Did the presence of anti-Nazi insurgents affect the likelihood of Jews’ survival in the Holocaust? A common view holds that insurgents’ presence attracts more incumbent state violence. Using multiple archival collections on WWI and WWII military personnel records, Holocaust victims’ records, and testimonies of survivors and rescuers, I show that the insurgent presence decreased local numbers of Holocaust victims. The two groups were motivated to cooperate, because they shared a common enemy, the Nazi occupier.
To ensure that the relationship is causal, I use an instrumental variable strategy exploiting the exogenous number of WWI military deaths by local communities, which increased insurgent recruitment in WWII. The study of rescuers in the Holocaust had so far been limited to the analysis of hiding by altruistic civilian bystanders. Expanding its scope to the interaction between the victims and the new bystander type, insurgents, enables the incorporation of new forms of help, such as document forgery or evasion, and the portrayal of the rescuers as beneficiaries of this cooperation. This in turn facilitates a more holistic account of survival in the genocide.