Early work on the Holocaust, one of the most well-documented episodes of mass killing, has tended to see it as a macro-historical phenomenon. Two recent books by Ethan Hollander and Robert Braun remind us that states’ and societies’ responses to the tragedy were varied. They offer novel and largely complementary explanations for the variation in Jewish survival across Europe: protecting Jews took both selfless actions by some population groups and collaboration by national governments with the Nazis.
Hollander’s Hegemony and the Holocaust begins with an observation that more Jews survived in states in which high-ranking officials were willing to collaborate with the Nazi regime. The author argues, counterintuitively, that their decisions to stay in office prevented the imposition of direct German rule, thereby reducing the human costs of occupation. The indirect and less hierarchical nature of occupation left room for idiosyncratic factors—political culture, anti-Semitism, or geography—to influence the implementation of the Final Solution. As a rule, the collaborating governments were willing to intercede on behalf of their Jewish citizens, hindering German deportation plans and increasing the probability of Jewish survival.
Hollander’s argument is concisely and accessibly presented in the introduction, and the remaining four chapters develop in-depth case studies based on archival research and secondary sources. Each chapter details national governments’ reactions to German invasion, trade-offs made by collaborating officials, and the implementation of the Final Solution. Countries are compared within regional groups, to condition on geography, political culture, and a country’s position in Nazi racial hierarchy. A key assumption behind this research design—which was more plausible for some country cases than others—is that the availability and acceptance of the collaborationist option were orthogonal to the anticipated treatment of a country’s Jewish population.
Chapter 2 compares Jewish victimization rates in Denmark (0.8% killed) and Norway (42.3% killed). Hollander links the ability of Danish leaders to postpone deportations and eventually secure the escape of Jews to Sweden to their willingness to negotiate with Germany. Norway’s leadership, by contrast, engaged in desperate resistance, leading to the imposition of a German-appointed administration under the leadership of Vidkun Quisling. Quisling owed his position to Germany alone; he was therefore unable to resist German demands and was eager to prove his loyalty by implementing anti-Jewish policies.
The next chapter examines consequences of varied forms of German rule for Jewish victimization rates in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Hollander reminds us that under the Vichy regime, known for its anti-Semitism, three out of four Jews survived the war. He explains this by the relative autonomy of the Vichy regime vis-à-vis Germany, which was secured through collaboration. Concerned about public opinion, Vichy officials protected French Jews, even as they passed anti-Jewish legislation and participated in roundups of foreign Jews. Collaboration explains why the rate of Jewish victimization in anti-Semitic France was much lower than in the Netherlands, where two-thirds of Jews were killed. Dutch leaders decided to resist the invasion, and their eventual defeat left the country without indigenous leadership and resulted in the heightened efficiency of the Final Solution. As we see also from Braun’s book, the societal response goes a long way toward explaining the survival of the Netherlands’ remaining Jewish population.
Hollander also compares responses to the Final Solution in Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, Germany’s three allies in Eastern Europe. The Hungarian case allows him to leverage temporal variation in German control within the same state.
Written in a clear and intelligible style, the book reveals complex and contradictory motivations underlying the governments’ efforts to rescue their Jewish citizens. Although genuine concern and empathy were not fully absent, the political costs incurred by deporting fellow citizens, the economic benefits from prolonging the exploitation of Jews, and the prospects of German victory also mattered. Hollander thus challenges “simplistic judgments of collaboration as morally vacant” (p. 273): resisting occupation was often futile and cost lives. Yet he also acknowledges that collaboration was not necessarily the lesser evil. It contributed to Germany’s war effort, exacerbating human suffering in those countries that resisted; some collaborationist regimes that spared their own Jews even murdered foreign Jews on Germany’s behalf.
The final chapter examines the correlation between hierarchy and the Jewish victimization rate on a Europe-wide scale. The relationship holds, but unexplained variation remains: for example, Romania, an Axis power, lost a much higher proportion of its Jews (51.2%) than the “gently occupied” Denmark (6.1%). Although differences in the characteristics of German rule between cases such as these come through in the qualitative chapters, this example illustrates the challenges involved in measuring hierarchy with precision and the limitations of hierarchy as an explanation. An elaboration of coding decisions and a more systematic incorporation of quantitative indicators, such as the number of German forces stationed in a country, could further strengthen the analysis in this chapter.
Altogether, the book is an important contribution to the scholarship on genocide, wartime governance, and negotiation. Hollander offers an insightful perspective on the role of the modern state in protecting its citizens and develops an explanation for the striking variation in Jewish victimhood across Europe that had been largely neglected in the earlier work on the Holocaust.
Braun’s Protectors of Pluralism examines ordinary citizens’ clandestine assistance to their Jewish neighbors, which was central to Jews’ ability to survive once the deportations began. This impactful book offers a comprehensive theory of resistance to genocide, bridging together multiple levels of analysis. Braun argues that a successful rescue required both empathy toward the victims and the capacity for clandestine collective action. Religious minorities were uniquely positioned with respect to both. Because all minorities depend on pluralism and share vulnerabilities with each other, minority religious leaders were more likely to empathize with the plight of Jews. Minorities were also well placed to render assistance to Jews. In majority-dominated areas, they formed dense yet isolated networks, which ensured a strong commitment to the group, superior knowledge of all community members, and the ability to set up interregional ties with other isolated minority groups.
The empirical chapters (3–10) superbly combine vivid and persuasive description with methodologically rigorous analysis to evaluate the theory’s predictions. Most evidence comes from the Netherlands and Belgium, where the Reformation and Counter-Reformation produced numerous pockets of religious minorities. Braun’s research design enables him to study the same religious denomination in a majority and minority context within the same state, as well as to compare minority response in states that differ in their occupation regimes, political cleavages, religious diversity, and characteristics of their Jewish populations. Braun uses a diverse set of data, which include information on the fate of Dutch and Belgian individuals of Jewish origin, painstakingly geocoded and matched across German registration lists, commemoration books, and return lists; hand-collected archival material on all clandestine rescue operations in select regions; a survey of Protestant and Catholic clerics in Belgium; testimonies from 20 countries affected by the Holocaust; records of postwar trials; and articles from the mainstream and underground press.
The book first establishes that minority status predicts more positive attitudes toward Jews and greater empathy with the Jewish plight in the Netherlands. Braun shows this through content analysis of more than 1,700 prewar claims by opinion leaders in the Catholic media in the 1930s in regions where Catholics comprised the majority or minority, as well as analysis of 905 resistance newspapers published during the war. He then runs regressions to demonstrate that proximity to Catholic churches increased evasion from deportation in Protestant-dominated areas, whereas proximity to Protestant churches increased evasion in Catholic-dominated areas. Next, he examines rescue activities across the religious divide in the Twente region of the Netherlands using mixed methods to explicate the mechanisms through which the structure of minority networks affects the success of clandestine collective action.
The final three chapters study cases off the regression line and derive the scope conditions of the argument. Braun finds that other minorities, such as radical socialists and communists, as well as members of ethnic enclaves, also contributed to the rescue of Jews. This finding reinforces his argument on the importance of both motivation and capacity in clandestine rescue operations. Braun explores the generalizability of his argument by analyzing the prevalence of religious minorities among rescuers identified in 6,407 Yad Vashem testimonies from across Europe. Strikingly, minorities were overrepresented in all but five countries: Denmark, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania. The first three states enjoyed considerable autonomy from Germany, which meant that majority churches and national elites could help their Jewish countrymen more openly, as detailed in Hollander’s book. In Poland and Lithuania, religious minorities often identified with the Nazi occupiers or were attracted to economic or political rewards that came from participating in genocide.
This thoroughly researched and persuasively argued book shows that it is not members of the society’s mainstream but rather of its marginalized groups who risk their lives to rescue others in a crisis. Furthermore, both empathy toward the victims of mass violence and the ability to help them are the product of underlying social structures. The book, as one of its many contributions, thus proposes important structural conditions for the defense of pluralism. It is a must read for scholars of intergroup relations, ethnic violence, civil society, collective action, and altruism.
Together, Braun and Hollander’s contributions refine our understanding of how genocide can be prevented and why victimization rates vary across states and localities. They establish that empathy toward the Jewish victims played some role in their survival, but only within the constraints of the occupation regime (Hollander) and may itself have been endogenous to the structural positions of their would-be rescuers (Braun).
