Responsibility For The Holocaust - Involved - Other States

Other States

Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found willing collaborators in other countries, both those allied to Germany and those under German occupation.

The civil service and police of the Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures; with the exception of Romania, they did not comply until compelled to do so. Bulgaria and Finland refused to co-operate, and all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews survived (though most lost their possessions and many were imprisoned), but thousands of Greek and Yugoslavian Jews were deported from the Bulgarian-occupied territories. Although Finland officially refused to participate in the Holocaust, and even operated a field synagogue for its Jewish soldiers some of whom were offered military decorations by Hitler (which they refused), it secretly extradicted 8 Jewish refugees to the Germans in November 1942. The Hungarian regime of Miklós Horthy also refused to cooperate, but after the German invasion of Hungary on March 18, 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz by the newly instated Döme Sztójay regime, fully knowing that they will be exterminated. The Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu actively collaborated, but its inefficiency meant that only a half of Romania's 600,000 Jews were killed. The German puppet regime in Croatia actively persecuted Jews on its own initiative.

The Nazis sought to enlist support for their programs in all the countries they occupied, although their recruitment methods differed in various countries according to Nazi racial theories. In the "Nordic" countries of Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, and Estonia they tried to recruit young men into the Waffen SS, with sufficient success to create the "Wiking" SS division on the Eastern Front, many of whose members fought for Germany with great fanaticism until the end of the war. In Lithuania and Ukraine, on the other hand, they recruited large numbers of auxiliary troops that were used for anti-partisan work and guard duties at extermination and concentration camps. Most of these recruits were peasant boys, who enlisted simply to gain a ration card, but the Germans were able in these countries to appeal to long traditions of local antisemitism.

In recent years, the extent of local collaboration with the Nazis in eastern Europe has become more apparent. Historian Alan Bullock writes: "The opening of the archives both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe has produced incontrovertible evidence ... collaboration on a much bigger scale than hitherto realized of Ukrainians and Lithuanians as well as Hungarians, Croats and Slovaks in the deportation and murder of Jews." Historians have been examining the question "Was the Holocaust a European Project?" Historian Dieter Pohl has estimated that more than 200,000 non-Germans "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder." That is about the same number as Germans and Austrians. Historian Götz Aly has concluded that the Holocaust was in fact a "european project that cannot be explained solely by the special circumstances of German history."

Some states, often while decrying Nazism publicly, closed their borders to Jewish immigrants and refugees, usually for fear of attracting the unwanted attention of Germany. These include powerful and influential countries including the USA. Oddly, places such as Shanghai gave as much help to Jewish refugees as was possible.