The most insidious collabos were those who threw in their lot with the Nazis – and the futures of their entire countries – for the sake of a single issue. Rather than looking at the whole picture and considering what the consequences of the entire Nazi package would be, they focused on one issue.

The most glaring example of this would be the Catholic bishops and priests who supported the Nazis because they were afraid of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, of course, took over the Russian empire during the Russian Revolution and created the Soviet Union as a communist state. And it has to be said that the Bolsheviks represented a clear and present danger, especially in German in the 1920s when Hitler was gaining followers. Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders made no secret of their intention to take the communist revolution west. They announced several times that they would “be in Berlin” by the following year. Ironically, they didn’t make it to Berlin until the end of Hitler’s war in 1945, but no one knew that in 1942.

Many Europeans feared Bolshevism and the Soviet Union on the grounds that communism: took away private property; took away democratic rights and suppressed religion. It was the Bolshevik’s violent atheism that especially alarmed some Catholic leaders. So they made a deal with the devil using the argument that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. They decided that because the Nazis would protect them from the Bolsheviks, they could ignore the details of Nazism.

Of course the Catholic Church is as complicated an institution as possible. There were Catholic archbishops who publicly disavowed the Nazis – and often ended up in concentration camps because of it. And there were many, many Catholic nuns, priests, brothers and lay pepole who sheltered Jews and other fugitives because they believed it was their Christian duty to do so. Many of them also ended up in the concentration camps.

The problem with refusing to consider the entirety of Nazism and the practical consequences of it was that otherwise well-meaning individuals turned themselves into collaborators with evil.