Collaboration – the moral maze of the enemy within

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The Krugersdorp concentration camp (Photo: Public domain, WikiMedia)

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It is by no means a clear-cut, black and white, binary choice to be a collaborator. There are usually powerful motives aplenty which drive desperate people to deal with the enemy.
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Who, these days, can recall Meyer de Kock? Executed on 12 February 1901 by his own commando, next to an open grave in the closing stages of the Boer War, on four counts of treasonable collaboration with the British.

But his name floated into my mind while listening to a recent interview with Eben Viktor, LitNet’s “Man in Ukraine”, in the course of which he mentioned that local collaborators had become persons of interest for the Ukrainian authorities, for allegedly providing the coordinates of military targets to the Russian army. Last week, The Guardian, a British newspaper well regarded for its accurate reporting, also carried a long article detailing the difficulties of dealing with collaborators for the Ukrainian judiciary, because it is by no means a clear-cut, black and white, binary choice to be a collaborator. There are usually powerful motives aplenty which drive desperate people to deal with the enemy.

Such was the case with Meyer de Kock.

Meyer was a well-respected, popular businessman from a good family, who lived on his farm in Dullstroom, in the Belfast region of the Eastern Transvaal (Mpumalanga). A mature 50-year-old who joined his local commando and played his part in the war, guarding key rail bridges, he was also deeply attached to his wife, by all accounts a most refined woman – and here lay the root of his downfall.

After Lord Roberts captured Pretoria, the Boer commandos switched to guerrilla war tactics, prompting General Kitchener to mount “drives” across the countryside, a bit like game drives, ruthlessly pursuing a scorched earth policy, which included burning down farmhouses and killing all livestock. Painful choices had to be made, if Meyer was to save both his house and his delicate wife from the privations of the crowded concentration camps, rife with disease and primitive sanitation.

He therefore resolved to surrender his weapons to the advancing imperial forces, and volunteered as secretary of a so-called “peace committee”, for which he hoped to win support in his area. He attempted to persuade some of his fellow burghers in the Belfast commando to lay down their arms as well. In Meyer’s view, the war was taking too brutal a toll, and would be lost in any event. Honourable surrender was the best way forward.

Lizzie van Zyl, when visited by Emily Hobhouse. Her dad was a Bittereinder. (Photo: Public domain, WikiMedia)

General Botha and the other Boer generals were having none of such defeatist talk, however. The haplessly optimistic and idealistic Meyer was arrested and, after a formal trial in the field, was found guilty, sentenced to death and handed over to his old commando to be executed immediately by firing squad.

It was a measure of the resolution of the Bittereinders that Meyer was by no means the only Boer to submit to the severe justice meted out to “hands-up” collaborators by the Boer high command. But Meyer’s case was particularly noteworthy because of his prior standing in the Belfast region.

Moving back to present-day Ukraine, but in a reprisal of the Meyer de Kock case, The Guardian reported that on the third day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the mayor of the city of Kupyansk, in the north-eastern Kharkiv region, received an invitation from a Russian army commander to talk. The mayor, Gennady Matsegora, accepted the invitation: “I took the decision to take part in negotiations to avoid loss of life,” he said, justifying handing over the keys of the city to the Russians without a fight. He was alleged to have provided the Russian soldiers with transport, food, housing and fuel, to prevent them from ransacking civilian dwellings.

Today, a few months later, Matsegora is accused by Ukrainian authorities of collaborating with the Russians, and faces 15 years in prison. He is not the only one. Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in May that so far, more than 700 Ukrainians were being charged with treason and another 700 or so with collaboration with the Russian enemy. Police officers, mayors and even a judge have been accused of either treason or collaboration for having opened up their towns to the Russians, who then entered unopposed and killed innocent civilians.

Other examples of collaboration included local residents in occupied areas giving to the Russians lists of names of those who were fighting in the Ukrainian army, as well as the names of wealthy locals.

The Ukrainian prosecutors have agreed that punishment for those helping the Russians should be swift and stern, but the question is where to draw the line. Some people have been forced to collaborate at gunpoint, while others have had little choice but to go along with the Russians in occupied areas, for example, schoolteachers who are required to change the curriculum into a Russian-approved curriculum.

Sergei Gorbachov, the education ombudsman of Ukraine, is quoted as saying: “It’s very difficult to decide where the line is. I don’t think you can demand heroism from unarmed people. The important thing is not to voluntarily collaborate. When we get the occupiers off all our land, I expect big problems over how we decide on this question.”

A Ukrainian MP, Volodymyr Ariev, said he hoped the Ukrainian parliament would draft a new law allowing for swift and effective punishment for collaborators: “Some people should go to jail, but some should just be fined.”

Interestingly enough, no one is suggesting the firing squad as a punishment. How times change. Other times, other mores. Meyer de Kock was unlucky in his moment in history, but then so were the French who collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War.(1)

At the end of the war, the French government established a Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, which found, after a study of the various purges in all the French départements, that about 9 000 suspected collaborators had been killed without any form of trial. The French state became sufficiently worried about this apparent unchecked bloodlust as to establish so-called Liberation Courts.

Different kinds of courts were set up to try different categories of collaborators. A high court tried Vichy ministers and senior administrative staff. Then there was a separate court of justice to deal with other cases of collaboration. Civic courts dealt with less serious cases of unpatriotic behaviour, and finally there were military tribunals.

For today’s modern audience, the number of capital sentences handed down by these courts is quite shocking.

In all, 6 778 death sentences were pronounced, excluding an additional 800 ordered by the military tribunal, although President De Gaulle side-stepped accusations of presiding over a new Terror by commuting 73 percent of executions.

A total of 311 263 alleged cases of collaboration were sent for consideration to the courts. Apart from those sentenced to death, another 40 000 were sent to prison and another 50 000 sentenced to dégradation nationale, a kind of limbo amounting to professional sanctions. You’d have trouble finding work, being ostracised in this way.

Towards the end of the war, as the German army withdrew, the fear of a fifth column, the “enemy within”, was acutely present in France, and the population often behaved in a frenzied lynch mob fashion, murdering dozens of citizens accused of working with the Germans. They had to dig their own graves in many cases, watched by jeering crowds.

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The most difficult collaborationist issues had to be dealt with by the courts – for example, there were cases of mayors being forced to decide which hostages should be offered to the Germans, who generally shot 50 French for every German murdered by the resistance.
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The most difficult collaborationist issues had to be dealt with by the courts – for example, there were cases of mayors being forced to decide which hostages should be offered to the Germans, who generally shot 50 French for every German murdered by the resistance. These lists often only contained the names of local communists, and the defence argument was advanced that this was an attempt to prevent the Germans from shooting, for example, French First World War heroes. Of course, it was then that the communists became the most vocal proponents of purges, leading to lynch mob executions.

In France: The dark years (2), mention is made of recent experiences, notably in South Africa, Chile and East Germany, that show how difficult it is to carry out a transition from one regime to another after a period of intense political polarisation. Each of these countries has dealt with the problem differently, and in no case has the process been judged entirely satisfactory.

In France, the epuration sauvage – the purges that occurred before the state took control of proceedings – is something that South Africa has experience of, in the case of necklacing of suspected collaborators with the nationalist government. No quarter was shown to these unfortunates, and there is no way of knowing whether many victims of a petrol-filled tyre may not, in fact, have been innocent. But for the cheerleaders of this epuration sauvage era, like Winnie Mandela, aiming to free South Africa “with our boxes of matches”, there was little room for judicial contemplation.

For Ukraine, therefore, drawing on the lessons of history, the issue of collaboration is not going to be easy.

Collaboration as such is rarely clear-cut as to the motive. A good recent book on the subject is Roland Philipps’s Victoire: A wartime story of resistance, collaboration and betrayal (3), which recounts the extraordinary true story of a young French woman, Mathilde Carré, who was a key player in what formed the first web of contacts orchestrated by British intelligence. But the Germans are closing in, and when she is finally arrested and faces torture, she makes a desperate compromise – a pact with the devil. She begins to spy for the Germans as well as for the British – who turn her into a triple agent.

The British manage in time to extricate her from France, and she is only returned to her native land at the end of the war – where she is immediately arrested and tried for collaborating with the enemy. She is sentenced by a French court, who disregard the circumstances that she was in fact a triple agent working for the British at the end, to be shot. Only a couple of hours before being blindfolded and led to the wall, does De Gaulle commute her sentence to 20 years in prison.

The dramatic tale of this young Frenchwoman illustrates, as little else, the treacherous quicksands of war, where every neighbour is quick to denounce the black marketeer or similar.

It is easy to suspect that Ukraine, when the current story is finally written up, may resemble France during the dark years of 1940–1944 when it comes to collaboration. When an area of one’s country is occupied by the enemy, then what can one do? Factories that continue to work, and the workers in those factories who are supplying Russian needs, are by definition technically collaborators for simply wanting to feed their families.

Endnotes

1) Julian Jackson, 2003, France: The dark years, 1940–1944, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2) Ibid.

3) Roland Philipps, 2021, Victoire: A wartime story of resistance, collaboration and betrayal, London: Bodley Head.

See also:

Die Kaapse kerk en die Boereoorlog

LitNet Akademies-resensie-essay: Broedertwis deur Albert Blake

Daar is nog hoop: Eben Viktor gesels uit Oekraïne (2 Mei om 15:00)

Verskroeide aarde: ’n onderhoud met Fransjohan Pretorius

Kritiese besinnings oor die Israelse eiendomsaansprake op Palestina

Die Anglo-Boereoorlog in kleur deur Tinus le Roux: Foto’s en nuwe waarheid

Vroeë artikels oor die Anglo-Boereoorlog wat in internasionale vakkundige tydskrifte verskyn het

Oekraïne: Berigte te velde

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