Saints and Sinners: Rescuers of Jews in Occupied Western Europe during the Second World War

This project examines the rescue of Jews in Western Europe from a historical perspective, placing it within the context of the social history of the countries occupied by Germany during the Second World War. It moves the discussion away from the heroic aspects of rescue, important though they are, and demonstrates the immense variety of rescuer motives and the wide range of circumstances that framed individual and collective rescues. Many Jews who survived in hiding owed their lives to people whose motives were far from pure, and whose 'philanthropy' was grounded in material or baser motives. Also important is the conclusion that help for the persecuted did not begin with the deportation of the Jews, but often had its origins in much earlier traditions; in assistance for refugees in the 1930s, in resistance to earlier German occupations between 1914 and 1918, in more general cultures of opposition to state power, and also possibly in rural traditions of help to those in need that stretched back many centuries.

The book divides rescue into two forms; escape and hiding. It begins with a discussion of the pre-1939 period and help given to Jews by diplomats to help them leave Nazi Germany. Some were clearly motivated by humanitarian concerns while others were prepared to sell documents for personal profit. This story continues after the German invasion of Western Europe, with one or two diplomats continuing to provide assistance in escaping, either in the form of documents or other material help. In this they were joined by individuals and organisations (for example, Varian Fry and the ERF and Jean Weidner and the Dutch-Paris network) dedicated to helping those sought by the Nazis over neutral frontiers, mainly from France into Spain or Switzerland. The analysis then shifts to the much more numerous examples of survival in hiding.
This begins with the ways in which persecuted Jews came in contact with rescuers, for example as friends, neighbours, business acquaintances or purely by chance, and questions how this was determined by the regional and local differences in relations between Jewish and Gentile communities across Western Europe. It also examines the religious or secular networks that were gradually created during the occupation to shelter the Jews, and their relationship to the broader resistance movements of the period. Sheltering people 'on the run' was frequently an open-ended commitment for the hosts and guests, and inevitably also stressful.
Using oral and written testimonies from both sides, the study seeks to draw some conclusions about the realities of being in hiding tor the Jews, and the strains created for the hosts by having strangers permanently in their households. One specific element common to all the countries of Western Europe was the sympathy shown towards the plight of Jewish children, even where adults were given little help. In many cases, this was truly philanthropic and based on the conception of the children as innocents. However, stories of apparent forced conversion of children by their foster­ parents do highlight the complexity of this aspect of rescue. Finally, there was also the involvement of the urban criminal underworld, whose entire culture was based around avoiding the gaze of the authorities that also served to shelter many Jews.

Ultimately, the project aims to change the perception of rescue as a purely altruistic feature of the Holocaust, and also to show how the multiplicity of non-Jewish responses to the persecution were conditioned by local and regional, as well as national circumstances across Western European states with markedly differing mortality levels among their respective Jewish populations.