Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

church leaders and Christian believers who were used to a certain amount of tension with political authorities and with the surrounding population tended to be more open to the possibility of opposing German policies, and quicker to recognize a Christian mission to aid Jews. It was not the content of Protestantism, most likely, that made French Protestants more likely to aid Jews than French Catholics, but rather their own minority status and history of persecution. In the Netherlands, where Catholics were predominant in some districts and Protestants were in others, the Catholics tended to rescue Jews where Catholics were the minority, and Protestants tended to rescue Jews where Protestants were the minority. Members of smaller religions, especially, were able to trust one another in times of stress, and accustomed to seeing their homes as embattled outposts of truth in a broken world. It seems that the more alienated Christians were from authority before the war, the more likely they were to rescue Jews.