ABSTRACT
This volume of essays has attempted to show that the category of ‘bystanders’ cannot be used in a uniform or unproblematic sense to describe the response of the democratic nations, their citizens, or the agencies which they sponsored and to which they played host during the persecution and mass murder of the Jews between 1933 and 1945. The essays demonstrate that for analytical purposes the governments and peoples of the democracies cannot be lumped together with the Third Reich, its allies, client states, or those of the countries it occupied. Despite the evidence of official complicity in Nazi economics and in some cases shared hostility towards Jewish refugees, the policy-makers in the neutral states operated within a different political and ideological framework and displayed significant shifts as overall relations with Germany changed. Radically different structural conditions, if nothing else, demand a more nuanced analysis.
