Collaboration, Competitive Victimization and the Contemporary Politics of the Holocaust in Former Socialist States

In post-Communist states, rewriting national narratives and establishing national self-conceptions are major undertakings. In some countries, how people acted during World War Two is a sensitive, complicated issue. I discuss five types of "collaboration" with the Nazis and why we should distinguish among these types. Another aspect of rewriting history is claiming victim status in order to justify collaboration and establish moral equivalency between the evils of Nazism and Communism, and of their respective adherents. The resolution of these contested and sensitive issues will strongly influence how future generations will understand their own people and states.

Zvi Gitelman is Professor of Political Science, Preston Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies, and a former Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and of the Center for Russian and East European Studies, all at the University of Michigan where he has won several awards for excellence in teaching. Educated at Columbia University, Gitelman is the author or editor of fourteen books and many scholarly articles. His most recent publications are a book co-edited with Yaacov Ro’i, Revolution, Repression and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and an edited volume titled Jewishness and Judaism: Secularization and Jewish Identities Through the Ages (Rutgers University Press, 2008). In 2005-2006 he was the J.B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2007 he was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council for a five year term.

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