'Seidler's List': On One Overly Broad Concept of Collaboration during the Second World War Cover Image

'Seidler's List': On One Overly Broad Concept of Collaboration during the Second World War
'Seidler's List': On One Overly Broad Concept of Collaboration during the Second World War

Author(s): Pavel Večeřa
Subject(s): Comparative history, History of ideas, Fascism, Nazism and WW II
Published by: Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: collaboration during the Second World War; occupations and occupiers; occupied populations; betrayal and traitors; informers and agent provocateurs; social behaviour and action; Franz Wilhelm Seidler;

Summary/Abstract: This article is based on a long-standing critique of the disproportionate magnifying of the term collaboration in the context of the Second World War (Hans Lemberg, Werner Röhr). In this text, I will critically analyse one such swelling and disproportionately widening scope of understanding of the concept of collaboration: how the German historian Franz Wilhelm Seidler worked with it in his publication Die Kollaboration: 1939-1945. Although this book was first published in 1995, the nature of the problem has not changed much. My aim in this contribution is not to criticise the work itself but to take the opportunity offered by its content to analyse controversial or borderline cases and present the described interactions of the alleged collaborators.

  • Issue Year: 56/2024
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 97-117
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: English
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