In Croatia, as the Germans were busy deporting the very last Jews under their control, the Italians, despite Hitler’s promise to Pavelic and an order from Mussolini to arrest the 5,000 Jews of their zone, did not act. In France matters came to a head. Not only did the Italian consul general in Nice, Alberto Calisse, refuse to have the identity papers of Jews marked, but during the last days of December 1942 he forbade the transfer of Jews from the Italian zone to the German-occupied areas, in the face of an order from Vichy (which, in principle, had jurisdiction over Jewish affairs on all of French territory). Calisse’s stand was backed within days by the Foreign Ministry in Rome.225
There was true refinement in the Italian response: The French were told that the Italians would agree to the transfer of French Jews but not to that of foreign Jews; Vichy was paralyzed.226 When, in January 1943, the German ambassador in Rome, Hans Georg von Mackensen, demanded of Ciano that these decisions be rescinded, Mussolini’s minister put the Germans on the spot: As the matter was complex, Ciano argued, Berlin had to formulate its demands in a detailed written memorandum that would be duly studied.227
In early 1943 Ciano was appointed ambassador to the Vatican and the Duce himself took over foreign affairs. A few days beforehand Mussolini and Ciano had seen the cable sent on January 3 by the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri: “Regarding the fate of [deported German Jews], like that of Polish, Russian, Dutch and even French Jews, there cannot be much doubt…. Even the SS talk about the mass executions…. A person who was there recalled with horror some scenes of executions by machine guns of nude women and children lined up at the mouth of a common ditch. About the tales of torture running the gamut I will limit myself to the one told to my colleague by an SS official who confided that he hurled babies of six months against a wall, shattering them, to give an example to his men, tired and shaken by an execution that was particularly horrible because of the number of victims.”228
Italian obstruction of German anti-Jewish measures would continue, as we shall see, during the spring and summer of 1943, until the German occupation of the country.
At the other end of the Continent, in Norway, the German anti-Jewish campaign had started in the fall of 1942. The usual decrees turned the small Jewish population into a group of pariahs. On November 20 the deportations began by ship from Oslo to Stettin, then by train on to Auschwitz. By the end of February 1943 the Jewish community of Norway had ceased to exist: More than 700 Jews had been murdered and some 900 had fled to Sweden.229
X
Whereas during the summer and autumn of 1942, information about the “Final Solution” was accumulating in the Allied capitals, hesitations about its publication came from some unexpected quarters, such as the Polish government-in-exile. Within days of the beginning of the deportations to Treblinka, the Polish underground was informed of details about the camp and the fate of its victims by a member of the Home Army working at the Treblinka railway station. Although the information was immediately transmitted to London, the government-in-exile kept it to itself until mid-September.230
The government-in-exile comprised representatives of the main political parties in the homeland; thus as far as possible it remained attuned to the attitudes of its constituency. And, as beforehand, the constituency itself may well have found the right expression of its feelings in the article published on August 15, 1942, at the peak of the exterminations in Treblinka, in the already mentioned Narod, the periodical of the mainstream Christian Democratic Party of Labor.
“At this moment,” Narod wrote, “from behind the ghetto walls, we can hear the inhuman moans and screams of the Jews who are being murdered. Ruthless cunning is falling victim to ruthless brutal power and no Cross is visible on this battlefield, since these scenes go back to pre-Christian times. If this continues, then it will not be long before Warsaw will say farewell to its last Jew. If it were possible to conduct a funeral, it would be interesting to see the reaction. Would the coffin evoke sorrow, weeping or perhaps joy?…For hundreds of years, an alien, malevolent entity has inhabited the northern sections of our city. Malevolent and alien from the point of view of our interests, as well as our psyche and our hearts. So let us not strike false attitudes like professional weepers at funerals—let us be serious and honest…. We pity the individual Jew, the human being and, as far as possible, should he be lost or trying to hide, we will extend a helping hand. We must condemn those who denounce him. It is our duty to demand from those who allow themselves to sneer and mock to show dignity and respect in the face of death. But we are not going to pretend to be grief-stricken about a vanishing nation which, after all, was never close to our hearts.”231
Finally the Polish Directorate of the Civilian Struggle (the delegatura) published a declaration on September 19, 1942, in agreement with the government-in-exile: “Without being able to actively oppose what is being done,” the directorate declared, “the leadership of the Civilian Struggle in the name of the entire Polish people protests against the crimes being committed against the Jews. All the political and social organizations in Poland are united in this protest.”232 No help was promised, however, nor was any encouragement given to the Jews to flee Warsaw and hide among the Polish population.
The same policy of delayed and reluctant sharing of information was noticeable in the “mission to the West,” undertaken in the fall of 1942 by the Polish courier and underground militant Jan Karski (who, it will be recalled, reported on the anti-Jewish attitude of the Polish population at the beginning of the war).233 The underground sent Karski to the West to report on the situation in Poland but without any importance being given to the fate of the Jews. It was only after two leaders of Jewish clandestine organizations became aware of Karski’s impending mission that he was allowed to meet with them, to enter the Warsaw ghetto and probably the Belzec slave labor camp. Moreover, the names of two Polish Jewish political individuals in London (Ignacy Schwarzbart and Szmuel Zygielbojm) were added to the list of people the envoy had to contact, but only as a last priority. At that stage Karski followed the line dictated to him and, acting on instructions, waited for several weeks before meeting his Jewish contacts in the British capital.234 Yet he was apparently taken aback by the minimal importance given to the Jewish issue by both the delegatura and the government-in-exile.235 He finally met Zygielbojm at the end of December 1942.236
The government-in-exile’s position was shaped, in fact, by an array of considerations.237 First, any emphasis put on the Jewish tragedy could deflect Western attention from the Polish tragedy per se. Thus declarations about German war crimes in Poland usually conveyed the impression that the victims were Poles in general and that there was no specificity to the fate of the Jews. In the fall, as ever-more-precise news reached Great Britain and the United States, the Polish government (hesitantly) revised its policy, in order to draw sympathy for the Polish plight, in view of what the Germans were capable of perpetrating on Jews—and on Poles.
The Polish struggle to mobilize Western public opinion was itself dominated by a major political goal: support of Poland against Soviet demands regarding the postwar eastern borders of the country. Stalin insisted on returning to the “Curzon line” of 1920, which was almost identical to the Ribbentrop-Molotov line of September 1939, whereas the Poles were adamantly demanding a return to the international border that had been recognized until the beginning of World War II.238 In the desperate Polish campaign for political support, the Jews played an important role, and not only as competitors in the struggle for sympathy.
For the Polish leadership, Jewish influence in London and Washington was axiomatic; moreover the Poles assumed that in the conflict over the postwar borders, the Jews would be readier to side with the Soviet Union than with Poland: Hadn’t their pro-Soviet sympathies been amply demonstrated during the occupation of eastern Poland between September 1939 and June 1941? In the late fall of 1942, Stanislaw Kot, a former minister of the interior and ambassador to the Soviet Union, as well as
a close political ally of Prime Minister Sikorski, arrived for an extended visit to Palestine.
Given the contrary agendas of the Polish government-in-exile and the Jewish leadership in Palestine, their negotiations did not turn into helpful exchanges between the victims of a common enemy. Kot accused the Jews of Poland of lacking loyalty to their homeland and at some point threatened that if the issue of Polish anti-Semitism was not dropped, the Poles would publicize the brutal behavior of the Jewish police and possibly the callousness of the councils toward their fellow Jews.239
The fundamental issues remained unresolved. Although they asked Kot for a stronger Polish commitment to help the hounded Jews, the Yishuv leaders were not ready for a clear quid pro quo in support of Poland’s position regarding its postwar borders. Presumably, as the Poles had surmised, their assessment of Soviet influence in the postwar world, and of the importance of Soviet political support for Zionist demands, played a major role. Morever Ben-Gurion and his companions hoped that Moscow would allow the emigration to Eretz Israel of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the USSR, particularly the refugees from Poland.240 Finally the leaders of the Yishuv might have been skeptical about concrete Polish readiness to rescue Jews or about the Poles’ ability to do so.
In the meantime the Zionist leadership itself did not demonstrate any major commitment to alleviating the fate of the Jews in Europe, nor did it seem to devote much attention to the unfolding of the ever-more-manifest catastrophe. During the historic conference that took place at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942, which led to a resolution demanding the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the assumption, voiced by several of the main speakers, was that two to three million European Jews would no longer be alive at the end of the war; it did not cause any particular stir. In the months that followed, Ben-Gurion’s main political agenda kept his attention away from the events in Europe and focused on the local political scene: He needed to convince part of Mapai to support the Biltmore program (which implied the partition of Palestine). He failed, and on October 25, 1942, at a meeting in Kfar Vitkin, the “B faction,” opposed to partition, left the party. In the words of Tuvia Friling, the historian most supportive of Ben-Gurion’s role in those years, when addressing the assembly about the situation in Europe, the Mapai leader found nothing better than the terminology commonly used until then: “Everything is at risk. The liberty of mankind, the physical existence of our people, the beginnings of our new homeland, the soul of our own movement—it is all at risk.”241 Or, as Ben-Gurion put it on several occasions in 1942 and 1943: “There has never yet been a time like today when we have all been threatened with destruction…. The destruction of the Jews of Europe is ruinous for Zionism for there will be no one left to build the state of Israel.”242
On November 16, 1942, a group of Polish Jews who carried passports of the British mandate and were exchanged for German citizens living in Palestine brought firsthand information about the fate of the local Jews and about deportations from Western Europe to the killing sites in the General Government. The news shocked the Yishuv and would soon be confirmed by official Polish and Allied announcements.
In the summer of 1942 three German sources also confirmed the most horrendous information available until then about the systematic and all-encompassing aspect of the exterminations. The impact of the first two reports remained limited, as their addressees did not forward them to London or Washington; the third report, however, would have major consequences within a few months.
Kurt Gerstein, a deeply religious Protestant, was a disinfection expert in the hygiene service of the Waffen SS when, in late July 1942, he was ordered by “SS Officer Günther of the RSHA,” as he later wrote, to obtain about 100 kg (220 pounds) of prussic acid (Zyklon B) and deliver it to Lublin.243 After meeting with Globocnik, Gerstein proceeded to Belzec on August 2, possibly in the company of Globocnik and certainly in that of SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Pfannenstiel, professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg, who had accompanied him on his trip.
In the camp Gerstein witnessed the arrival of a transport from Lwov. He saw how Ukrainian auxiliaries drove the Jews out of the freight cars, how the deportees were forced to strip naked, and how, told they would undergo disinfection, they were pushed into the gas chambers. Gerstein timed the asphyxiation: The engine did not work at first. The Jews cried and wailed: “like in a synagogue,” said Pfannenstiel, his eye glued to the peephole. After two and a half hours, the engine started; thirty-two minutes later all the Jews were dead.244 In June 1950 Pfannenstiel’s deposition confirmed the gist of Gerstein’s report.245
On the train journey from Warsaw to Berlin, Gerstein, without any SS travel companion this time, started a conversation with a Swedish diplomat, Göran von Otter, attaché at the embassy in Berlin. Gerstein identified himself, gave references (among them, the Evangelical bishop in Berlin, Otto Dibelius), and told Otter what he had witnessed. Back in the capital, the diplomat checked the SS officer’s credentials and, convinced of his reliability, sent a report to Stockholm. The Swedish Foreign Ministry did not respond and did not inform the Allies. After the war Otter repeatedly confirmed his conversation with Gerstein, and the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs admitted having received the report and having kept it undisclosed till the end of the war.246
During the weeks that followed his return to Berlin, Gerstein attempted to inform the nuncio and the Swiss legation. He also informed Preysing’s coadjutor, one Dr. Winter, as well as Bishop Dibelius and others: to no avail.247 Gerstein continued to play his double role to the end. He delivered Zyklon B shipments to the camps and unsuccessfully attempted to arouse German and foreign awareness of the events. At the end of the war he wrote three reports on what he had seen and otherwise knew, and handed them to the Americans to whom he had given himself up. He was transferred to the French occupying forces and jailed in Paris as a potential war criminal. On July 25, 1945, he hanged himself in his cell.248
Almost exactly at the date on which Otter’s report reached Stockholm, a similar report was forwarded by the Swedish consul in Stettin, Karl Ingve Vendel.249 Vendel was in fact a Swedish intelligence agent monitoring German troop movements under the guise of consular activities and thus was also secretly in touch with some members of the German military opposition to the regime. After visiting a friend on an estate in East Prussia, Vendel, on August 9, 1942, filed a lengthy report on the situation in the General Government, which included a section on the extermination of the Jews:
“In a city, all the Jews were assembled for what was officially announced as ‘delousing.’ At the entrance they were forced to take off their clothes; the delousing procedure, however, consisted of gassing and, afterward, all of them would be stuffed into a mass grave. The source from which I obtained all this information on the conditions in the General Government is such that not the slightest shade of disbelief exists concerning the truthfulness of my informant’s descriptions.”250
According to historian Jozef Lewandowski’s inquiry, Vendel was given the information by his friend, Count Heinrich von Lehndorff, a reserve lieutenant at Army Group Center, and by a guest who joined them at Lehndorff ’s estate, “Gross Steinort,” in East Prussia. The guest was probably Lt. Col. Henning von Tresckow, whom we already encountered, the most active organizer of the military conspiracy against Hitler.251 Vendel’s report wasn’t forwarded to the Allies either.
Again at approximately the same time, a third German source conveyed information that, in due time, put an end to Allied disbelief. In the last days of July 1942, a German industrialist, Eduard Schulte, well connected to high Nazi officials, traveled to Zurich and informed a Jewish business friend of a plan “prepared at Hitler’s headquarters” for the total extermination of the Jews of Europe by the end of the year. The information was conveyed to Benjamin Sagalowitz, the press attaché of the Jewish community in Switzerland, who, in turn, alerted Gerhart Riegner, the director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress.
Riegner asked to send a cable to World Jewish Congress headquarters in New York and London via the American and British legations in Bern. Both the American and the British diplomats agreed.
The identically worded text sent to Washington and to London read as follows. “Received alarming report that in Führer’s headquarters plan discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering three and a half four million should after deportation and concentration in East be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe stop Action reported planned for autumn methods under discussion including prussic acid stop We transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed stop Informant stated to have close connections with highest German authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable.”
The State Department and the Foreign Office remained skeptical, and Washington did not forward the cable to Stephen Wise, its main addressee. However, as the same cable had been received by the head of the British section of the World Jewish Congress, it was transmitted to Stephen Wise from London, notwithstanding some initial difficulties. On September 2 U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles phoned Wise and asked him to avoid publicizing the contents of the report before it could be independently confirmed. Wise accepted.252
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with headquarters in Geneva, included Swiss members only, and the Bern government’s directives regarding major decisions went generally unchallenged. According to Jean-Claude Favez, the foremost historian of the ICRC and the Holocaust, Riegner insisted [in 1998] that in August or September 1942 he had informed three key members of the committee, Carl J. Burckhardt, Susanne Ferrière, and Lucie Odier, of the information that had been imparted to him. Burckhardt confirmed the facts reported by Riegner to the American consul in Geneva, Paul C. Squire, and to Riegner’s colleague, Paul Guggenheim, from his own sources, sometime at the end of October 1942 and again to Riegner himself in November.253
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