Allied landing in North Africa and the Warsaw ghetto uprising, hence the months
November 1942 to May 1943, that is the period during which the Axis powers lost
the military initiative; autumn 1943, when Italy left the alliance and the German
Reich occupied further territories previously controlled by Fascist Italy; finally, the
period from spring to summer 1944, during which the German Reich occupied
Hungary and Slovakia.
As a consequence of the Allied landing in North Africa which, from the point of
view of the German leadership, threatened the whole southern flank of Europe,
the Jews of Tunisia and France had found themselves directly in the clutches of the
German persecutors, while at the beginning of 1943 the RSHA organized mass
deportations in Greece and Bulgaria. The further military successes of the West-
ern Allies, but above all the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April/May 1943, led to a
further burst of radicalization of Judenpolitik, which can be demonstrated by the
intensification of the persecution in Poland, in the occupied Soviet territories, in
the Netherlands, in Belgium, in France, in Croatia, and in Slovakia.
After Italy’s departure from the Axis alliance Judenpolitik was extended to
Italian territory under German control as well as to the former Italian zones of
occupation in Croatia, Greece, and France. That same period coincides with the
attempt to deport the Danish Jews, which can be seen as Germany’s reaction to
growing resistance in that country.
434
Conclusion
With the occupation of Hungary and Slovakia and the deportation of the Jews
living in those countries, in 1944 the Third Reich attempted to prevent both states
leaving their alliance with Germany.
It became apparent, however, that, after the turning point of the war in the
winter of 1942/3, it became increasingly difficult to implement the deportations
in participation with governments allied or collaborating with Germany. They
succeeded in Croatia, to a limited extent in Bulgaria and France; efforts with
regard to Hungary and the Italian-occupied territories remained initially ineffect-
ive; Romania and Slovakia, which had originally been enthusiastic participants in
German Judenpolitik, now changed their attitude. However, the Germans did
not abandon their policy, since precisely in view of the deteriorating military
situation they saw the intensification of the persecution of the Jews and the related
compromising of their ‘partners’ as an important means of securing the German-
ruled block.
It was particularly important here that the three states which successfully
resisted German Judenpolitik during this phase—Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria—
managed to leave the alliance with Germany between September 1943 and Sep-
tember 1944 through separate ceasefires. This departure of what Germany saw as
its ‘philo-Semitic’ allies must have looked like confirmation of their policy not to
compromise in any way on Judenpolitik.
If Judenpolitik had originally been one of the chief axes of German occupation
and alliance policy, it now entered a phase in which it began to destroy Germany’s
policy of collaboration and alliance. Judenpolitik could only be implemented if a
regime of terror was installed in countries where it was completely under the
control of the Nazis, and it could only be implemented with the support of
indigenous forces.
This policy was to prove horribly efficient in Hungary and Slovakia. It was
initially adopted in France and northern Italy, but finally foundered on a lack of
support from local forces. All regimes that became collaborators with German
Judenpolitik in the second half of the war collapsed with the Third Reich: the
Vichy regime, the Republic of Salò, the Arrow-Cross regime in Hungary, and the
clerical-fascist Slovakian Republic.
The example of Denmark shows that Judenpolitik was not feasible without the
conditions described: a regime dependent on Germany and support from local
forces. The alternative, implementing the deportations with the help of German
forces, foundered on a lack of staff resources and the fact that such an action
would have destroyed the political basis of the German occupation policy in
Denmark.
As far as the mass murders in territories directly under German control were
concerned, it has become clear that Judenpolitik produced a particularly high
percentage of victims in those areas in which a civilian administration was
preparing the construction of a ‘Greater German Reich’ with the support of the
Conclusion
435
SS. This applies to the Reich, including the annexed territories, the Protectorate,
Bohemia and Moravia, Poland and the occupied Soviet territories, but particularly
also to the Netherlands. The Jews living there only had a chance of survival if they
managed to escape before the start of the murders; there were also limited
possibilities of surviving by going into hiding, which increased towards the
end of the war. But the numbers of victims were also very high in two territories
which were controlled by a military administration and were not the target of a
Germanization policy: in Greece and Serbia. In Belgium there was a German
military administration and the country was also the target of German ideas of
Germanization; but the percentage of Jewish victims was—if compared with the
Netherlands—considerably lower, which may be down to the lower pressure of
persecution, the sluggish Belgian authorities, the more cautious behaviour of the
victims, and the helpfulness of the Belgian population. Norway was also consid-
ered a ‘Germanic’ country, and ruled by a civilian administration, but more than
half of the small Jewish minority managed to escape the deportations in the
autumn of 1942.
This brief survey of the fate of the Jews in the countries occupied by and allied
with Germany shows once again that the German persecution of the Jews pro-
ceeded in very different ways in the individual territories within the German
sphere of influence in the second half of the war. A large number of factors
affected Judenpolitik, which for these reasons could be accelerated, slowed down,
modified, and suspended. It was, among other things, because of this flexibility,
the ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, that the persecution of the
European Jews by the Nazi regime produced such terrible results.
Notes
Introduction
1. Among the most important contributions to Holocaust research by the intentionalists
were: Helmut Krausnick, ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, in Hans Buchheim et al.,
Anatomy of the SS-State (London, 1968), 1–124; Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final
Solution (London 1984); and Andreas Hillgruber, ‘Die ideologisch-dogmatische Grund-
lage der nationalsozialistische Politik der Ausrottung der Juden in den besetzten
Gebieten der Sowjetunion und ihre Durchführung, 1941–1944’, German Studies Review
2 (1979), 263–96. See also Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews 1933–1945
(London, 1975). For brief discussions of the intentionalist/functionalist debate as it
related
to the Holocaust see the chapter on the Holocaust in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi
Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th edn (London, 2000); and
the chapters ‘Hitler and the Third Reich’ and ‘The Decision-Making Process’, in Dan
Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust (London, 2004).
2. Helmut Krausnick, the leading representative of the intentionalists, worked on the
assumption that a decision by Hitler on the ‘Final Solution’ had been made in conjunc-
tion with the decision to commit genocide on the European Jews, which he placed in
spring 1941. See Krausnick, ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, 59 ff. A similar position is taken by Hermann Graml, who assumes that Himmler and Heydrich had learned of Hitler’s
intention to murder the European Jews in the first half of June 1941. See Hermann
Graml, Reichskristallnacht. Antisemitismus und Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Mun-
ich, 1988), 222–3. In Der Holocaust (Munich, 1995), 50 ff., Wolfgang Benz sees the ‘genesis of the final solution’ as early as the time of the Madagascar Plan. More recently the idea of an early decision has been revisited by Richard Breitman who, working against the
tide of current research, dates a decision by Hitler and Himmler at the beginning of 1941.
See Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution
(London, 1991), 146 ff.
3. Uwe Adam, Die Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), 312, places the timing of the decision between September and November 1941 as a ‘way out’ of a ‘dead-end
situation’ for everyone since, although the German leadership had begun deporting
the Jews from Germany, the original intention of ‘moving the deportees into the
conquered areas of Russia’ could not be realized because of the stage the war was at.
Philippe Burrin favoured dating the decision to murder the European Jews between the
middle of September and October: he emphasized its link to the critical military
Notes to page 2
437
situation. See Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (London, 1994), 115 ff. Christopher Browning had also placed the decision in the same period,
although in contrast to Burrin he regarded the victory over Russia that the Nazis felt was imminent as a decisive factor. Browning has always stressed the close connection
between the decision to murder the European Jews and the decision to murder all the
Soviet Jews in July 1941, as in his latest contribution to the topic in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–1942 (London, 2004), 426–7. In
this excellent work he has differentiated his position still further and here argues that in mid-September (in connection with the start of deportations) Hitler decided in principle
to murder the deportees and that by the end of October the course had been set. In
arguing in this manner, Browning is closer to the idea of a process of decision-making
seen as a fluid continuum (see pp. 532 ff.). Götz Aly has also indicated a preference for seeing the early part of October as the critical period in which ‘an official decision may have been made’. See Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder
of the European Jews (London, 1999), 231.
4. See Wolfgang Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich, 1933–1945 (Berlin, 1960).
5. See Martin Broszat, ‘Hitler and the Genesis of the “Final Solution”: An Assessment of
David Irving’s Theses’, in H. W. Koch, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich (Basingstoke, 1985), 390–429, 405. This develops the hypothesis that the annihilation of the Jews developed
‘not only as a prior will to destruction but also as a “way out” of a cul-de-sac that they had manoeuvred themselves into’. He goes on to argue that ‘once it had been begun and
institutionalized, the practice of liquidation nonetheless took over and in the end de
facto turned into an all-encompassing “programme” ’. Hans Mommsen makes a similar
point in ‘The Realization of the Unthinkable: The “Final Solution of the Jewish Ques-
tion” in the Third Reich’, in Hans Mommsen, ed., From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in
German History (Cambridge, 1991), 224–53, 251. He establishes beyond dispute that ‘it
could be categorically denied that Hitler initiated the policy of genocide in the form of a direct “order from the Führer” (Führerweisung)’ (p. 417). In his polemic against the
intentionalist school of thought Mommsen advocated the view ‘that Hitler virtually hid
behind the annihilation process that was already underway’, in Eberhard Jäckel and
Jürgen Rohwer, eds, Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Entschlußbildung
und Verwirklichung (Stuttgart, 1985), 66.
6. See Saul Friedländer, ‘Vom Antisemitismus zur Judenvernichtung: Eine historiogra-
phische Studie zur nationalsozialistischen Judenpolitik und Versuch einer Interpret-
ation’, in Jäckel and Rohwer, Der Mord, 18–62 (p. 47); and Raul Hilberg, ‘Die Aktion
Reinhard’, ibid. 125–36.
7. Christian Gerlach, ‘The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of the German Jews, and
Hitler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews’, Journal of Modern
History 70 (1998), 759–812. A similar view had already been taken by the Dutch
historian L. H. Hartog, Der Befehl zum Judenmord. Hitler, Amerika und die Juden
(Bodenheim, 1997).
8. Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945
(Oxford, 1990); Michael Wildt, ed., Die Judenpolitik des SD, 1935 bis 1938. Eine Dokumen-
tation (Munich, 1995); Gerhard Paul and Klaus Michael Mallmann, eds, Die Gestapo.
Mythos und Realität (Darmstadt, 1995); Jens Banach, Heydrichs Elite. Das Führerkorps
der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1936–1945 (Paderborn, 1998); Gerhard Paul and Klaus
438
Notes to page 2
Michael Mallmann, eds, Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Darmstadt, 2000); Holger
Berschel, Bürokratie und Terror. Das Judenreferat der Gestapo Düsseldorf, 1935–1945
(Essen, 2001); Erik Arthur Johnson, The Nazi Terror: Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary
Germans (London, 1999); Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungs-
korps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002); Michael Wildt, ed., Nachricht-
endienst, politische Elite und Mordeinheit. Der Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers SS
(Hamburg, 2003).
9. Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann, eds, Die nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslager. Entwicklung und Struktur, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1998); Robert Jan
van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New Haven, 1996); Karin
Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Orga-
nisationsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1999); Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide:
The SS, Slave Labor and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
10. Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer (Vienna, 1993), in paperback as Eichmann und
seine Gehilfen (Frankfurt a. M., 1995); Wolfgang Scheffler and Diana Schulle, eds, Buch
der Erinnerung. Die ins Baltikum deportierten deutschen, österreichischen und tsche-
choslowakischen Juden, 2 vols (Munich, 2003); essays in Birthe Kundrus and Beate
Meyer, eds, Die Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland. Pläne—Praxis—Reaktionen
1938–1945 (Göttingen, 2004); Alfred Ottwaldt and Diana Schulle, Die ‘Judendeportation-
en’ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945. Eine komme
ntierte Chronologie (Wiesbaden,
2005).
11. Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die ‘Genesis der Endlösung’ (Berlin, 1996); Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42. Die Tätigkeits- und
Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin, 1997); Martin Cüppers,
Wegbereiter der Shoah. Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die
Judenvernichtung 1939–1945 (Darmstadt, 2005).
12. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland, 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg, 1999); Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung,
Völkermord. Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg
(Hamburg, 1998); Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front. Besatzung, Kollaboration
und Widerstand in Weißrußland, 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998); Dieter Pohl, ‘Schauplatz
Ukraine. Der Massenmord an den Juden im Militärverwaltungsgebiet und im Reichs-
kommissariat 1941–1943’, in Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher, and Bernd C. Wagner,
eds, Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit. Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen
Lagerpolitik (Munich, 2000); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in
Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord.
Die Einsatzgruppen in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg, 2003); Andrew
Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center (Riga and Washing-
ton, 1996); Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die ‘Endlösung’ in Riga. Ausbeutung und
Vernichtung, 1941–1944 (Darmstadt, 2006); Thomas Sandkühler, Die ‘Endlösung’ in
Galizien. Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiative von Berthold Beitz,
1941–1944 (Bonn, 1996); Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgali-
zien, 1941–1944. Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens
(Munich, 1997); Dieter Pohl, Von der ‘Judenpolitik’ zum ‘Judenmord’. Der Distrikt
Lublin des Generalgouvernements 1939–1944 (Frankfurt a. M., 1993); Bogdan Musial,
Notes to pages 2–3
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