Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (82 page)

further initiatives were to be developed with regard to Hungary, Bulgaria, and the

Italian-occupied zone of Croatia.
300

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

367

In issuing this directive Ribbentrop, concerned about his authority, found

himself in complete agreement with the RSHA. For it too did not consider that,

in summer 1942, the preconditions yet existed for deportations from Hungary,

Bulgaria, and the Italian-occupied zone of Croatia.

Thus, on 21 August, Luther had already recorded in a note that the Hungarian

government had not yet been approached because ‘the Hungarian legislation

concerning the Jews does not yet promise sufficient success’.
301
In fact the people of Jewish descent living in Hungary (including the annexed former Czechoslovak,

Romanian, and Yugoslavian territories), over 800,000 in number, were at this

point subject to anti-Semitic laws that corresponded more or less to the Nuremberg

Laws.
302
In August 1941, admittedly, 16,000–18,000 ‘foreign’ Jews (Jews who had lost their Hungarian citizenship because of the anti-Semitic legislation) had been

deported to the newly occupied Eastern territories, the great majority of them

being killed in the massacre of Kamenetsk-Podolsk.
303
In January 1942, in the wake of a ‘cleansing action’, Hungarian troops had shot thousands of civilians, including

hundreds of Jews. But the Hungarian government made no arrangements to

extend this policy to Jews with Hungarian citizenship.
304

In July 1942, when the Hungarian military attaché in Berlin submitted his

government’s proposal that all Jews living in Hungary ‘illegally’ be resettled to

Transnistria,
305
Himmler decided that the evacuation from Hungary of Jews of non-Hungarian citizenship who had fled to the country should be delayed until

Hungary declared itself willing to include its own Jews in the planned measures.
306

Along very similar lines, Eichmann too declared on 25 September 1942 his lack

of interest in the deportation of foreign Jews from Hungary, as this would have

been only a ‘partial’ action that ‘according to experience’ required the same

expenditure of effort as the comprehensive deportation of all Jews living in a

country. One should therefore wait until Hungary was ready to include the

Hungarian Jews in the deportations as well.
307

At the beginning of 1941, the Bulgarian government had passed special laws

against the Jews living in the country (removal from public service, confiscation

of property) which, after the Balkan campaign in the spring of 1941, were

extended to the occupied Greek (Thracian and eastern Macedonian) or Yugo-

slavian (Macedonian) territories with their native Jews numbering between

4,000 and 7,000
.308
If these measures were, from the German point of view, far from adequate preconditions for the deportation of Jews living in Bulgaria,

this situation changed very quickly in the course of the summer of 1942, plainly

still influenced by the preparations for the deportations from Croatia and

Romania.

On 26 August a Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was set up and the same decree

extended the term ‘Jew’ in a racist sense and laid the legal foundation for

deportations.
309
After these measures had been introduced, at the beginning of September the RSHA immediately urged the deportations from Bulgaria.

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

In September even Ribbentrop allowed himself to be persuaded to withdraw his

opposition to the inclusion of Bulgaria in the deportation programme.
310

Since the start of the preparations for the deportations in Croatia, the Foreign

Ministry and the RSHA had assumed that the deportation of the Jews from the

German-occupied zone would be followed at the end of August by the deportation

of the Jews from the Italian-occupied zone to Auschwitz.
311
The Croatian government had declared its agreement with this procedure, but Luther expected ‘certain

difficulties’ on the part of the Italians.
312
However, in response to a request that came via the German Embassy in Rome Mussolini initially decided, or so Luther

informed Ribbentrop on 11 September, ‘to treat the Jews in the Italian-occupied

parts of Croatia in the same way . . . as in the rest of Croatia’.
313

But since Ribbentrop, as we have shown, had instructed Luther on 25 August to

develop no further initiatives with regard to the Jews in the Italian-occupied zone

for the time being out of concern for the German-Italian alliance, he now proved

extremely displeased about the request made to the Italian government; they had

‘interfered in a Croatian-Italian question . . . which contradicted the principle of

not making ourselves spokesmen for Croatian interests where the Italians were

concerned, but giving Italy precedence in Croatia in every respect’.
314

With regard to Greece, too, the RSHA became active in July 1942, the time when

the initiative was being taken to set in motion the first wave of deportations from

South-Eastern Europe. But preparations for immediate deportation were not at

first made, as it was hoped above all that they would reach a uniform procedure in

both occupied zones. (In the Italian zone of occupation there were at this point

about 13,000 Jews, in the German zone of occupation about 55,000; there were also

around 4,000 Jews living in the north-east of the country, which was allocated to

Bulgaria.)
315
As in Croatia the policy initially pursued here was to avoid a conflict with Rome at all costs.

In July 1942 the RSHA informed the Foreign Ministry of its desire to introduce

anti-Jewish measures, namely universal labelling and internment of Jews who had

fled Germany. But the Italians, who had been approached with this in mind, did

not approve of the labelling of the Jews in their zone of occupation.
316

Also in July 1942 the German military administration introduced forced labour

for Jewish men. Thousands were deployed on hard physical labour in very severe

working conditions; hundreds died and a mass flight to the Italian zone began.

The emphatic demand by the Germans that Jews throughout the whole of Greece

be compulsorily labelled could not be enforced because of the dilatory treatment

of the requests by the Italian government.
317

The German efforts to organize deportations in the summer of 1942 also

focused on another country. After the war, former Prime Minister Rangell

reported that in July 1942, on a visit to Finland, Himmler had addressed the

topic of ‘Finnish Jews’; he, Rangell, however, had brought the discussion to a close

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

369

by pointing out that in Finland (where some 2,000 Jews lived) there was no ‘Jewish

question’.
318

These initiatives and negotiations on the part of the Germans with their allies

allow us to draw the conclusion that a fundamental decision had been made in

July in favour of a deportation from the allied states. At the same time, priorities

had been set, in which the state of anti-Semitic measures taken in the individual

countries was crucial. First of all, the Jews were to be deported from Croatia and

Romania; in Croatia, the Jewish population had already been largely interned,

while in Romania registration had been introduced and because of the mas-

sacres in the newly conquered territories there could be no doubt about the

radically anti-Semitic stance of this ally. The deportations from Hungary and

Bulgaria had, on the other hand, been postponed to a later time because of the

unsatisfactory state—from the German point of view—of Judenpolitik in those

countries, while the issue of the deportation of the Jews from the Italian-

occupied territories in Croatia and Greece remained shelved because of the

fundamental attitude of the Italian government towards the ‘Jewish question’.

Himmler’s unsuccessful foray into Finland in July 1942 produced the same

result.

Intensified Efforts to Extend the Deportations

in Autumn 1942

On 23 September 1942 Mihai Antonescu, on a visit to Hitler’s headquarters, again

confirmed to Ribbentrop his intention to deport the Romanian Jews.
319
During or immediately after this visit a fundamental decision must have been made by the

German leadership to intensify the deportations across the whole of Europe. For

the next day, 24 September, Ribbentrop instructed Luther by telephone to ‘acceler-

ate the evacuation of the Jews from the most diverse of countries in Europe’.

Ribbentrop had ordered that ‘we should now approach the Bulgarian, the Hungar-

ian, and Danish governments with the intention of setting in motion the evacuation

of the Jews from these countries as soon as possible’. Where Italy was concerned,

Ribbentrop had reserved further action to himself: either he would clarify the issue

with Ciano or it would be discussed between Hitler and Mussolini.
320
The fact that Ribbentrop was thus abruptly revoking his instruction of 25 August to stay out of

the deportation question indicates that he was obeying a decision from Hitler.

Immediately prior to this, at the armaments discussion held between 20 and

22 September, Hitler had called for the removal of those Jews still working in

armaments production within the Reich and their deportation.
321

On 25 September—the previous day the Croatian Prime Minister Ante Pavelic

had been received in the Führer’s headquarters, where he had talked to Hitler

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

and Ribbentrop about the ‘Jewish problem’ in Croati
a322—
Ribbentrop issued a directive concerning the deportation of Jews in the Italian zone of Croatia, to

which Mussolini had already agreed in principle. The question should tentatively

be raised in Rome about ‘how matters stood’, although one should not strive

for ‘an actual demarche demanding, for example, that the Duce’s decision con-

cerning the instructions should be quickly passed on to the military authorities in

Croatia’.
323

In fact, however, apart from Croatia, all the allies who had come to be included

in the German deportation plans in the course of 1942 would thwart German

intentions in autumn 1942. This applied to Slovakia, where the deportations came

to a complete stop,
324
to Romania, which withdrew from the deportation agreement that it had given in July, to Bulgaria and Hungary, which had been newly

included in the deportation programme in September, and to Italy, which pre-

vented further deportations from its occupied zone in Croatia. In the last quarter

of 1942, the RSHA only managed to organize deportations from one other

country, Norway, possibly in place of Denmark, which had been brought into

play in September.

As regards Romania, in the last quarter of 1942 the Germans were forced to

acknowledge that the deportation agreed there in July was being delayed.
325

Towards the end of the year, the RSHA decided to postpone the deportations

from Romania to the following spring. On 14 December, Luther described this

postponement to the German embassy in Sofia as not very serious, as the

‘deportation’ (Abtransport) was ‘not in any case desirable during the main winter

months’. Things should be kept ‘in flux’ so that at the beginning of spring ‘one

could expect the measures to continue’.
326
In January 1943, however, Himmler reached the conclusion that further attempts to move the Romanian government

to hand over their Jews were pointless. He, therefore, proposed that the ‘Jewish

adviser’ be withdrawn from the German embassy in Bucharest.
327

On 16 October Luther ordered the German ambassador in Sofia to ‘discuss the

question of a transport to the East of the Jews due for resettlement according to

the new Bulgarian regulations’ with the Bulgarian government. Luther was start-

ing from the premise that these plans could be connected with the forthcoming

deportations from Romania. But Ambassador Adolf Beckerle learned from the

Bulgarian Prime Minister that the German offer was basically welcome, but the

Bulgarians wanted first to ‘concentrate (the Jewish workers) and deploy them

for road-building’.
328
After further discussions in mid-November, Beckerle still believed that the transport of the ‘the majority of the Bulgarian Jews’ was possible

in the near future.
329
In parallel with this, Richter, the ‘Jewish adviser’ at the German embassy in Bucharest, approached Protisch, the press attaché at the

Bulgarian embassy there, who had been specially commissioned by his govern-

ment to investigate Romania’s ‘Jewish policy’. Richter suggested that perhaps ‘the

resettlement of the Jews of Bulgaria in collaboration with the Reich, which has

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

371

already been decided upon’, could be undertaken. He indicated that the ‘Reich

office responsible for the solution of the Jewish question was very interested in

such a collaboration.’
330
As early as November, however, a detailed report from the SD foreign department reached the conclusion that further intensification of