Occupation, Collaboration and Resistance in World War II

German occupation produced different political arrangements in different countries. Denmark surrendered after brief fighting on 9 April 1940, but the king, government, parliament, courts and police remained in place and Danish officials continued to administer domestic affairs under German pressure. France followed another path after the armistice of June 1940: Germany occupied the north and west, while Pétain's government exercised authority from Vichy in the unoccupied zone and, after 10 July, possessed the constitutional powers of the new French State. The continued existence of French institutions gave Vichy room to pursue policies of its own as well as to cooperate with German demands.

Central occupied Poland had no comparable national government. The territories not annexed directly to Germany were organised on 26 October 1939 as the General Government under Hans Frank. German civil administration operated beside SS, police and military authorities within a programme that combined extraction, forced labour, racial persecution and the destruction of Polish political and cultural institutions. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler created another civil framework under Alfred Rosenberg, but military commanders, the SS and police, and economic agencies retained overlapping powers. Administrative fragmentation did not lessen the violence; several institutions could pursue exploitation and racial policy at the same time.

Japanese rule in the Dutch East Indies again followed a different structure. The Dutch capitulation on Java in March 1942 replaced colonial government with military administrations divided between Japanese army and navy commands. On Java, the Sixteenth Army used existing local structures where useful, sponsored Indonesian political organisations and elevated nationalist leaders such as Sukarno, while requisitioning food and labour for the Japanese war economy. The occupation simultaneously widened political mobilisation and imposed coercion on a scale that reached deeply into village society.

Collaboration described relationships that differed in authority and consequence. Vidkun Quisling sought political power through German occupation and headed a Norwegian government subordinate to Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven. Anton Mussert's Dutch NSB supplied supporters and administrators to the occupation but never received the sovereignty Mussert wanted. Vichy France retained a functioning French state whose leaders pursued an authoritarian programme of their own while negotiating with German authorities over policing, labour and deportation. These were political choices made under occupation, but they were not institutionally identical.

The distinction becomes sharper when policy reached individual victims. Vichy enacted its first Statut des Juifs on 3 October 1940 through French law, excluding Jews from major public and professional positions. In July 1942 German authorities set the deportation programme for Paris while French officials negotiated its execution and French police carried out the arrests. Administrative cooperation therefore had consequences that can be traced from a ministerial decision to an arrest list, a police visit and a deportation convoy.

Other cases resist a simple political label. Sukarno worked through Japanese-sponsored organisations while pursuing Indonesian independence, and his public cooperation intersected with occupation labour mobilisation. Danish ministries continued negotiating with German authorities for more than three years in an effort to preserve domestic control; after the government ceased to function in August 1943, senior civil servants still administered the country. Historical responsibility depends on what authority a person or institution possessed, what choices were available, what they chose to do and what followed from that choice.

Occupation depended on ordinary administrative acts as well as armed force. Identity papers established legal categories; ration books connected households to controlled food distribution; travel permits restricted movement; labour registers identified workers who could be requisitioned. Railways, municipal offices and police records allowed occupation policy to operate repeatedly and at scale. In places where existing national or local institutions remained intact, the occupier could make use of administrative systems that had been created before the war.

The same machinery could be turned toward persecution. Vichy's anti-Jewish statutes converted racial classification into employment restrictions and exclusion from public life. Police records made mass arrest possible in Paris. The Service du travail obligatoire, established in February 1943, converted German demands for French labour into a French legal obligation for designated age groups. Evasion then became part of the resistance problem: forged papers, sympathetic officials, hiding places and rural networks helped some men avoid compulsory labour and pushed others toward the maquis.

On Java, labour mobilisation extended far beyond the group shipped overseas. NIOD summarizes scholarship estimating about 1.6 million permanent Javanese romusha and notes evidence that almost every healthy working-age man outside privileged village positions was mobilised at least once. Estimates for those transported outside Java range from roughly 160,000–200,000 in Shigeru Sato's work to a commonly cited figure near 300,000. Japanese records were incomplete and many were destroyed after the surrender, so mortality among these labourers cannot be reconstructed with comparable precision.

The numerical record of occupation is strongest when it is tied to a defined action. Paris police records give 13,152 arrests during the Vel' d'Hiv operation of 16–17 July 1942. Danish rescue records support about 7,200 Jews reaching Sweden in autumn 1943, alongside roughly 680 non-Jewish relatives, while about 500 Jews were captured and deported to Theresienstadt. The romusha figures describe labour mobilisation rather than arrests or deportations and remain a range because the Japanese occupation left a much weaker statistical record.

Liberation created another set of records as governments tried to distinguish political leadership, participation in repression, economic cooperation and lesser forms of assistance. In France, the cours de justice judged 55,331 people. They pronounced 6,763 death sentences, most of them either in absentia or later commuted; 767 of those sentences were carried out. Extrajudicial killings and public punishments such as the shaving of women's heads belong to a different category and cannot be folded into the judicial total.

The Dutch CABR shows the scale of investigation without proving the guilt of everyone named in it. About 425,000 people were investigated after the war for suspected collaboration with the German occupier. Many never came before a court, were not convicted, or had been accused incorrectly. The archive therefore records the reach of the postwar justice system as much as it records collaboration itself.

Occupation regimes produced large quantities of paperwork because control depended on registration. Laws, police instructions, labour files, rationing systems, deportation records and correspondence can show who issued an order, which institution executed it and how a policy changed over time. Their precision has limits. Administrative records describe people as the state classified them, and clandestine activity often appears only when it was detected, denounced or reconstructed after the war.

Postwar collaboration files answer a different question. A prosecution dossier can establish an allegation, an investigation and sometimes a conviction, but the existence of a file does not establish guilt. The Dutch CABR is particularly important because its roughly 425,000 investigated persons are sometimes mistaken for 425,000 convicted collaborators. French purge statistics also change according to whether judicial courts, military tribunals, professional sanctions or extrajudicial violence are being counted.

Photographs require the same source criticism. German propaganda units documented occupation from the occupier's point of view, while liberation photographers often recorded moments of resistance, arrest and public punishment that were exceptional precisely because they were visible. A dated photograph can establish that an action occurred at a particular place and time; it cannot by itself establish how typical that action was across an occupied society.