Beyond victimhood and perpetration
Reconstruction of the ingroup's historical role in eight Eastern and Western European countries under Nazi occupation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7971920 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fiona Kazarovytska (0000-0003-3537-5710, Department of Social and Legal Psychology Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Mainz Germany), Roland Imhoff (0000-0003-0807-463X, Department of Social and Legal Psychology Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Mainz Germany), Gilad Hirschberger (0000-0002-4248-132X, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology Reichman University Herzliya Israel) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 785-805 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-895X • E-ISSN: 1467-9221 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/pops.13037 |
| OpenAlex | W4402849399 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 49 |
The Nazi regime's aggressive expansion across Europe during WWII created a landscape of suffering, resistance, and collaboration. How do lay Europeans today reconstruct their ingroup's roles during Nazi occupation, and how do different role representations relate to defensive responses aimed at protecting the ingroup from threat? We tested two theoretical predictions: Following the identity threat prediction, we expected that denying culpability but endorsing morally favorable group representations (e.g., victim‐heroism) would represent an ingroup‐defensive strategy, correlating with other defensive responses, such as victim‐directed negativity or victim‐blaming. Following the identity management prediction, we expected that precisely accepting culpability and acknowledging threatening representations (e.g., willing collaboration with Germans) would form the basis for a defensive stance and thus correlate with defensive intergroup reactions. Analyzing data from nine European samples spanning eight countries ( N = 5474), we found support for the identity management prediction in six contexts: Lay representations as willing collaborators were associated with negative collective emotions and correlated with victim‐directed negativity, whereas victim‐hero representations showed no such connections. The remaining three countries revealed a mixture of the two identity accounts. We discuss implications for understanding historical representations and identity protection in groups that were both victims and perpetrators of massive intergroup atrocities
Criminology · Ingroups and outgroups · Nazism · Political science · Politics · European history and politics · German History and Society · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
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The Measurement of Collective Guilt
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Evaluating Goodness-of-Fit Indexes for Testing Measurement Invariance
Sensitivity of Goodness of Fit Indexes to Lack of Measurement Invariance
Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
From Threat to Challenge
Assigning moral roles within the Second World War in Europe
Three Fish at One Hook? Future-Oriented, Reconciliatory, and Defensive Claims for Historical Closure as Expressions of the Same Defensive Desire
History Education and Conflict Transformation
The Perpetrator-Bystander-Victim Constellation
From moral disaster to moral entitlement – The impact of success in dealing with a perpetrator past on perceived ingroup morality and claims for historical closure
Appealing to Moral Exemplars
The lay historian explains intergroup behavior
Making sense of the past to understand the present
What do I Care? Perceived Ingroup Responsibility and Dehumanization as Predictors of Empathy Felt for the Victim Group
Collaboration in comparative perspective
Painful collective memory
Defensive representations of an uncomfortable history
Too great to be guilty? Individuals high in collective narcissism demand closure regarding the past to attenuate collective guilt
Defend or repair? Explaining responses to in-group moral failure by disentangling feelings of shame, rejection, and inferiority
Not quite human
Harmful Ideas, The Structure and Consequences of Anti‐Semitic Beliefs inPoland
Victim and Perpetrator Groups’ Divergent Perspectives on Collective Violence
Explaining the Inexplicable
A needs-based model of reconciliation
Guilty by association
Nuestra culpa
Can there be genocide without the intent to commit genocide
The Illiberal Memory Politics in Hungary
How the past weighs on the present
The case for motivated reasoning
Preserving cultural heritage
Construct validity in psychological tests
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |