Researchers have equipped us with a solid inventory of anti-Jewish legislation in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. However, few analyses across national boundaries exist. This demonstrates, once again, how much the history of the persecution of European Jews consists of separate national histories – which serve, first of all, to create national identities. Accordingly, there is a debate for virtually every country about the degree to which anti-Jewish laws and regulations depended on German rule or political influence, Nazi ideas, or had indigenous origins. Indeed, these discussions dominate the field.

Just a handful of works – a few articles and short book sections – attempt a comprehensive analysis of anti-Jewish legislation outside Germany. Their authors likewise either take German regulations as a yardstick – as, for example, did Raul Hilberg, who emphasized, however, that the intensity and form of persecution by non-German governments differed according to their various and shifting interests – or they assess the extent of German influence as being either small (like Asher Cohen), or large (like Randolph Braham). Donald Bloxham puts the persecution of Jews outside Germany within what he calls an ethno-political context of other violence. All of these authors note that the economic aspects of such legislation were important, but treat them relatively briefly. The entire debate focuses on countries that were either occupied by Germany, depended on it politically, or were otherwise ruled by right-wing authoritarian or fascist regimes: Vichy France and Norway; Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary and Romania; Bulgaria and Italy.

In my view, a comparative analysis should take into account countries that are often left aside in this context, as well as aspects (especially xenophobia) that have not received much attention. This leads to a number of new conclusions. My objective here is, in part, a generalizing and, in part, a variation-finding comparison of government actions, which I shall approach in three different ways: by country, according to historical phases, and, finally, according to various themes that are set out in the content of legislation.

This chapter is restricted to legal regulations of non-German states, broadly understood. German-occupied territories without their own governments are not considered here. I will deal with mere executive measures and orders in later chapters; alongside boycotts, pogroms and other action taken by non-state protagonists. However, I do not aim at purely legal considerations here, and complete coverage of every relevant law is impossible.

During World War II, more than 200 million people in seventeen nations came under German occupation. Germany conquered these countries for a mixture of intertwined political, strategic and economic reasons. Control over them served military functions, but it was also a precondition for exploitation. Because of geographic overextension and the concentration of troops at the fronts, the Germans were usually only able to deploy relatively weak military and police forces to the occupied areas. This resulted in the German view that one needed to rely, first, on indigenous forces and, second, on fear-inducing violence. For this they developed systematic strategies that went far beyond aimless reprisals. Nonetheless, armed resistance movements and guerrilla warfare sprang up in many areas. Across Europe, German repression led to the deaths of about a million people (most of whom were not Jews), often unarmed civilians, primarily in rural areas.

In comparison to work about the impact of repression on the countryside, there has been little systematic research on German methods of terror for suppressing urban resistance. Though it is clear that thousands were detained, deported to German camps and often murdered, numbers specifically for urban victims of terror have not been clearly delineated from other forms of persecution (such as forced labor conscription), and nor are the patterns of urban violence entirely clear.

The fate of Jews was connected in many ways to the persecution of resistance fighters and those suspected of supporting them. Blaming partisan activity on Jews prompted many efforts to kill them, but guerrilla warfare also created spaces where it was possible for Jews to survive. In order to understand these links it is necessary in this chapter to explain, phase by phase, who the partisans were, what their activities consisted of, and which repressive strategies and for which areas Germans developed. These conflicts were not always binary. Other Axis governments killed hundreds of thousands in this context (see Chapter 14). As a result of the German practice of indirect rule, partisan warfare included an element of domestic conflict from the start, and, given deepening social tensions, it often ended in civil war. The end of this chapter discusses the influence of partisan war on the survival chances of Jews. The connection that German politicians and functionaries saw between Jews and insurgency was important, but not their only reason by far for killing Jews.

There was a complex interrelationship between official policies and the activities of non-state actors, whether in Germany or elsewhere. Citizens were affected by government propaganda, but they also, in turn, tried to influence government policies in their own interest. A clear-cut distinction between official and private contributions is not usually possible; state functionaries and citizens cooperated in too many ways. What ordinary people did was influenced not only by the state but also by their social situations, the ideas and actions of enemies and allies from other countries, and deep-rooted attitudes (against Jews and toward diverse related political issues).

A very common question in this context – often the first – is how anti-Semitic the population of a particular country was. There are a number of reasons why this will not be central to this chapter. First, there is no convincing way of measuring anti-Jewish attitudes. With one notable exception (see below), we lack contemporary opinion surveys, let alone a series of them over time. Retrospective polls after World War II about anti-Jewish attitudes before 1945 cannot be trusted as the moral frameworks had changed radically. Second, answers to the question ‘How anti-Semitic was a country?’ are usually speculative, vague and overly sweeping – in part because their bases are national frameworks. Resembling outdated and unscientific inquiries about ‘national character,’ they ignore vast differences among groups (and individuals) within countries. In fact, one important insight is that a great deal of diversity existed. To be sure, it is not enough to state this fact, for ubiquitous contradictions do not account for the very different outcomes in terms of the persecution and survival of Jews. Yet, third, it may be somewhat comforting that popular attitudes toward Jews among the population of a country, though they did matter, were only one factor determining this outcome. Romania is supposed to have been a strongly anti-Semitic country, but survival rates for Jews were higher there than in Croatia, Slovakia and Hungary. Many scholars assess anti-Jewish attitudes in France as being stronger than in Norway, Greece or the Netherlands, and yet the survival rate was much higher in France. This may underline how questionable judgments about a national level of Jew hatred are, but it also indicates that attitudes did not necessarily lead to related action.

Food was a scarce commodity of major political importance during World War II. Unlike in the European Union of today, there were no large European grain surpluses, butter mountains and wine lakes. Instead, Europe – and especially its chief industrial powers, Germany and Great Britain – depended on large overseas imports. However, Germany, her allies, and the countries she occupied, had these deliveries cut off from late 1939 by the British naval blockade. This resembled the situation in World War I, which is why German leaders – and especially Hitler – worried about it. They believed Germany had lost that war because of a breakdown of morale and political willpower in 1918, and that famine (which was supposed to have claimed the lives of 300,000 Germans) had played a crucial role in this collapse, as well as mobilizing proletarians for the 1918–19 revolution. They wished to prevent a repeat of this at all costs. Nazi leaders blamed hunger in Europe from 1939 to 1945 on the Allied blockade, which was allegedly inspired by Jews who were, thus, responsible for the fact that Aryan children starved to death, as Hitler wrote in his testament. Before the war, Hitler had already emphasized that territorial expansion was necessary for German food autarchy. In Mein Kampf he had portrayed starvation as a crucial personal experience and a great threat to the German nation and its culture.

The potential for increasing domestic food production to replace lost imports was low. Food production markedly decreased in most countries, as one would expect, due to a lack of agricultural inputs. The supply of labor fell as the military recruited men from the countryside; less machinery could be used because of the lack of fuel and the military's requisitioning of tractors; horses were also requisitioned; less mineral fertilizer was available since it was produced from phosphate and nitrogen, which were needed for making ammunition; and natural fertilizer was scarce because the lack of imported feed grains and forage meant that the number of livestock had to be reduced as pasture was converted to cropland. The move from animals to grain for human consumption, and from grain to potatoes or sugar beet (which were more calorie-efficient), could only remedy the problem in part.

This chapter focuses on Jewish action and the possibilities of Jewish survival, but also the lack thereof. Concentrating on survival, as such, is unrepresentative because most Jews did not survive. Close to 6 million were murdered; about 1.3 million Jews once living under German rule – or in countries allied with Germany – lived to see the end of the war in 1945 (see Chapter 5). Also, the experiences of the survivors are not always representative of all the persecuted. For instance, living in a camp – so prominent in survivors’ accounts and the imagination of today's public – was far from a universal Jewish experience (unlike other victim groups, like Soviet POWs and Polish and Soviet forced laborers). A majority of Jews were in camps, but I estimate that 2.5 million never so much as spent a single night in a camp. This number includes those Jews, predominantly in the occupied Soviet territories, who Germans and their helpers massacred close to their towns; and those who were deported to extermination camps and murdered within hours of their arrival. Life in confinement of other kinds (in ghettos, Jewish neighbour-hoods, or ‘Jew houses’) was more typical. But as this chapter also deals with many failed attempts to survive, and the reasons for these failures, it does account for Jewish responses in general to German and Axis persecution, which has been covered before.

The perspective of this chapter is narrow in that it does not offer a full account of Jewish life and emotions during the persecution. Like most other parts of this book, it analyzes actions, as a principle, and tries to explain their background, also in terms of ideas and emotions. But, like elsewhere, I do not elaborate much on thoughts, attitudes and emotions that did not lead to action. I think that a total history of that side of life, in all its aspects, remains to be written (as it does for perpetrators too). In particular, we have not fully understood the everyday lives of the persecuted in which, it seems to me, not everything was related to being persecuted. This would have to have been so. Psychologically, their everyday lives can be understood in terms of an instinctive distancing of themselves from the dangers they faced.

As described in Chapter 4, Hitler had decided in principle in December 1941 to kill the Jews in Europe, Göring had given the matter urgency in August 1942, and by June 1942 Himmler had adopted a plan to murder all of the Jews within one year, i.e., by the middle of 1943. But none of this meant that annihilation would run automatically or smoothly. Further mass murders required new impulses and institutional support based on the views and interests of German functionaries. They also needed the consent of foreign governments, bureaucracies and, to a certain extent, populations. Moreover, in the second half of World War II, Germany occupied one friendly country after the other in order to prevent them from switching sides, and this brought new Jewish communities under more direct German control. This expanded and prolonged efforts aimed at the extermination of Jews, with greatly varying outcomes.

By the end of 1942, the great majority of Jews within the German sphere of influence had been murdered. About 4.5 million were dead, about 1.1 million lived in German-occupied countries (primarily Poland and France), and some 1.2 million others lived in countries allied with Germany but not occupied (above all, Hungary and Romania). About 3 million Jews perished from May to December 1942, 2 million in the four horrible months from July to October 1942 alone.

This chapter provides a survey of the major mass murders of the second half of World War II, and is based on the assumption that they did not happen randomly. Rather, the places and times of their occurrence were the result of certain political groups, and their considerations, winning the upper hand over other groups and considerations. The fact that the pace of mass murder clearly slowed after the end of 1942 was also due to a number of political factors. In German-occupied countries without dependent national governments, the German demand for Jewish labor decelerated the destruction. In several countries with a national government, whether under German occupation or not, the readiness of regimes, non-German administrations and local non-state actors to hand over their Jewish compatriots decreased considerably. Such reluctance had already begun to develop between August and November 1942, most notably, and in remarkably parallel fashion, in Romania, Italy, France and Slovakia – but also, to a certain degree, in occupied Poland, though for other reasons.

From the onset of Nazi rule, Jews were the targets of hostile propaganda in the German media, on posters and banners, and in mass gatherings. The central government under Hitler desired this atmosphere. However, there was no single authority in charge of the persecution of Jews. Rather, different state and Nazi Party agencies – central, regional and local – pursued their own anti-Jewish policies. These policies were related to other political areas, for no authority and virtually no single official in the government or Party was responsible for Jews alone. There was no consistent, undisputed, overall strategy. Accordingly, this chapter tries to sketch anti-Jewish policies in Germany, the relevant agents from 1933 through mid 1941 on different levels, legislation and centralized action, popular violence, communal policies and Jewish behavior. The chapter also covers the first years of German anti-Jewish policies in annexed and occupied countries until mid 1941, before the systematic massacres started.

The Nazi Party was handed power on January 30, 1933, at the low point of the Great Depression. Within months, it erected a dictatorship, introduced press censorship, took control of radio broadcasting, outlawed all other political parties and suppressed leftist opposition through mass arrests and detention, partially in improvised camps. In the general elections of March 5, 1933, the Nazis, despite their intimidation, did not win an absolute majority. In the months afterwards, however, they gained the often-enthusiastic sympathy of the vast majority of Germans who often flocked to Nazism of their own accord. This mass support was consolidated by an economic recovery stronger than in many other countries, a recovery that was built in no small degree on dirigiste measures – and especially on a massive rearmament effort – and accompanied by the rhetoric of class compromise that in reality gave entrepreneurs a free hand. By 1938, Germany enjoyed full employment. The social crisis seemed to be overcome. Nazi organizations and their propaganda permeated the everyday, but at the same time the regime integrated most of the traditional elites and the middle classes into its politics. The Party's relationship with parts of the Protestant and Catholic Church remained conflicted, incomes were modest, and there was repeated grumbling over scarce consumer goods and too much empty Nazi propaganda. Currency problems restricted foreign trade. Still, birth rates rebounded – indicating increasing confidence.

This chapter deals with a period of time that included several dramatic turns in German anti-Jewish policies and practices. Extermination was not decided upon all at once. Within one-and-a-half years, from the spring of 1941 to the late summer of 1942, the imaginations about schemes for the territorial concentration of the Jews came to include more and more violence combined with ideas for the selective mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union that was to be occupied. This led to intentions to kill virtually all Soviet Jews; to which were then added plans to murder those Polish Jews who were regarded as unproductive, until, finally, the plan to kill all European Jews by 1943 was developed. Such policies came about through a complex process involving different central and regional authorities and agencies – at different levels of their hierarchies – and were the result of a number of intertwined motives. Practice evolved accordingly, though in regionally uneven ways – from selective mass shootings to almost complete annihilation in the occupied Soviet territories in 1941, though in some regions large numbers of Jews were spared for a year or longer; and from selective deportations from many countries to newly built extermination centers; and then the almost complete wiping out of Jewish communities in 1942. Other policies of mass violence also emerged and evolved during 1941–42, including the starving of Soviet POWs and others, forced labor, and anti-guerrilla warfare, all of which were, in some ways, connected to the fate of Jews. All of these developments were closely connected to the war's having become a relentless life-and-death struggle as a result of Germany's invasion of the USSR in June 1941 – and the subsequent hard-fought battles; of Germany's feverish efforts to support the Eastern Front with a wartime economy hampered by scarcity; and by the start of guerrilla uprisings in several countries. Non-German policies and actions against Jews and others must also be borne in mind.

It is important to examine the many initiatives and twists and turns in German decision-making because such patterns indirectly provide insights into more profound questions about the motives behind, the forces driving, and the political structures responsible for the extermination of Jews.