Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  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.

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  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

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  439

  Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement. Eine Fallstudie