ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role which ordinary Polish people played during the so-called Judenjagd, the hunt for the Jews, in the context of the Holocaust. It engages with the ambivalences between the black-and-white categorizations of perpetrators and bystanders, underlining the necessity of a more action-centric approach to studying perpetrators and perpetration. The exploration of the agency of Polish people under German rule highlights the motivational diversity of low-level participants among the Polish Gentile population. The chapter argues that the violence can only be understood by recognizing the top-down, oppressive structures of German rule, but at the same time heeding the dynamics of village society and individual motivations from the bottom up.
