“The hag that was beating the Jews is again roaming the streets” (26): so wrote Adam Czerniaków on Easter Sunday, March 1940, at the start of a week-long pogrom about a fury, as the diarist thought, unseen in Warsaw since 1881. In Paris, anti-Jewish tumults erupted in July, August, and October 1940; in the Netherlands, in February 1941; in Belgian Antwerp, in April. In Kaunas, Lithuania's capital, a shockingly bloody week-long pogrom raged in June 1941, following the Red Army's withdrawal and prior to the conquering Germans' decision to end their cynical toleration of the carnage.
These are historian Tomasz Szarota's themes, now presented in updated form in English translation. Each event is significant in its country's wartime history. At the outset, Szarota provides a disclaimer for his intent to argue what would be the strongest possible thesis: that these antisemitic explosions were authorized, if not unleashed, by the Nazi occupiers to justify ghettoization or other escalation of anti-Jewish policy, thus catapulting forward the Final Solution. He emphasizes that the violence's perpetrators acted autonomously, whether as enraged civilians, intent on plunder and bodily injury, or as local fascist groups, taking advantage of Nazi occupation to attack local Jewry and curry the conquerors' favor. As closely as Szarota's flashlight scanned the myriad polyglot documents, it proved impossible to find smoking guns linking perpetrator groups to Nazi managers. Yet, Szarota can show that the occupiers seized on the violence to tighten the noose around captive Jews' necks (7, 13).
Holocaust histories, from Raul Hilberg's and Saul Friedländer's to Christian Gerlach's and David Cesarani's, have declined to see in these collective outbursts of hatred and plunder a significant dynamic advancing the genocide. Hitler and the SS did encourage pogroms at east European civilian hands following the 1941 Soviet retreat. They infamously exploded at Jedwabne, L΄viv and Kaunas/Kovno, yet German expectations were largely disappointed, leading Nazi minds to the conviction that mass murder must be accomplished from above and at their command alone (although lawless micro-murder never stalked eastern Europe so freely as under Nazi occupation).
Szarota nevertheless convincingly demonstrates that non-German anti-Jewish violence marked a significant moment in the implementation of repressive policies in each case he examines. The tumults also measured the strength of local fascist movements, pressing their own antisemitic agendas and looking for Nazi backing. They also, if in shadowy form, bring to light the shape and power of grassroots, street-centered, popular anti-Jewish aggression.
In Warsaw, Szarota finds that Polish fascist organizations, led chiefly by veterans of the 1930s' National Radical Camp (ONR), marched their followers into orchestrating a week-long pogrom, while maneuvering to gain Nazi toleration for their activities. The Germans themselves, seeing the Easter pogrom explode, seized the opportunity, through filming the battery and pillage and perhaps also clandestinely rewarding the mostly youthful pogromists, to stigmatize Polish brutality and justify Nazi conquest as triumph of order.
Finally, however, the Nazis—among whom many feared that non-German fascist collaborators, both in Poland and in western Europe, might serve as fronts for anti-German armed resistance—halted the mayhem, in Poland moving immediately thereafter to the many thousand-fold “AB” mass executions of arrested Polish activists of all political colors, including ONR men. The Easter pogrom figured as one argument among others for erecting the Warsaw ghetto later in 1941.
In western Europe, negative public reaction to anti-Jewish violence—bravely expressed in the February 1941 Amsterdam general strike—weakened would-be collaborationists in Nazi eyes. Here grass-roots engagement in plundering and destruction of Jewish property was minimal, damage done instead chiefly by fascist groups' foot soldiers. In the east, demotic, populist violence ruled the streets. In Warsaw, plundering mobs claimed that Jewish merchants had killed a young apple thief, justifying retaliatory mayhem. Szarota might have noted that this was a modernized version of the blood-libel charge—that Jews had ritually murdered a Christian child—which often justified Polish pogroms, especially at Eastertide. The violence, committed by roving crowds of adolescents, students, and adults of both sexes, spread across the city and found echoes in provincial towns. Polish opinion, notably in the underground press, was loath to condemn it, and often only deplored it as playing into German hands, while declaring that Polish society would itself, after liberation, “settle accounts with the Jews.”
In Kaunas, immediately upon Soviet withdrawal, the bloodiest possible civilian pogrom ensued, claiming through cruel murder perhaps four thousand lives. It yielded terrible photographs of civilian street killers, one ending his death clubbing by ascending a pile of corpses to play the national anthem on an accordion to the audience's cheers. Szarota invokes the “baseness” man can resort to, “the immense reservoirs of sadism he can draw from” (14–15). The oft-cited alibi of revenge for Soviet deportations and imprisonment leaves psychic depths unplumbed. The mythical-magical imaginings driving these defeated and humiliated people to their nightmarish deeds remain undocumented and uninterrogated.
