This decree had been received by the Military Command in Paris and transmitted in the following terms: ‘The Reichsführer SS has given orders that the emigration of Jews from Germany and the occupied territories has to be prevented on principle.’
In charge of Jewish affairs in Occupied France was SS Obersturmführer Dannecker. In 1941 he drew up a voluminous report entitled, ‘The Jewish Question in France and its Treatment.’ This gave a preliminary survey of the problem in that country and categorically stated that the final solution of the Jewish question was the objective of the SD and SIPO services who were handling the matter.
Further sections dealt with the history of the Jews in France and their organization and then the report went on to deal with the importance of a campaign against ‘leading Jewish personages’. ‘From a study of the records collected in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland,’ states the report, ‘it was possible to conclude that the centre of Judaism in Europe, and the chief lines of communication to overseas, must be sought in France. Realizing this, the offices of great Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress have been searched and sealed.’
A great bond is stated by Dannecker to exist in France between Catholicism and Judaism and as evidence of this he produced the results of searches made in the homes of the Rothschild family, Georges Mandel former Minister for the Colonies, the Press Attache to the British Embassy, and Maîtres Moro-Giafferi and Torres of the French Bar.
Seven months later Dannecker issued a further report which shows that there had been a marked speed-up in dealing with the Jewish problem since the first report had been issued.
The headings of various sections of the second report bear witness to the quickening rhythm. ‘Task of the SIPO and SD in France’—’Card Index of Jews’—’French Commission for Jewish Questions’—’The French Anti-Jewish Police’.
These titles show that the Gestapo net was closing round French Jewry, that all Jews now had police dossiers, that there was co-ordination on this subject between the Occupying Power and Vichy and that the hated Milice had a special branch to deal with Jews.
In the spring of that year the first deportations of Jews began and all were deprived of their French nationality before leaving. By June, over 100,000 had been deported. In order to conceal their real purpose, which was forced labour until no longer fit for work and then the gas chamber, these deportations were called ‘Jewish resettlement’. Following a further conference between Dannecker and RSHA, new directives for the deportation of Jews from France were issued. In these they were merely referred to as ‘Jewish livestock’.
By the end of October 1942 over 50,000 had been deported from the Occupied Zone, but the pace did not satisfy the authorities who were also anxious to include Jews from the Unoccupied Zone.
At further conferences Vichy was told that most of the other European countries were much nearer to a final solution of the Jewish problem than France was, and that she must make up the leeway. The German authorities at the same time expressed their dissatisfaction at the attitude of Italians towards the deportation of Jews from that part of France which was under Italian Occupation. The Italians had indeed strongly opposed this policy and Ribbentrop was instructed to discuss the situation with the Duce.
Large numbers of the Jews who were being deported had been sent to Auschwitz. For a time deportation to the Government General had been suspended, but it was meanwhile decided that as soon as these convoys could be resumed, trainloads of children could also be despatched.
The Nazis tried by every means to conceal this practice and to create the impression that entire families were sent out of France together. To further this deception they arranged that adults and children should both be included in the convoys in fixed proportions.
This was one of their deportation instructions: ‘The Jews arriving from the Unoccupied Zone will be mingled at Drancy with Jewish children now at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, so that out of a total of 700 at least 300 will be children. According to instructions from RSHA no trains containing Jewish children only are to leave.’
The treatment of Jews in the Netherlands was no less severe and Seyss-Inquart as Reich Commissioner for Holland was relentless in his attitude towards them. In a speech made in Amsterdam early in 1941 he said: ‘The Jews for us are not Dutch. They are those enemies with whom we can come to neither an armistice nor a peace…. We will beat the Jews wherever we meet them and those who join them must bear the consequences. The Führer has declared that the Jews have played their final act in Europe and they have, therefore, played their final act.’
A series of anti-semitic decrees was then promulgated subjecting all Jews to the usual humiliating disabilities. They were deprived of their property rights and of their civic liberties. They were forced to register their businesses, including any firm or partnership which had a predominant Jewish interest, and the occupation authorities could arbitrarily terminate the employment contract of any Jew.
All the above were merely the preliminary measures which later enabled the German occupation authorities to put their programme of wholesale deportation into operation.
Of a total of 140,000 Jews residing in Holland at the time of the Nazi invasion over 115,000 were deported to Poland where the ultimate fate of the majority was never in doubt. Two thousand others were sent to Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps whence, after cremation, their ashes were despatched to their families against payment of 75 guilders.
The Jews of Hungary suffered a similar fate. In 1944 more than 200,000 Jews were rounded up and many of them loaded into railway trucks and sent to extermination camps.
Accompanying the German occupying troops on their arrival in Budapest was another Einsatzkommando of the SIPO whose task, as in the other countries in which they operated, was to liquidate Hungarian Jews. In command was SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Aichmann, a senior official from RSHA. The unit arrested all the leaders of Jewish political and business circles in Hungary, together with journalists and all democratic and ‘anti-fascist’ politicians.
Of the Hungarian Jews who were sent to Auschwitz, children up to the age of fourteen, people over fifty years of age, the sick and those with criminal records, were transported in specially marked waggons. All were sent to the gas chamber immediately after their arrival in the camp. The Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, admitted putting to death about 40,000 Hungarian Jews during the summer of 1944.
This dreary catalogue of murders could be continued but it would always be the same old story. Registration, segregation, humiliation, degradation, deportation, exploitation, and extermination. These were the milestones on the road of suffering along which these luckless Jews made their last journey.
To those who have never heard the tramp of the jackboot along the village street or the Gestapo knocking at their door; who have not seen fifty of their friends and neighbours shot in the market place as a reprisal for the ambush of a single German despatch rider: whose sons and daughters have not been taken away from their homes in the dead of night and never seen again, to such people all this cannot but seem incredible and unreal.
The murder by the Germans of over five million European Jews constitutes the greatest crime in world history. That the total Jewish population of Europe was not exterminated is due solely to the fact that the Nazis lost the war before they could bring their ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ to its conclusion.
1 A pornographic and anti-Semitic newspaper edited by Streicher.
2 This ‘Jew’ was a cloud of smoke which had been touched up in the photograph to resemble the face of a Jew.
1 The Black Corps—named after their black uniforms.
1 Treblinka Extermination Camp No. 2.
2 Some of them appear as illustrations to this book.
1 Report from RSHA to the Führer, dated 2nd October, 1941.
1 Vol. II, Oppenheim’s International Law, 6th Edition. Ed. by Lauterpacht.
2 The evidence of
von Dem Bach—Zelewski. 7th January, 1946.
1 The Swastika—called by the French ‘La Croix Gammée’.
2 Another euphemism for extermination.
1 So named after Otto Abetz.
EPILOGUE
THERE was one concentration camp which in 1945, when it had been swept clean of its deathly garbage, could be visited by the general public. This was at Dachau, not far from Munich, and a visitor to it came away with a memory he could never forget.
The only prisoners he saw there were Germans accused of committing war crimes and awaiting trial or discharge. Each one of these lived in comfort in a light airy cell, had electric lighting, and in winter central heating, a bed, a table, a chair, and books. Well fed and sleek they looked, and on their faces was a look of slight astonishment. They must indeed have wondered where they were.
Leaving the living quarters now so clean and tidy, the visitor crossed to the other side of the camp where the crematorium compound was situated. There, in good preservation, was the whole machinery of death which for so long had been used to get rid of those who had dared to cross the Führer’s path.
Gone were the corpses which once lay in the annexe waiting their turn to be burnt when the gas chamber killed more than the ovens could hold: gone too were the queues of hapless humans waiting outside in the changing room for their turn to enter the lethal chamber. Gone they were for ever; but their ghosts remained and their memories filled the air.
But there, clean and swept, still for all to see was the room where the victims undressed, the gas chamber itself with the peep-hole through which the operator watched for the last death agony so that he could switch on the electric fan to clear the air of its deathly fumes, the adjacent crematorium, and the iron-wheeled stretchers by which the corpses were brought to the oven’s mouth, the little room where bodies lay piled up ceiling-high and where the marks of their feet could still be seen on the plaster walls, the machine for grinding bones to make them into fertilizer for the adjoining farm-lands, and the room where the ashes were stored.
As the visitor passed through these rooms and surveyed the scene of so much suffering and tragedy, the stench of rotting bodies and the smell of burning flesh seemed to rise to his nostrils, and as he came out into the clean fresh air and raised his eyes towards the heavens to clear away this haunting vision of evil, what did he see? Nailed to a pole on the crematorium roof, a little rustic nesting box for wild birds, placed there by some schizophrenic SS man.
Then and then only was it possible to understand why the nation which gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, Schiller and Schubert, gave it also Auschwitz and Belsen, Ravensbrück and Dachau.
APPENDIX
The German Soldier’s Ten Commandments
[Printed in every German soldier’s paybook].
1. While fighting for victory the German soldier will observe the rules of chivalrous warfare. Cruelties and senseless destruction are below his standard.
2. Combatants will be in uniform or will wear specially introduced and clearly distinguishable badges. Fighting in plain clothes or without such badges is prohibited.
3. No enemy who has surrendered will be killed, including partisans and spies. They will be duly punished by courts.
4. P.O.W. will not be ill-treated or insulted. While arms, maps, and records are to be taken away from them, their personal belongings will not be touched.
5. Dum-Dum bullets are prohibited, also no other bullets may be transformed into Dum-Dum.
6. Red Cross Institutions are sacrosanct. Injured enemies are to be treated in a humane way. Medical personnel and Army chaplains may not be hindered in the execution of their medical, or clerical activities.
7. The civilian population is sacrosanct. No looting nor wanton destruction is permitted to the soldier. Landmarks of historical value or buildings serving religious purposes, art, science, or charity are to be especially respected. Deliveries in kind made as well as services rendered by the population may only be claimed if ordered by superiors and only against compensation.
8. Neutral territory will neither be entered nor passed over by planes, nor shot at; it will not be the object of warlike activities of any kind.
9. If a German soldier is made a prisoner of war he will tell his name and rank if he is asked for it. Under no circumstances will he reveal to which unit he belongs, nor will he give any information about German military, political, and economical conditions. Neither promises nor threats may induce him to do so.
10. Offences against the a/m matters of duty will be punished. Enemy offences against the principles under i to 8 are to be reported. Reprisals are only permissible on order of higher Commands.
The Scourge of the Swastika Page 27