Conclusion: What Have We Learned, and Why Does It Matter?

This book has its origins in a problem that we have observed in the scholarship on violence in the 1940s in Europe. It is clear that World War II was a total war. It is also clear that different groups of people experienced, or were responsible for, different kinds of acts of violence on a mass scale at different points in the war. Yet most of the knowledge about the experience of violence during Europe’s mid-century crisis derives from local or national studies. These studies generally focus on a specific group, such as a celebrated resistance movement, or a specific question, such as establishing responsibility for the Holocaust. Another feature of the literature is the distinction between ‘wartime’ and ‘post-war’, which obscures the connectedness of wartime and post-war paramilitary violence in the 1940s. The historiography is fragmented and allows only a partial understanding of the lived experience of violence as a social process, and of violence as a transnational phenomenon that spanned the wartime/post-war watershed. In our view, the reason for this fragmented and partial historiography is the disconnect between the nature of violence in this period and the dominant and universalising interpretative framework, which we have called the Resistance-Collaboration Paradigm or the RCP.