Jews Went Passively to Their Deaths

The claim is built on a false premise: that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust did not resist. They did, in many forms and at every level. There was armed resistance in numerous ghettos and camps, including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, the Vilna Ghetto resistance, the Treblinka uprising, the Sobibór uprising, the Auschwitz Sonderkommando uprising, and the Jewish partisan formations across Eastern Europe. There was unarmed resistance in the form of escapes, rescues, smuggling networks, the maintenance of Jewish religious and cultural life under impossible conditions, and the determined creation of records that would survive even when the people did not. The claim of “passive going to deaths” is itself a myth, partly perpetuated by post-war Israeli political discourse that valued armed combat as the standard for honourable resistance, but rejected by all serious historical work on the subject.

The armed uprisings

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April to 16 May 1943 was the largest armed Jewish resistance operation of the war. Approximately 750 fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) under Mordechai Anielewicz and the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW) held off SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop’s force of approximately 2,000 Waffen-SS troops, Order Police, and Trawniki auxiliaries for four weeks. The fighters used small arms, Molotov cocktails and a few captured machine guns. Stroop’s eventual suppression of the uprising required the systematic burning of the entire ghetto, building by building, with flamethrowers. The Stroop Report (covered on its own leaf above) is the operational record from the German side. The fighters’ own accounts survive in the Marek Edelman memoir The Ghetto Fights, in the testimony of the few survivors of the uprising, and in the Oneg Shabbat archive prepared by Emanuel Ringelblum and his collaborators in the ghetto’s final months.

The Treblinka uprising of 2 August 1943 was an armed revolt by approximately 700 Sonderkommando workers at the Treblinka killing camp. The fighters had stolen weapons from the camp armoury and set fire to camp buildings; approximately 200 escaped from the camp; approximately 70 survived the war. The Sobibór uprising of 14 October 1943 was a similar revolt at Sobibór, organised by the Polish Jewish leader Leon Feldhendler and the Soviet Jewish POW officer Alexander Pechersky. Approximately 600 prisoners attempted to escape; approximately 300 made it through the perimeter; approximately 50 to 70 survived the war. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando uprising of 7 October 1944 destroyed crematorium IV and killed three SS guards before being suppressed. The Białystok Ghetto Uprising of 16 August 1943, the Vilna Ghetto fighting, the Sosnowiec resistance, and many smaller actions occurred across the network of ghettos and camps.

The partisan formations

Beyond the ghettos and camps, Jewish partisan formations operated in the forests of Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. The Bielski partisans in the Naliboki Forest in Belarus, led by Tuvia, Asael, Zus and Aron Bielski, sheltered approximately 1,200 Jewish civilians and conducted armed operations against German forces; their story has been documented in detail by Nechama Tec in Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (1993). The Soviet partisan units across the occupied territories included substantial Jewish components, often forming dedicated Jewish units within the larger structures. The French Resistance had the Armée Juive and the Mouvement de la Jeunesse Sioniste; the Belgian Resistance had the Jewish Resistance Group; the Greek Resistance included Jewish units in the EAM-ELAS network. The total estimate of Jews who fought as armed partisans is approximately 20,000 to 30,000 across the war.

The unarmed resistance

The unarmed resistance was orders of magnitude larger and equally important. The maintenance of Jewish religious and cultural life under conditions of persecution and imprisonment was itself an act of resistance. The schools that operated in the Warsaw Ghetto despite German prohibition. The synagogue services that continued in the camps despite the impossibility of religious practice. The literary work that survived from Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and the ghettos. The Oneg Shabbat archive prepared by Emanuel Ringelblum and his colleagues in the Warsaw Ghetto, recording the experience of the ghetto in real time and burying the records to ensure they survived. The Sonderkommando manuscripts buried at Auschwitz-Birkenau by Gradowski, Langfus and Lewental. The diaries kept across the camps and ghettos. The smuggling networks that brought food into the ghettos to sustain life past the regime’s planned starvation. The escape and rescue operations that hid Jewish individuals across occupied Europe.

The historian Yehuda Bauer’s standard treatment Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations 1933 to 1945 (1994) and his earlier Rethinking the Holocaust (2001) place the unarmed resistance at the centre of the historical understanding. Bauer’s category of amidah (Hebrew for “standing”) covers the entire range of Jewish responses, from armed combat to the maintenance of human dignity in conditions designed to destroy it. The framework is now standard in the historical literature.

The conditions of resistance

The deniers’ “passive deaths” framing also ignores the operational reality of the killing. People arriving at the gas chambers had typically been transported in sealed cattle cars for days without food, water or sanitation; many had died en route; the survivors arrived in extreme physical and psychological exhaustion. They were lied to by the SS at every stage about what was happening; the deception about “showers” was deliberate; the use of the Jewish Sonderkommando to lead people in was specifically designed to maintain the deception until the last moment. The people in the chambers had no weapons, no information about what was happening, no group cohesion (the transports mixed people from different communities and cities), and no time to organise resistance once they realised what was happening. Resistance under those specific conditions was almost impossible. Resistance under other conditions, where it was possible, was extensive.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the Jews went passively to their deaths is harmful in two distinct ways. First, it falsifies the historical record by denying the extensive armed and unarmed resistance that did occur. Second, it embeds a victim-blaming logic that treats the killing as somehow more credible if the victims had fought back, and less credible if they had not, regardless of the operational reality of what fighting back was possible under what conditions. The Jews who walked into the gas chambers without armed resistance were doing what almost any group of unarmed civilians would do under those specific conditions: deceived, exhausted, isolated, terrorised, and given no opportunity to organise. The Jews who did fight back, where conditions allowed it, did so with extraordinary courage. Both groups were victims of the same operation. The deniers’ framing dishonours both.

What was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? What were the Treblinka and Sobibór uprisings? What was the Bielski partisan operation? Where can the unarmed resistance be read about?

See also

• The Sonderkommando
• The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943
• The Białystok Ghetto Uprising 1943
• The Bielski Partisans
• The Vilna Ghetto Resistance
• The Stroop Report

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Sources

• Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1994
• Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, Bookmarks, 1990
• Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, edited by Jacob Sloan, Schocken, 1958
• Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oneg Shabbes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
• Yitzhak Arad, The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, revised and expanded edition, Indiana University Press, 2018, on the Treblinka and Sobibór uprisings
• Richard Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka, Northwestern University Press, 1995
• Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, Northwestern University Press, 1997
• Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press, 1993
• Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations 1933 to 1945, Yale University Press, 1994
• Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001
• Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, Paul Elek, 1974
• Patrick Henry (ed.), Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, Catholic University of America Press, 2014
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Jewish Resistance” and “Resistance during the Holocaust”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org