SUMMARY:

The recent historiography of the Holocaust tends to focus on local interaction in Eastern Europe, emphasizing the improvised nature of the destruction of the Jews, and the involvement of a wider group of perpetrators and more or less active bystanders. If one shifts the focus to Western Europe, it becomes clear that the Holocaust was a deliberate and planned project. Yet the remarkably different outcomes in the Netherlands, France, and Belgium reveal that local factors also played a determining role.