The institute was inaugurated on March 25, 1941, and its acting director was none other than Wilhelm Grau. On the opening evening a veritable who’s who of European anti-Semitism (Alexander Cuza from Romania, Sano Mach from Slovakia, Vidkun Quisling from Norway, and Anton Mussert from Holland, among others) and party dignitaries, albeit no first-rank figure, congregated in the Römersaal to listen to Rosenberg’s diatribe against the “Jewish poison,” which was now being rigorously analyzed by German science. Rosenberg stressed that the victories of the Wehrmacht had allowed the establishment in Frankfurt of the “largest library on Jewish matters in the world.” In his closing address, two days later, the Reichsleiter described the political goal sought by Germany in regard to the Jews: their complete expulsion from Europe. The scientific part of the inauguration ceremonies took place on March 26 and 27.134
Together with Heinz-Peter Seraphim, the main Nazi specialist on Eastern European Jewry, Grau had taken over a party periodical specializing in the “anti-Jewish struggle,” Weltkampf [The World Struggle], and made it into the official publication of the new institute. The periodical, which had undergone a series of changes since its founding in 1924, now became “academic”; but its subtitle, Die Judenfrage in Geschichte und Gegenwart (The Jewish Question in History and in the Present), indicated that its guidelines remained the same. “Weltkampf,” Grau wrote in his first editorial, “is going to be the mouthpiece of German and European scholarship…. Scholarship, too, today more than at any other time, looks upon this [anti-Jewish] work as a ‘world struggle’, a war that is inevitable for the peoples that are aware of their own unique characteristics.”135
In his speech at the inaugural conference, Seraphim did not leave any doubts in the minds of his audience: Neither ghettoization nor a Jewish “reservation” in the East could be considered a solution: The city ghetto could not supply itself with either manufactured goods, raw materials, fuel, or food. Consequently the entire supply would have to be imported. These imports could be small per capita and not exceed the subsistence minimum, and yet in their totality they represented a major burden; the Jews, in short, would be fed and supported by the non-Jews.
Such difficulties might be met by assigning a larger territory to the Jews; the Lublin reservation, for example. “This plan,” Seraphim conceded, “looked fascinating at first glance, but there were also difficulties to be reckoned with. The territory could not become self-supporting. Furthermore, 5,000,000 Jews would have to be moved into this reservation and 2,700,000 non-Jews would have to be removed. But in Europe, there is no place for them. This means,” he exclaimed indignantly, “that non-Jews would have to be compelled to emigrate from Europe in order to settle Jews in Europe.” Moreover, guarding the frontiers of such a giant ghetto would involve colossal expenditures. Seraphim finally emphasized: “Through legislation and administrative measures, the Jews in the cities are to be replaced by non-Jews to the degree in which qualified non-Jews are available for this substitution…the Jew must yield wherever an equally qualified non-Jew is available.”136
The other speakers were more explicit. “The dangerous Jewish influence in Europe,” Walter Gross, head of the racial policy office of the NSDAP, explained, “could be fought only by way of total geographical removal.”137 And, for Wilhelm Grau, “The twentieth century, which at its beginning saw the Jew at the summit of his power, will at its end not see Israel anymore because the Jews will have disappeared from Europe.”138
From the outset the Frankfurt institute looked for alliances with other kindred institutions beyond the Reich’s borders. Thus Grau openly welcomed the development of research about Eastern European Jewry at the Institute for German Study of the East (Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit) in Krakow, set up in one of the buildings of the Jagellonian University under the direction of Fritz Arlt and Heinrich Gottong.139
In the face of the massive Rosenberg offensive, Walter Frank did not concede defeat easily. Volumes 5 and 6 of the Reich institute’s Forschungen zur Judenfrage (Research Studies on the Jewish Question) were hastily readied and publicly presented to Keitel just ahead of the official inauguration of Rosenberg’s institute.140 Rosenberg tried to have Frank boycotted by the German press; in the meantime, however, Goebbels had opened the pages of Das Reich to Frank for an article on “The Jews and the War.”141
In December 1940 Frankfurt mayor Krebs, Rosenberg’s ally, sent two of his main museum directors to Paris on a scouting expedition. The envoys were given clear instructions: They had to make sure that art “which belonged to Frankfurt should not get into other hands.”142 With money allocated by the city, the Frankfurt emissaries started buying in France, Belgium, and Holland; they knew that in Germany this art would fetch five- or sixfold higher prices.
In the spring of 1941 the potential benefits became even greater, and Krebs’s delegates were back in Paris in February, March, and April.143 The mayor explained the buying spree to the city council on March 31: “In my visits to France and Belgium, I heard from various agencies that art dealers make pilgrimages to Paris in droves and buy whatever can be bought. What is cheap for the dealers is right for the city administrations. That is why we have also gone for these art treasures. Such favorable conditions must be taken advantage of by Frankfurt…. I know that other city administrations are buying whatever they can get…the acquisitions we made up to now have been a profitable business for us. These are unique occasions. One has to be clever and be the first on the market.”144 The mayor did not need to explain the circumstances that facilitated such easy cleverness: The market was replete with art objects sold by Jews, fleeing for their lives.
Krebs was following in the steps of much greater collectors than German city administrations. On June 30, 1940, five days after the armistice with France, General Keitel had informed the military commander of Paris that “the Führer ordered the safe-keeping of all art objects and historical documents belonging to individuals, and Jews in particular.”145 Such an order had indeed been given by Hitler to Ribbentrop, who conveyed it to the newly appointed German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz. Within weeks Abetz’s men pounced on art collections (which the French had moved to Loire castles to protect them) and confiscated whatever belonged to Jewish owners, particularly the Rothschilds. Before the summer was over, some 1,500 Jewish-owned paintings had been transferred to a depot belonging to the embassy and a curator arrived from Berlin to start the inventory of the booty.146 On September 17, 1940, the authority to impound “ownerless property” was delegated by Hitler to Rosenberg and his “Kommando.”147
By March 1941, Rosenberg could report to his master that a special train put at his disposal by Göring and carrying art objects having belonged to Jews in France had arrived at Neuschwanstein (in Bavaria). The twenty-five freight cars contained some four thousand pieces “of the highest artistic value.” Moreover, the Reichsmarschall had already sent two “special freight cars” to Munich with some of the main pieces that had belonged to the Rothschilds.148 Some of Hitler’s acquisitions were earmarked for the supermuseum he planned to set up in Linz; others were handed out as gifts to his German and foreign devotees; some of the best pieces he kept for himself.
The plunder was unconcealed. On May 18, 1941, Ulrich von Hassell mentioned that Elsa Bruckmann (one of Hitler’s earliest supporters) noticed that sizable amounts of French antique furniture were being loaded onto trucks in front of the Prinz-Karl Palast in Munich. The owner of the moving company, whom she knew, told her that the furniture was being sent to Obersalzberg (Hitler’s mountain retreat). Had it been bought? she asked; “So to say bought,” he replied, “but if you were to give me 100RM for this Louis XVI desk, it would be a good price.149
For ordinary Wehrmacht members the booty may have been less grand, yet being an occupier had its advantages: “We live here in a house that had belonged to a Jewish emigrant,” Sgt. HH wrote from France on August 13, 1940. A great amount of silver tableware will no doubt find a new owner. I think that, slowly, the
pieces will reach the homeland. That’s war.”150
The SS Reichsführer did not collect art or silverware. His looting was more directly related to his professional activities: At the end of 1940 he had the entire skull collection of eighteenth-century scientist Franz Joseph Gall transferred from Paris to the racial-biological institute of Tübingen University.151
V
In his January 30, 1941, speech, Hitler concluded his prophecy of anti-Jewish retribution by expressing the hope that an increasing number of Europeans would follow the German anti-Semitic lead: “Already now,” he declared, “our racial awareness penetrates one people after the other and I hope that also those who today stand in enmity against us, will recognize one day their greater internal enemy and then join in a common front with us: the front against the international Jewish exploitation and corruption of nations.”152 As he mentioned the growth of anti-Semitism, the Nazi leader probably had in mind the events that had occurred in Bucharest just a few days beforehand.
On January 21, 1941, the Romanian capital had been shaken by a brief and abortive attempt by the SS-supported Iron Guard to wrest power from its ally, the dictatorial head of state, Marshal Ion Antonescu. During their three-day rampage, Horia Sima’s “legionnaries” first and foremost vented their rage upon the Jews of the city. “The stunning thing about the Bucharest bloodbath,” Mihail Sebastian recorded a few days after the events, “is the quite bestial ferocity of it, apparent even in the dry official statement that ninety-three persons (person being the latest euphemism for Jew) were killed on the night of Tuesday the 21st in Jilava forest. But what people say is much more devastating. It is now considered absolutely certain that the Jews butchered at Straulesti abattoir were hanged by the neck on hooks normally used for beef carcasses. A sheet of paper was stuck to each corpse: ‘Kosher Meat.’ As for those killed in Jilava Forest, they were first undressed (it would have been a pity for clothes to remain there), then shot and thrown on top of one another.”153 The guard was crushed, and its leaders fled to Germany, but their anti-Jewish rage was deeply anchored in Romanian society.
In great part Romanian anti-Semitism shared the basic aspects of anti-Jewish agitation throughout the eastern part of the Continent (except for the USSR), with, as mentioned, some differences between countries or areas of growing modernization and those that remained essentially traditional peasant societies. Whereas in Romania the “Old Kingdom” (the Regat) belonged to the first category, the “lost provinces” of Bukovina and Bessarabia belonged to the second. In that sense Romanian anti-Semitism reached some of its most vitriolic manifestations and expressions in the more developed parts of the country, among the incipient native middle class, among students and intellectuals, and in the ultranationalist military establishment.
It was widely believed that the 375,000 Jews living in Romania in early 1941 were guilty of the loss of Bessarabia and Bukovina to the Soviet Union in July 1940 and of northern Transylvania to Hungary. These territorial changes, needless to say, had been arranged by Germany in its secret agreement with the USSR and in its arbitration between Hungary and Romania in the summer of 1940. In any case, these latest accusations were but the tip of the iceberg of Romanian anti-Jewish hatred.
As in other East European countries, the very foundation of Romanian attitudes toward the Jews was nurtured by virulent religious anti-Judaism, spewed, in this case, by the Romanian Orthodox Church. This brand of religious hostility had first flourished among the peasantry before spreading to the new urban middle classes, where it acquired its economic and mainly nationalist dimensions.154 “Romanianism” mainly targeted ethnic and cultural minorities in its struggle for domination of the borderland provinces, which were considered as rightfully belonging to Greater Romania: The Jews were deemed foreign and hostile both ethnically and culturally, and in the struggle for Romanianism they were accused of siding with the Hungarians or the Russians.
Even before World War I the National Christian Party of Alexander Cuza and Nicolae Jorga, both highly respected intellectuals, demanded the exclusion of Jews from Romanian society. On the morrow of the war, after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Béla Kun’s short-lived Communist regime in Hungary, Judeo-communism was added as a major element to the already explosive anti-Jewish mix. In the words of Andrei Petre, a Romanian sociologist writing in 1928: “Our young people confine nationalism particularly to anti-Semitism,…they attribute more of a destructive than a creative, constructive note to it…. They demand the settlement of the Jewish question even by violent means and put forward as immediate legal measures the removal of Jews from the army and administration…and the numerus clausus in order to limit the number of Jews in the universities, where the country’s ruling class is being trained.”155
Shortly before Petre wrote his analysis, a movement born among the most extreme anti-Semitic students and baptized by its leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the “Legion of the Archangel Michael,” gave a new and radical political framework to the most extreme expression of anti-Jewish hatred. The “Iron Guard,” as the legionary movement became known, soon expanded its constituency to wide segments of Rumanian society, from the peasantry to the urban intelligentsia. One of the peculiar characteristics of Iron Guard ideology was its fanatical, quasimystical identification with Romanian Orthodox Christianity, including of course the most virulent Christian hatred of Jews. Thus, in September 1941, the journalist Mihai Mirescu wrote an editorial significantly titled “The Student Church,” in which he emphasized: “The anti-Semitism of the young generation was not only racial struggle. It asserted the necessity of spiritual war, the Jews representing in their spirit amoral materialism, and the only salvation being embodied in Christianity.”156
The accession of the Nazis to power had buoyed Codreanu’s troops. The appointment by the Romanian monarch, King Carol II, of an openly anti-Semitic right-wing government (the Goga-Cuza government, headed by Alexander Cuza and Octavian Goga) in the mid-thirties did not outmaneuver the “legionnaries,” notwithstanding a spate of anti-Jewish decrees. The king then decided to crush his radical opponents: Codreanu was assassinated at the end of 1938 and mass executions of guardists followed.157
The turn to dictatorial measures did not save Carol’s regime. The loss of Bessarabia and Bukovina to the Soviet Union in July 1940 accelerated the monarch’s downfall, and his use of anti-Semitic measures to placate his right-wing enemies also petered out: “There is reason to believe,” the U.S. minister in Bucharest, Franklin Mott Gunther, commented on July 2, 1940, that regarding measures against the Jews “more serious leaders are counseling calm and caution…while other Government officials are pursuing the traditional policy in Southeastern Europe of using anti-Semitic agitation to cloak from the people at large Government inefficiency and ineptitude. Very strict instructions are being issued by the Government however, to avoid provocative acts.”158
On September 6, 1940, a coup engineered by the army and by the Iron Guard expelled the King and put the commander in chief of the army, Ion Antonescu, and the Iron Guard’s new leader, Horia Sima, in power in a so-called legionary regime. On October 1 Gunther reported about a conversation with the Iron Guard chief, now vice president of the Council of Ministers: “Our conversation turned briefly to the subject of the Jews. After asserting, to my surprise, that the legionaries had swung to the support of the Axis because it is anti-Jewish, he went on to say that he personally was anti-Jewish because the Jews had succeeded in obtaining a strangle-hold upon every branch of Rumanian life. He warned me that they probably were trying to do the same thing in America and would not be convinced that a serious Jewish problem does not exist in the United States.” Horia Sima assured Gunther that any anti-Jewish measures would be carried out by “pacific means.”159
After the January 1941 massacres, Gunther could not help to vent his indignation, even in an official dispatch: “It makes one sick at heart,” he wrote to the secretary of state on January 30, “to be accredited to a country where suc
h things can happen even though the real faults of inspiration and encouragement lie elsewhere” [Germany].160
The anti-Semitic violence in Romania in early 1941 was but an indication of what was about to happen on local initiative in much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans with the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union. In various stages and diverse political and strategic circumstances, local hatred of Jews and German murder policies were soon to mix in a particularly lethal brew.
VI
A Hitler-Pétain meeting took place in the little town of Montoire, on October 24, 1940: “Collaboration” between Vichy France and the Reich was officially proclaimed. Yet on December 13 Laval was dismissed by the elderly marshal. The turmoil was brief. German pressure and internal constraints set Vichy back on track: In early 1941, Darlan replaced the moderate Pierre-Étienne Flandin as the head of government, and the collaboration with Germany tightened. Anti-Jewish measures spread.
In February 1941, out of the 47,000 foreigners imprisoned in French concentration camps, 40,000 were Jews.161 Aryanization progressed apace. Jewish businesses were increasingly put under the control of “French” supervisors (commissaires-gérants) who had, in fact, full power to decide the businesses’ fate. Once the commissaires-gérants had taken over, yellow signs were replaced by red ones. This, of course, encouraged scoundrels of all hues to buy all remaining wares (or the businesses themselves) from the Jewish owners at a fraction of the price. Simultaneously the largest French banks took steps on their own to interpret German ordinances as extensively as possible. Thus, in the occupied zone, the Germans allowed for the cancellation of agreements dealing with Jewish property (paragraph 4 of the ordinance of October 18, 1940) but did not allude to bank accounts held by Jews. Crédit Lyonnais made sure that the silence of the ordinance would not allow unwanted freedom of action to Jewish depositors. On November 21, 1940, a first internal directive was issued:
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