Mich: The problem about “Grey Zone” in a totalitarian context.

Mattia Gozzi (Università degli studi di Padova)

When talking about totalitarianism, we usually tend to consider only two categories: the victims and the perpetrators. However, the size of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes cannot be sufficiently comprehended, if we do not take a third middle group into account, namely the so-called “Grey Zone”. In that context, we have the victims who decide to become the perpetuators, in other words, all those people who are victims of totalitarian ideologies and begin to collaborate with totalitarian authorities.

Based on such idea, I am going to dwell on the following questions: 1) To what extent are the “Grey-zone” victims free to choose whether to cooperate or not? 2) Why would they decide to collaborate?

To answer to my problems, I will draw a comparison between the principal cases of the "Grey Zone" phenomenon, focusing in particular on the privileged prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps (Lager) and in the Soviet forced labour camps (Gulag).