Immediately following theGerman invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in at least 219 localities in the territories that had been part of Poland prior to 1939 and were occupied by the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941. This included murders, beatings, robberies and other manifestations of anti-Jewish violence by the local population and were encouraged by the Germans and especially the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen had received orders from Security Police ChiefReinhard Heydrich to tolerate and even encourage the locals to launch pogroms.[1][2]
According to political scientistsJeffrey Kopstein andJason 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."[3]
Pogrom is a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” The term usually refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries.[4] 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 wereoccupied by the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941.[5] Among these pogroms were theJedwabne pogrom,[6]Lviv pogroms (1941),[7]Szczuczyn pogrom,[8] andWąsosz pogrom.[9] Kopstein and Wittenberg estimate around twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand "deaths resulting from neighbor-on-neighbor violence in summer 1941", significantly less than the1918–1920 pogroms in Poland.[10]
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