Immediately following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in at least 219 localities in the lands that had been part of Poland prior to 1939 and were occupied by the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941. [1]
According to political scientists Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, the presence of a political threat is the strongest explanatory factor for why pogroms occurred in some locations but not others: "Pogroms were most likely to occur where there were lots of Jews, where those Jews advocated national equality with non-Jews, and where parties advocating national equality were popular." [2]
Anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in at least 219 localities in the eastern borderlands of Poland, i.e. lands that had been part of Poland prior to 1939 and were occupied by the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941. [1] Among these pogroms were the Jedwabne pogrom, [3] Lviv pogroms (1941), [4] Szczuczyn pogrom, [5] and Wąsosz pogrom. [6] Kopstein and Wittenberg estimate around twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand "deaths resulting from neighbor-on-neighbor violence in summer 1941", significantly less than the 1918–1920 pogroms in Poland. [7]
Kopsten and Wittenberg also write that "Yet pogroms were relatively rare events." The 219 pogroms represent "just 9 percent of all localities in the region where Jews and non-Jews dwelled together. Most communities never experienced a pogrom and most ordinary non-Jews never attacked Jews". [1]
The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, children, and elderly, many of whom were locked in a barn and burned alive.
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews which occurred in other times and places also became known as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
Jedwabne is a town in northeast Poland, in Łomża County of Podlaskie Voivodeship, with 1,942 inhabitants (2002). It is notable for the Jedwabne pogrom of 10 July 1941, during the World War II German occupation of Poland.
The Kielce pogrom was an outbreak of violence toward the Jewish community centre's gathering of refugees in the city of Kielce, Poland, on 4 July 1946 by Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians during which 42 Jews were killed and more than 40 were wounded. Polish courts later sentenced nine of the attackers to death in connection with the crimes.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Polish-American historian specializing in Central European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches at the Patrick Henry College and at the Institute of World Politics. He has been described as conservative and nationalistic, and his attitude towards minorities has been widely criticized.
Jan Tomasz Gross is a Polish-American sociologist and historian. He is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society emeritus and professor of history emeritus at Princeton University.
Żydokomuna is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, or a pejorative stereotype, suggesting that most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union in importing communism into Poland, or that there was an exclusively Jewish conspiracy to do so. A Polish language term for "Jewish Bolshevism", or more literally "Jewish communism", Żydokomuna is related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.
The Lwów Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto in the city of Lwów in the territory of Nazi-administered General Government in German-occupied Poland.
The Holocaust in Poland was the ghettoization, robbery, deportation and mass murder of Jews, alongside other groups under similar racial pretexts in occupied Poland by the Nazi Germany. 3,000,000+ Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps, who made up half of the Jewish Holocaust victims.
Szczuczyn is a town in Grajewo County, Podlaskie Voivodeship, Poland. As of 2004, it has a population of 3,602.
The Wąsosz pogrom was the World War II mass murder of Jewish residents of Wąsosz in German-occupied Poland, on 5 July 1941. The massacre was carried out by local Polish residents without participation of Germans.
The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive pogroms and massacres of Jews in June and July 1941 in the city of Lwów in German-occupied Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine. The massacres were perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists, German death squads (Einsatzgruppen), and urban population from 30 June to 2 July, and from 25 to 29 July, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jews were killed both in the pogroms and in the Einsatzgruppen killings.
The mass murders in Tykocin occurred on 25 August 1941, during World War II, where the local Jewish population of Tykocin (Poland) was killed by German Einsatzkommando.
The Lwów pogrom was a pogrom perpetrated by Polish soldiers and civilians against the Jewish population of the city of Lwów. It happened on 21–23 November 1918, during the Polish–Ukrainian War that followed World War I.
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is a book published in 2000 written by Princeton University historian Jan T. Gross exploring the July 1941 Jedwabne massacre committed against Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Wąsosz is a village in Grajewo County, Podlaskie Voivodeship, in north-eastern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina called Gmina Wąsosz. It lies approximately 17 kilometres (11 mi) south-west of Grajewo and 73 km (45 mi) north-west of the regional capital Białystok.
Hermann Schaper, was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was a Holocaust perpetrator responsible for atrocities committed by the Einsatzgruppen in German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union and was convicted after the war of numerous war crimes.
Szczuczyn pogrom was the massacre of some 300 Jews in the community of Szczuczyn carried out by its Polish inhabitants in June 1941 after the town was bypassed by the invading German soldiers in the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. The June massacre was stopped by German soldiers after Jewish women bribed them to intervene.
Jeffrey Stephen Kopstein is an American social scientist who specializes in interethnic violence, anti-liberal tendencies, and minority voting patterns with a focus on Jewish history in Russia and Europe. Kopstein received his PhD at University of California, Berkeley in 1991, subsequently held various positions at University of Colorado Boulder until 2002, subsequently at University of Toronto where he was a full processor until 2015, and from 2015 at University of California, Irvine, where he is Professor and Chair of Political Science.
The Radziłów pogrom was a World War II massacre committed on 7 July 1941 in the town of Radziłów, in German-occupied Poland. Local Poles, under SS orders or with German encouragement, forced most of the Jews of the town into a barn and set it on fire, Jews were also murdered in surrounding villages. Death toll estimates vary between 600 and 2,000; only some 30 Jews survived the massacre due to help from local Poles.