(Jewish Group) How individual, ordinary Jews fought Nazi persecution − a new view of history
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Challenging traditional views of Jewish resistance
Historians, including myself, had long painted a picture of passivity of the persecuted. When discrimination in Nazi Germany gradually increased, the Jews slowly adapted, so went the argument. More generally, an assumption still exists today that defiance, especially individual protest, is rare in authoritarian regimes.
The astonishing evidence from the Berlin police files resonated deeply with me on a personal level. I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. The communist regime persecuted even mild expressions of individual opposition as threats. This personal experience of living in a dictatorship until the age of 28 provided me with a distinct sensitivity that enabled me to recognize day-to-day forms of resistance.
Knowing from history that the treatment of the political opposition in Nazi Germany was so much more brutal, how much more serious must the Hitler regime have perceived any signs of resistance coming from their No. 1 racial enemy, the Jews?
Still, today the public and many scholars understand Jewish resistance during the Holocaust mostly in terms of rare armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East, for example ghetto uprisings or partisan attacks.
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