During their tireless campaign to annihilate Europe's Jews, the Nazis found thousands of willing accomplices among the populations of Eastern and Western Europe.

Indigenous police forces in France and the Netherlands took part in roundups. Hungarian troops and Fascist extremists joined the hunt and helped slaughter thousands. Slovakia's Hlinka Guard, modeled on Nazi Storm Troopers, attacked Jews while local police organized deportations. The Ustasa --a Croatian nationalist, separatist, terrorist organization--tortured and barbarously murdered Jews with axes and hammers. In Romania and the Crimea, the bloodthirsty enthusiasm of volunteer ethnic Germans and Romanian army units who engaged in mass shootings shocked even the SS.

When the mobile killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen swept into the Soviet Union, their comparatively thin ranks were augmented by auxiliary troops of native Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The Omakaitse, Estonian police collaborators, rounded up the Jews of Tallinn and helped the Nazis shoot hundreds. Selbstschutz, Latvian police, assisted in the killing of thousands in Riga. Lithuanian police seized and executed Jews, while Lithuanian nationalists killed thousands in pogroms. The particularly brutal Hilfspolizei (Ukrainian Auxiliary Police) hunted down Jews escaping from ghettos and killed thousands. Without the work of these sympathizers, the Nazi campaign of genocide would have been noticeably less effective.
Photo: Romania Library of the Academy/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive