Tatjana Tönsmeyer

Occupied Societies. Conceptual reflections on the history of experiences of everyday life under German occupation in the Second World War^*.

Citation: Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Occupied Societies. Conceptual Reflections on the History of Experiences of Everyday Life under German Occupation in the Second World War [translated by Francis Ipgrave], in: Online Edition “Societies under German Occupation”, 28th June 2023. DOI: 10.57886/1

When the German Reich surrendered on 8 May 1945, it is estimated that 36.5 million people had died in Europe as a direct result of the war, more than half of whom, at least 19 million, were civilians, including the six million victims of the Shoah. The continent was literally in ruins; there were 25 million homeless people in the Soviet Union alone.¹ Furthermore, millions of people had been pressed into forced labour to support the German war economy – in the Reich but as well in the occupied territories. Research speaks of 36 million unfree labour relations in the German-occupied territories, referring thereby to forced and slave labour as well as to labour relations based on compulsory labour. ² Even those who survived and had been spared forced labour had, in many cases, experienced years of a catastrophic supply problems and an existential shortage of goods.³ What these figures don’t tell is that each individual survivor had a personal story to relate about the years of occupation - and these tales were almost all about the suffering and pain resulting from exploitation and persecution, violence, humiliation, fear and loss.

In view of the fact that the German occupation meant a profound, and not infrequently crisis-ridden incision into the daily lives of some 235 million people from Tromsø to Heraklion, and from Smolensk to Bordeaux, it is remarkable that occupation as a history of experience has found less resonance in research than the commemorative and cultural treatment of the Second World War, or the history of the institutional and political occupation structures, which often tend to focus on the German actors.⁴

To a large extent, this is down to the terms and concepts that structure the relevant research. This article, therefore, takes its starting point from common interpretations and shows that "resistance and collaboration" are to be understood, rather, as terms of social self-description while, in Holocaust research, the figure of the bystander isincreasingly reflected in view of the passivity inscribed in the term. Accordingly, new conceptual approaches are required for investigations into both the diversity and the impact of the experience of occupation, which affected all areas of daily life. Under occupation, all people in the occupied countries were fundamentally hierarchised according to the racist and utilitarian criteria of the German occupiers while, at the same time, previously existing social, ethnic, religious or political antagonisms persisted and new ones, triggered by the occupation, were added. Between 1939 and 1945, occupied societies were thus societies in which specific dynamics developed because their members were subjected to a wide range of enormous pressures, both socially and emotionally, but also with regard to gender structures and their horizons of orientation which, in many cases had become just as obscure as the consequences of their behaviour had become unforeseeable. For those forced to live under it, occupation imposed constraints on action but sometimes opened up certain possibilities as well. It should therefore be conceived of as a context of experience on its own, under the term "occupied societies", since it is associated with specific logics of behaviour and forms of action, including survival strategies, within the framework conditions of violence.

Early Attempts at Making Sense of Occupation: Resistance and Collaboration

As is proved by the commemorations surrounding the major anniversaries of the end of the war in Europe or the liberation of Auschwitz, just as much as by opinion polls, memories of the Second World War and the genocide have not faded, despite the amount of time that has since passed. On the contrary, these events continue to play an important role in the memory cultures of European countries, precisely because their identity is often based on the legacy of the Second World War.

The master narratives of the early post-war period celebrated the victory over the German Reich or fascism as a (self-)liberation; accordingly, armed forces, including the resistance, played a prominent role here.⁵ In the 1950s and 1960s, these narratives in many European countries underwent an integrative shaping as ever larger populations were included in an identity-forming narrative. In particular, where there was a lack of “uncontaminated” elites, the memory of resistance served to reconstruct national identity and unity, or, in the words of Pieter Lagrou, to restore the "legitimacy of the majority"⁶. Western and Eastern European narratives agreed that "the nation" - for example the "true" Poles, Czechs, French, Dutch - had resisted the occupiers.

This finding certainly has its particular national nuances and variants. In France, Charles de Gaulle emphasised his own role in the resistance as a central source of political legitimacy, so as to represent himself as the embodiment of republican citizenship, of the rejection of foreign influences and of a timeless Frenchness ("la France éternelle"). This detachment of the concept of resistance from the historical circumstances made its broad interpretation possible so that, through this, and by rehabilitating the person of Pétain, members of the Vichy regime could be credited with also having opposed the occupation within the scope of their possibilities, and could therefore also be integrated into an anti-left coalition. In the context of the Cold War, on the other hand, communist resistance was excluded from this narrative.⁷ Redefined in this way, the Résistance became the core of French post-war identity, a phenomenon described by Henry Rousso as "Résistancialisme".⁸

In Belgium, too, where the nature of the Belgian political community and nation was negotiated in the context of the memory of war and occupation, an inclusive narrative was quickly established which saw Belgium as a society of resistance - sustained by anonymous, disciplined patriots whose "quiet" (i.e. non-military) and at the core apolitical heroism had been demonstrated in the support for downed Allied pilots or in intelligence activities.⁹ The Dutch narrative, in turn, also made use of national-moral categories, which were shaped above all by the doyen of Dutch World War historiography, Louis de Jong, and his colleagues at the RIOD, the National Institute for War Documentation.¹⁰ In this, the Netherlands was portrayed as a small but "courageous and steadfast" country that was ready to resist, or carried out "internal resistance".¹¹

Resistance was heroically exaggerated in the Soviet narrative of the Second World War. While victory was initially attributed primarily to the outstanding leadership qualities of "Generalissimo" Stalin, after his death the Soviet myth of victory and superiority was based on representations of the war as a joint effort and the outstanding accomplishment of the entire Soviet people.¹² Recently, following the start of the war against Ukraine, these interpretations have once again been sharpened by Vladimir Putin in the justification narrative of the "denazification" of Ukraine.¹³ The Polish resistance narrative, on the other hand, finds its most striking incarnation in the memory of the Warsaw Uprising.¹⁴ Whilst, in Stalinist post-war Poland, the fact that the Red Army did not support this resistance against the German occupiers led by the Armia Krajowa resulted in the official suppression of its memory, the anti-communist opposition responded to later attempts to propagate it as a "people's uprising" by raising questions about the Soviet role in it. The occupation years, as a whole, entered the collective memory as the "Years of Death", and were also represented for a long time by Auschwitz, as a prominent site of Polish suffering, and memorialised through the narrative of the endangered and yet indomitable Polish nation.¹⁵

In Slovakia, too, an uprising, the so-called Slovak National Uprising, takes a central place in national remembrance. This is an example of how an inclusive expansion of the resistance narrative took place in the post-state socialist era: Since 1989, the narrative of the nation in resistance is no longer embodied only in the communist partisans fighting together with the Red Army, but also integrates national Slovak forces as well as Jewish and foreign fighters, thus demonstrating the nation’s membership in the European "family of nations". This enables an interpretation of the Slovak state which reduces it to its political elite, who are held to be solely responsible for Slovak participation in the Holocaust.¹⁶

It would be easy to mention further variants of this sort of memorialisation but, in all of them, and in each context of instrumentalization, the common finding is that these inclusive narratives of national resistance to the German occupiers were, and continue to be, central to identity-forming narratives in post-war Europe and that, in this, ever larger groups of the population were continuously incorporated. Within the context of the Cold War, this was accompanied in Western Europe by a tacit exclusion of communist and, in state-socialist Europe, bourgeois, national(istic) and Jewish resistance. From the 1970s, and particularly since 1989/90, these "patriotic" narratives began to be challenged, and were replaced by a "genocide memory", whose moral definitions arose from transnationally led debates about the past, conducted in the name of ethical-universal values.¹⁷

More recent Holocaust research will be discussed below. At this point, it should first be noted that narratives of resistance carry with them, as antipodes, the concept of "collaboration". As great as the appreciation of the resistance was, and with it the emphasis on the unity of the "true" nation, as much were post-war societies united in their rejection and condemnation of those whom they accused of having betrayed the unity of the nation by working together with the German occupiers as "collaborators"¹⁸.

This general finding, like the resistance narrative before it, also has variants in a European perspective. In the Soviet Union, any long-term contact with the German side, including that of forced labourers and prisoners of war, was suspected of being a form of collaboration and often resulted in arrest by the NKVD as well as legal proceedings and draconian punishments.¹⁹ In other countries, too, in the "heated phase" at the end of the war and in the immediate post-war period, the leaders of the "collaboration governments" were prosecuted as so-called quislings²⁰ in retribution trials.²¹ It was also not uncommon for women to be accused of "horizontal collaboration", beaten and publicly humiliated by having their hair shorn.²² Convictions were sometimes accompanied by the confiscation of property, reductions in food rations, the denial of a "certificate of national reliability" or the removal of the right to vote on the basis of "unworthiness".²³ In sum, it can be seen that, with the restoration of the "legitimacy of the majority", social and gender orders were (re)established.

The concept of collaboration proves to be a constructed one, even where it was used within the framework of procedures based by the rule of law.²⁴ This is all the more true for Eastern Europe. Thus a large number of party members who had not been evacuated²⁵, but had remained in the occupied territories, had to undergo an internal examination by local party offices in the liberated Soviet Union. Even if, as a result of personnel shortages, not all those who were considered to be incriminated lost their positions, they were still considered unreliable and were placed under increased surveillance. The local press had a further group in its sights: They contrasted male heroes with the weak and faithless women who had lost their honour in (sexual) contact with the German occupiers. Although submittals to the party organs from this period show that a large part of the population was well aware of the shades of grey between "betrayal" or "collaboration" and "loyalty"²⁶, these nuances soon became lost in the myths of victory and superiority described above, and could no longer be articulated individually.

This was only possible in fiction, albeit in a rudimentary form. Konstantin Simonov, probably the best-known and most widely read Soviet war correspondent, has his heroine Sofia Leonidovna become worked up about a neighbour in the story of the same name: "It is understandable that she works [as a typist in the city administration, to be understood: where she had contacts with collaborators, T.T.], after all she has to feed the children, but why complain forever? [...] She always complains: 'It's terrible, I'm a former Komsomol member, and only my husband, he's a political leader, what will he think of me when he comes back [from the front]?'", only then to have Sofia categorically declare immediately afterwards: "If he's not a donkey, then he must be able to think that she had three children to feed, or else he shouldn't have retreated - one of the two."²⁷ However, since the regime did not accept the care of children as justification for contact with the occupiers, the character who embodies pro-Soviet resistance in the novella (a young woman named Masha) reacts in a perturbed manner. Simonov protects the character of Sofia from rejection or condemnation by staging her as a reincarnation of Prince Bolkonsky from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, who falls in battle against Napoleon.²⁸ Just as Bolkonsky saw the French as enemies and criminals, so did Sofia Leonidovna look upon the Germans. She therefore supports the resistance and, with her eyes wide open, undergoes arrest and torture in order to enable Masha to escape. Masha remains the positive Soviet heroine but, en passant,Simonov weaves in aspects of the everyday reality of those people who were unwilling to sacrifice their own lives. In this way, he opens small windows into what can be said without questioning the conviction of the political leadership that the loyalty of Soviet citizens belongs to the state, and not to their families - the figure of the neighbour remains negatively connoted.

It would go beyond the scope of this article to go through the construction mechanisms of what is commonly referred to as "collaboration" for each occupied country. What can be said, however, is that the concept of collaboration - beyond the variety of interactions between occupied and occupiers, which need to be examined more closely - marks the boundaries for those who can neither be integrated into the narrative of resistance nor tacitly excluded from it. Accordingly, the talk of collaboration also represents a creation of meaning with identity-building intentions: It separates an "us" from a "them" - the "us" of the many who resisted from the "them" of the few who became traitors (and thus had to answer to the courts). The concept of collaboration therefore does not aim to shed light on possibilities and opportunities for action under the specific conditions of occupation, but rather, as part of the narratives of the post-war period which create meaning and identity, it clouds the analysis of these. In other words: The terms "resistance" and "collaboration" are terms of social (self-)description. As such, they were not developed in order to enable an analytical contribution to the understanding of occupied societies, and they therefore also tend to obscure the perception of the diversity of interactions between occupied and occupiers, as well as the resulting behavioural options available to them in the reality of everyday life under occupation.

Impulses from recent Holocaust research

Recent Holocaust research provides helpful suggestions for the description of occupation societies, including Jewish populations. This has become almost impossible to overlook in recent years, especially with regard to Eastern Europe. However, it is evident that Holocaust research, long characterised by a perpetrator-victim dichotomy, is striving for a stronger contextualisation of the events of persecution within their particular social environment.

An early impulse for this came from Raul Hilberg and the concept of the bystander heused to refer to the multitude of actors beyond the immediate perpetrators and victims. The focal point of the bystander concept, as used by Raul Hilberg and earlier by Michael Marrus, is the question of the assistance provided to persecuted Jews. Accordingly, attention is focussed on the Allies, the neutral states or the Vatican.²⁹ However, the term suffers from a conceptual narrowing which it has experiences in the context of Holocaust education through its moral charge.³⁰

At the same time, the closer research came to the actual sites of mass murder and the more it became clear that the war and the Shoah could no longer be regarded as separate entities, the more it became apparent that people who belonged neither to the group of German perpetrators nor to the group of Jewish victims were present at the sites which were now being more closely examined. In his much-discussed book "Neighbours", Jan T. Gross demanded, emphatically, that these be included in the research to a greater extent.³¹ In the meantime, a number of studies have been published which show that occupation created constraints as well as new options for action for members of the local populations. These also included direct or indirect participation in the German project of murdering the Jews. Driven by the desire to enrich themselves on Jewish property, locals denounced hidden Jews and participated in downright hunts for them.³² Under the conditions of occupation and the violence it unleashed, long established local anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic stereotypes were re-activated³³ in the form of persecution practices, with fatal consequences for the victims.

However, local populations were also involved when it came to ascriptions of identity, or their denial: In an effort not toappear Jewish to the occupiers, who were unfamiliar with the area, crosses were nailed to house doors or images of saints were placed in windows so as to clearly distinguish "Jews" from "non-Jews".³⁴ Elsewhere, Ukrainian and Russian relatives of German-born family groups also found themselves categorised as "ethnic group members" (so-called Volksgruppenangehörige). In rural southern Ukraine, this could mean preferential treatment in the supply of seeds and agricultural equipment, but could also lead to the recruitment of males as militia, often used as auxiliary troops in mass shootings.³⁵ As Omer Bartov points out, the virulence of autochthonous ethnic conflicts in many border regions of eastern and south-eastern Europe led to a further dynamization of the murder of the Jews set in motion by the German occupation.³⁶

One of the central findings of recent Holocaust research is that, particularly in the so-called killing fields of Eastern Europe, members of local societies were present as "third parties" alongside German perpetrators and Jewish victims.³⁷ They, however, were not passive spectators, as has been shown by recent research, which is also sensitive to gender history and focuses more on forms of agency beyond the immediate contexts of power and killing.³⁸ In the vicinity of the execution sites, even those who were supposedly "only" watching often signalled to the victims that they could not count on help if they tried to escape.³⁹

All in all, the impact of the experience of occupation and the often-existential impact of violence, but also that of hunger and lack of food, the tearing apart of families and social networks, and the loss of work or housing⁴⁰, demanded that people behave and act in many everyday situations. Since occupation also opened up new possibilities for action, an understanding of these local actors as passive spectators, or as "victims by dint of having to watch", falls short. This is how Patrick Desbois sees the local population, about whom he writes: "These were people who saw what happened but could do nothing. Powerless people who still ask themselves whether they are guilty or innocent".⁴¹ It becomes apparent here that the concept of victimhood itself is subject to historical processes of change.⁴²

It is therefore insufficient to describe the realities of occupation through the categories of the bystander or, as shown above, those of resistance and collaboration, since these do not cover the broad spectrum of the everyday actions of people who, especially in Eastern Europe, could themselves become victims at any time, but some of whom also became perpetrators. Rather, occupation must be conceptualised as a distinct context of experience, with its own specific forms of behaviour and strategies for survival within the framework conditions of violence.

According to Tony Judt, the Second World War was a "war of occupation"⁴³. Recent estimates suggest that 235 million people across the continent were affected, living under German occupation during the war years, from northern Norway to Greece and from Russia to western France. Even though occupation took differing forms, and there were both military and civilian-administered, annexed and protectorate territories⁴⁴, one of the characteristics of occupation is that it is always to be understood as a form of war-induced foreign rule⁴⁵, accompanied by a disempowerment of statehood on the part of the occupied.⁴⁶ Furthermore, occupation is usually, and therefore also in the Second World War, associated with the physical and/or regulative presence of the occupiers. As a result, a relational, non-static and asymmetrical relationship develops between the occupiers and the occupied societies. Members of societies are therefore often directly or indirectly "occupier-driven" in their actions and forms of behaviour.⁴⁷ German historiography in particular, in which perpetrator research plays an important role, often writes occupation history as the history of German crimes. The survival strategies of the occupied, as observed in Poland, often take a subordinate place in comparison.⁴⁸

This finding needs to be taken more fully into account, particularly since occupation, even if it had regional variations, essentially had major consequences for all dimensions of daily life. In addition to the experience of violence, these included the rapidly deteriorating supply situation, especially with regard to food, but also other daily necessities such as clothing, shoes or medicine, as well as electricity, gas or water. Not infrequently, hungry or starving rump families found themselves in (partially) destroyed dwellings which were often no longer connected to a functioning infrastructure. Increasingly compelled to carry out forced labour, and at the same time threatened with being sent to work in the Reich if they lost their jobs, women, children and the elderly in particular had to walk further and further distances, since public transport was limited, queue for increasingly longer hours for food, secure the procurement of rationing stamps and obtain certificates for a multitude of everyday needs at offices and German departments: from clothing cards and relocation permits to travel passes and registration cards which entitled the holder to buy a ticket for transportation.⁴⁹ Many of the practices necessary to meet every day needs were criminalised by the occupiers, such as shopping on the black market or travelling without the appropriate papers.⁵⁰

It is no question that, even under these circumstances, it did make a difference whether hunger was the result, for example, of deliberate German strategy, as in parts of Ukraine, the consequence of shipping restrictions and the rapid collapse of the local administration, as in Greece, or resulted from the collapse of economic cycles and extensive requisitions, as in France.⁵¹ Despite these obvious differences, however, there were also commonalities at the level of experience and practice, such as the experience of hunger itself, the dependence on the black market and barter, and the fear of being caught by the local police or German forces.⁵² In fact, especially when looking at the food supply, it becomes clear that, under occupation, all people in the occupied countries were essentially categorised and hierarchised according to the racist and utilitarian criteria of the German occupiers.⁵³

In the same way, both differences and similarities can also be identified for many other dimensions of the everyday experience of German occupation in the Second World War. In this context, this article seeks to take up the Polish observation, as formulated, for example, by Robert Traba⁵⁴, and to demonstrate that the behaviour of those under occupation was much more varied in its characteristics than previous interpretations, primarily aimed at making sense of the situation, have thus far suggested. Therefore, in order to address the everyday dimensions of action and experience⁵⁵ of non-German actors in their interactions with the occupiers or the occupation, we propose the term “occupied society(ies)”.

What connects the concept of war society to that of occupied society is that both social formations were the result of social, cultural and political transformation processes of "peace" societies; from these transformation processes arose experiences of violence, forms of rule, social relations and social participation.⁵⁶ However, while studies centred upon the concept of war society focus primarily on Germany (and England/ Great Britain), and essentially ask what enabled the respective society to wage war by focussing on agencies and measures of population mobilisation for the purpose of crisis management in the sense of meeting the war aims and maintaining war morale⁵⁷, the concept of occupation society takes the establishment of a violent foreign rule as its starting point and inquires into the related dimensions of experience. To put it more pointedly: The concept of war society seeks to investigate interactions between the population and their "own" regime (even if not everyone supported this regime), while the concept of occupied society focuses on interactions between the local population and the foreign occupying power.⁵⁸

The concept of occupation society, as developed here, also takes up the postulate of not reducing the history of Jewish people to a passive history of suffering, but rather of integrating it into wider events⁵⁹, since Jews were also members of the occupied societies until they were murdered or interned in camps without external contact. Their options for action were undoubtedly enormously restricted by the transformation processes which accompanied the occupation, but survival would not have been possible without their own agency and action, particularly under these conditions.

Compared to the majority of peacetime societies, occupied societies are also characterised by marked differences in their gender and generational composition: Men, especially those of military age, were conscripted, at the front, killed in action, prisoners of war or compelled to conduct forced labour. The societies still “at home” therefore consisted of a higher percentage of women⁶⁰, children, young people and old people than in peacetime⁶¹. These groups should therefore also be analysed as central actors in occupied societies.

When it was mentioned above that the actions and behaviour of people in an occupied country were often "occupier-driven", the driving force that comes to mind is the violence used by the occupiers. According to Dieter Pohl, German occupation "changed the face of Europe"⁶². What is obvious for large areas of eastern and south-eastern Europe also applies, albeit with some reservations, to many other areas of occupation, as the high number of civilian victims shows: it also exceeds the number of military victims in Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.⁶³

Moreover, occupation violence was not limited to killing. Everyday life under German occupation was also marked by all kinds of assaults, involving injuries, threats, humiliation and demonstrations of armed superiority. Furthermore, experiences at the workplace could be as threatening as humiliating - as work took on an increasingly coercive character in many places - or the experience of being hierarchised according to the racist and utilitarian ideas of the occupiers was also felt, as reflected, for example, in staggered allocations of food and heating materials.⁶⁴

According to Doris Bergen, in view of the violence of the occupiers, there was "no option of non-involvement"⁶⁵. The ongoing existential threat to familiar living conditions therefore usually constituted a crisis⁶⁶ for those affected: Assumptions of what was normal were increasingly questioned, behavioural expectations and routines became uncertain, what had previously been reliable corroded, and the feeling of being deprived of rights and protections rapidly spread. Occupied societies thus turn out to be societies whose order is massively threatened and which are thus under considerable stress.⁶⁷ Like other societies under conditions of violence, they seem to disintegrate group, as if the rules of social action prescribed by mores, customs and regulations were suspended. In fact, however, trust and mistrust are rearranged, representing, according to Jan Philipp Reemtsma, "strategies of coming to terms with the unclear"⁶⁸.

For occupation societies, it is important, therefore - with a differentiated perspective of their various groups - to reflect further on the effects of the anxious experience of the threat and use of violence and to enquire into these strategies of (attempting to) come to terms with the unclear, since this represents a central task of the members of occupation societies in everyday life. In these attempts, social relationships, especially family and kinship, play a prominent role.⁶⁹ Mutual ties and obligations, secured by conventions, made family solidarity, in particular, a "mutual insurance in times of need"⁷⁰. However, this did not function as an abstract norm, but had to be lived – both before the emergency situation occurred as well as during it. This provided not only the basis for the makeshift economy in deprived areas or for efforts to hide sons with relatives in order to prevent them from being sent to work in the Reich, but it was also reflected in the composition of bunkers in which Jews hoped to survive.⁷¹ Family-based strategies of (attempting to) find some sort of security in an uncertain world could also look like this: of several adult sons, one would join the local police force, while his brother joined the resistance⁷², meaning that a form of contact existed between the various camps.

Under occupation, face-to-face relationships such as those with family and relatives were all the more important because supra-regional relationships were rendered more difficult by the restrictions on mobility imposed by the occupiers, and because the occupied states were limited in the extent to which they could take care of the interests of their citizens. The restriction of the welfare state, which was in any case developed to varying degrees, once again forced the members of occupied societies to turn to the solidarity structures offered by family and neighbours, especially since support benefits, for example for the unemployed, could only be received by registering with the labour offices, which could in turn result in being sent to work in the Reich.⁷³ Family-based strategies of survival and attempts to achieve security through the solidarity of relatives were therefore at the heart of many new arrangements of trust and mistrust, fed by the hope that the family could generate a sense of belonging and a minimum of social reliability, even in crisis situations.

The extent to which these strategies, which were based on (idealised) assumptions of normality, proved to work in occupation societies which were under massive strain is something that further research will have to consider in more detail. However, we know from Holocaust studies that (young) children and their mothers had the worst chances of survival, with parents, and apparently mothers in particular, often finding themselves faced with irresolvable dilemmas, that is, choiceless choices⁷⁴.

Further close social relationships also included relations with neighbours. Not only in rural regions, but also among the less well-off in the urban environment, informal structures often developed at a neighbourhood level, with a clear obligation to provide mutual support.⁷⁵ Their role in the context of occupation societies, placed under enormous social pressures, has yet to be investigated in any great detail, particularly for Western and Northern Europe. The only initial findings available to us are taken from Holocaust research on occupied Poland and the occupied western territories of the Soviet Union, and here it becomes apparent that the Jewish population, particularly in rural regions, often came to the bitter realisation that they had been excluded from neighbourly relations following the occupation. While, in recent years, the assistance provided has increasingly been taken into account⁷⁶, for a long time it was not recognised that "hiding" and "denunciation" could also represent successive forms of dealing with persecuted Jewish persons. In fact, it is now well documented that Jews were not infrequently betrayed, denounced and murdered by their neighbours. Survivors' accounts therefore speak of the great fear they had of their neighbours, which was often greater than their fear of "the Germans", since the latter rarely came to remote villages and could not distinguish Jews from non-Jews without local assistance.⁷⁷ However, the murderous campaigns of summer 1942, at the latest, made very clear to the local populations that "the Germans" were masters of life and death, and that Jewish life no longer had any value.⁷⁸

This "insight" had enormous consequences, as demonstrated by studies on rural occupation areas: Locals also participated in the hunt for hidden Jews set in motion by the occupiers, and this in turn also caused fear among those who hid Jews since, time and again, entire families were murdered by the villagers, along with those they had sheltered. Sometimes such incidents were the trigger for further tragedies, when farmers who had been hiding Jews feared so much for their own safety that they themselves killed those whom they had sometimes sheltered for months.⁷⁹

A multitude of such episodes indicates that, according to the logic of the village, hiding Jews was partly understood as taking an unfair advantage in the redistribution of Jewish property. This was all the more reprehensible in the eyes of village communities because, in the event of discovery, the entire village could be affected, i.e. those as well who had not profited from hiding Jews. By contrast, empathy with the persecuted, which was substantiated as help, was apparently rather rarely part of the communicatively generated village consensus.⁸⁰ In other words: In village logics, hiding often meant a "privatisation" of the "benefit", while the possibly catastrophic consequences had to be borne by the whole community. This therefore violated the norms of group behaviour established under occupation. Those who did not comply with these ran the risk of turning the village community against them, and this could extend to the use of violence.⁸¹

The episodes underlying the logics outlined above shed light on what life under occupation meant, since they clearly illustrate the enormous strain which members of occupation societies were placed under. The findings taken from the context of research on the Shoah point to more general social mechanisms and draw attention to the vulnerability⁸² of certain groups in the occupied societies. They also make clear that the arrangements of trust and mistrust found in each case always remained precarious - not least because the localscould not control occupation policies but, for some, the occupation opened up new options. Enrichment through the acquisition of Jewish property was an essential part of this, and thus it seems reasonable to examine anti-Semitism as a set of practices.⁸³ What speaks for this, and this applies beyond the context of persecution, is that, from a socio-psychological point of view, people seek to orient their actions to social settings and valid social norms, so that they can understand them as appropriate and meaningful in the situation.⁸⁴ However, not every case in which people placed themselves in danger was perceived as unreasonable in the situation, as is shown by the examples of women and children in the territory of the occupied Soviet Union who, in the vicinity of the large POW camps, sought to help feed imprisoned Red Army soldiers threatened with starvation. This was apparently based on the conviction that, if women behaved in this way throughout the occupied Soviet Union, their own husbands, fathers or brothers would also have a chance of returning home.⁸⁵

The differences in the treatment of differing groups of people in need of help requires further research. A more precise understanding of this phenomenon could be gained from the observation that members of the group are treated more positively the more explicitly the boundaries are drawn vis-à-vis non-members. As a consequence of this mechanism, the latter thus have less chance of securing empathy and help.⁸⁶ Investigations of village communities confirm that those demarcations which the occupiers drew in an extremely brutal manner between "Jews" and "non-Jews" (and elsewhere also between "Germans" and "non-Germans") where confirmed in these societies. In comparing occupation societies in Western and Eastern Europe, one could therefore ask whether, in view of the differing levels and forms of violence, the drawing up or confirmation of group boundaries, for example through village communities, also differed across the continent.

Two further aspects need to be considered in this context: The likelihood of developing feelings of empathy for others, out of which solidary behaviour can grow, depends on their perceived characteristics.⁸⁷ Traditional anti-Judaism and violent anti-Semitism however rarely gave rise to empathy and a desire to help persecuted Jewish neighbours. The self-perception of village populations as "poor", along with the simultaneous stereotyping of Jews as "rich", also contributed to the fact that villagers, mostly under the guidance or with the approval of local elites⁸⁸, rather demonstrated solidarity against the persecuted. In this context, social psychologists speak of relative deprivation, based on perceived injustices, and understand this to mean a feeling of dissatisfaction triggered by the belief that one is doing badly compared to others. These feelings are particularly pronounced when the desired aim is close, but the last step to achieving it seems blocked, thus triggering an even greater degree of anger the closer the goal supposedly is.⁸⁹ This logic must be taken into account with regard to the enrichment gained through the acquisition of Jewish property. It also reinforces the importance of giving a higher research priority to the emotional character of occupation societies and their effects on concrete actions.

The aim of this article is to outline occupation as a specific context of experience, with specific forms of behaviour and strategies of survival under the conditions of violence. The areas of research which emerge from this include the investigation of attempts to come to terms with the unclear through recourse to family networks and other solidarity structures or the examination of the behavioural options which, under the conditions of occupation, appeared situationally appropriate to the local actors. This also includes an exploration of the emotions underpinning such behaviour, as well as of the fact that the consequences of actions may have been unforeseeable, which is essential for an understanding of occupation societies and cannot be restricted to Eastern Europe, which constitutes the current focus of this research.

Among the desiderata in the study of occupation societies are not only the effects on social relations, including the handling of experiences of violence, but also horizons of orientation, ways of speaking and rules governing what could be said under occupation. On the one hand, it must be borne in mind that the disempowerment of statehood brought about by occupation was often accompanied by the formation of hybrid state structures, which found its expression in the rise of local functionaries who were now subject to German leadership. Although it is known that the number of such local officials was in the hundreds of thousands, there continues to be a lack of studies focusing on practices that ask what behavioural options these institutions of hybrid statehood opened up for members of occupying societies and what horizons of orientation were reflected in them. In turn, rules governing “what could be said” also found their expression in rumours, which can be interpreted as a struggle "for the right language for what is to come"⁹⁰, and in denunciations, which represent a specific form of participation in occupation rule. Overall, the role of those actors involved in both local and supra-regional sense-making, and their interpretation, is beginning to be investigated, and this includes the role of churches and religious communities as well as organisations of national unity.

Conclusion

In the term “occupied society”, the considerations above formulate and provide a conceptual proposition. To this end, they take the fruitful ongoing research on the Second World War and mass crimes as a starting point, in order to contribute to a systematisation of the dimensions of experience associated with occupation and to open these up to a European comparison.

The core of the term occupation society is that it understands occupation as a form of war-induced foreign rule that is associated with the physical and/or regulatory presence of the occupiers, meaning that members of occupation societies are often "occupier-driven" in their actions and forms of behaviour. Occupation also entails the disempowerment of statehood, which often results in the emergence of hybrid state structures. Questions about the relationship between locality and statehood, including the behavioural options that the institutions of hybrid statehood opened up for members of the occupied societies, have yet to be properly discussed.

With regard to the actors, this concept indicates a stronger gender and generational sensitivity, since occupied societies differed from peacetime societies in that, due to the absence of many men as a result of the war, those present at the local level consisted to a much higher degree of women, children, the young and the elderly. Their possibilities for action and patterns of behavior, survival strategies and assumptions of normality, consensus-building and the rules governing what could be said, horizons of orientation as well as the agencies that mediated these (supra-regionally), all make up a central research interest which extends beyond the narrower context of German mass crimes.

In all of this, regional differences in occupation structures play an important role, as does the precise location in the chronology of the war. Overall, however, it is clear that occupation confronted members of the occupied societies with a variety of options, ranging from experiencing repression and persecution to opportunities for enrichment and social advancement. This demonstrates that occupation – though man-made, but in this regard like natural disasters – helps us have a closer look on assumptions about normality, on which the functioning of societies is based,⁹¹ since they appear as "the ordinary" within the extraordinary situation of war and occupation⁹². In a European perspective, the concept of the occupied society aims to contribute to unlocking this everyday life in the extraordinary.

Translation: Francis Ipgrave

Matthias Bremm, Laura Eckl, Francis Ipgrave, Agnes Laba, Daniela Zimmer

Guidelines for the online portal “Societies under German Occupation – Experiences and Everyday Life in World War II”

Citation: Matthias Bremm/Laura Eckl/Francis Ipgrave/Agnes Laba/Daniela Zimmer, Guidelines for the Online Portal “Societies under German Occupation – Experiences and Everyday Life in World War II” [translated by Francis Ipgrave], in: Online Edition “Societies under German Occupation”, 28th June 2023. DOI: 10.57886/2

1. Opening remarks: Online edition and print version

This portal offers the online counterpart to the print edition "Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe", recently named one of the Best Historical Materials published in 2021 and 2022 by the American Library Association¹. Both editions, print and online, offer a source collection that documents everyday experiences in occupied societies in Europe during the Second World War, focusing in particular on hunger and shortage. The print edition, located at the University of Wuppertal, started as a joint project carried out between 2012 and 2021 in cooperation with the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, financed by the Leibniz Association and supported by the German Historical Institute in Paris as well as the University of Wuppertal. The result of this cooperation was the publication of a two-volume edition containing 600 translated and edited sources from throughout German-occupied Europe.² This online edition builds on the work of the print edition. The hybrid format is intended to combine the advantages of a print and online edition for research and academic teaching. In cooperation with theTrier Center for Digital Humanities, this online portal was designed to enable interactive work with the sources. The implementation of a digital edition in the format of an online portal was funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2018 until 2023 and received further support from the University of Wuppertal.

The project ‘Societies Under German Occupation – Experiences and Everyday Life in World War II’ is based upon an international network of academic experts in the field from throughout the European continent. What you have before you, therefore, is a project that is transnational in structure and organisation. The network consists of three levels. At the first level, guiding the project throughout, were the general editors. This team was assisted, at the following level, by a network of country supervisors, each with a responsibility for overseeing the selection and annotation of the sources from their respective countries. In this they were supported, at the third level, by their own groups of researchers – generally young academics. Finally, the network was completed by experts from the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, who brought their programming and design expertise in working on online editions to the team. Alongside this network, the work of the project was closely coordinated and supervised by the project coordinator and the managing editor. In their work overseeing the implementation of the project guidelines and the preparation of the selected documents for publication, they, in turn, were assisted by a team of nearly 40 translators and numerous proof-readers.

The goal of the project ‘Societies under German Occupation – Experiences and Everyday Life in World War II’ is a scholarly portal which contributes to research on the history of everyday life under German occupation during the Second World War. It is aimed at a readership that is presumed to have a general level of historical knowledge, but not necessarily a detailed knowledge of World War II and occupation. The edition builds on the concept of “occupied societies”³, which can be found on the portal under “About the Edition”/ “Guiding Concept”. It has been developed to describe central criteria that demonstrate how occupied societies differ from peacetime societies, but also from war societies or the so-called “Lagergesellschaften” (“camp societies”) of the concentration camps. Central to this concept is a pan-European approach which investigates both commonalities and differences within the everyday life of the various local occupied societies. It also enquires into the specific conditions of life and survival under German occupation and elaborates upon the agency of the local societies. One of the key issues facing occupied societies all over Europe was securing sufficient foodstuffs. The sources presented here therefore all document “shortage and supply” as a central aspect of everyday life under German occupation in Europe. Wherever the German Wehrmacht arrived, hunger and shortage soon made themselves felt. Though the extent of this differed from country to country and, often, between cities and the countryside, local people were forced to develop their own strategies for survival.

Given the vastness of the occupied territory concerned and the fact that it was inhabited by about 230 million people, the corpus of sources presented here is of an exemplary character. Careful attention has been paid to ensure that the sources selected allow the user to gain a representative picture, both in geographical terms and with regard to the thematic aspects of the various experiences related to shortage and supply under German occupation in Europe. The sources have been researched and compiled in various archives, from the local to the national level, and the researchers responsible collected their sources according to guidelines binding for the entire international team. These guidelines urged researchers to pay attention to the specific forms of the occupation regime (annexation, military occupation, civil administration, etc.), to identify sources from different phases of the occupation, to focus regionally on both urban centres and the countryside, to represent differing social, national, and ethnic groups within the occupied societies and to highlight specifics about everyday life under conditions of hunger and shortage in the respective country. These guidelines were designed to ensure the exemplarity and representativity of the selected sources, as well as to highlight the similarities, differences and specificities in the experience of German occupation throughout Europe.

Furthermore, all technical decisions were informed by the latest historical research findings on the subject, and these were then implemented in the digital edition.⁴ These decisions were brought together with the latest findings on application options and user behaviour in online portals⁵ and, thus, significantly shaped the structure of the online portal. The team in Wuppertal and Trier wanted to ensure that the online edition, with all its tools, serves the purpose of transferring academic knowledge, for example reflections on concepts such as “occupied societies”, to the design of research and working tools.

These guidelines (as well as the tutorials which are located as pop-ups, helping the user navigate the search instruments) are designed to serve as a point of reference for the reader in finding their way through the online edition. The tutorials explain the various tools in practical terms. The guidelines and tutorials refer to each other but can also be used separately. The following outlines the manner in which the sources have been collected, translated, annotated and presented, providing the reader with an explanation of the online portal’s structure, in particular its various search and access options to the source corpus, as well as the theories, methods and technical choices behind them.

2. Editorial Approach

2.1. Transfer of print guidelines into the digital space

In the process of the project, which started as an analogue one, workflow and editorial guidelines had to be transferred and further developed to meet the specific requirements of a digital format, whilst at the same time maintaining the basic principles that had been fundamental to the research and preparation of the sources in the first place. At the beginning of the workflow for the print edition, a carefully constructed catalogue of over 100 research questions had been drawn-up, which served to outline the criteria by which the sources for this publication were to be selected. The researchers then identified over 2,500 sources from local, regional and national archives according to the binding specifications for selection. These were analysed and discussed within the network before being whittled down to the roughly 600 sources which are to be found in this online edition. In a second step, a commentator worked in close cooperation both with the editorial team and their particular country supervisor, and followed the requirements and standards laid out in the project guidelines. Furthermore, each source was provided with a heading, a scholarly annotation and keywords. The headings of the sources detail the country of origin, outline the original language of the source and provide a short content description, the date of origin and the archival reference. Following the completion of the annotation process, the sources and the annotations were translated by a member of the team of professional translators. Guidelines developed specifically for the project ensured that the translation was as close as possible to the original wording and consistent with the other translations. As a further measure of quality control, the final versions were proofread and standardised by the managing editor, a further translator and the country supervisor.

The online edition maintains the carefully selected source material, the English translations as well as the annotations of the print edition. It further offers transcripts in the original source language, alongside guidelines drawn up specifically for this project. Whereas the sources in the print edition are arranged in a chronological manner so as to ensure the comparative and transnational nature of the edition, this online edition can present them in a more dynamic and – with regard to the amount of countries represented – more simultaneous way. Users can cite sources from the digital edition using a DOI. The citation needs to contain the archive or institution that provided the source, the heading of the source that appears in the “Document Search” list, the date of the source, the online portal “Societies under German Occupation” as the publishing medium, the DOI and the date of the last online access of the source. All of this information can be found within the metadata of the source which is located in the margins of the “Reading View” or “Comparative Mode”. The first source of the edition, following the alphabetic order, should therefore be cited as follows: Národni knihovna Praha (National Library Prague): Czech Lands. Newspaper article on food supply problems in Brno. 15 March 1939, in: Online Edition “Societies under German Occupation”, DOI: 10.57886/008s [last accessed on XX.XX.20XX]. The DOI can be found in the metadata of the sources, which are displayed in the right-hand column in the search module (see chapter 3 on Using the Portal). Furthermore, while the print edition provides the sources as annotated English translations in order to present them as closely to the original but in a manner still clear and readily digestible for its readership, the online format offers further possibilities. Since it provides a different and wider space, the portal is able to present the sources in three different versions: as a translated annotated version, as a transcript in the original language of the source, and, where the copyright situation permits this, as a scan of the original. This threefold presentation of the sources is supplemented by a complex annotation apparatus as well as metadata and keywords. The online edition, therefore, has further developed and sharpened the editing principles of the print edition. The resulting product is an online portal which, in addition to the presented sources, also offers various innovative working and research tools.⁶

Since, in addition, the online edition is also able to present digitalized scans of the sources, the data-providing institutions were asked for rights of use and high-quality scans, the latter based on technical requirements set up in accordance with the German Research Foundation (DFG)⁷. The management of these tasks, already an intricate issue involving archives, libraries and research institutes in over 20 countries, was further complicated by the Russian war against Ukraine, which impacted upon the edition in numerous ways, since it complicated the communication with not only Ukrainian but also – albeit for differing reasons - Russian and Belarusian institutions. These circumstances, alongside questions of privacy rights, are the reason why a number of scans of sources that were represented in the print edition cannot be shown in the online edition.

2.2. Language and Translation

This being an intrinsically international and multilingual project, some comments on key decisions regarding the English language translations of the primary source material seem appropriate at this point. The meta data section provides information on the language in which the original source was written. Since several sources – like posters or public announcements – where originally printed in two or even three languages, usually German and another, ‘local’, language, in these instances it is indicated which of the original versions formed the basis of the English translation. If necessary, a footnote comments upon significant differences between the versions in the original source document. In other cases, some of the original sources contain terms in a language different to the remainder of the text. These terms have been left in their original language; a footnote indicates this and provides an English-language translation. This has been done in order to ensure that the English-language translation does not confer a greater linguistic unity upon the original source than was actually the case.

Furthermore, the guiding principle for the translations was that the English version should reflect the tone and structure of the original text as closely as possible. Nevertheless, minor mistakes and grammatical errors have been corrected, rather than recreated in an incorrect English. Where an original-language text contains numerous such errors, a footnote has been provided to indicate, for example, that the author was not particularly literate, or seems to have had difficulties writing in a foreign language. In addition, there were also several passages in some of the sources which were no longer legible, be it because of damage to the original document, illegible handwriting or unintelligible grammatical or spelling mistakes etc. Such passages have been marked with an ellipsis in brackets – ‘[…]’ – and provided with an explanatory footnote. Signatures which could not clearly be read have also been marked with the comment ‘[signature illegible]’. All translations in this edition have been rendered in British English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Furthermore, passages or terms which have been retained and which were originally written in Greek or Cyrillic alphabets (in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Serbian sources) have been provided in their transliterated form, in the interests of standardisation and accessibility.

With regard to language, two further aspects require explanation. These are the retention of certain terms and names in their original language and our policy towards place names. Both reflect the aim to present the sources in a form as close to the original as possible and in a manner which is clear and readily digestible.

Firstly, in going through the collection, the reader will see that some of the sources contain names in their original language. Such terms have been italicised, and an approximate English translation or explanation provided in a footnote. This refers in particular to institutions, organisations, administrative authorities and political parties etc., but also to the titles of newspapers and journals. Taking the various regional administrative bodies which are given as ‘Rayon’, ‘Prefettura’ or ‘Département’ as an example, it is obvious that to simply translate these as ‘regional administration‘ or ‘district administration’ would not cover their proper scope. At the same time, it would also be inaccurate to attempt artificially to impose English terms such as ‘county office’ on them, since these terms in themselves reflect a particular administrative structure which has developed historically and differs to that in the countries in question. Suggested translations in the footnote therefore offer an approximation, whereas the text of sources sticks with the original term. This sometimes leads to a situation in which certain terms such as ‘Banque de France’ have been retained in their original language, regardless of how clear their meaning might be to the majority of readers. In the interests of consistency, however, and bearing in mind the differing linguistic background of the readership, all these terms have been translated in all the documents.

This same approach is reflected, secondly, in our editorial policy relating to the presentation of place names. Here again, the policy has been to provide the name in the version which appears in the text. Whilst a Czech-language text may refer to ‘Plzeň’, therefore, a German-language one referring to the same city would use the term ‘Pilsen’. In each case, the English translation of the source retains the version found in the original. Where such places are referred to in headings or annotations, the current place name has been used. The exception to this approach is for places, such as Warsaw, Moscow, or Athens, for which there is an accepted English version. In the interests of standardisation and accessibility, this English name has always been used, as is the case for all countries which are referred to in the source documents. When it came to translating the historical geographical terminology of occupation, we followed common scholarly practices within the English-speaking research community. The historical research here tends to retain more widely known historical designations (e.g. “Reichskommissariat Ukraine") in the original German. By contrast, less common historical designations of the German occupiers (e.g. “German military administration Ukraine”) are generally translated into English. As the online portal provides both the transcript in the original language, and the scan of the source, they help to make the translation process transparent to the user. While the English translation of the sources with its annotations can be regarded as the main working tool for the sources, the other two versions are useful supplements for in-depth analyses; especially for users with a command of the respective languages.

2.3. Annotation

At the outset, it should be reiterated that all the sources in the online edition have been chosen as exemplary sources, capable of standing on their own merit. This is reflected in the annotation, in which certain footnotes repeat themselves in various sources, translating or explaining particular institutions or currencies so as to ensure the appropriate level of commentary for each individual source. The commentators conducted their annotation of the sources on the basis of both the original documents and the transcriptions of the text, as well as the guidelines for annotation. In doing so, the commentators worked in close cooperation with the managing editor and the rest of the editorial team. The commentators were asked to keep their annotations to the minimum required for an ‘informed reader’ to understand the source within its particular context. Accordingly, they have sought to supply the ‘factual’ background information which supports the understanding of the text whilst seeking to leave the interpretation of the source to the individual reader. Furthermore, it was also considered to be important that the reader should be provided with information on the appearance and form of the original source document.

2.4. Personal Names

This online edition documents the everyday life of private individuals under German occupation and their agency. This derives from methodological considerations of the Alltagsgeschichte, the “history of everyday life”⁸, but also from those of the concept of “occupied societies”, and its aim is to reconstruct the diverse experiences of life under German occupation. In keeping the personal names of the people mentioned in the sources, not only is their agency demonstrated but also the centrality of women and the female experience of occupation to the subject matter of this edition. As is discussed in the guiding concept “occupied societies”, to an extent greater than in peacetime, women were crucial actors in occupied societies, and this is reflected in the source material.

In relation to the names of official and public figures, the biographical data provided has been kept to the minimum required, that is biographical information referring to the office or title which they held at the time documented in the source.

3. Using the Online Portal

3.1. Presentation of the Sources

As outlined above, the sources are presented in three different versions: as a scan of the original document, as an original language transcript, and as an annotated, English-language translation. The original language transcripts enable the user to work with the source text as it was originally written. In keeping with the editorial plain text policy, these transcripts do not include any annotation or highlighting; the source text itself is at the centre. The scan of the original document provides the user with a concrete visualisation of the source itself. Marginalia, stamps and handwritten notes etc. included in the original can be clearly seen, and taken into account when working with the source. The third version, the annotated translation in English, contains, among other things, editorial notes and references to related sources. This makes it easier for the user to work with the portal, and pop-up tutorials are provided in the modules described below.

3.2 Document Search, Reading View and Comparative Mode

The portal offers the user various search tools. The "Document Search" module forms the core instrument here, with the map and timeline providing useful additional search modes. Visually, the "Document Search" is divided into three areas. The search can be started from the left, and users can either search the sources using a full-text search or using the thematic and chronological filters in the left and right columns. In the case of a full-text search, it should be noted that the words must be spelled exactly as they appear in the wording of the source. If a word is used in the genitive case in the source (woman's) and the word is searched for in its nominative form (woman), for example, this source cannot be found. Using Search Term 1 and Search Term 2, several search terms can be related to each other by selecting "or", "and", "not". A combined search can be carried out by selecting "and". By selecting "not", certain contents can be excluded from the search. Selecting "or" displays sources that either contain both search terms or only one of them.

Source results from the search query appear in the central column of the module. In the right-hand column, it is possible for the user to refine the search using further filters. Here, the links available refer solely to the source selection which has already been made. The online edition offers 1,736 keywords for further filtering, clustered into 24 themes, and developed specifically to allow a deeper investigation into the central issues related to hunger and shortage under occupation. These categories support the user in their search strategy by offering key themes related to the subject of the edition, both descriptive and analytical. One descriptive theme, for example, is “food”. Here, the foodstuffs mentioned in the source texts are listed as keywords. Analytical themes include those such as “violence of occupation”, under which can be found keywords, such as “commercial restrictions for Jews”, which go beyond the purely descriptive and refer to the inequality in power relations during occupation. All keywords can also be found independently of the category to which they have been assigned, and the plus sign can be used to add further themes and keywords to the search.

Having selected a source from the middle column following a search in “Document Search”, the user will arrive at the “reading” view. Here the selected source can be found as a scan of the original source, a transcript of it in the original language, and an annotated English-language translation. This function allows for a parallel investigation of the source in various formats. The metadata of the selected source is displayed on the right-hand side, where it is possible to see, for example, from which archive the source has been taken. The DOI and the metadata make it possible to cite the source accurately. In a toolbar on the left-hand side, the user is provided with the options of “notes”, “annotations” and tagging”. Here, using the plus symbol, users can create their own notes, annotations and tags, and these are automatically saved. The magnifying glass symbol can be used to highlight passages in the text. It is located within the annotations. The notes, annotations and tags created by the user appear in the “Virtual Workspace” area, where they can be managed further. To the right of the source heading there are two further green icons. The left of these can be used to place the source in “My Repository” (and the right allows the user to switch to comparative mode.

The Comparative Mode allows the user to place two different sources alongside each other. As with the Reading View, it is also possible to display the source in its three different versions (scan, original-language transcript, annotated English translation). In the headings of documents 1 and 2, "i" provides the option of selecting sources for the comparative mode. If, for example, no source has been selected for document 2, and users click on "Choose a document for the right side", they are returned to the document search, allowing them to search for a further source. As soon as this source has been selected in the middle column, the user automatically returns to comparative mode. The comparative mode can be closed by clicking on the green icon "close comparative mode".

3.3 Map and Timeline

In addition to the search options mentioned above, the portal also offers geographical and temporal search tools which visualise the source collection in the form of a map and a timeline. The markers and numbers on the map show which locations are linked to how many sources from the edition. If a source is assigned to a particular place this can either mean, on the one hand, that it was written there or, on the other, that this place is mentioned in the source text. As a result, it is therefore possible to establish geographical references which point beyond the specific places where the sources were written. Clicking on a marker zooms in at that point on the map and the clustered markers, which were provided with numbers, spread out as individual markers on the enlarged map.

The map provides a visual representation of the scope of the German occupation in the Second World War and reflects the pan-European perspective of the edition project, which illuminates the commonalities, differences and particularities in experiences across the continent. In this geographical search function, drop-down menus provide users with the option to input either contemporary state designations (e.g. “Ukraine”) or historical designations from the occupation period (e.g. “Reichskommissariat Ukraine”). This option of searching the map using the historical geographical terminology of occupation represents a new service unavailable in other portals. It therefore allows the user to trace the differing forms of occupation. The map used here is based on a contemporary one, taken from Open Street Maps, which uses corresponding alphabets (e.g. Cyrillic), since there is to date no map which shows in detail the historical course of the front and German occupation as this ebbed and flowed in the years between 1939 and 1945. In view of the historical-cartographical research and shape files required, the creation and development of such an accurate map would constitute a major project in its own right.

Users can select and mark out their own regions of choice on the map by drawing polygons, rectangles or circles. This geographical search option can also be supplemented or filtered using the timeline, which is located beneath the map. Here it is possible to specify a certain time-period or a particular point in time for which the sources are to be displayed on the map. It is possible to zoom in or out of the map using the “plus” and “minus” symbols. Once the user has conducted a geographical search, all the documents located in their selected area are displayed. Additionally, users can also find sources which are located outside of the chosen region but are linked to the selected sources by clicking on the toggle “Show selected places”: The linked paces are then displayed in grey. If the user has already performed a document search it is also possible for them to display the places linked to the search on the map. This can be done using the “documents” / “show search hits” option on the bar below the map. It is also possible here to select the option to display the sources from “My Repository”.

3.4. Virtual Workspace and My Repository

In the Virtual Workspace, users can compile an individual source corpus from the edition. Here, the sources can be provided with individual annotations or notes. In addition, it is possible to tag sources with one's own keywords in order to create one's own system and thus make them easier to find. This individually compiled corpus of sources can be downloaded at any time, so that the next time the Online Edition is visited, it can be uploaded again and the user can continue to work on the data set they themselves have compiled.

The self-compiled data can be organised on the "Virtual Workplace" page. This system works with so-called configuration files, and users can work on different configuration files at the same time. Each configuration has a task with a title and description. In addition, a title, a description and an author can be entered for each file, and these can be provided with a date. The configuration can be saved using the "Save" button. This is then downloaded to the hard disk and stored as a selection item under "Current Configuration File". The Delete button only deletes the configurations from the selection and not from the hard disk.

The Virtual Workspace includes a toolbar which can be seen on the right-hand side of each view. Here the user can enter detailed data for each page. Text views such as Reading View and Comparative Mode can also be annotated and tagged. The system remembers assigned tags and displays them in a selection list. The three options can be selected by clicking on the lettering and can be hidden again by clicking on the Toggle button. As soon as the user has made their selection, the individual elements appear. The magnifying glass symbol can be used to highlight passages in the text.

In the My Repository area, users can also display the corpus of sources that they themselves have compiled. In Document Search, Reading Mode and Comparative Mode, sources can be added to "My Repository". The view and filter options in the repository are similar to those in Document Search. The map and timeline can also be accessed from the repository in order to display the source corpus. The repository is also stored in the configuration files of the Virtual Workspace.

In collecting and preparing the sources, colleagues from all over Europe and beyond have contributed to the print edition “Fighting Hunger. Dealing with Shortage” (https://brill.com/display/title/59599) which is the basis of this online portal.