While as nations, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, etc. were generally against the Nazis there were many collaborators, not just Vichy but everywhere, for many different reasons. Sadly many of the bigger fish who weren't too famous - Pierre Laval or Vidkun Quisling were too famous for their own good - slipped through the cracks. I remember watching a documentary on the Railway of Death (the Bridge on the River Kwai) where they interviewed the camp commandant who was alive, well, well respected (apparently went into business post-war and didn't do too badly) and he had his own 'version' of why thousands of Allied POWs died during the war. Heavens no, it wasn't because of any brutality on my part, it was the wretched diet, which my own men had to contend with as well. We all suffered together - so said this guy who by rights should have been up against the wall.
Collaboration is a sticky issue though - check the scene in Taegukgi where the 'anti-communists' are executing 'collaborators' who apparently only signed up for the 'communist party' to get rice to feed themselves. There are many documented cases of both guerrillas and collaborators just using the war as an excuse for unsupervised atrocities and settling scores without having to answer for it afterwards. In the Philippines it got even stickier for those that MacArthur and Philippine President Quezon left behind - Quezon ordered guys like Jose P.Laurel and Jorge Vargas to stay behind and help the people, doing anything 'short of swearing allegiance to the Japanese' (which was a ridiculous and impossible order). There's a whole controversy because Laurel and Vargas were prosecuted post-war for being collaborators with the Japanese while Manuel Roxas, who was no less a part of the occupation government even if he was there 'on the sidelines' was proclaimed a hero - because he was MacArthur's buddy. But then, since they were all scions of the old rich clans which rule the country even to this day, as the Percies, Nevilles, Howards and Stanleys ruled old England they were all eventually 'rehabilitated'. Ah Philippine politics!
Poland was terribly unlucky in that respect, caught between two monstrosities. Someone should make a movie about the '44 rising - though it probably would qualify as a 'horror' movie because of the sheer viciousness of the fighting and the characters involved - Bronislav Kaminski's antipartisan brigade (RONA) and, the worst of the lot, 'Doctor' Oskar Dirlewanger's antipartisan brigade. Dirlewanger makes Ted Bundy look like a sunday school teacher. The Dirlewanger brigade, Germany's 'dirty dozen' was REALLY dirty and it was Warsaw's ill luck that they sent his riff-raff to pacify the city. The SS commander Von Dem Bach-Zelewski was so shocked by the reports of Dirlewanger and Kaminski's men's atrocities that he summoned each in turn with a view to arresting and shooting them. Kaminski got put up against the wall but (according to one source) Dirlewanger never got arrested, indeed his thugs THREATENED the SS General with their MP40's when he came to put Dirlewanger in his place.
It's perhaps small but sweet consolation that Oskar Dirlewanger was arrested just at the end of the war and (according to my readings) beaten to death by his Polish 'guards'.
Cheers AllenKr,
Tom516
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