measures in the area of Judenpolitik299 and, on 25 August, issued a directive that the measures agreed with the Romanians were to be continued, but that no
further initiatives were to be developed with regard to Hungary, Bulgaria, and the
Italian-occupied zone of Croatia. 300
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
367
In issuing this directive Ribbentrop, concerned about his authority, found
himself in complete agreement with the RSHA. For it too did not consider that,
in summer 1942, the preconditions yet existed for deportations from Hungary,
Bulgaria, and the Italian-occupied zone of Croatia.
Thus, on 21 August, Luther had already recorded in a note that the Hungarian
government had not yet been approached because ‘the Hungarian legislation
concerning the Jews does not yet promise sufficient success’. 301 In fact the people of Jewish descent living in Hungary (including the annexed former Czechoslovak,
Romanian, and Yugoslavian territories), over 800,000 in number, were at this
point subject to anti-Semitic laws that corresponded more or less to the Nuremberg
Laws. 302 In August 1941, admittedly, 16,000–18,000 ‘foreign’ Jews (Jews who had lost their Hungarian citizenship because of the anti-Semitic legislation) had been
deported to the newly occupied Eastern territories, the great majority of them
being killed in the massacre of Kamenetsk-Podolsk. 303 In January 1942, in the wake of a ‘cleansing action’, Hungarian troops had shot thousands of civilians, including
hundreds of Jews. But the Hungarian government made no arrangements to
extend this policy to Jews with Hungarian citizenship. 304
In July 1942, when the Hungarian military attaché in Berlin submitted his
government’s proposal that all Jews living in Hungary ‘illegally’ be resettled to
Transnistria, 305 Himmler decided that the evacuation from Hungary of Jews of non-Hungarian citizenship who had fled to the country should be delayed until
Hungary declared itself willing to include its own Jews in the planned measures. 306
Along very similar lines, Eichmann too declared on 25 September 1942 his lack
of interest in the deportation of foreign Jews from Hungary, as this would have
been only a ‘partial’ action that ‘according to experience’ required the same
expenditure of effort as the comprehensive deportation of all Jews living in a
country. One should therefore wait until Hungary was ready to include the
Hungarian Jews in the deportations as well. 307
At the beginning of 1941, the Bulgarian government had passed special laws
against the Jews living in the country (removal from public service, confiscation
of property) which, after the Balkan campaign in the spring of 1941, were
extended to the occupied Greek (Thracian and eastern Macedonian) or Yugo-
slavian (Macedonian) territories with their native Jews numbering between
4,000 and 7,000.308 If these measures were, from the German point of view, far from adequate preconditions for the deportation of Jews living in Bulgaria,
this situation changed very quickly in the course of the summer of 1942, plainly
still influenced by the preparations for the deportations from Croatia and
Romania.
On 26 August a Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was set up and the same decree
extended the term ‘Jew’ in a racist sense and laid the legal foundation for
deportations. 309 After these measures had been introduced, at the beginning of September the RSHA immediately urged the deportations from Bulgaria.
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
In September even Ribbentrop allowed himself to be persuaded to withdraw his
opposition to the inclusion of Bulgaria in the deportation programme. 310
Since the start of the preparations for the deportations in Croatia, the Foreign
Ministry and the RSHA had assumed that the deportation of the Jews from the
German-occupied zone would be followed at the end of August by the deportation
of the Jews from the Italian-occupied zone to Auschwitz. 311 The Croatian government had declared its agreement with this procedure, but Luther expected ‘certain
difficulties’ on the part of the Italians. 312 However, in response to a request that came via the German Embassy in Rome Mussolini initially decided, or so Luther
informed Ribbentrop on 11 September, ‘to treat the Jews in the Italian-occupied
parts of Croatia in the same way . . . as in the rest of Croatia’. 313
But since Ribbentrop, as we have shown, had instructed Luther on 25 August to
develop no further initiatives with regard to the Jews in the Italian-occupied zone
for the time being out of concern for the German-Italian alliance, he now proved
extremely displeased about the request made to the Italian government; they had
‘interfered in a Croatian-Italian question . . . which contradicted the principle of
not making ourselves spokesmen for Croatian interests where the Italians were
concerned, but giving Italy precedence in Croatia in every respect’. 314
With regard to Greece, too, the RSHA became active in July 1942, the time when
the initiative was being taken to set in motion the first wave of deportations from
South-Eastern Europe. But preparations for immediate deportation were not at
first made, as it was hoped above all that they would reach a uniform procedure in
both occupied zones. (In the Italian zone of occupation there were at this point
about 13,000 Jews, in the German zone of occupation about 55,000; there were also
around 4,000 Jews living in the north-east of the country, which was allocated to
Bulgaria.)315 As in Croatia the policy initially pursued here was to avoid a conflict with Rome at all costs.
In July 1942 the RSHA informed the Foreign Ministry of its desire to introduce
anti-Jewish measures, namely universal labelling and internment of Jews who had
fled Germany. But the Italians, who had been approached with this in mind, did
not approve of the labelling of the Jews in their zone of occupation. 316
Also in July 1942 the German military administration introduced forced labour
for Jewish men. Thousands were deployed on hard physical labour in very severe
working conditions; hundreds died and a mass flight to the Italian zone began.
The emphatic demand by the Germans that Jews throughout the whole of Greece
be compulsorily labelled could not be enforced because of the dilatory treatment
of the requests by the Italian government. 317
The German efforts to organize deportations in the summer of 1942 also
focused on another country. After the war, former Prime Minister Rangell
reported that in July 1942, on a visit to Finland, Himmler had addressed the
topic of ‘Finnish Jews’; he, Rangell, however, had brought the discussion to a close
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
369
by pointing out that in Finland (where some 2,000 Jews lived) there was no ‘Jewish
question’. 318
These initiatives and negotiations on the part of the Germans with their allies
allow us to draw the conclusion that a fundamental decision had been made in
July in favour of a deportation from the allied states. At the same time, priorities
had been set, in which the state of anti-Semitic measures taken in the individual
countries was crucial. First of all, the Jews were to be deported from Croatia and
Romania; in Croatia, the Jewish population had already been largely interned,
while in Romania registration had been introduced and because of the mas-
sacres in the newly conquered territories there could be no doubt about the
radically anti-Semitic stance of this ally. The deportations from Hungary and
Bulgaria had, on the other hand, been postponed to a later time because of the
unsatisfactory state—from the German point of view—of Judenpolitik in those
countries, while the issue of the deportation of the Jews from the Italian-
occupied territories in Croatia and Greece remained shelved because of the
fundamental attitude of the Italian government towards the ‘Jewish question’.
Himmler’s unsuccessful foray into Finland in July 1942 produced the same
result.
Intensified Efforts to Extend the Deportations
in Autumn 1942
On 23 September 1942 Mihai Antonescu, on a visit to Hitler’s headquarters, again
confirmed to Ribbentrop his intention to deport the Romanian Jews. 319 During or immediately after this visit a fundamental decision must have been made by the
German leadership to intensify the deportations across the whole of Europe. For
the next day, 24 September, Ribbentrop instructed Luther by telephone to ‘acceler-
ate the evacuation of the Jews from the most diverse of countries in Europe’.
Ribbentrop had ordered that ‘we should now approach the Bulgarian, the Hungar-
ian, and Danish governments with the intention of setting in motion the evacuation
of the Jews from these countries as soon as possible’. Where Italy was concerned,
Ribbentrop had reserved further action to himself: either he would clarify the issue
with Ciano or it would be discussed between Hitler and Mussolini. 320 The fact that Ribbentrop was thus abruptly revoking his instruction of 25 August to stay out of
the deportation question indicates that he was obeying a decision from Hitler.
Immediately prior to this, at the armaments discussion held between 20 and
22 September, Hitler had called for the removal of those Jews still working in
armaments production within the Reich and their deportation. 321
On 25 September—the previous day the Croatian Prime Minister Ante Pavelic
had been received in the Führer’s headquarters, where he had talked to Hitler
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
and Ribbentrop about the ‘Jewish problem’ in Croatia322—Ribbentrop issued a directive concerning the deportation of Jews in the Italian zone of Croatia, to
which Mussolini had already agreed in principle. The question should tentatively
be raised in Rome about ‘how matters stood’, although one should not strive
for ‘an actual demarche demanding, for example, that the Duce’s decision con-
cerning the instructions should be quickly passed on to the military authorities in
Croatia’. 323
In fact, however, apart from Croatia, all the allies who had come to be included
in the German deportation plans in the course of 1942 would thwart German
intentions in autumn 1942. This applied to Slovakia, where the deportations came
to a complete stop, 324 to Romania, which withdrew from the deportation agreement that it had given in July, to Bulgaria and Hungary, which had been newly
included in the deportation programme in September, and to Italy, which pre-
vented further deportations from its occupied zone in Croatia. In the last quarter
of 1942, the RSHA only managed to organize deportations from one other
country, Norway, possibly in place of Denmark, which had been brought into
play in September.
As regards Romania, in the last quarter of 1942 the Germans were forced to
acknowledge that the deportation agreed there in July was being delayed. 325
Towards the end of the year, the RSHA decided to postpone the deportations
from Romania to the following spring. On 14 December, Luther described this
postponement to the German embassy in Sofia as not very serious, as the
‘deportation’ (Abtransport) was ‘not in any case desirable during the main winter
months’. Things should be kept ‘in flux’ so that at the beginning of spring ‘one
could expect the measures to continue’. 326 In January 1943, however, Himmler reached the conclusion that further attempts to move the Romanian government
to hand over their Jews were pointless. He, therefore, proposed that the ‘Jewish
adviser’ be withdrawn from the German embassy in Bucharest. 327
On 16 October Luther ordered the German ambassador in Sofia to ‘discuss the
question of a transport to the East of the Jews due for resettlement according to
the new Bulgarian regulations’ with the Bulgarian government. Luther was start-
ing from the premise that these plans could be connected with the forthcoming
deportations from Romania. But Ambassador Adolf Beckerle learned from the
Bulgarian Prime Minister that the German offer was basically welcome, but the
Bulgarians wanted first to ‘concentrate (the Jewish workers) and deploy them
for road-building’. 328 After further discussions in mid-November, Beckerle still believed that the transport of the ‘the majority of the Bulgarian Jews’ was possible
in the near future. 329 In parallel with this, Richter, the ‘Jewish adviser’ at the German embassy in Bucharest, approached Protisch, the press attaché at the
Bulgarian embassy there, who had been specially commissioned by his govern-
ment to investigate Romania’s ‘Jewish policy’. Richter suggested that perhaps ‘the
resettlement of the Jews of Bulgaria in collaboration with the Reich, which has
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
371
already been decided upon’, could be undertaken. He indicated that the ‘Reich
office responsible for the solution of the Jewish question was very interested in
such a collaboration.’330 As early as November, however, a detailed report from the SD foreign department reached the conclusion that further intensification of
the persecution of the Jews would encounter indifference and resistance. 331 The deportations that had originally been planned were thus, as in the case of
Romania, postponed to the following year.
In late September 1942 Luther also took the initiative with the Hungarian
government. 332 On 5 October, unofficially at first, he put the German demands about the ‘Jewish question’ to the Hungarian Ambassador in Berlin, Dominik
Sztojay. The Hungarian government was to declare itself in agreement with the
deportation of the Hungarian Jews from Germany and the occupied countries, or
fetch them back to Hungary by 31 December 1942. At the same time, Luther drew
up a comprehensive programme for the ‘treatment of the Jewish question in
Hungary’, including the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. 333
At this meeting Sztojay pointed out amongst other things that the Hungarian
Prime Minister, Miklos Kállay, was particularly interested to learn ‘whether the
Jews would be able to go on living after their evacuation to the East’. In this
context certain rumours were circulating, which he himself, of course, considered
unbelievable, but which concerned Kállay. He did not want ‘to be accused of
handing over the Hungarian Jews after their evacuation to misery or worse’.
Sztojay seemed content with Luther’s answer that all evacuated Jews would
‘initially find employme
nt in road-building’, and would later be ‘accommodated
in a Jewish reservation’.
On 17 October, the German ambassador in Budapest handed over the German
demands in an official form. 334 Within the Foreign Ministry, however, it soon became clear that the Hungarian government was far from willing to start the
deportation of the Hungarian Jews. 335 However, towards the end of November, Himmler assumed that the deportations could soon be set in motion. To this end,
he suggested to Ribbentrop that he send an experienced adviser, Wisliceny
perhaps, to the German embassay in Budapest as a ‘consultant on Jewish ques-
tions’. 336 As a ‘first instalment’ one could deport 100,000 Jews from the annexed Slovakian and Romanian territories, a suggestion already made to Wisliceny by a
Hungarian contact when he was staying in Budapest in October. 337
But this suggestion contradicted the official Hungarian position, which was
hardening at this time. In a note of 2 December 1942, the Hungarian ambassador
in Berlin summed up his government’s attitude to the German proposals of
17 October. 338 According to this, the Hungarian government was only prepared to withdraw its Jews from the German sphere of influence if all foreign Jews also
living there were forced to take the same step. The labelling of Jews living in
Hungary, or indeed their deportation, was for various reasons impossible at the
present time.
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
Luther’s attempts, beginning in October 1942, to clarify the further stance of the
Italians with regard to the deportation of Croatian Jews from Italy’s occupied
zone, also did not lead to the desired outcome. 339 Although Mussolini had, in August 1942, agreed with the German demand to hand over the Jews living in the
Italian occupied zone, senior Italian officers and officials were determined to
prevent this from happening. 340
While these initiatives were still fully under way, on 22 October Luther pre-
sented Ribbentrop with a lengthy paper containing the suggestion that Italy be
addressed about the ‘Jewish question’ at the level of Foreign Ministers or the
Heads of State. The Italians should be exhorted to agree to the deportation of all
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