The Holocaust did not happen only in the camps. Most of the killing happened outside them, in the open territories of occupied Europe, in places where the German army had brought either its own personnel or its local allies. Of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, around half were killed at the Operation Reinhard camps and Auschwitz. The other half were killed in shootings in the killing fields of the east, in the ghettos before the deportations, in the forests where Jewish partisans were hunted down, on the death marches at the end of the war, and in the various national killing operations conducted by Nazi allies and collaborators.
The pages in this section cover the killing as it happened across the European continent, country by country and theme by theme. Each occupied country had its own particular story. The collaboration of local police, the participation of local civilians, the response of local churches, the conduct of local resistance movements: all varied. Each variation has its own historical record, its own post-war reckoning, and its own contemporary politics.
What is here
Several pages cover themes that ran across countries. Jewish Partisans Across Occupied Europe covers the armed resistance Jews mounted in the forests of Eastern Europe and the cities of the west. Jews in Allied Armed Forces covers the more than a million Jews who fought in uniform on the Allied side. Should the Allies Have Bombed the Railways to Auschwitz covers one of the most-argued questions of the wartime Allied response. International Resistance and Rescue and Deportations from Across Occupied Europe cover the wider patterns of how the killing was organised and how it was sometimes opposed. International Collaboration with the Nazis covers the patterns of cooperation that made the killing possible at scale.
The country pages then cover each occupied country or German ally in turn. The Baltic states, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, the Soviet Union, Spain and Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia. Each has its own page, with the size of the pre-war Jewish community, what happened to it, the role of the local authorities and population, and the size of the surviving community after the war.
Jewish Communities That Survived Relatively Intact covers the small number of European Jewish communities that came through the war with most of their numbers intact. They are the exceptions, and the reasons for each one’s survival are a particular and often unexpected combination of geography, politics, and individual courage. The Dominican Republic and Jewish Refugees covers the only country at the Evian Conference of 1938 to have offered to take a substantial number of Jewish refugees from Europe.
The pattern across the continent
The mortality of European Jewry varied dramatically by country. In Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, around 90 to 95 per cent of the pre-war Jewish population was murdered. In Hungary, around 70 per cent. In the Netherlands and Greece, around 75 per cent. In France, around 25 per cent. In Italy, around 17 per cent. In Bulgaria and Denmark, almost none of the native Jewish population was killed. In Albania, the Jewish population at the end of the war was larger than at the beginning, the only country in occupied Europe of which that can be said.
The variation was not simple. It depended on the German occupation regime in each territory, on the willingness of local police forces to cooperate with deportations, on the geography of escape, on the timing of the German invasion and the consequent length of the killing window, on the existence of ferry routes to neutral Sweden, on the pre-war character of local antisemitism, and on the actions of named individuals at moments where individual action made a difference. Each country page tries to identify the particular combination that produced the particular result.
The operational record
The operational record on Beyond the Camps is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.
The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
- Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
- Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994