Toivi Blatt, who at the age of fifteen was selected as a Sonderkommando at Sobibor, was astonished at how the horrific circumstances of the camp could alter the character of those who worked there. ‘People change under some conditions,’ he says. ‘People asked me, “What did you learn?” and I think I’m only sure of one thing – nobody knows themselves … All of us could be good people or bad people in these [different] situations. Sometimes, when somebody is really nice to me, I find myself thinking, “How will he be in Sobibor?” ’64
As the first anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union approached, Hitler and his followers had travelled a long way in a short time – not just in terms of the physical progress the German Army had made inside the Soviet Union, but in the conceptual decisions the SS and others had made about the fate of the Jews and the means by which they sought to kill them.
By June 1942, the first death factories of the Holocaust were in place, and the Nazis had created a method of killing that allowed them to murder in considerable numbers and experience little psychological torment. What they sought now were large numbers of Jews to kill. But since the Nazis could not find every foreign Jew for themselves, they needed willing collaborators. The story of how they acquired them is one of the most troubling parts of this whole history.
12. Search and Kill
(1942)
In their quest to deport the Jews of western Europe to the killing factories in the east, the Nazis faced formidable difficulties. No one country could be dealt with the same way as another. The occupied countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark were all administered differently; Italy was an ally; and France was a strange cross between a quasi-ally and a subjugated nation. Not only that, but in the summer of 1942 German forces were focused on the conquest of the Soviet Union – the defining conflict of history, as Hitler saw it. As a consequence, the SS were given minimal resources to accomplish their mission and deport the Jews. They could succeed only with the help of others.
In France in particular, the Nazis were able to exploit many pre-existing prejudices – not just anti-Semitic beliefs, but fear of foreigners and dislike of immigrants. Even before the creation of the Vichy government, the French authorities had opened camps in order to detain unwanted foreigners. In 1939, at Gurs in the Pyrenees, the French set up a camp to imprison people fleeing from the Spanish civil war; not just Spaniards who had fought, and lost, on the republican side, but many other nationalities were held in terrible conditions at Gurs.
However, the worst kind of unwanted foreigner, as far as the French authorities were concerned, was the Jew. ‘The Jew is not only an unassimilable foreigner, whose implantation tends to form a state within the state,’ said Xavier Vallat, the Commissioner-General for Jewish Questions within the Vichy government. ‘He is also, by temperament, a foreigner who wants to dominate and who tends to create, with his kin, a super state within the state.’1
The Vichy authorities not only imposed a whole series of restrictive laws targeted at Jews from 1940 onwards, but were also sympathetic in principle to the idea of deporting large numbers of their foreign Jews – many of whom had fled Nazi oppression in Germany and Austria. The Vichy government recognized, however, that solely because of practicalities expelling all these foreign Jews had to be a long-term aim. ‘Send them where?’ asked Vallat in a speech in 1942. ‘By what means, so long as the war is going on? In reality, it will be the victor’s business, if he intends to organize a durable peace, to find the means, worldwide if possible, European in any case, to settle the wandering Jew.’2
Notwithstanding Vichy’s dislike of foreign Jews, the first train filled with Jews that left France for Auschwitz in 1942 was sent not as part of a concerted plan to expel foreign Jews, but in an act of reprisal. The reasons why more than a thousand Jewish men were on that train in March 1942 can be traced back to the summer of 1941. In August 1941, French Communists shot two Germans in Paris, killing one and badly injuring the other. The German invasion of the Soviet Union had released French Communists from the shackles placed on their actions by the pact between Stalin and Hitler. The following month another German was shot dead. In reprisal, the German military authorities killed three Communist hostages. Hitler was incensed. He thought this a trivial response. ‘The Führer considers one German soldier to be worth much more than three French Communists,’ wrote Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in a dispatch from Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. ‘The Führer expects such instances to be responded to with the harshest reprisals … At the next assassination at least 100 shootings for each German [killed] are to take place without delay. Without such draconian retribution, matters cannot be controlled.’3
However, General Otto von Stülpnagel, the German military commander in France, believed that such ‘Polish methods’ simply did not work in France.4 And the evidence on the ground seemed to support that view. There was outrage among many French citizens, for instance, at the German reprisal killing of ninety-eight hostages in Nantes in October 1941. In January 1942 Stülpnagel offered his resignation. He was particularly bitter about having to leave his job because, as he outlined in a letter to Field Marshal Keitel, he thought he had come up with a better way to deter future attacks on Germans: ‘I believed that I could accomplish the clearly necessary reprisals for assassinations of personnel by other means, i.e., through limited executions, but primarily through transporting massive numbers of Jews and Communists to the East, which, in my informed opinion, has a far more chilling effect on the French population than these mass shootings, which the French do not understand.’5
Stülpnagel’s successor, his cousin Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, managed to obtain agreement to try out this policy of reprisal by mass expulsion. Hence the first deportation in March 1942, in response to resistance attacks, of 1,112 Jews from Compiègne to Auschwitz. It didn’t matter to the Germans that none of these 1,112 Jews had been found guilty of acts of murderous resistance. Because of the Nazi belief in the iron link between Communism and Judaism, it was sufficient merely that they were Jews.
The train carrying the French Jews reached Auschwitz on 30 March 1942, just a few days after the first transport carrying Slovak Jews had arrived at the camp. The French Jews, like the initial transports of Slovaks, were not selected on arrival and were admitted to the camp, but virtually all of them still perished in Auschwitz. More than 1,000 of them were dead within five months.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1942 that the mass deportation of Jews from France as a consequence of the Final Solution began. This action was intended as part of a pattern for western Europe as a whole. On 11 June, SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann of the Department of Jewish Affairs convened a meeting in Berlin to discuss the implementation of the Final Solution with his various representatives from France, the Netherlands and Belgium. He told them that Himmler had ordered the deportation of large numbers of Jews from the west, but that 90 per cent of these Jews had to be fit and healthy. Only 10 per cent could be ‘not able to work’.6 Specific targets for the number of Jews to be deported were also fixed at the meeting – 10,000 from Belgium, 15,000 from the Netherlands and 100,000 from France. The French figure was obviously the most ambitious and represented a challenge for Eichmann’s representative in Paris, Theodor Dannecker, a twenty-nine-year-old SS Hauptsturmführer (captain).
Dannecker knew that he had to gain the collaboration of the French authorities in order to fulfil his task. There were only around 3,000 German police in the whole of France in 1942, a completely inadequate force to implement the target set by Eichmann – but there were nearly 100,000 French police.7 At a meeting on 2 July 1942 between German and French officials, René Bousquet, the head of the French National Police, outlined the French position. In the occupied zone of France – the area under the administrative control of the Germans – only foreign Jews could be deported. In the unoccupied zone – the area controlled by the Vichy government – the French police would not ta
ke part in an attempt to round up any Jews. ‘On the French side we have nothing against the arrests themselves,’ said Bousquet, but the involvement of the French police ‘would be embarrassing’.8 Bousquet altered his position after the head of the German security police, Helmut Knochen, pointed out that Hitler would object strongly to the French attitude. Bousquet now said that the French police would cooperate in both occupied and unoccupied zones, but they would still target only foreign Jews, not French Jews. He subsequently confirmed that Marshal Pétain had agreed to the deportation of the foreign Jews in all parts of France ‘as a first step’.9 There was no agreement with the Germans that the French Jews would somehow be saved at the expense of the foreign Jews – merely a statement by the French authorities that the foreign Jews would be sent first.
These are the figures of Jews deported to Auschwitz – the great majority of whom died there. Almost all arrived at Auschwitz Birkenau, though the initial transports in 1942 went to Auschwitz main camp. The figures are taken from Franciszek Piper’s detailed analytical study, Auschwitz: How Many Perished, Oświęcim, Frap Books, 1996, p. 53.
Dr Piper gives an additional figure of 34,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz from concentration camps and ‘unknown places’. It is also important to note that his original figure of 438,000 Jews from Hungary was subsequently revised to 430,000, and a Norwegian Royal Commission gives a more exact estimate for the number of Jews from Norway who died in Auschwitz, rather than were deported, at 747 (see here).
Finally, it should of course always be remembered that Jews were deported by the Nazis to many other camps and destinations, and not just Auschwitz.
On 4 July, the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, met with Dannecker to discuss the forthcoming round-up. Laval said that, as far as the French were concerned, ‘during the evacuation of Jewish families from the unoccupied zone, children under sixteen [can] also be taken away.’10 He went on to express indifference for the fate of the children in the occupied zone. Laval thus voluntarily gave up the Jewish children. The Nazis had not asked for them – at this moment, they appeared not to want them. But the Prime Minister of France, a country with a proud history of protecting the rights of the individual, took the initiative and suggested that the Nazis carry away innocent children. Laval later tried to present his actions as a humanitarian act, but that was always an unsustainable excuse, not least because Laval knew that Hitler had publicly committed himself to ‘exterminating’ the Jewish race in Europe in the event of a world war. Laval – just as the Slovaks had been – was almost certainly motivated by simple expediency. If Jewish parents were allowed to leave their children behind after they had been deported, their offspring would become a problem for the French authorities. Laval didn’t want that problem, so he tried to get rid of them. Laval was not even a fanatical anti-Semite. But he was a cynical and cold-hearted politician.
Over two days, 16 and 17 July 1942, some 9,000 French police took part in one of the most infamous actions in the history of Paris – the round-up known as the grande rafle. In the 10th arrondissement, Annette Muller – then just nine years old – remembers the police pushing into her flat and her mother ‘begging them to spare her children, to take her [instead] … I have the vision of my mother being humiliated by the police officer who pushed her. I remember the scene in front of my eyes.’ Annette, her youngest brother Michel and their mother were taken to a hall close by where the French police were temporarily gathering the Jews together. ‘I saw people lying on tables who were having fits,’ says Annette, ‘and others who were vomiting.’11 Her two elder brothers had managed to escape in the chaos – Annette’s mother had encouraged them to run as she was under no illusions as to what might await the family in captivity. Her husband, who was away from the flat that night, was Polish, and had learnt a few months before that many of his close relatives in Poland had been shot by the Germans.
Altogether 12,884 Jews were snatched from their homes by the French police in the course of the grande rafle – nearly 10,000 on the first day of the raid, the rest on the second. Several thousand Jews – including Annette, Michel and their mother – were transported to the Vélodrôme d’Hiver, a cycle stadium on the left bank of the Seine where they were confined in atrocious conditions. Michel, just seven years old at the time, still has memories of the terrible stench of diarrhoea that enveloped the Vélodrôme.
From the Vélodrôme d’Hiver, they were sent to Beaune-la-Rolande, a holding camp in the Loiret, south of Paris. Though the whole experience was frightening, Annette and Michel felt comforted because they were with their mother. ‘She was there,’ says Annette, ‘she was warm. We felt protected. We felt that as long as she was there, nothing could happen to us.’ Nonetheless, Annette worried about ‘what was going to happen to us when we went back to school’ because they might ‘miss the beginning of classes’.
They were held at Beaune-la-Rolande for three weeks. They didn’t know it, but during this time the Nazis were discussing what should be done with the children who had been caught in the round-ups. Dannecker had asked Eichmann for a ruling, and during a telephone call on 20 July Eichmann finally passed on the verdict – the children could be sent east as well, but only once transport complications had been sorted out. The French authorities now decided – instead of waiting until the families could be deported together – to send the parents of the children away first. So much for Laval’s claim that he wanted for humane reasons to deport the children along with their parents.12
Early in August, parents at Beaune-la-Rolande were separated from their children. ‘They brought us together, all of us, in the middle of the camp,’ remembers Annette, ‘and the police very violently beat the women back. The children were holding on to their clothing … there was a lot of screaming, crying, it was really a lot of noise.’ Her last memory of her mother is that ‘she made a sign with her eyes and we watched her. I had the impression that her eyes smiled at us, as if she wanted to say that she was going to come back.’13
The mothers were sent to Drancy in the suburbs of Paris, and a camp that had been established in a half-built housing estate. The majority of the Jews that were deported from France – around 69,000 people – left for the east from Drancy. In 1942 the camp was administered by the French authorities, and conditions were appalling. Not only were sanitation and food wholly inadequate, but this was also a place of emotional despair, especially when the mothers arrived who had been taken from their children. Odette Daltroff-Baticle, an adult who was imprisoned in Drancy that summer, remembers, ‘These women naturally were hurt, because they had to leave their children, and some of them threw themselves out of windows. There was one who was saved because she fell on to barbed wire that went around the courtyard [and so her fall was cushioned]. But some of them did die.’14
After their mother had been snatched away, life at Beaune-la-Rolande became all but unbearable for Annette and her brother. ‘After the departure,’ she says, ‘for a few days I didn’t want to go out of the barracks because I was so sad. I couldn’t stop crying. I stayed sleeping on the straw, and I told myself that it was my fault that my mother left, that I wasn’t nice with her. All those sorts of things that I could reproach myself with … It was a period of constant fear. The Gendarmes had become menacing, threatening, and we needed to stay quiet.’
There was one poignant physical reminder of the mothers who had been separated from the children. ‘All the children had gone to go look at the latrine,’ says Annette, ‘and they had said, “Oh, come look, come look,” because at the bottom of the latrine, mixed with the excrement, there was lots of brilliant, shiny things. It was rings. It was wedding rings that the mothers had preferred to throw into the latrines rather than give up, because they had been told to surrender all their jewellery.’15
After two weeks or so at Beaune-la-Rolande without their mothers, the children were sent to Drancy. By now their mothers had been deported to Auschwitz. At Drancy, Annette and her brother slept on the concrete
floor of a half-finished flat and tried ‘not to slip on the stairway because there was so much excrement. We all had diarrhoea.’ Though she remembers that she saw some French police ‘cry’ at the plight of the children, the majority did their work ‘with a lot of zeal’.16
Odette Daltroff-Baticle tried to look after the children as best she could: ‘When they arrived they were in really poor shape. The children were surrounded by insects and they were very, very dirty and had dysentery. We tried to give them showers but we didn’t have anything to dry them with. Then we tried to give them food – these children hadn’t eaten for several days – and we had a hard time giving them any. Furthermore, we tried to make a full list of their names, but many of them didn’t know their family names and so they just said things like, “I’m the little brother of Pierre.” So we persisted in trying to find out their names; the older ones, yes, of course, but for the smaller ones it was absolutely impossible. Their mothers had tied little pieces of wood on them with their names, but a lot of them had taken off the pieces of wood and played with them amongst themselves … The children always spoke about their parents, of course, they spoke about their mother mostly. They spoke about the moment when they had left their mothers, but we felt in everything they said that they knew that they would never see them again, that’s what it seemed to me.’17
In one respect, Michel and Annette were fortunate. Unbeknown to them, their father had been trying to get them released for weeks. Through an intermediary he managed to bribe French officials so that they were transferred from Drancy to a holding centre in Montmartre. Here the security was more lax, and he succeeded in taking them away and hiding them in a Catholic orphanage. Most of the other children held in Drancy had no such saviour working to protect them. They were on their own. Had Michel and Annette’s father not escaped the initial round-up on 16–17 July, they too would almost certainly have been sent on one of the seven trains that left Drancy for Auschwitz in late August, carrying the newly orphaned children to their deaths.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 36