Max Hastings argues that 'We would have done the same under Nazi occupation'. He means the British would have; and 'the same' is the same as many French did - that is, they would have collaborated. He puts forward compelling arguments:
It is extraordinarily difficult to resist tyranny ruthlessly enforced, especially in a densely populated country with little wilderness.And see further for yourself. But when there's a 'we would have done the same', there's nearly always also a 'we could have done differently' - as indeed all those French who didn't collaborate and who did resist did.
Here's a point, for example. Hastings is more open about whether 'British people would have dispatched their own Jews to death'. He is tentative:
There was considerable anti-semitism in prewar Britain; it is sometimes remarked that "the biggest favour Hitler did the British upper classes was to make anti-semitism cease to be respectable". British anti-Jewish sentiment, however, was less virulent than that of the French. It is pleasant to suppose that a fundamental decency might have rendered ordinary people unwilling to denounce their Jewish neighbours, even had a British collaborationist government urged them to do so.The issue of why more Jews survived in some European countries than in others is a complicated one that I can't go into (see p. 10 here). But one thing we know is that collective efforts to protect Jews from deportation were the most effective kind of rescue activity: by the Danes, at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in southern France, at Nieuwlande in the Netherlands. One mustn't allow any of these episodes, heroic as they are, to obscure the wider picture - which is that Europe became a graveyard for the Jewish people. But it is perfectly proper to register that, however many there were who behaved otherwise, forms of non-collaboration and resistance were possible. 'Would have done the same' is not only a neutral piece of sociological projection; it can also be a way of telling people, fatalistically, that we are worse than we think. For many, maybe so. But some of us may be better than we fear. 'Could, should and so might have done differently' is an observation also to the point. And it is especially to the point when the projection is about the future and not the past.
