Allies of the Weak: La Résistance and Jews in the Holocaust (Forthcoming at the American Political Science Review)
Do insurgents help or hinder survival of the targets of genocide? In the case of the Holocaust, many resistance movements across occupied Europe have been typically accused of not having helped their fellow Jewish citizens escape from genocide. In addition, a common view in political science holds that insurgents’ presence attracts state violence against civilians. In contrast to this, I use multiple archival collections on WWI and WWII military personnel, Holocaust victims’ records, and testimonies of survivors and rescuers to show that insurgent presence in fact decreased local numbers of Holocaust victims. To ensure that the relationship is causal, I use an instrumental variable exploiting the exogenous number of WWI military deaths, which increased insurgent enlistment in WWII. Case studies of mechanisms reveal that individual insurgents helped the Jews mainly out of "moral" motivations, by using tactics they had developed to fight the incumbent. By zooming out of times of increased counterinsurgency and studying the specific needs of genocide targets, this article nuances existing literature and points to an overlooked source of variation in genocide survival.
Designing the Holocaust: Radicalisation of anti-Jewish violence during the invasion of the Soviet Union (Working Paper)
Who devised the Holocaust and decided on its implementation? Most historians agree that the Holocaust originated during the invasion of the Soviet Union, before the Conference in Wannsee in January 1942. While Hitler’s responsibility is not put into question, scholars do disagree about the exact place, time and authorship of the genocide. This manuscript systematically describes the violence committed in 1941 by Nazi Germany and their collaborators during the invasion of the USSR drawing on information from interviews with Holocaust witnesses. I classify the violence experienced by the Jews by its degree, intent and perpetratorship. I find considerable heterogeneity between the degree of violence with major, swiftly committed events concentrated in contemporary Lithuania, some parts of Ukraine and Moldova. Conversely, large swaths of today’s territories of Belarus and Galicia in Ukraine did not experience mass killings until after the Wannsee Conference, at the same time as Jews of Central and Western Europe started being transported to extermination camps.
How Bad Can It Get? Polarization and the Public Interest When It Matters (Working Paper with Mark A. Kayser)
Political polarization has been associated in recent years with the weakening of democratic norms, the undermining of accountability and increasing difficulty of compromise, as partisans trade off principles associated with the public interest against partisan loyalty. Most evidence supporting these claims, however, comes from cross-sectional survey data or survey experiments in a benign context. Do partisans really prioritize in-group loyalty over the collective good when it really matters? To answer this question, we conducted survey experiments in one of the most polarized democracies, Poland, after the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022 and just before a national election that risked consolidating authoritarian rule in 2023. We find disconcerting levels of in-group biased decision-making to the detriment of the public interest in a study about electoral integrity but little effect in a study about national security. When the stakes are high, individuals may be more willing to trade off democratic principles than security in favor of in-group loyalty.