(Jewish Group) Nazi guards weren't the only ones killing Jews during the Holocaust.

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Nazi guards weren’t the only ones killing Jews during the Holocaust. Some — but not all — communities did it themselves first. Why?

As the United States deports a former Nazi concentration camp guard to Germany, the world has been reminded again of the popular image of the Holocaust as one of impersonal mass slaughter. In the death camps, Jews and other victims died at the hands of murderers who didn’t know their victims but were filled with anti-Semitic hate.

But by the time that the death camps’ gas chambers became operational, approximately half of the Jews who would perish in the Holocaust were already dead. Many of these Jews were tortured or killed by “ordinary” non-Jews at close quarters: in apartments, in streets, in the woods and anywhere else Jews could be found. The perpetrators often knew or knew of their victims, and the means were often primitive: guns, axes, crowbars, bricks, fire, beating and drowning.

Jews did not face this kind of personalized anti-Semitic violence in every community. Our recently published book, “Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust,” identifies the factors that put Jews at risk in some places but not others. And these factors involve more than just anti-Semitism.

Targeting Jews in Poland and Ukraine

Our book examines a particularly brutal wave of anti-Jewish violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities on the eastern front in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. We document 219 communities of local non-Jews attacking their Jewish neighbors, nearly 10 percent of the 2,304 localities where Jews and non-Jews lived together. Ethnic Poles were the primary perpetrators in approximately 25 percent of these pogroms; in the remaining instances, ethnic Ukrainians predominated.

These attacks were often gruesome. In Wasosz, a small town in northeastern Poland, Szymon Datner’s testimony describes the events of early July 1941:

… women were raped, their breasts cut off, little children were smashed on the walls, the fingers of the dead were cut off along with their gold rings, gold teeth were torn out of mouths; when in a house children were found with their parents, they would torture the children first, and then the parents.

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Some of the comments....







But so goddamned predictable!