Comparing and contrasting total war-era occupations in Europe (1914-1948)
Samuël Kruizinga, University of Amsterdam
During the total wars of the twentieth century (taking place roughly from the 1910s to the 1940s), and the post-war reconstructions that followed, occupations seemed the rule rather than the exception. During the First World War, significant territories in Western, South-Eastern, Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Asia and in Africa were conquered and controlled, the object of this control being the extraction of resources usable for war, but also administration of these territories in such a way that would help prepare significant post-war power shifts (either through regime change, through annexations, or by simply creating new polities out of the conquered areas). After the war, forms of occupation were used to enforce treaty obligations, or to pave the way for imperial expansion under the guise of League of Nations mandates. The Second World War, too, saw large-scale occupations in Europe, Asia, and Africa: resource extraction to aid the war effort and preparing the ground for a new post-war order were, once again, chief objects of the Axis powers, but particularly in Europe they were joined by a third: a genocidal project aimed at forcibly re-creating the ethnic make-up of the continent. Conversely, Allied occupations of Germany, Japan and other former Axis powers, including Italy, were seen as critical elements to secure a transformative post-war settlement.
The histories of these four waves of occupation currently form part of either essentially national narratives of war and liberation, of larger narratives about total warfare, of the apex and nadir of European Empires, or of genocide and Holocaust. Scholars from different disciplines, studying different wars or atrocities, time periods or territories, rarely come together. Moreover, they are usually understood to encompass different types of occupations: belligerent occupations in which an army hostile to the state exercising sovereignty over a territory assumes temporary control during an interstate war, a type of foreign rule that is intended to remain in place until a new regime has acquired the requisite legitimacy, or a type of forced transitional regime in place until a new native government enforcing a rule broadly compatible with the aim of the occupier can take its place.
The panel presented here, by contrast, focuses on comparisons and entanglements between different types of occupation in the age of total warfare, with a view to cutting across some of the typological distinctions that may hide elements of continuity or convergence among various occupation policies and experiences. It does so by showing that the experiences of occupation in both World Wars and the immediate post-war periods were linked both by expectations and ideas shaped by one occupation influencing the other, and by actors moving between different temporally and geographically contingent occupations. These two types of the transfer of “occupational knowledge”: between different instances of occupation and/or through time have not been studied systematically.
This panel, chaired by Samuël Kruizinga, features three papers that dive deeper into when and how forms of “occupational knowledge” were transferred, and how contemporaneous understandings of occupation in this particular space and time evolved. Prof. Aviel Roshwald will focus on transfers and comparisons between German occupations of Eastern Europe in World Wars I and II, Dr. Fabio Simonetti on the travelling history of the wartime practice of forcibly shaving the heads of women accused of fraternisation with the occupier (be it Axis or Allied), and Dr. Enrico Accai on the learning experiences of resistance fighters (and those opposing them) fighting in successive conflicts, in particular the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Italian campaign from 1943-1945.
Our panel will be held on Thursday 10 July 2025 from 09:45-11:15h in the Bush House Auditorium.
Panel speakers and presentations
Chair/discussant: Samuël Kruizinga (University of Amsterdam)
Avial Roshwald (Georgetown University): German Occupations in Eastern Europe in WWI and WWII
Fabio Simonetti (Brunel University London): Shaving Women’s Hair in Occupied Italy
Enrico Acciai (University of Rome Tor Vergata): Armed Resistance to Nazi/Fascist Occupation in Italy
Picture credits:
Cover picture: Women with shaved heads led through a street in Paris after liberation
Source: German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons
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