During World War Two, the European Jewish population was faced with this during Shoah (the Holocaust). From Kristallnacht in November 1938 to the collapse of the Nazi Regime in May 1945, they relied heavily on each other and their instincts to discover ways to survive while in the ghettos, labor camps, and partisan units, if they managed to escape and head for the forests. Even with some Jews turning on their own to help the Nazis, the vast majority stuck together and did everything they could to persist and survive. While only two uprisings were viewed as successes, the ghetto and camp revolts that failed still showed the Jewish people were not going to lie down to the Germans and that they were never going to give up. This thesis details some of the ways Jews fought for survival in the ghettos, concentration/extermination camps, and as partisan fighters.

I analyze the behavior of Jews imprisoned in the Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau extermination camps in order to illustrate a systematic process of deception and psychological conditioning, which the Nazis employed during World War II to preclude Jewish resistance to the Final Solution. In Chapter I, I present resistance historiography as it has developed since the end of the war. In Chapter II, I delineate my own argument on Jewish behavior during the Final Solution, limiting my definition of resistance and the applicability of my thesis to behavior in the extermination camp, or closed, environment. In Chapters III, IV, and V, I present a detailed narrative of the Treblinka, Sobibór, and Birkenau revolts using secondary sources and selected survivor testimony. Finally, in Chapter VI, I isolate select parts of the previous narratives and apply my argument to demonstrate its validity as an explanation for Jewish behavior.

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