SINCE the early 1990s, research about the genocide of the Jews in eastern Europe has focused increasingly on developments in the so-called ‘regional periphery’ of Nazi-dominated Europe, rather than on the decision-making process at the ‘centre’ in Berlin. As a result of this shift, a number of scholarly studies have begin to take into account the role east Europeans played in the destruction of Jewish communities during the German occupation. One book in particular, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross, sparked a storm of debate in Poland about the complicity of non-Jewish Poles in the murder of Polish Jews. By writing that Poles in Jedwabne and other small towns west of Białystok had taken part in the murder of local Jews, Gross challenged the longcherished notion in Poland that all Poles—Christians and Jews—had suffered equally under the Nazis. Gross's description of the spontaneous massacre of Jedwabne's Jews by their Polish neighbours also deeply offended Poles, who considered his version of events one-sided and inaccurate. Indeed, Neighbors contributed to an ongoing re-examination of the history of the Holocaust in Poland, but Gross's failure to examine German documentary sources fundamentally flawed his depiction of the events. The result was a skewed history that did not investigate either SS operations in the region or German interaction with the Polish population. This chapter therefore attempts to redress this oversight by describing the historical context within which the pogroms in Jedwabne and elsewhere in the Białystok district occurred. For in fact a detailed exploration of SS activities in the region reveals that the outbreak of ‘popular’ violence against Jews was directly related to policies that the SS implemented during the brief ‘transitional phase’ from the targeted killing of Jewish men in June–July 1941 to the comprehensive annihilation of Soviet Jewry in August 1941.

The Nazi regime defined the war against the USSR as a conflict of mutually antagonistic ideologies, the ultimate aim of which was to destroy what Adolf Hitler commonly referred to as the ‘Judaeo-Bolshevik’ system. Because National Socialism conflated notions of ideological identity and racial–biological origin, however, the attack on the Soviet Union (code-named Operation Barbarossa) was not a normal military offensive in which the sole objective was the destruction of the Red Army.