The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The surrender of the Italians meant that this protection was removed in an instant. The lives of Jews both in the former occupied zones and within Italy itself changed suddenly for the worse. For example, as soon as the Germans entered Nice in the south of France – a city that had been under Italian control – they began searching for Jews in an action that became infamous for its brutality. Thousands of Jews had taken refuge in Nice, protected for the last ten months since the fall of Vichy by the Italians. But now the Germans took their revenge. On entering Italian territory itself, the Germans were similarly heartless. Around Lake Maggiore in the north of Italy the SS began searching for Jews, and at Meina at the southern end of the lake they came across a number of Jews in a hotel. They murdered sixteen of them, and threw their bodies into the lake.5

  Less than a month later, on 16 October 1943, German forces moved against the Jews of Rome. This, one might think, ought to have been a risky operation for them, since they were snatching Jews close to the Vatican. For while it was true that Pope Pius XII had not yet publicly condemned the extermination of the Jews, surely he would not ignore this outrage? Ernst von Weizsäcker, German ambassador to the Holy See, certainly thought he wouldn’t. He believed that deporting the Jews of Rome would result in such censure from the Pope that it would damage Germany.6 But Weizsäcker was wrong. Not only did the Pope not threaten to condemn any attempt to deport the Jews from Rome, he never even spoke out against the action after it had happened.

  Early in the morning of 16 October, Settimia Spizzichino, a twenty-two-year-old Roman Jew, suspected that something was wrong: ‘That night was a slightly different night from the others. One could feel that there was something in the air. A kind of cottonwool silence. I can’t describe it. And towards four in the morning we started hearing footsteps, heavy footsteps. Soldiers’ footsteps, marching. So we went to the windows to see what was going on and we saw the Germans breaking into the houses and taking the Jews. We took fright because we saw them coming into our building.’7 Settimia was taken with her family to a prison close to the Vatican, where she describes conditions as ‘horrendous’, and from there to Auschwitz. She was one of 1,800 Jews deported from Rome during the German occupation. ‘I came back from Auschwitz on my own [at the end of the war],’ she says. ‘I lost my family there. My mother. Two sisters, my little niece and then one brother. Had the Pope spoken out a number of Jews would have fled. They would have reacted. Instead he kept quiet. He played into the Germans’ hands. The Pope was very near. We were right under his nose. But he didn’t lift a finger. He was an anti-Semitic Pope. He didn’t take a single risk.’

  While it is understandable, given what happened to her, that Settimia Spizzichino believes that the Pope was anti-Semitic, the charge is hard to sustain. Not least because the Pope certainly did not prevent priests and nuns from hiding Jews in Italy. ‘The Pope issued the order that the convents could open up,’ says Sister Luisa Girelli of the Sisters of Sion. ‘It lifted the rule of enclosure – opening the door to any escapee.’8 Enrichetta Di Veroli was just one of the Jews hidden by the Sisters of Sion, and will never forget how they saved her life. ‘We were accepted here with no problems,’ she says, ‘the nuns were very nice. These nice nuns represented nine months of my life. They were important. I feel much more than gratitude.’9 Over 4,000 Jews were protected by the Catholic Church and hidden in convents, monasteries and other church buildings. Several hundred even found refuge inside the Vatican.10

  But what the Pope would not do, even having been told that the Nazis were almost certainly exterminating the Jews, was to speak out about the crime. Most likely, he was frightened for a number of reasons. He feared, first of all – as we have noted before – the victory of the Godless ‘Bolsheviks’ and the subsequent threat to the Catholic Church. Second, he worried that if he condemned the Nazis’ attack on the Jews, the Germans might enter church property and in doing so capture the Jews who were hidden there. Finally, he was anxious lest the Germans bomb the Vatican itself.11 So he kept his mouth shut. By this course of action he undoubtedly also served, as he saw it, the interests of the Catholic Church as an institution. But, as we have already seen in the case of the Dutch Jews, we can’t know for sure what would have happened if he had taken a stronger line. Maybe the Germans would have moved against the church, or maybe – given the reluctance Hitler had already shown to attack the church in Germany – they would have done nothing. What we do know is that if the Pope had spoken out he would have offered moral guidance to the world.

  It was not just the Germans who conducted the Jewish deportations in Italy. Italians were also involved, in particular members of Fascist groups like the Brigate Nere (the Black Brigades) and other military units attached to the so-called Italian Social Republic – the area of northern Italy still ruled by Benito Mussolini, who had been rescued from imprisonment by German paratroopers.

  Altogether around 7,000 Jews were deported from Italy and murdered.12 More than 80 per cent of Jews in Italy thus survived the war – most by hiding or escaping across the border into neutral Switzerland. Initially, even after the Germans had occupied Italy, the Swiss maintained that Italian Jews had no right to asylum in Switzerland unless they ‘qualified’ in some way – for example, if they were children, pensioners or married to a Swiss citizen. These instructions were relaxed in December 1943, and replaced entirely by more liberal measures only in July 1944. Throughout the war, as far as Italian Jews seeking refuge in Switzerland were concerned, a great deal depended on the compassion – or lack of it – of individual Swiss border guards.13

  The fact that just under 20 per cent of Jews in Italy were murdered remains a disturbing one, even given that in a country like the Netherlands 75 per cent of Jews died. That’s because, unlike in the Netherlands, the full-scale persecution of the Jews in Italy came relatively late in the war, and the threat was eliminated in large parts of the country by the Allied advance. Rome, for example, fell to the Allies less than nine months after the Italian surrender, on 4 June 1944. The opportunity for the Germans to identify, capture and deport the Jews was thus necessarily limited.

  The history of the Holocaust in Italy is especially bleak when compared to events in another country occupied by the Germans, 700 miles to the north. Denmark was home to about 7,500 Jews, and the Nazis planned on moving against them for the first time in the autumn of 1943, around the same time as they were deporting Italian Jews. The relatively light-touch Nazi occupation of Denmark had come to an end during the summer in the wake of strikes and other protests. When the Danish government resigned in August, a state of emergency was imposed by the Germans and the Nazi plenipotentiary, Werner Best, pressed for action against the Jews. The idea was to detain the Danish Jews on the night of 1–2 October 1943, and then deport them. But just a few days before the planned action, Werner Best did something extraordinary. Through an intermediary, Georg Duckwitz, the German naval attaché, Best told the Danish Jews what was about to happen to them. Best briefed Duckwitz on the planned deportations, knowing that Duckwitz, a man sympathetic to the plight of the Danes, would pass the information on to members of the Danish elite, and that they in turn would warn the Jews.

  ‘We heard that [the news about the impending deportations] at the police station,’ says Knud Dyby, a Danish policeman. ‘Of course we heard it at the same time as the journalists and the politicians heard it. It was a great surprise to all of us. We never thought – after more than two years – that the Germans would arrest the Danish Jews.’14 Knud Dyby, who like his colleagues ‘did not believe in discrimination’, felt compelled to help the Jews, in part because he knew about the likely fate of the Jews from the ‘underground press’.

  Up to the moment the Germans decided on the deportation, ‘The situation of the Jews in Denmark was quite a happy one,’ says Bent Melchior, who was fourteen years old in 1943. ‘We were not very many Jews at any point and we were well integrated into the Danish society. Over the centuries there has been a lot of in
termarriage and people who were not Jews might have a Jewish great-grandfather or mother. So I would say there was a pro-Semitic atmosphere, and we were no threat – not to the church, not to the country. On the contrary, many Jews played a very important role in public life in Denmark, in the arts, in the science, even in politics.’15

  Bent Melchior remembers that, if you felt in any danger, you could ‘ask any policeman in the street to help you, without fearing that this would have given anything away to the Germans’. The atmosphere in Denmark was very much one of the Danes – regardless of religion – together as one nation against the Germans.

  After learning about the proposed German action, Jewish leaders gave warnings in synagogues and throughout the Jewish community. As a result, many of the Jews living in Copenhagen left the city to hide in houses in the countryside or moved in with their non-Jewish neighbours.

  Non-Jewish Danes also made a major effort to warn the Jews. ‘I went from house to house in the streets of the neighborhood,’ said Robert Pedersen, then seventeen years old. ‘Whenever I saw a name plate that indicated a Jewish family, I rang the doorbell and asked to talk to them. Sometimes they did not believe me. But I succeeded in persuading them to pack and come with me to Bispebjerg Hospital which had been turned into a gathering place for Jewish refugees … After that the doctors and nurses took care of them. And then I went back to my neighborhood and collected more Jews.’16

  The most common escape route was across the narrow channel to neutral Sweden. Volunteer guides, such as Knud Dyby, escorted small groups of Jews through the streets of Copenhagen to the fishing port. ‘It was always done at night,’ he says. ‘We preferred the worst weather because we didn’t want any light evenings where everybody could see us.’ Once at the harbour, ‘we would hide ourselves in the small sheds that the Germans normally used for nets and tools’ until called on to the boat by a fisherman. ‘I was scared all the time,’ he says. ‘I had to move many places to rest my aching body and I had no trouble finding Danes that would give me room and board, without payment at all, just to help me out as an underground person.’17

  The church in Denmark also tried to protect the Jews. ‘Wherever Jews are persecuted for racial or religious reasons,’ said the Bishop of Copenhagen, in an unequivocal statement of support on 3 October, ‘it is the duty of the Christian Church to protest against such persecution … Irrespective of diverging religious opinions, we shall fight for the right of our Jewish brothers and sisters to keep the freedom that we ourselves value more highly than life.’18

  As a result of this resistance, the German action on 1–2 October largely failed – most Jews were not at home when the Germans called. Out of the 7,500 or so Danish Jews, fewer than 500 were ever deported. Those that were captured by the Germans were sent not to the death camps of the east but to Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czech territory, and the majority survived the war.

  The Danish experience of the Holocaust is singular. This was the only country under Nazi domination where large numbers of Jews – around 95 per cent – were saved by their fellow countrymen. There is no simple explanation for why this happened in Denmark and nowhere else – a combination of factors all came together at this moment. In the first place, there was a historical culture of Danes sticking together against their powerful neighbour, Germany. There was also a profound sense of the importance of individual human rights. ‘It is a question of what I call Danish fairness and justice,’ says Rudy Bier, a Jewish teenager who was saved by his fellow Danes in the autumn of 1943. ‘I think we want to protect each other and we do not easily give in or up on things.’19 The proximity of a neutral country also played a part. Sweden was near by and offered an immediate place of refuge – especially after the Swedes had broadcast on radio on 2 October 1943 that they would welcome any Danish Jews who could make the crossing.

  Another factor – notwithstanding the fact that around a thousand of the Jews in Denmark at the time were foreign – was the perception, as Knud Dyby puts it, that the Jews were ‘all Danish’. The suspicion thus remains that the Danes were not so much rescuing Jews, as rescuing fellow Danes who happened to be Jewish. Had Denmark not placed such strong restrictions on foreign Jews entering the country in the 1930s, and instead allowed many more Jews to take refuge, the situation might possibly have been different in the autumn of 1943. We cannot, of course, know for sure.

  Finally, there is the most crucial reason why so many Jews in Denmark were saved – the attitude of the Germans. The rescue was possible only because Werner Best, the leading German representative in the country, sent out a warning that he knew would reach the Jewish community. Furthermore, the German Navy made little effort to police the water between Denmark and Sweden, thus allowing the Jews to escape. ‘I always maintain’, says Rudy Bier, ‘that if the Germans had wanted to stop that operation, they could have done it extremely easily because the whole of the water between Denmark and Sweden is not that wide, nor that long, and with four or five motor torpedo boats the whole operation would have gone flat.’20 That is not to say that the Germans ignored the flight of the Jews entirely. On the Danish mainland some German security personnel did try to capture Jews – the amount of effort depending, it seems, on the enthusiasm of the individual German units.

  However, at the top of the German hierarchy in Denmark, the position was clear. Werner Best wanted to allow the Jews to escape. Yet before this action, Best had previously been no friend of the Jews. He was a committed Nazi who had worked closely with Reinhard Heydrich, helping to devise and implement Nazi racial policy in France. There is no evidence that he had suddenly developed a sense of compassion for the plight of the Jews. He was acting out of self-interest, not humanity. A clue to his real thinking is contained in a document he wrote for the authorities in Berlin, dated 5 October 1943: ‘As the objective goal of the Judenaktion in Denmark was the de-judaization of the country, and not a successful headhunt, it must be concluded that the Judenaktion has reached its goal.’21 In essence, Best was arguing that since his job was to clear the Jews out of Denmark, he had succeeded. It was just that he had achieved success not by deporting the Jews to their deaths, but by letting them escape to Sweden. He could also have added that the political situation in Denmark had always been different from that in other Nazi-occupied countries. The Nazis had largely permitted the Danes to enforce their own occupation, in order to ensure that Danish food supplies kept arriving in the Reich, and the bad feeling caused by the forced deportation of the Jews would have been considerable. Much better, Best must have thought, to achieve the desired ‘goal’ by more subtle means than used elsewhere.

  There was almost certainly another reason for Best’s actions – one that he would never have told his fellow Nazis. Best was a sophisticated man. A trained lawyer, he was appointed a judge when he was still in his twenties. So it is not unreasonable to suppose that by the autumn of 1943 he had worked out that the Nazis would lose, and that he needed to start improving his CV as far as the Allies were concerned. It was a strategy that worked, because despite his close association with Heydrich and his past record of crimes, he was only imprisoned briefly after the end of the war. He subsequently became an executive with a large German industrial conglomerate.

  It is thus a mistake to believe that the Danish example shows that heroic resistance was the most significant factor in determining how many Jews survived in any particular country. Even more important was another element – how much in each instance the Nazis wanted to find and deport the Jews concerned. That conclusion is supported by studying the experience of the Greek Jews. In Greece, despite a number of instances of resistance, around 80 per cent of the 70,000 Jews in the country died during the war.22 In large part that was because, unlike in Denmark, the Germans were determined to expel the Jews of Greece.

  The Germans moved into the Italian zone of Greece in September 1943 and at once started planning mass deportations. There were immediate protests from non-Jewish Greeks. Archbishop Da
maskinos, the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Athens, not only made representations to the Germans, but also called on his fellow clergy to hide Jews. Academics at the University of Athens also protested. The Germans responded by closing the university and arresting hundreds of clergy.

  Though anti-Semitism was not unknown in Greece and some Jewish communities had few non-Jewish friends to count on, the broad picture in Greece was one of sympathy and support for the Jews. As one scholar of the history of the Holocaust in Greece concludes, ‘the mass of Greeks offered hospitality to Jews who asked for assistance.’23

  The most famous act of resistance was on the island of Zakynthos. When asked by the Germans to produce a list of every Jew on the island, the local mayor and bishop handed over a piece of paper that contained just two names – their own. Meanwhile the Jews were hidden in the houses of non-Jewish islanders. All 275 Jews survived. We don’t know exactly why the Germans chose not to pursue the Jews on Zakynthos. Most probably they simply decided there were too few Jews on the island to justify the resources needed to find them. But it was, once again, the decision of the Germans not to try and take the Jews that was crucial. The incident on Zakynthos is famous because the Jews survived. But there were many more cases in Greece where despite similar heroics the Jews were captured and deported.

  Salonica, the area in Greece with the highest percentage of loss, had been under German control from spring 1941. About 95 per cent of the Jews of Salonica died in the war – up to 48,500 men, women and children. Both the fact that so many Jews were concentrated in this one place, and the fact that the Germans had been in control for two years before the deportations, help explain why such a high percentage of Greek Jews from this area died. In addition, unlike in many other parts of Greece, the Jews of Salonica were not largely assimilated into the local population. Before the war there had been a small but vociferous group criticizing the Jews – many of whom were economically successful – and the Germans were able to build on these tensions.24