"The volume offers a broad overview of the 'bystander' research in recent years, which has identified as the most common behaviour rescue, apathy, indifference, passive complicity, or collaboration, all defying exact quantification. However, what all societies have in common is the notion of Jews as a group apart, reinforced substantially through occupation and propaganda ... As a stocktaking exercise and starting point for a many more investigations this volume will be of lasting significance."áá·ááDieter Pohl, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München

In recent years scholars and researchers have turned their attention to the attitudes of "ordinary men [and women]" during the period of the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. This comprehensive work addresses the disturbing question of how people reacted when their neighbours were ostracized, humiliated, deported and later murdered. On the basis of new archival material the authors also discuss the attitudes and actions--or lack of actions--of those who had an official status, or were active in the underground. The studies present the varying and complex situations that pertained in Europe reaching from states allied to Nazi Germany, such as Slovakia and Romania, to countries like France with a relatively autonomous population; also included are countries like Ukraine and Lithuania, whose nationalist movements viewed the Third Reich as the major factor that would aid them in achieving independence.