Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (28 page)

Soviet law was applied retroactively in occupied Estonia, under the logic that the Estonian state not only did not exist, but had never existed. State service in the 1920s and 1930s was thus considered a crime. In what quickly became Soviet Estonia, the new Soviet authorities carried out some four hundred executions, and were preparing mass deportations as the German armed forces assembled to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. On the night of June 14, the Soviet NKVD deported about 10,200 Estonian citizens, one percent of the entire population (and about ten percent of the Jewish minority, which was hugely overrepresented in Soviet repressions). A few days later, as German forces raced north through the Baltics to Estonia, the Soviets were shooting Estonian prisoners and leaving their corpses in the prisons.

The Germans arrived in Estonia in early July 1941 with their handpicked Estonians. As in Lithuania and Latvia, the Soviet occupation of Estonia had forced thousands of people to flee the country, many to Berlin. This left the Germans their choice of future collaborators. Many Estonians wished to return; the Germans could choose the ones they saw as most useful to their own purposes. The double occupation, here as elsewhere, meant a double filtering of the political elite. The Soviets destroyed the former ruling class; the Germans now prevented anyone who did not seem sufficiently pliable from returning. Naturally, the Nazi selection excluded the political Left and Center. As elsewhere that summer, the Germans could exploit moral, material, and political resources created by the Soviet occupation.

As in Latvia and Lithuania, the political resource in Estonia was especially abundant. An entire state had been destroyed in humiliating and vicious fashion only a year earlier, so people were prepared for personal and political redemption. By July 1941, when
Einsatzgruppe
A reached Estonia, the Germans had perfected their argument that the liberation that they offered was from Jews and that local participation in such liberation was a precondition to political negotiations. As in Lithuania and Latvia, locals in Estonia served as translators of this message, adding the element that the Germans themselves would not have understood: that if Estonians collaborated with the second (German) occupier, their first (Soviet) collaboration would be forgotten. No pogroms of Jews took place in Estonia, nor were such seen as necessary by the Germans.

Double collaboration was quite widespread. Some of the Estonian anti-Soviet partisans known as the Home Guard killed Jews; the most zealous killers among those partisans were Estonian communists who had switched sides as the German invasion began in order to clear their names. The Estonian policemen who had collaborated in the Soviet deportations of Estonians and Jews now carried out the German murder of Estonians and Jews. Whereas the Soviets deported about ten thousand Estonian citizens, including about 450 Jews, under German occupation some ten thousand Estonian citizens were executed, among them 963 Jews. From the local perpetrator’s perspective the work was not entirely different.

Former employees of the Soviet NKVD were especially significant in the mass murder of Jews in Estonia. Ain-Ervin Mere, for example, was an NKVD agent and director of a special department of the Estonian Rifle Corps, a Soviet unit that was supposed to defend Soviet Estonia from capitalist invasion. Instead he joined the Estonian Security Police under the Germans, serving as its commander from May 1942 through March 1943. The Estonian Security Police was the major agency charged with the murder of Jews. From April 1943 through the end of the war, Mere was a battalion commander in a
Waffen-
SS division. Ervin Viks, an Estonian policeman in the interwar period, worked for the NKVD in 1940 and 1941. Then he joined the Estonian Security Police under the Germans, where he ordered hundreds of executions of Jews and non-Jews. Alexander Viidik had served in the Estonian Political Police before the war, then offered his services to the Soviet NKVD in 1940. After the German invasion he worked for the SD, the intelligence section of the SS, where he recruited his former Soviet contacts.

In Estonia, as everywhere else, the people who killed Jews under the German occupation also killed others. In occupied Lithuania, the policemen who took part in the shooting of more than 150,000 Jews in 1941 also guarded the camps where a similar number of Soviet prisoners of war starved. In Latvia, the commando that murdered the country’s Jews also killed psychiatric patients and Belarusian civilians. Because there were very few Jews in Estonia, the murder of non-Jews was relatively more important than elsewhere. All of the 963 Estonian Jews murdered under German occupation were killed by Estonians, usually policemen. About ten times as many non-Jewish Estonians were also killed by those same Estonian policemen.

In Denmark almost everything was different. Unlike other northern European states such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the Kingdom of Denmark shared no border with the Soviet Union, was not subject to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and was not occupied by the Red Army. When the Second World War began with a German-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Denmark was not involved. It suffered no Soviet invasion; its elites were untouched by Soviet practices of mass shooting and deportation. The political resource that was generated in Estonia could not be created in Denmark, since the Danish state was never destroyed. No double collaboration could be expected when there was only one occupation.

The German occupation of Denmark, when it came in April 1940, was mild. Denmark was, for Germany, neither an ideological enemy nor a racial target, and its territory was invaded for straightforward military reasons. The Germans did not declare, as they had already in Poland and would soon in the USSR, that the state they had attacked no longer existed. On the contrary, the German occupation proceeded on the explicit basis of Danish sovereignty. The Germans made clear that they did not “aim at disturbing the territorial integrity or the political independence of the Kingdom of Denmark.” King Christian remained in Copenhagen and ruled as head of state. Democratic elections continued, parliament functioned, and governments changed according to the wishes of Danes. After 1941, during the unexpectedly long and fruitless German campaign in the East, Denmark’s main task in the German empire was to provide food. Six thousand Danish men did serve in the
Waffen
-SS, some of them in the
Wiking
division alongside Estonians.

When the Final Solution was extended westward from the occupied Soviet Union to the rest of Europe in 1942, this created a problem in German-Danish relations. Danish authorities understood that yielding Jewish citizens to Germany would compromise Danish sovereignty. In December 1942, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued a warning that collaborators in the German crime of killing Jews would face consequences after the war. Sovereign governments, such as the Danish one, were in a position to heed such warnings. In early 1943, after the German surrender at Stalingrad, the tide of the war turned visibly against Germany. Copenhagen had ever less reason to participate in the Final Solution, while German authorities had ever less reason to alienate the Danes.

The elimination of the Jews nevertheless remained a constant priority in Berlin, and for Werner Best, the leader of the Nazi occupation authority in Denmark. In his initial communications with Berlin, Best maintained that a Final Solution in Denmark was impractical, since it would violate the constitution and lead to the fall of the government. This would force a massive German intervention and disrupt the favorable equilibrium that had been attained. But when the Danish government fell for other reasons, Best saw the opportunity to kill the Jews. It could be done, he thought, in the interval of instability, before a new government was formed. He made the appropriate proposal to Berlin in early September 1943.

There was a will but there was not a way. Rudolf Mildner was assigned to Copenhagen as the head of the Security Police and SD on September 20. He came directly from Katowice, in occupied Poland, where he had been the Gestapo chief with responsibility for Auschwitz. In other words, he was hardly a man without experience in the mass murder of Jews. Yet what he saw in Copenhagen convinced him that a Final Solution, at least of the sort that had been achieved in the stateless zone, was impossible in Denmark. He was confronted in Copenhagen with institutions that had been abolished further east: a sovereign state, political parties with convictions and support, local civil society in various forms, a police force that could not be expected to cooperate. Other German authorities had already drawn much the same conclusion. The local army commander refused to support the German police in any action against Jews. The local naval commander sent all of his ships for repairs on the day chosen for the roundup of Jews, October 2, 1943, so that the coast would be clear for whatever the Danes would wish to do. He also informed Social Democratic politicians of the date, and they in turn informed Danish Jews.

Denmark’s neighbor Sweden, neutral in the war but complicit in the economic side of Germany’s war effort, had every reason in 1943 to demonstrate a tilt towards the Allies. The Swedish government now proposed to Germany that Sweden take Denmark’s Jews. It repeated the proposal over the radio on an open frequency, so that Danish Jews knew that they would be welcome in Sweden. Danes then arranged for a flotilla to ship their Jewish population to Sweden. The German police knew about this undertaking and did not stop it; the German navy watched the Danish boats float slowly by. The Danish citizens did this work at little risk to themselves, since helping their fellow citizens was not a crime in their own country. The German police raid of October 2 caught only 481 of the 6,000 or so Jews of Danish citizenship. The sovereign Danish government intervened with Berlin on behalf of these citizens. Some of them were released, and the rest were sent to Theresienstadt, a transit camp in what had been Terezín in Czechoslovakia, rather than to Auschwitz. Not a single one of them was gassed. Other Jews from other countries were however sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and murdered to make room for the Danish Jews. German authorities took advantage of the presence of Danish Jews to make a propaganda film about the ostensibly good conditions for Jewish life in their camps.

Jews who were Danish citizens survived, which is not exactly the same thing as Jews in Denmark surviving. Danish authorities did not accept Jewish refugees after 1935, and they deported some of the ones who had arrived earlier back to Germany. The Jews who were denied state protection in Denmark shared the fate of Jews who lacked state protection in Estonia or, for that matter, everywhere else: death.

Occupied Estonia was part of the zone of statelessness where the entire Holocaust took place. In Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the western Soviet Union, Hitler’s vision of global racial struggle was converted, in conditions of statelessness, to new forms of politics. In each of these places the sequence of events that permitted the emergence of the Final Solution as mass killing was different. Nevertheless, a set of actions and absences can be identified.

The
actions
were the advance creation of racial or hybrid institutions whose major task was state destruction; the undertaking of aggressive war, permitting these institutions to fulfill their mission beyond their own homeland and in a permissive environment; the fact of state destruction, the removal of political capacity, the murder of leading classes, and the redefinition of such actions as law; the solicitation of collaboration, which was effective when it involved the exploitation of political resources created by an earlier state destroyer, but which always required the exploitation of existing local police forces, cut off from previous authority or eager to prove their loyalty after previous collaboration; the mobilization of psychological resources such as the release from humiliation and the gratification of the desire for revenge; the exploitation of greed, the material resource, enabled by ongoing or prior elimination of property rights; the recruitment of German institutions beyond those originally tasked with killing civilians; the exploitation of fragments of institutions remaining from earlier destructions of states.

After German (or Soviet and German) power destroyed states, the
absences
were the formal denial of sovereignty and the nullification of any connection by foreign policy to a larger world beyond German power; the lack of an overarching political entity that might protect its citizens, or motivate its citizens to protect it, and thus the disappearance of citizenship as a reciprocal relationship; the experience of the removal of traditional state protections in the form of laws and customs; the resulting spread of the dark market, the economic behaviors that arise in a free market without individual rights in which some people are treated as mere economic units to be consumed or sold; and the legal abyss, where all was permitted, where colonial thinking was natural, because international law in the traditional European sense did not apply.

These lists of actions and absences are both ways of characterizing the same extreme: the stateless zone where a Holocaust could be imagined, begun, and completed. At the other extreme during the Second World War were sovereign states that were untouched by German power. Although these generally pass unmentioned in analyses of the Holocaust, they are worth considering. After all, Hitler’s racial theory was planetary, and his declaration of war against the Jews was global. There is no particular reason to think that antisemitism was more prevalent in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania between the wars than it was in the United States, Great Britain, or Canada.

Most Jews in the world were safe during the Holocaust for the simple reason that German power did not extend to the places they lived and did not threaten the states of which they were citizens. Jews with Polish passports were safe in countries that recognized the prewar Polish state, and killed in countries that did not. American and British Jews were safe, not just in their home countries but everywhere. The Germans did not contemplate murdering Jews who held American and British passports, and, with few exceptions, did not do so. Statehood, like statelessness, followed Jews wherever they went. Soviet Jews were killed, with few exceptions, if they were caught in the lands occupied by the Germans and where Germany fought its war of extermination. In these places the Germans behaved as if the Soviet state had been destroyed and sought to annihilate all of its traces. So long as Jews were in Soviet territory and east of the German occupation, however, they were preserved from the Final Solution—although they were of course subject to Soviet policies. Roughly fifteen percent of the Polish Jews deported by the NKVD in 1940 died in transit or in the Gulag; even so, at the end of the war these deportees were the largest surviving group of Polish Jews.