Far right-wing party members in Poland saw the deportation of the Jews in a favorable light, but for the majority of Poles, their thoughts on the matter were far more complex. When the Nazis attacked the Red Army in Soviet-occupied Poland during Operation Barbarossa of 1941, witnesses recalled a series of massacres committed against Jews by the Polish locals in the Białystok and Łomża areas, such as in Jedwabne, Radziłów, and Kolno villages, along with several others in the area. The extent of local collaboration in these massacres is a controversial issue, as is the role of German units present there. Historian Peter Longerich points out that "even if the pogroms can be attributed in large part to German plans to spark off 'attempts at self-cleansing', it has to be admitted that they would not have been possible if there had not already been a significant potential for anti-Semitic violence in the indigenous population and if they had not been susceptible to mobilization for such murderous campaigns." This is also true of Jedwabne, "[which] was engineered by a unit of the German Security Police... [which] had recruited local Poles as auxiliary 'pogrom police' for this purpose." According to Timothy Snyder, there were about a dozen pogroms instigated by the Nazis' arrival in Poland, resulting in several thousand deaths, but "the scale of the murder was...inferior to what the Germans were already achieving to the north and east."