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Why didn't Jewish people fight back?

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sister_of_mercy On March 11, 2015




London, United Kingdom
#31New Post! Mar 14, 2012 @ 03:15:50
We can all say that we'd fight back if we were in that situation but if it really came down to it and you were in an environment in which all hope was stomped out of you by soldiers, where you were separated from your family and hardly fed anything, I doubt many would have had the strength to fight. Being herded around like cattle only with the knowledge that they will soon face the abattoir, or that they will never see their children again or that they will be made to work until they died of exhaustion- can't begin to fathom where you'd get the motivation and psychological strength to put up a convincing fight.
crazylikeafox On June 02, 2017




McKinney, Texas
#32New Post! Mar 14, 2012 @ 04:32:26
@Elza Said

I'm not sure if i have picked the right spot for this subject so i'll leave that to the mods.

I've been thinking why didn't the Jewish people fight back in WWII when they were rounded up in groups that were larger than the nazi's and French with guns? I came to asking myself this question over and over again while reading a novel called 'Sarah's Key', last week. Although the story is based on facts of how the jews were rounded up in Paris, some 13,000 of them and by then in 1942, they knew about the death camps.... they never fought back. Why? I know i was not there, but I'd like to think if i knew my family was being sent to a death camp that i would fight tooth and nail to overpower my guards and free them. That a few of us dead to overpower the few that would kill thousands of us would be worth the effort in dying for. And what of the people who watched and didn't agree with it, why didn't they overpower the few. Were people that self preserving that selfish that they were cowardice enough not to fight back in the masses? Did they not comprehend that guns only ave so many bullets and far less would have died had they sacrificed a few of themselves to save thousands?? I just find it VERY hard to understand why they would let fear overpower them enough to stop them from saving or at least trying to save more of their Jewish faith people, and not just Jews but all the others also rounded up at that time.

So perhaps some of you can enlighten me and explain why? Perhaps some of you have wondered the same thing and have questions to add?


Some of them never heard about what was going on. Many of them didn't believe it. There's some parts of the Holocaust that are STILL hard to believe, and we have evidence of it. There were also those that knew the Nazis payed any resistance back 10 fold, usually on people unrelated to the resistance. A prof of mine had the thought that, maybe for most of them, they were just so broken down by that point they could no longer imagine resisting, which I think is an interesting thing to consider too.
Elza On July 27, 2012




, Canada
#33New Post! Mar 27, 2012 @ 19:30:45
Firstly thank you all for the responses and yes each one of you makes sense... fear and mental break down of confidence and other factors thrown ontop.
@BozieFozie Said

I've read a lot about the Holocaust, since one of my grandfather's cousins was in Dachau and they talked about it a lot when I was a child. Maybe it was the Jews' massive persecution complex that led them to be so passive, maybe it was that their spirits were broken and all hope was gone. Whatever it was, it rendered HUGE groups of people as passive as sheep being herded.....strange!

yes very strange, i think thats why i questioned it.

@buffalobill90 Said

That's straight utilitarian logic when you look at it from an outside, historical perspective, but obviously the Nazis relied on compliance through fear to oppress superior numbers. In their situation, you wouldn't be able to do the math; if you had your family with you, you wouldn't want to endanger them by being a hero. All modern states rely on threats of force more than they rely on genuinely superior force to keep order, whether they're democracies or not.

yes very true and from what i have read it was done over years so they could finally implement their genocide of the jews and other religions and race.

@Eaglebauer Said

I haven't read most responses so if I repeat anyone's answers, apologies.

Putting aside the knee-jerk reaction toward anger and taking the question for what it is...there are a few angles one really has to approach it with. Earlier in the war, up until the end of the 1930s, there really wasn't a final solution in place per se in which the systematic execution of the Jewish was being undertaken, primarily because there hadn't been an efficient method worked out yet. The Nazis actually had experimented with simply putting explosives into a group of people and literally blowing them to bits, and they tried doing this very thing with a few Polish Jews in the late 30s, but abandoned the idea as being too inhumane....to the guards setting the explosives not the Jews themselves.

So during this time, what Europe had was a rounding up of the Jewish people, many of them being contained into ghettos, some others sent to work camps in places like Reichenbach, and they cowed along, effectively considering themselves political prisoners more than anything else alongside other "undesireables" such as homosexuals, communists, and gypsies. When you're feeding your five year old dinner and an armed soldier comes to the door and orders your family onto the truck, you don't fight back because of that five year old...you do what you can to keep the family alive.

The Nazis also exploited fear as a method of control and enforcing the herd mentality among the Jews. Several times if anyone refused to comply with orders to move along...vacate the house..get on the cattle car...he or she was gunned down in front of the rest of the crowd as an example, sometimes while holding a child who was also killed. If you're an able-bodied man...do you also refuse and risk getting shot in front of your family? Or, being an able bodied man, do you take the chance of being put to work and face the possibility of surviving? A lot of times men and older boys were picked out and sent to work rather than being murdered..so it was a viable option for survival, and at the end of machine gun barrel it was also the more probable option in a lot of cases.

Later on when news of the death camps made the rounds, which in fact for the people living in that area of Europe was not until very late in the war (a large percent of German Christians themselves were actually unaware of the lengths things had gone), the Jews had dwindled to much smaller numbers of people who weren't already imprisoned in the camps, and those who weren't were largely confined to small ghetto areas where health conditions were deplorable. This lead to a large population of undernourished and diseased Jews who could barely walk fifty feet much less charge a healthy young soldier with a machine gun.

It's not an unfair question I think, but it's important to remember that fear and intimidation is a very powerful psychological weapon when dealing with a group of people and that threatening the well being of those close to someone will often yield results that wouldn't play out against an individual him- or herself.

yes weakness of body and spirit. great post btw, explained a lot.

@restoreone Said

the Holocaust Museum seems to say they did fight back. https://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/question/

i want to go there and actually see the museum.

@MadCornishBiker Said

You could say the same about most large groups of people, and the answer is simple, in the vast majority of cases, yes they knew some would have survived and broken free, but that "some" would not necessary have included them or their loved ones.

People are inherently selfish, and much as they want freedom for all they are rarely willing to put their own lives on the line without a good chance of getting away with it.

That wasn't limited to civilians either. Your question reminds me of something I heard long ago, one November 11th.

I will never forget a true story I came across one day, when I overheard a conversation between a wounded "war hero" and some teenagers who were so full of admiration for him and his kind. His comment went something like this "Brave! We weren't brave. If the truth be told the vast majority of us were only there because we were more scared of what would happen to us if we didn't go than we were of German bullets, have you any idea how badly conscientious objectors were treated? Few of us had the guts to join them even if we wanted to, and many of us would have loved to".

OK that's not verbatim, there was more to it than that, but it is the gist of what he said, and I have to say it made me think. As he was implying, sometimes the ones we see as heroes are the biggest moral cowards of all. It all depends on if we look behind the actions to the motivation rather than just assuming we know them.
yes and god only knows what hey saw back then.


@Eaglebauer Said




Yeah, the numbers of folks who have first hand knowledge of those horrible places and times is getting expontentially smaller every year. I also have ancestors who died in the camps, from my father's side of the family who were Austrian jews (My great grandparents came to New York in the late 19th century but left a lot of family in Europe). That picture is haunting...I've seen a lot of photos of people (both dead and living) from then that are heartwrenching.

There are tons of stories like your uncle (or cousin...relative anyway) of folks who, like you said, weren't Jewish but suffered under the holocaust just the same. A lot of people overlook the Ukranians who in some cases were treated worse than the Jews.

And then...pretty much anyone else they just didn't like...

I think also what i find interesting is how there are still a lot of people out there who do not believe any of this even happened.

@crazylikeafox Said

Some of them never heard about what was going on. Many of them didn't believe it. There's some parts of the Holocaust that are STILL hard to believe, and we have evidence of it. There were also those that knew the Nazis payed any resistance back 10 fold, usually on people unrelated to the resistance. A prof of mine had the thought that, maybe for most of them, they were just so broken down by that point they could no longer imagine resisting, which I think is an interesting thing to consider too.


yes it seems a lot of the people did not know until a couple years before the war ended. That surprised me as well that something to terrible could be kept so secret for so long...or perhaps so unbelievable that it wasn't accepted as truth.
Corey On January 25, 2022




Sacramento, California
#34New Post! Oct 16, 2012 @ 18:41:57
There are examples of the Jews fighting back in WWII. It is very hard for an unarmed population to fight back against machine gun armed guards. That is one reason I believe in private gun ownership. One very famous revolt by the Jews was the escape form the prison camp in Poland named Sobibor. There was a movie made about that escape, I recommend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4stuU9yc4k

Corey.
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