Such events further strengthening "Żydokomuna" sentiment that held Jews responsible for collaboration with the Soviet authorities in importing communism into divided Poland. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, widespread notion of Judeo-Communism, combined with the German Nazi encouragement for expression of antisemitic attitudes, may have been a principal cause of massacres of Jews by gentile Poles in Poland's northeastern Łomża province in the summer of 1941, including according to Joanna B. Michlic the massacre at Jedwabne. Doris Bergen writes that "it was often precisely those Polish gentiles most deeply implicated in Soviet crimes who were quicket to take the lead in attacks on Jews—attacks that would serve both to deflect the anger of their neighbors and to curry favor with the new Germans occupiers."