Death of a Nation
Page 55
At the turn of the twentieth century, there was no shortage of nations in Europe with appalling records of anti-Semitism that posed as likely reservoirs for renewed genocides against the Jews. At the Versailles Peace Conference following the First World War, John Maynard Keynes famously said that the only economic activity in a newly reconstituted Poland would be ‘Jew baiting’, implicitly referring to the fact that Poland and Russia, along with most of Eastern Europe in general, were synonymous with rabid anti-Semitism.(9)
During the inter-war period, extreme authoritarian and/or Fascist governments in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia introduced anti-Semitic legislation.(10) Anti-Semitism fell on the most fruitful ground in Poland, where again the Church took the lead in preparing the path, first for ever-greater grass roots action, and then for governmental persecution of its Jewish citizens. Anti-Semitic appeals came right from the head of the Catholic Church in Poland, Cardinal Hlond, who openly spoke about what he termed the ‘Jewish Problem’. His utterances included comments such as, ‘It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church… that they are the advanced guard of Godlessness, the Bolshevik movement and of subversive actions. It is a fact that Jewish influence upon public morals is to be condemned and that their publishing houses distribute pornography. It is true that they are swindlers, profiteers and are actively engaged in prostitution…’(11) Hlond and the Church used their network of thousands of pulpits to rail against the Jews, and although they did not condone the use of violence against them, they created an atmosphere in which more radical anti-Semites flourished. The Church, and later the Polish government, forced large swathes of the Jewish community into abject poverty by calling for boycotts on trade with them, or buying goods from their shops, or reading books and papers from their publishing houses.
After the death of Polish leader Marshal Józef Piłsudski in 1935, the government became increasingly anti-Semitic. Between 1935–36, a new wave of pogroms was unleashed in over 150 towns in Poland, killing hundreds of Jews.(12) Jewish shops were targeted, as were Jewish students at Polish universities, whose numbers declined dramatically from 20.4 per cent of the university population in 1928, to 9.9 per cent in 1938.(13) The Jewish community in Poland made up 10 per cent of the total population, but they were concentrated in the big cities where they often represented more than 30 per cent of the population.
In the period from 1937 to the outbreak of the Second World War, the Polish state stopped employing Jews, and professional associations did the same, which further curtailed the financial viability of the Jewish community in Poland. The Polish National Democrats had long sought a more radical solution, namely the expulsion of the Jews altogether, aiming to deport them to Palestine. In January 1937, negotiations began between the French and Polish governments about the practicalities of shipping Polish Jews to the French colony of Madagascar. The French government sent an investigative commission, which included two Jewish members, to the island. Elements of the Polish media and government portrayed this as a positive and realistic possibility. Discussions continued well into 1938, ignoring the pessimistic summary of the Jews who had been sent to the island as part of the commission.(14)
Anti-Semitism in France, which had a history stretching back to the Crusades, came back into public prominence during the 1894 Dreyfuss Affair, in which a Jewish officer in the French army was convicted, on falsified evidence, of being a German spy. The trial polarised French society and brought to the fore the widespread and deep-rooted anti-Semitism within France. This was only exacerbated when the evidence was proved to have been a fabrication and Dreyfuss had to be reinstated, much to the chagrin of the anti-Semites.
The Polish Prime Minister, Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, and Cardinal Hlond both supported and encouraged continued efforts to accelerate Jewish immigration out of Poland. On 20th September 1938 in view of the Polish government’s obvious anti-Semitism, Adolf Hitler suggested to Józef Lipski, the Polish Ambassador to Berlin, that, together with Romania and Hungary, they could resolve the ‘Jewish question’ and seek deportation of Europe’s Jews to an overseas colony. Lipski replied that such a plan would be worthy of a nice memorial in Warsaw.ccvii (15)
The worst excesses of anti-Semitism in pre-war Germany had been held on a leash while the world’s media spotlight was focused on Germany during the Summer Olympic Games in 1936. However, no sooner than they were over, a meeting was organised at the Interior Ministry of the Reich on 29th September 1936, with the aim of removing all of Germany’s Jews. This meeting not only sought to continue the economic and political persecution of Germany’s Jews, but also began discussing the ‘final goal’ of their ‘forced emigration’.(16) At the end of October 1938, German authorities expelled all Polish citizens of Jewish origin from Germany. These totalled around 17,000 people and included the famous literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who returned to Germany after the war and who remains a household name in Germany today. Many of these Jewish families had originally come to Prussia from the parts of Poland taken over by Russia during the partitions. The Polish government did not want them, and neither did their media, so when they were expelled, they were stuck in no-man’s-land between the German and Polish borders for days. The Polish government finally decided to intern them, under appalling conditions, in abandoned army barracks at Zbaszyn, where they remained until the outbreak of war.
The reluctance of the Poles to take the Jews who were fleeing Nazi Germany was mirrored by other states. From 1937 onwards, the tide of Jews leaving Germany rose dramatically as the murderous Nazi onslaught against the Jews in Germany continually increased. After the Reichskristallnacht pogrom of 9th November 1938 it became abundantly clear to many who remained in Germany that they had a precarious future at best. Desperate German Jews began to seek refuge abroad, in any country that would take them. France had been receiving an influx of German Jewish refugees but was making them increasingly unwelcome. Ever more Draconian measures were introduced, peaking under the premiership of Pierre-Étienne Flandin in November 1938. France introduced a law seeking the immediate removal of immigrant Jews, which even went as far as removing the citizenship rights of those to whom they had previously been issued. Professional associations in France, feeling threatened by the arrival of so many talented and qualified Jews from Germany, also lobbied the French government to have Jews barred from professions such as law and medicine. Right-wing groups such as the Action Française and Croix de Feu became increasingly anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism in France was not confined to the margins of society. In 1936, when the People’s Front, led by Leon Blum, was elected to power, Xavier Vallat (the man who would be in charge of ‘Jewish Affairs’ in the coming Vichy government) made the following speech in the French Parliament:
Mr Prime Minister, your seizure of power is, without a shadow of doubt, an historic occasion. For the first time this ancient Gallo-Roman land is being governed by a Jew. I dare to say this out loud, that which the people are thinking in their innermost thoughts; it would be better to put at the pinnacle of power of this nation a man… whose roots belong in this soil, rather than a subtle Talmudist.(17)
And there were many on the right who came to see the ‘threat from the Jewish Communist left’ as a greater threat than that posed by the Third Reich.(18)
Less than a month after the November 1938 Reichkristallnacht, during which synagogues had been burned and hundreds of Jews had been murdered, the French Foreign Secretary, George Bonnet, did not hesitate to welcome the German Foreign Minster, Joachim von Ribbentrop to Paris on 7th December. Furthermore, he took the opportunity of impressing on Ribbentrop that, ‘The French government simply cannot take any more Jews,’ which led to the French and Nazi governments discussing the possibility of shipping Jews to France’s colony in Madagascar. The French appeared to be the willing conduit to send any and all of Europe’s Jews to a far-off island off the coast of Africa.(19) Hitler continued to entertain the idea of sending Europe’s Jews to Madagascar un
til 1941. In the interim, the Third Reich continued any and all means to ‘encourage’ Jewish immigration out of Germany to the Holy Land and anywhere else they could emigrate to. To this end, Nazi Germany had even been willing to sign the Haavara Agreementccviii with representatives of the Zionist movement in Germany and Palestine, to facilitate Jewish emigration to what became Israel.
Those German Jews who were enticed to leave for Palestine soon discovered that the Zionist propaganda of ‘a land without people for a people without land’ was far from the truth. The Arabs, who were already fighting against British forces in charge of the colony, came into increasing conflict with the steady flow of Jewish refugees arriving there. One German Jewish immigrant arriving in Jerusalem in 1938 wrote:
It looked and smelled like an oriental city: small houses, often derelict, dusty streets full of merchants advertising their wares, and donkeys braying. There were open spaces between the houses where rubbish had been dumped, very few trees and no grass. Jerusalem was divided by ethnic origin — Arabs in the old city, neighbourhoods of Orthodox Jews, and districts where Jews from oriental countries lived. Rehavia, on the other hand was a middle-class garden suburb mainly inhabited by German Jews. They had small gardens and lots of trees. They often owned a grand piano, read Goethe and played Schubert. In all, it was a population that had come from all over the world, with a bewildering variety of languages, clothes and customs. But however much the various groups might dislike and distrust each other, they all united in hating the yekkes, as Jews from Germany were called… or ‘Hitler Zionists’, people who had merely come to save their own skins, not out of a deep Zionist conviction.(21)
After everything Germany’s Jews had lost and left behind, and would lose as the Holocaust swung into full gear, what an unbearable prejudice that must have been; many left Palestine and moved on as soon the war was over and it was safe to do so.
The Peel Commission, set up by the British government in 1937, had toyed with the idea of dividing their colony of Palestine in two, with a northern Arab state and a southern Jewish state, but this had led to uproar and protests among the Arab community in Palestine. In the spring of 1939, Great Britain closed the door on the emigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine and gave no thought to alternatives.ccix Increasingly no nation was willing to take the large numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. As early as 1924, the United States had legislated the National Origin Quota and a new immigration act seeking to stem the flow of immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe. In the inter-war years, anti-Semitic prejudice was far from uncommon in the United States. Jews were barred from membership of many private clubs and golf courses, and there were no shortage of openly anti-Semitic establishment figures. Henry Ford was so taken with the ‘Protocols of the Elder of Zion’, which portrayed the Bolshevik revolution as a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, that he printed and distributed a further 500,000 copies. His own newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, was also not short on anti-Semitic articles. Ford then went on to publish further anti-Semitic diatribes in the four volume pamphlet The International Jew and started making generous donations to the Nazi Party. The radio speeches of Father Coughlin helped stoke the fires of anti-Semitism further, as did the comments of Louis T. McFadden, chairman of the US House Committee on Banking and Currency. While the US was imposing immigration quotas, the Wagner-Rogers Child Refugee Bill attempted to grant 20,000 Jewish children entry into the United States. However this bill was rejected in the Senate. The most infamous case of Jewish refugees being turned away from the US was the so-called ‘Voyage of the Damned’, when SS St Louis, a ship carrying 907 Jews sought refuge and was turned away by both Cuba and the United States. They were eventually allowed to disembark in Great Britain, where the Daily Mail welcomed them with the headline, ‘This example cannot set a precedent. There is no more room for refugees.’(22)
Throughout 1940, even after the war began, Hitler and Himmler continued to discuss the practicalities of deporting Jews from Germany and their occupied territories to Madagascar. They also made use of a provision in the agreement made with Vichy France, following France’s surrender, which allowed them to deport Jews in Alsace-Lorraine (which was to again become part of the Reich) to France, and in October 1940, when the state of Baden and the Saar were merged into one new Reich region with Alsace-Lorraine, they shipped Jews from these two German states to France as well. Vichy France was becoming the dumping ground and intended transit point for the Jews of the expanded Reich.ccx (23)
Far from there being a plan with a timetable for the extermination of the Jews in German-occupied Europe, the regime showed signs of prevarication during the first two years of the war. On 21st October 1941 in a meeting with the Croatian Marshal Slavko Kvaternik, Hitler made his last recorded statement regarding the deportation of Jews to a colony or to northern Russia now that Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union was underway.ccxi (24) Whether you believe that Hitler had planned the extermination of the Jews from the very outset, or that a process of cumulative radicalisation in his thinking had taken place over the course of the regime’s time in power, the organised mass slaughter of the Jews of Eastern Europe had begun before Hitler made this statement. The SS Einsatzgruppen (extermination squads) followed hot on the heels of the German invasion of the Soviet Union and immediately began a process of making the areas behind the lines Judenfrei (free of Jews). The most appalling butchery took place between June 1941 and April 1942 as entire communities were rounded up, forced to dig their own graves, strip naked and were either forced to lie on the bodies of their family, friends and neighbours before being shot in the back of the head, or they were shot at the edge of the pits.
The following rather matter-of-fact statement by a member of the SS Einsatzgruppen captured by Russian authorities describes the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Borissov in Byelorussia between 19th and 20th October 1941; it illustrates the sheer horror and barbarism unleashed by the Nazi extermination squads. According to the full statement, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst — the intelligence and security body of the SS and Nazi Party) had appointed a man named David Ehof to lead the extermination; he had mobilised around 200 police, mainly Latvians, for the purpose. Ehof’s statement reads:
I sealed off the ghetto during the night of the 19th/20th October, with additional guards. By this time three graves had been dug near the airfield about two kilometres from Borissov by prisoners of war under the direction of the Secret Field Police. They were about four hundred metres long, three metres wide and up to two metres deep and were intended for burying the corpses. Early on the morning of the 19th October, we assembled the police, who were not yet sober, in front of the security administration building and explained to them that we were now going to begin shooting all the Jews in the ghetto… The police broke into the Jewish houses, chased the people into the square in the centre of the ghetto, drove them into vehicles by force and transported them to the place of execution. There was no mercy shown either to old people, children, pregnant women, or the sick. Anyone who offered resistance was shot on the spot on my orders…
The people who had been brought to the place of execution were placed about fifty metres from the graves and guarded until it was their turn to be shot. Twenty or twenty-five people at a time were led to the place of execution, to the graves. At the graves they were undressed; they even had their good quality underclothes torn from their bodies. Having been completely undressed they were driven to the graves and forced to lie face down. The police and Germans shot them with rifles and automatic weapons. In this way more and more groups were driven to the graves and shot. They too were made to lie face down on the corpses of those who had been previously shot. At the place of execution there were snacks and schnapps. The police drank schnapps and had a snack at intervals between shooting the groups of Jews and then got back to their bloody work in a state of intoxication. I arrived at the place of execution at about eleven o’clock in the morning and saw an incredible sight �
�� the place of execution was filled with groans and cries and the continual shrieks of horror of the women and children. The dehumanised and drunken policemen beat those that offered resistance, who did not step to the edge of the grave, with rifle butts and kicked them. The children were thrown into the graves and shot there. During the first few minutes this horrific picture even shook me, although by then I had shot hundreds of people. I was roused from this mood of uncertainty and depression, which had gripped me against my will under the impression of what I had seen, by the official of the Minsk SD, Kraffe, who accused me of sympathising with the Jews. The police who had been egged on by me, Kraffe, and the other SD officials exterminated no fewer than 7,000 people on the first day of the mass shootings.(26)
By December 1941, all the Jews of the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania had been largely exterminated. By June 1942, 750,000 Jews had been shot in the back of the head and buried in unmarked mass graves.(27) On 20th January 1942, a conference took place in a luxury villa that had been requisitioned from a wealthy German Jewish family, on the Berlin lakeside resort of Wannsee. The conference was chaired by SS Reichsführer Reinhard Heydrich, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and it finally closed the door on any further talk of Jewish emigration. Rather, there was to be a ‘Final Solution’, which took the form of the accelerated extermination of Europe’s Jews by means of industrial mass murder.
WHY?
The sheer inhumanity of the Holocaust is barely describable. Confronted with its horrors, the most common question is simply ‘why?’ Impossible as it is to explain ‘why’, there is an incumbent responsibility on humanity for future generations to remember the Holocaust, but also to try and learn from it, to understand which forces led to one of the greatest crimes in the history of mankind. To that end, a number of underlying themes in the history of anti-Semitism have emerged that clearly need to be highlighted. The fact that the Nazis unleashed the Holocaust during their conquest of Eastern Europe, where anti-Semitism was so deep rooted, seems no accident; it is where all the extermination camps were built, and where the SS death squads found an abundance of willing executioners.