Religious Minorities and Resistance to Genocide: The Collective Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust

Abstract

This article hypothesizes that minority groups are more likely to protect persecuted groups during episodes of mass killing. The author builds a geocoded dataset of Jewish evasion and church communities in the Netherlands during the Holocaust to test this hypothesis. Spatial regression models of 93 percent of all Dutch Jews demonstrate a robust and positive correlation between the proximity to minority churches and evasion. While proximity to Catholic churches increased evasion in dominantly Protestant regions, proximity to Protestant churches had the same effect in Catholic parts of the country. Municipality level fixed effects and the concentric dispersion of Catholicism from missionary hotbed Delft are exploited to disentangle the effect of religious minority groups from local level tolerance and other omitted variables. This suggests that it is the local configuration of civil society that produces collective networks of assistance to threatened neighbors.

Social Changes in Impressionable Years and Adult Political Attitudes: Evidence From Jewish Expulsions in Nazi Germany

“…Finally, this paper improves our understanding of the long-term causes, consequences, and impacts, of the Nazi regime (Acemoglu, Hassan, and Robinson 2011;Akbulut-Yuksel and Yuksel 2015;Braun 2016;Cantoni, Hagemeister, and Westcott 2019;D'Acunto, Prokopczuk, and Weber 2015;Fontana, Nannicini, and Tabellini 2018;Grosfeld, Rodnyansky, and Zhuravskaya 2013;Moser, Voena, and Waldinger 2014;Pascali 2009;Satyanath, Voigtländer, and Voth 2017;Voigtländer and Voth 2015;Waldinger 2010Waldinger , 2012. Consistent with our findings, Acemoglu, Hassan, and Robinson (2011) find that Jewish persecution during the holocaust in Russia is negatively related to current political behavior, due to changes in the social structure within Russian society.…”

A Source of Escalation or a Source of Restraint? An Empirical Investigation of How Civil Society Affects Mass Killings

“…The first category of such benevolent effects include acts of help, mutual aid, and rescue. In many cases of mass killing, people who try to flee or evade mass killings are highly dependent on others to share resources, provide shelter, facilitate movement, or appeal to authorities for mercy (Braun 2016;Varese and Yaish 2000). When communities engage in collective action to shelter, hide, rescue, or facilitate the flight of targeted populations, they can have a substantial impact on the survival rates among these communities (Braun 2016).…”

“…A large body of work has focused on the important role played by civil society and non-governmental actors in initiating different forms of rescue, evasion, and assistance in the midst of different cases of mass killings, as well as the political pressure they have applied in bringing about the ends of civil conflicts (Nilsson 2012;Gbowee 2011;Robinson 2010). In cases as diverse as Nazi Germany (Fein 1979;Phayer 1993), Nazi-occupied Holland (Braun 2016;Varese and Yaish 2000) and France (Moore 2010), Rwanda (Longman 2010), India (Varshney 2002), East Timor (Robinson 2010), Colombia (Kaplan 2017), the Ottoman Empire (Tevosyan 2004), and Eastern Europe (McMahon 2007), churches, civic organizations, labor unions, local community councils, and transnational networks played important roles in halting or foiling killings, providing protection, and reducing the number of killed overall.…”

“…Second, until the last decade, most scholarship on genocide, politicide, and mass killings fell into one of two categories: either they focused on "macro" societal factors, such as regime type (Rummel 1994), war and instability (Harff 2003), or nationalism (Mann 2005), or they focused on micro-level factors, such as personality type (Oliner and Oliner 1998), obedience to authority (Milgram 1965), and moral cognition or identity (Gross 1994;Monroe 2011) in explaining why some people become bystanders, perpetrators, or resisters of genocide. In contrast, more recent works have pushed for highlighting the impacts of meso-level, societal factors on mass killings rather than focusing only on static, state-or international-level conditions or individuals' dispositional traits as the primary drivers of this grisly phenomenon (Braun 2016;Finkel and Straus 2012;Fujii 2011;Longman 2010;McDoom 2014;Straus 2012). Although we are not entirely able to move beyond fairly macro analyses in the first cut of this study, our findings provide ample evidence justifying further research into the conditions under which civil society accelerates or stalls mass killings, and they also point us to some potential directions for refining our hypotheses and analysis in deeper research on particular cases.…”

Genocide as Contentious Politics

“…Yet curiously, studies of genocide have not been incorporated into this work (Owens et al 2013). Besides research that studies how targets of genocidal violence mobilize resistance to their oppressors (e.g., Einwohner 2003Einwohner , 2006Einwohner and Maher 2011;Finkel 2015;Maher 2010;Soyer 2014), or how non-targets mobilize to save victimized civilians (Braun 2014;Luft 2013), the question of how previously non-violent individuals mobilize to kill their neighbors is often treated separately and external to research on political violence in contentious politics (Verdeja 2012, p. 307). 1 However, genocide, like other forms of contention, is worthy of our attention as social scientists: basic social processes are at the root of most cases of extreme state violence and how non-state actors choose to respond.…”