Introduction

The term ‘Righteous among the Nations’ or העולם אומות חסידי originates from a meeting on 31 December 1941 in Vilnius between some Jews in hiding and their rescuer, Feldwebel Anton Schmid, who was a member of the occupying German army. Although none of the participants survived, a record of the meeting was taken by a courier to Warsaw and was found after the war in the Oneg Shabbat archive.1 The term was resurrected in 1953, when Yad Vashem was created by an Act of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament,) as a memorial to those who died in the Shoah. Included in the Act was a stipulation that it found a way to honour those Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from death. Yet it was only after the visit of Oskar Schindler to Jerusalem in May 1962 that the programme got underway.2 The founders of the state of Israel looked for inspiration from stories of active ‘resistance’, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, rather than the more passive role of the ‘rescued’. The award used nominations from survivors and a set of strict criteria to vet applicants, and as of January 2020 have given 27,712 persons the award.3

The award has come in for criticism, and from the 1980s alternate paradigms have been proposed to examine the role of the ‘rescuer’ in the Shoah. This essay will analyse the award of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ and to compare it with other paradigms, to see if it or any of the others, offers a fuller understanding of the role of the ‘rescuer’.

In order to carry out this assessment, this essay will first examine the statistics relating to rescue and then conduct a survey of all the different types of rescues and the processes behind them to be found in the literature. The next section will describe the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ paradigm and then the main alternatives. Finally, the conclusion will assess the place of the ‘Righteous’ in research into the Shoah. The essay will draw on extensive literature on the subject of rescue and the rescuer.4 Many of the awards of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ are chronicled by the programme’s director, Mordekhai Paldiʾel in a series of books and by Martin Gilbert. 5 From the 1970s through to 1990s there was a considerable body of work complied on the phenomenon of altruism. From the 1980s two distinctly German paradigms were proposed by Arno Lustiger and researchers such as Wolfram Wette and Bette Kosmala. 6 As more subject material on rescue has emerged, modern studies have concentrated on the darker side of rescue for money, sex or labour with the work of researchers such as Bob Moore, or the idea of ‘brokerage’ as Jews in hiding negotiated hiding places, forged papers and help from the work of Marten Düring. 7

The village of Nieuwlande where Arnold Douwes organised the hiding of Dutch Jews

Statistics of survival and rescue

In order to understand the numbers and mechanisms of rescued and to fit them into the wider framework of the Shoah, it is necessary to understand the population statistics for Europe and individual countries, to establish the number of Jews who survived at the end of the war and how they had survived. The rescued represent one sub-set of the survivors along with protected Jews and those remaining in the system at the end of the war. However, caution must be used when using these statistics since many of them are estimates are of varying degrees of confidence.

The population of Jews in Europe was around 9.5 million of whom 5.5 million would be killed during the Shoah, leaving around 4 million alive at the end of the war. Of these 400,000 lived in neutral countries at the start of the war, while the number who survived in the Nazi occupied zone numbered between 1 and 2 million. The balance of around 2 million survivors occurred by avoiding the Nazis altogether, either by emigration, evacuation or protection by other members of the Axis. This is shown on a country basis in Map 1.

Pre-war Jewish Population and Survivors in 1945

Examples of this include Germany with a pre-1938 population of 365,000 of whom 185,000 emigrated, 151,000 were killed, 15,000 were protected by being married to Gentiles, 9,000 had been deported but remained in the camps at the end of the war and 5,000 in hiding. 8 The Soviet Union (pre-1939 borders) had a population of 3,028,538 of whom 2.12 million lived in areas which fell into German hands in 1941. However, 1.17 million of these were evacuated to the interior of the USSR before the Germans arrived. 9 An additional 300,000 Polish Jews were deported from the annexed regions after 1939 and so saved.10 Poland spent a long time under an oppressive German rule, with some 3 million killed and 380,000 surviving, of whom most were in the USSR. 20,000 Polish Jews survived in the camps and 30,000 survived in hiding of whom the resistance organisation Zegota rescued 4,000. Estimates of Polish rescuers range from 300,000 to 1 million.11 At the other end of the scale, Albania only came under German rule from September 1943 and had geography on her side. The pre-war population of Jews numbered only 200 however there were several waves of refugees which increased the numbers greatly. The initial German deportations captured 400, the remainder were protected by the government and hidden by the local population so that 1,800 survived and 300 others died.12

Comparison of the Netherlands and Belgium

Further factors affecting the success of rescue can be revealed by comparisons of similar countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium, which had the same length of German occupation and geographic position. Yet as shown in Table 1, the outcome for Dutch Jews was far worse than for Belgian Jews, even though in the latter case the majority of these were refugees (90%).

Both countries had compliant administrations and police forces, a section of the population supported the Nazis and denunciations were common.14 The differences in outcome can be attributed to Belgium’s earlier occupation during the First World War, so that when the second occupation arrived, resistance movements were immediately established and a specific organisation created to save Jews, the Comité de Défence des Juifs (CDJ).15 Also Belgium did not have any previous history of anti-Semitism, though there was xenophobia directed at refugees.16 Interventions from all sections of society including Elizabeth the Queen Mother, (a Wittlesbach princess,) churches, right through to individual villages meant that Belgium only lost 21,000 Jews to the Germans compared to the Netherlands 105,000. The Dutch were certainly capable of hiding greater number of Jews since in 1944 some 300,000 workers were hidden to escape forced labour, however by the time resistance organisations were established most of the Jews had already been deported.17

Outline of rescue activities

Surviving the Shoah was difficult and there were only a limited of number of strategies that worked.

Evacuation
Emigration
Protection by Axis governments
Being a member of a protected category, such as married to a Gentile
Hidden in plain sight, living as an Aryan with false papers
Hidden out of sight in a secret hideaway
External evasion, moving to a neutral country such as Sweden
Internal evasion, moving into the woods to join partisan groups

All these categories include some element of rescue. For instance, of the 810,000 Jews who emigrated from Europe, 305,000 did so legally from Germany, 250,000 did so legally from Italy, Spain and Portugal having been rescued by other means. 18 The balance of over 250,000 Jews were rescued by some 375 diplomats of 41 neutral countries with impressive individual efforts such as that of Raoul Wallenberg who rescued more than 10,000 Hungarian Jews.19 The use of several methods was common, as being a member of a protected category might only offer a temporary reprieve, as in the case of Victor Klemperer who in February 1945 changed to hiding in plain sight using forged papers.20

In most cases, these strategies required help from Gentiles or other Jews, as the distances to be covered were very large, the bureaucratic hurdles complex or a substantial level of support was needed to carry them out. This was a multi-factorial scenario whose outcome was governed by a range of different moderating factors which acted upon any given strategy. Most of these strategies required a sequence of actions or events to occur for them to work, and any break in the chain of events would spell failure.

Huneke proposed a model of the rescue decision process which went from: Apprehension; Comprehension; Attribution (Interpretation; Responsibility; Decision; Assessment and Competency.) From this he concluded that the main reason for the small number of rescuers was failure at the Comprehension stage. 21

A similar failure of comprehension can be seen at work in the ghettos in Poland with divisions between groups of Jews. The Bund (older Jews with families,) attempting to work within German policy while Zionists (younger and more radical,) urged active resistance. Yet it could also fail at the Decision stage, as four of the five ghettos which offered resistance; Warsaw, Bialystok, Vilna and Kovno chose armed revolt, while only Minsk chose joining the partisans and 10,000 managed to flee this way, compared to only 300 at Kovno.22

The sequential nature of hiding followed a similar decision path, deciding how to hide, preparing the necessary, money, papers, food supply, or hiding place and then making the leap.23 This was followed by the continual assessment of risk and adjustments to the plan, finding new sources of help and negotiating a landscape of potential denouncers and informers, some of whom were Jewish. Düring calls this process ‘brokerage’ where Jews take an active role in organising their own rescue, with chains of as many as 79 helpers, some of whom did not even know that they were helping a Jew.24 While the strategy chosen and the decision-making process were the key to survival rates, individual circumstances were subject to modification by several outside factors.

As was shown in the statistical survey, the most important of these were time and geography. Time was needed to gain knowledge of German intentions, to establish resistance and rescue networks and for diplomats to begin their work. Those killed in the initial phases of the Eizsatzgruppen and Aktion Reinhard operations stood little chance of being rescued. Location played a major role in survival rates, from different German occupation policies, local levels of anti-Semitism, the presence of forests or mountains suitable for partisan groups, the proximity of neutral borders, and the type of religion practiced in the district. Geography excluded some means of rescue and hence altered overall survival rates. In the Netherlands, Jewish survival rates were highest in Utrecht, close to the Belgian border, Walloon, Catholic, rural and of less interest to the German occupiers.25

However, care needs to be taken in assessing the significant factors as social scientists such as Bob Moore produced a list of possible causes for the high loss rate in the Netherlands, ranging from a superior level of population registration, through to Dutch characteristics of deference to authority.26 A later statistical survey showed that the main factor at work was the level of activity of the German security forces and that many of Moore’s factors played no part.27

Dutch Jews boarding the train at Amersfoort

The Righteous Among the Nations

When the Award was established, efforts were made to ensure that only the best were included, and a committee formed to scrutinise every application made by survivors. The criteria28 were:

Rescue by an individual
Risk to the rescuer’s life
Directly helping a Jew
No reward or compensation received
Did not cause harm to Jews
Documented by the rescued party
No personnel of concentrations camps

However, this created several issues. The requirement for altruism excluded many potential rescuers, since keeping even one hidden Jew fed at a time of rationing required large resources only available to the wealthy or farmers. It required food or false ration cards bought from the black market or provided by resistance organisations. An artisan taking money from a hidden Jew to purchase black market rations was excluded. A German officer in Vilnius, Hauptmann Karl Plagge protected 1,500 Jews for over two years and when his unit was forced to relocate back to Poland, he warned the Jews so that they could escape and 250 survived the war. Nonetheless when these survivors applied to Yad Vashem, Karl Plagge was denied the award times, because he did not face sufficient risk to his life.29 Finally in 2004 after the third application he received the award.

Making the award for individuals, excluded the most common form of rescue which was carried out by groups, governments, resistance organisations, partisans, churches, Communists, diplomatic missions, or communities. Two countries, Norway and Denmark considered their communal effort so important that they ask to be excluded from the Award and no individuals named, a request that was granted by Yad Vashem.

Similarly, the requirement to ‘cause no harm to Jews’ should have excluded one of the most famous recipients of the Award, Oskar Schindler. Early in his career in the occupied East he appropriated at least two Jewish companies under murky circumstances, yet such was the clamour from his group of rescued Jews that it was unthinkable not to grant him the Award.

The committee were faced by a comparable situation with diplomats since few of these risked their lives, as they were protected by their position. Even the most famous Raoul Wallenberg did not risk his life, worked as part of a group alongside Secretary Per Anger, Minister Carl Ivan Danielsson and Secretary Lars Berg and carried out official Swedish government policy in issuing visas to Hungarian Jews so failing in several categories. To date six Swedish diplomats from the Budapest Legation have been recognised with a total of 54 diplomats honoured in total.

The greatest problem arose from the fact that the committee did not do its own research but relied on applications from survivors. This opened the door to particular groups promoting their own agenda and influencing the number of awards. This issue was identified by the Director Mordecai Paldiel in 1996.30 The result was that there is no correlation between the number of Awards granted and the actual success rate of rescue for individual countries. Two of the countries with the worst survival rate have the highest number of Awards, Poland 7,112 Awards, 400,000 or 12% survived and the Netherlands with 5,851 Awards, 35,000 survivors or 40% survived. By contrast Belgium has 1,767 Awards, 35,000 survivors or 58% survived. Nor is there any relation to anti-Jewish activity, since deeply tainted countries such as Lithuania (916 Awards) and Ukraine (2,659) fare much better than deeply principled countries such as Albania (75) or Denmark (22).31 The reliance on applications counts against countries who had erased the memory of rescuers either because they felt that their actions were not extraordinary or to fit in with wider societal norms. In the case of Germany, the assertion that resistance was impossible in the face of a totalitarian state and Gestapo surveillance, was supported by erasing the memory of Germans who hid Jews.32 Another issue arising from the use of survivor applications is that it favours successful rescue while those to died in the attempt are forgotten.

The final problem of the Award is that it excluded Jewish rescue of Jews.33 18,000 Jews were smuggled out of Europe through Romania and Turkey by Zionist organisations 1937-1944 and to date 2,700 Jewish rescuers have been identified. 34

Masha Bruskina captured Jewish partisan in MInsk 1941

Other Paradigms

Many of the competing paradigms that have been proposed to account for the phenomenon of rescue are based on country specific research and so favour those countries particular conditions. From the 1980’s Arno Lustiger, a German survivor of the Shoah, promoted the idea of Rettungswiderstand or ‘rescue-resistance’ which had resonance in Germany, as interest grew in resistance and opposition to the state. He took a much wider definition than Yad Vashem of rescue and included Jewish rescue as well. However, he makes the point that most resistance movement’s primary motivation was to further the liberation of their country and that rescue of Jews came under the category of sabotaging the occupation policy. Only Zegota in Poland and Comité de Defence des Juifs in Belgium were exceptions that prioritised the rescue of Jews.35 He quotes the work of the Ollingers, Tec and Fogelman to stress the wide range of religious, political and humanitarian reasons for rescuers to act and the work of Wolfson as an early researcher in this field.36 Particularly important in Lustigers view are small resistance groups such as the Solf-Kreis which included Countess Maria von Maltzan who has received the Award while the other members have not.

Between 1958 and 1962, the city of Berlin honoured its residents for rescuing Jews with the award of Unbesungrene Helden, ‘Unsung Heroes’ which was later taken over by Stille Helden ‘Silent Heroes’ database of the Die Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, the ‘German Resistance Memorial Centre’. Tying into this is the work of Beate Kosmala. 37 She stresses individual helper in Germany, often women, who operated in one of three ways. Either as part of an informal network based around churches, Social Democrats, and other resistance groups or situational help for neighbours, fellow workers or others known to the helper, or reactive help given on the spur of the moment to a stranger.

A wider viewpoint was adopted by Frances Henry who suggested four models of the rescuer:38

Grand rescuers with the influence and resources to mount major rescue operations such as Oskar Schindler.
Middle range rescuers who acted on principle and who risked their own security by helping Jews such as Anton Schmid.
Special interest groups who acted to protect the interests of the institutions with which they were affiliated. Examples include churches, students, journalists or trade unionists.
Ordinary citizens who engaged in minor acts of kindness, prompted by personal association such as customers, employers, friends, or neighbours.

The problem with all these paradigms is that they focus research on the idea of the ‘Righteous Gentile’. Moore’s research into the Netherlands shows that Jews were involved both in their own rescue and the rescue of other Jews in cooperation with Gentiles as illustrated in the diary of Arnold Douwes.39 Moreover he shows that rescue could be a messy and human business, as a local priest felt compelled to poison ‘an especially nervous twenty-two-year-old Jewish onderduiker (under-diver) who constantly threatened to leave the house, saying that he knew all about the illegal activity in the area.’ An entire village may have protected Jews but for a variety of motives, some from religious conviction, while others demanded payment or labour. 40 Nor were all rescuers law-abiding citizens, forgers were in demand to produce papers and burglars to break into registrar’s offices to steal documents blanks and authenticating stamps.41 Schrafstetter proposes widening the Rettungswiderstand still further to account for motives such as the religious conversion of Jewish children, blackmail, fraud and extortion, and including acts of minor help such as giving food. 42 This more transactional viewpoint would need to include sexual favours, as in the case of the SS man, Alfons Zundler posted in Amsterdam who rescued a number of families. 43

The other criticism that can be levelled against these paradigms is that they apply to Western Europe, focussing on rescue through hiding, whereas the reality in Eastern Europe revolved around ghettos with evasion to partisans and hiding by resistance groups being of greater importance. The Minsk ghetto illustrates the potential for rescuing Jews through a close association between the partisans in the forests and the ghetto inhabitants.44 The other ghettos did not do as well, through a combination of poor knowledge and decision making on the part of Jewish leaders. This was not helped in Poland by the hostility of the Home Army particularly in specific districts, even though they maintained the Zegota organisation and individuals tried to rescue Jews.45 Polish anti-Semitism meant that barely 30,000 Jews survived the war in hiding.

Major Karl Plagge rescued over 1,000 Jews in Vilnius

Conclusion

The Righteous Among the Nations Award was created to honour the Gentiles who saved Jews from the Shoah. This essay has tested that objective as a paradigm of rescue from three different viewpoints, firstly against the statistics, then against modern understanding of the term ‘rescue’ and finally against other paradigms of rescue.

This has shown that the Award fails to reflect the overall picture of rescue as given by a statistical survey. Diplomats were the largest and most effective group of rescuers, yet out of 27,000 Awards only 54 are listed as diplomats, out of a known 341 diplomats who rescued Jews. Similarly, the second largest group of rescuers were resistance groups in Occupied Europe, yet as this is an individual award much of the work of the Communist partisans, Zegota and the Marquis remains unrecognised. However, the most serious problem is the large number of awards given to countries which had the worst rates of rescue. This has been recognised by the former Director of the programme, Mordecai Paldiel in several of his most recent books. It is noticeable that he has started to include many failed applicants for the Award in his writings. Their stories are just as interesting and inspirational even if they did not fit all the criteria.

Modern research into the phenomena of rescue have shown that there are numerous motivations involved, that there are several methodologies at work and that Jews could be both passive recipients of rescue or active participants in their own rescue, especially those in hiding. Yet the structure of the ‘Righteous award’ with its focus on altruism and individual rescue tends to obscure many of these features.

For example, the Segal family took an active role in their own rescue by seeking out people to help them when in hiding. Of the 79 people who helped them, only Wanda Feuerherm and her daughter Vera Lagrange received the award.46

Of course, the largest missing group of rescuers are those that failed and where rescuer and rescued all died.

Other paradigms of rescue have sought to address some of the problems with the Righteous award, however much of recent research has been on a country specific basis and so has tended to address the issues of the individual country, as in Arno Lustigers work for Germany. Nonetheless the collective contribution has advanced our understanding of rescue considerably.

The use of a wider set of parameters than the Righteous award allows inclusion of more rescuers, the incorporation of Jewish rescuers, different motives and exploration of the mechanisms underlying rescue, such as Düring’s system of brokerage.

The Righteous Among the Nations award remains a fine achievement of Yad Vashem in memorialising the Rescuers of the Shoah. However, its faults mean that the Award cannot be used in the future as a paradigm of rescue. A combination of the other paradigms between them represents the best way forward to explore the intricacies of this subject.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portugese diplomat who rescued 30,000 in Bordeaux, France including 10,000 Jews

1 ‘The Promise. “A Golden Star of David” | Milestones | A Tribute to the Righteous Among the Nations’, Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, 2021, https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/righteous/milestone01.asp; Arno Lustiger, ‘Feldwebel Anton Schmid - Judenretter in Wilna 1941-1942’, in Retter in Uniform: Handlungsspielräume im Vernichtungskrieg der Wehrmacht, ed. Wolfram Wette,

2. Aufl, Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), pp.45. 2 Mordekhai Paldiʾel, ‘Yad Vashem and Jewish Rescuers of Jews’, The Jerusalem Post, 2016, https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Yad-Vashem-and-Jewish-rescuers-of-Jews-472621.

3 ‘Names of Righteous by Country’, Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, 1 January 2020, https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/statistics.html.

4 ‘Rescue Bibliography’, Rescue in the Holocaust, 8 October 2017, https://www.holocaustrescue.org/rescuebibliography.

5 Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (Hoboken, New Jersey: Ktav, 1993); Mordecai Paldiel, Sheltering the Jews: Stories of Holocaust Rescuers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996); Mordecai Paldiel, German Rescuers of Jews: Individuals versus the Nazi System, 2017; Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt, 2003).

6 Lawrence Baron et al., Embracing the Other: Philosophical, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives on Altruism (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1992), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg24m; Arno Lustiger, Rettungswiderstand: Über die Judenretter in Europa während der NS-Zeit [Rescue as resistance: About the Jewish Rescuers in Europe during the Nazi Period] (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), https://www.nomoselibrary.de/10.5771/9783835321502/rettungswiderstand?hitid=12035&search-click; Beate Kosmala and Revital Ludewig, Verbotene Hilfe : deutsche Retterinnen und Retter während des Holocausts [Banned help: German rescuers during the Holocaust] (Zürich: Verl. Pestalozzianum, 2003), https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/21089/.

7 Bob Moore, ‘Understanding Everyday Rescue: Insights from the Diary of Arnold Douwes’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 34, no. 2 (19 November 2020): 183–205, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcaa029; Marten Düring, ed., ‘The Dynamics of Helping Behaviour for Jewish Refugees During the Second World War’, in Knoten und Kanten III Soziale Netzwerkanalyse in Geschichts- und Politikforschung (De Gruyter, 2015), 321–38, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/9783839427422-010/html. Published on Encyclopédie des violences de masse (http://ww w.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance) https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/84742495.pdf

8 Paldiel, German Rescuers of Jews, pp.6.

9 The discrepancy between the figures can be explained by those who did not record their nationality as ‘Jew’ in the 1939 census but were nonetheless regarded as such by the Germans.

10 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust (Lincoln: Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press ; Yad Vashem, 2009), p.25, 78, 85, 515, 521,524, 525. 11 ‘Poland - Historical Background’, Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, 2021, https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/poland-historical-background.html; Hans G. Furth, ‘One Million Polish Rescuers of Hunted Jews?’, Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 2 (June 1999): p.229, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623529908413952.

12 ‘Fact Sheet - The Statistics of Rescue’, Rescue in the Holocaust, 2017, https://www.holocaustrescue.org/factsheet; Gilbert, The Righteous, pp.241.

13 Sylvain Brachfeld, A Gift of Life: The Deportation and the Rescue of the Jews in Occupied Belgium (1940-1944) (Institute for the Research on Belgian Judaism, 2007), pp.53; Mamix Croes, ‘Holocaust Survival Differentials in the Netherlands, 1942-1945: The Role of Wealth and Nationality’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45, no. 1 (2014): pp.1.

14 Brachfeld, A Gift of Life, pp.25; Pinchas Bar-Efrat, Denunciation and Rescue: Dutch Society and the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2017), pp.79.

15 Brachfeld, A Gift of Life, p.64; Bob Moore, ‘The Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Belgium, France and the Netherlands’, The Australian Journal of Politics and History 50, no. 3 (2004): p.394, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467- 8497.2004.00341.x.

16 Elisabeth Maxwell, ‘The Rescue of Jews in France and Belgium During the Holocaust’, The Journal of Holocaust Education 7, no. 1–2 (1998): p.6, https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.1998.11087061.

17 Bar-Efrat, Denunciation and Rescue, p.265.

18 Paldiel, German Rescuers of Jews, p.6; ‘Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust (ISRAH)’, Rescue in the Holocaust, Fact sheet (note 8), accessed 30 April 2021, https://www.holocaustrescue.org.

19 ‘Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust (ISRAH)’, https://www.holocaustrescue.org/diplomats-recognized-by-yad-vashem.

20 Martin Chalmers, To the Bitter End the Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-45 (London: Phoenix, 2000), p.xiii, 389-393.

21 Douglas Huneke, ‘A Study of Christians Who Rescued Jews During the Nazi Era’, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 9, no. 1 (1981): p.144-5. 22 Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2008), pp.258, p.283.

23 Paldiel, Sheltering the Jews, p.188.

24 Düring, ‘The Dynamics of Helping Behaviour for Jewish Refugees During the Second World War’, p.3.

25 Marnix Croes, ‘The Holocaust in the Netherlands and the Rate of Jewish Survival’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20, no. 3 (12 January 2006): p.480, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcl022.

26 Croes, p.476 see discussion of historiography in the work of Blom, Moore and Griffioen.

27 Croes, ‘Holocaust Survival Differentials in the Netherlands, 1942-1945: The Role of Wealth and Nationality’, p.494; Croes, ‘The Holocaust in the Netherlands and the Rate of Jewish Survival’, p.2.

28 Paldiel, Sheltering the Jews, p.2; Paldiel, German Rescuers of Jews, pp.205.

29 Michael Good, The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition (Fordham University Press, 2006), p.168, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x04k9.

30 Paldiel, Sheltering the Jews, p.205.

31 ‘Names of Righteous by Country’; ‘Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust (ISRAH)’

32 Dori Laub, ‘In Search of the Rescuer in the Holocaust’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 39, no. 2 (2013): p.41, https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh.2013.390205.

33 Paldiʾel, ‘Yad Vashem and Jewish Rescuers of Jews’.

34 ‘Jewish Rescuers of the Holocaust’, Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust, 2021, http://www.jewishholocaustrescuers.com/.

35 Lustiger, Rettungswiderstand: Über die Judenretter in Europa während der NS-Zeit, p.20.

36 Lustiger does not reference the Wolfson source he quotes in this section: Emil Walter-Busch, ‘«Entstehungszusammenhang und Ergebnisse von Manfred Wolfsons Retterstudie (1945-1975).»’ [Underlying context and results of Manfred Wolfson’s Rescuer study (1945-1975)], in Überleben im Untergrund. Hilfe für Juden in Deutschland 1941-1945, ed. Beate Kosmala (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2002), p.335-361.

37 Kosmala and Ludewig, Verbotene Hilfe; Beate Kosmala, Verbotene Hilfe: Rettung für Juden in Deutschland 1941 - 1945 ; Vortrag, gehalten auf einer Veranstaltung der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Verbindung mit dem Verein ‘Gegen Vergessen - Für Demokratie’ am 28. September 2004 in Bonn [Forbidden help. Rescue of Jews in Germany 1941- 1945. Lecture given at proceedings at the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation in connection with the conference ‘Against Forgetting - For Democracy’ on 28 September 2004 in Bonn], Reihe Gesprächskreis Geschichte 56 (Bonn: Historisches Forschungszentrum, 2004).

38 Frances Henry, ‘Heroes and Helpers in Nazi Germany: Who Aided Jews?’, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 13, no. 1/2 (1986): 306–19.

39 Moore, ‘Understanding Everyday Rescue’.

40 Moore, p.190.

41 Moore, ‘The Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Belgium, France and the Netherlands’, p.389.

42 Susanna Schrafstetter, ‘“Life in Illegality Cost an Extortionate Amount of Money.” Ordinary Germans and German Jews Hiding from Deportation’, in The Holocaust and European Societies. The Holocaust and Its Contexts, ed. Bajohr F. and Löw A. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016), p.70.

43 Moore, ‘The Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Belgium, France and the Netherlands’, p.394.

44 Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943, pp.30.

45 Joshua D Zimmerman and Cambridge University Press, The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p.175, 264-6.

46 ‘Wanda Feuerherm and Vera Legrande’, The Righteous Among The Nations, 1987, https://righteous.yadvashem.org/?search=wanda%20feuerherm&searchType=righteous_only&language=en&item Id=4014813&ind=0.