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Allies of the Weak: La Résistance and Jews in the Holocaust
Article Abstract:
Do insurgents help or hinder survival of the targets of genocide? A common view in political science holds that insurgents’ presence attracts state violence against civilians. In contrast to this, I use multiple archival collections on WWI and WWII military personnel, Holocaust victims’ records, and testimonies of survivors and rescuers to show that insurgent presence in fact decreased local numbers of Holocaust victims. To ensure that the relationship is causal, I use an instrumental variable exploiting the exogenous number of WWI military deaths, which increased insurgent enlistment in WWII. Case studies of mechanisms reveal that individual insurgents helped the Jews mainly out of “moral” motivations, by using tactics they had developed to fight the incumbent. By zooming out of times of increased counterinsurgency and studying the specific needs of genocide targets, this article nuances existing literature and points to an overlooked source of variation in genocide survival.
| Allies of the Weak: La Résistance and Jews in the Holocaust was authored by Kasia Nalewajko. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2025. |
