Some background on German and other European Jews (I'll try and keep it topline)
• Jews in Germany, Austria and Hungary had become westernized in the 19th century, post-Napoleon, and thought of themselves as Germans, Austrians...who happened to be Jewish. They were generally very integrated into the population at large.
• They looked down on the mass of Polish and Russian Jews who continued to live the way you saw in Fiddler On The Roof and speak Yiddish
• In the 1920s there was a very large population of Polish and Russian Jews who'd fled to Germany and looked (kind of) like Hasids
• Initially many German Jews assumed the Nazis were prejudiced against those Jews, because they themselves were good Germans who'd fought for the Kaiser in WW1 and even had Iron Cross medals.
• It increasingly became clear that the Nazis meant all Jews and restrictive laws made it all but impossible to earn a living--that was their purpose, to get Jews to immigrate.
• Most German Jews did get out before the Shoah.
• Western countries did not want to take them bc antisemitism and the Brits would not let them into Palestine bc Arabs and the Brits needed Arab support bc oil.
• Many of the German Jews who stayed were elderly or just in deep denial or had converted/were married to Christians and thought they'd be okay.
• When the Germans took over Poland they suddenly had 3 million Jews on their hands. Plus one or two million more in the ares of Russia/Ukraine/Belorussia/Lithuania they'd captured.
• Initially they were rounding them up and shooting them, but that traumatized the young Germany army soldiers who were not SS and so many had nervous breakdowns the army staff told the SS it had to stop or they had to find local volunteers.
• That's when they came up with the idea of gas chambers and death camps
• The Polish Jews had no idea what awaited them. There were rumors but it seemed so far-fetched--the Germans were "civilized" and "Western" many refused to believe it.
• The Germans lied and told them they were being resettled, told them they'd be working, told them the gas chambers were showers.
• Polish Jews had been the subject of horrific antisemitic behavior--pogroms and legal restrictions--for years, they were initially not all that concerned by the notion of being "resettled" if it meant leaving their antisemitic Polish neighbors. (Not all Poles were antisemitic and many risked their lives to save Jews, but Polish Jews rarely considered themselves Poles, which was a fairly new national identity as it was.)
• All that said, there were many Westernized Polish Jews and they did help organize resistance.
• Initially the Polish and Lithuanian Jews were herded into ghettos in big cities (Warsaw, Vilna) where many died from starvation and disease. They were locked into the ghetto, crammed dozens to an apartment and had limited food and medical supplies.
• They thought that was going to be the worst though--the deportations came as a sort of shock and initially many thought it was a good thing, wherever they were going could not be worse than the ghetto
