History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  That atrocities on this scale could have been carried out in civilized Europe, albeit in wartime and behind the protective screen of the German army, raises a number of questions about the behaviour of the German people, their allies, associates and conquests, about the British and Americans, and not least about the Jews themselves. Let us examine each in turn.

  The German people knew about and acquiesced in the genocide. There were 900,000 of them in the ss alone, plus another 1,200,000 involved in the railways. The trains were one giveaway. Most Germans knew the significance of the huge, crowded trains rattling through the hours of darkness, as one recorded remark suggests: ‘Those damned Jews, they won’t even let one sleep at night!’158 The Germans were beneficiaries of murder. Scores of thousands of men’s and women’s watches, fountain-pens and propelling pencils, stolen from the victims, were distributed among the armed forces; in one six-week period alone, 222,269 sets of men’s suits and underclothes, 192,652 sets of women’s clothing, and 99,922 sets of children’s clothes, collected from the gassed at Auschwitz, were distributed on Germany’s Home Front.159 The recipients knew roughly where these came from. The Germans did very little to protest about what was being done to the Jews or to help Jews escape. But there were exceptions. In Berlin, at the very heart of Hitler’s empire, several thousand of the city’s 160,000 Jews managed to escape by going underground, becoming ‘U-boats’ as they were called. In each case it meant some connivance and assistance by non-Jewish Germans.160 One such was the scholar Hans Hirschel, who became a U-boat in February 1942. He moved into the flat of his mistress, the Countess Maria von Maltzan, sister-in-law of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, an ardent Nazi. She designed for him a box-like bed into which he could climb, with holes drilled for breathing. Each day she put in a fresh glass of water and a cough-suppressant. One day she came back to her flat and heard Hirschel and another U-boat, Willy Buschoff, singing at the top of their voices: ‘Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one’.161

  The Austrians were worse than the Germans. They played a role in the Holocaust out of all proportion to their numbers. Not only Hitler, but Eichmann and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Gestapo, were Austrian. In the Netherlands, two Austrians, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Hanns Rauter, directed the killing of the Jews. In Yugoslavia, out of 5,090 war criminals, 2,499 were Austrian. Austrians were prominent in the mobile killing battalions. They provided one-third of the personnel of the SS sextermination units. Austrians commanded four out of the six main death camps and killed almost half of the six million Jewish victims.162 The Austrians were much more passionately anti-Semitic than the Germans. Menashe Mautner, a disabled veteran of the First World War with a wooden leg, fell on the icy pavements of Vienna and lay there three hours vainly asking the passers-by for help. They saw his star and refused.163

  The Rumanians were no better than the Austrians; worse in some ways. There were 757,000 Jews in pre-war Rumania, among the worst-treated in the world. The Rumanian government followed Hitler step by step in his anti-Jewish policy, with far less efficiency but added venom. From August 1940, laws stripped Jews of their possessions and jobs and subjected them to unpaid forced labour. There were pogroms too—in January 1941 170 Jews were murdered in Bucharest. The Rumanians played a major part in the invasion of Russia which for them was also a war against the Jews. They killed 200,000 Jews in Bessarabia. Jews were packed into cattle-trucks without food or water and shunted around with no particular destination. Or they were stripped of their clothes and taken on forced marches, some actually naked, others dressed only in newspapers. The Rumanian troops working with Einsatzgruppe D in southern Russia outraged even the Germans by their cruelty and their failure to bury the corpses of those they murdered. On 23 October 1941 the Rumanians carried out a general massacre of Jews in Odessa, after a land-mine destroyed their army HQ. The next day they herded crowds of Jews into four large warehouses, doused them with petrol and set them alight: between 20,000 and 30,000 were thus burned to death. With German agreement, they carved out the province of Transnistria from the Ukraine, as their own contribution to the Final Solution. In this killing area, 217,757. Jews were put to death (an estimated 130,000 from Russia, 87,757 from Rumania), the Rumanians dispatching 138,957 themselves.164 After the Germans and Austrians, the Rumanians were the biggest killers of Jews. They were more inclined to inflict beatings and torture, or to rape, the officers being worse than the men since they selected the prettiest Jewish girls for orgies. They were also more mercenary. After they shot Jews they sold the corpses to local peasants who stripped them of their clothes. They were willing to sell live Jews too if they could get enough cash for them. But from 1944 on their attitude became less bellicose as they realized the Allies would win.165

  In France too there was an important section of opinion willing to take an active part in Hitler’s Final Solution. It had never forgiven the Dreyfusard victory in 1906 and its hatred of the Jews was reinforced by the Blum Popular Front government of 1936. As in Germany, the anti-Semites included a great many intellectuals, especially writers. They included a doctor, F. L. Destouches, who wrote under the penname Céline. His anti-Semitic diatribe, Bagatelle pour un massacre (1937), written under his real name, was highly influential just before and during the war, arguing that France was already a country occupied (and as a woman raped) by Jews, and that a Hitlerian invasion would be a liberation. This extraordinary book resurrected a deep-seated notion that the English were in unholy alliance with Jews to destroy France. During the Dreyfus case the phrase ‘Oh Yes’, pronounced in an exaggerated English accent, was an anti-Semitic war-cry, and in Bagatelle Céline lists the slogans of the Anglo-Jewish world conspiracy: ‘Taratboum! Di! Yie! By gosh! Vive le Roi! Vivent les Lloyds! Vive Tahure! Vive la Cité! Vive Madame Simpson! Vive la Bible! Bordel de Dieu! Le monde est un lupanar juif!’166 There were no fewer than ten anti-Semitic political organizations in France, some of them funded by the Nazi government, calling for the destruction of the Jews. Mercifully they could not agree on a common policy. But their moment came when the Vichy government adopted an anti-Semitic policy. Darquier de Pellepoix, who had founded the Rassemblement Anti-Juif de France in 1938, became Vichy Commissaire-Général aux Questions Juifs in May 1942.167 Most of the French declined to collaborate with the Final Solution policy but those who did were more enthusiastic than the Germans. Thus Hitler contrived to kill 90,000 (26 per cent) of French Jews, and of the 75,000 deported from France, with the help of the French authorities, only 2,500 survived.168 There was a large element of personal hatred in French wartime anti-Semitism. In 1940, the Vichy and German authorities received between three and five million poison-pen letters denouncing particular individuals (not all of them Jews).169

  Hitler found his Italian ally much less co-operative. Since the end of the papal states, the Italian Jewish community had become one of the best-integrated in Europe. As King Victor Emmanuel III told Herzl (1904): ‘Jews may occupy any position, and they do…. Jews for us are full-blown Italians.’170 It was also one of the oldest in the world. Benito Mussolini liked to joke that Jews ‘supplied the clothes after the rape of the Sabine Women’. Jews had produced two Italian prime ministers and one war minister; they provided a disproportionately large number of university teachers, but also of generals and admirals.171 Mussolini himself oscillated all his life between philo-semitism and anti-Semitism. It was a group of Jews who helped to convert him to intervention in the First World War, the critical moment in his life when he broke with Marxist internationalism and became a national socialist. Five Jews were among the original founders of the fasci di combattimento in 1919 and Jews were active in every branch of the Fascist movement. The learned article on anti-Semitism in the Fascist Encyclopaedia was written by a Jewish scholar. Both Mussolini’s biographer, Margharita Sarfatti, and his Minister of Finance, Guido Jung, were Jews. When Hitler came to power, Mussolini set himself up as the European protector of the Jew and was hailed by Stefan Zweig as ‘wunderbar
Mussolini’.172

  Once the Duce fell under Hitler’s spell his anti-Semitic side became uppermost but it had no deep emotional roots. There was a definite anti-Semitic fringe within the Fascist Party and government but it was much less powerful than in the Vichy regime and seems to have had no popular support at all. Italy, in response to German pressure, introduced race laws in 1938 and when war came some Jews were interned in camps. But it was not until the Italian surrender in 1943 delivered half of Italy into German military control that Himmler was able to draw it into the Final Solution. On 24 September he sent instructions to his ss boss in Rome, Herbert Kappler, that all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, were to be rounded up and sent to Germany. But the German ambassador in Rome, whose Italian mistress was hiding a family of Jews in her home with his approval, gave no help and the military commander, Field-Marshal Kesselring, said he needed the Jews to build fortifications. Kappler used his order to blackmail the Jewish community. There was a gruesome, medieval scene in the German embassy, where he saw its two leaders, Dante Almansi and Ugo Foa, and demanded 50 kilos of gold within thirty-six hours; otherwise 200 Jews would be murdered. The two men asked to be allowed to pay in lire but Kappler sneered: ‘I can print as much of that as I want.’ The gold was delivered to the Gestapo within four days. Pope Pius XII offered to provide as much as was needed but by this time enough had been collected, many non-Jews, especially parish priests, contributing. A more serious loss was the most valuable volumes of Judaica in the community library, which went to swell Alfred Rosenberg’s private collection.

  Himmler, who wanted live Jews to kill, not treasure, was furious with Kappler and sent his round-up expert, Theodor Dannecker, with a team of forty-four ss killers, to conduct a Judenaktion; he had carried out similar ones in Paris and Sofia. The German ambassador to the Holy See warned the Pope, who ordered the Rome clergy to open sanctuaries. The Vatican sheltered 477 Jews and a further 4,238 found refuge in convents and monasteries. The raid was a failure. Kappler reported: ‘The anti-Semitic section of the people was nowhere to be seen during the action, only a great mass of people who in some cases tried to cut off the police from the Jews.’ But it yielded 1,007 Jews, who were sent straight to Auschwitz and all but sixteen were murdered.173 There were raids in other Italian towns, also largely frustrated by the Italians. One notable survivor was Bernard Berenson, the intensely bookish scion of a Lithuanian rabbinical family who, in a secular age, had become the world’s leading authority on Italian Renaissance painting. He was tipped off in code by the local police: ‘Dottore, the Germans want to come to your villa but we are not sure exactly where it is. Could you give us instructions for your visit tomorrow morning?’ The Italians hid him for the rest of the German occupation.174

  In other European states, the ss got little or no help. But this did not necessarily mean failure in rounding up Jews. In occupied Greece, without any local help, they murdered all but 2,000 of the ancient 60,000-strong Salonika Jewry. In Belgium, despite local resistance, they killed 40,000 out of 65,000 Jews and almost wiped out the famous diamond-trading quarter of Antwerp. The ss effort in the Netherlands was particularly fierce and unremitting and, although the Dutch went so far as to hold a general strike to protect the Jews, the total loss was 105,000 out of 140,000. The Finns, Germany’s ally, refused to yield up their 2,000 Jews. The Danes succeeded in ferrying almost their entire Jewish community of 5,000 into Sweden. On the other hand, the great Hungarian Jewry, the last to be sacrificed, lost heavily: 21,747 were murdered in Hungary, 596,260 were deported, of whom only 116,500 survived.175

  The mass murder of the Hungarians took place at a time when the Allies had complete air superiority and were advancing rapidly. It raised in acute, practical form the question: could the Allies have done anything effective to save European Jewry? The Russians were closest to the Holocaust but never showed the slightest desire to help the Jews in any way. On the contrary: Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian, who tried to save Jewish lives in Budapest, vanished when the Red Army arrived there, the Swedes being told: ‘measures have been taken by the Soviet military authorities to protect Mr Raoul Wallenberg and his belongings’. He was never seen again.176

  The British and American governments were in theory sympathetic to the Jews but in practice were terrified that any aggressively pro-Jewish policy would provoke Hitler into a mass expulsion of Jews whom they would then be morally obliged to absorb. For the Nazis, emigration was always one element in the Final Solution, and although the balance of evidence seems to show that Hitler was determined to murder Jews rather than export them, he was quite capable of modifying his policy to embarrass the Allies if they gave him the opportunity. Goebbels wrote in his diary, 13 December 1942: ‘I believe both the British and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff.’ This was not true. But neither power was prepared to save Jewish lives by accepting large numbers of refugees. Of all the major European powers, Britain was the least anti-Semitic in the 1930s. Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt movement, founded in 1932, was a failure, not least because it attacked Jews. The government feared, however, that widespread anti-Semitism would be the inevitable result of a mass immigration of Jews. Nor were they prepared to budge from the immigration restrictions laid down in the 1939 White Paper for Palestine. Winston Churchill, always a Zionist, favoured a larger Jewish intake. But his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, argued that to open up Palestine would alienate all Britain’s Arab allies there and destroy her military position in the Middle East. When the New York Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise asked him in Washington (27 March 1943) to support an Anglo-American plea to Germany to let the Jews leave occupied Europe, Eden told him the idea was ‘fantastically impossible’. But he privately confessed: ‘Hitler might well take us up on any such offer.’177 The Foreign Office were against taking Jews and resented even Jewish requests to this effect: ‘A disproportionate amount of the time of this office’, minuted one senior official, ‘is wasted in dealing with these wailing Jews.’178

  The United States could certainly have accommodated large numbers of Jewish refugees. In fact during the war period only 21,000 were admitted, 10 per cent of the number allowed under the quota law. The reason for this was public hostility. All the patriotic groups, from the American Legion to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, called for a total ban on immigration. There was more anti-Semitism during the war than at any time in American history. The polls showed, 1938-45, that 35-40 per cent of the population would have backed anti-Jewish laws. In 1942, according to the polls, the Jews were seen as a bigger threat to America than any other group after Japanese and Germans. In 1942-4, for instance, every synagogue in New York’s Washington Heights was desecrated.179 News of the extermination programme was available from May 1942, when the Polish Jewish Labour Bund got verified reports to the two Jewish members of the Polish National Committee in London. This included descriptions of the gas vans at Chelmno and the figure of 700,000 Jews already murdered. The Boston Globe gave it the headline ‘Mass Murders of Jews in Poland Pass 700,000 Mark’ but buried the story on page 12. The New York Times called it ‘probably the greatest mass slaughter in history’ but gave it only two inches.180 In general the Holocaust news was under reported and tended to get lost in the general wartime din of horror stories. But there was also great resistance in America to accepting the fact of the Holocaust, even when the US army broke into the camp areas. James Agee, writing in the Nation, refused to watch the atrocity films and denounced them as propaganda. The GIS were furious when people back home refused to believe what they had seen or even look at their photos.181

  A major obstacle to action was F.D. Roosevelt himself. He was both anti-Semitic, in a mild way, and ill informed. When the topic came up at the Casablanca Conference, he spoke of ‘the understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50 per cent of the lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers,
college professors in Germany were Jews’ (the actual figures were 16.3, 10.9, 2.6 and 0.5 per cent).182 Roosevelt seems to have been guided purely by domestic political considerations. He had nearly 90 per cent of the Jewish vote anyway and felt no spur to act. Even after the full facts of systematic extermination became available, the President did nothing for fourteen months. A belated Anglo-American conference on the issue was held in Bermuda in April 1943, but Roosevelt took no interest in it, and it decided that nothing of consequence could be done. Indeed it specifically warned ‘that no approach be made to Hitler for the release of potential refugees’.183 In the end, a War Refugee Board was created. It had little help from the government and 90 per cent of its funds came from Jewish sources. But it did contrive to save 200,000 Jews, plus 20,000 non-Jews.

  The question of bombing the gas chambers was raised in the early summer of 1944, when the destruction of the Hungarian Jews got under way. Churchill in particular was horrified and keen to act. The killing, he minutes, ‘is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world’. He instructed Eden, 7 July 1944: ‘Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.’184 An operation was feasible. An oil-refining complex 47 miles from Auschwitz was attacked no less than ten times between 7 July and 20 November 1944 (by which point the Holocaust was complete and Himmler ordered the death machinery to be destroyed). On 20 August 127 Flying Fortresses bombed the Auschwitz factory area less than five miles to the east of the gas chambers.185 Whether bombing would have saved Jewish lives cannot be proved. The ss were fanatically persistent in killing Jews, whatever the physical and military obstacles. It was certainly worth trying. But Churchill was its only real supporter in either government. Both the air forces hated military operations not directed to destroying enemy forces or war potential. The US War Department rejected the plan without even examining its feasibility.