A significant share of anti-Jewish violence in Poland was perpetrated spontaneously by Poles themselves.

Evidence

Not long after Nazi Germany’s ill-fated assault on the Soviet Union in 1941, the climactic exterminatory phase of Hitler’s campaign against the Jews was launched. Over the next few years, Poland, the locus of the bulk of the killings, became a graveyard for Jews (who made up approximately 10 percent of the country’s pre-war population). A significant portion of the violence towards Poland’s Jewish inhabitants, however, did not come at the hands of Germans or even from people doing the Nazis’ bidding; instead, it was spontaneously generated by Poles themselves. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2333

Categorization

• XREF: Consonant with Jan Gross’s ‘Neighbors’ narrative of Jedwabne, and connects to Israel’s righteous gentiles recognition statistics.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the tension between spontaneous Polish violence and the nearly-half righteous-gentiles statistic within a single paragraph.