The Germans were assisted in the persecution and killing of Jews by collaborators and accomplices in virtually every Nazi-occupied country.
Antisemitic laws were instituted in all of these countries so as to give the persecution of Jews a veneer of legality in the first instance. In many Nazi-occupied countries and territories, the local police rounded up Jews for incarceration in ghettos and camps, and for deportation to the death camps. The transports to the killing centers could not have happened without the assistance, often unwitting, of railway employees across Europe.
Many Jews who were in hiding or trying to pass themselves off as non-Jews were betrayed by their non-Jewish neighbors and either killed or handed over to the Germans. Partisans often murdered Jews hiding in the forests of Eastern Europe.
Shooting operations in the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus were often carried out by locals, with German troops rounding Jews up and marshalling them before they were shot. In occupied Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine pogroms against Jews were often supported or carried out by local communities.
