Professor István Deák is a pioneer of the study of Central and East European history and one of the founders of the field in the United States. Though his monographs were concerned with Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy, he has also published essays, chapters, and a fine edited volume on World War II. To this latter project he has brought a dispassionate attention to comparison and context in the pursuit of understanding such fraught subjects as collaboration. In this valedictory synthesis, Deák places Europe “on trial” in two separate ways: it is a study of post–World War II political justice, but also a judgment passed on wartime Europe.

The premise of this fine book is that one is impossible without the other. The word “retribution” smuggles in an axiom where a question is needed. The word denotes a fitting response to a particular wrong, and thus the policy implicitly defines what that wrong was. But in fact, Deák suggests, policies of retribution stand in no particular relationship to the wrongs that are done. Defining the prior history in terms of the later retribution can thus obliterate the very context that is necessary to understand attempts at historical justice. Deák, who has been considering these issues for some time, thus opts to begin from the beginning, from the history rather than from the policies that are presented as justice. His task, then, is to reckon with the reckoners. The first part of his case is that Europe as a whole collaborated in one way or another with Nazi power during its rise and during the war. He is less concerned with the micropolitics or microsociology of collaboration at the level of individuals faced with a situation altered by German power than with the breaking of political will at the highest levels and the broad social consensus that adaptation to German power was good, wise, or necessary. The suggestion is that when political classes break and societies yield, as during the period 1938–40, it will later be convenient to blame individuals. The people in question might well be guilty and found to be so by perfectly reasonable means, but individualization itself might be a deferral rather than a consummation of responsibility.

The essence of the method is thus to recount the history of collaboration at a high rather than a low level, considering what was possible at the time, and conveying the moral costs of doing nothing. Deák is sure that the “combined European forces could have successfully resisted German aggression” (28), and thus argues that the inability to combine in any meaningful alliance before the war was already a failure. Czechoslovakia's decision not to fight in 1938, however, is not blamed on the failure of its French allies to defend it, but presented as Prague's own responsibility. Deák describes the surrender as a deliberate national compromise that was successful in minimizing Czechoslovak casualties during the war. Stalin's desire to make peace with Hitler, consummated as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, figures as an example of a general trend. He draws attention to the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 as another failure of Western unity.

As Deák quite rightly maintains, Hitler's major goal was never war in Central or Western Europe but domination and colonization in Eastern Europe. The true war, from Hitler's perspective, began in June 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union. The attempt to win Lebensraum brought a new level of atrocity, including the beginning of the Holocaust of the Jews, and demonstrated the pervasiveness of European political cooperation with Nazi aims. Deák makes the case that Germany's direct allies in the invasion, generally the sovereign states of Southern and Southeastern Europe (plus Finland), were places where political elites had long had good reason to believe that Western democracies could not ensure economic or political sovereignty. The administrations of the occupied states of Northwestern Europe, defeated by Germany in 1940, were also generally supportive of the war against the Soviet Union, supplying men and food.

If collaboration in this general sense was a result of the real and perceived weakness of the Western democracies, then resistance should generally arise from real or perceived Nazi weakness. One would not want to understate the significance of 1941 itself, which freed European Communists from the prior policy of supporting the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany and allowed them to resist. During the period 1941–43 most of the impressive anti-Nazi resistance was in fact from the far Left, be it in the occupied Soviet Union, partisan Yugoslavia, or France. (The major exception was Poland and its Home Army.) But Deák is surely right that the impact of the visible German defeat at Stalingrad and the ever-growing need for labor mobilized resistance from those who wished to be on the side of the victor and avoid deportation. In this account, the Soviet Union is not much different than the rest of Europe; its leaders collaborated for as long as they could.

Postwar trials thus become a chapter of a history rather than some sort of logical conclusion. Deák is struck that French enthusiasm for De Gaulle so resembles French enthusiasm toward Pétain: the man of the hour who can liberate society from the predicament of its prior commitments. He marvels at the limited reach of the Nuremberg trials into German society. He points to the general problem of legitimacy, perhaps sharpest in Hungary: How is a government brought by the Red Army, he asks, to judge one supported by the Wehrmacht a few months before? The hundreds of thousands of Russians who served in the German armed forces will never be conceptualized as an instance of massive and systematic Soviet collaboration. In Central and Eastern Europe, sometimes Communist (Poland) and sometimes not (Czechoslovakia), “the postwar purges were only one egregious stage in the process of ridding Eastern Europe of its most valuable minorities.” The past was not so much considered as externalized or ethnicized. The Soviets and the Americans helped to build larger narratives around the gaps in national history. Deák's work calls into question, at an appropriate moment, the myth that European societies learned from Second World War II.