Testing Human Bonds Within Nations: Jews in the Occupied Netherlands
Helen Fein, a holocaust scholar, has posited that "Jewish victimization was a test case of the response of nations, the end product of a process testing human bonds within nations subject to German instigation or occupation." In order to implement the Final Solution, "the Germans had to change the boundaries of the universe of obligation" in each of the nations controlled by them. In this effort they did not always succeed, and the rates of Jewish victimization varied accordingly: "in almost half . .. of the states and regions occupied by or allied to Germany, fewer than half of the Jews counted there were killed."' National bonds between Jews and non-Jews had been close in the Netherlands before the German invasion. The Jewish population, some 143,000, was well integrated, and anti-Semitism had been relatively unimportant.2 Yet these national bonds did not withstand the Nazi onslaught when the Germans implemented