Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  A meeting of the Zionist Executive Committee in Jerusalem in February 1943 starkly illustrated the prevalent mood at the top of the establishment: “We certainly cannot abstain from any action,” Gruenbaum declared. “We should do all we can…but our hopes are infinitesimal…. I think we have only one hope left—and I would say the same thing in Warsaw—the only action, the only effort that provides us with hope, that is unique, is the effort being made in the Land of Israel.”191 The debate about the 1943 budget better reflected this shared attitude than any declarations: 250,000 Palestine pounds for new settlements, the same amount for agricultural development, vast sums for irrigation and the like, and 15,000 pounds for rescue activities.192

  Over the following months the debate concerning the allocation of funds for rescue operations continued. While the Jewish Agency maintained its reticence and Gruenbaum continued to show only apathy, the trade union organization (Histadrut) took the initiative of raising funds by way of a public campaign: “Diaspora Month.” The initiative, launched in mid-September 1943, failed dismally. The skepticism of the population regarding the commitment of the political leadership to the rescue operations certainly contributed to the meager results of the appeal. It seemed to some that “the Yishuv had fallen into atrophy.”193

  Zygielbojm, it will be recalled, was the Bund’s delegate to the Polish National Council in London. As we saw, it is only at the end of December 1942, that Karski was allowed to meet with him and with his colleague Ignacy Schwarzbart. Until the fall of that year, Zygielbojm had not fully understood the information about the total extermination of the Jews of Poland. By November and December, however, he had grasped major aspects of the German murder campaign and was increasingly bitter about the absence of adequate response, particularly from the Polish government-in-exile and the Delegatura, which did not call upon the population to extend help to the hounded Jews. On December 23 he declared at the meeting of the National Council: “War will end and the tragedy of Polish Jewry [Zygielbojm had not yet perceived the total dimension of the events] will weigh upon the conscience of humanity for generations. Unfortunately, it will be associated with the attitude of part of the Polish population. I leave it to you to find the adequate answer.”194

  There wasn’t much the Bund delegate could do. When, a few months later, the ghetto uprising started and was abandoned to its fate without any outside support, Zygielbojm knew he had reached the end of the road.195 On May 11, 1943, he wrote a letter to the president of the Polish republic, Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, and to the prime minister of the government-in-exile, Wladyslaw Sikorski. “The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nation in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking passively upon this murder of defenseless millions…they have become partners to the responsibility.

  “I am obliged to state that although the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world, it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimension of the tragedy taking place in Poland….

  “I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last, heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.”196

  On May 12 Zygielbojm committed suicide. To his comrades of the Bund in New York he had written: “I hope that with my death I shall succeed in what I failed to achieve during my life: to contribute really in saving at least some of the 300,000 Jews still alive [in Poland] out of a population of over 3 million.”197

  X

  Unlike her brother Mischa, Etty Hillesum had decided to stay in Westerbork when her parents’ deportation date arrived. But on September 6, 1943, the order came: She was to board the same transport. No interventions helped. In a letter of September 7, a friend, Jopie Vleeschouwer, described the events of that day: “Her parents and Mischa went to the train first. Then I trundled a well-packed rucksack and a small hamper with a bowl and mug dangling from it to the train. And there she stepped on to the platform…talking gaily, smiling, a kind word for everyone she met on the way…every inch the Etty you all know so well…. Then I lost sight of her for a bit and wandered along the platform…. I saw Mother, Father H. and Mischa board Wagon No. 1. Etty finished up in wagon No. 12, having first stopped to look for a friend in wagon No. 14 who was pulled out again at the last moment. Then a shrill whistle and the 1000 ‘transport cases’ were moving out. Another flourish from Mischa who waved through a crack in wagon No. 1, a cheerful ‘bye’ from Etty in No. 12 and they were gone.”198

  On that same September 7 Etty still managed to throw a postcard from the train; it was addressed to a friend in Amsterdam: “Opening the Bible at random I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower.’ I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, Mother, and Mischa are a few cars away. In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from the Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too. We shall be traveling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care…. Good-bye for now from the four of us.”199

  According to a Red Cross report, Etty was murdered in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943; her parents and her brother Mischa shared the same fate. Her brother Joop survived the camp but died on his way back to Holland, at the end of the war.200

  CHAPTER X

  March 1944–May 1945

  On April 6, 1944, Klaus Barbie, chief of the Gestapo in Lyons, informed Röthke of a particularly successful catch:

  “This morning, the Jewish children’s home ‘Colonie d’Enfants’ in Izieu (Ain) has been taken away. A total of 41 children, aged 3–13, have been caught. Moreover all the Jewish staff was captured: 10 people, including 5 women. We have not seized any cash or valuables. The transport to Drancy will take place on April 7.”1

  Most of the children and staff of Izieu were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz on April 13 in transport 71; the remaining ones were deported on May 30 and June 30: None survived. The first ten names on the list (in alphabetical order) included children from five countries: Adelsheimer, Sami, age five (Germany); Ament, Hans, age ten (Austria); Aronowicz, Nina, age twelve (Belgium); Balsam, Max-Marcel, age twelve (France); Balsam, Jean-Paul, age ten (France); Benassayag, Esther, age twelve (Algeria); Benessayag, Ellie, age ten (Algeria); Benessayag, Jacob, age eight (Algeria); Benguigui, Jacques, age twelve (Algeria); Benguigui, Richard, age seven (Algeria). The last children on the list were Weltner, Charles, age nine (France); Wertheimer, Otto, age twelve (Germany); Zuckerberg, Émile, age five (Belgium).2

  The murder of the children and staff of Izieu was but a minute event in the routine of German mass extermination, but it demonstrated, as the war entered its last year, that despite the rapidly deteriorating situation of the Reich, no effort would be spared, no roundup deemed too insignificant in the final drive toward the complete extermination of the European Jews.

  Both the evolution of the war and that of the anti-Jewish campaign between March 1944 and May 1945 can be divided into three distinct and yet roughly coinciding phases. The first and longest phase ended approximately at the beginning of 1945, after the failure of Hitler’s major offensive in the West and the liberation of Auschwitz. At the end of this phase the Führer’s state controlled hardly more territory than the prewar Reich. Yet through the preceding months it had remained a unified political entity capable of conducting large-scale military operations and implementing thoroughly planned measures against the Jews withi
n its reach.

  During the second phase, stretching from the beginning of 1945 to early April, Allied forces in the East and the West were closing on Germany’s vital centers. The disintegration of the Nazi state and regime had become irreversible, and chaos spread within the shrinking Reich. The murderous anti-Jewish steps taken during those few months resulted in part from the growing anarchy combined with the persistence of raging anti-Semitism among party officials high and low and in wide strata of the population. Nonetheless there was no unified anti-Jewish policy any longer as Himmler in particular started following an independent course.

  The last phase (April and early May 1945) was that of the Reich’s collapse and surrender, of course, but also that of Hitler’s final message to future generations. The Jewish issue dominated the Nazi leader’s ultimate ramblings but, in some aspects, it did so in quite a peculiar way, as we shall see.

  During this entire final year the Allies did not countenance any major rescue efforts and rejected the main plans submitted to them in regard to Hungarian Jewry (in one case at least, not without plausible reasons). But the liberation of camps and of ever-larger areas in which Jews had survived, as well as the initiatives of individuals and neutral organizations mainly in still-occupied parts of Hungary, saved tens of thousands of lives. The Jewish issue as such, however, was generally speaking nonexistent in terms of Allied decisions.

  As for the majority of the surviving Jews themselves, they had become, by early 1944, a motley population of isolated individuals. Those who could joined the partisans or Resistance forces; the vast majority clawed its way through slave labor, starvation, and potential extermination at every step and, finally, survived by pure chance or mostly perished by German design.

  I

  During the first phase the Wehrmacht stemmed the Allied advance on Rome until early June 1944, and in mid-March it had occupied Hungary. German armaments production did not drastically decrease until the end of the year. Although the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6 succeeded, and although in the summer and autumn Soviet forces occupied Poland and the Baltic countries, toppled the Romanian regime, took over Bulgaria, and established a front line on the outskirts of Budapest, the Germans still launched dangerous counteroffensives in both the east and the west.

  By the end of the year, however, after the failure of the military countermoves on all fronts (particularly the offensive in the West, definitively halted on December 27), the Reich’s military might was spent: East Prussia had already partly fallen into Soviet hands, and huge Allied forces were poised on the borders of the Reich; by that time, too, the country’s industrial capacity was rapidly sinking under the relentless Anglo-American bombing attacks.

  At times some minor incident allowed Hitler to give a new and unexpected twist to his anti-Jewish rage, as for example, in the case of the Hungarian general Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner and some fellow officers. Feketehalmy and his associates were responsible for the massacre of about 6,000 Serbs and 4,000 Jews in Novi Sad in March 1943. About to be put on trial by Kallay’s government (as a sign of goodwill directed at the Western Allies), the Hungarian officers fled to Germany in early 1944. When the Budapest government asked for their extradition, Hitler granted them political asylum. On January 19 the Nazi leader’s adjutant, Walter Hewel, informed Ribbentrop that, in his chief ’s words, “everyone in Europe should know that a person accused of persecuting Jews who would flee to Germany would be granted asylum. Anybody who fights against the Jewish pest in Europe, stands on our side. We did not yet hear that in Hungary there had been complaints against the Jews who were responsible for the mass murder of women and children in the Anglo-American bombings. It should be clear to everybody that only the Jews could be the agitators behind these horrifying terror-attacks.” Hitler asked that Horthy be informed of the message.3 The Jews as inciters of the “terror attacks” became one of Hitler’s most recurrent themes.

  On April 27, 1944, the propaganda minister recorded a conversation that must have taken place on the previous day in Berlin. The most recent bombing of Munich had caused heavy damage. Hitler was filled with intense desire for vengeance against England and expected a great deal from the forthcoming “reprisal weapons.” Then, without transition, Goebbels noted: “The Führer’s hatred against the Jews has intensified even further rather than declined. The Jews must be punished for their crimes against the European nations and in general against the entire cultured world. Wherever we can get hold of them, they should not escape retribution. The advantages of anti-Semitism do offset its disadvantages, as I always said. All in all, a long-term policy in this war is only possible if one considers it from the standpoint of the Jewish question.”4

  Why, in fact, could Hitler’s hatred of the Jews have eventually lessened? For the obvious reason that most of the Jews of Europe had already been murdered. Yet as German cities were reduced to rubble and as total defeat loomed ever closer, the Führer’s hatred increased.5 Furthermore Hitler’s declaration indicated once again that for him Jewry as an active entity was independent of the concrete fate of the Jews who had been murdered under German domination. The destruction of German cities was the work of “the Jew.” Thus the full significance of the war and any long-term policy could not be grasped and formulated without setting the “Jewish question” (the role of the Jew) at center stage.

  The same crazed obsession resurfaced in Hitler’s address to an assembly of generals and officers of other ranks on May 26, 1944, in Berchtesgaden. This group of several hundred newly minted “National Socialist guidance officers” responsible since December 1943 for ideological indoctrination in the Wehrmacht, had just completed their own special training before returning to the front.6 Two days before the meeting with Hitler, they had been harangued by Himmler at Sonthofen. As in Posen in October 1943, the Reichsführer did not mince words: The extermination of the Jews, as difficult as it was, had been a necessity for the safety and the future of the Volk.7 Now it was Hitler’s turn.

  According to historian Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, who first published the speech in 1976, Hitler’s main aim was to inform these officers of the extermination of the Jews (already widely known by then and mentioned to them by Himmler).8 The Jews, the Nazi leader proclaimed, had been a “foreign body” in the community of the Volk; it had been necessary to expel them, although not everybody grasped why it had to be done “so brutally and ruthlessly.” “In removing the Jew,” Hitler explained, “I eliminated in Germany the possibility of creating some sort of revolutionary core or nucleus. You could naturally say: Yes, but could you not have done it more simply—or not more simply, since everything else would have been more complicated—but more humanely? Gentlemen, we are in a life-or-death struggle. If our opponents are victorious in this struggle, the German people will be eradicated [ausgerottet]. Bolshevism would slaughter millions and millions and millions of our intellectuals. Anyone not dying through a shot in the neck would be deported. The children of the upper classes would be taken away and eliminated. This entire bestiality has been organized by the Jews.” After evoking the 40,000 women and children killed in Hamburg, he went on, now answering his own initial rhetorical question: “Don’t expect anything else from me except the ruthless upholding of the national interest in the way which, in my view, will have the greatest effect and benefit for the German nation.” The speech was greeted with frenetic applause.9

  As was his wont, when haranguing foreign dignitaries, the Nazi leader rarely missed some threatening reference to the Jews. Yet in 1944, the anti-Jewish outbursts turned even shriller than before and their setting, ever more grotesque, as the once-all-powerful Führer was now trying to convince his Balkan and Central European allies that Germany would win in the end and that they should faithfully accept his explanations despite the overwhelming Soviet military tide surging at their very borders.

  Thus on March 16 and 17, on the eve of the browbeating of Horthy and the occupation of Hungary, Hitler preached at great length to the Bulgarian
regency council set up after King Boris’s sudden and mysterious death. The Jews were unavoidably present, of course. Atypically however, the Nazi leader started with defensive remarks: “One had often reproached him that by his ruthless handling of the Jews he had turned them into inexorable enemies.” The answer was ready: The Jews would have been his enemies and those of Germany in any case; “by totally excluding them, he had completely eliminated the danger to the internal morale that they represented.”10 Just beforehand, he had mentioned 1917 and 1918 again: The link was clear enough. Whether the Bulgarians were convinced is doubtful. In any case, it would be the last visit of a Bulgarian delegation to the leader of the Great German Reich.

  The “Priesterchen” Tiso, as the Nazi leader referred to him at times, Antonescu, or the new Hungarian prime minister, Sztójay, remained Hitler’s only “politically significant” guests (there were Croats as well and the former Duce—still a Duce in title—and soon de Brinon would arrive, as spokesman of the French government-in-exile in Germany, probably in the company of his Jewish-born wife).

  Hitler had already addressed the Jewish issue at length in his conversation with Tiso on April 22, 1943. On May 12, 1944, the Nazi leader was ready for a repeat performance. Right from the outset he informed his Slovak guest that the military struggle that was unfolding was certainly the mightiest confrontation in Europe since the breakup of the Roman Empire. In such a gigantic battle, crises and difficulties were unavoidable. The greatest difficulty was “that in this battle against world bolshevism we also have to take up the struggle for those who are not bolsheviks but who, by way of the Jewish segment of their society, have an inner connection to bolshevism.”11