How Insurgency Decreases Genocidal Violence: La Résistance and Jews in the Holocaust

Kasia Nalewajko, European University Institute

Did the presence of anti-Nazi resisters help or hinder Jews’ survival in the Holocaust? Resistance movements across occupied Europe have been typically accused of not having done enough to help their fellow Jewish citizens escape from genocide. In addition, a common view in political science holds that insurgents’ presence attracts more incumbent state violence. In contrast to this, I use multiple archival collections on WWI and WWII military personnel records, Holocaust victims’ records, and testimonies of survivors and rescuers to show that insurgent presence in fact decreased local numbers of Holocaust victims. To ensure that the relationship is causal, I use an instrumental variable strategy exploiting the exogenous number of WWI military deaths by local communities, which increased insurgent recruitment in WWII. Qualitative case studies of causal mechanisms reveal that the insurgents helped the Jews by sharing rebellion technology they had developed to evade the Germans. The two groups were motivated to cooperate, because they had a common enemy, the Nazi occupier, and ran similar deportation dangers which increased their mutual trust. This article offers counterintuitive insights into the dynamics of genocide by studying its interaction with civil war, with which it typically co-occurs. It therefore contributes to unifying scholarship on political violence, which has been fragmented by conflict type.

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 Presented in Session 167. Protests, Movements, Rebellions