Though the Nazis’ Madagascar idea was not an immediate plan for the extermination of the Jews, it would have led to the deaths of millions. That’s because the Polish commission that had investigated the possibility of mass emigration to Madagascar before the war had concluded that only 60,000 Jews could survive on the island, yet Eichmann’s office sent a memo to Rademacher on 15 August saying that ‘four million’ Jews would be settled there.72 Nor, under the Nazi plan, were the Jews to be allowed any form of self-government on Madagascar. The island would be ‘under the control of the Reichsführer SS’ and a ‘police governor’.73 Two further indications that the Nazi plans were quasi-genocidal was the fact that Philipp Bouhler – one of the originators of the adult euthanasia scheme – was mentioned as a possible ‘Governor’ of Madagascar, and that by late summer 1940 Rademacher had revised up his estimate of the number of Jews to be sent to the island still further – from 4 million to 6.5 million.74
The reason this scheme could even be discussed during the summer of 1940 was because of the Germans’ swift victory in western Europe. In just six weeks in late spring 1940 the Wehrmacht had accomplished more than the German Army had achieved during the whole of the First World War. Popular myth tells us that this victory was inevitable, that the German armed forces were destined to win because their forces were more armoured, more motorized, more modern in every way than their opponents. But this is simply not the case. The reality was that the Western Allies possessed more tanks – and better ones – than the Germans. Victory in the west was not a foregone conclusion for Hitler’s forces.
The background to this immense German success is significant in the context of the development of the Holocaust because of the change in perception of Hitler that occurred as a result of the victory. Towards the end of 1939 senior figures in the German Army had considered removing Hitler from power. Not because they were outraged by the appalling atrocities the Germans were committing in occupied Poland, but because they believed that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster by planning to invade western Europe. General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff of the German Army, wrote in his diary on 3 November 1939, ‘None of the Higher Hq [Headquarters] thinks that the offensive ordered by OKW [the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht, which worked directly for Hitler] has any prospect of success.’75 One senior officer expressed his view more succinctly, saying the invasion plan was simply ‘mad’.76
In November 1939, that judgement was almost certainly correct. For if the plans to invade the west as they existed at that time had been implemented, the Germans would most probably have suffered a catastrophic defeat. Only a change in strategy, caused in part by the Allies gaining intelligence about the Germans’ original intentions, created the necessary precondition for success. The new idea was an enormous gamble – a swift attack through the seemingly impassable Ardennes forest towards the French city of Sedan, coupled with a diversionary thrust further north into Belgium. Hitler bet his entire future, and the fate of Germany, on the assumption that the Allies would not spot the movement of German armour through the Ardennes until it was too late to prevent the panzers of the Wehrmacht crossing the River Meuse at Sedan and dashing over the plains of central France to the Channel. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate either the radical nature of this plan or the element of risk involved. But, as we all know, it worked – chiefly because of the incompetence of the Allied military leadership who, as Hitler had gambled, did not understand the significance of the German advance towards Sedan until too late.
Hitler was now fêted by his military commanders. General Wilhelm Keitel, head of the OKW, the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht – promoted to field marshal after the victory over France – announced that Hitler was ‘the greatest military leader of all time’.77 Most of the German population was just as ecstatic; the mass crowds that greeted Hitler on his return to Berlin from the western front on 6 July 1940 were almost hysterical as they demonstrated their gratitude for their Führer’s apparent genius.
As a result of all this adulation, Hitler would have been reconfirmed in his own assessment of himself as one of the most important individuals that had ever existed. As he had told his generals in August 1939, ‘essentially all depends on me, on my existence …’78 He had also reiterated, in a speech to his military leaders three months later, on 23 November, that he saw the conflict in which they were now all embroiled in equally epic terms. The choice was either ‘victory or defeat’; it was therefore necessary to ‘annihilate’ the enemy or risk annihilation oneself. This ‘racial struggle’ was inevitable, according to Hitler, because ‘the increasing population [of Germany] needs larger Lebensraum.’79
The message that victory in the west sent out to the millions of Germans who were predisposed to support the Nazi movement was clear. It was no longer necessary to worry about the future. They could throw away their individual doubts and anxieties, because their Führer had shown that he was always right. Hitler had not ‘hypnotized’ these people. It was not that they agreed with him because their own better judgement had somehow been usurped. They chose to trust him because recent events had demonstrated that this appeared to be the most sensible thing to do. But that mindset was immensely dangerous. It meant that later on, when the Jews started vanishing from the streets, they could attempt to dismiss any anxieties they might have by hiding once again behind the familiar rubric – the Führer knows best. Hitler had shown in the past that he knew best, so he would know best in the future as well. If he ordered that the Jews should suffer more than ever before, then it was the right thing for Germany and the policy should be supported.
After the German victory on mainland Europe, Hitler expected Britain to make peace. In his Reichstag speech on 19 July 1940 he appealed to the British to see ‘reason’. He said: ‘I am still sad today that, in spite of all my efforts’ no ‘friendship’ had been established with ‘England’.80 Churchill, who had become Prime Minister two months before, was against any such accommodation, as was the government he led. And once it was clear that the British would carry on fighting, Hitler faced a dilemma. He could direct his armed forces to invade Britain, or he could turn his attention east and confront the enemy he had identified in Mein Kampf in 1924 – the Soviet Union. For Hitler, this was an easy choice. He had never wanted war with Britain, and the German Navy lacked the warships capable of protecting a cross-Channel invasion fleet. At a meeting on 31 July 1940 he raised with his military commanders the possibility of invading the Soviet Union – even before Britain had been defeated. He justified this course of action by using somewhat twisted logic. He argued that one of the reasons the British had carried on fighting was because they hoped that eventually the Soviet Union would come to their aid, saying that ‘Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most.81 So destroying the Soviet Union’s chances of entering the war on the British side, Hitler implied, would make Churchill sue for peace. It was a bizarre argument, not least because the British war effort depended on aid from America, not the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, no one spoke up against the idea.
Hitler didn’t completely reject the idea of invading Britain. Plans were still put in place to launch an aerial bombardment, and despite the gloomy prospects for a cross-Channel attack outlined by Grand Admiral Raeder at the 31 July 1940 meeting, half-hearted preparations were made for Operation Sealion – the invasion of the British mainland. But Hitler was never committed to this option, and his hopes for another military triumph rested on the plans that were developed during the rest of 1940 for a massive strike against the Soviet Union the following year.
Hitler had said, as far back as 1924, that Germany needed to gain land in the east – and the war necessary to win this new territory was getting nearer.
9. Persecution in the West
(1940–1941)
While plans were drawn up to invade the Soviet Union, the Nazis had to resolve a pressing question that had arisen as a consequence of their victory in the west. Now that the Germans had many mo
re Jews under their control, how should they treat them?
The way in which they answered that question, between May 1940 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, tells us a great deal about the flexibility of their anti-Semitic policy during this first phase of the war. It also shows, once again, that no decision had been taken at this stage to implement mass murder. For the Nazis still clung to the belief that, in the long term, the way to ‘solve’ their ‘Jewish question’ was by expulsion.
On 10 May 1940 the German Army invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium. In Luxembourg, by far the smallest of the three countries, there were around 3,500 Jews out of a population of 300,000.1 A Volksdeutsche movement within the country called for Luxembourg to ‘come home’ to the Reich, and Gauleiter Gustav Simon2 instigated an extensive programme of ‘Germanization’, with the Nuremberg Laws put into effect as early as September 1940. Jews were pressured to travel across the border into France, and the Nazis set various deadlines in the autumn of 1940 by which they wanted all Jews to have left the country. Some Jews were just taken to the border and simply abandoned.3
In neighbouring Belgium the situation was different. Just before the Nazis invaded there were about 65,000 Jews in the country, out of a total population of 8.3 million. Most of these Jews did not hold Belgian citizenship but had fled from Nazi Germany or other eastern European countries. Unlike in Luxembourg, the Germans made no attempt to force the Jews to leave the country, but starting in October 1940 they imposed anti-Semitic legislation. New laws decreed who was a Jew and who was not, and the Nazis demanded that Jews be expelled from various professions. However, the absence of any concerted violence on the streets, together with the fact that the Nazis permitted the Jews to continue to work in the diamond industry in Antwerp, led some Jews to return to Belgium in the summer and autumn of 1940 from neighbouring countries. Nazi policy started to change in November 1940, when Göring demanded that Jewish enterprises be ‘Aryanized’, although the process did not gain full momentum until well into the following year.
There were isolated acts of protest in Belgium against the German persecution of the Jews. In October 1940, for instance, Belgian government officials initially refused to obey a German request to apply anti-Semitic measures, though they did subsequently implement the legislation once the Germans forced it on them. Academics at the Free University of Brussels also protested when the Germans demanded that Jewish academics be deprived of their jobs – but their remonstrations were ignored.
The King of the Belgians, Leopold III, decided to stay on in the country, and was placed under house arrest by the Germans. In the power vacuum that resulted, the government-in-exile based in London played an influential role. Headed by the pre-war Prime Minister of Belgium Hubert Pierlot, the government-in-exile stated in January 1941 that all stolen goods and property would be returned to the true owners once the Germans had been defeated, and that those Belgians who sought to profit by stealing property from others would be held to account. Though this statement did not specifically mention the anti-Semitic measures that the Germans had imposed on Belgium, the effect of the declaration was to warn of eventual retribution for those who stole from Jews. That was certainly how the words were understood by the American Jewish Congress, and Rabbi Stephen Wise wrote to Prime Minister Pierlot in London to thank him for his support.4
In occupied Belgium there were also those who welcomed both the racism and the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. The Rexists, for instance, a far-right Belgian political party under the leadership of Léon Degrelle, came to embrace Nazi ideology. Jacques Leroy, a committed Rexist, confirms that he was also a dedicated ‘racist’. ‘The difference’, he says, ‘between the people whom you call Übermenschen [a superior race] and the ones whom you call Untermenschen [an inferior race] is that the Übermenschen are the white race … In those days we were proud to belong to the white race.’5 As for his attitude towards the Jews, Jacques Leroy’s views can be deduced from the fact that after the war he became a Holocaust denier.
There was sufficient anti-Semitic hatred in Belgium for a pogrom to be launched in the spring of 1941. On 14 April around 200 Belgian collaborators, from paramilitary units like the VNV (Volksverwering), set two synagogues on fire in Antwerp and then turned on the home of the Chief Rabbi.6 The Germans prevented the Belgian fire brigade and police from taking action to extinguish the fire and catch the perpetrators.
Revealingly, those responsible for the attack had just watched Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), an anti-Semitic propaganda film released the previous year. The film is infamous for comparing Jews with rats. It also mounted an attack on Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds, accusing them of opening branches of their bank in different European capitals in an attempt to gain Jewish domination of the banking system. The film thus purported to demonstrate that Jews owed loyalty to each other across international borders, rather than to their country of residence.
Der Ewige Jude was by far the most nauseating piece of anti-Semitic film propaganda produced by the Nazis, and there is evidence that Hitler himself had a hand in its construction. Archival evidence, plus testimony from its director, Fritz Hippler,7 strongly suggests that Hitler’s contribution was to make the film more extreme. Fritz Hippler remembers how, via Der Ewige Jude, ‘Hitler wanted to bring the “evidence” so to speak with this film that the Jews are a parasitic race … who had to be separated from the rest of men.’8 The comparison of Jews with rats was something that Hitler would have found especially powerful, since he had a special loathing of these particular animals. ‘I learnt to hate rats when I was at the front,’ he said during the war. ‘A wounded man forsaken between the lines knew he’d be eaten alive by these disgusting beasts.’9
Goebbels was not a believer in such crude attempts to influence the audience. In July 1941, he outlined how his approach to film propaganda differed from Hitler’s: ‘A few disagreements over the newsreel. The Führer wants more polemical material in the script. I would rather have the pictures speak for themselves and confine the script to explaining what the audience would not otherwise understand. I consider this to be more effective, because the viewer does not see the art in it.’10
In box-office terms, Der Ewige Jude was a failure. But although many in the audience disliked it – there were cases of women fainting while watching it – for fanatics, like the Belgian paramilitaries who saw the film in April 1941, it confirmed their view that Jews, like rats, had to be forcibly expelled.
While the synagogues of Antwerp burnt, a very different form of occupation was in force to the north-west, in Denmark. On 9 April 1940, one month before they invaded western Europe, the German Army had moved north, crossing the Danish border. Massively outnumbered and outgunned, the Danes had little choice but to accept the inevitable. Two hours after the first German soldiers arrived the Danish government surrendered. What happened next was surprising, especially in the context of the Nazi governance of neighbouring territory. For the Germans left the Danes largely to themselves. King Christian X carried on as head of state and the Danish police and judiciary functioned almost as before.
The Germans behaved in this comparatively restrained way for several reasons. First, the Nazis regarded the Danes as racial brothers – they had no ideological quarrel with the vast majority of the inhabitants of Denmark. As for the Jews, there were only 7,500 of them living in Denmark – just 0.2 per cent of the population. (This small number was partly because the Danes had refused to help thousands of Jews who were seeking refuge from the Nazis during the 1930s.) Finally, the Nazis wanted to do nothing to jeopardize the export of Danish agricultural produce to Germany. As a consequence, the Nazi occupation of Denmark was less oppressive than that of any other defeated country.
On the eve of the German invasion, Bent Melchior, a Jewish schoolboy living in Denmark, was terrified that his father who had been ‘outspoken’ in his criticism of the Nazis would be in immediate danger.11 But after the Germans had arrived, Bent’s fathe
r suffered no persecution, and life continued for the Danish Jews much as before. Knud Dyby, a Danish policeman during the war, confirms that the Danish Jews remained safe – at work and at home. ‘The Jews were absolutely assimilated. They had their businesses and their houses like everyone else.’12
The Germans invaded Denmark en route to another Nordic nation, Norway. Hitler wanted to secure Norway for strategic reasons: to gain easy access for the German Navy into the north Atlantic and to protect the shipment of iron ore from neutral Sweden. Despite an attempt by the Allies to prevent the Germans seizing Norway, the country was under Nazi control by the end of the first week of June 1940. Vidkun Quisling, who had established a quasi-Nazi party in Norway in 1933, became the initial ruler immediately after the Germans arrived, but he was replaced within days by a genuine Nazi – Josef Terboven, the former Gauleiter of Essen.
Just as in Denmark, there were only a small number of Jews living in Norway – around 1,700 Jews out of an overall population of 3 million. But, unlike the Danish Jews, they were singled out for persecution. This was partly because of geography. Norway’s long Atlantic coastline made it much more vulnerable to Allied attack than Denmark, and the Germans placed naval bases and troops in Norway in significant numbers. The Jews, as we have seen, were always perceived by the Germans as the ‘enemy behind the lines’ and so were thought to pose a threat to any military installation. But a more hard-line attitude towards the Norwegian Jews was also taken because in Quisling the Nazis possessed a willing anti-Semitic collaborator with a political base.
In the summer of 1940, Quisling managed to convince Hitler to reinstate him as head of the Norwegian government, serving under the authority of Terboven as Reichskommissar. In March 1941 Quisling gave a speech in Frankfurt in which he called for the Jews to be expelled from Norway. He claimed that it was necessary to remove the Jews because they were perverting Norwegian society and ‘corrupting’ the blood of the Norwegians like ‘destructive bacilli’.13 By the time he spoke those words Norwegian collaborators had already closed a number of Jewish shops and other commercial enterprises.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 24