Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (96 page)

escalation of the extermination policy and military developments, in other words

the preparations for the summer offensive in the East, is just as apparent as the

fact that, in view of the mass recruitment of workers from the occupied Soviet

Union, in the spring of 1942 the Nazis believed they would soon be able to do

without Jewish forced labourers.

At the beginning of June a concrete programme of deportations was established

for the West, which according to the plan was to be realized within three months

beginning in mid-July. This meant that the ‘European’ plans first discernible in

early April were to be continued and adapted to the conditions set by the transport

ban in June/July. In June 1942, however, Himmler went a step further and called

for the rapid and complete deportation of all Jews from France.

The transports from Western Europe and—because of the transport ban—also

those from Slovakia were now directed to Auschwitz. There, from early June, the

great majority of deportees (as before in Minsk and Sobibor) fell victim to the new

and more radical variation of the extermination policy: immediately after their

arrival they were killed with poison gas, after a ‘selection’ had taken place on the

railway ramp.

In May 1942 the mass murder of the Soviet Jews, which had begun in the

summer of 1941, received a new impulse: the murders now resumed on a large

scale, before ending in the summer of 1942 in the complete extermination of the

indigenous Jewish population.

After the lifting of the transport ban in July 1942, the deportation and murder

programme was fully operational, and we know that Himmler insisted on con-

vincing himself of the functioning of the extermination programme by paying an

inspection visit. At the end of that inspection, on 19 July he issued the order that

the ‘resettlement’ of the entire Jewish population of the General Government was

to finish at the end of 1942.

432

Conclusion

During the summer of 1942 the first preparations were made to organize larger

numbers of deportations from the West and the South-East of those parts of

Europe under the control of the ‘Third Reich’.

This acceleration and radicalization of the extermination programme in spring

and summer 1942 clearly reflected the decision of the Nazi leadership essentially to

implement the intended ‘Final Solution’ during the war. After the USA entered the

war the ‘Third Reich’ faced the necessity of waging a long-term war on several

fronts, and this new situation also necessarily altered the status of the systematic

mass murder of the Jews. With the extension of this last and most radical stage of

Judenpolitik to all the territories under German control, the entire German sphere

of influence was subjected to the hegemony of racism. The occupied and allied

states were drawn into the ‘New Order policy’ and, for better or worse bound to

the German leadership by their participation in an unparalleled crime. The

extermination policy thus came to underpin the German policy of occupation

and alliance. This central function of the mass murder of the Jews for the

maintenance of German rule on the continent also serves to explain the great

efforts made by the Nazi leadership to involve more and more countries in the

extermination programme by the end of the war.

During the second half of the war Judenpolitik—along with efforts to provide

political military and police security for the territory under German rule, and

alongside the issues of economic and food policy—became a major axis of

German occupation and alliance policy. The more the war advanced, the greater

the significance that the systematic murder of the Jews assumed, from the point of

view of the National Socialist leadership, for the cohesion of the German power

block. Because the executive organizations of the mass murders—whether they

were German occupying administrations, local auxiliaries, governments willing to

collaborate, or allies—were made henchmen and accomplices of the extermin-

ation policy, and bound to the engine of that policy, the leadership of Nazi

Germany. The altered and more important role given to Judenpolitik provides a

significant explanation for the fact that the murder of millions in the second half

of the war was not only continued but even extended.

During the war something that we have already been able to observe in

Germany during the 1930s was repeated on a European scale. Just as it had been

impossible to implement a racist policy in a ‘positive’ way within the German

Reich, during the war the Nazi regime was in no position to introduce its planned

racist ‘reorganization’ of Europe through constructive measures. All the measures

taken in this direction either failed pitifully or laid bare the absurdity of National

Socialist ideas of race.

If the National Socialists did not wish to abandon their aspiration to start the

racist reorganization of the European continent even during the war, they were

obliged to undertake concrete measures in anticipation of their racist utopia in a

negative way. The Entjudung of the German sphere of influence—because of the

Conclusion

433

inconsistency and lack of feasibility of a ‘positive’ racial policy—became the

substitute for the unrealizable racial ‘New Order’.

There was an additional effect that we have also been able to observe since 1933

with regard to Judenpolitik in Germany: the further radicalization of the persecu-

tion reinforced the power of the SS and the radical Party forces within the

occupying administrations and finally led to an overall gain in importance for

these forces within the Nazi system of rule. The total implementation of the

Judenpolitik within the entire German territory was thus tantamount to the

definitive realization of National Socialism’s total claim to power. However,

from the perspective of the National Socialists, Judenpolitik was far more than a

mere instrument for the extension of their power: they saw its radical implemen-

tation as a matter of their own survival.

Even though all the major decisions concerning the National Socialist Europe-

wide ‘Final Solution’ programme had been made by mid-1942, in the time

remaining until the end of the war it turned out that the implementation of the

mass murders, because of the central role occupied by the Judenpolitik within

Germany’s occupation and alliance policy, made great additional demands on the

Nazi leadership. Judenpolitik was not a programme that ran automatically, but a

series of systematically organized mass murders that could only be implemented if

the National Socialist regime created the appropriate preconditions.

It is possible to identify three further periods during the second half of the war

in which the Nazi regime further escalated its Judenpolitik: the phase between the

Allied landing in North Africa and the Warsaw ghetto uprising, hence the months

November 1942 to May 1943, that is the period during which the Axis powers lost

the military initiative; autumn 1943, when Italy left the alliance and the German

Reich occupied further territories previously controlled by Fascist Italy; finally, the

period from spring to summer 1944, during which the German Reich occupied

Hungary and Slovakia.

As a consequence of the Allied landing in North Africa which, from the point of

view of the German leadership, threatened the whole southern flank of Europe,

the Jews of Tunisia and France had found themselves directly in the clutches of the

German persecutors, while at the beginning of 1943 the RSHA organized mass

deportations in Greece and Bulgaria. The further military successes of the West-

ern Allies, but above all the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April/May 1943, led to a

further burst of radicalization of Judenpolitik, which can be demonstrated by the

intensification of the persecution in Poland, in the occupied Soviet territories, in

the Netherlands, in Belgium, in France, in Croatia, and in Slovakia.

After Italy’s departure from the Axis alliance Judenpolitik was extended to

Italian territory under German control as well as to the former Italian zones of

occupation in Croatia, Greece, and France. That same period coincides with the

attempt to deport the Danish Jews, which can be seen as Germany’s reaction to

growing resistance in that country.

434

Conclusion

With the occupation of Hungary and Slovakia and the deportation of the Jews

living in those countries, in 1944 the Third Reich attempted to prevent both states

leaving their alliance with Germany.

It became apparent, however, that, after the turning point of the war in the

winter of 1942/3, it became increasingly difficult to implement the deportations

in participation with governments allied or collaborating with Germany. They

succeeded in Croatia, to a limited extent in Bulgaria and France; efforts with

regard to Hungary and the Italian-occupied territories remained initially ineffect-

ive; Romania and Slovakia, which had originally been enthusiastic participants in

German Judenpolitik, now changed their attitude. However, the Germans did

not abandon their policy, since precisely in view of the deteriorating military

situation they saw the intensification of the persecution of the Jews and the related

compromising of their ‘partners’ as an important means of securing the German-

ruled block.

It was particularly important here that the three states which successfully

resisted German Judenpolitik during this phase—Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria—

managed to leave the alliance with Germany between September 1943 and Sep-

tember 1944 through separate ceasefires. This departure of what Germany saw as

its ‘philo-Semitic’ allies must have looked like confirmation of their policy not to

compromise in any way on Judenpolitik.

If Judenpolitik had originally been one of the chief axes of German occupation

and alliance policy, it now entered a phase in which it began to destroy Germany’s

policy of collaboration and alliance. Judenpolitik could only be implemented if a

regime of terror was installed in countries where it was completely under the

control of the Nazis, and it could only be implemented with the support of

indigenous forces.

This policy was to prove horribly efficient in Hungary and Slovakia. It was

initially adopted in France and northern Italy, but finally foundered on a lack of

support from local forces. All regimes that became collaborators with German

Judenpolitik in the second half of the war collapsed with the Third Reich: the

Vichy regime, the Republic of Salò, the Arrow-Cross regime in Hungary, and the

clerical-fascist Slovakian Republic.

The example of Denmark shows that Judenpolitik was not feasible without the

conditions described: a regime dependent on Germany and support from local

forces. The alternative, implementing the deportations with the help of German

forces, foundered on a lack of staff resources and the fact that such an action

would have destroyed the political basis of the German occupation policy in

Denmark.

As far as the mass murders in territories directly under German control were

concerned, it has become clear that Judenpolitik produced a particularly high

percentage of victims in those areas in which a civilian administration was

preparing the construction of a ‘Greater German Reich’ with the support of the

Conclusion

435

SS. This applies to the Reich, including the annexed territories, the Protectorate,

Bohemia and Moravia, Poland and the occupied Soviet territories, but particularly

also to the Netherlands. The Jews living there only had a chance of survival if they

managed to escape before the start of the murders; there were also limited

possibilities of surviving by going into hiding, which increased towards the

end of the war. But the numbers of victims were also very high in two territories

which were controlled by a military administration and were not the target of a

Germanization policy: in Greece and Serbia. In Belgium there was a German

military administration and the country was also the target of German ideas of

Germanization; but the percentage of Jewish victims was—if compared with the

Netherlands—considerably lower, which may be down to the lower pressure of

persecution, the sluggish Belgian authorities, the more cautious behaviour of the

victims, and the helpfulness of the Belgian population. Norway was also consid-

ered a ‘Germanic’ country, and ruled by a civilian administration, but more than

half of the small Jewish minority managed to escape the deportations in the

autumn of 1942.

This brief survey of the fate of the Jews in the countries occupied by and allied

with Germany shows once again that the German persecution of the Jews pro-

ceeded in very different ways in the individual territories within the German

sphere of influence in the second half of the war. A large number of factors

affected Judenpolitik, which for these reasons could be accelerated, slowed down,

modified, and suspended. It was, among other things, because of this flexibility,