Under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 concluding the First World War, the territory of Hungary was reduced from 325,000 (or, discounting Croatia, autonomous within the kingdom of Hungary, 282,000) to 93,000 sq. km, while her population fell from around 20 million to 7.6 million inhabitants. With this Hungary went from a medium-sized country to one of the region’s small states; by comparison, in terms of territory Poland was more than four times the size of Hungary; Romania more than three times; the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes nearly three times; and Czechoslovakia one and a half times. Romania received the largest area (103,000 sq. km) with more than 5 million inhabitants.

‘Yesterday, a large fixed sign “Victorija” fell from the city hall onto the head of a police detective Alija Delpašić who was afterwards taken to hospital where he died. Investigations are continuing. A report will follow.’ So wrote Ivan Tolj, director of the Ustasha police, from Sarajevo in a telegram to the Ministry of the Interior on 16 December 1941. Earlier that summer, the victory sign had been omnipresent in billboards, placards, on the sides of state buildings and on banners at rallies throughout the Croatian state.

Among the examples of collaborationism in Western Europe, the case of France stands out for its extreme heterogeneity. The ultra-right wing parties in Belgium and Holland that concluded alliances with the Nazis clearly took this step largely from a desire to occupy a favourable place in Adolf Hitler’s post-war Europe. The collaborationists faced the need to quickly prove their worth in the eyes of the Germans who, almost no-one doubted, would soon rule the continent. The war against the common enemy represented by the Soviet Union provided ample opportunities of this kind.

The Slovak language, belonging to the western-Slav language group, is closely related to the Czech language. Both languages are mutually comprehensible and Czechs and Slovaks understand each other. For this reason the Czechs in the past usually considered the Slovaks to be part of the Czech nation and Slovak to be just another dialect of the Czechs. In Slovakia, this idea was not commonly accepted but, still, the idea of Czech-Slovak reciprocity was relatively strong in the nineteenth century. As a result the idea of a common Czecho-Slovak state gradually emanated during the First World War.

Denmark’s involvement in the German war in the east was determined by the limits and options of a small neutral, but occupied state. Joining Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union was a political issue that constituted a serious dilemma for the Danish government. There were no significant ideological obstacles to the decision: anti-Communism was widespread in the government as well as in parliament, among Social Democrats and labour unions, business and civil servants, and throughout most of the population. Prior to signing the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1941, the Danish Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning, who was also the leader of the Social Democratic Party, was asked about his opinion and replied: ‘Communism? I’ve been fighting it for twenty years.’

About 25,000 Belgians actively served on the eastern front under German command during the Second World War, as members of armed units and the Waffen-SS, but also as workers or drivers in the Organisation Todt, the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps – NSKK) and the German Red Cross (about 600 Flemish women served as nurses).

On the evening of 26 June 1941, Finns gathered around their radio receivers to listen to a speech by their President Risto Ryti. His message was dramatic but predictable: Finland, a sparsely populated but territorially large Scandinavian democracy on the northeastern shores of the Baltic Sea, had once again stumbled into a war with its mighty neighbor to the East. Since the launching of Operation Barbarossa four days earlier, the Soviet air force had bombed Finnish coastal defences. During the following days airfields and large towns also became the targets of air attacks, prompting the Finnish parliament, on the afternoon of 25 June, to give its unanimous backing to a government statement declaring a state of war.