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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

> Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented.

I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were.

The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost.

Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day.

Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.

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> The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost.

Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do.

Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything.

The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...

I'm not sure what you are trying to say - hopefully not that there weren't any unwilling collaborators?

Read the biography of Stanislaw Lem for instance, who grew up in Lwów(current Ukraine, back then Poland) - Nazis frequently recruited local population to both kill and then bury anyone they wanted to get rid of, under a) promise of reward b) threat of being killed themselves. But you don't need to trust the biography of one man and his experiences - we also know this because Nazis kept extensive video and photo evidence of those executions, which they would show back in the 3rd Reich as "evidence" of the barbarism of the local people in places they were occupying ("look at those stupid Poles/Ukrainians/Jews, killing each other for a scrap of food!").

"Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them."

Again, because some of them were given a choice of either joining the ghetto kommando unit, or being shot there and then, along with their families. It didn't matter at all in the end of course, because they all got executed in the end anyway. Can you say with with 100% confidence that you wouldn't make the same choice in the same situation? And I do mean 100% confidence?

Polish nobelist, Wiesława Szymborska, said something about these choices people faced in WW2 that I will always remember - "we only know ourselves as much as we have been tested - and I pray that my moment of trial never comes".

I think she's absolutely right - it's easy to judge what people have done from the comfort of our homes in 2021. But I do hope that I am never put in front of the same choice. I hope I will never be tested in the same way those people were.

And I will clarify here - of course there were willing collaborators too. 100%. But your comment reads as if that wasn't the case and the "myth" of unwilling collaborators was purely made up. I see no reason to believe such a thing.

> Can you say with with 100% confidence that you wouldn't make the same choice in the same situation? And I do mean 100% confidence?

10000% confidence

Then all I can say is that I envy your confidence in your resolve, and I wish I could be as confident about what I would do with a gun to my head(or worse, to my children and my wife heads) as you are.

Like I said above - I hope my moment of trial never comes.

>Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.

Yet they themselves were eventually murdered by the germans..

Not always. My grandfather, who was in Auschwitz, ran into, and confronted one of his own Kapos[1] on the street several years after the war.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo

Not all of them some were even declared "Honorary Aryans" including Hitlers personal chauffeur Emil Maurice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Maurice

I wouldn't even necessarily call the SLS collaborators. They were primaries. Broadly though, yes. When we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. Even (especially) individuals are not one thing or another.

> we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated.

The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good.

One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.

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