The Holocaust was not conducted by Germans alone. In every territory the Wehrmacht entered, local paramilitary formations were recruited, equipped, and deployed alongside the German forces to do the work of identifying, arresting, and killing the local Jewish population. In some cases the local force did most of the killing in its territory; in some cases the Germans depended on local cooperation to find the people they wanted to kill; in some cases the local force operated with such enthusiasm that it shocked even SS officers. This page introduces the principal national groupings; the individual pages below cover each in detail.
Why the local groups mattered
The German occupation forces were never large enough, on their own, to find and kill the millions of Jews dispersed across occupied Eastern Europe. The killing in 1941 in the Soviet territories was conducted by Einsatzgruppen units of around 600 to 1,000 men each, four units in total, covering an area larger than France. The arithmetic does not work without local participation. Local auxiliaries provided most of the manpower at the killing pits at Babi Yar (around two thirds of the shooters were Ukrainian auxiliary police), at Ponary (the killings were conducted by Lithuanian auxiliary units), at Rumbula in Latvia (the Arajs Kommando), and at hundreds of smaller sites across the Soviet territories. The local participation was the operational precondition of the Holocaust by bullets in the East.
The Soviet territories
In the Baltic states, Belorussia and Ukraine, German forces recruited local auxiliary police, partisan units, and SS volunteer formations from populations that, in many cases, were already actively antisemitic and had welcomed the German invasion as deliverance from Soviet rule. The Lithuanian Activist Front conducted pogroms in Kaunas and elsewhere in the first days of the German invasion in June 1941, before the Germans had given any orders. The Latvian Arajs Kommando, named after its commander Viktors Arājs, killed around 26,000 Jews at Rumbula and elsewhere. Ukrainian auxiliary police provided the bulk of the manpower for killings across Ukraine.
Romania and Hungary
Romania conducted its own killing programme in 1941 and 1942 under the Iron Guard and the Antonescu regime’s gendarmerie, killing around 280,000 to 380,000 Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria. The Hungarian Arrow Cross, after the German-backed coup of October 1944, conducted the most intensive single phase of street-level killing of Hungarian Jews, including the Danube shootings of December 1944 to January 1945 in which thousands were marched to the river bank, ordered to remove their shoes, and shot into the water.
The Western and Southern collaborators
In Western Europe the local instruments were typically state police forces operating under the existing national government rather than party paramilitaries. In France the Vichy police and the Milice française carried out the round-ups. In the Netherlands, the Dutch police, with NSB members at its core, did most of the arrests. In Belgium and Luxembourg the local police participation was more limited but still significant. In southern Europe, Croatia’s Ustaše ran the Jasenovac killing camps largely independently of German direction.
The post-war reckoning
The post-war prosecution of the local collaborators was uneven. Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Greece conducted substantial trials of leading collaborators between 1945 and 1948. The Soviet Union prosecuted some Baltic and Ukrainian collaborators where they could be identified and apprehended, but many escaped to the West and lived out their lives in émigré communities in Canada, the United States, Argentina, Britain and Australia. The cases that surfaced decades later, John Demjanjuk, Anton Geyer, the Latvian Konrāds Kalējs, the Ukrainian Mykola Sysyn, all involved men who had been identified as wartime perpetrators but had been admitted to Western countries in the post-war refugee waves on the basis of false biographies.
Several post-1989 governments in the formerly communist Eastern European countries have moved, with variable degrees of success, to come to terms with their countries’ wartime collaborationist roles. Romania commissioned the Wiesel Commission of 2003. Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Hungary have produced varying official histories, often complicated by the desire to balance the wartime period against the subsequent communist persecutions. The result is that the historical accounting for the local collaborators is, in 2026, still unfinished business across much of Eastern Europe.
The pages in this section
The pages that follow cover the principal local instruments of the Holocaust: the Lithuanian Activist Front, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Polish Blue Police, the Romanian Iron Guard, the French Milice, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, and the Croatian Ustaše. The named-figure pages cover the senior individuals: Antonescu, Horthy, Laval, Mussert, Pétain, Quisling, Waldheim, and the cases of Pope Pius XII and the Mufti of Jerusalem.
See also
- Romania
- Activist Front, Lithuania
- Hungary
- Ukrainian Auxiliary Police
- The Netherlands
- The Rumbula Massacre
Sources
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004
- Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013
- Tomislav Dulić et al., The Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945, Routledge, 2007
- USHMM: Local Collaboration