Wartime Collaboration

Wartime collaboration is the voluntary cooperation of local populations, officials or combatants with an occupying enemy against their own state, often for personal gain, ideological alignment or survival, and is widely treated as a form of betrayal amounting to treason. The modern sense of the term took shape in France after 1940, when Marshal Petain announced the Vichy government policy of cooperating with Nazi Germany; historians distinguish this ideological collaborationism, embraced chiefly by French fascists who wanted a German victory, from broader wartime collaboration undertaken pragmatically to maintain order, conduct commerce or simply survive occupation. After the war, collaborators faced public humiliation, imprisonment and execution; in France alone an estimated 10,500 collaborators were killed, some through formal legal proceedings and others extrajudicially.