Thus, although the persecution of the Jews that led to the Holocaust was a German project — a point which cannot be overemphasized — it chimed with the programmes of many European fascist and authoritarian regimes. Without the Germans’ umbrella project, the Holocaust in Europe would not have happened. Nor were its allies as obsessed with the ‘world-historical threat’ posed by the Jews as the Germans were, although some came close, especially certain figures in the Croatian, Romanian and French leadership strata. But without the willing participation of so many collaborators across Europe, the Germans would have found it much harder to kill so many Jews. In Norway, France and Hungary, local police rounded up, guarded and deported Jews; in Slovakia the impetus to deport Jews came from the indigenous ‘clerical-fascist’ regime rather than from the Germans. The same is true in the country of the Enlightenment, where French officials drafted the legislation and provided the manpower to arrest and deport Jews from France, the ‘only country in Western Europe where Jews were deported from a zone not under direct German occupation’. In the Romanian case, the regime of the conducător (leader), Ion Antonescu, grasped the opportunity provided by the German plans to carry out a Holocaust of its own, deporting Jews from recently annexed areas of Romania and killing them alongside local Jews and Roma in Transnistria. The scope of the killing implicates the whole of Europe, not just the Nazi regime and a few quislings.
