‘Seidler’s List’: On One Overly Broad Concept of Collaboration during the Second World War

This article is based on a long-standing critique of the disproportionate magnifying of the term collaboration in the context of the Second World War (Hans Lemberg, Werner Röhr). In this text, I will critically analyse one such swelling and disproportionately widening scope of understanding of the concept of collaboration: how the German historian Franz Wilhelm Seidler worked with it in his publication Die Kollaboration: 1939–1945. Although this book was first published in 1995, the nature of the problem has not changed much. My aim in this contribution is not to criticise the work itself but to take the opportunity offered by its content to analyse controversial or borderline cases and present the described interactions of the alleged collaborators.