14. On the entire episode see also Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), pp. 39–40.
15. Frank Dingel, “Waffen-SS,” in Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, and Hermann Weiss (Stuttgart, 1997), p. 792.
16. See, for example, Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, p. 336.
17. Heinz Höhne, Canaris (Garden City, NY, 1979), pp. 487ff.
18. For these aspects, see Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996), p. 327.
19. Ibid., p. 330
20. Ibid., p. 332.
21. For the standard work on the Jews of Denmark during the Holocaust see Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy (Philadelphia, 1969). Yahil’s study can be usefully complemented by relevant chapters in Ulrich Herbert’s biography of Werner Best and by Hans Kirchhoff, “Denmark: A Light in the Darkness of the Holocaust? A Reply to Gunnar S. Paulsson,” in Cesarani, Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, vol. 5, pp. 128ff. As for Gunnar S. Paulsson, “The Bridge over the Øresund: The Historiography on the Expulsion of the Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark” (in Cesarani, Holocaust, vol. 5, pp. 99ff), it is not always convincing, particularly in view of Herbert’s study on Best.
22. Herbert, Best, p. 362ff.
23. Ibid., p. 366.
24. Ibid., p. 367.
25. Ibid., p. 368.
26. Ibid., p. 369.
27. About Best’s attitude, see ibid. As for the participation of the Danes in the rescue operation, see Kirchhoff, “Denmark,” in Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel, eds., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven, 2001), p. 148.
28. Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (London, 1997), p. 104.
29. Ibid., p. 102.
30. For this summary see ibid., p. 125.
31. Philip Mechanicus, Waiting for Death: A Diary (London, 1968), p. 48.
32. Ibid., p. 49.
33. Ibid., p. 33.
34. Ibid., pp. 32–33.
35. Ibid., p. 76.
36. Etty Hillesum, Letters from Westerbork (New York, 1986), p. 97.
37. Ibid., p. 55–56.
38. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, ed. Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler (New York, 1995), p. 187.
39. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven, 2002), p. 525.
40. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy et les juifs (Paris, 1990), pp. 325ff.
41. Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1983–85), vol. 2, p. 331.
42. Jacques Adler, “The Changing Attitude of the ‘Bystanders’ Toward the Jews in France, 1940–1943,” in John Milfull, Why Germany?: National Socialist Anti-semitism and the European Context (Providence, RI, 1993), pp. 184ff.
43. Richard I. Cohen, The Burden of Conscience: French Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust (Bloomington, 1987), pp. 91–92.
44. Ibid., pp. 90–91.
45. Ibid., p. 97.
46. For the clandestine efforts, see Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York, 1987), pp. 154ff.; Cohen, The Burden of Conscience, pp. 96–97.
47. Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, vol. 2, p. 124.
48. Ibid.
49. André Kaspi, Les Juifs pendant l’occupation (Paris, 1991), pp. 294ff.
50. Ibid., p. 298.
51. Ibid.
52. Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, vol. 2, pp. 124–25.
53. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin: 1940–1943, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Paris, 1985), pp. 233–34.
54. Ibid., pp. 235–36.
55. Ibid., p. 238.
56. Simon Schwarzfuchs, Aux Prises avec Vichy: Histoire politique des Juifs de France, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1998), pp. 304–6.
57. Aharon Weiss, “Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland—Postures and Attitudes,” Yad Vashem Studies 12 (1977), pp. 363–64.
58. Dan Diner, “Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as Epistemological Vantage,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 128ff.
59. Quoted in Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, 1987), p. 276.
60. For these details, see mainly ibid., pp. 282ff.
61. Ibid., pp. 290ff.
62. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London, 1974), pp. 239–40.
63. Arad, Belzec, p. 298.
64. Ibid., p. 297.
65. Jacob Wiernik became one of the main witnesses in Claude Lanzman’s film Shoah.
66. For the preparations of the uprising in Sobibor see Arad, Belzec, pp. 299ff. and mainly 306ff.
67. For the events of October 14, 1943, see ibid., pp. 322ff.
68. On the basis of the “SD decodes” and other sources, Richard Breitman reached the conclusion that Himmler’s order to Kappler was issued on September 24 or possibly a few days earlier. See Richard Breitman, “New Sources on the Holocaust in Italy,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 3 (Winter 2002), pp. 403–4.
69. For these details see mainly Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans and the Pope, September 1943–June 1944 (New York, 2003), pp. 61ff.
70. Breitman, “New Sources on the Holocaust in Italy,” p. 404.
71. Katz, The Battle for Rome, pp. 63ff.
72. Stanislao G. Pugliese, “Bloodless Torture: The Books of the Roman Ghetto Under the Nazi Occupation,” in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, ed. Jonathan Rose (Amherst, MA, 2001), p. 52.
73. Ibid., p. 53.
74. Ibid.
75. Katz, The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans and the Pope, September 1943–June 1944, p. 77; Breitman, “New Sources on the Holocaust in Italy,” pp. 405–6.
76. Breitman, “New Sources on the Holocaust in Italy,” p. 407.
77. For the sequence of the events see Daniel Carpi, “Italy,” in Laqueur and Baumel, eds., The Holocaust Encyclopedia, pp. 336–39.
78. Ingrid Krüger-Bulcke and Hans Georg Lehmann, eds., Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918–1945, Ser. E, 1941–1945 (Göttingen, 1969), vol. 7, p. 31.
79. Ibid., p. 31 n. 2.
80. Katz, The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans and the Pope, September 1943–June 1944, pp. 78ff.
81. Pierre Blet, Angelo Martini, and Burkhart Schneider, eds., Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Vatican City, 1975), vol. 9, pp. 505–6.
82. According to some historians, one of the German diplomats, Gerhard Gumpert, dictated the letter to Hudal. See for example Katz, The Battle for Rome, pp. 106ff.
83. For the text of Weizsäcker’s cable see Saul Friedländer, Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (New York, 1966), p. 207.
84. Ibid., p. 208.
85. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Ser. E, vol. 7, pp. 130–31.
86. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 97.
87. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 7, p. 295.
88. Ibid., p. 465.
89. Ibid., p. 569.
90. ADAP, Ser. E, vol. 6 (Göttingen, 1979), pp. 232–33.
91. Saul Friedländer, Pius XII, p. 190.
92. Ibid., pp. 191–192.
93. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Series E, vol. 6 (Göttingen, 1979), pp. 584–86.
94. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 9, pp. 264–65.
95. Ibid., part 2, vol. 10, p. 104.
96. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington, 2000), pp. 100–101.
97. For the text of the a
ddress entitled “Grandezza dolori e speranze del popolo Polacco” see Blet, Martini, and Schneider, Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 801–2. For a discussion of Pius XII’s attitude to the Polish issue and for the translation of the quotes from his speech of May 31, 1943, see Robert S. Wistrich, “The Vatican Documents and the Holocaust: A Personal Report,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 15 (2002), pp. 426ff. and particularly 429.
98. See for example, among many other such interventions, the nuncio’s protest to Weizsäcker about the fate of Polish priests, on September 20, 1940, and the Holy Office’s Declaration of early December 1940 concerning euthanasia, in Friedländer, Pius XII, pp. 63 and 66.
99. Father Pierre Blet’s study on the pope’s policies and decisions during World War II is unconvincing, notwithstanding the fact that Blet, as one of the three editors of the Vatican documents, had full access to Vatican archives. Blet’s core argument regarding Pius’s silence in the face of the deportation and extermination of the Jews of Europe is that of ignorance about the ultimate fate of the victims (“As long as the war lasted, the fate of the deportees was shrouded in obscurity.”). Yet, Blet stated, “Pius XII never used this continuous shadow regarding an unknown destination as an excuse for abandoning those who were being persecuted. On the contrary, he employed all the means at his disposal to save them. As much as possible he took care to limit what he said in public, expecting nothing worthwhile to come out of this. He did not speak, but he took action.” Pierre Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican (New York, 1999), p. 167.
100. For the text, see Friedländer, Pius XII, p. 143.
101. For the emphasis on Poland see the comments added to the mention of the address in Blet, Martini, and Schneider, Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, vol. 9, p. 327.
102. Quoted in Friedländer, Pius XII, p. 143.
103. Letter from Preysing to Pius XII, March 6, 1943, quoted in Burkhart Schneider, Pierre Blet, and Angelo Martini, eds., Die Briefe Pius XII. an die deutschen Bischöfe 1939–1944 (Mainz, 1966), p. 239n1.
104. Quoted in Friedländer, Pius XII, p. 139.
105. Ibid. (emphasis added).
106. For this argument, see most recently John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York, 1999), pp. 295–97.
107. Pius’s special affection for the German people and his love for German culture have often been recognized. The way he chose at times to express his feelings was neither subtle nor diplomatic. Thus, at the end of October 1941, as the German attack on Moscow was still in full swing, the pope gave a private audience to Goebbels’s sister Maria, on a visit to Rome, and asked her to transmit his personal blessing to the propaganda minister. Goebbels noted the event with highly sarcastic comments in his diary entry of October 26. See Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1998), part 2, vol. 2, p. 185.
108. Friedländer, Pius XII, pp. 141–42.
109. Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, 2000), p. 307.
110. Ibid., pp. 307–8.
111. Ibid., p. 208.
112. Regarding Vatican policy toward Croatia, see Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII (London, 1970), which remains the most thorough study on this issue; see, also, Menachem Shelach, “The Catholic Church in Croatia, the Vatican and the Murder of the Croatian Jews,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, no. 3 (1989), pp. 323ff.
113. According to historian Giovanni Miccoli, Pius XII was essentially guided by the rule of necessary neutrality (formulated by Benedict XV during World War I) in a war opposing “post-Christian” nation-states over which the pope had no authority but that included Catholics fighting on each side. Miccoli himself considers this attitude as highly problematic in the face of Nazi atrocities and interprets Pius’s position as attributing to the war itself the responsibility of all evils. For this thesis, see mainly Giovanni Miccoli, Les Dilemmes et les silences de Pie XII. Vatican, Seconde Guerre mondiale et Shoah (Bruxelles, 2005), pp. 425ff. This interpretation would be convincing if the Vatican had not taken such a resolute, albeit non-public, position against the Soviet Union.
114. Tittmann to Hull, October 19, 1943, FRUS, 1943, vol. 2 (Europe), Washington, p. 950.
115. Quoted in Kenneth C. Barnes, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hitler’s Persecution of the Jews,” in Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, ed. Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel (Minneapolis, 1999), pp. 125–26.
116. Ibid., p. 126.
117. Ludwig Volk, ed., Akten deutscher Bischöfe über die Lage der Kirche, 1933–1945, 6 vols., vol. 6: 1943–1945 (Mainz, 1985), p. 310.
118. Ibid., p. 480.
119. See the document discovered in the French archives and published by Alberto Melloni in Corriere della Sera, on December 28, 2004. The authenticity of the document is unquestionable. I am grateful to Carlo Ginzburg and to Michael R. Marrus for having drawn my attention to this document and to various aspects of the controversy surrounding it. For a thorough discussion of the Vatican’s stance, see Michael R. Marrus, “Le Vatican er les orphelins juifs de la Shoah,” L’Histoire 307 (March 2006), pp. 75–85.
120. Cordelia Edvardson, Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer (Munich, 1989), pp. 81ff.
121. Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York, 2001), pp. 104ff. and 107–08.
122. Ibid., p. 107.
123. Ruth Bondy, “Elder of the Jews”: Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt (New York, 1989), pp. 386ff.
124. Egon Redlich, The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, ed. Saul S. Friedman (Lexington, KY, 1992), p. 129.
125. Jean-Claude Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999), p. 41.
126. Otto Dov Kulka, “Ghetto in an Annihilation Camp: Jewish Social History in the Holocaust Period and its Ultimate Limits,” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf, eds., The Nazi Concentration Camps (Jerusalem: 1984), p. 328.
127. See, among others, Nili Keren, “The Family Camp,” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 428ff.
128. Ibid., p. 436.
129. Ibid., p. 440.
130. For details on the diarists see Nathan Cohen, “Diaries of the Sonderkommando,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 592ff.
131. Ibid., p. 523.
132. Zalman Gradowski, “The Czech Transport,” quoted in David G. Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 562–63.
133. Ibid., p. 563.
134. Roskies, “The Great Lament” in The Literature of Destruction, p. 518.
135. Gradowski, “The Czech Transport,” in ibid., pp. 563–64.
136. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Series E, vol. 8 (Göttingen, 1979), pp. 153–54.
137. For a typical camp of this category, see Felicja Karay, Death Comes in Yellow: Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave Labor Camp (Amsterdam, 1996).
138. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Series E, vol. 5 (Göttingen, 1978), pp. 326–27.
139. Eberhard Kolb, “Bergen-Belsen, 1943–1945,” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf, The Nazi Concentration Camps: Structure and Aims, the Image of the Prisoner, the Jews in the Camps (Jerusalem, 1984), p. 335.
140. Ibid., pp. 336–37.
141. Martin Gilbert, introduction to Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat (Cambridge, UK, 1990).
142. Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 508ff.
143. Gilbert, Introduction to ibid., pp. xxiii and xxiv.
144. Ibid., pp. 506–7.
145. See on this issue, Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lódz Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven, 1984), pp. lx and lxi.
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146. Ibid., p. lxii.
147. Ibid., pp. 422–23.
148. For these cultural aspects see also Gila Flam, “Das kulturelle Leben im Getto Lodz,” in “Wer zum Leben, wer zum Tod…” Strategien jüdischen überlebens im Ghetto, ed. Doron Kiesel et al. (Frankfurt, 1992), p. 92.
149. Dobroszycki, The Chronicle., p. 413.
150. Ibid., p. 470–71.
151. Helmut Heiber, Reichsführer! Briefe an und von Himmler (Munich, 1970), p. 120.
152. Ibid., p. 213.
153. Ibid., pp. 246–47.
154. Ibid., pp. 175–76. Rumor had it that Richard Wagner was the illegitimate son of the Jewish actor Ludwig Geyer.
155. Warren Paul Green, “The Nazi Racial Policy Towards the Karaites,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 8, no. 2 (1978), p. 40.
156. Ibid., p. 38.
157. Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York, 1980), p. 155.
158. Green, “The Nazi Racial Policy Towards the Karaites,” p. 40.
159. Ibid.
160. Friedman, Roads to Extinction, pp. 164–65.
161. Green, “The Nazi Racial Policy Towards the Karaites,” pp. 38–39.
162. For details on the activities of “Amt VII,” see Jürgen Matthäus, “Weltanschauliche Forschung und Auswärtung. Aus den Akten des Amtes VII im Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 5 (1996), pp. 287ff., and Lutz Hachmeister, Der Gegnerforscher, pp. 212ff.
163. See Wolfgang Behringer, “Der Abwickler,” in Himmlers Hexenkartothek: Das Interesse des Nationalsozialismus an der Hexenverfolgung, ed. Sönke Lorenz et al. (Bielefeld, 2000), pp. 121ff.
164. Jürgen Matthäus, “Weltanschauliche Forschung und Auswärtung. Aus den Akten des Amtes VII im Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 5 (1996), p. 288.
165. Ibid., p. 289.
166. For many of the details see David E. Fishman, “Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna,” in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, ed. Jonathan Rose (Amherst, MA, 2001), pp. 68ff.
167. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, p. 311.
168. Fishman, “Embers,” p. 69.
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