WHO ELSE WAS TO BLAME

1
WHO ELSE WAS TO BLAME?
2
AIMS

• To look at other groups and understand how some
  historians have assigned some blame to them.
• To assess the validity of these claims.

3
JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY

• Should Jews have resisted more?
• Jewish leaders co-operated with the Nazis in
  rounding up Jews from the ghettosThe role of
  these leaders in the destruction of their own
  people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the
  whole dark story.Hannah Arendt.
• Without Jewish assistance would Nazi manpower
  have been overstretched?

4
IS THIS FAIR?

• Most Jews did not know their fate until mid-1942.
• Appeasement made sense it bought time and may
  have led to some Jews surviving.
• If this was the wrong tactic, what was the right
  tactic?

5
RESISTANCE

• Most Jews killed before they had the chance to
  form resistance groups.
• Most resistance groups had little equipment.
• Resistance could lead to reprisals.
• This made it harder for Jews to melt away.
• Anti-Semitism of some Polish resistance groups.

6
IN SPITE OF THESE DIFFICULTIES

• Warsaw uprising, April/May 1943.
• Escapes.
• Attacks on guards.
• Fleeing from ghettos.
• Subverting Nazi law in the ghettos.
• Staying alive.

7
NON-GERMAN RESPONSIBILITY

• How far did people under Nazi rule have to
  co-operate with the Final Solution?
• Post-war claims that coercion and force were used
  to guarantee co-operation.

8
CENTRAL EASTERN EUROPE

• Not a uniform response.
• Slovakia co-operated to win German favour.
• Croatia ethnically cleansed Jews, Serbs
  Bosnians.
• Romania enthusiastically joined in, until Germany
  looked like being defeated.
• Bulgaria refused to hand over Bulgarian Jews.
• Hungary ignored Nazi requests until Nazis took
  over government.

9
WESTERN EUROPE

• Vichy France happy to co-operate but no French
  born Jews were transported.
• Denmark escape to Sweden.
• Did refusal to collaborate work? Was Vichy policy
  of co-operating slowly a successful delaying
  tactic?
• Italy did not co-operate until the Nazis took
  over Northern Italy.
• No Finnish Jews killed.

10
POLAND THE USSR

• No collaborationist governments Nazis took
  over.
• Long history of Polish anti-Semitism. Few Poles
  helped Jews but could they?
• USSR civilians saw Nazis as liberators and Jews
  as Bolshevik agents.

11
FARMERS VIEW

• The degree of Nazi control, rather than the
  strength of local anti-Semitism, was the decisive
  factor in determining the number of Jews who were
  killed. Holland, for example, which was far less
  anti-Semitic than Romania, had a much higher rate
  of Jewish losses.

12
ALLIED RESPONSIBILITY

• Reports of atrocities reached the West.
• Indifferent or anti-Semitic?
• Is either description fair?

13
PAPAL RESPONSIBILITY

• Pius XII did not speak out even though many
  Nazi occupied countries were Catholic.
• Was this silence complicity?
• Few Protestants in occupied countries spoke out
  either.

14
NEUTRAL RESPONSIBILITY

• Most neutral countries did not aid Jews because
  they were scared of upsetting Hitler.
• Only from 1944, when Nazi defeat seemed more
  likely, did this view begin to shift.