Pretexts for hatred of the Jews..contd..

     During the years in which the Holocaust took place (1941-45) many fleeing refugees and escapees were given compassionate and risky reception and sacrificial assistance by their neighbours and those in authority.  Even before those years, the Jewish community in Germany realised that a storm was gathering after the events of  “Kristallnacht” ( November, 10th. 1938), when 1000 synagogues were destroyed and 91 Jews were murdered. The Jewish authorities asked for the British to allow their children to be evacuated to the Mandated territory in Palestine. Britain refused this request in order not to offend the resident Arabs. Despite this set-back, the Jewish leaders in Britain persuaded Parliament to admit some Jewish children and give them refuge , and 198 children arrived in December of that year at Harwich.

    There is the testimony of many hundreds in Occupied Europe who were saved from certain death by friendly small-holders, farmers, partisans, officials, and even the local police. Such unsolicited favour and mercy shown to so many stands in sharp contrast to the malicious treatment accorded to many Jews by local populations who collaborated readily with the S.S. squads and the Einsatzgruppen in the detention and murder of their erstwhile Jewish neighbours throughout Occupied Europe. In many countries the civil servants, gendarmerie, police, and partisans willingly co-operated with their Nazi overlords in the extermination programme devised by their conquerors. Such localised hostility towards indigenous Jews seems to have been the outworking of a pan-European phenomenon which welled-up as a release valve in the newly-created autocracies which arose on the ruins of old monarchies after world war 1. These illiberal autocracies in Soviet Russia, Italy, Austria, Romania,Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stifled popular dissent. As a result there was a surrender of individual and collective social responsibility to the powers of the state machine, which was generally anti-Semitic in outlook. Communal aggression and a craving for plunder was given opportunity to exercise itself by official sanctions by these anti-Jewish governments.