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... > I was further arguing that in Vichy > France (for example) there wasn't much risk to helping > people escape because the Germans _weren't there_. I'd have to go dig up the sources again, but in theory, anyone protecting Jews in France at that time was to be treated the same as the Jews. I say "in theory" because this apparently was the directive from Hitler and others at the top, but the German officers in France were apparently reluctant to carry out those orders. As for the French police, I haven't seen anything that indicated if they went along with that, but there are anecdotes in which they clearly knew that some French were hiding Jews, but were not punished for it. So I guess it's a bit ambiguous. The potential risk was high, given the German policy from on high, but the reality seemed to be that one could get away with it. Considering that more than three-quarters of Jews in France in 1940 survived, it seems that something was working. As for the timeline, the French Jews apparently went to Auschwitz in the spring of 1942; Hitler did not order the occupation of Vichy France until November of that year. > brunt of it, and they didn't really care. Had it been > Catholics (for example) I think things might have been > different. No doubt, although I head in this direction with trepidation. There was a longstanding connection between Catholicism and anti-Semitism (anti- anything not Catholic) in France. The most well-documented effort to hide a large number of Jews in France, which I referenced earlier, was led by Protestant pastors. The silence of the Church of Rome in France at that time is very difficult to accept. But there is a much larger issue, of course, about the church and the Nazis, what should have been said and done when, which has begun to be addressed in the last few years. > But we have a relative scale here, in terms of most > effective to least effective resistance: > Serbs and Russians (militarily) > Danes (saving their Jews) > and, at the bottom, > France (which did neither). Given that some people > did manage to do it, what's your explanation for why > others, in basically the same circumstances, failed? How can France be at the bottom when more than three-quarters survived? France had a higher proportion of survivors than most, since the overall survival rate in Europe was only 40 percent...? In these terms, the countries with the lowest proportion surviving (in order) would be Poland (by far, the saddest, with a 1.5 percent survival rate), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Greece, Hungary, the Ukraine. In fact, as far as I can see, France had the highest survival rate -- 78% -- of all of the nations of Europe (I had no idea) other than Finland, Denmark and Bulgaria. I'm finding varying estimates for Italy, so it's not clear where it stands relative to France. Various Holocaust web sites seem to name Ukrainians, the Poles, Croats, and Lithuanians as those who most collaborated with the Nazis. Living in a world of statistics these days (and waiting for a very long database index update), I looked for some patterns in the basic data. * The nations with the highest proportion of pre-war Jewish population also tended to have the highest percentage loss. They are Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia, Netherlands, Greece, Luxembourg. Two anomalies, though -- Romania and Austria, where the Jewish losses were quite a bit lower than in the rest of that group. * France falls just after the nations above, with a pre-war population that was 0.8 percent Jewish and a 22 percent loss. Germany itself had almost the same pre-war percentage of Jews, but its loss rate was 24 percent. * Yugoslavia is anomalous at the other end of the scale, having a pre-war Jewish percentage of only 0.5 percent, but a loss of 72 percent. I'm afraid this may have been the work of my ancestors. My namesake was Croatian. He lived on a small island in the Adriatic, so I could hope that he wasn't part of the collaboration. Perhaps it should go without saying, but surely it would be wrong to assume that survival rates directly correspond to resistance. Surely they have a great deal to do with geography and German priorities. But I'm out of my depth as far as being able to make any informed summary in that regard. Here's the data... Country Total Jews Pre-war % Losses % Lost Poland 22,000,000 3,300,000 15.00% 2,900,000 88% Lithuania 2,879,070 168,000 5.84% 140,000 83% Greece 6,204,684 77,380 1.25% 60,000 78% Latvia 1,950,502 91,500 4.69% 70,000 77% Slovakia 3,329,793 88,950 2.67% 68,000 76% Yugoslavia 15,500,000 78,000 0.50% 56,200 72% Netherlands 8,900,000 140,000 1.57% 100,000 71% Hungary 14,683,323 825,000 5.62% 550,000 67% Luxembourg 300,000 3,500 1.17% 1,950 56% Norway 2,814,194 1,700 0.06% 762 45% Romania 19,933,802 609,000 3.06% 271,000 44% Belgium 8,300,000 65,700 0.79% 28,900 44% Estonia 1,133,917 4,500 0.40% 1,500 33% USSR 170,467,000 3,020,000 1.77% 1,000,000 33% Austria 7,009,014 185,000 2.64% 50,000 27% Germany 69,622,483 556,000 0.80% 134,500 24% France 41,907,056 350,000 0.84% 77,320 22% Italy 42,993,602 44,500 0.10% 7,680 17% Denmark 3,706,349 7,800 0.21% 60 1% Finland 3,667,067 2,000 0.05% 7 0% Bulgaria 6,200,000 50,000 0.81% 0 0% _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
