In Serbia the Germans set up a collaborationist government under Prime Minister Milan Nedíc, a fervent anticommunist. Nedíc hardly mattered, though, and even before the German attack against the Soviet Union, armed resistance started mainly in the countryside. Throughout the summer relatively small and untrained Wehrmacht forces fought a losing battle against the spreading insurrection by Communist and Serbian nationalist guerrillas belonging to Tito (Josip Broz) and Draža Mihajlovic, respectively. Notwithstanding the widespread shooting of hostages (Serbs and mainly Jews) by the Germans, the destruction of villages, and the killing of their inhabitants, the rebellion spread. In September, on the recommendation of Field Marshal List, the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht in the Balkans, Hitler appointed the Austrian general Franz Boehme, a notorious Serb hater, as commanding general of the forces stationed in Serbia and gave him a free hand to use “severe methods” to regain control of the situation. Boehme complied, enthusiastically.122
In Croatia, no sooner did Pavelíc return from Italian exile and establish his new regime–a mixture of fascism and devout Catholicism—then, as the German envoy to Zagreb, Edmund von Glaise Horstenau, reported “the Ustasha went raging mad.”123 The poglavnik (“leader,” in Serbo-Croat) launched a genocidal crusade against the 2.2 million Christian Orthodox Serbs (out of a total population of 6.7 million) living on Croatian territory, and against the country’s 45,000 Jews, particularly in ethnically mixed Bosnia. The Catholic Ustasha did not mind the continuous presence of Muslims or Protestants, but Serbs and Jews had to convert, to leave or to die. According to historian Jonathan Steinberg, “Serbian and Jewish men, women and children were literally hacked to death. Whole villages were razed to the ground and the people driven to barns to which the Ustasha set fire. There is in the Italian Foreign Ministry archive a collection of photographs of the butcher knives, hooks and axes used to chop up Serbian victims. There are photographs of Serb women with breasts hacked off by pocket knives, men with eyes gouged out, emasculated and mutilated.”124
While Archbishop Alois Stepinac, the head of the Catholic Church in Croatia, waited for months to denounce the savage murder campaign publicly, some local bishops rejoiced at the extermination of the schismatics and the Jews, or at their forced conversion. In the words of the Catholic bishop of Mostar, “There was never such a good occasion as now for us to help Croatia to save the countless souls.”125 And while bishops blessed the unique occasion to save souls, some Franciscan monks took a leading role in the most vicious murder operations and in the decimation of Serbs and Jews in the uniquely Croat Jasenovac extermination camp.126
The Vatican was well informed, of course, of the unfolding atrocities perpetrated by the new Catholic state. Yet, not everything appeared in a negative light either to the Curia or to the Holy See’s apostolic visitor to Zagreb, the Benedictine abbot Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone. In May 1941 anti-Semitic laws and the wearing of the star inscribed with the letter Z (for Zidov, or Jews) had been introduced throughout Pavelíc’s state. On August 23, shortly after his arrival, Marcone reported to the Vatican secretary of state, Luigi Maglione: “The badly tolerated badge and the hatred of the Croats toward them [the Jews], as well as the economic disadvantages to which they are subjected, often brings about in the minds of the Jews the desire to convert to the Catholic Church. Supernatural motives and the silent action of divine grace cannot be a priori excluded from this. Our clergy facilitates their conversion, thinking that at least their children will be educated in Catholic schools and therefore will be more sincerely Christian.”127
In his answer of September 3, 1941, Maglione did not comment on the role of God’s hand in the conversions, nor did he instruct his delegate to protest against the treatment of Serbs or Jews: “If your Eminence [Marcone] can find a suitable occasion, he should recommend in a discreet manner that would not be interpreted as an official appeal, that moderation be employed with regard to Jews on Croatian territory. Your Eminence should see to it that activities of a political nature engaged in by the clergy should not cause friction between the parties, and that the impression of loyal cooperation with the civil authorities be always preserved.”128 Throughout 1941 and early 1942 the Croats exterminated some 300,000 to 400,000 Serbs and most of the 45,000 Jews (either directly or by delivering them to the Germans). Throughout the entire period not a word about the Ustasha murders was heard from the pope himself.129
In the meantime Serbs and Jews were seeking refuge in the Italian zone in ever greater numbers, and the Croats were increasingly treated as enemies by Mussolini’s army. Soon the Italians went one step further and, to put an end to Ustasha crimes, they moved forces farther into Croatian territory.130 On September 7, 1941, the commander of the Italian Second Army, General Vittorio Ambrosio, issued a proclamation that established Italian authority over the new occupation area; its final lines read: “All those who for various motives have abandoned their country are herewith invited to return to it. The Italian armed forces are the guarantors of their safety, their liberty and their property.” The Germans were outraged; Italian protection of Serbs and Jews had become open, and Italian declarations were hardly disguised expressions of scorn and disgust at Croatian behavior and even more so at that of their German masters.131
In their mixture of Christian beliefs, fascist policies, and savage murderousness, the Croat Ustasha and the Romanian Iron Guard, or even Antonescu’s regime, had much in common; the same extremist ingredients characterized the Ukrainian nationalists, mainly Bandera’s faction in the OUN, and the sundry groups of Lithuanian and Latvian “partisans.” For all these radical killer groups, local Jews were a prime target, as we saw. Similar ideological components also characterized the Slovak People’s Party—created before World War I by a Catholic priest, Father Andrej Hlinka—and its armed militants, the Hlinka Guard. Hlinka, who died in 1938, had fought for Slovak autonomy and the defense of church interests. From the outset the People’s Party was divided between traditional conservatives and a militant quasifascist wing led by Vojtech Tuka (a former law professor at the University of Bratislava), a fierce nationalist and no less fierce anti-Semite. After Hlinka’s death, Dr. Jozef Tiso, a conservative priest, became the chief of the party and the president of independent Slovakia in March 1939, while Tuka drifted ever closer to National Socialism and was soon appointed prime minister of the new state.132 Of course the new Slovak regime did not forfeit the confidence of its Berlin masters—nor could it; its anti-Semitism was inherent in a religious tradition and open to direct German influence.133
The great majority of the largely rural Slovak population of approximately 2.6 million was devoutly Catholic; the Evangelical community counted around 15 percent of the population, and at the end of 1940, the Jews (after the transfer to Hungary of a south Slovak province) represented some 80,000 people—that is, around 3.3 percent of the population.134
It may be remembered that when Tiso, Tuka, and Interior Minister Sano Mach were received by Hitler on July 28, 1940, the Nazi leader demanded of his Slovak partners that they coordinate their anti-Jewish legislation.135 Soon thereafter SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny arrived in Bratislava as “adviser for Jewish affairs.” A Central Office for the Economy (UHU) was established to oversee the Aryanization of Jewish property and expel the Jews from any significant functions in business life; a Jewish Council (Už) was set up, and in September 1941 the “Jewish Codex,” a whole array of anti-Jewish laws, was promulgated. The new decrees included the wearing of the Jewish star (just then being introduced in the Reich and in the Protectorate), and compulsory labor; the measures closely copied the basic anti-Jewish legislation in existence in Germany.136 The stage was set for further steps that would lead Catholic Slovakia to be the first country—after the Reich—to start the deportation of its Jews.
Hungary remained relatively calm; in 1941 some 825,000 Jews lived in the country (according to the census of that year, which included provinces annexed since the fall of 1938, with German suppo
rt: a part of southern Slovakia, Subcarpathian Russia (also previously a part of Czechoslovakia), northern Transylvania (transferred to Hungary by Romania as a result of German “arbitration,” and finally the Banat, previously a Yugoslav province, acquired after the April 1941 campaign. Thus around 400,000 Jews of these new provinces were added to the 400,000 Jews who lived in pre-1938, so-called Trianon Hungary. In the larger cities of pre-1938 Hungary—and mainly in Budapest—most Jews were a highly assimilated community that had thrived in a quasi symbiosis with the country’s social elite until the end of World War I.137
In 1918 the political situation changed radically. A defeated and “dismembered” Hungary was engulfed by revolution. Although Béla Kun’s communist dictatorship lasted only 133 days, his own Jewish origins and the massive presence of Jews in his government triggered a violent anti-Semitic reaction and a “white terror” that left thousands of Jewish victims in its wake. Moreover, the presence of a substantial minority of nonassimilated, mainly Polish Jews added to growing anti-Jewish hostility, fueled over the following years by nationalist revisionism, militant anticommunism, and increasingly so by the ever stronger pull of Nazism.
Yet through the interwar period, the regent, Adm. Miklós Horthy, succeeded in keeping conservative governments in power and in staving off Ferenc Szalasi’s Arrow Cross fascist and rabidly antisemitic movement. One of the methods chosen by Horthy and the traditional conservatives to stem the rise of the Arrow Cross was to enact anti-Jewish discriminatory laws. An early law of 1920 introducing an anti-Jewish quota in the universities—the first anti-Semitic law in postwar Europe—was adopted but not applied very stringently. The laws of 1938 and 1939, however, concretely limited Jewish participation in the political and economic life of the country, at least as far as the Jewish middle class was concerned (the Jewish banking and industrial elites generally remained untouched). The “third law,” that of August 1941—was a replica of the Nuremberg racial legislation. In most of these policies Horthy was backed by the Hungarian Catholic Church and by the Protestant churches. The Hungarian episcopate readily accepted the anti-Jewish decrees of 1938 and 1939 but, as could be expected, balked at the law of August 1941 because of its openly racial dimension, a threat to Jewish converts.138
Thousands of foreign Jews who lived in Hungary had to pay for the regent’s appeasement tactics. In the course of August 1941, 18,000 of these foreign Jews (almost all Polish, some of whom had barely escaped from occupied eastern Galicia) were rounded up by the Hungarian police and turned over to the SS in the western Ukraine, in the area of Kolomea and Kamenets-Podolsky. On August 27–28 the expellees and a few thousand local Jews (around 23,600 in all) were exterminated.139 When the news of the massacre seeped back to Hungary, the minister of the interior ordered an end to the deportation. In the meantime, however, first thousands, then tens of thousands of Jewish men were being drafted for forced-labor in the occupied Ukraine. By the end of 1941 some 50,000 Jews had been conscripted; some 40,000 of the first lot would not return. It became apparent, however, that Horthy was not ready to go beyond a certain limit in his anti-Jewish measures, despite repeated German prodding. A stabilization of sorts would last from March 1942, when the relatively liberal Miklós Kallay replaced the pro-German Laszlo Bardossy as the head of government, until the German occupation of the country in March 1944.
VII
For the SS Reichsführer the conquest of immense expanses in the East meant first and foremost the sudden possibility of implementing his colonization dreams: SS strongholds of racially perfect warrior-farmers would become the infrastructure of German domination from the Lublin district in the General Government to the Ural Mountains. Hostile population groups (Russians and Ukrainians) would be subdued, deported (part of the Polish population), or annihilated by expulsion to the polar wastes of northern Russia or by mass-murder operations (the Jews). Such extraordinary prospects demanded immediate action.
After Hitler’s decision of July 16 about the division of authority between the SS chief and Rosenberg, Himmler finalized the administrative technicalities in a conversation with Lammers and Brautigam on the seventeenth.140 On July 20, he was in Lublin. It was probably there, in a meeting with Globocnik and Oswald Pohl (the chief of the SS Main Office for Economy and Administration) that the first measures required by the new projects were decided upon.141 Existing workshops on Lipowa Street in Lublin (with Jewish forced laborers) would be expanded; a new and much larger slave labor camp would be set up in the city (Lublin-Majdanek) for Jews, Poles, and Russians, and the first settlement plans for Volksdeutsche in the Zamóść area of the district were discussed.142
Of course the complementary aspect to the grandiose colonization plans had to be implemented simultaneously: The group considered as most hostile and dangerous for the security of the newly conquered territories, the Jews, had to be eliminated. Himmler’s plans fitted perfectly with the killings that had started immediately after the beginning of the campaign, and with Hitler’s new directives regarding “partisans.” In this sense the rapid expansion of the murder operations from Jewish men only to that of entire Jewish communities was determined by a convergence of policies; these new dimensions in the scope of the killings in turn demanded the most efficient mass murder methods. The execution of women and children seemed to Himmler to be too stressful for his commando members; toxic gas was more promising.
In the euthanasia program the gassing of mental patients had been used alongside other killing methods. Carbon monoxide was released from bottles into stationary gas chambers or into vans (first adopted for this purpose in the Warthegau in the summer of 1940). In September 1941 a technical modification in the euthanasia gas vans, developed at the Criminal Technical Institute of the RSHA, opened new possibilities. The redesigned vans (Saurer models equipped with powerful engines) would become mobile suffocating machines for batches of around forty people per van and per operation: A metal pipe connected to the exhaust gas hose would be inserted into a hermetically sealed van. Running the engine sufficed to asphyxiate its human cargo. The van was first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen, and the first units were activated in Poltava, in the Southern Ukraine, in November 1941, under the direct command of Paul Blobel’s Einsatzkommando 4a, which itself belonged to Max Thomas’s Einsatzgruppe C.
In his postwar testimony, commando member Lauer described the process: “Two vans were in service [in Poltava]…. They drove into the prison yard, and the Jews—men, women and children—had to get straight into the vans from their cells…. The exhaust fumes were piped into the interior of the vans. I can still hear the hammering and the screaming of the Jews—‘Dear Germans, let us out!’…As soon as the doors were shut, the driver started the engine. He drove to a spot outside Poltava. I was there when the van arrived. As the doors were opened, dense smoke emerged, followed by a tangle of crumpled bodies. It was a frightful sight.”143 Within a few months some thirty gas vans were to become operational in the Baltic countries, in Belorussia, in the Ukraine, in the Warthegau, and in Serbia.
It was but a short step from the gas van to the stationary gas chamber, which functioned on the same technical principles: the use of carbon monoxide produced by attached engines. As we shall see, while several gas vans were used at the Chelmno extermination site in the Warthegau from early December 1941 on, the construction of gas chambers—activated by the exhaust gas from various engines—began in November on the site of the future Belzec extermination camp. Somewhat earlier, in September 1941, a different set of murder experiments by gas had started at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz had undergone several stages of development since opening its gates in June 1940 as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. Situated near the eastern Upper Silesian town of the same name (half of whose fourteen thousand inhabitants were Jewish), it was conveniently located between the rivers Vistula and Sola and close to a railway junction of some importance. On April 27, 1940, Himmler had decided on the setting up of the camp
and, on May 4, Rudolf Höss, formerly on the staff of Dachau, was put in charge. On June 14, as the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, the first transport of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów in Galicia arrived at the new camp.144
In September 1940, Pohl, who, during a visit, had grasped the possibilities offered by the camp’s location at the rim of sand and gravel pits, ordered Höss to add a second story to each of the existing barracks; new batches of inmates would become slave laborers in the production of building materials, a cost-effective addition to the usual fare of torture and executions.
Pohl’s project was soon overshadowed by plans of a totally different scale. In March 1941 it was Himmler’s turn to visit the Upper Silesian camp, in the company of representatives of the chemical industry giant, I.G. Farben. This visit had been preceded by arduous negotiations between I.G. Farben, officials of Göring’s four-year-plan administration and the SS. The continuation of the war with England and the planned attack on the Soviet Union had convinced Hitler and Göring that the production of synthetic rubber and gasoline should be given the highest priority. I.G. Farben, the German pioneer in this domain, was ordered to expand its production capability considerably. A new plant had to be built as rapidly as possible.
Otto Ambros, the head of the Commission for Rubber and Plastics at I.G. Farben, had been aware for some time of the favorable conditions for a new plant in the Auschwitz area (abundant water supply, flat land, a nearby railway junction). Yet the firm’s directorate hesitated to send its workers and engineers to the rundown Polish town.145 In March and April 1941 Himmler finalized the deal by promising the supply of cheap slave labor (from Auschwitz and other concentration camps) and the construction of adequate housing for the German personnel. Höss was ordered to expand the capacity of the camp from 11,000 to 30,000 inmates. The Jews from the town of Auschwitz were expelled and their homes taken over while Poles were rounded up for construction work both at the camp and at I.G. Farben’s future Buna plant site at Dwory.146
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