The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (112 page)

58. A strange epilogue to the Madagascar plan appeared in internal party correspondence on October 30, 1940. Martin Bormann informed Rosenberg that Hitler deemed the publication of Rosenberg’s article “Jews in Madagascar” as inadvisable for the time being, “but it possibly would be so within a few months.” Helmut Heiber, ed.,
Akten der Partei-Kanzlei der NSDAP: Rekonstruktion eines verlorengegangenen Bestandes. Regesten.
, vol. 1, part 2 (München, 1983), abs. no. 24983.

59. Sybil Milton and Frederick D. Bogin, eds.,
Archives of the Holocaust
, vol. 10, part 2 (New York: 1995), pp. 649ff.

60. Joseph Walk, ed.,
Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien, Inhalt und Bedeutung
(Heidelberg, 1981), p. 320. The interdiction regarding the deportation of Jews into the General Government was reversed a few days later. John Mendelsohn and Donald S. Detwiler, eds.,
The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes
, vol. 6, doc. 150 (New York, 1982), pp. 234–38. In May of the same year, the United States chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander Kirk, informed Washington that according to a high-ranking German official, “It was still Germany’s policy to encourage emigration of German Austrian and Czech Jews respectively from the Old Reich, Austria, and the Protectorate.” In the case of Polish Jews, they would be allowed to leave only if they were not hindering the departure possibilities of Jews from Germany for the Protectorate; mixed areas would be given preference over the General Government.

61. Heydrich’s memorandum is quoted verbatim in a circular sent by Hans Frank’s office on November 23, 1940, to the district governors in the General Government. Tatiana Berenstein, ed.,
Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord: Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges
(East Berlin, 1961), p. 59.

62. On French acceptance of the German demands on this issue and the consequences it entailed, see Regina M. Delacor, “Auslieferung auf Verlangen: Der deutsch-französische Waffenstillstandsvertrag 1940 und das Schicksal der sozialdemokratischen Exilpolitiker Rudolf Breitscheid und Rudolf Hilferding,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
30 (1999), pp. 217ff.

63. About the activities of the ERC and the role of Varian Fry, see Varian Fry,
Surrender on Demand
(New York, 1945); Anne Klein, “Conscience, Conflict and Politics: The Rescue of Political Refugees from Southern France to the United States, 1940–1942,” in
Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute
(London, 1998), pp. 287ff. See also “The Varian Fry Papers,” in
Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents
, ed. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, vol. 5 (New York, 1990), pp. 1–76.

64. For Zweig’s letter, see Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, eds.,
Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents
, vol. 14 (New York, 1993), p. 111. One of the strangest rescue operations was that of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Joseph Schneersohn, and of his extended family, from Warsaw via Berlin, Riga, and Stockholm, to the United States. At one point or another, it led to the involvement of Secretary of State Cordell Hull; one of the leading officials of the Reich’s Four-Year Plan administration, Helmut Wohltat; the chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris; of half-Jewish Abwehr officers; and many others on both sides of the Atlantic. Let it be added, to compound the imbroglio, that the Rebbe created some difficulties of his own: He insisted on the rescue of his forty-thousand-volume library. For this operation see Bryan Mark Rigg,
Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe
(New Haven, 2004).

65. Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut,
American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945
(Bloomington, 1987), p. 112.

66. Ibid., pp. 126ff. About public opinion on this issue and the attitude of the press, see Deborah E. Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945
(New York, 1986), pp. 125ff.

67. Klein, “Conscience, Conflict and Politics,” p. 292.

68. On Long see in particular Henry L. Feingold,
The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945
(New Brunswick, 1970), pp. 131ff., and Henry L. Feingold,
Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust
(Syracuse, 1995), pp. 86ff.

69. Breitman and Kraut,
American Refugee Policy and European Jewry
, p. 135.

70. In fact, some Jewish refugees became a rather formidable asset to the security of the United States. Albert Einstein was certainly the most famous Jewish emigrant to leave Germany after Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship. When the Nazi leader came to power, Einstein was on his way back to Germany from a visit in the United States. He interrupted his trip in Belgium and, after some hesitation, returned to the United States on the invitation of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. Until then Einstein had been a determined pacifist, but he soon understood that in the face of Nazism such an ideological choice was untenable. For him as for other Jewish refugee physicists, the Nazi danger became overwhelming after the takeover of Czechoslovakia. The Germans now controlled the richest uranium mines in Europe; moreover, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who had discovered the principle of nuclear fission, continued to work in Germany. Hitler’s Reich could eventually build nuclear weapons.
      In August 1939 Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, all three newly arrived Jewish refugees, asked Einstein to approach the president and draw his attention to the looming threat. Einstein prepared a short draft of a letter to the president (in German), Teller wrote the final English version, and Einstein signed it. After describing the main aspects of the nuclear fission of uranium and of its military significance, and after suggesting a series of measures for taking up the challenge, the letter concluded on an ominous note. “I understand,” Einstein wrote, “that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.”
      Einstein’s letter was delivered to Roosevelt on October 11, 1939; on the nineteenth the president replied and appointed an advisory committee “to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestions regarding the element of uranium.” As the bureaucratic follow-up was slow, Szilard again approached Einstein, and in March 1940 a second letter was sent to Roosevelt. This time more decisive steps were taken: U.S. nuclear weapons research and planning began. Bernard T. Feld, “Einstein and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons,” in
Albert Einstein, Historical and Cultural Perspectives
, ed. Gerald James Holton and Yehuda Elkana (Princeton, 1982), pp. 372–74. In Great Britain other Jewish refugees, among them Rudolf Peierls and Maurice Halban, helped their British counterparts to start on a similar track. Soon the American and the British programs were coordinated.
      While the first meetings of the new, enlarged advisory committee were taking place, Hitler’s victory in Europe seemed plausible and American intervention in the war unlikely. If Hitler alone were to acquire nuclear weapons, Nazi domination of the world would become a nightmarish possibility. About Germany’s progress in the field of nuclear physics and its plans to construct nuclear weapons, mainly between 1939 and 1943, see, among a vast literature, Kristie Macrakis,
Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany
(New York, 1993), pp. 164ff.

71. Quoted in Guile Ne’eman Arad,
America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism
(Bloomington, 2000), pp. 211–12.

72. For the unsuccessful attempts of a German Jewish family to reach the United States, then Chile and Brazil, then the United States again, see David Clay Large,
And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust
(New York, 2003).

73. On this issue see Susan Zuccotti,
Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy
(New Haven, 2000), pp. 72ff.

74. The Western Hemisphere country possibly most hostile to any Jewish immigration was Canada (despite the favorable attitude of its prime minister, William Mackenzie King), as a result of the (ultra-Catholic) xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes of the authorities and the population of Quebec Province. On this subject see Irving M. Abella and Harold Martin Troper,
None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948
(Toronto, 1982).

75. Milton and Bogin, eds.,
Archives of the Holocaust
, vol. 10, part 1, pp. 391ff. Ultimately, in 1940 and 1941, 2,178 Polish Jews reached Japan, among them many rabbis of ultra-Orthodox yeshivas: The majority had to move to Shanghai and remain there throughout the war. Cf. Efraim Zuroff, “Rescue Via the Far East: The Attempt to Save Polish Rabbis and Yeshivah Students, 1939–1941,”
Simon Wiesenthal Center Yearbook
1 (1988), pp. 171–72.

76. Yehuda Bauer,
Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945
(New Haven, 1994), p. 50.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. For a detailed study see Dalia Ofer,
Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1939–1944
(New York, 1990). For the events described here see mainly pp. 42ff.

80. Ibid., pp. 49ff.

81. Quoted in Bernard Wasserstein,
Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945
(London, 1979), p. 50.

82. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

83. Ibid., p. 63.

84. Ibid., pp. 64ff.

85. Alfred Fabre-Luce,
Journal de la France 1939–1944
, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1946), p. 246. (The first edition of volume 1 was published in Paris in 1940 and in Hamburg in 1941.)

86. Haim Avni,
Spain, the Jews, and Franco
(Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 73ff. Spanish policy was apparently more reticent toward Jews carrying Spanish passports and living in German-occupied countries; on this issue see mainly Bernd Rother, “Franco und die deutsche Judenverfolgung,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ)
46y plans saved Gibraltar and helped British operations in North Africa and in the Mediterranean. On October 4, 1940, an incensed Hitler told Mussolini that, in a conversation with Franco, he [Hitler] “was almost represented as if he were a little Jew who was haggling about the most sacred possessions of mankind.”
DGFP: Series D
, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. 251.

87. On this subject see Avraham Milgram, “Portugal, the Consuls and the Jewish Refugees, 1938–1941,”
Yad Vashem Studies
37 (1999), pp. 123ff.

88. See in particular Rui Alfonso, “Le ‘Wallenberg Portugais’: Aristides de Sousa Mendes,”
Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah. Le monde juif
, no. 165 (1999), pp. 7ff.

89. For a summary about Swiss policy regarding Jewish refugees in the fall of 1938, see Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland—Second World War,
Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War
(Zurich, 2002), pp. 108–9. About the indelible ink to be used for the red J stamp, see Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939
, p. 265.

90. See in particular Paul A. Levine,
From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944
(Uppsala, 1996).

91. Klepper,
Unter dem Schatten Deiner Flügel
, p. 845.

92. Ibid., p. 843.

93. Ibid., p. 860.

94. Ibid., p. 866.

95. Ibid., p. 874.

96. Ibid., p. 884.

97. Wolfgang Gerlach,
And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews
, ed. Victoria Barnett (Lincoln, NE, 2000), pp. 155ff.

98. This document was found in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz by Dr. Joseph Henke. The initials at the bottom of the document were identified as those of Adolf Eichmann. The document was published in French (with a photocopy of the German original) in Lucien Steinberg,
Un document essentiel qui situe les débuts de la “solution finale de la question juive”
(Paris, 1992). See also Götz Aly,
Endlösung: Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden
(Frankfurt am Main, 1995), pp. 124–26.

99. Memorandum of Department Germany of the Foreign Ministry, October 31, 1940,
DGFP: Series D
, vol. 11, p. 444.

100. Instructions for the officials in charge of the deportations of the Jews from the Palatinate, n.d., reproduced in Sauer,
Dokumente über die Verfolgung
, vol. 2, pp. 236–37.

101. Ibid., p. 231.

102. Leni Yahil,
The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945
(New York, 1990), p. 177.

103. Anne Grynberg,
Les Camps de la honte: Les internés juifs des camps français, 1939–1944
(Paris, 1991), p. 142. Tens of thousands of non-Jews considered French nationalists were also expelled from Alsace and Lorraine in the course of the summer and fall of 1940. See Jean-Pierre Azéma,
De Munich à la Libération
(Paris, 1979), p. 116.

104. Both decrees are quoted in Harold James,
Die Deutsche Bank und die “Arisierung”
(Munich, 2001), p. 199.

105. Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder,
Juden, Christen, Deutsche, 1933–1945
, vol. 3, part 2, (Stuttgart, 1995), p. 193. On the same day, Gröber asked Prelate Kreutz to intervene with the nuncio, together with Bishop Heinrich Wienken. To the arguments used in his letter to Orsenigo, Gröber added that the deportees for whom he was interceding “were Catholics who had made great sacrifices in separating themselves from the members of their race.” Bernhard Stasiewski and Ludwig Volk, eds.,
Akten deutscher Bischöfe über die Lage der Kirche, 1933–1945
. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte bei der Katholischen Akademie in Bayern. Reihe A: Quellen, Bd. 5; v. 2–6: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Reihe A: Quellen, 6 vols. (Mainz, 1968–1985).