Beyond victimhood and perpetration : reconstruction of the ingroup's historical role in eight Eastern and Western European countries under Nazi occupation

Abstract

The Nazi regime's aggressive expansion across Europe during WWII created a landscape of suffering, resistance, and collaboration. How do lay Europeans today reconstruct their ingroup's roles during Nazi occupation, and how do different role representations relate to defensive responses aimed at protecting the ingroup from threat? We tested two theoretical predictions: Following the identity threat prediction, we expected that denying culpability but endorsing morally favorable group representations (e.g., victim-heroism) would represent an ingroup-defensive strategy, correlating with other defensive responses, such as victim-directed negativity or victim-blaming. Following the identity management prediction, we expected that precisely accepting culpability and acknowledging threatening representations (e.g., willing collaboration with Germans) would form the basis for a defensive stance and thus correlate with defensive intergroup reactions. Analyzing data from nine European samples spanning eight countries (N = 5474), we found support for the identity management prediction in six contexts: Lay representations as willing collaborators were associated with negative collective emotions and correlated with victim-directed negativity, whereas victim-hero representations showed no such connections. The remaining three countries revealed a mixture of the two identity accounts. We discuss implications for understanding historical representations and identity protection in groups that were both victims and perpetrators of massive intergroup atrocities.