The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  As for the Pope, he did not just stay silent about the deportation of the Jews, he did not even publicly express outrage at the atrocities the Nazis were committing against Catholic Poles. ‘We all expected something – a word,’ says Witold Złotnicki, who fought with the Polish Home Army. ‘Some acknowledgement of what we were going through. Some word of sympathy. Some word of hope. But not total silence.’43

  The Pope, and the Catholic Church as a whole, possessed enormous latent power – particularly in Slovakia. The President of Slovakia, Jozef Tiso, was an ordained Catholic priest and large numbers of the Hlinka Guard were Catholics. At the time of the initial deportations in the spring of 1942, leaders of the Jewish community in Slovakia pleaded with the Catholic Church to protest about the expulsion of the Jews. But they were dismayed by the response. The priority for the church as a whole appeared to be to try and save Jews who had been baptized as Christians.

  Some individual churchmen, like Augustín Pozdech, a parish priest in Bratislava, did protest at the inhumanity of the deportation process. His outrage at the actions of the Slovak government and the Nazis was transmitted to the Vatican via the papal nuncio in Budapest. ‘I am distressed to the depth of my heart’, wrote Pozdech, ‘that human beings whose only fault is that they were born Jews should be robbed of all their possessions and should be banished – stripped of the last vestiges of their personal freedom – to a foreign country … It is impossible that the world should passively watch small infants, mortally sick old people, young girls torn away from their families and young people deported like animals: transported in cattle wagons towards an unknown place of destination, towards an uncertain future.’44 But Pozdech was an exception. The bulk of the Catholics in Slovakia made no protest against the deportation of the Jews in 1942.

  One of the Pope’s closest aides in the Vatican, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, recognized the problem the church faced in not acting against President Tiso. ‘Everyone understands that the Holy See cannot stop Hitler,’ he wrote in March 1942. ‘But who can understand that it does not know how to rein in a priest [i.e. Jozef Tiso, President of Slovakia]?’45 As for the Pope, he was worried that the Soviet Union might triumph in this war, and was afraid of what the consequences of a Communist-dominated Europe would be for the Catholic Church. In such circumstances, in spring 1942, he might well have doubted the value of publicly breaking Tiso, a Catholic head of state who was confronting the Godless armies of Stalin.

  Preaching at a Mass in August 1942, President Tiso said that it had been a Christian act to expel the Jewish ‘pests’. He also followed the Nazi line and declared that it was impossible for Jews to be converted into Christians – ‘a Jew remains a Jew,’ said Tiso, ‘even if he is baptized by a hundred bishops.’46 Yet just two months later Tiso suspended the deportations. It is not clear exactly why he did this. One likely answer is that he thought Slovakia had deported the agreed number of Jews and the deal with Germany had been fulfilled.47 It is also possible that he was responding both to foreign protests and to the increased knowledge in the world that the majority of Jews had been sent to their deaths. Even at his trial after the war, however, Tiso never claimed that he had stopped the deportations out of any sense of common humanity with the Jews.

  By October, when the deportations ceased, around 58,000 Jews had been handed over to the Germans, leaving 24,000 in Slovakia. These remaining Jews were not yet safe, since – as we shall see – in 1944 the situation in Slovakia changed and the deportations started again.

  The temptation to stray into counter-factual history is overwhelming at this point. What if the Pope had personally taken action against Tiso once the deportations began in the spring of 1942? As a Catholic priest, Tiso was especially vulnerable. Suppose Pius XII had threatened to excommunicate him – would not that have made Tiso think again? There was a precedent for excommunication during the war. Léon Degrelle, the leader of the Rexists in Belgium, was excommunicated in the summer of 1943 for wearing his SS uniform to Mass. Tiso’s crimes were surely greater, and though by the end of the war he had been heavily criticized by the Vatican, he remained a Catholic priest until his dying breath. He was still dressed as a priest while in prison awaiting execution for treason in April 1947.

  The Jews languishing in the Warsaw ghetto were also aware that the Pope had the powerful weapon of excommunication at his disposal. We know this as the result of the experiences of an exceptional man called Jan Karski. He was a member of the Polish resistance, who was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 because he wanted to witness first hand the horrific conditions. ‘I saw terrible things,’ he says, ‘I saw horrible things. I saw dead bodies lying on the street. We were walking the streets, [and] my guide said from time to time, “Remember.” And I did remember.’ Karski met two Jewish leaders inside the ghetto who said they had a request directed at the Pope. They said to him, ‘ “But we don’t know how one does talk to your Pope, we are Jews. But we understand, however, that your Pope has a power to open and close the gates of heaven. Let them close those gates for all of those who persecute us. He [the Pope] doesn’t have to say that this concerns [all] the Germans. Only those who persecute and murder the Jews. [That] they may be subjects for automatic excommunication. Perhaps it will help. Perhaps even Hitler will reflect. Who knows? Perhaps some Catholic Germans will reflect and exercise some pressure. In the name of our common roots. We come from the same roots … Will you do it?” I said “I will do it, sir.” And I did it.’48 After witnessing the atrocious conditions inside the Warsaw ghetto, Karski managed to escape from Poland and cross occupied Europe. By the end of 1942 he had reached Britain and spoke personally with Anthony Eden. He also tried to influence the Vatican to speak out more strongly against the Nazis. But he feels that ‘nothing important happened as a result of my mission. It didn’t do any good.’

  As the Nazis widened their search for Jews in the summer of 1942, their attention turned to Belgium. At Eichmann’s infamous meeting on 11 June, a quota of 10,000 Jews from Belgium had been set, and the first train filled with Jews left the country on 4 August. Queen Elisabeth of Belgium had asked the German authorities to exclude Belgian Jews from the deportations, and at least to begin with this request was met. But agreeing to the wishes of Queen Elisabeth was not difficult for the Nazis as 90 per cent of the 52,000 or so Jews in the country were not Belgian citizens.49

  The deportation process was not as straightforward for the Nazis in Belgium as it was in the Netherlands. This was partly because of conflict between the military administration and the SS, but also because many of the non-Belgian Jews – having already fled from elsewhere to escape the Nazis – had no reason to trust the Germans when they announced that they wanted the Jews to work as forced labour in the east. Hard as it was to find a place to hide in a foreign country, for a number of the non-Belgian Jews that struggle was preferable to putting their fate back in the hands of their persecutors. The Nazis also faced a tough administrative task in Belgium, because unlike in the Netherlands there was not a fully functioning and cooperative civil service. Despite this, the initial quota of 10,000 Jews was reached by the middle of September 1942, and by the end of the year the Nazis had sent nearly 17,000 to the east.

  In the autumn of 1942 the Germans also ordered the deportation of Jews from Norway, and Vidkun Quisling and the Norwegian police collaborated in the practicalities of their arrest.50 In December 1942, Quisling said in a speech that his administration had ‘protected itself against the Jews’ by cooperating with the Nazis.51 Not only that, but the Norwegian authorities benefited financially from the deportations. At the end of October 1942, Quisling signed a law that allowed the Norwegian state to seize Jewish property and assets.

  On 26 November, the merchant ship Donau left Oslo for Stettin in the Baltic with 532 Jews on board. Eventually, after further deportations, a total of 747 Norwegian Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. But the majority of the 2,000 Norwegian Jews managed to escape the Nazis, most by fleeing across the bord
er to neutral Sweden.52

  The Nazis knew that they had to adapt their demands not only according to the individual circumstances of each country, but also according to whether they were dealing with their allies or with conquered nations. While they could decide themselves to deport the Jews of Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium – although to do so they still needed the assistance of the individual administrations – it was more difficult to act as decisively with countries like Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Croatia, which were treated not as conquered nations but as junior partners in an alliance.

  One of the most intriguing examples of how the Nazis trod carefully with their allies is the case of Bulgaria. There were around 50,000 Jews living in Bulgaria – less than 1 per cent of the population. While there had been riots directed against the Jews early in the twentieth century and there were still staunch anti-Semites within the Bulgarian government, the country lacked the virulent anti-Semitism that existed, for example, in Slovakia. The regime signed up to the Axis in March 1941 only after Hitler had agreed that they could gain back territory lost to Romania in the First World War. The Bulgarians acquired more territory in April 1941, when they participated with the Germans in the invasion of Greece. Now Thrace and Macedonia became part of a ‘Greater Bulgaria’.

  The Bulgarians demonstrated their independence by refusing to participate in the war against the Soviet Union, a decision arising from Bulgaria’s long historical association with Russia. However, the Bulgarian government was much more accommodating on the question of the Jews. In January 1941 the Bulgarians enacted a Law for the Protection of the Nation, which contained a host of anti-Semitic measures – such as banning marriages between Jewish and non-Jewish Bulgarians and excluding Jews from jobs in the civil service. But it wasn’t until March 1943, as we shall see, that the first Jews were deported to their deaths from Bulgarian-occupied territory.

  Circumstances were very different in Croatia, another Balkan nation, to the west of Bulgaria. Here, astonishingly, members of the SS were shocked by the level of brutality displayed by the Croat militia, the Ustaše – not towards the Jews, but towards the Serbs. The head of the Security Police and SD in Croatia reported to Himmler in February 1942 that Ustaše units had committed atrocities against ‘defenceless old men, women and children, in a beastly manner’.53 The primitive way the Croats were killing their enemies seems to have had a particular effect on the Germans. Another SS security service report described how the Ustaše had stabbed farmers with ‘spear-like sticks’.54 As far back as July 1941, the German ambassador to Croatia had brought the attention of the Croatian authorities to the numerous ‘acts of terror’ committed against the Serbs which gave ‘rise to serious concerns’.55 At the Nuremberg war trials in 1946, Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, said that he had been aware of the ‘unimaginable atrocities’ committed by one particular Ustaše company in June 1942. The war diary of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff confirmed that the actions of this one Ustaše unit had been thought so appalling that the German Army field police had moved in and disarmed them.56

  However, the Nazis did not seem to object to the atrocities committed by the Ustaše against the Jews. During 1942 the majority of the 40,000 Jews in Croatia were imprisoned in concentration camps within the country – most in the infamous camp at Jasenovac. The Germans now asked the Croatians to deport the surviving Jews and on 13 August the first transport left for Auschwitz.

  Notwithstanding the immense brutality of the Croat Ustaše, the SS could never implement the Final Solution as they wished in Croatia. The fundamental problem for the Nazis, as we have already seen, was the relationship between a number of Croat leaders and individual Jews. As the German police attaché to Croatia, SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Helm, put it in a report April 1944, ‘to a great extent the Croatian leadership is related to Jews by marriage.’ The ability of the Croatian leadership to declare individual Jews ‘Honorary Aryans’ meant that it was impossible ever to declare the ‘Jewish question’ in Croatia entirely ‘settled’. As long as Croatia remained an ally, there was little that the Nazis could easily do about this other than, as SS Obersturmbannführer Helm suggested, attempt to ‘persuade’ the Croatian government to ‘eliminate itself those Jews who are still in public positions’ and ‘apply a more severe standard in granting the rights of Honorary Aryans’.57

  The Germans also had issues with the Hungarians’ attitude to the Jews, even though the authorities had already intensified anti-Semitic persecution. As far back as August 1941 the Hungarians had expelled around 17,000 Jews who did not have Hungarian citizenship, sending them into the maelstrom in the east where almost all of them were murdered by Einsatzgruppen and SS units at Kamenets-Podolsk in western Ukraine. The Hungarians also presided over a brutal occupation of territory in Yugoslavia, and in January 1942 massacred hundreds of Jews at Novi Sad in Serbia. In addition, they forced many Hungarian Jews to serve in Labour Service Battalions where their fate depended on the whim of the commander of their unit. According to one report, a number of Jews in one labour unit were hosed down with cold water in winter so that they resembled ‘ice statues’.58 Another Hungarian officer decided to execute his unit en masse. Ninety-six were killed, thirty murdered by the officer himself. One estimate is that more than 30,000 Hungarian Jews never returned from the eastern front.

  However, the Hungarian government were still not willing to deport all of the Jews within the country and the neighbouring territories under Hungary’s control – a total of more than 750,000. Admiral Horthy, Hungarian Regent and head of state, was a sophisticated politician, and he balanced the need to be friendly to his German ally with the discontent that had followed from the disappearance of the Jews who had been handed over by the Hungarians to the Germans in 1941 and murdered at Kamenets-Podolsk. In March 1942 Horthy replaced the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi Prime Minister, László Bárdossy, with the much more pragmatic figure of Miklós Kállay. Horthy had decided to play a long game, waiting to see how the war developed. He understood that it wasn’t necessarily in Hungary’s interests to hand over large numbers of Jews to the Nazis. After all, he must have thought, suppose the Allies won. What retribution might follow?

  Hungary’s actions, while disappointing for the Nazis, were not too surprising since Admiral Horthy never hid his pragmatic attitude. What was more unexpected was the behaviour of Romania. The Romanian government had previously demonstrated an enormous commitment to killing Jews. Romanian troops, working alongside Einsatzgruppen, had murdered 160,000 Jews in Ukraine in the wake of the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Romanian authorities had deported 135,000 Jews from eastern Romania to Transnistria where around 90,000 died in camps.59

  In the summer of 1942 it appeared that the Romanians would cooperate with the Germans and expel Jews from the Romanian heartland. On 8 August 1942, the Bukarester Tagblatt, a newspaper published in Romania by the German embassy, announced that preparations were being made to clear Romania ‘definitively’ of Jews.60 Shortly afterwards the Völkischer Beobachter confirmed the news, saying that ‘in the course of the next year, Romania will be completely purged of Jews.’61 But then the discussions about the deportations started to unravel.

  Marshal Antonescu prevaricated. He did not say that he was no longer prepared to deport the remaining Jews in Romania, but nor did he commit to an exact date when the deportations would start. He was dithering for a combination of reasons. Information, as we have seen, was reaching the world about the fate of the Jews. This meant that any head of state that handed over Jews to the Germans would now find it hard to plead ignorance at the end of the war. Not that this would matter for the Romanians if the Germans won, but that outcome did not seem certain. Despite the gains that the Wehrmacht were making as they advanced towards the River Volga and the mountains of the Caucasus, the entry of America into the war had caused many of those who had allied themselves to the Germans to reassess what the future might bring. Even some wit
hin the German leadership were voicing doubts. In September 1942, for instance, General Friedrich Fromm, who was in charge of the supply of armaments to the German Army, sent a report to Hitler which called for him to negotiate with the Allies and stop the war. Germany, in Fromm’s view, simply could not compete with the firepower now at the disposal of the Allies.62

  There was also an increasing lack of trust between the Romanians and the Germans. The Romanian government were upset by the perceived lack of respect shown to Radu Lecca, the Romanian Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, when he visited Berlin in the summer of 1942. At the same time, Gustav Richter, Eichmann’s agent in Bucharest, reported that he thought some Romanian politicians were accepting bribes from Jews.63 Antonescu was also lobbied by pressure groups within Romania about the fate of the Jews, particularly Archbishop Andrea Cassulo, the papal nuncio in Bucharest. Antonescu, like Admiral Horthy, was making a pragmatic political decision in the summer of 1942. He wasn’t suddenly ashamed about the quarter of a million Jews that he had condemned to death the previous year. He was just responding to changing circumstances.

  Hitler behaved very differently. He was more intransigent than ever, and gave free rein to his fanaticism in a speech on 30 September 1942. He called the Jews the ‘wire-pullers of this insane man in the White House [i.e. Roosevelt]’, and said, ominously, ‘The Jews once laughed about my prophecies in Germany. I do not know whether they are still laughing today or whether they no longer feel like laughing. Today, too, I can assure you of one thing: they will soon not feel like laughing anymore anywhere.’64 Many of his followers were just as belligerent. In October 1942, shortly after General Fromm had submitted his memorandum to Hitler saying that Germany was heading for catastrophe, Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front (the Nazi trade union organization), said at a meeting in Essen in Germany, ‘We have burnt all bridges behind us, intentionally we have. We have virtually solved the Jewish question in Germany. That alone is something incredible.’65 And that same month Göring declared in a speech in Berlin, ‘May the German Volk realize one thing: how necessary this fight has become! The terrible situation in which we lived [previously] was unbearable.’66