No serious investigation of German generals on the Eastern Front can avoid an explicit engagement with the ubiquitous criminality that pervaded the occupation of the Soviet Union. Given that the letters of the generals were provided by family descendants who tended to venerate their famous relatives, it should not be surprising that the letters do not explicitly mention German war crimes or the Holocaust. Yet that in itself is a telling omission given the direct evidence from divisional, corps and panzer groups files pointing to widespread, even exceptional, killing programs within the units under Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt’s command. All four men were among the most active in carrying out the murderous Commissar Order as well as the violent suppression of perceived acts of resistance in their zone of control. Moreover, the post-war myth of an honourable and ‘clean’ German army finds no such supporting evidence in the correspondence – there is not one letter in a combined collection spanning well over 100 examples that expresses any outrage or even acknowledgment of the mass murder of Soviet Jews. Indeed, there is no criticism for any of the action undertaken by the German security force or army.

Typically, the success of a general is thought to be measured in their professionalism and military achievements, however this is only partly true of the German Wehrmacht. As the letters reveal, the panzer generals were very much aware that their career success was determined by gaining public prominence and attaching oneself to battlefield triumph. This consumed a remarkable amount of their time and, in no small part, helped shape the direction of their campaigns. Propaganda companies operating at the front become engines for self-promotion, which transformed the achievement of the formation into the achievement of the individual. The most successful practitioners of this media campaign, like Guderian, became indivisible with the all-conquering German Panzertruppe in the East, while others who commanded similar sized forces, like Hoepner, proved far less successful. One of the consequences of such military celebrity, which was unique to the German Wehrmacht, was the autograph-hunting children who sent countless requests to the generals and often received favourable responses. The culture of public acclaim and mutual support fed the National Socialist ethos of front and Heimat united in struggle.

During the Second World War the German panzer generals were the subject of a great deal of myth-making, both in German and in Allied propaganda. After the war this entered a new phase with the publication of self-exculpating memoirs, studies for the US army historical division and uncritical biographies. Only relatively recently has a great deal of research been done to reassess their role both in a professional military capacity and in terms of their individual participation in Germany’s war of annihilation in the East. We therefore know a great deal more about what these men did and how they did it, but that does not always provide the answer why. If the image of the German panzer generals was built on a myth, then who were these men beyond the stylised propaganda images and resolute military orders?

For lowly German soldiers there were highly restrictive rules about what information could be included in their letters home, but the correspondence of the leading panzer generals were not subject to any form of censorship and they felt themselves at liberty to discuss all manner of military operations. This may have been militarily reckless, but it provides an unfiltered view of German operations and the personal relations among the high command. More specifically, one sees how the generals account for their successes and failures, with the former being routinely embraced, while the latter are typically blamed on individuals failing to support them. What is notable about these explanations are the relative absence of geographic, topographical or environmental factors in slowing their advance. Likewise, the countermeasures of the Red Army scarcely rate a mention and the same is true of German organisational or logistic difficulties. The letters offer an insight into a world view that suggests the army command alone will decide the outcome, if only the correct decisions are made.

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-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.

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.

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.

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.

The cases in this section involve countries whose 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?

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.

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.

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