr. 10,” August 16, 1941, in Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen, 345–47. Johannes Due Enstad, Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Felix Römer, “The Wehrmacht in the War of Ideologies: The Army and Hitler’s Criminal Orders on the Eastern Front,” in Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel, eds., Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

381

had been foes and victims of the Soviet system. That said, it is quite startling – in light of conventional narratives about the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War – how widespread and significant was the involvement in local administration and economic management of former Communist Party members, collective-farm managers, Soviet bureaucrats, and so forth.173 A particularly interesting example is that of the so-called Lokot’ Republic. (See Map 13.) This was an unusual case of an autonomous local governmental authority in central Russia (east of the Belarusian border and north of Ukraine) set up with the blessing of German military occupation authorities in an area too close to the front lines to be assigned to one of the civilian-run Reich commissariats. (At its greatest territorial extent, in 1942, this self-governing zone comprised a population of some 581,000.) Consistently more open to pragmatic arrangements with local elites than the more ideologically zealous Nazi party officials who typically ran the commissariats alongside a powerful SS presence, the Wehrmacht and Abwehr officers in this sector were willing to grant more than nominal authority to local anti-Communist figures, who seized upon the opportunity of creating what they vainly imagined would be the launching pad for a broader, Russian right-wing nationalist polity aligned with Nazi Germany. For the overstretched German military, this served as a useful experiment in subcontracting responsibility for maintaining security behind the front lines to local authorities. The leaders of the district were able to raise a military force of several thousand men (the so-called Russian National Liberation Army, or RONA), which fought against Soviet partisan detachments and continued to serve in combat alongside the Germans even after the advancing Soviets had forced its withdrawal from Lokot’ itself in mid-1943.174 Much of the Lokot’ region’s peasant population had an unusual history of relative prosperity rather than abject serfdom under the tsars, which may have made the collectivization of agriculture under the Soviets a particularly bitter pill to swallow. The top leaders whom the German military appointed to run the autonomous district were individuals who had suffered political

173 174

Ermolov, Pod znamenami Gitlera, 27–28, 47–48. This discussion of the Lokot’ Republic draws on the following: Ermolov, Pod znamenami Gitlera, ch. 4; D. I. Cherniakov, “Lokotskaia gazeta ‘Golos Naroda’ na sluzhbe u natsistkoi propagandy, 1942–1943 gg.,” Voprosy istorii, No. 5 (May 2010), 63–73; Fyodor L. Sinitsyn, “Nationalnii faktor v gitlerovskoi okkupatsionnoi politike v pervii period velikoy otechestvennoi voini, iyun 1941 g.–noyabr 1942 g.,” Vestnik RUDN. Seriya: Istoryia Rossii, No. 3 (2011), 83–100; Alan Donohue, “The ‘Lokot’ Republic and the RONA in German-Occupied Russia, 1941–1943,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2018), 80–102.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

382

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

persecution under the Stalinist regime. But much of the bureaucratic infrastructure was run by former Soviet apparatchiks and members of the educated strata (the “intelligentsia”). The republic’s press churned out rabid, Nazi-style propaganda about “Judeo-Bolshevism” and the autonomous zone’s leaders organized a National Socialist Party of Russia. But, in the estimation of scholars who have focused on this phenomenon, whatever acceptance and support this regime gained among the population was likely more a function of its breakup of collective farms and redistribution of land and livestock for use by individual farmers as well as of its ability to provide basic services and to maintain a less awful standard of living for the public than was the norm in adjacent areas directly under the German boot. The legitimacy of the “Lokot’ Republic” may have been enhanced by its ability to persuade the German military to allow its court to issue death sentences against two German officers convicted of having murdered a local miller.175 Conversely – and this was a countervailing factor that appears to have contributed to collaborationist behavior elsewhere in occupied Russian lands – the ruthlessness of partisan units requisitioning supplies and meting out brutal retaliation against peasant households that refused their demands served to alienate segments of the rural population. This contributed to a widespread pattern of denunciation of partisan units to the German authorities – a tendency which diminished as the Germans’ own brutality grew ever more extreme and as the tides of military fortune came more clearly to favor the Red Army.176 In the estimation of I. G. Ermolov, the rise and fall of the “Lokot’ Republic” constitutes a sort of real-life experiment in counterfactual history. The experience of the region suggests that, had such tolerance on the German occupation authorities’ part for limited self-government with a notional view to the eventual establishment of an anti-Communist, nationalist Russian client state been the rule rather than the exception, a broad cross-section of the Russian population left behind by the Red Army’s retreat would have been open to even more substantive and farreaching collaboration with the Germans.177 Whether this perspective weakens or strengthens the conception of the USSR as an empire is an open question. On the one hand, the notion of liberating the Russian nation from Communism served as the dominant propagandist theme invoked both by the leaders of the “Lokot’ Republic”

175 177

176 Ermolov, Pod znamenami Gitlera, 190. Ibid., 35–36, 190–98, and Conclusion. Ibid., Conclusion. For a much more skeptical view of the Lokot’ experiment, see Pohl, who emphasizes the brutality of the “republic’s” leaders towards the region’s population and contends that the material advantages enjoyed by the region’s inhabitants were marginal. Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 180–81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

383

and by the circle around captured Soviet-general-turned-German-collaborator Andrey Vlasov. Thinking of a subset of Russians as potentially no less eager for “liberation” from the Soviet Union than many Ukrainians were tends to undermine the notion of the USSR as a latter-day incarnation of the Russian empire. By the same token, groups such as the Lokot’ region’s Russian Nationalist Socialists obviously portrayed the Communist state as an empire of sorts in its own right – an ethnoideologically alien, “Judeo-Bolshevik” empire from which the Russian nation itself needed to be liberated. Then again, these anti-Communist visions of Russian revival were themselves neo-imperial, insofar as they upheld the concept of a Greater Russian state encompassing multiple nationalities.178 Muddying the waters yet further is the fact that various right-wing Russophile or Russocentric conceptions of liberation from Communism also enjoyed significant purchase among the intelligentsia and Orthodox clergy of areas beyond the borders of the Russian SSR, such as eastern Ukraine. In the final analysis, the recent scholarly findings about the extent of collaborative practices in ethnically Russian territory necessitate a reexamination of simplistic narratives which take for granted the existence of stark differences in responses to German occupation of Soviet territory depending on whether a given region was inhabited by notionally dominant Russo-Soviet patriots or by members of a “subject nationality” such as the Ukrainians. In Ukraine’s case, the differences between a more decisively nationalist western region (particularly Eastern Galicia) and a more complex gradient of ethno-national and political identities in the east seem starker than those between eastern Ukraine and Russia. As to the relationship between imperial and national agendas and identities, the complexity of responses to the German occupation serves to highlight the fact that – at least in this case – these categories do not lend themselves to the sharply delineated contradistinctions conventionally attributed to them. That said, it should also be kept in mind that – regardless of ethnonational identity – popular support for collaborationist entities tended to be more clearly correlated with the (extremely limited) ability of such elements to provide some meaningful alleviation in the material 178

The pronouncements of the Russian National Socialists did describe the movement as being “all-Russian” rather than Russian in a narrowly ethnic sense, and paid lipservice to the idea of some form of self-determination for nationalities comprising part of this Greater Russia. It was unclear what that would mean in practice beyond just that – lipservice. The movement also embraced the values of its German big brother by calling for the eradication of the Jews. Boris Kovalev, Povsednevnaia zhiznʹ naseleniisa Rossii v period natsistskoi okkupatsii (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2011), 139–42.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

384

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

conditions of the population under their jurisdiction than with interest in their ideological platform. Relief at the reopening of churches under the Germans seems to have provided the most powerful non-material inducement for cooperation on the part of peasant communities. By extension, one must wonder how much of whatever popular support OUN-M activists were able to garner had to do with their nationalist message as distinct from the hope that they might be able to provide some form of assistance to, or intercession on behalf of, communities where they held some position of administrative authority. By the same token, the fact that both OUN factions were late in highlighting any prospective program of reversing Soviet agrarian collectivization and instituting land reform likely cost them potential support among the peasantry, especially in eastern Ukraine.179 The bottom line is that any potential anti-Soviet movements of whatever description had for garnering significant mass support was radically circumscribed by their dependence upon and collaboration with a merciless, conscienceless, and blatantly colonialist Nazi occupation regime that was transparently committed to the ruthless exploitation and partial eradication of indigenous populations rather than to any substantive devolution of power to autonomous local authorities, a handful of highly localized exceptions notwithstanding. Under these circumstances, it was Soviet partisans and the Red Army that ultimately had the best case to make for themselves as the least of evils from which people could realistically choose. Given the mind-boggling brutality of past Soviet rule over these lands, a more telling indictment of the Nazi invaders and their collaborators could not be made.180 Denouement: A National Liberation Struggle in the Form of Ethnic Cleansing Before leaving this case study, this discussion must circle back a final time to western Ukraine and the OUN-B. As the Germans were slowly but steadily losing ground in Ukraine to the Red Army over the course of 1943–44, the very prospect of defeat made the Germans – including even Himmler’s SS – more open to some form of Ukrainian role in combat operations than had been the case since the summer of 1941. Hence, for instance, the formation of the Galician Division of the Waffen-SS in mid1943 – rebranded as part of a “Ukrainian National Army” at the eleventh hour, in March–April 1945, when it was no longer even operating on 179 180

Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, ch. 10. This point is made in Ermolov, Pod znamenami Gitlera, Conclusion.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

385

Ukrainian soil.181 For its part, German military intelligence tried to persuade the SS that the OUN-B itself was once again a potential partner, given its clear decision to prioritize the fight against the Soviets once the Red Army’s advance back onto Ukrainian soil had begun.182 For the OUN-B, this context created new opportunities for orchestrated “liberationist” violence that flew in the face of statements issued by the movement’s 1943 Third Extraordinary Grand Assembly designed to persuade the British and Americans that the organization had suddenly developed an appetite for democratic pluralism. The gradual retreat of German forces was leading to a growing realization among OUN leaders that, in the long run, Germany had no future in the region. And yet, the longer the Germans could retard the Soviet advance, the better the chances of salvaging some form of Ukrainian victory from the jaws of disaster – a notion that rested in part on the vain expectation of some form of assistance from the British and Americans. (A partly analogous and partly contrasting calculus may have shaped Sukarno and Hatta’s continued collaboration with the Japanese in the last two years of the war, the idea in their case being that they could take advantage of Japan’s weakening position to extract greater political concessions and gain additional training for PETA forces in anticipation of a likely struggle over independence in the context of Allied victory and Dutch return.) The situation seemed fluid and unpredictable in many ways. Would Berlin relent and create a self-governing Ukrainian client state as part of its efforts to stave off Soviet victory? Could the Western Allies be induced to turn against the Soviets in the context of German defeat, lending assistance to anti-Communist liberation movements? More worryingly, would there be international support for a postwar attempt to assert the Polish government-in-exile’s continued claim to the regions of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia? The local presence or activity of Polish Home Army (AK) units had the potential to advance such a scenario. It was amidst these fast-changing and uncertain conditions that the OUN-B’s leadership on the ground decided to create a fighting force of its own that would try to resist the Soviet advance as well as prepare for the possibility of protracted guerrilla warfare behind Soviet lines as territory changed hands. In any or all of the above scenarios, the OUN-B’s 181

182

Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chs. 7 and 9; Miroslav Yurkevich, “Galician Ukrainians in German Military Formations and in the German Administration,” in Yury Borshuk, ed., Ukraine during World War II: History and its Aftermath (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 78. Fremde Heere Ost report to SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Hengelhaupt at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), July 4, 1944, Microfilm Series T78, Roll 565, frames 186–88, NARA.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

386

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

leadership felt it was vital to establish the movement’s presence and assert its agenda through armed action in the field. To that end, OUN-B brought together a variety of smaller militias and armed groups and recruited additional men to form the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA), adopting the name used by an independent guerrilla force whose leadership had been at odds with the OUN-B but which had been violently brought to heel, with some of its rank-and-file integrated into the new organization.183 Some UPA units engaged in localized clashes with German forces at times, while a broader pattern of contact and tactical cooperation between OUN/UPA and German military intelligence in the context of the fight against the Soviets prevailed during 1944.184 German military intelligence described regular communication, including inperson meetings, between UPA and German commanders, even if the German side was unwilling to expand and formalize the relationship to the extent that UPA officers wanted.185 But the sphere where UPA formations had the most decisive impact was that of the ethno-demographic composition of what the OUN and UPA considered western Ukraine. For decades, the ethno-religiously diverse makeup of these regions had served as the basis for seemingly irreconcilable, competing political-territorial claims. The Jewish population, which had been constructed by Dontsovite zealots as the facilitator of Polish and/or Soviet colonial oppression of the Ukrainian nation, had by now mostly been murdered or fled. There remained the ethnic Poles, as many as several hundred thousand of whom had been deported (along with a disproportionately large ratio of Jews and some Ukrainians) into the Soviet interior in several waves over the course of 1940–41,186 but many of whom still inhabited the region. It was against them that the OUN-B, via its UPA formations (which came to number some forty thousand men by the end of 1943), now turned, focusing on the heavily rural region of Volhynia, where 183 184

185

186

Rudling, “The OUN,” 10. Marples, Heroes and Villains, 150. The extreme fluidity of the situation was such that some Soviet partisan commanders at times negotiated localized understandings with Ukrainian nationalist forces. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 72, 79–80. Report by Abwehrkommando 105, June 5, 1944, Microfilm Series T78 (Records of Headquarters German Army High Command), Roll 565, frames 3–6, NARA; Memo dated June 12, 1944, ibid., frames 7–8. Otto Bräutigam, an official in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (the head of which, Alfred Rosenberg, had fought a losing battle for influence against Himmler’s SS), advocated in favor of much broader support for Ukrainian nationalists in September 1944, as German troops were retreating from Soviet territory. Message on behalf of Bräutigam to German Armed Forces and Army Commands, September 18, 1944, Series T78, Roll 565, frame 19, NARA. Kiebuzinski and Motyl, “Introduction,” 37–38; Amar, Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, 52–58; Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust, 14.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ghosts of Colonialisms and Weight of Occupations

387

the geography facilitated relative freedom of operation.187 What ensued was a series of blood-curdling atrocities against vulnerable and relatively isolated pockets of Polish population – a pattern that bore the hallmarks of centralized orchestration combined with operational flexibility. A wide range of testimonies and documentation confirms that these crimes were not simply manifestations of local blood feuds or spontaneous unrest, but the result of orders from OUN-B leaders determined to precipitate the mass flight of surviving Poles, thus achieving the ethnic “cleansing” of western Ukraine. In the course of these activities, UPA men also murdered thousands of surviving Jews whom they discovered in forests and other places of hiding. The UPA, many of whose volunteers had previously served under German command in the Ukrainian auxiliary police forces, adapted some of the tactical aspects of the operation from Nazi examples during the mass shootings of Jews that had marked the opening phase of the Holocaust in this region.188 For individual “missions” against Polish communities, local men without any organizational affiliation were often recruited or dragooned into providing logistical support (such as manning an outer perimeter around a targeted village to prevent any victims from escaping the butchery). In many cases, the massacres included entire communities, with women and children not spared. Given a shortage of arms and ammunition, the use of axes and other common implements as instruments of murder was widely encouraged.189 Polish Home Army (resistance) units undertook revenge killings, but were generally outmanned by UPA forces. Estimates of the total number of Poles murdered in these operations range from fifty to sixty thousand, with ten to twenty thousand Ukrainian civilians likely falling victim to Polish reprisals. Many surviving Poles responded to this campaign of terror by fleeing from rural settings into the relative security of Germancontrolled towns and cities, or else escaping from the region altogether. All this accelerated a process begun by the Soviet deportations of large numbers of ethnic Poles and Jews from the region during the initial occupation of 1939–41, and bled into the systematic, state-run ethnic population transfers between Communist Poland and the Ukrainian SSR in the immediate aftermath of the war.190 187 188 189 190

Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 113–15; Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 84–89. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 260, 269. Jared McBride, “Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944,” Slavic Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Fall 2016), 630–54. Ibid., 639; Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 271; Timothy Snyder, “‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1999), 86–120; Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, ch. 7. Lviv/Lwów’s population briefly became more Polish than ever by percentage as a result of the influx of refugees from the countryside (and in the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

388

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Thus, although the OUN factions’ dreams of an ethnically homogeneous and sovereign Ukrainian nation-state were dashed, first by German hostility, then by Soviet victory, the vicious assault the UPA launched against Polish civilian populations during the last phase of the war in western Ukraine played a significant role in reshaping the ethnic composition of that region. So, indeed, had the participation of OUN-Baffiliated personnel in the Ukrainian auxiliary-police formations involved in the Nazi-orchestrated genocide against the Jews. The OUN’s attempts to keep alive the flame of anti-Soviet resistance and revolt died out by the early 1950s under the pressure of a determined Soviet counterinsurgency campaign. But the western portion of the expanded Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – which once again incorporated the Volhynian and Eastern Galician territories first seized by Stalin in 1939 – was now characterized by a much higher degree of ethnic “purity” than perhaps even the leaders and ideologues of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism could realistically have anticipated a decade earlier. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, it would be in the eastern stretches of Ukraine that the legacy of Russian and Soviet rule, and the associated patterns of cultural assimilation and Ukrainian–Russian ethnodemographic mixing, would constitute the greatest potential element of vulnerability for the newly independent Ukrainian state’s legitimacy and territorial integrity. Ironically, it was precisely the efforts by Vladimir Putin’s Russia to take advantage of that vulnerability, starting with the aggressions of 2014 and escalating dramatically with the all-out invasion of 2022, that have arguably done more to unite eastern and western Ukraine around a shared sense of national identity than any prior set of events or initiatives in the country’s history.

absence of Jews), before the formal, systematic “exchange” of ethnic populations between Soviet Ukraine and Communist-controlled Poland got under way in 1945–47. Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, ch. 4. For a nauseating, first-hand account of Polish reprisals against rural Ukrainians, see the memoir by Waldemar Lotnik, Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish–Ukrainian Borderlands (London: Serif, 1999).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part III

“If these barbarians had been able to replace the old colonial authority, why had that authority been necessary at all?”1 With these words, Sutan Sjahrir conveyed how he perceived the impact on his compatriots of the rapid fall of the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese, whose own approach to governance they saw, he claimed, as crude and ignorant. At the same time, the opportunity the Japanese afforded indigenous elites to move higher up the administrative ladder than before served to bolster their confidence in their ability to run their country themselves. Exposing the fragility of imperial rule was one of the most obvious and best-known ways in which Axis occupations could and did change political equations in colonial societies, especially as the short lifeexpectancies of Japan’s and Germany’s own rapidly acquired empires became increasingly apparent from 1943 on. The results could be revolutionary in ways that the Axis powers themselves had not necessarily intended or anticipated. (The post-war history of Indochina is a case in point.) But a comparative look at this section’s three cases reveals that the degrees and forms of political change that wartime occupations catalyzed in colonized societies fell across a broad spectrum of possible scenarios. The Ukrainian case highlights the centrality of past imperial contexts for understanding responses to German wartime occupation, but in ways more diverse and complex than any standardized or conventional anticolonial narrative would have one believe. The previous experiences of western and eastern Ukraine under different imperial and/or postimperial regimes made for very divergent patterns of receptivity to the messages of OUN activists and agitators. The territorial contiguity and cultural propinquity between Ukraine and the polities of which it had previously formed part further differentiates its case from that of overseas colonies governed by European metropoles. Indeed, that element of territorial contiguity played a significant role in the USSR’s successful

1

Sjahrir, Out of Exile, 249.

389

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

390

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

reabsorption of Ukraine by war’s end, although an OUN/UPA insurgency continued to flicker in the western regions for several years thereafter. Yet, even as the political map reflected Moscow’s successful reimposition of the borders of 1939–41, the ethnic cleansing and population exchange accompanying that settlement belied the notion of a return to the status quo ante. In the longer run, Ukraine’s wartime experiences would take on new, and bitterly contested, meanings in the aftermath of the Soviet empire’s final collapse in 1991. If Ukraine is the typological outlier in a comparative study of colonies under wartime occupation, it remains the case that there were also significant differences between Part III’s two Southeast Asian examples, despite their more conventional categorization as colonies. Indeed, among this section’s three cases, it was arguably the Philippines whose relations with its pre-war imperial rulers ended up least changed by the experience of wartime occupation. This was partly because of the preexisting promise of independence by 1946 and the large measure of autonomy that the USA had already ceded to the indigenous elite prior to the war. But wartime experience, if anything, had served to tighten rather than fray the sense of connection to the United States on the part of certain sectors of Filipino society. Among the factors at play here was the legacy of fighting alongside American troops on Bataan followed by the ongoing involvement of American officers in a number of active resistance forces under Japanese occupation. Another factor may have been a shared hostility to the Huk movement, which represented the most serious challenge to the establishment’s vision of the Philippines’ place in the world and to the socio-economic and political hierarchies associated with it. Had the Huks been able to use their wartime emergence as a disciplined resistance movement with mobilizing and coercive capacities in the rural sector as a springboard to power, the wartime years might have indeed led to a paradigm shift in the country’s course of development. But the Huks were held at bay by the Japanese and then sidelined and suppressed by the country’s traditional elites and their American backers, first in 1945, and again in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For its part, the Japanese military command had itself favored the cooptation of Americanized elites into the country’s governance as a path of least resistance during the occupation, in the face of extremist officers’ attempts to empower radically right-wing alternatives to the old sociopolitical establishment. Thus, factors on both sides of the equation militated in favor of fundamental continuities in the country’s historical trajectory, amidst the cataclysmic experiences of wartime invasion, occupation, resistance, and liberation and across formal passages from colonial to sovereign status.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part III

391

Scholars have actively debated to what degree and in what ways Indonesia emerged structurally and ideologically transformed from its experience of Japanese occupation. Without a doubt, the ascendance of an Asian power at the expense of European colonial rule dealt a fatal blow to the Netherlands’ credibility as a renascent imperial power in the war’s aftermath. Beyond that, given Indonesia’s enormous geographical and demographic size, and its ethno-cultural diversity, it is safe to say that the form and extent of change varied widely across the breadth of the archipelago. Harry Benda has argued that the creation of neighborhood associations (standard instruments of surveillance, discipline, and mutual accountability in Japan of the 1930s and 1940s, which were imposed on other societies in the expanding Japanese empire), along with Japaneseinitiated attempts to train Java’s kiyayi (rural spiritual leaders) and ulama’ (more formally educated Islamic religious authorities) for purposes of mass political indoctrination, served to organize the Javanese rural sector and politicize Islam in ways that had the unintended effect of lending themselves to cooptation by the nationalists, at least in the short run. At the same time, Japanese forces’ ruthless exploitation of rural Indonesian society also provoked its politicization. The result was to facilitate the nationalists’ mobilization of popular support for the post-war independence struggle against the Dutch, even if the secular–religious alliance frayed and degenerated into outright conflict in West Java in the late 1940s and into the 1950s.2 The nationalist movement itself was, clearly, profoundly shaped by its interactions with the Japanese occupation forces. Ken’ichi Goto has argued that the Japanese army bequeathed a legacy of militarism, authoritarianism, and chauvinism to the dominant currents of Indonesian nationalism via the example of their military administration. Institutionally, this pattern can be most clearly seen in the Indonesian army, which was to play a decisive and extremely sinister role in the country’s internal upheaval and mass killings of the 1960s. The army traced its origins – and perhaps certain aspects of its ethos – to the PETA auxiliary forces created during the occupation under Japanese military tutelage.3 In a word, Sjahrir’s early post-war belief that the deficiencies and abuses of Japanese rule constituted a stark contrast with how 2

3

Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun, chs. 1–3 and 7–8. For a discussion of views that highlight continuities or at least downplay the centrality of Japanese agency in effecting structural changes in Indonesian society, see Peter Post and Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, “Introduction,” in Post and Touwen-Bouwsma, eds., Japan, Indonesia and the War. Ken’ichi Goto, “Modern Japan and Indonesia: The Dynamics and Legacy of Wartime Rule,” in Post and Touwen-Bouwsma, eds., Japan, Indonesia and the War. The history of Burma offers some disturbing parallels. Yellen, Greater East Asia, ch. 6.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

392

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

Indonesians would govern themselves was sadly belied by the subsequent course of his country’s history, as the legacy of the Japanese occupiers’ influence and example continued to manifest itself in certain institutional and political spheres. It goes without saying that the diverse policies carried out by the occupying powers constituted an enormously significant factor in shaping political responses to Axis conquest in colonial settings. Not only were there differences between Japanese and German approaches and among the strategies each regime adopted in its various acquisitions; even within any given conquered land there were divisions – political and sometimes also territorial – between competing institutions of the occupying power. This fostered a degree of chaos and confusion which could frustrate anti-colonial nationalists seeking to work out a modus vivendi with the new hegemon. But it also created potential openings that entrepreneurial activists could exploit. Ukrainian nationalists targeted for suppression by the SS could try to seek out some basis for accommodation in areas remaining under the control of the Wehrmacht. Indonesian nationalists could leverage their connections with the Japanese naval liaison in Java to declare independence at a time when the Japanese army was still hedging on the issue. The Laurel government was able to persuade Japanese military commanders that keeping radically antiWestern Philippine nationalists and their Japanese-officer supporters at bay was in their mutual interest. As to the matter of movement towards formal independence, the impact of Axis choices in this regard was significant, but perhaps not in the expected sense. The granting of formal independence to the Philippines in 1943 did not ease the burden on society of the continued Japanese military presence and it did not significantly undercut the position of resistance movements. It may perhaps have enhanced the ability of Laurel, Recto, and other former collaborators to redeem their reputations and return to positions of public prominence in later years. But, at the time, perhaps its most significant impact (along with Japan’s roughly simultaneous granting of independence to Burma and Germany’s earlier creation of self-governing client states in Slovakia and Croatia) was to both raise expectations and increase frustration among nationalists in territories like Indonesia and Ukraine, where the Axis powers were unwilling to take parallel steps until the eleventh hour, if then. Yet, even in contexts where independence was not on the cards, the occupiers favored the cultivation of indigenous cultures and languages to various extents. While it suppressed post-fourth-grade education with the exception of technical schools, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine did

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part III

393

support conducting whatever education did take place in Ukrainian, as a buffer against Soviet influence.4 For some weeks or months (depending on the location), the German authorities also allowed Ukrainian flags and images of the trident – an alternative emblem of Ukrainian identity – to be flown over public buildings alongside Nazi flags. (This paralleled the Japanese military’s short-lived toleration of the public display of Indonesian flags during the initial phase of that occupation.) Public events took place commemorating and celebrating notable figures in Ukrainian cultural history, such as the nineteenth-century nationalist poet Taras Shevchenko (1814–61).5 For that matter, OUN-M personnel remained a significant presence in cultural institutions, on some newspaper staffs (which were, of course, required to toe the Nazi propagandist line), and in the organizing of sports and entertainment activities to the limited extent this was possible in towns such as Zhytomyr (where the OUN-M had established the staging grounds for its eastern Ukrainian expeditionary groups soon after the German occupation). Throughout their occupation, the Germans tended to support the Ukrainianization of administrative personnel and proceedings across much of Ukraine. The effort took on the characteristics of a full-fledged publicity campaign and obligatory language training in the culturally Russified eastern town and administrative district of Dniepropetrovsk.6 This is reminiscent of the linguistic developments noted earlier in wartime Indonesia and the Philippines, where public use of the Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog languages instead of Dutch and English (but alongside the dissemination of the Japanese language) was encouraged by the occupiers as part of a general program of instilling in the public a sense of national pride as members of a Japanese-led pan-Asian community. Such cultural policies helped legitimize, at least in their own eyes, the roles of what Jeremy Yellen has dubbed “patriotic collaborators” – anticolonial nationalists who were convinced that defeat of the previously established imperial powers by the Axis conquerors represented a singular historical opportunity that national-liberation movements could not

4 6

5 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, ch. 9. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 53, 188. Marina Krugliak, “Povsednevnaya zhizn ukraintsev v usloviyakh natsistskoy okkupatsii na-materialakh goroda zhitomira, 1941–1943” (Everyday Life of the Ukrainians under the Nazi Occupation. Based on the Materials of the City of Zhitomir, 1941–1943), Rusin, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2015), 148–73; Simone A. Bellezza, “The Discourse over the Nationality Question in Nazi-occupied Ukraine: The Generalbezirk Dnjepropetrowsk, 1941–3,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October 2008), 573–96. Serhii Plokhy suggests that German occupation left a legacy of heightened awareness of ethnic distinctions between Ukrainians and Russians in eastern Ukraine. Plokhy, Gates of Europe, 275.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

394

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

afford to pass up, and who remained largely wedded to that position despite German and Japanese wartime rule turning out to be even more wantonly destructive, exploitative, and murderous than that of their predecessors.7 There was undoubtedly an element of sunk-cost fallacy at play here as well: having thrown their political and personal lots in with the occupiers, it was very hard to admit to themselves or to others that their gambles might have been ill-calculated. In this respect, there are obvious parallels here to the other collaborationist regimes and movements explored in this book; but in the colonial context, it seems that the collaborationist calculus could hold sway longer by virtue of these societies’ long history of subjection to alien rule. Against that background, it was easier to justify continued cooperation with, accommodation of, or at least restraint in confrontation with, Axis occupation forces which were inflicting material and physical suffering on often unimaginable scales upon wide swaths of the general population. By the same token, insofar as cultivation of a distinctive national culture was the one sphere in which the occupiers were willing to offer some leeway and whence “patriotic collaborators” could derive continued legitimacy, this was also an area where they often appeared most willing to draw certain lines or take active initiative. One of the forms such linedrawing took was an emphasis on cultural-linguistic unity combined with an intolerance towards minorities seen as unassimilable. The OUN engaged very actively in the murderous persecution of Jewish and Polish communities. Indonesian nationalists treated the ethnic Chinese minority as a scapegoat for the patterns of exploitation in which the nationalists themselves were complicit, and were reluctant to include them in their imagination of an Indonesian national community. The (negative) association of ethnic Chinese with Jews was indeed a commonplace in Indonesian nationalist rhetoric, and some nationalists found inspiration in the Nazi technique of dealing with minorities deemed socially parasitical. In April 1942, for instance, an Islamic nationalist published an article in which, alluding to the Chinese, he called for the “filtration” from Indonesian society of those who “truly possess a jewish [sic] nature, whose behavior is jewish behavior.”8 In the Philippines, members of that country’s better integrated ethnicChinese community actually organized their own anti-Japanese resistance movement which took an active role in the armed struggle alongside some of the other major formations, further enhancing ethnic-Chinese 7 8

Yellen, Greater East Asia, ch. 4. Anwar Tjokroaminoto, “Saringan,” Pemandangan, April 4, 1942, p. 1, as quoted and translated in Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java, 32.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion to Part III

395

claims to full membership of the Philippine nation in the war’s aftermath.9 Yet, as in Indonesia, the Chinese were just one among many distinct communities in an ethno-linguistically and culturally heterogeneous country. For the nationalist establishment, this longstanding challenge of internal diversity, on the one hand, and Japanese pressure to replace English with Japanese as the conduit to a higher, transnational culture, on the other, reinforced the drive to build up Tagalog as the national language, even if this riled some of the many Filipinos for whom Tagalog (which was spoken mainly in swaths of Luzon and neighboring islands) was not a native tongue.10 The Philippine establishment’s sensitivity on this subject was evident in an August 1943 exchange between the commissioner of education (soon to be foreign minister) Claro Recto and members of the Japanese commission of inquiry visiting the country on the eve of its nominal independence. According to the notes taken by a member of the Japanese commission, they put it to Recto that, “We often hear about Filipinization. Whom do you have in mind when you speak of a Filipino – a Tagalog, a Visayan, or a non-Christian? Whom are you going to take as the standard type when you carry out a Filipinization policy? Give us some of the attributes of what you might call the personality of Philippine nationalism.” Mr. Recto seemed to take considerable offense at this last question. He resented the implication the question carried that Tagalog and Visayan belonged to different types. Recto admitted the existence of linguistic groups but insisted that this did not mean differences in national sentiments; they are the same in their awareness of being Filipinos. He placed higher weight on historical factors than on ethnological ones in the development of Philippine nationalism.11

For their part, of course, Philippine resistance movements portrayed their own struggles as simultaneously reflective and constitutive of an overarching Philippine national solidarity, even as they periodically competed or clashed among themselves. Mythologized narratives cultivated in real time, as well as retroactively, served to paper over persistent internal divisions along lines of ethnicity, religion, and/or social class. For example, Kawashima Midori argues that, whereas official memory celebrates Christian–Muslim fraternity forged of a shared experience in the resistance struggle on the southern island of Mindanao, in fact Muslim resistance leaders were mostly members of a fairly thin administrative elite that had already been coopted by the political establishment before the war. Their involvement in the anti-Japanese effort should not be read as reflecting the emergence of a new, deeply rooted, popular coalition

9 11

10 Terami-Wade, Sakdalistas’ Struggle, 328–29, n. 1. Foronda, Cultural Life, 12, 46. Takeuchi, “Manila Diary,” August 9, 1943 entry, p. 260.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

396

Conquest in the Guise of Liberation

between Christians and Muslims (who were themselves divided among more than a dozen different ethno-linguistic groups).12 That said, such mythologizing of wartime unity (be it under the auspices of a new, Axis-aligned order or of a heroic struggle against it) in the face of accentuated internal divisions was hardly the exclusive preserve of anti-colonial nationalists. In one form or another, as seen in other sections of this book, very similar patterns played out across nearly all the societies that underwent Axis occupation, in Europe and Asia alike. Before concluding, there is one final irony to note. In at least two of this section’s cases, a subset of self-described anti-colonial nationalists made political bets that paid off only to the extent that their premises failed to be borne out. Both Sukarno’s nationalists and the OUN’s two factions initially believed that the Axis powers would emerge victorious in their respective theaters of war and that throwing their lot in with them was therefore a singular opportunity that must not be passed up. Had the assumption underlying their choices proved correct, their countries would have remained subject to German and Japanese hegemony, be it formal or informal, for an indefinite future. Many of the anti-colonial nationalists would have faced a choice between long-term complicity in a brave new form of fascist imperialism or a painful and hazardous acknowledgment that they had erred in a very fundamental way. It was largely because their initial strategic reading of the geopolitical situation proved wrong and Axis rule short-lived that – particularly in the case of the leading Indonesian nationalists – they were able to escape this fate and retroactively reframe their wartime choices as tactically nimble attempts to steer their societies towards national self-determination in a post-imperial and post-Axis world order.

12

Kawashima Midori, “Japanese Administrative Policy towards the Moros in Lanao,” in Ikehata and Jose, eds., Philippines under Japan, 99–100.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

Occupations Compared The eleven cases of wartime occupation discussed in this book have been arranged under three umbrella themes: patriotism, civil war, and colonial legacy, respectively. These have been intended to serve as comparative frameworks rather than denoting hard-and-fast typological categories. They do not come close to exhausting the pool of potential organizing principles, nor are they mutually exclusive. Patriotism was, obviously, a hotly contested issue in all these societies, not just those that retained a semblance of unitary sovereignty or administrative continuity. Deep internal divisions and inter-factional violence were not restricted to those countries included in the civil-war section. Even the category of colonialism has ragged boundaries. For example, Ukrainians’ pre-war relationships with Poland and the Soviet Union were more complicated than can be captured by a reductionist characterization of them as either victims of imperialism or not. Indeed, one of the effects of this comparative exercise has been to highlight the plasticity – particularly under the high-pressure circumstances of occupation – of concepts such as “patriotism,” “civil war,” and “anti-colonial struggle.” That said, some broad patterns marking relations of occupiers with occupied can be discerned. From the point of view of the Axis aggressors, previously colonized societies constituted particularly promising targets of occupation insofar as the occupiers could, at least initially, play the role of liberators. By the same token, countries or regions previously subject to imperial rule, or otherwise felt by many of their inhabitants to have been externally oppressed, had an attractive feature – preexisting infrastructures of control and exploitation, ready for cooptation by their new overlords. Thus, in the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese kept the pangrèh praja in place despite this indigenous administrative stratum’s history of service to Dutch colonial masters. In Ukraine, the Germans promised to redistribute land, but found the Stalinist system of siphoning off agricultural

397

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

398

Conclusion

surpluses via the collective-farm system far too convenient for their purposes to follow through. Obviously, posing as liberators while preserving colonial systems of governance was a contradiction in terms. The occupiers usually focused on the latter, at best offering vague assurances that such measures were only a matter of wartime expediency. What was remarkable was how long some anti-colonial nationalists were willing to continue along the path of collaboration with Axis imperialists despite such disappointments. It is also striking – particularly in the Indonesian case – how effective the legacy of pre-war colonial rule (and the prospect of its potential post-war return) could be in legitimizing such choices, if the post-war political survival of figures such as Sukarno can be taken as a measure of public legitimacy. What one might term the “next best” setting for the creation of occupation regimes was that of previously sovereign countries where governments and/or civil services remained in place. Here again, the strategy of coopting central and local administrative institutions offered an obvious path of least resistance. It was a course that German and Japanese conquerors tended to favor over the potentially dysfunctional alternative of empowering ideologically like-minded zealots among the locals. By the same token, the prospective empowerment of these same zealots could be used as a threat to extract continued compliance from established elites. For example, the fear of being supplanted by the NSB likely extended the duration of Dutch civil servants’ and mayors’ cooperation with the Germans. When and where that cooperation began to break down, the occupiers did indeed start appointing Dutch Nazis to positions of administrative authority. For those indigenous political or administrative elites in sovereign states under occupation who allowed themselves to be coopted, this choice frequently set them on a very slippery moral and political slope. Their conduct could only be legitimized in the eyes of their publics to the extent that their remaining in office could be shown to make a meaningful difference to people’s material and physical well-being. Any associated “collateral damage” often proved much harder to justify politically or ideologically than was the case with collaboration undertaken in a colonial context. That said, the devil lay in the details of collaborationist arrangements. The Dutch were able to hedge their bets by having a government-in-exile while the civil service did the collaborating. This division of labor – combined with an active domestic resistance movement affiliated with the government-in-exile – facilitated the cultivation of a simplified, mythologized, post-war historical narrative that preserved a sense of patriotic pride. The queen and cabinet’s refusal to compromise

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

399

with the enemy proved to be of more than symbolic value, as it paid rich dividends in the form of long-term political capital. By contrast, the French case, in which the government opted to negotiate an armistice and stay put, contributed to a crisis of legitimacy, the aftershocks of which continue to reverberate in French political culture to this day.1 Then again, the Danish and Thai governments were able to remain in place while gaining meaningful concessions from their Axis partners – such as the Germans not forcing the Danes to adopt antisemitic practices, and Thailand being spared the most egregious forms of economic exploitation. This contributed to those states’ relatively smooth political transitions into the post-war era. The occupiers tended to have a rougher time of it in civil-war-prone societies than in more cohesive ones. There is a tautological element to this observation, insofar as these civil wars were usually sparked by the rise of resistance movements, which challenged both the occupiers and their local, collaborationist partners. The competition between resistance movements for prospective post-war power could also lead to armed conflict between them. But such scenarios were themselves most likely in societies that had entered the war deeply divided and that had been held together, if at all, by brittle institutions and coercive practices. Hence the irony, pointed out by Greg Brew, that occupations tended to face less resistance in relatively cohesive and politically well-integrated societies than in countries such as China with a recent history of weak government and internal conflict.2 Although the focus in this book has been on political responses to occupation by the occupied, one pattern that has clearly emerged from these pages is that the experience of the occupied depended heavily on how the occupiers chose to conduct themselves. This book’s introduction alluded to some of the ideological as well as functional differences and similarities between the German and Japanese wartime empires. Among the distinguishing features was the central role racial ideology played in shaping Nazi practices and the “anti-colonial imperialism” that characterized Japanese wartime rhetoric. Among the points of

1

2

See Rousso, Vichy Syndrome. Most recently, right-wing French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour has doubled down on his pattern of making misleading statements in defense of the Vichy regime as part of his campaign to call into question the legitimacy of the French republic’s liberal values. Roger Cohen, “A Jewish Far-Right Pundit Splits the French Jewish Community as He Rises,” New York Times, October 25, 2021; Angelique Chrisafis, “Macron Takes on Far-Right Presidential Rival in Visit to Vichy,” Guardian, December 8, 2021. Greg Brew made this observation in the context of a graduate seminar I taught some years ago.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

400

Conclusion

convergence were the perception of the German and Japanese regimes that their countries were starved of access to strategic resources, and their decision to address this – and to catapult themselves into the position of global powers – by gambling on the use of Blitzkrieg to establish expansive, autarchic empires.3 The failure of their initial victories and conquests to end the war on their terms resulted ironically in the realization of their worst fears, as shortages of key commodities such as oil dimmed their prospects of prevailing in the total war which ensued; hence the common pattern of ever more ruthless exploitation of occupied societies over the course of the conflict. But one of the most striking similarities between Japanese and German imperialisms was the very heterogeneity of the forms they took. Particularly during the initial phases of occupation, before the pressures of total war had begun to take their toll, Japanese and German masters adopted a wide variety of approaches to the treatment of occupied societies. At one end of the spectrum were instances such as Denmark and Thailand, which Berlin and Tokyo chose to hold up as examples of how much autonomy could supposedly be enjoyed by states willing to accommodate themselves to the “New Order” in Europe and Asia. At the other end were cases such as Indonesia, much of the population of which was subjected to extremes of deprivation and enslavement, and Eastern European countries where a combination of the Nazis’ racial ideology and their colonialist plans precluded the possibility of even token forms of self-government. And, of course, for purely ideological reasons, the Nazis targeted Jews for extermination wherever they could gain direct or indirect access to them on the European continent; the escape of Danish Jewry was the one exception to an otherwise relentlessly implemented rule. This diversity of approaches often reflected strong differences over imperial policy between rival institutions and factions within the Japanese and German governing and military apparatuses. German military intelligence was at loggerheads with the SS over whether and how to engage with OUN activists in Ukraine. The German plenipotentiary in Copenhagen enabled Danish political elites to sabotage the round-up of Jews which he himself had set in motion. Administrative pragmatists in the Japanese military administration of the Philippines defended their cooptation of Americanized political elites in the face of dissent from radical zealots within the Japanese officer corps. The Japanese navy pursued plans to permanently incorporate the islands of the Indonesian 3

Overy, Blood and Ruins; Mazower, Hitler’s Empire; Baranowski, Nazi Empire; M. Paine, The Japanese Empire, 152–53.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

401

archipelago which it held, while the 16th Army toyed with the hopes and expectations of nationalists in Java. Conversely, at the eleventh hour, it was the Japanese naval liaison in Java who helped expedite the Indonesian declaration of independence. In sum, the German and Japanese empires as wholes, and each of the occupation regimes within them, were far from homogeneous entities. The push and pull of ideological, political, and geo-strategic considerations combined with personality clashes, institutional rivalries, and bureaucratic politics to create complex, ever-evolving, political ecologies which defined the limitations and possibilities of choice available to members of occupied societies. For most people, the simple struggle to survive the ordeal eclipsed other considerations. For some political leaders and movements, the challenge was to identify a niche that might allow them not only to endure, but to inch towards their longer-term objectives while gaining ground over internal or external opponents. Whether their choices paid off depended heavily on the circumstances that happened to prevail locally at the time the global conflict ended. One way or another, then, a theme common to all societies under wartime occupation was the challenge of adapting to a rapidly shifting and treacherous political landscape. The Shifting Horizons of Expectation Now, on the day after the battle, the shops were open again… We went into a watchmaker’s to try and buy a strap for my wrist watch. The watchmaker greeted us with a brisk “Heil Hitler” and a Nazi salute, redeemed, on second thoughts, by a sudden convulsive clenching of the fist. Clearly he found the military situation rather hard to follow, but this did not worry him for long and he was soon doing his best to sell us a monumental marble clock for which we could have no possible use.4

Thus did Fitzroy Maclean, head of a British SOE mission to the Yugoslav partisans, describe an encounter in Livno, Bosnia in October 1943, shortly after the town’s capture by Tito’s forces. The fact that even a professional watchmaker had trouble transitioning smoothly from Nazi salute to partisan-style raised fist reflects how tricky the business of political timing could be amidst the rapid wartime ebb and flow of regime types and occupation forces. The challenge of navigating the treacherous rapids of regime change was just one of many contexts in which evolving understandings of the present moment and shifting expectations of what the future might bring played crucial roles in the political and personal 4

Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), 351.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

402

Conclusion

choices people in occupied societies made. This was equally the case for leaders making decisions about collaboration and resistance and for modest shopkeepers trying to keep their saluting protocols up to date. Time under occupation was not homogeneous and empty; it was variously compressed and stretched out, as assumptions about what its passage might bring were subject to radical paradigm shifts.5 Periods of shockingly fast, and seemingly fateful, transformation brought on by foreign conquest often gave way to what seemed like eternities of waiting, watching, and trying to endure, succeeded in turn by renewed waves of revolutionary change.6 Considering responses to occupation through the lens of evolving temporal sensibilities may therefore serve as a parting perspective on the range of cases and experiences discussed in this volume.7 Synchronicity of experience is the most banally obvious temporal factor which forms the very basis for this book. The Axis powers’ early victories brought all the societies discussed here under their sway within a year or two – in many cases within months or weeks – of one another. These conquests came about very rapidly, as the result of what appeared to be decisive victories; the rapid succession of their occurrence across vast geographical spheres contributed to a widespread early impression of irreversibility. But the global wave of occupations washed across a diversity of historical landscapes. The resultant political currents accordingly flowed along a variety of patterns, depending on whether the country or region in question had previously been a colony or a sovereign state, whether or not it had recently been conquered by another power (such as the Soviet Union in western Ukraine), whether or not it suffered from historically deep divisions along ideological or ethnic lines, and so on. The occupying powers themselves arrived with different sets of 5

6 7

The notion of “homogeneous and empty time” as characteristic of certain manifestations of the modern historical sensibility was, of course, articulated by Walter Benjamin (who regarded it as a dangerous obstacle to any prospect of human liberation) in his 1940 essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” published in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968). For a critique of how Benedict Anderson adapted the concept in his treatment of nationalism, see John D. Kelly, “Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous, Empty Communities in Contemporary Theory,” Development and Change, Vol. 29 (1998), 839–71. On the sense among the occupied of being stuck in a “long stretched-out present,” see Fritzsche, An Iron Wind, 19. For reflections on the interplay of synchronicity of experience with diversity of preexisting structures of perception, as well as on the concept of accelerated time, see Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), chs. 1, 6, and 13.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

403

presumptions about, and intentions towards, their conquests, depending on a variety of historically informed (or misinformed) ideological and geopolitical considerations. These were further complicated by internal disagreements and rivalries within the occupying powers’ political and/or military establishments. Finally, highly contingent choices made at the very outset by political and administrative elites in invaded countries had profound significance for path-dependent chains of subsequent events. This is apparent, for example, in the case of early decisions by leaders in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Thailand about whether to negotiate political understandings (if those were on offer) with, or just capitulate militarily to, the invaders. If, as this book has suggested, historical pasts were influential in shaping responses to occupation, so too were conceptions of the future. The occupation-era choices available to many prominent figures and ordinary people alike were often a matter of balancing one evil against another – such as the evil of the massive civilian atrocities that occupation forces would commit in response to armed resistance vs. the evil of failing to lift a hand against the harsh rule of alien conquerors. Perceptions of what constituted the lesser evil shifted over the course of the war, as people’s “horizons of expectation” were transformed.8 What they expected the future to hold shaped what they perceived as prudent, legitimate, and even moral, on an individual and local level as well as on the broader political stage. Each of the forces, movements, and/or regimes competing with one another made claims upon the future as they sought to define people’s expectations and thus influence their choices. 8

On horizons of expectation in World War I Belgium see Schaepdrijver, “No Country.” For a systematic attempt to discuss how the concept of a horizon of expectations can be applied to the study of history, see Reinhart Koselleck Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 267–88. In Koselleck’s view, one of the distinguishing features of modernity is the gap it opens up between past experience and expected – often utopian – futures. In the context of wartime occupations, one might say that fatalistic expectations of a dystopian future (one that was rooted in, rather than set off from, contemporaneous experience) competed with various dreams of liberation. For a critique of Koselleck’s approach in favor of an understanding of any given society or era as marked by often chaotic clashes and interactions among divergent conceptions of time, see Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, “Chronocenosis: An Introduction to Power and Time,” in Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley, eds., Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Anson Rabinbach calls into question the applicability of Koselleck’s approach to a century marked by the dystopian phenomena of totalitarianism and genocide. Anson Rabinbach, “Rise and Fall of the Sattelzeit: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Temporality of Totalitarianism and Genocide,” in Edelstein et al., eds., Power and Time. On social constructions of time, see also Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

404

Conclusion

The Axis and Allied coalitions each proclaimed the inevitability of their eventual victory on the world stage, as did rival political movements and armed formations jostling or doing battle with one another within occupied territories.9 The relative credibility of these claims shifted over time. The compelling early case for planning on the basis of an expected Axis victory thus gave way to increasing support for movements or approaches that banked on Allied triumph. The year 1943 was pivotal in Axisoccupied Europe and Asia, not only because Germany’s and Japan’s defeat was starting to appear like a foregone conclusion, but because their abusive exploitation of populations in occupied territories was so sharply aggravated by their ever more desperate efforts to overcome their increasingly grim military prospects. That said, it was not a simple matter for local elites or activists who had bet on an Axis victory to switch strategies amidst such a quickly changing set of global, regional, and local circumstances. Some did manage to adapt skillfully to evolving expectations of the future, as in the case of the Thai leaders whose finesse at gradually extricating themselves from the Japanese embrace and realigning themselves with the Americans while holding off the less-forgiving British put the maladroit antics of Maclean’s watchmaker to shame. The top leadership of France’s Vichy government was neither willing nor able to escape the trap it had created for itself in 1940, but a great many Vichy officials, bureaucrats, cultural figures, and others – some of whom had participated in crimes against humanity – were remarkably successful at establishing timely lines of communication and cooperation with the resistance. This frequently facilitated their continued career success in the aftermath of liberation.10 OUN-B’s eleventh-hour attempts to rebrand itself as a champion of democratic change, even as it was orchestrating the brutal anti-Polish ethnic-cleansing campaign in Volhynia, were not very convincing. Nonetheless, during the Cold War, émigré veterans of the wartime fight 9

10

On the Nazis’ vision of the future as a historically static reconnection with the timeless values of a racialized mythological past, see Christopher Clark, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), ch. 4. Another scholar describes the Nazi vision of the future as “an arrested, other time, a budding golden age full of danger and power.” Stefanos Geroulanos, “The Temporal Assemblage of the Nazi New Man: The ‘Empty’ Present, the Incipient Ruin, and the Apocalyptic Time of Lebensraum,” in Edelstein, et al., eds., Power and Time. See Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, ch. 1. The early post-war convictions and punishments of some collaborators soon gave way to the amnesty and rehabilitation of many others. Cf. Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). On continuities across the 1945 divide throughout much of Europe, see Tony Judt, “Conclusion,” in Deák et al., eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

405

on behalf of Ukrainian self-determination succeeded in playing on their anti-Communist credentials to win sympathetic audiences in the West. As the horizon of expectations shifted toward the prospect of Axis defeat, civil wars broke out not only between die-hard collaborationists and resistance movements, but also among rival forces within some resistance movements, particularly between Communists and their adversaries. For many political contenders, the prime question now became not how to expel the invaders but who would fill the vacuum created by their anticipated downfall. At the same time, realizing that their prospects of holding on to power in the aftermath of Allied victory were vanishingly dim, some of the movements and regimes which had closely attached their destinies to the Axis became more, rather than less, politically extreme and gratuitously violent. The growing expectation of defeat freed them to pursue dystopian ideals unfettered by any real thought for the future. This phenomenon was particularly notable in the cases of Croatia’s Ustaša regime and the Italian Social Republic, and is strikingly apparent in other episodes not studied in this book, such as the escalating murderousness of the fascist Milice in the waning days of the Vichy regime and the orgy of antisemitic violence by the Arrow Cross in Hungary during 1944.11 It was noted above how conditions and decisions at the initial time of occupation could set in motion a path-dependent chain of sequelae. The particular conjuncture of circumstances at the moment of an occupation’s end could likewise play a critical role in shaping subsequent developments. For instance, the fact that Japanese forces remained in occupation of Indonesia at the time of Tokyo’s surrender created a propitious window of opportunity for Sukarno’s declaration of independence. This furnished him with an eleventh-hour vindication of his cooperation with the Japanese throughout the preceding years. In Ukraine, the end of the European war came long after German forces had retreated in the face of Red Army offensives, leaving UPA paramilitaries to carry on with a hopeless guerrilla campaign in the western countryside that persisted for a few years before its final suppression. In China, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Philippines – among other countries – the distribution of forces at war’s end combined with the prestige of their ideological association with a victorious Soviet Union gave Communist-led resistance movements prospects of political power that 11

On the Milice’s ideology as a break from Vichy, see Yagil Limore, “La Milice française,” French Politics and Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 1999), 37–55. On the Arrow Cross, see István Deák, “A Fatal Compromise: The Debate over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary,” in Deák et al., eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

406

Conclusion

eclipsed any opportunities they might have had prior to the war. In Yugoslavia, the decisive portion of the civil war had already been fought, leaving the Communists not only in control, but also in a sufficiently strong position for Tito to break with the Soviet Union a few years later. Intensely fought civil wars resumed or ensued in the three other cases, with the Communists emerging victorious in China and experiencing decisive defeat (thanks in part to American support for the existing regimes) in Greece and the Philippines. Finally, collective memories, commemorative practices, and historical scholarship concerning wartime experiences of occupation have been subject to intense contestation and radical shifts in perspective with the passage of time since war’s end. The very moment of liberation was often marked by violent practices of exclusion that constituted acts of rewriting history. Former members of collaborationist militias and their ilk were naturally targeted, first by means of summary executions and various forms of street justice, later by means of judicial proceedings and public trials, which also held to account some of the leading figures of former collaborationist regimes. But at the same time, members of certain ethnic minorities were once again targeted in many countries. In some instances this was because of their association with the former occupiers, as in the case of the millions of ethnic Germans who had been elevated in status under the Nazis and were now expelled en masse from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other East European countries.12 Hundreds of thousands of Japanese colonists were obliged to return to their home islands from Manchuria and other parts of the former empire, while the large number of Koreans long resident in Japan suddenly lost the status of Japanese nationals, as this legacy of some fifty years of Japanese rule over the Korean peninsula was erased overnight.13 In other cases, the choice of ethnic targets was marked by continuities with wartime and/or pre-war tendencies, as in the attacks that took thousands of ethnic Chinese lives in Indonesia during the violence and warfare of the second half of the 1940s, and the hostile and sometimes violent responses in Eastern 12

13

Eagle Glassheim, “National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945,” Central European History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2000), 463–86; Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), ch. 6; R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). On the use of “zero hours” among other temporal demarcations in delimiting membership in the nation, see Elizabeth F. Cohen, The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

407

Europe to surviving Jews returning home to reclaim property that had fallen into the hands of their neighbors. For years, there was also a widespread tendency across Europe (particularly in the Communist bloc but also in the West) to downplay the distinctive experience of Jews as targets of the most systematic genocidal campaign in history. The complicity of local officials and members of the indigenous population in implementation of the Holocaust threatened to undercut simplistic public narratives about proud nations that had steadfastly maintained patriotic solidarity in the face of external or externally imposed oppression.14 Across much of Western Europe, the hours, days, and weeks following liberation were also marked by brutal assaults against a new target – women accused of having engaged in so-called horizontal collaboration with the German occupiers. Their brutal head-shaving and public humiliation seems to have served a combined psychological and political purpose for communities which were full of many other people who had been complicit with the enemy – often in far more harmful ways. Local society now channeled the occupation-era legacy of humiliation and shame into a quasi-scripted, sexist, victimization ritual that targeted a vulnerable subset of women as scapegoats for the collaborationist sins of a much broader cross-section of society. Inflicting retribution on women alleged to have consorted with the Germans served as a diversion from confronting much more widespread and profound patterns of moral compromise that implicated too many people to be faced honestly. It can also be interpreted as a crude psychological response to the perception that the experience of defeat and occupation amounted to a feminization of the nation and a humiliation of its men. The virility of the nation and the masculinity of the men who were supposed to defend it was now notionally reasserted by viciously penalizing women alleged to have sexually betrayed their fatherland and their menfolk.15 The onset of the Cold War led to a rapid shift in many nonCommunist countries away from early attempts to prosecute, punish, and/or purge from employment former civil servants, businesspeople, educated professionals, and others accused of collaboration. Such efforts 14

15

Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin, 2013), ch. 17. On exclusionary and antisemitic elements in anti-fascist and post-liberation forms of European patriotism, see Peter Fritzsche, An Iron Wind, 290–91. Claire Duchen, “Crime and Punishment in Liberated France: The Case of les femmes tondues,” in Claire Duchen and Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, eds., When the War Was Over: Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000); Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

408

Conclusion

gave way to a pattern of amnesties in the interest of political and economic stabilization and the consolidation of a common domestic front against Communism (in tandem with a corresponding international alignment). This shift was intimately connected to the cultivation – in practices of public commemoration, rhetoric, and education – of simplifying myths about wartime. According to such narratives, support for Axis invaders and for the local regimes set up under their aegis had been limited to the proverbial “few bad apples” – unfortunate exceptions to the rule of a nation that remained committed to resistance. Falling under the control of invaders was retroactively reframed as the beginning of a painful, but time-constrained, test of the nation’s enduring qualities – a test that the people as a whole had passed – rather than as the radical rupture that occupation had seemed to mark at its onset. De Gaulle’s France is the locus classicus for this phenomenon, but variations on the pattern can be found in most, if not all, of the countries partially or totally occupied by Axis powers during the Second World War.16 In Communist China, there was for years a reluctance to pay much public attention to the country’s suffering during the war years, as the legacy of the United Front with the KMT ran counter to the confrontation with the Nationalists, first during the renewed civil war and subsequently across the Taiwan Straits. Making too much of outrages like the Nanjing massacre also threatened to undercut Beijing’s attempts to woo Japan out from under the American nuclear umbrella during the early decades of the Cold War. In a later, post-Mao context marked by the erosion of Communist economic norms under the continued dictatorship of the Communist Party, playing on nationalist themes associated with the wartime struggle took on a new political salience for the regime, which adjusted its commemorative practices accordingly to highlight Japanese wartime atrocities and the nobility of the Chinese people’s struggle against the enemy.17 In many countries, the legacy of occupation remains almost as politically salient and nearly as freighted today as it was in 1945. Recent decades have witnessed attempts to grapple more fully with the complexities and ambiguities associated with the occupation-era conduct of political elites and ordinary citizens alike. Historical scholarship has often taken the lead in these efforts, sometimes followed years later by shifts in public discourse and rituals of commemoration. French President Chirac’s 1995 acknowledgment of the role of French administrators 16 17

Tony Judt, “The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” Daedalus, Vol. 121, No. 4 (Fall 1992), 83–118. Coble, China’s War Reporters; Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Conclusion

409

and the French state in the deportation of Jews to concentration and death camps was a notable example, as was Polish President Kwasniewski’s 2001 apology in the name of the state for the massacre of Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the Polish town of Jedwabne following its seizure by the Germans in the summer of 1941.18 But such pivots in turn provoke historiographical and political backlashes amidst new rounds of victim-blaming. For example, in China, admitting that collaboration with the Japanese involved more than a marginal group of hanjian (traitors to the Han nation) remains off the table.19 Yugoslavia’s breakup and its successor states’ ethnic wars of the 1990s were marked by a revival of images and recriminations associated with the wartime fight between the fascist Croatian Ustaša regime and its opponents. In many of these instances, memories of wartime events passed down within families and local communities, along with rival regimes’ and movements’ propagandistic use of incendiary historical allusions, combined to fuel distrust and legitimize violence and atrocities directed at ethnic others. Four and a half decades of relative stability under the Communist slogan of “brotherhood and unity” were suddenly reframed as a parenthetical interlude between two phases of a brutal inter-ethnic war.20 In Ukraine, the outbreak of border conflicts with Russia and/or Russian-supported separatists in 2014 was associated with right-wing revivals of OUN/UPA symbols and slogans and public commemoration of wartime OUN leaders, with a considerable amount of complicity on the part of various public authorities. This played conveniently into the hands of a Kremlin propaganda campaign that has sought to mark the entire movement to democratize Ukraine with the stain of the OUN’s wartime fascism, collaborationism, and antisemitism.21 At the time of 18

19 20

21

Julie Fette, “Apology and the Past in Contemporary France,” French Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2008), 78–113; Ian Fisher, “At Site of Massacre, Polish Leader Asks Jews for Forgiveness,” New York Times, July 11, 2001, Section A, p. 1. The rise to broad public attention of the Jedwabne massacre was largely due to the publication of Gross, Neighbors, in 2002. Brook, Collaboration, Introduction. Slavenka Drakulić, The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (New York: Norton, 1993); John Borneman, Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 180–87. For a case study focused on war memory and latter-day violence in Yugoslavia of the 1960s, see Bergholz, “Sudden Nationhood.” Lucan Ahmad Way, “Ukraine’s Post-Maidan Struggles: Free Speech in a Time of War,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 2019), 48–60; Lina Klymenko, “The Changed Paradigm of World War II Commemorations in Ukraine after Crimea’s Annexation,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2020), 517–20; Taras Kuzio, “Soviet and Russian anti-(Ukrainian) Nationalism and re-Stalinization,” Communist and Post-

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

410

Conclusion

writing (April 2022), Russia is in the midst of a brutal, neo-imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to justify, among other spurious claims, by insisting that the country is in dire need of being “de-Nazified.” The Kremlin has essentially sought to cast its invasion as a continuation or resumption of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against the Nazis and their allies and collaborators. But this is not 1943 or 1944, and the historical context has radically changed over the course of the past eight decades. Ukraine has a democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who happens to be Jewish, and the vocal Ukrainian far Right has not succeeded in gaining more than a tiny fraction of votes in the country’s free, multi-party elections. The continued activity of neo-fascist movements and armed formations (such as the Azov Battalion) remains a source of concern, as do equivalent phenomena the world over.22 But the most striking feature of Ukraine’s political and national sentiment at this juncture is the unprecedented degree of trans-regional and trans-ethnic solidarity the country’s population has manifested in the face of the murderous Russian onslaught. Indeed, Putin’s war has likely done more to bridge the differences between east and west Ukraine, between the country’s Russophones and its native speakers of Ukrainian, than any prior event in history. As to analogies, it is Russia’s atrocity-ridden assault on Ukraine’s civilian population that is most reminiscent of the twentieth century’s wars of fascist aggression. While patent falsehoods and fundamentally misleading historical analogies can and should be exposed as such, there is no “final judgment of history” on subjects as complicated and ambiguity-ridden as that of responses to wartime occupation. The more one seeks to approach a horizon, the more it continues to recede. As time goes on and our frameworks of fear and expectation about the future continue to shift, the history of this period will remain a subject of heated and often bitter contestation. Its serious study is all the more salient at a time when orchestrated mendacity has surged into the mainstream of social and political discourse around the globe.

22

Communist Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 2016), 87–99; Mark Edele, “Fighting Russia’s History Wars: Vladimir Putin and the Codification of World War II,” History and Memory, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2017), 90–124. See Sudarsan Rathavan, Loveday Morris, Claire Parker, and David L. Stern, “Rightwing Azov Battalion Emerges as a Controversial Defender of Ukraine,” Washington Post, April 6, 2022.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Archives Library of Congress, Washington, DC Andres Soriano Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division “Documents Relating to the Fall and the Liberation of the Philippines in World War II,” Library of Congress Rare Book Collection Paroles françaises, paroles d’espoir (n.a., n.d.) (Clermont-Ferrand: Imprimerie Spéciale, 1942?), DC 397 [Vichy -government -era pamphlets], #97, Collection Level Cataloguing [CLC] Français gardez votre confiance dans le Maréchal (n.a., n.d.), pamphlet apparently published in the second half of 1942, DC 397, #46, CLC

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland National Archives Microfilm Publications (NAMP) Series T78 (Records of Headquarters, German Army High Command) Series T501 (Records of German Field Commands: Rear Areas, Occupied Territories and Others)

Record Groups RG 165 (Military Agency Records) RG 226 (OSS Papers) RG 407 (Philippine Archives Collection)

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (The Shapell Center, Bowie, Maryland) Selected records from the Zhytomyr State Oblast Archive

411

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

412

Bibliography

Published Documents and Document Collections L’Associazione nazionale delle famiglie dei caduti e dispersi della RSI, ed., Lettere dei caduti della RSI (Rome: Edizioni B e C, 1975) Benda, Harry J., James K. Irikura, and Kōichi Kishi, eds., Japanese Military Administration in Indonesia: Selected Documents (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1965) Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, Vol. III: The Far East (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955) Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941, Vol. V: The Far East (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956) Foreign Relations of the United States, 1942, China (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956) Foreign Relations of the United States, 1942, General; the British Commonwealth; the Far East, Vol. I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960) Hatta, Mohammad, The Putera Reports: Problems in Indonesian–Japanese Wartime Cooperation, trans. and ed. William H. Frederick (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1971) Klein, Peter, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitpolizei und des SD (Berlin: Publikationen der Gedenk- und Bildungsstätte Haus der WannseeKonferenz, 1997) Reid, Anthony and Oki Akira, eds., The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected Memoirs of 1942–1945 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1986) Viganò, Marino, Il congresso di Verona (14 novembre 1943): Una antologia di documenti e testimonianze (Rome: Settimo Sigillo, 1994)

Contemporaneous Newspapers and Periodical Publications The Argus (Melbourne) Bangkok Chronicle Combat (France) Indonesia (an offshoot of De Bevrijding: Weekblad uitgegeven door de Indonesische Vereniging Perhimpoenan Indonesia), publication of Indonesian student association in the Netherlands Keesings Historisch Archief (The Netherlands) Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bulletin (official publication of the Republic of the Philippines under Japanese occupation) Official Gazette (of the Philippine Executive Commission) Provinciale Drentsche en Asser Courant (Drenthe, the Netherlands) La Repubblica Fascista De Sumatra Post Le Temps (France) The Times (London) The Tribune (Manila) De Unie (The Netherlands) Veritas: Onafhankelijk Dagblad voor Delft en Omstreken (Delft, the Netherlands)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

413

Contemporaneous Writings and Publications Bessières, Albert, “Les femmes et la mode: Les enseignements du Pape,” ch. 6 of n.a., Refaire la France… Pour restaurer la famille française (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1941) Chaumet, André and H.-R. Bellanger, Les juifs et nous (Paris: Éditions Jean Renard, 1941) Colijn, Hendrikus, Op de Grens van Twee Werelden (Amsterdam: N.V. Dagblad en Drukkerij de Standaard, 1940) D’Apery, Théophile, Pétain: Histoire actuelle à l’occasion du 1er anniversaire de la Légion Française des Combattants (Algiers: Imprimerie Baconnier, 1941) Glaise von Horstenau, Edmund, Ein General im Zwielicht: Die Erinnerungen Edmund Glaises von Horstenau, Vol. III: Deutscher Bevollmächtigter General in Kroatien und Zeuge des Untergangs des “Tausendjährigen Reiches”, ed. Peter Broucek (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1988) Guéhenno, Jean, Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, trans. David Ball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014; first published 1947) Hervé, Gustave, C’est Pétain qu’il nous faut! (Paris: Éditions de “La Victoire,” 1936) Jansen, L. F., In deze halve gevangenis: Dagboek van mr dr L. F. Jansen, Batavia/ Jakarta, 1942–1945 (Franeker: Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, 1988) Labrador, Juan, A Diary of the Japanese Occupation, December 7, 1941–May 7, 1945, trans. from Spanish (translator not named) (Manila: Santo Tomas University Press, 1989) Lichauco, Marcial P., “Dear Mother Putnam”: A Diary of the War in the Philippines ([Manila]: n.p., 1949) Paroles du Maréchal, Vol. II, pamphlet (Hanoi: n.p., 1941) Pétain, Philippe, Actes et écrits, ed. Jacques Isorni (Paris: Flammarion, 1974) Discours aux Français, 17 juin 1940–20 aoȗt 1944, ed. Jean-Claude Barbas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989) Pourrat, Henri, Le chef français (Marseille: Robert Laffont, 1942) Takeuchi Tatsuji, “Manila Diary, December 1942–October 1943,” Appendix A in Royama Masamichi and Takeuchi Tatsuji, The Philippine Polity: A Japanese View, trans. Takeuchi Tatsuji, ed. Theodore Friend (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1967)

SECONDARY SOURCES Adam, Jean-Michel, La linguistique textuelle: Introduction à l’analyse textuelle des discours, 3rd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011) Adams, Cindy, Sukarno: An Autobiography. As Told to Cindy Adams (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) Agoncillo, Teodoro A., The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941–1945, 2 vols. (Quezon City: R. P. Garcia, 1965) Agung, Ide Anak, Agung Gde: From the Formation of the State of East Indonesia towards the Establishment of the United States of Indonesia, trans. Linda Owens (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1996)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

414

Bibliography

Amar, Tarik Cyril, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015) Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991) Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944–1946 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972) Antoine, André-Paul, ed., Mémorial de France: Faits d’armes de la campagne 1939–1940 (Paris [this publication printed in unoccupied Toulouse]: Sequana Éditeur; Édition speciale de la Légion, 14 January 1941). Appiah, Kwame Anthony, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Applebaum, Anne, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Anchor, 2017) Armitage, David, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Knopf, 2017) Armstrong, John, Ukrainian Nationalism, 3rd ed. (Englewood, CO: Ukrainian Academic Press, 1990) Ascherson, Neal, “Hanging on to Mutti,” London Review of Books, 6 June 2013, 6–8 Azéma, Jean-Pierre, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938–1944, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Bak, Sofie, “Between Tradition and New Departure: The Dilemmas of Collaboration in Denmark,” in Roni Stauber, ed., Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse after the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2010) Baker, Chris and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Ballinger, Pamela, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) Bankwitz, Philip Charles Farwell, Maxime Weygand and Civil–Military Relations in Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) Banomyong, Pridi, Pridi by Pridi: Selected Writings on Life, Politics, and Economy, trans. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2000) Baracetti, Gaia, “Foibe: Nationalism, Revenge and Ideology in Venezia Giulia and Istria, 1943–5,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 2009), 657–74 Baranowski, Shelley, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Barmé, Scot, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993) Barrett, David P., “The Wang Jingwei Regime, 1940–1945: Continuities and Disjunctures with Nationalist China,” in David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Bartov, Omer, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018) Bartov, Omer and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

415

Batinić, Jelena, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Batson, Benjamin A., “Siam and Japan: The Perils of Independence,” in Alfred W. McCoy, ed., Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1980) Bauer, Raimund, “National Socialist Notions of Europe and their Implementation during the Second World War,” doctoral diss., Loughborough University, 2015 Bellezza, Simone A., “The Discourse over the Nationality Question in NaziOccupied Ukraine: The Generalbezirk Dnjepropetrowsk, 1941–3,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October 2008), 573–96 Benda, Harry J., The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1958) “The Japanese Interregnum in Southeast Asia,” in Grant K. Goodman, ed., Imperial Japan and Asia: A Reassessment (New York: Occasional Papers of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 1967 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968) Benoist-Méchin, Jacques, De la défaite au désastre, Vol. I: Les occasions manquées, juillet 1940–avril 1942 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984) Benvenisti, Eyal, The International Law of Occupation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Bergholz, Max, “Sudden Nationhood: The Microdynamics of Intercommunal Relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina after World War II,” American Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 3 (June 2013), 679–707 Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016) Bergin, Bob, “War of a Different Kind: OSS and Free Thai Operations in World War II,” Studies in Intelligence (US Central Intelligence Agency publication), Vol. 55, No. 4 (Unclassified Extracts, December 2011), 11–22 Berkhoff, Karel C., Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) “Was There a Religious Revival in Soviet Ukraine under the Nazi Regime?” Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (July 2000), 536–67 Berkhoff, Karel C. and Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Attitude toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3–4 (December 1999), 149–84 Best, Werner, Dänemark in Hitlers Hand: Der Bericht des Reichsbevollmächtigten Werner Best über seine Besatzungspolitik in Dänemark mit Studien über Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Canaris u. a., ed. Siegfried Matlok (Husum: Husum Verlag, 1988) Beyen, Marnix and Svenja Weers, “Écrire l’histoire comme pratique d’occupation: L’administration militaire allemande en Belgique d’une occupation à l’autre,” in James Connolly, Emmanuel Debruyne, Élise Julien, and Matthias Meirlaen, eds., En territoire ennemi: Expériences d’occupation, transferts, héritages

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

416

Bibliography

(1914–1949) (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2018) Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995) Biondich, Mark, “Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942,” Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 83, No. 1 (January 2005), 71–116 Bishku, Michael B., “Sukarno, Charismatic Leadership and Islam in Indonesia,” Journal of Third World Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 1992), 100–17 Blitstein, Peter, “Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in its Comparative Context,” Slavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer 2006), 273–91 Bloch, Marc, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Norton, 1999; first published 1946) Bokovoy, Melissa, Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) Boom, Bart van der, “Ordinary Dutchmen and the Holocaust: A Summary of Findings,” in Peter Romijn et al., The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers – University of Amsterdam Press, 2012) Borish, Steven, “Hal Koch, Grundtvig and the Rescue of the Danish Jews: A Case Study in the Democratic Mobilisation for Non-Violent Resistance,” unpublished and undated paper held by the Royal Danish Library, ojs.statsbiblioteket .dk/index.php/grs/article/download/16541/14334 (accessed March 13, 2017) Borneman, John, Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003) Borshuk, Yury, ed., Ukraine during World War II: History and its Aftermath (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986) Bottlenberg-Landsberg, Maria Theodora von dem, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, 1902–1945: Ein Lebensbild (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2003) Boyle, John Hunter, China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972) Brailey, Nigel J., Thailand and the Fall of Singapore: A Frustrated Asian Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986) Braun, Robert, Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the Rescue of Jews in the Low Countries during the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Bresadola, Gianmarco, “The Legitimising Strategies of the Nazi Administration in Northern Italy: Propaganda in the Adriatisches Küstenland,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 2004), 425–51 Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988) Bronzwaer, Paul, Maastricht en Luik bezet: een comparatief onderzoek naar vijf aspecten van de Duitse bezetting van Maastricht en Luik tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Hilversum: Verloren, 2010) Brook, Timothy, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

417

“The Creation of the Reformed Government in Central China, 1938,” in David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Broucek, Peter, “Einleitung [Introduction],” in Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, Ein General im Zwielicht: Die Erinnerungen Edmund Glaises von Horstenau, Vol. III: Deutscher Bevollmächtigter General in Kroatien und Zeuge des Untergangs des “Tausendjährigen Reiches”, ed. Peter Broucek (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1988) Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Bryant, Chad, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Buckser, Andrew, “Rescue and Cultural Context during the Holocaust: Grundtvigian Nationalism and the Rescue of the Danish Jews,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter 2001), 1–25 Bulutgil, H. Zeynep, The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Bunyaket, Thawi, “Additional Facts on the Situation in Thailand during World War II,” in Direk Jayanama, Thailand and World War II, trans. Jane Keyes (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2008; original Thai ed., 1967) Burgwyn, H. James (with Amedeo Guerrazzi), Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 1943–1945: The Failure of a Puppet Regime (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Burleigh, Michael, Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945–1965 (London: Macmillan, 2013) Burrin, Philippe, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 1996; first published 1993) “Vichy,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoires, Vol. III: Les France, Part 1: Conflits et partages (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) Buton, Philippe, “Experiences of War, Memories of War, and Political Behavior: The Example of the French Communist Party,” in Jörg Eschternkamp and Stefan Martens, eds., Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2010) Caratini, Roger, Jeanne d’Arc: De Domrémy à Orléans et du bûcher à la légende (Paris: l’Archipel, 1999) Cârstocea, Raul, “Native Fascists, Transnational Anti-Semites: The International Activity of Legionary Leader Ion I. Mot¸a,” in Arnd Bauerkämpfer and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, eds., Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2017) Carynnyk, Marco, “Foes of our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussions about Jews, 1929–1947,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 39, No. 3 (May 2011), 315–52 Casambre, Napoleon J., “The Impact of American Education in the Philippines,” Educational Perspectives, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter 1982), 7–14 Chaloemitiarana, Thak, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2007). Champoux, Richard J., “The Massilia Affair,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 1975), 283–300.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

418

Bibliography

Cheah Boon Kheng, “Japanese Army Policy toward the Chinese and MalayChinese Relations in Wartime Malaya,” in Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Milton Park, UK: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002) Chernev, Borislav, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017) Cherniakov, D. I., “Lokotskaia gazeta ‘Golos Naroda’ na sluzhbe u natsistkoi propagandy, 1942–1943 gg.,” Voprosy istorii, No. 5 (May 2010), 63–73 Cheung, Andrew, “Slogans, Symbols, and Legitimacy: The Case of Wang Jingwei’s Nanjing Regime,” Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China, No. 6, July 1995, www.indiana.edu/ ~easc/publications/doc/working_papers/Issue%206%201995%20July% 20IUEAWPS%20Cheung,%20Strauss.pdf (accessed August 8, 2017) Chiarini, Roberto, L’ultimo fascismo: Storia e memoria della Repubblica di Salò (Venice: Marislio, 2009) Chickering, Roger, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner, eds., World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Chong, Ja Ian External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, and Thailand, 1893–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Ciancia, Kathryn, On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) Clark, Christopher, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019) Clogg, Richard, “The Greek Government in Exile, 1941–4,” International History Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 1979), 376–98 Close, David H., The Origins of the Greek Civil War (London: Longman, 1995) Coble, Parks M., China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) “Japan’s New Order and the Shanghai Capitalists: Conflict and Collaboration, 1937–1945,” in David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Cohen, Elizabeth F., The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Connors, Michael Kelly, Democracy and National Identity in Thailand (London: Routledge, 2003) Constantino, Renato and Letizia R. Constantino, The Philippines: The Continuing Past (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1978) Conway, Martin and Robert Gerwarth, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution,” in Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Conway, Martin and Peter Romijn, eds., The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture, 1938–1948 (New York: Berg, 2004)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

419

Cook, Haruko Taya and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992) Coughlin, Richard J., Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960) Crémieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis, Les Français de l’an 40, Vol. II: Ouvriers et soldats (Paris: Gallimard, 1990) Dahm, Bernhard, Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, trans. Mary F. Somers Heidhues (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969) Dallin, Alexander, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (London: Macmillan, 1957) Davies, Peter, Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two (London: Longman, 2004) De Schaepdrijver, Sophie, “No Country for Young Men: Patriotism and its Paradoxes in German-Occupied Belgium, 1914–18,” in Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Quincy Cloet, and Alex Dowdall, eds., Breaking Empires, Making Nations: The First World War and the Reforging of Europe (Warsaw: College of Europe at Natolin, 2018) Deák, István, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution in World War II Europe (Boulder: Westview Press, 2015) “A Fatal Compromise: The Debate over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Deakin, Frederick William, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Fall of Italian Fascism (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) Delis, Panagiotis, “The British Intervention in Greece: The Battle of Athens, December 1944,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (May 2017), 211–37 Dethlefsen, Henrik, “Denmark and the German Occupation,” Scandinavian Journal of History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1990), 193–206 Diner, Dan, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge, trans. William Templer and Joel Golb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007) Djilas, Milovan, Wartime (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) Donohue, Alan, “The ‘Lokot’ Republic and the RONA in German-Occupied Russia, 1941–1943,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2018), 80–102 Douglas, R. M., Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) Dower, John, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986) Drakulić, Slavenka, The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (New York: Norton, 1993) Dryburgh, Marjorie, North China and Japanese Expansion, 1933–1937: Regional Power and the National Interest (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000) Duara, Prasenjit, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) Duchen, Claire, “Crime and Punishment in Liberated France: The Case of les femmes tondues,” in Claire Duchen and Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, eds.,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

420

Bibliography

When the War Was Over: Women, War and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000) Duggan, Christopher, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Edele, Mark, “Fighting Russia’s History Wars: Vladimir Putin and the Codification of World War II,” History and Memory, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Fall/ Winter 2017), 90–124 “Why did Ukrainian Red Army Men Go over to the Germans: The Case of Defectors to the Wehrmacht’s 296 Infantry Division, 1942–1943,” Ukraı¨ns’kij istoričnij žurnal (2019), 86–102 Edelstein, Dan, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, “Chronocenosis: An Introduction to Power and Time,” in Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, eds., Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) Edelstein, David M., Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) Eldredge, Niles and Stephen J. Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Thomas J. M. Shopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co., 1972) Elvert, Jürgen, Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918–1945) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999) Enstad, Johannes Due, Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Erlacher, Trevor, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes: An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021) Ermolov, I. G., Pod znamenami Gitlera. Sovetskie grazhdane v soyuze s natsistami na okkupirovannykh territoriyakh RSFSR v 1941–1944 gg. (Moscow: Veche, 2013) Felice, Renzo de, Mussolini l’alleato, 1940–1945, Vol. II: La guerra civile, 1943–1945 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1997) Fernandez, Doreen G., “Zarzuela to Sarswela: Indigenization and Transformation,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1993), 320–43 Ferro, Marc, Pétain (Paris: Fayard, 1987) Fette, Julie, “Apology and the Past in Contemporary France,” French Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2008), 78–113 Finchelstein, Federico, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017) Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2010) Finder, Gabriel N. and Alexander V. Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter 2004), 95–118 Fischer, Bernd J., Albania at War, 1939–1945 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1999)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

421

Fisher, Ian, “At Site of Massacre, Polish Leader Asks Jews for Forgiveness,” New York Times, 11 July 2001, Section A, p. 1 Fishman, Sarah, Robert Zaretsky, and Ioannis Sinanoglu, eds., France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford: Berg, 2000) Fogel, Joshua A., ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) Fogu, Claudio, “Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory,” in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) Foot, M. R. D., ed., Holland at War against Hitler: Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1940–1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1990) Foray, Jennifer L., Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Foronda, Marcelino A., Jr., Cultural Life in the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (Manila: Philippine National Historical Society, 1975) Fortescue, William, The Third Republic in France, 1870–1940: Conflicts and Continuities (London: Routledge, 2000) Francia, Luis H., A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos (New York: Overlook Press, 2014) Frederick, William H., “Introduction,” in Mohammad Hatta, The Putera Reports: Problems in Indonesian–Japanese Wartime Cooperation, trans. and ed. William H. Frederick (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1971) Friend, Theodore, The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) Fritzsche, Peter, An Iron Wind: Europe under Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2016) Fusayama, Takao, A Japanese Memoir of Sumatra, 1945–1946: Love and Hatred in the Liberation War (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1993) Gagliani, Daniella, Brigate nere: Mussolini e la militarizzazione del Partito fascista repubblicano (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999) Gatu, Dagfinn, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008) Gerlach, Christian, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Gerolymatos, André, An International Civil War: Greece, 1943–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) Geroulanos, Stefanos, “The Temporal Assemblage of the Nazi New Man: The ‘Empty’ Present, the Incipient Ruin, and the Apocalyptic Time of Lebensraum,” in Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, eds., Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) Gerwarth, Robert, “Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe,” in Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds.,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

422

Bibliography

War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 65–66. Gerwarth, Robert and John Horne, “Introduction,” in Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Gildea, Robert, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (London: Macmillan, 2002) The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) Glassheim, Eagle, “National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945,” Central European History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2000), 463–86 Goltz, Anna von der, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Goodman, Grant K., Four Aspects of Philippine–Japanese Relations, 1930–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1967) “General Artemio Ricarte and Japan,” Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (September 1966), 48–60 Gosiengfiao, Victor, “The Japanese Occupation: ‘The Cultural Campaign,’” Philippine Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (April 1966), 228–42 Goto, Ken’ichi, “Modern Japan and Indonesia: The Dynamics and Legacy of Wartime Rule,” in Peter Post and Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, eds., Japan, Indonesia and the War: Myths and Realities (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997) “Returning to Asia”: Japan–Indonesia Relations, 1930s–1942 (Tokyo: Ryukei Shyosha, 1997) Griffioen, Pim and Ron Zeller, “Comparing the Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, France and Belgium, 1940–1945: Similarities, Differences, Causes,” in Peter Romijn et al., The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers – University of Amsterdam Press, 2012) Gross, Jan, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002) Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002; first published 1988) Guerrazzi, Amedeo Osti, “Italians at War: War and Experience in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 5 (2017), 587–603 Storia della Repubblica sociale italiana (Rome: Carocci, 2012) Gumz, Jonathan E., “Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia, 1941–42,” Historical Journal, Vol. 44, No. 4 (December 2001), 1015–38 Haan, Ido de, “Routines and Traditions: The Reactions of Non-Jews and Jews in the Netherlands to War and Persecution,” in David Bankier and Israel Gutman, eds., Nazi Europe and the Final Solution (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003). Hæstrup, Jørgen “The Danish Jews and the German Occupation,” in Leo Goldberger, ed., The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage under Stress (New York: New York University Press, 1987)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

423

Han Bing Siong, “Sukarno–Hatta Versus the Pemuda in the First Months after the Surrender of Japan (August–November 1945),” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 156, No. 2 (2000), 233–73 Hanebrink, Paul, A Specter Haunting Europe; The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) Have, Wichert ten, De Nederlandse Unie: Aanpassing, vernieuwing en confrontatie in bezettingstijd, 1940–1941 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1999) Heidhues, Mary Somers, “Anti-Chinese Violence in Java during the Indonesian Revolution, 1945–49,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 14, Nos. 3–4 (September–November 2012), 381–401 Henshaw, Jonathan, Craig A. Smith, and Norman Smith., eds., Translating the Occupation: The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931–45 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021) Hershatter, Gail and Emily Honig, “Introduction,” in Isabel Brown Crook and Christina Kelley Gilmartin with Yu Xiji, Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) Hershkovitz, Roni, “The Persecution of the Jews, as Reflected in Dutch Underground Newspapers,” in Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan, eds., Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 2001) Himka, John-Paul, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2021) Hionidou, Violetta, Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) Hirschfeld, Gerhard, “Collaboration and Attentism in the Netherlands, 1940–41,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 1981), 467–86. “Nazi Propaganda in Occupied Western Europe: The Case of the Netherlands,” in David Welch, ed., Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations (London: Croom Helm, 1983) Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (New York: Berg, 1988) Hnatiuk, Ola, Courage and Fear, trans. Ewa Siwak (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019) Hoare, Marko Attila, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Hobsbawm, E. J., Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1959) Hobsbawm, E. J. and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Hofmann, Reto, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

424

Bibliography

Holbraad, Carsten, Danish Reactions to German Occupation (London: UCL Press, 2017) Holmes, Kent, Wendell Fertig and his Guerrilla Forces in the Philippines: Fighting the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015) Horne, John and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) Hotta, Eri, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War, 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Houghton, Frances, “‘To the Kwai and Back’: Myth, Memory and Memoirs of the ‘Death Railway,’ 1942–1943,” Journal of War and Culture Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 2014), 223–35 Hudak, Thomas John, “Spelling Reforms of Field Marshall [sic] Pibulsongkram,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1986), 123–33 Huff, Gregg, World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) Hull, Isabel, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) Hunt, Ray C. and Bernard Norling, Behind Japanese Lines: An American Guerrilla in the Philippines (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986) Iatrides, John O., “Greece at the Crossroads, 1944–1950,” in John O. Iatrides and Linda Wrigley, eds., Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and its Legacy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) Revolt in Athens: The Greek Communist Secound Round, 1944–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) Ikehata, Setsuho, “The Japanese Military Administration in the Philippines and the Tragedy of General Artemio Ricarte,” trans. Elipidio R. Sta. Romana, Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore, Papers in Japanese Studies: Research Paper No. 14 (1991) Ikehata, Setsuho and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999) Immerwahr, Daniel, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) Iriye, Akira, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) Israel, John, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) Jackson, George D., Jr., “Peasant Political Movements in Eastern Europe,” in Henry A. Landsberger, ed., Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1974) Jackson, Julian, De Gaulle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Jareb, Mario, “The NDH’s Relations with Italy and Germany,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 7, No. 4 (December 2006), 459–72

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

425

Jenkins, David, “Soeharto and the Japanese Occupation,” Indonesia, No. 88 (October 2009), 1–103 Jensen, Mette Bastholm and Steven L. B. Jensen, eds., Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen: Institute for International Studies, Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003) Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962) Jong, Louis de, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Vol. IV (Mei ’40–Maart ’41), Part 2 (‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1972) Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog , Vol. V (Maart ’41– Juli ’42), Part 1 (‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1974) The Netherlands and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) Jose, Ricardo T., “Accord and Discord: Japanese Cultural Policy and Philippine National Identity during the Japanese Occupation (1942–1945),” in Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb, eds., Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) Judson, Pieter M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) Judt, Tony, “Conclusion,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). “The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” Daedalus, Vol. 121, No. 4 (Fall 1992), 83–118 Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005) Kahin, Audrey, Rebellion to Independence: West Sumatra and the Indonesian Polity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999) Kahin, George McTurnan, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952) Kalyvas, Stathis N., The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006) Kamenetsky, Ihor and Roman Smal-Stocki, Hitler’s Occupation of Ukraine, 1941–1944: A Study of Totalitarian Imperialism (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1956) Kaminski, Theresa, Angels of the Underground: The American Women who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Kaplan, Alice, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000) Karnow, Stanley, In our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989) Kawamura, Koichi, “The Origins of the 1945 Indonesian Constitution,” in Kevin Y. L. Tan and Bui Ngoc Son, eds., Constitutional Foundings in Southeast Asia (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2019) Kawashima Midori, “Japanese Administrative Policy towards the Moros in Lanao,” in Setsuho Ikehata and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The Philippines

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

426

Bibliography

under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999) Kawato, Yuko, Protests against US Military Base Policy in Asia: Persuasion and its Limits (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015) Kedward, H. R., Resistance in Vichy France: A Study of Ideas and Motivation in the Southern Zone, 1940–42 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) Kelly, John D., “Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous, Empty Communities in Contemporary Theory,” Development and Change, Vol. 29 (1998), 839–71 Kennedy, Sean, The Shock of War: Civilian Experiences, 1937–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) Kerkvliet, Benedict J., The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) Kershaw, Ian, “‘Working towards the Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 1993), 103–18 Kesteloot, Chantal, “The Role of the War in National Societies: The Examples of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands,” in Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens, eds., Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2010) Khromeychuk, Olesya, “Ukrainians in the German Armed Forces during the Second World War,” History, Vol. 100, No. 5 (December 2015), 704–24 Kiebuzinski, Ksenya and Alexander Motyl, eds., The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017) King, Charles, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: Norton, 2011) Kirchhoff, Hans, “Die dänische Staatskollaboration,” in Werner Röhr, ed., Okkupation und Kollaboration (1938–1945): Beiträge zu Konzepten und Praxis der Kollaboration in der deutschen Okkupationspolitik (Berlin: Hüthig Verlagsgemeinschaft, 1994) “Denmark: A Light in the Darkness. A Reply to Gunnar S. Paulsson,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 1995), 465–79 “The Rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943,” in David Bankier and Israel Gutman, eds., Nazi Europe and the Final Solution (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003). Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Klymenko, Lina, “The Changed Paradigm of World War II Commemorations in Ukraine after Crimea’s Annexation,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2020), 517–20 Kocher, Matthew A., Adria K. Lawrence, and Nuno P. Monteiro, “Nationalism, Collaboration, and Resistance: France under Nazi Occupation,” International Security, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2019), 117–50 Koliopoulos, John S., Greece: The Modern Sequel: From 1821 to the Present, 2nd ed. (London: Hurst, 2007)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

427

Konrad, Lawson, “Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937–1953,” doctoral diss., Harvard University, 2012 Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and StefanLudwig Hoffmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018) Koshiro, Yukiko, Imperial Eclipse: Japan’s Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013) Kovalev, Boris, Povsed.evnaia zhiznʹ naseleniisa Rossii v period natsistskoi okkupatsii (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2011) Kowner, Rotem, “The Repatriation of Surrendered Japanese Troops, 1945–1947,” in Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis, eds., In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020) Kraume, Anne, Das Europa der Literatur: Schriftsteller blicken auf den Kontinent, 1815–1945 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010) Krugliak, Marina, “Povsednevnaya zhizn ukraintsev v usloviyakh natsistskoy okkupatsii na-materialakh goroda zhitomira, 1941–1943,” Rusin, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2015), 148–73 Kuhn, Philip A., Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) Kuisel, Richard F., “The End of Americanization: or Reinventing a Research Field for Historians of Europe,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 92, No. 3 (August 2020), 602–34 Kurapovna, Marcia, Shadows on the Mountains: The Allies, the Resistance and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2010) Kurosawa, Aiko, “Forced Delivery of Paddy and Peasant Uprisings in Indramayu, Indonesia: Japanese Occupation and Social Change,” Developing Economies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 1983), 52–72 Kuzio, Taras, “The Myth of the Civic State: A Critical Survey of Hans Kohn’s Framework for Understanding Nationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (January 2002), 20–39 “Soviet and Russian Anti-(Ukrainian) nationalism and re-Stalinization,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 2016), 87–99 Laborie, Pierre, L’opinion française sous Vichy: Les Français et la crise d’identité nationale, 1936–1944, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2001) Lambauer, Barbara, “Contre ‘l’ennemi à arrière’: La répression allemande en Europe occupée, 1939–1945,” in James Connolly, Emmanuel Debruyne, Élise Julien, and Matthias Meirlaen, eds., En territoire ennemi: Expériences d’occupation, transferts, héritages (1914–1949) (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2018) “Un engagement pour l’Europe allemande: La collaboration,” in Alya Aglan and Robert Frank, eds., 1937–1947: La guerre-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2015) Lammers, Karl Christian, “Die deutsche Besatzungspolitik und ihre dänischen Partner,” in Robert Bohn, ed., Die deutsche Herrschaft in den “germanischen” Ländern, 1940–1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

428

Bibliography

Lane, Ann, “Perfidious Albion? Britain and the Struggle for Mastery of Yugoslavia, 1941–44: A Reexamination in the Light of ‘New’ Evidence,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 1996), 345–77 Lanzona, Vina A., Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender, Sex, and Revolution in the Philippines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) Lapham, Robert and Bernard Norling, Lapham’s Raiders: Guerrillas in the Philippines, 1942–1945, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996) Lary, Diana, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Lee, Erika, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015) Legge, J. D., Sukarno: A Political Biography (New York: Prager, 1972) Lengkeek, Yannick, “Staged Glory: The Impact of Fascism on ‘Cooperative’ Nationalist Circles in Late Colonial Indonesia, 1935–1942,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, Vol. 7 (2018), 109–31 Leonhard, Jörn and Ulrike von Hirschhausen, eds., Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011) Levin, Dov, “On the Relations between the Baltic Peoples and their Jewish Neighbors before, during and after World War II,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1990), 53–66 Levy, Michelle Frucht, “‘The Last Bullet for the Last Serb’: The Ustaša Genocide against Serbs, 1941–1945,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 37, No. 6 (November 2009), 807–37 Limore, Yagil, “La Milice française,” French Politics and Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 1999), 37–55 Linn, Brian McAllister, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000) Lo, Jiu-Jung, “Survival as Justification for Collaboration, 1937–1945,” in David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Lorimer, Frank, The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946) Lotnik, Waldemar, Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish–Ukrainian Borderlands (London: Serif, 1999) Lowe, Keith, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin, 2013) Lower, Wendy, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) Lundbak, Henrik, Danish Unity: A Political Party between Fascism and Resistance, 1936–1947, trans. the Language Center, Copenhagen Business School (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003) Ma, Xiaohua, “China, Japan, and the United States in World War II: The Relinquishment of Unequal Treaties in 1943,” Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations (Kaohsiung), Vol. 1, No. 2 (August 2015), 451–88

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

429

McBride, Jared, “Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944,” Slavic Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Fall 2016), 630–54 McCoy, Alfred W., ed., Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1980) MacDonald, David B., “From Jasenovac to Srebrenica: Subaltern Genocide and the Serbs,” in Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones, eds., Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) MacKinnon, Stephen R., Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) Maclean, Fitzroy, Eastern Approaches (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949) McNeill, J. R., The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Malaka, Tan, From Jail to Jail, Vol. II trans. and ed. Helen Jarvis (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1991; first published 1948) Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Mangkupradja, Raden Gatot, “The PETA and my Relations with the Japanese: A Correction of Sukarno’s Autobiography,” Indonesia, No. 5 (April 1968), 105–34 Manning, Adrian F., “The Position of the Dutch Government in London up to 1942,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (January 1978), 117–35 Margolis, Nadia, “The ‘Joan Phenomenon’ and the French Right,” in Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood, eds., Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc (New York: Garland, 1996) Mark, Ethan, Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) Markiewicz, Paweł, Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government during World War II (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2021) Marks, Steven G., How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to AntiSemitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) Marples, David R., Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008) Marrus, Michael R. and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981) Martin, Benjamin G., The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) Martin, Terry, The Affirmative-Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) Matsuki Hidemitsu, The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies, War History Series Vol. III, compiled by the War History Office of the National Defense College of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

430

Bibliography

Japan, ed. and trans. Willem Remmelink (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015; first published 1967) Matthiessen, Sven, Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Philippines from the Late 19th Century to the End of World War II: Going to the Philippines is Like Coming Home? (Leiden: Brill, 2016) “Re-Orienting the Philippines: The KALIBAPI Party and the Application of Japanese Pan-Asianism, 1942–45,” Modern Asia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2019), 560–81 Mazower, Mark, “The Cold War and the Appropriation of Memory: Greece after Liberation,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012) Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008) Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) Meissner, Gustav, Dänemark unterm Hakenkreuz: Die Nord-Invasion und die Besetzung Dänemarks, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1990) Minehan, Philip B., Civil War and World War in Europe: Spain, Yugoslavia, and Greece, 1936–1949 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Mitter, Rana, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) Mogensen, Michael, “October 1943: The Rescue of the Danish Jews,” in Mette Bastholm Jensen and Steven L. B. Jensen, eds., Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen: Institute for International Studies, Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003) Moore, Bob, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (London: Arnold, 1997) Morgan, Philip, The Fall of Mussolini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Moses, A. Dirk, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008) Motadel, David, “The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire,” American Historical Review, Vol. 124, No. 3 (June 2019), 843–77 Mrázek, Rudolf, Sjahrir, Politics and Exile in Indonesia (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994) Muel-Dreyfus, Francine, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender, trans. Kathleen A. Johnson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) Muller, Jerry Z., “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 2 (March–April 2008), 18–35 Mulready-Stone, Kristin, Mobilizing Shanghai Youth: CCP Internationalism, GMD Nationalism and Japanese Collaboration (London: Routledge, 2015)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

431

Murashima, Eiji, “The Thai–Japanese Alliance and the Chinese of Thailand,” in Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Milton Park, UK: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002) Murray, Bryan, “Stalin, the Cold War, and the Division of China: A MultiArchival Mystery,” Working Paper No. 12, The Cold War International History Project, June 1995, www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ ACFB69.PDF (accessed December 1, 2018) Muscolino, Micah, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Nakano Satoshi, “Appeasement and Coercion,” in Setsuho Ikehata and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999) National Federation of Kenpeitai Veterans’ Associations, The Kenpeitai in Java and Sumatra: Selections from the Authentic History of the Japanese Kenpeitai (Nihon Kenpei Seishi) trans. Barbara Gifford Shimer and Guy Hobbs (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1986; first published by National Federation of Kenpeitai Veterans’ Associations: Tokyo, 1976) Neaman, Elliot Y., A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) Nery, John, Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011) Newsinger, John, “A Forgotten War: British Intervention in Indonesia,” Race and Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation, Vol. 30, No. 4 (April– June 1989), 51–66 Niethammer, Lutz, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (New York: Verso, 1993) Nitisastro, Widjojo, Population Trends in Indonesia (Jakarta: Equinox, 1970) Nolte, Ernst, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1987) Nord, Philip, France 1940: Defending the Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) Numnonda, Thamsook, Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 1941–45 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies [Research Notes and Discussions Series, No. 6], 1977) Nurtazina, Nazira, “Great Famine of 1931–1933 in Kazakhstan: A Contemporary’s Reminiscences,” Acta Slavica Japonica, Vol. 32 (2012), 105–29 O’Rourke, Shane, The Cossacks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) Olesen, Niels Wium, “Change or Continuity in the Danish Elites? Social Movements and the Transition from War to Peace in Denmark, 1945–1947,” in Stefan Berger and Marcel Boldorf, eds., Social Movements and the Change of Economic Elites in Europe after 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) “The Obsession with Sovereignty: Cohabitation and Resistance in Denmark, 1940–45,” in John Gilmour and Jill Stephenson, eds., Hitler’s Scandinavian Legacy: The Consequences of the German Invasion for the Scandinavian Countries, Then and Now (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 50–52

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

432

Bibliography

Olick, Jeffrey K., In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) Ooi Keat Gin, The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941–1945 (London: Routledge, 2011) Ophuls, Marcel, Le chagrin et la pitié: Chronique d’une ville française sous l’occupation (Milestone Films, 1969) Ossendorff, Ingo, “Den Krieg kennen wir nur aus der Zeitung.” Zwischen Kollaboration und Widerstand: Dänemark im II. Weltkrieg (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990) Østergård, Uffe, “The Nation as Event: The Dissolution of the Oldenburg Monarchy and Grundtvig’s Nationalism,” in John A. Hall, Over Korsgaard, and Ove K. Petersen, eds, Building the Nation: N. F. S. Grundtvig and Danish National Identity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015) Oushakine, Serguei, “V poiskakh mesta mezhdu Stalinym i Gitlerom: O postkolonial’nykh istoriakh sotsializma”, Ab Imperio, No. 1 (2011), 209–23 Overy, Richard, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2021) Paine, C. M., The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Paine, S. C. M., The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Paulsson, Gunnar S., “The ‘Bridge over the Øresund’: The Historiography on the Expulsion of the Jews from Nazi-Occupied Denmark,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 1995), 431–64 Pavlowitch, Stevan K., Hitler’s New Disorder: The Second World War in Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) Pavone, Claudio, Una guerra civile: Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991) Paxton, Robert O., Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972) Payne, Stanley, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) Peleggi, Maurizio, “Refashioning Civilization: Dress and Bodily Practice in Thai Nation-Building,” in Mina Roces and Louise Edwards, eds., The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2007) Pelikan, Jaroslav, “Grundtvig’s Influence,” in Leo Goldberger, ed., The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage under Stress (New York: New York University Press, 1987) Peschanski, Denis, “Legitimacy/Legitimation/Delegitimation: France in the Dark Years, a Textbook Case,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 2004), 409–23. “Le régime de Vichy a existé: Gouvernants et gouvernés dans la France de Vichy, juillet 1940–avril 1942,” in Denis Peschanski, ed., Vichy, 1940–1944: Archives de guerre d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1986)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

433

ed., Vichy, 1940–1944: Archives de guerre d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1986) Pestaño-Jacinto, Pacito, Living with the Enemy: A Diary of the Japanese Occupation (Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 1999) Petersen, Roger D., Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Petrick, Fritz, “Dänemark, das ‘Musterprotektorat’?” in Robert Bohn, ed., Die deutsche Herrschaft in den “germanischen” Ländern, 1940–1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997) Pezzino, Paolo, “Un termine di paragone: Casi di conflitti interni alla Resistenza Toscana,” in Tommaso Piffer, ed., Porzûs: Violenza e resistenza sul confine orientale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012) Piffer, Tommaso, ed., Porzûs: Violenza e resistenza sul confine orientale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012) Plokhy, Serhii, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015) Pohl, Dieter, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1944 (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2011) Pons, Silvio, “Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 2001), 3–27 Potichnyj, Peter J. and Howard Aster, eds., Ukrainian–Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (Toronto: CIUS Press, 1990) Poulsen, Henning, “Dänemark unter deutscher Besetzung,” in Eberhard Jäckel, Henning Poulsen, and Johan Frieswijk, Dänemark und die Niederlande unter deutscher Besetzung (Bräist/Bredstedt, Nordfriesland, Germany: Verlag Nordfriisk Instituut, 1991) Prusin, Alexander, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017) Puymège, Gérard de, “Le soldat chauvin,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoires, Vol. II: La nation, Part 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986) Rabinbach, Anson, “Rise and Fall of the Sattelzeit: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Temporality of Totalitarianism and Genocide,” in Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, eds., Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) Recto, Claro M., Three Years of Enemy Occupation: The Issue of Political Collaboration in the Philippines (Manila: People’s Publishers, 1946), 99. Reid, Anthony and Oki Akira, “Introduction,” in Anthony Reid and Oki Akira, eds., The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected Memoirs of 1942–1945 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1986) Rein, Leonid, The Kings and the Pawns: Collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II (New York: Berghahn, 2011)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

434

Bibliography

Rémond, René, “La fille aînée de l’église,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. III: Les France, Part 3: De l’archive à l’emblème (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) The Right Wing in France: From 1815 to de Gaulle, trans. James M. Laux (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969) Reshetar, John, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952) Resis, Albert, “The Churchill–Stalin ‘Percentages’ Agreement on the Balkans, Moscow, October 1944,” American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 (April 1978), 368–87 Reuter, Thomas Anton, “The Once and Future King: Utopianism as Political Practice in Indonesia,” in Pablo Guerra, ed., Utopía: 500 años (Monteria, Colombia: Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, 2016) Reynolds, Craig J., ed., National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today, rev. ed. (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002) Reynolds, E. Bruce, “Anomaly or Model? Independent Thailand’s Role in Japan’s Asian Strategy, 1941–1943,” in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) “Phibun Songkhram and Thai Nationalism in the Fascist Era,” European Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2004), 99–134 Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, 1940–1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994) Thailand’s Secret War: The Free Thai, OSS, and SOE during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Ricklefs, M. C., A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) Rickum, Boryano, Die japanische Besatzungszeit in der nationalen Erinnerungskultur Indonesiens (Berlin: Regiospectra Verlag, 2012) Rieber, Alfred, “The Cold War as Civil War,” Final Report to National Council for Soviet and East European Research, November 1987, www.ucis.pitt .edu/nceeer/1987-801-7-Rieber.pdf (accessed August 14, 2013) Risser, Nicole Dombrowski, France under Fire: German Invasion, Civilian Flight, and Family Survival during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Roberts, David D., Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2016) Roberts, Geoffrey, Stalin’s Wars: From World War II to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) Roberts, Walter R., Tito, Mihailović and the Allies, 1941–1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973) Robinson, Ronald and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961) Rodogno, Davide, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; first published 2003) Rolland, Romain, Above the Battle (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1916)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

435

Romani, John H., “The Philippine Barrio,” Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2 (February 1956), 229–37 Römer, Felix, “The Wehrmacht in the War of Ideologies: The Army and Hitler’s Criminal Orders on the Eastern Front,” in Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel, eds., Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012) Romijn, Peter, “The ‘Lesser Evil’: The Case of the Dutch Local Authorities and the Holocaust,” in Peter Romijn et al., The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers – University of Amsterdam Press, 2012) Rooy, Piet de, A Tiny Spot on the Earth: The Political Culture of the Netherlands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015) Ropa, Rossella, L’antisemitismo nella Repubblica sociale italiana: Repertorio delle fonti conservate all’Archivio centrale dello Stato (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 2000) Roshwald, Aviel, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2001) Roshwald, Aviel and Richard Stites, eds., European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Rossignol, Dominique, Histoire de la propagande en France de 1940 a 1944: L’utopie Pétain (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991) Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist – Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2014) Rota, Emanuel, A Pact with Vichy: Angelo Tasca from Italian Socialism to French Collaboration (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013) Rousso, Henry, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Rudling, Per A., “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011) Rünitz, Lone, “The Politics of Asylum in Denmark in the Wake of the Kristallnacht: A Case Study,” in Mette Bastholm Jensen and Steven L. B. Jensen, eds., Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen: Institute for International Studies, Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003) Saaler, Sven and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Vol. II: 1920–Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011) Salvador, Alessandro and Jacopo Calussi, “The German Occupation of Italy, 1943–45: Conflicting Authorities and Contrasting Strategies in the Management of Resources and Supplies,” in Raffael Scheck, Fabien Théofilakis, and Julia Torrie, eds., German-Occupied Europe in the Second World War (London: Routledge, 2019)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

436

Bibliography

Samson, Allan A., “Conceptions of Politics, Power, and Ideology in Contemporary Indonesian Islam,” in Karl D. Jackson and Lucian W. Pye, eds., Political Power and Communication in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) SarDesai, D. R., ed., Southeast Asian History: Essential Readings (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006) Sato, Shigeru, “Gatot Mangkupraja, PETA, and the Origins of the Indonesian National Army,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 166, No. 2/3 (2010), 189–217 “Japanization in Indonesia Re-Examined: The Problem of Self-Sufficiency in Clothing,” in Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb, eds., Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) “The Pangrèh Praja in Java under Japanese Military Rule,” in Peter Post and Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, eds., Japan, Indonesia and the War: Myths and Realities (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997) War, Nationalism and Peasants; Java under the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994) Seferiades, Seraphim, “Small Rural Landownership, Subsistence Agriculture, and Peasant Protest in Interwar Greece: The Agrarian Question Recast,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (October 1999), 277–23 Seybolt, Peter J., “The War within a War: A Case Study of a Country on the North China Plain,” in David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Shalom, Stephen, “Philippine Acceptance of the Bell Trade Act of 1946: A Study of Manipulatory Diplomacy,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 49, No. 3 (August 1980), 499–517 Sheffer, Edith, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Shkandrij, Myroslav, Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) Sinitsyn, Fyodor L., “Nationalnii faktor v gitlerovskoi okkupatsionnoi politike v pervii period velikoy otechestvennoi voini, iyun 1941 g.–noyabr 1942 g.,” Vestnik RUDN. Seriya: Istoryia Rossii, No. 3 (2011), 83–100 Sivaraksa, Sulak, “The Crisis of Siamese Identity,” in Craig J. Reynolds, ed., National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today, rev. ed. (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002), 33–48 Sjahrir, Soetan, Out of Exile, trans. Charles Wolf, Jr. (New York: John Day, 1949) Skinner, G. William, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957) Slama, Alain-Gérard, “Un quotidien républicain sous Vichy: Le Temps (juin 1940–novembre 1942),” Revue française de science politique, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1972), 719–49 Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), 414–52

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

437

Sluga, Glenda, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) Smit, Herman, Gezag is gezag … Kanttekeningen bij de houding van de gereformeerden in de Indonesische kwestie (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006) Smith, M. I., “Neither Resistance nor Collaboration: Historians and the Problem of the Nederlandse Unie,” History, Vol. 72, No. 235 (June 1987), 251–78 Smith, Peter Scharff, Niels Bo Poulsen, and Claus Bundgård Christensen, “The Danish Volunteers in the Waffen SS and German Warfare at the Eastern Front,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (March 1999), 73–96 Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010) The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, new ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) “‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1999), 86–120 So, Wai Chor, “Race, Culture, and the Anglo-American Powers: The Views of Chinese Collaborators,” Modern China, Vol. 37, No. 1 (January 2011), 69–103 Solonari, Vladimir, A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019) Statiev, Alexander, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Steinberg, David Joel, “Jose P. Laurel: A ‘Collaborator’ Misunderstood,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (August 1965), 651–65 Philippine Collaboration in World War II (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House [by arrangement with Michigan University Press], 1967) Steinhart, Eric C., The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Stites, Richard, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Stone, Marla Susan, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), Stowe, Judith A., Siam Becomes Thailand: A Story of Intrigue (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991) Stuart-Fox, Martin, “Factors Influencing Relations between the Communist Parties of Thailand and Laos,” Asian Survey, Vol. 19, No. 4 (April 1979), 333–52. Sullam, Simon Levis, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy, trans. Oona Smyth with Claudia Patane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) Sutherland, Heather, “Notes on Java’s Regent Families, Part I,” Indonesia, No. 16 (October 1973), 112–47 Suwannathat-Pian, Kobkua, Thailand’s Durable Premier: Phibun through Three Decades, 1932–1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

438

Bibliography

Sweets, John, Choice in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) Tarling, Nicholas, A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, 1941–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) Taylor, Jay, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011; first published 2009) Taylor, Jeremy E., Iconographies of Occupation: Visual Cultures in Wang Jingwei’s China, 1939–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021) “Republican Personality Culture in Wartime China: Contradistinction and Collaboration,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 57, No. 3 (July 2015), 665–93 Teodori, Giovanni, Alessandro Pavolini: La vita, le imprese e la morte dell’uomo che inventò la propaganda fascista (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2011) Terami-Wade Motoe, “The Filipino Volunteer Armies,” in Setsuho Ikehata and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999) “Lt. Shigenobu Mochizuki and the New Philippine Cultural Institute,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 1996), 104–23. Sakdalistas’ Struggle for Philippine Independence, 1930–1945 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014) Thorne, Christopher, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) Tomasevich, Jozo, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Torrie, Julia S., “France’s Role in the Holocaust Revisited: Marrus and Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews,” American Historical Review, Vol. 126, No. 4 (December 2021), 1535–51. Touwen-Bouwsma, Elly, “The Indonesian Nationalists and the Japanese ‘Liberation´ of Indonesia: Visions and Reactions,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 1996), 1–18 “Japanese Minority Policy: The Eurasians on Java and the Dilemma of Ethnic Loyalty,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Vokenkunde, Vol. 152, No. 4 (1996), 553–72 Traverso, Enzo, A ferro e fuoco: La guerra civile europea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008) Trifković, Srdjan, “Rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia, 1942–1943,” Historical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Dec. 1993), 879–904 Van Slyke, Lyman P., ed., The Chinese Communist Movement: A Report of the United States War Department, July 1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968) Veidlinger, Jeffrey, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt, 2021) Vellut, J. L., “Foreign Relations of the Second Republic of the Philippines, 1943–1945,” Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 1964), 126–42 Velychenko, Stephen, “The Issue of Russian Colonialism in Ukrainian Thought, Dependency Identity and Development,” Ab Imperio, No. 1 (2002), 323–67

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

439

“Post-Colonialism and Ukrainian History,” Ab Imperio, No. 1 (2004), 391–404 Ven, Hans J. van de, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, 1937–1952 (London: Profile, 2017) War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) Villanueva, James A., “Awaiting the Allies’ Return: The Guerrilla Resistance against the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2019 Virgili, Fabrice, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Oxford: Berg, 2002) Viroli, Maurizio, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) Wallerstein, Immanuel, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) Wang Ke-wen, “Wang Jingwei and the Policy Origins of the ‘Peace Movement,’ 1932–1937,” in David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Warmbrunn, Werner, The Dutch under German Occupation. 1940–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963) Watt, Lori, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) Way, Lucan Ahmad, “Ukraine’s Post-Maidan Struggles: Free Speech in a Time of War,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 2019), 48–60 Weber, Thomas, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (New York: Basic Books, 2017) Weeks, Theodore R., Nation and State in Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996) Wei, Shuge, News under Fire: China’s Propaganda against Japan in the EnglishLanguage Press, 1928–1941 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017) Weiner, Amir, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) Werckmeister, Otto Karl, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) Werth, Alexander, De Gaulle: A Political Biography, new ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) Wertheim, W. F., review of From Jail to Jail, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (September 1992), 449–53 Wesselink, E. H., Kom vanavond met verhalen: Eibergen in Oorlogstijd, Deel I: De Jodenvervolging [Come Tonight with Stories: Eibergen in Wartime, Vol. I: The Persecution of the Jews] (Eibergen: Historische Kring Eibergen, 1990) Wever, Bruno de, Herman van Goethem, and Nico Wouters, Local Government in Occupied Europe (1939–1945) (Ghent: Academia Press, 2006) Wielenga, Friso, A History of the Netherlands: From the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) Wieviorka, Olivier, Une certaine idée de la Résistance: Défense de la France, 1940–1949 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

440

Bibliography

Winichakul, Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). Winock, Michel, “Jeanne d’Arc,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. III: Les France, Part 3: De l’archive à l’emblème (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) Woodehouse, C. M., The Struggle for Greece, 1941–1949 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002; first published 1976) Wou, Odoric Y. K., “Food Shortage and Japanese Grain Extraction in Henan,” in Stephen R. MacKinnon, Diana Lary, and Ezra F. Fogel, eds., China at War: Regions of China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) Wouters, Nico, “The Impact of the German Occupation (1940–1944) on the Belgian and Dutch Mayoralty,” in John Garrard, ed., Heads of the Local State: Mayors, Provosts and Burgomasters since 1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Mayoral Collaboration under Nazi Occupation in Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, 1938–46 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Wyatt, David K., Thailand: A Short History, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) Xia, Yun, Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017) Yahil, Leni, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, trans. Morris Gradel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969) Yang Kuisong, “Nationalist and Communist Guerrilla Warfare in North China,” in Mark Peattie, Edward J. Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Sanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) Yellen, Jeremy A., The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019) “Wartime Wilsonianism and the Crisis of Empire, 1941–43,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2019), 1278–311 Yeomans, Rory, “The Adventures of an Ustasha Youth Leader in the Adriatic: Transnational Fascism and the Travel Polemics of Dragutin Gjurić,” Journal of Tourism History, Vol. 6, Nos. 2–3 (2014), 158–73 Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) Yick, Joseph, “Communist-Puppet Collaboration in Japanese-Occupied China: Pan Hannian and Li Shiqun, 1939–43,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2001), 61–88 Young, John E. de, Village Life in Modern Thailand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955) Young, Louise, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) Yurchuk, Yuliya, “Historians as Activists: History Writing in Times of War. The Case of Ukraine in 2014–2018,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 49, No. 4 (July 2021), 691–709 Zahra, Tara, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2010), 93–119

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Bibliography

441

Zanasi, Margherita, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) Zerubavel, Eviatar, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) Zhang, Shaoqian, “Combat and Collaboration: The Clash of Propaganda Prints between the Chinese Guomindang and the Japanese Empire in the 1930s– 1940s,” Transcultural Studies, No. 1 (2014), 95–133 Zhao, Suisheng, Power by Design: Constitution-Making in Nationalist China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996) Zhou, Xun, Chinese Perceptions of the “Jews” and Judaism: A History of the Youtai (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

Aanwijzingen, 19–22, 356 Abwehr, 231, 381 relations with Ukrainian nationalists, 385–6 Adenauer, Konrad, 249 Adun Adundetcharat, 109 Africa French colonies, 102 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 258, 309, 320, 324–8 Albania, 145, 152, 239, 247, 249 Alexander I, King (Yugoslavia), 180 Algeria, 31, 254 al-Husseini, Mufti Haj Amin, 209 Allied powers, 1, 8 Alsace-Lorraine, 27 Ambert, 67 American exceptionalism, 309 Amsterdam, 44, 51, 53 andartes, 181 Anschluss (of Austria), 230 anti-colonial nationalism, 253–6, 285 and Ukraine, 378–9 various forms of, 309–11 Anti-Comintern Pact, 79, 113, 183 anti-Communism, 236 Anti-Revolutionary Party (Netherlands), 19, 39 antisemitism in China, 235 in Hungary, 405 in Poland, 409 in Ukraine, 360–4, 366–75 in Vichy France, 64–6 anti-Sinitism, 352 Anton Mussert, 40 Appeasement, Anglo-French, 6 Arrow Cross, 405 asrama, 279 Athens, 150 Atlantic Charter, 235 Auschwitz, 118, 226, 374 Australia, 266

Austria, 6, 52, 230 Axis powers aggression of, 1 occupations by compared, 2–11 Azov Battalion, 410 Badoglio, Marshal Pietro, 157 Bahasa Indonesia, 270, 347, 393 as language of instruction, 275 Bali, 270 Balkan Wars, 143 Baltic states, 3 Bandera, Stepan, 299, 366–7, 374 Bangkok Chronicle, 94 Banten, 341 Barthou, Louis, 180 Basques, 254 Bataan peninsula, 262, 318–19, 332, 334, 390 Batavia. See Jakarta Beijing, 168 Belarus. See Belorussia Belgium, 3, 20, 22, 128 Bell Act, 309 Belorussia, 3, 254, 288, 302, 379 Bessières, Albert, 62 Best, Werner, 127–32 Black Brigades (Italy), 217–22, 241 Black Sea, 290 Blitar, 280, 342, 359 Blitzkrieg, 400 Blum, Léon, 68, 122 Bologna, 212 Bolsheviks, 3, 294–5, 300 and Ukraine, 293 Bolshevism, 138 Borneo, 273 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 235 Bosnia, 227 Muslims, 209, 225 Brenner Pass, 220 Brest-Litovsk, Peace of, 3, 293–4, 364

442

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Bridge on the River Kwai, The, 336 Brisbane, 266 Britain, 6 Italian campaign, 159 military activity in Greece, 150 military activity in Indonesia, 356 policy in Greece, 144–9 role in Indonesia, 282–3 as sole power fighting Germany, 40 and Thailand, 110 Buddhism, 85–6, 89, 269 Buffa, Aldo, 212 Bukovina, 302 Bulgaria, 145, 152 Burma, 33–7, 83, 90, 96, 174, 235, 253–4, 277, 336, 338, 343, 392 Cairo, 145, 148 Cambodia, 35 Canada, 18 capitalism, 7, 207, 210, 215–16, 347, 349, 353 Caribbean, 20 Catalans, 254 Catholicism, 225, 227, 257, 288 in the Philippines, 333 Central Advisory Council (Indonesia), 357 Chetniks, 135–6, 151–2 Chiang Kai-shek, 160–1, 233–8 China, 83 end of extraterritorial privileges in, 234 history of internal conflicts, 200–7 invasion by Japan, 160–1 legacy of war in, 408 National Revolutionary Army (KMT), 165 People’s Republic of, 248 relations between Communists and Nationalists, 200–7, 408 China Expeditionary Army (Japanese), 187 China Youth Corps, 190 Chinese massacred in Indonesia, 406 as minority in Dutch East Indies, 269 as minority in Indonesia, 275, 278, 351–4, 358, 394–5 as minority in Malaya, 91 as minority in Thailand, 86–7, 89–91, 125 as minority in the Philippines, 394–5 treatment of as minority compared to that of Jews, 394–5 Chirac, Jacques, 408 Chongqing. See Chungking Christian Historical Union (Netherlands), 19

443 Christian Orthodox Church, 226 Christian X, King (Denmark), 126 Christianity, 45, 51, 66, 287–8 Chulalongkorn University, 96 Chungking, 84, 169 as Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital, 176 Churchill, Winston, 23, 155, 245 civil war as a conceptual framework, 142–3, 243–9 European, 142–3 Clausen, Frits, 78 Cold War, 137, 151, 159, 245–9, 407 Colijn, Hendrikus, 19, 39–41, 272 collaboration/resistance paradigm, 9, 189, 241 Combat, 104 Comintern, 154, 261 and China, 166 dissolved, 200 Communism, 73 and internationalism, 200–7 and patriotism, 103, 200–7, 241 Communist parties Chinese, 160–1, 200–7, 245 Danish, 113 Dutch, 51 Euro-Communism, 249 French, 68, 71, 246 Greek, 144–9, 244 Indonesian, 284 Italian, 159, 244 Philippine, 328–36, See and resistance movements, 179–92, 200–7 Soviet, 299–302 Thai, 110 Yugoslav, 200–7 Confesor, Tomás, 317, 331 Constantinople, 287 Corregidor, 262 Cossacks, 288–90 Crimea, 290 Croatia, 151–2, 198–222 Croatian Peasant Party, 223, 232–3 Independent State of (NDH), 223 Nazi puppet state as aspirational model for OUN, 366 NDH as aspirational model for Ukrainian nationalists, 303 relations with Italy, 223 Crusades, 318 Cyrillic script, 292 Czechoslovakia, 6, 254, 297, 308, 406

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

444

Index

Dakar, 102 Danish Unity. See Dansk Samling Dansk Samling, 74 Darlan, François, 30, 73 Darnand, Joseph, 104 Democratic Army of Greece, 151 Denmark accommodation of and resistance to Germans, 127–32 cabinet’s resignation (Aug. 1943), 82, 127–32 collaboration with Nazis, 74–82 compared with France, 127–32 compared with the Netherlands, 127–32 compared with Thailand, 127–32 compared with Vichy France, 78 Danish Unity movement, 127–32 Evangelical Lutheran Church, 78, 115, 121 Freedom Council, 116, 124 German invasion of, 23–32 Jewish population saved, 127–32 National Socialist Party, 78, 114, 122 resistance activities, 74–82 trade union movement, 78 treatment of Jews compared with the Netherlands, 127–32 treatment of Jews compared with Vichy regime’s, 125–6 under German occupation, 74–82 Depression. See Great Depression Dewantoro, Ki Hadjar, 277 Djilas, Aleksa, 204 Djilas, Milovan, 201 Dnieper, 292 Dnipro. See Dnieper Domei news agency, 282 Dontsov, Dmytro, 360–4 Dreyfus Affair, 122 Duckwitz, George, 114 Dutch internment by Japanese in East Indies, 275 in Japanese-occupied Indonesia, 336–59 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 268 Dutch East Indies. See Indonesia EAM/ELAS, 144–9 compared with Garibaldi Brigades, 159 East Slavic languages, 288, 292 Eastern Europe anti-Communism, 249 under Communism, 249 Eastern Orthodoxy, 287–8 Eichmann, Adolf, 117

Einsatzgruppe, 375 Einthoven, Louis, 39–58 Epirus, 150 ethnic cleansing, 384–8 Eurasians (Indonesian racial category), 344–5, 353 European “New Order”, 221 Fascist Grand Council (Italy), 157 fascist internationalism, 74, 104, 207–9, 212–17, 233, 236 in occupied Russia, 378–84 and Ukraine, 360–4 Fertig, Wendell, 335 First United Front (China), 164 First World War, 3, 19, 27, 76, 81, 131, 137, 147, 151, 180, 199, 207, 221, 230, 293, 296, 306, 364, 373 French mutinies, 99 Flores, 271 France Fall of, 22–32, 58–74 German occupation of, 58–74 post-war, 324 Third Republic, 99, 105 Franco, Francisco, 224 Franco-British political union proposal, 25, 29 Free French, 103 Free Thai, 37, 82–98, 107–12, 127–32 Freedom Council (Danish), 116, 124 Freemasons, 64, 99, 223 Galicia, 285–308 as base for OUN activism, 366–76 Eastern, 366–76 as site of antisemitic violence, 366–76 as zone of Polish–Ukrainian conflict, 361–2 Ganap, 324–8 Garibaldi Brigades, 201 Gaulle, Charles de, 22–32, 58–74, 99–105, 324 radio broadcasts, 30 Gaullism, 72 Geer, Dirk Jan de, 18–19, 21 gender, 62, 407 geography, role of, 143 Gerbrandy, Pieter, 18–19 German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, 29 Germany expansionism, 2–11 occupation policies in Western and Eastern Europe compared, 129

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index pre-1914 policy towards Polish minority, 296 and total war, 99–112 Glaise-Horstenau, Edmund, 229–32 Goebbels, Joseph, 221 Great Depression, 41, 43, 259, 261 Great Patriotic War, 381 Great Terror (Stalinist), 296 Greater East Asia Conference, 235, 277 and Thailand, 109 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 7, 37, 84, 94, 187, 189, 278, 302, 318, 325, 347 and Thailand, 109 Greco-Turkish population exchange, 147 Greece EDES resistance movement, 144–9 famine of 1942-43 147 monarchists, 145, 180 Security Battalions, 151 Greek Catholicism, 288 Grundtvigian nationalism (Denmark), 81, 119 Guangdong, 164 Guéhenno, Jean, 64, 70, 139 Habsburg empire, 287, 290–2 in First World War, 230 Hague Convention (1907), 20–1, 128 hanjian, 189, 237, 409 Hanoi, 169 Hatta, Mohammad, 271–85 collaboration with Japanese, 336–59 and Indonesian independence, 336–59 Henan province flooding of, 168 Henriques, C. B., 116 Himmler, Heinrich, 231, 307, 366 Hinduism, 269 Hirohito, Emperor (Japan), 110, 355 Hiroshima, 355 Hitler Youth, 85 Hitler, Adolf, 43, 208 alliance with Mussolini, 157 assassination attempt on, 219, 231 attitude towards Habsburg monarchy, 230 characteristics of regime, 100 downfall of, 55 and fascist internationalism, 212 foreign policy, 7 and Holocaust, 216 as influence on Ukrainian right-wing nationalists, 364, 367 invasion of Poland, 299

445 meeting with Pétain, 69–70, 72 and Munich Agreement, 254 policy in the Netherlands, 128 policy in Ukraine, 304, 366 policy in Yugoslavia, 155, 231 reprisal policy of, 232 supposedly better than Blum, 68, 122 US–Soviet alliance against, 329 view of Vichy France, 69, 83 Holocaust, 6, 10, 127–32, 216, 407 France, 66 Netherlands, 39–58, 66 Ukraine, 366–75 Holodomor, 299–302, 304, 361, 376 Homan, Johannes Linthorst, 39–58 Home Army (Polish), 247, 385 Hong Kong, 87, 169, 171 House of Orange, 57 Hukbalahap, 266, 328–36 post-war role, 390 relations with USAFFE, 266–7 Hungary, 152, 224, 230, 341, 405 Ichigo Offensive, 177 Ilocos Norte, 317 ilustrados, 260, 312 imperialism, 2–11, 253–6, 286 Anglo-French rivalry, 103 and China, 164, 185 French, 99–105 German and Japanese compared, 399–401 various forms of, 309–11 India, 84, 235 Indochina, 33, 35, 84, 103, 110, 112, 169, 253–4, 389 Indonesia, 21 Central Advisory Council, 342 historical overview, 268–85 independence of, 336–59 Parindra, 271, 273 Partindo, 272 Islam, 257 Indonesia, 354, 391 Italy anti-Fascist resistance, 157–60 Christian Democrats, 160 civil war, 157–60, 209–22 in Cold War, 160 Committee of National Liberation (CLN), 157–60 Garibaldi Brigades, 157–60 German occupation, 209–22 and Holocaust, 180 invasion of Greece, 145

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

446

Index

Italy (cont.) Jews, 180 monarchy, 159 occupying forces in Yugoslavia, 135–6 ouster of Mussolini, 157–60 Republican Fascist Party, 160, 209–22 Social Republic, 157–60, 209–22 Ivan III, Grand Duke, 287 Jablanica, 135 Jakarta, 275, 341, 347, 354 Medical College, 279, 341 Japan expansionism, 2–11 relations with Thailand, 82–98 and total war, 99–112 Java, 255, 273 as core of Dutch East Indies empire, 268 peasant revolts in, 354 population loss under Japanese, 338 post-war Muslim insurgency, 391 as potential target for Allied attack, 337 Javanese language, 271 Jawa Hokokai (the Java Patriotic Service Association), 278 Jedwabne, 409 Jews, 6, 10 blamed for immodest fashion designs, 62 in Croatia, 223 denounced by Wang Jingwei, 235 Dutch, 39–58, 105 in French resistance, 198 Italian, 180 massacres of in Ukraine (1918–21), 294, 360–4 as middlemen, 269 OUN-B’s violence against, 366–75 in Serbia, 232 treatment of as minority compared to that of ethnic Chinese, 394–5 in Ukraine, 360–4 in Vichy France, 64–6 Jiangsu province, 204 Jim Crow, 259 Joan of Arc, 102 Jong, Louis de, 46, 106 Judeo-Communism, 208, 294, 362, 373, 382–3 Kalibapi, 262, 278, 324–8 Katuya, Lt. Col. T., 321 Katyń, 379 Kenpeitai, 264, 282, 345, 350 Khatyn, 379 Khuang Aphaiwong, 110, 112

Kiev. See Kyiv kiyayi, 391 Koch, Erich, 304 Koch, Hal, 81, 121 Koiso Kuniaki, 280, 354 Korea, 2 Koreans as minority in Japan, 406 Kresy, 296 Kuomintang (KMT), 160–1 and clashes with Thai forces in Burma, 84 and ethnic Chinese diaspora, 269 internal divisions, 200–7 and Wang Jingwei’s regime, 233–8 Kwasniewski, Aleksander, 409 Kyiv, 203, 306 mayor of executed, 375 Laborie, Pierre, 61 Lake Garda, 209 language politics Ukrainian, Indonesian, and Philippine compared, 393 Laos, 35 Laurel, Jose, 262, 314, 319–20, 322–3, 328 Laurel, Sotero, 322 Lean, David, 336 Lebanon, 103 Lebed, Mykola, 366 Lebrun, Alfred, 26 Légion française des combattants, 73 Lenin, Vladimir, 199, 300 Lichauco, Marcial Primitivo, 332–4, 336 Lithuania, 288 Ljotić, Dimitrije, 222 Lokot’ Republic, 381–3 Long March (China), 196 Lorković, Mladen, 232 Lorković–Vokić Plot, 233 Low Key Club, 169 Loyal National Salvation Army (LNSA), 204 Lübeck, 74 Luxembourg, 22 Luzon, 257, 266, 315–16, 335, 395 Lviv, 303 1941 massacre of Jews in, 368–70 Lwów. See Lviv MacArthur, Douglas, 261, 267, 319, 329 Macedonian Slavs, 198 Maček, Vladko, 223 Madura, 273 Maeda, Tadashi, 282

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Maginot Line, 22 Majapahit, 270 Makapili, 324–8 Makhno, Nestor, 295 Malacca, 268 Malaka, Tan, 340 Malay language, 270 Malaya, 36–7, 84, 91, 96, 112, 253, 272, 277 Malayo-Polynesian languages, 257, 269 Manchukuo. See Manchuria Manchuria, 2, 131, 161, 165, 183, 235 post-war evacuation of Japanese from, 406 Manila, 267, 319 filming of Japanese propaganda movie in, 333 Manila Bay, 262 Mao Zedong, 160–1 Marc, Franz, 137 March on Rome, 219 Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 163, 168 Marion, Paul, 71 Marseille, 180, 225 Marshall Plan, 249 Marxism, 41 Mauthausen concentration camp, 52 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 181 Mecca, 279 Mediterranean, 31, 136, 138, 238 Mel’nyk, Andrii, 299 Mers el-Kebir, 31, 101 Metaxas, Ioannis, 144–5, 181, 205 Middle East, 103 Mihailović, Dragoljub (Draža), 151–2 Milice (Vichy France), 104 Mindanao, 257, 335, 395 Mongolia, 7 Mongols, 287 Monnet, Jean, 25, 249 Montoire, 69, 72 Moors, 329 Moros, 335 Moscow Grand Duchy of, 287 Muhammadiyah, 278 Munich Agreement, 254 Muslims Philippine, 335, 395 Mussert, Anton, 52 contrasted with Sukarno, 357 Mussolini, Benito, 157–60, 209–22 German rescue from captivity, 157 Nachtigall Battalion, 306

447 Nagasaki, 355 Nagoya, 173, 315 Nakamura, Lt. Gen., 110 Nanjing, 83, 166, 358 Japanese massacres in, 168, 408 Napoleonic Wars, 142 Nasjonal Samling, 46 nationalism ethnic and civic, 254 Nazis Austrian, 230 and bureaucratic feudalism, 100 and occupation of Netherlands, 39–58 racist ideology as hindrance to effective rule, 304 relations with other fascist movements, 209–22, 228 NDH. See Croatia Nederlandse Unie, 39–58, 61, 74, 105 Nedić, Milan, 152, 222 neo-fascism, 410 Neretva, Battle of the, 135 Netherlands, the attempt to reconquer Indonesia, 282–4 compared with France, 99–112 compared with Thailand, 99–112 German invasion of, 18–22 German occupation, 39–58 overseas empire of, 57 treatment of Jews compared with Denmark, 127–32 New Citizens Movement (China), 185 New Fourth Army Incident, 162, 175, 178 New Guinea, 272 New Life Movement (China), 185 Non-Aggression Pact Danish–German, 32 German–Soviet, 7, 302 North Africa, 1, 24, 26–8, 30, 69, 73, 102–3, 142 North China Area Army (Japanese), 187 Northern Expedition (China), 164 Norway, 32, 46, 80–1, 131 NSB (Dutch National Socialist Movement), 21, 39–58, 357 Nuremberg Laws, 119 Old Church Slavonic, 376 Operation Barbarossa, 254 Ophuls, Marcel, 103 Osias, Camilo, 327 Osmeña, Sergio, 267, 312 OSS (Office of Strategic Services), 148 Ottoman empire, 143, 287, 290

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

448

Index

OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), 359–78, 389–96 factional struggles within, 359–78 founding of, 296–9 Homeland Executive, 366 legacy of, 409 OUN-B, 296–9, 303–8, 359–78, 389–96 OUN-M, 296–9, 303–8, 359–78, 389–96 continued role under German occupation, 393 Padua, 212 pan-Asianism, 185, 233–8, 314, 322 Panay, 315, 331 Pancasila, 355 pangrèh praja, 336–59, 397 Paris, 104, 362 Paris Peace Conference, 164 patriotism, concept of, 15–17, 38–9, 99–112, 127–32 compared across French, Dutch, Danish, and Thai cases, 127–32 Pavelić, Ante, 151–2, 198–222 Pavolini, Alessandro, 179, 209–22 Pavone, Claudio, 160, 286 Pearl Harbor, 3, 7, 100 peasantry Greek, 151 Indonesian, 354 as object of nationalists’ obsession, 292 Philippine, 264, 325, 328–36 and resistance movements, 179–92 Soviet, 379–80 Pećanac, Kosta, 154 pemuda, 281–2, 336–59 People’s Party (Thailand), 23 Peralta, Macario, 317, 331 pergerakan, 271, 336–59 permanent secretaries, Danish, 82, 114–16, 124, 126 Pershing, General John, 258 PETA (Defenders of the Homeland), 280, 336–59, 385 and origins of Indonesian military, 391 Pétain, Philippe, 58–74, 99–105, 127–32, 324 and Fall of France, 22–32 Petliura, Symon, 294–5, 363 assassination of, 362 petroleum, 277 Pezzato, Enzo, 221 Phibun Songkhram, 23, 82–98, 107–12, 125, 127–32 Philip II, King (Spain), 257 Philippine–American War, 258, 320

Philippines, the, 235 American rule, 257–68 collaborationist groups, 324–8 Commonwealth established, 259 cooptation of elites, 311–24 declaration of war on United States, 262 educational institutions, 260 Executive Commission, 319 historical overview, 257–68 independence, 259, 336 Japanese Military Administration, 311–24 Partido Nacionalista, 260 resistance organizations, 328–36 Spanish rule, 257 Phunam, 85, 87 Piłsudksi, Józef, 362 Poglavnik, 225 Poland, 3, 104, 224, 247, 269, 286, 290, 387, 397, 406 early modern Commonwealth, 288 inter-war republic’s Ukrainian minority, 288 Nazi Generalgouvernement, 299 and Ukraine, 295–9, 359–78 war with Bolsheviks, 295 Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, 288 Popular Front, 200 and Philippines, 261 Popular Front (France), 68 Portugal, 22 Pridi Banomyong, 23, 82–98, 107–12 Propaganda Squad (Japanese, in Indonesia), 273 Prussia, 290 punctuated equilibrium, 193 Putera, 278 Putin, Vladimir, 378, 388, 410 Qing emperor, 165 Quay, Jan de, 39–58 Quezon, Manuel, 261, 312, 319, 326 death of, 267 Quisling, Vidkun, 46, 131 Rallis, Ioannis, 145 Ramos, Benigno, 324–8 Recto, Claro, 318–20, 323 and Philippine ethnic diversity, 395 Reichskommissariat Ukraine, 303–4, 374, 392 Renewal movement (Dutch), 39–58, 68, 74 Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, 171, 184 resistance

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index myth of, 408 revolutions of 1820-21 142 Reynaud, Paul, 22–32 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 155 Ricarte, Artemio, 324–8 Risorgimento, 181 Roland Battalion, 306 Rolland, Romain, 137 Roma, 10, 233 Romania, 224, 297, 302 Romanov empire, 287, 378 romusha, 336–59 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 259 Rosenberg, Alfred, 304 Roxas, Manuel, 267 rubber, 277 Rus’, 287, 361 Russia invasion of Ukraine (2022), 388, 410 National Socialist Party of, 382 under German occupation, 378–84 Russo-Japanese War, 164 Ruthenians, 288, 292 Sachsenhausen, 374 Saigon, 355 Sakdal, 324–8 Salò, 157, 209 sarswela, 329 Scavenius, Erik, 74–82, 118–20 Schleswig, 81 Schmidt, Fritz, 43 Schwartzbard, Sholom, 362 Second United Front (China), 160–1 secretaries-general, Dutch, 20, 39–58, 105, 126 self-determination, 7 Seni Pramoj, 93 Serbia, 151–2 Seri Thai. See Free Thai Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 43 Shan States, 84 Shanghai, 169 Sheptytskyi, Andrey, 303 Shevchenko, Taras, 393 Siam. See Thailand Sichuan province (China), 176 Sicily Allied landings in, 157 Singapore, 36, 91 Sjahrir, Sutan, 279, 389, 391 Skoropadsky, Hetman Pavlo, 294 Slovakia, 303, 366, 392 SOE (Special Operations Executive), 148 Sørensen, Arne, 74, 122

449 Sorrow and the Pity, The, 103 Southern Europe as civil war zone, 142–4 Soviet Union as aspirational model, 203 and China, 167 collapse of, 285 collectivization of agriculture, 299–302 deportations of Poles and Jews from western Ukraine, 386–7 as empire, 285, 382–3 as ethnic federation, 300 First Five Year Plan, 299–302 and Japan, 233 and partisan warfare, 379, 382 relations with Communist resistance movements, 143 and resistance movements, 103 Stalinist famine, 203 and Ukraine, 359–78 Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, 7 Spain, 247, 254 Civil War, 99, 135, 142, 207, 224, 238, 245 cultural legacy in the Philippines, 329, 333 imperial legacy in Philippines, 317 squadrismo, 210 Srivijaya, 270 Stalin, Joseph, 200, 296, 299–302 and collectivization of agriculture, 379 Stalingrad, Battle of, 55 Stetsko, Iaroslav, 303, 366, 374 Stillwell, Lt. Gen. Joseph, 174 Sudetenland, 6, 254 Sukarno, 271–85 collaboration with Japanese, 336–59 and Indonesian independence, 336–59 Sumatra, 270–2, 280 Sun Yat-sen, 164, 184 Supriyadi, 359 Surakarta, 268 Sweden, 81, 115, 117, 121, 123 Switzerland, 34, 37, 107 Syotiku Dance Company, 331 Syria, 103 Tagalog, 257, 315, 321–2, 393, 395 Taiwan, 2, 161, 408 Tang Liangli, 236 Tatars, 287, 290 Thai–Burma Railway, 336–7 Thailand alliance with Japan, 36 compared with Denmark, 93, 125 end of royal absolutism, 34

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

450

Index

Thailand (cont.) and Greater East Asia Conference, 96 Japanese attack, 23 and Japanese surrender, 107–12 monarchy, 107–12 People’s Party, 91 public opinion, 82–98 regency council, 93 relations with Allies, 107–12 under effective occupation by Japan, 82–98 wartime cultural reforms, 98 Theresienstadt, 117 Three-A Movement (Indonesia), 273 time, perceptions of, 401–10 Tito, Josip Broz, 151–2 post-war break with Soviet Union, 406 Togliatti, Palmiro, 219 Tojo, Hideki, 280, 354 Tokyo, 279 Transcarpathia, 308 Tripartite Pact, 152 Triumvirate (of Nederlandse Unie), 39–58 Truman Doctrine, 151 Turkey, 88, 143 Tydings–McDuffie Act, 259 Ukraine, 3 Directory, 294–5 émigrés, 285 historical overview, 285–308 Rada, 293–4 religious divisions, 288 as republic in USSR, 299–302 as site of anti-colonial nationalism, 359–78 as site of ethnic cleansing of Poles, 384–8 Ukrainian People’s Republic, 294 West Ukrainian People’s Republic, 295 Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, 376 Ukrainian language, 393 Ukrainian National Army, 384 Ukrainians as ethnic minority in interwar Poland, 296–9 Unamuno, Miguel de, 138 Union of Brest, 288 Union of Danish Youth, 81 United Nations, 285 United States and China, 169, 174, 245 imperialism, 257–68 Italian campaign, 159 policy towards Greece, 151 and Thailand, 37, 93

United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), 261, 316, 323, 328–36 relations with Hukbalahap, 266–7 UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), 308, 384–8 post-1945 insurgency, 390 USSR. See Soviet Union Ustaša, 151–2, 180, 198–222 atrocities perpetrated by, 233 Vargas, Jorge, 262, 319, 321–2, 327 Vendée, 218 Venizelists, 145, 180 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 147 Verdun, Battle of, 60 Verona, 210 Versailles, Treaty of, 39 Vichy regime, 58–74 collaboration with Germans, 99–105 compared with Thailand, 36, 99–112 compared with the Netherlands, 99–112 labor conscription compared with Indonesia’s, 338 Milice, 405 National Revolution, 99 origins of, 22–32 public opinion, 99–105 treatment of Jews compared with Denmark’s, 125–6 Vietnam, 83 Visayas, 317 Vlasov, Andrey, 383 Vokić, Ante, 232 Volhynia, 295, 361 Volksraad (Dutch East Indies), 270 Waffen-SS Bosnian Muslim volunteers, 231 Danish volunteers, 80, 115 French volunteers, 117 Galician Division, 384 international recruitment of volunteers, 209 as part of European civil war, 138 Ukrainian volunteers, 307 Wang Jingwei, 83, 160–1, 200–7, 233–8 compared with Pétain, 200–7 death of, 172 Sukarno compared to, 358 Warsaw, 267, 295 Warsaw Pact, 249 Weygand, Maxime, 22–32, 73 Wilhelmina, Queen (Netherlands), 105, 348, 356 escape of to Britain, 18

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index and Indonesia, 284 political persona of, 19 Winkelman, Henri Gerard, 26 Winterhilfswerk, 50 women Jewish, as objects of violence, 368 scapegoated as collaborationists, 407 Wuhan, 176 Yamashita, General Tomoyuki, 328 Yamato race, 7 Yan’an, 177, 196 Yangtze river, 175 Ybarnegaray, Jean, 25 Yellow River, 168

451 Yiddish, 362 Yogyakarta, 268 Yugoslavia, 135–6 Communist partisans, 135–6, 151–2, 200–7, 401 monarchy, 152 Yuwachon Thahan, 85 zarzuela, 329 Zbor, 222 Zelensky, Volodymyr, 410 Zervas, Napoleon, 149 Zhang Xueliang, 165, 167 Zhou Enlai, 177 Zhytomyr, 374, 393 Zoelen, Groeninx van, 50

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786430.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press