The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965

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Cambridge University Press, Feb 13, 1999 - History - 327 pages
This volume, in Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series, examines how France, Belgium and the Netherlands emerged from the military collapse and humiliating Nazi occupation they suffered during the Second World War. Rather than traditional armed conflict, the human consequences of Nazi policies were resistance, genocide and labour migration to Germany. Pieter Lagrou offers a genuinely comparative approach to these issues, based on extensive archival research; he underlines the divergence between ambiguous experiences of occupation and the univocal post-war patriotic narratives which followed. His book reveals striking differences in political cultures as well as close convergence in the creation of a common Western European discourse, and uncovers disturbing aspects of the aftermath of the war, including post-war antisemitism and the marginalisation of resistance veterans. Brilliantly researched and fluently written, this book will be of central interest to all scholars and students of twentieth-century European history.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
the postwar treatment of resistance veterans
19
Part II Repatriating displaced populations from Germany
79
Part III The legacy of forced economic migration
129
Part IV Martyrs and other victims of Nazi persecution
197
Conclusion
292
Bibliography
307
Index
323
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