I’m reading an interesting book focusing on the early postwar period in Western Europe called The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965. It focuses on three groups: veterans, drafted wartime laborers, and victims of Nazi persecution. The section on veterans highlights some of the diverse and often bizarre disputes involving the recognition of resistance fighters and such as war veterans – something important in the process of rebuilding national pride after liberation by the Allies. In one interesting Belgian case, a volunteer of a relief action for victims of Allied bombing applied for recognition in one such veteran organization and was questioned as to how such activities were appropriate for inclusion:
‘…our activity had no clandestine character whatsoever. We usually wore an arm-badge to be allowed on the site of the disaster. There was no risk involved and the Germans were quite positive about our action.’
The volunteer had been urged to apply for membership because the actions might be included in the clause, “works of patriotic solidarity.” But there is more,
The administration rejected the demand on the behaf of his relief work, but assured him that he was entitled to the statute under another heading of the law, since he had given shelter to two Jewish clandestines during the occupation. This the applicant refused, since, according to his own declaration, this had nothing to do with resistance, but with sheer humanity.1
There are a number of fascinating things which come out in this little anecdote. Among other things it shows the difficulty in weighing the “value” of resistance in wartime, which might include publishing anti-German pamphlets or sabotage and which implies a nation’s active contribution in its own liberation, as compared to the non-national, potentially even “collaborationist” humane act of relief work in the face of Allied bombing in a German occupied Belgium, and then the non-national, non-resistance action of hiding Jews from death at the hands of the Holocaust. Ultimately, however, what naturally got privileged in the early aftermath of any war of “resistance” were acts which contribute to a national epic of salvation from the humiliating experience of occupation or, as in the case of recognizing help for Jewish clandestines, those which counter the evils of the enemy. As the author Pieter Lagrou clearly goes on to show, however, these too become almost comically co-opted, manipulated, and recreated by the early postwar regimes that came into power.
In applying for recognition, however, this volunteer shows on the one hand a willingness to interpret an act which embarrassingly preserves the reality of Allied bombing in national memory, as “patriotic”, while on the other exposing the absurdity of recognizing aid to Jews in hiding as some kind of national service.
1. Lagrou, Pieter The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 55-56