On 10 May 1940, the Germans invaded another country that had, like Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg and Belgium, attempted to avoid the war by claiming neutrality. Three-quarters of the Jews of this country – the Netherlands – would be killed in the Holocaust: a greater proportion than in any other sizeable nation in western Europe. Just why about 75 per cent of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust – compared to around 40 per cent of Belgian and Norwegian Jews and 25 per cent of French Jews – is a question that has long troubled historians, and some suggestions as to why there was this eventual disparity are made later in this book.14
Unlike the Belgian government-in-exile, the Dutch government-in-exile was not united in its response to the German occupation. While Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was opposed to any collaboration with the Germans, her Prime Minister, Dirk Jan de Geer, took a different view. He believed that the war against the Germans could not be won, and that the Dutch should cooperate with the Nazis in a similar way to the Vichy government in France. True to his beliefs, de Geer secretly left Britain for the Netherlands in September 1940 and subsequently published a pamphlet advocating collaboration with the Germans.15
In the absence of strong political leadership, Dutch civil servants played a crucial role. The majority of them decided to assist the Germans in the administration of the country in a professional and diligent way. As the Dutch government-in-exile stated in 1943: ‘They [the civil servants] had spent their whole lives accustomed to obey, they were always – and rightly – so proud of the impeccable execution of their tasks and conscientious fulfilment of their duties, that they brought the same conscientiousness and the same fulfilment of duty to the scrupulous organization of the plunder of our country, to the advantage of the enemy.’16
Almost all Dutch civil servants agreed to sign forms that confirmed they were of ‘Aryan’ descent – the so-called ‘Aryan attestation’ – and in November 1940 they acceded to the German demand that Jews be removed from public service. The civil servants, keen to preserve appearances, considered the Jews ‘suspended’ from their duties rather than ‘dismissed’.17 It sounded less brutal, but the impact was the same.
Any judgement on the actions of the Dutch civil servants during this period should not, of course, be tainted by our own knowledge of what was to come. Even so, the efficiency with which they facilitated the German desire for all Jews to be individually registered, starting in January 1941, remains startling. This comprehensive system of registration would prove to be of enormous assistance to the Nazis at the time of the deportations of Dutch Jews to the death camps.
By June 1941 a whole range of anti-Semitic measures were in place, directed against the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands.18 Dutch Jews could no longer visit cinemas or public parks or swimming pools; they could not own radio sets or attend mixed schools or work as lawyers or doctors for anyone other than Jewish clients. The Reichskommissar for the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, had demanded all these measures. A committed anti-Semite himself, he was a hard-line Nazi who had grown up in Austria and played a part in the downfall of Chancellor Schuschnigg in 1938. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939 he had served as deputy to Hans Frank, helping to administer and oppress the Poles in the General Government. So by the time he was appointed to his post in the Netherlands he had experienced first hand the bloody reality of the Nazi policy in the east. The fact that the Netherlands was ruled by a brutal racist like Seyss-Inquart, and Belgium by a military governor, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, also partly explains the subsequent disparity between the death rates of Jews in the two countries. Which is not to say that Falkenhausen was any friend of the Jews. He presided over appalling atrocities in Belgium, in part orchestrated by Eggert Reeder, the SS administrator who worked with him, but he still remained an old-school general – one who would eventually be sent to a concentration camp for his complicity in the 20 July plot against Hitler.
Not all institutions in the Netherlands cooperated with the Nazis as efficiently as the civil service. On 26 November 1940, Professor Rudolph Cleveringa of the University of Leiden delivered a devastating riposte to the German order that Jewish professors should be sacked. In the Great Hall of the university he condemned the demand as ‘beneath contempt’ and drew a stark comparison between ‘power based on nothing but force’ and the ‘noble’ example of Eduard Meijers, one of the Jewish professors at the university. Professor Meijers, said Cleveringa, was this ‘son of our people, this man, this father to his students, this scholar, whom foreign usurpers have suspended from his duties …’.19 Shortly after he gave this speech, Cleveringa was arrested. He spent the next eight months in prison, and the University of Leiden was closed down.20
Hetty Cohen-Koster, a Jewish student of Leiden University, heard Cleveringa speak that day in November. She described his words as ‘salve for my doubting soul’. At the time she felt that ‘the same thoughts and feelings are being communicated back and forth between us, wordlessly, yet completely and precisely understood by us all. I sit in a community of people sharing the same feelings, the same opinions. I belong here.’21
Hetty Cohen-Koster had not experienced any persecution in pre-war Netherlands. At her school in Haarlem there ‘was not the slightest sign or trace of anti-Semitism … On the contrary, the school had an atmosphere of complete tolerance across all areas: origin, gender, religion and race.’ Many Jews in the Netherlands felt the same way. Though in the 1930s there had been isolated anti-Semitic incidents, the idea of persecuting the Jews went against a tradition of Dutch tolerance that dated back to the emancipation of the Jews at the end of the eighteenth century. It was the legacy of this sense of security that led many to feel that the future could not be totally dark. ‘At that time,’ wrote Hetty Cohen-Koster, ‘we believed that the labour camps in Germany were the worst that could happen.’
The Dutch experience thus demonstrates that it is a serious mistake to assume that the amount of pre-existing anti-Semitism in any country is a guide to the level of subsequent Jewish suffering under the Nazis. Other factors, such as the type of Nazi governance, the continuing presence of a functioning system of administration and the degree to which the Nazis desired to undertake anti-Semitic persecution within that specific territory all played an important part.
There were further voices of resistance in the Netherlands. In October many ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church protested against the ‘Aryan attestation’ by reading a letter of censure to their congregations, and in February 1941 a strike was held – initially in Amsterdam – to protest against the German occupation. All this brave dissent must be remembered, but so must the fact that at a bureaucratic level the Germans were well served by Dutch civil servants who collaborated with the occupying forces in the most ‘scrupulous’ and helpful way imaginable.
France, the final country that the Germans occupied in their march across western Europe, was treated very differently from the other conquered nations. France had never sought to use the cloak of neutrality as a protection against the Germans. The French and the British had reacted together when the Germans invaded Poland, and both had declared war on 3 September 1939. The French had been supremely confident of victory before the German invasion. General Gamelin, the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, said that Hitler would ‘definitely’ be beaten if he tried to attack France in spring 1940.22 It was an optimism shared by many ordinary French citizens. According to one foreign journalist in Paris on 10 May 1940, the day the Germans launched their assault, the people were ‘bubbling with enthusiasm. On the streets and cafés, in the press and on the radio, there was jubilation over the blunder that Germany had just committed.’23
Against this background of over-confidence, it is hard to exaggerate the sense of national humiliation felt by the French when the Germans subsequently defeated them in just six weeks. France had been overrun, the French Army disgraced, and more than 1.5 million soldiers captured and taken to camps in Germany. In the wake of this disaster
, the French turned to a national hero in an attempt to regain their self-respect – Marshal Philippe Pétain, the victor of the Battle of Verdun during the First World War. Pétain, eighty-four years old at the time of the French defeat in 1940, was the personal embodiment of the dignity of France. Solemn, grave and forbidding, he was tasked with rescuing the French from this physical and emotional catastrophe.
Pétain agreed an armistice with Germany on 22 June, six days after becoming Prime Minister. The terms of the peace treaty with France left the Germans occupying most of France – the north and the south-west – while around 40 per cent of French territory – the south and the south-east – remained technically under the control of the new French government led by Marshal Pétain. Because Paris was within the German-occupied zone, the capital of this new French regime was established at the spa town of Vichy. Once ensconced in Vichy, Pétain – who was now also Chief of State – possessed considerable power over French citizens, and blamed much of the trouble that had engulfed the country on the weaknesses of the Third Republic. He rejected the revolutionary watchwords of ‘Liberty, equality, brotherhood’ and adopted a new slogan of ‘Work, homeland and family’.
A number of politicians and administrators who served Pétain were confirmed anti-Semites. Xavier Vallat, for instance, who became Commissioner-General for Jewish Questions within Pétain’s government in spring 1941, subsequently said to Theodor Dannecker, the SS officer who oversaw the deportations of Jews from France, ‘I have been an anti-Semite for much longer than you.’24 There was also Louis Darquier, who replaced Vallat as Commissioner-General: he had founded the French Anti-Jewish Assembly before the war, had served a prison sentence for inciting racial hatred and used to confront Jews in cafés.25
Pétain’s government acted swiftly to impose anti-Semitic legislation. In October 1940 the Statutes on Jews were passed which deprived Jews of the ability to work in a whole host of professions. They could no longer be civil servants, policemen, journalists or teachers or serve as officers in the army. Only a narrow range of Jews were exempted from these draconian restrictions – such as those who had fought in the First World War. As for foreign Jews, they were treated worst of all and were now liable to be interned in ‘special camps’ within France.26
There is no evidence that the Germans asked the Vichy government to impose these anti-Semitic measures.27 Indeed, Pétain personally altered a draft of the October statutes in order to make the regulations still harsher.28 The disturbing truth is that the French authorities persecuted the Jews because they chose to, not because they were told to. For the Jews of France, this evidence that fellow French citizens were prepared to victimize them was devastating. ‘I cried last evening,’ wrote Raymond-Raoul Lambert in his diary on 19 October 1940, ‘as a man might cry who has suddenly been abandoned by the woman who was the sole love of his life, his mentor and the guide of his actions.’29
The actions of Vichy seemed all the more outrageous because France was the country of the Enlightenment, of the Rights of Man, the champion of free speech and liberal democracy – indeed, the first European country to emancipate the Jews, as long ago as the end of the eighteenth century. But it was more than that. It was also the country of the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer had been falsely accused in the 1890s, and the place where the left-leaning government of Léon Blum in the 1930s had been attacked purely because of Blum’s Jewish ancestry. The Jewish Statutes certainly reflected the spirit of that latter legacy of intolerance. The preamble to the statute of 3 October 1940 states: ‘In its work of national reconstruction, the government from the very beginning was bound to study the problem of Jews as well as that of certain aliens, who, after abusing our hospitality, contributed to our defeat in no small measure.’30
It was no accident that foreign Jews were especially vulnerable under the new legislation. Out of a total of approximately 330,000 Jews in France in December 1940, about 135,000 were not French citizens, but had sought sanctuary in France from other countries. These ‘aliens’, as the Statutes described them, were particularly hated by French anti-Semites, and would later suffer disproportionately compared to French Jews. While around 10 per cent of French Jews would lose their lives in the Holocaust, more than 40 per cent of foreign Jews in France would die at the hands of the Nazis.31
In essence, the Vichy government’s policy was to separate and eventually try and expel ‘alien’ Jews and ‘neutralize’ – or otherwise assimilate – Jews who were French citizens. Indeed, there was always an element of ambiguity in the Vichy attitude towards French Jews. Admiral François Darlan, who became French Prime Minister in February 1941, went as far as to say: ‘The stateless Jews who have thronged to our country for the last fifteen years do not interest me. But the others, the good old French Jews, have a right to every protection we can give them. I have some, by the way, in my own family.’32
Thus, if you were a Jew in occupied Europe during the first year or so of the war, how you were treated could depend not just on the country in which you lived, but whether you were a native of that country or not. Equally, while there was no overarching policy that the Nazis sought to impose on all the Jews under their control, certain core principles were evident across most of occupied Europe. Just as they had in Germany, the Nazis wanted – as a first step – to identify the Jews and isolate them.
As for the longer term, the Nazis had already demonstrated their desire to rob Jews of their wealth and then expel them from all areas under their control. Madagascar, as we have seen, offered one possible destination for the Jews during this period. But since the Madagascar plan depended on the ability of merchant ships carrying the Jews to sail thousands of miles in safety, it was an idea that could only be implemented once the British fleet had been rendered harmless – and the only way to do that was to force Britain out of the war. But that was proving hard to do. Dissatisfied with the Luftwaffe’s inability to bomb Britain to the negotiating table, and after it became obvious that the Germans could not mount a successful seaborne invasion of Britain, Hitler increasingly turned his attention to the east. Operation Sealion was postponed – indefinitely as it turned out – after a meeting Hitler held on 17 September 1940 and plans proceeded for an attack on the Soviet Union.
The inability of the Nazis to implement the Madagascar plan did not mean that the idea of deporting Jews out of the Reich had been shelved. That autumn Robert Wagner, the Gauleiter of Baden in the west of Germany, forcibly expelled 6,500 German Jews over the border into Vichy France. Wagner, also the Gauleiter of territory in Alsace-Lorraine, had previously presided over the deportation of French citizens unwanted in this newly ‘Germanized’ land. This experience appears to have given him the idea of taking the same action against Jews within his domain in Germany. Local police detained German Jews on 22 and 23 October 1940 and forced them to board trains to Vichy. They were each permitted to take with them just 50 kilos of belongings and a maximum of 100 Reichsmarks. Heydrich noted that ‘The deportation of the Jews was conducted throughout Baden and Pfalz without incident. The general population was hardly aware of the operation.’33
It was an action reminiscent of the deportations that had recently taken place in Poland of Jews from the lands to be Germanized to the General Government. And just as Hans Frank in the General Government had done, the Vichy authorities objected to their territory being used in this way. They had accepted the nine trains of Jews – seven from Baden, two from Saarpfalz – only because they thought they contained French citizens.34 ‘The French government can no longer provide asylum to these foreigners,’ the Vichy authorities declared in a protest letter of 18 November 1940. ‘It most urgently proposes that the Reich government immediately take the necessary measures so that they are transported back to Germany and the expenditures arising from their stay in France are repaid.’35 But the Nazis refused to do as their defeated neighbour asked, and the German Jews continued to be held in internment camps in south-west France. A large proportio
n of them were shipped east in 1942 and eventually died in the Nazi death camps in Poland.
This little-known action in the autumn of 1940 is significant not just because of the importance of remembering the suffering of those German citizens who were suddenly snatched from their homes, but because it offers an insight into the way local initiatives could help shape decision-making. Hitler, as we have seen, did not come up with the idea of deporting the Jews of Baden and Pfalz and then order Wagner to implement the task. Instead, it was Gauleiter Wagner who wanted to send German Jews across the border without telling the French in advance. This initiative was then given the green light by Himmler and, according to one report, by Hitler as well.36
All this was possible only because Hitler was a visionary leader who expected his underlings to demonstrate huge amounts of initiative. A month before these deportations took place, he had said to Wagner and Gauleiter Bürckel of the Saar-Palatinate and Lorraine, that ‘in ten years’ time there was only one report he would want to have from the Gauleiters, namely that their areas were German and by that he meant completely German. He would not ask questions about the methods they had used to make the areas German and could not care less if some time in the future it was established that the methods used to gain the territories had been unpleasant or not absolutely legal.’37
In many ways this was a typical Hitler instruction to elite Nazi leaders. This is your goal, accomplish it by whatever means you like. As a consequence, different Gauleiters could pursue wildly different methods of implementation. That is certainly what happened in Poland as rival Gauleiters Albert Forster of Danzig/West Prussia and Arthur Greiser of the Warthegau both sought to impose the ‘Germanization’ policy desired by Hitler. Arthur Greiser ordered an examination of Poles to see if they could be classed as Germans or not. Those that weren’t considered German were subject to deportation. In the next-door Gau (administrative region), Albert Forster took a much more laissez-faire approach and categorized some entire groups of Poles as German. Not only did this result in a row between Greiser and Forster, but it also led to the bizarre situation whereby some members of the same family were categorized as German in Foster’s Gau and others as Poles in Greiser’s Gau.38 This mattered a great deal to these Poles – indeed, it could be a matter of life and death, as the ones classed as Germans in Forster’s Gau were not subject to deportation and received more food than those classed as Poles in Greiser’s Gau. Yet both Forster and Greiser claimed that they were each implementing Hitler’s vision – just in different ways.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 25