Escaping Nazi deportation and temporary protection status: Applying causal modelling in a study on Amsterdam Jews

This study applied causal modeling to address a controversy regarding the Holocaust in the Netherlands: The Jewish Council issued temporary exemptions intended to delay the deportations of Jews, though some scholars contended that these facilitated deportations. To assess the impact of temporary exemptions on deportation, data on exemption status, hiding or fleeing, and deportation were collected for a random sample of nearly 400 Amsterdam Jews. Calculating conditional probabilities (Tree diagram) and applying Pearl’s front-door criterion (causal diagram) indicate that the average causal effect of temporary exemption is about a 10-percentage-point reduction in deportation chance. This research demonstrates that utilizing statistical methods such as causal modeling on collected life trajectory data for Jewish survivors and victims can enhance our understanding of the Holocaust.