It is ridiculously easy to troll self‐proclaimed ‘antifascist’ anticommunists into defending Axis collaborators. Their oversimplification of the matter basically goes like this: the only ‘truly’ bad people working for the Axis was a small group of high‐ranking German officials. That’s it. Everybody else (anticommunist Austrians, Balts AKA ‘Forest Brothers’, Belgians, Chinese, Finns, Frenchmen, Greeks, Hungarians, Iberians, Imperial Japanese, Italians, Netherlanders, Romanians, Scandinavians, Slavs including traitors, Swiss bankers, Anglo‐American businessmen, Austro‐German businessmen, the Wehrmacht—you name it) just kinda weakly and reluctantly went along with it even though they really, really, really didn’t want toooooooo, so if they committed atrocities—which they probably didn’t—it was only because Adolf Schicklgruber forced them to do it.

This, of course, overlooks the atrocities that they willingly and repeatedly committed without any outside pressure. For many anticommunists, the Third Reich’s early successes tremendously bolstered its credibility, and for a while it looked like the Axis was here to say, so rebellion would have been pointless. Read Industrial Collaboration in Nazi-Occupied Europe for examples.