Ethan Hollander is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wabash College, USA and author of Hegemony and the Holocaust: State Power and Jewish Survival in Occupied Europe.

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In 2004, I interviewed Maurice Papon, a war criminal convicted for collaborating with Nazi Germany during World War II. Papon was Secretary General of the Gironde Prefecture in German-occupied France during the war. He was eventually charged and convicted of assisting in the deportation of about 1500 Jewish people, mostly from the city of Bourdeaux. He remains, to this date, the only Vichy official to be convicted for crimes directly related to the implementation of the Final Solution in France.

Papon’s defense was intriguing, if not convincing. Ultimately, he claimed to have stayed in office during the German occupation so as to help the resistance and to protect his fellow French citizens. In other words, he claimed that by staying in office and collaborating with the occupier, he was able to ‘soften the blow’ of what would otherwise be a more direct German occupation. As such, Papon’s defense echoed that of other Vichy collaborators—who claimed that their collaboration spared the people of France the more extreme brutality visited upon citizens of countries with less compliant governments elsewhere on the Continent.

I examined the logic of Papon’s claim, not by investigating the collaborators themselves—whose testimony is, unsurprisingly, unreliable—but by looking at the political dynamics of states under German occupation. I find that more Jewish people did indeed survive in those countries where high-ranking, state officials—people like Maurice Papon—remained in office and collaborated with the occupying German forces. Where the state bureaucracy ceased to exist – either because the Germans removed domestic officials from office or because the domestic officials themselves ‘heroically’ refused to collaborate—Germany filled the power-vacuum with its own staff or with obedient appointees. Jewish survival rates were consistently lower where Germany imposed these more direct forms of rule. Alternatively, where Germany implemented its policies through the organ of an existing state administration, those very administrators—consciously or otherwise—hindered the efficiency of Nazi genocidal policies. In short, state power led to Jewish survival.

But why would German collaborators – be they state leaders or lower-level functionaries like Maurice Papon—hinder the efficiency of genocidal policy? Certainly, genuine concern for the well-being of local Jews—and particularly Jewish citizens – was sometimes a relevant factor. But ‘protection’—and that may not always be the right word—was also and often ‘accidental’, since agents of a collaborating regime were sometimes simply ‘unenthusiastic’ or ‘sloppy’ when it came to implementing policies on behalf of an occupying power. Nationalism was sometimes a factor, as it was politically costly for leaders of nominally sovereign countries to deport their own citizens—even Jewish ones—at Germany’s behest. And, in the most cynical sense, collaborators who deported local Jews also gave up potentially profitable opportunities to exploit them. (There were, in certain German satellite states, lively extortion rackets, where state officials could be convinced to protect local Jews … for a price.) In other words, local officials protected local Jews for a variety of reasons, from the accidental to the heroic, from the wicked to the banal.

Indeed, this diversity of motives provides us with one of the most important and most troubling lessons of my investigation into the administration of genocide and the nature of crimes against humanity. While it’s temping to put the perpetrators of state-sponsored violence into distinct categories of heroes and villains—those who carried out evil commands and those who did their best to stop them—the nature of bureaucratic criminality is that it is neither. Institutions don’t have intentions. And even the human members of those administrations are seldom solely good or evil. Ultimately, the dichotomy of “guilt” and “innocence” is a simplified rubric that we impose on world; it doesn’t exist in the nature of things and people themselves. A French court declared Papon guilty, and generations of Holocaust historiography have done the same for the Vichy regime that he served. But in a German-occupied country where 75% of the Jewish population survived the war, that is our legacy as much as it is theirs.

That said, we must remember that—even if more Jews did survive in countries that collaborated with Nazi Germany (which they did), and even if most collaborators protected local Jews for the ‘right’ reasons (which they did not)—collaboration itself can’t easily be justified. Ultimately, collaborators were only allowed to stay in office under German occupation because they were otherwise faithful servants of the German cause. As such, they played an important but indirect role in the perpetration of Nazi violence elsewhere on the Continent. International hierarchy—both in the German case and more broadly—is a negotiated equilibrium between a hegemon and local leaders, willing to trade compliance on some issues for autonomy and assistance on others. It may be true that some collaborators served evil regimes with the aim of serving the lesser of two evils. But we mustn’t forget that, unlike Maurice Papon, the best people are those who don’t have to provide such nuanced testimony in the first place.