The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (14 page)

And, during these same years, Antonio de Salazar’s Portugal, Francisco Franco’s Spain, the post-Pilsudski Polish governments, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary, and, from March 1939 on, Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia, displayed various shades of a not-unnatural political-religious alliance against communism, liberalism, and “materialism,” the common enemies of both the Christian churches and authoritarian right-wing regimes. Soon Antonescu’s Romania would march down the same path, and, even more violently and viciously, so would Ante Pavelíc’s Croatia. As for Vichy France, its authoritarianism and Catholicism epitomized a strangely stunted return of the “ancien régime”—without the monarchy.

The alliance against communism, liberalism, and “materialism” included to various degrees, as we have seen, some of the main ingredients of modern anti-Jewish hostility. One should add to this brew the themes spread by Nazi propaganda and a variety of national anti-Semitic rantings: those of the Endeks in Poland, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Croatian Ustasha, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Action Française—and, for good measure—those of the still-exiled Ukrainian OUN and the underground nationalist militants in the Baltic countries in the summer of 1940. The “new order” thus also became an intrinsically anti-Jewish new order. In 1940, however, the ultimate consequences of this tide of hatred could not yet be perceived; the common aim was exclusion and segregation.

Against the background of this momentous ideological evolution and in the midst of an expanding war and a heightening political and moral crisis throughout much of the Western world, the influence of the pope came to play a major role. A few months before his death, Pius XI, whose growing hostility to the Nazi regime we already mentioned, had demanded the preparation of an encyclical against Nazi racism and anti-Semitism. He received a draft of
Humani Generis Unitas
as he lay dying. His successor must of course have known of the existence of the document and probably decided to shelve it.
¹¹

Pius XII’s attitude toward Germany and mainly toward the Jews has often been contrasted with that of his predecessor, thus creating the impression that, in many ways, Pius XII’s policy was unusual, even aberrant.
¹²
In fact Pius XI, as legate nuncio to Poland in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and during most of his pontificate, openly expressed unconcealed anti-Jewish attitudes, as had been the case among most of his predecessors in the modern era. The change that led to
Humani Generis Unitas
occurred during the last years of Pius XI’s life and created a growing rift with the Curia, the Roman Jesuits of the periodical
Civiltà Cattolica
; the Vatican daily,
Osservatore Romano
; and possibly his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII.
¹³
Thus it can safely be said that Pacelli himself, as secretary of state and later as pope, merely followed a well-established path, even though he may have perceived that the world around him was changing radically. The new pontiff, however, added a personal imprint and initiatives of his own to a well-honed tradition.
¹⁴

Distant, autocratic, and imbued with a sense of his own intellectual and spiritual superiority, Pacelli was as fiercely conservative in politics as in church matters. Nonetheless he was considered an able diplomat during his tenure as nuncio in Munich (1916–20) and then in Berlin in the 1920s. His drive for centralization and for the control of the Vatican bureaucracy over the national churches led him to strive for a concordat with Germany, even at the cost of sacrificing the German Catholic Party, the Zentrum, in the process. The Concordat was signed in July 1933 and ratified that September. The German signature was Adolf Hitler’s. In return, on March 23, 1933, the Zentrum had voted full powers for the Nazi leader, which, for the Catholic Party, meant its own demise and the final demise of the German Republic.

The appearance of good relations between Pius XI and Nazi Germany did not last. From 1936 on, as the danger Nazi racial tenets posed to Catholic dogma grew clearer, as important aspects of the Concordat regarding Catholic institutions (youth movements and religious orders) and church property were disregarded by Berlin, and as trumped-up charges against priests and nuns signaled the possibility of direct persecution of the Catholic Church, Pius XI became increasingly hostile to the new Reich. The pope’s 1937 encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
(“With Deepest Concern”) heightened the existing tension. There can be little doubt that Secretary of State Pacelli was involved in the preparation of the encyclical and shared Pius XI’s outrage at Nazi measures. It was most probably in this context that, in April 1938, Pacelli handed a confidential memorandum to the U.S. ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, during a meeting in Rome. Compromise with the Nazis, it stated, was out of the question. At approximately the same time, in a conversation with the U.S. consul general in Berlin, Alfred W. Klieforth, Pacelli supposedly said “that he [Pacelli] unalterably opposed every compromise with National Socialism. He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel, but as a fundamentally wicked person. He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation.”
¹⁵

Once Pacelli was elected pope, however, some of his first initiatives (apart from the shelving of
Humani Generis Unitas
) confirmed the persistence of an ultraconservative stance and showed an unmistakable desire to placate Germany. Thus, in mid-April 1939, in a radio broadcast, the pontiff congratulated the Spanish people on the return of peace and the achievement of victory (Franco’s, of course), adding that Spain “had once again given the prophets of materialist atheism a noble proof of its indestructible Catholic faith.”
¹⁶
A few months later Pius XII rescinded his predecessor’s excommunication of the French antirepublican, monarchist, furiously nationalist, and anti-Semitic Action Française. The Holy Office lifted the condemnation on July 7, 1939, but the decision was announced in the
Osservatore Romano
on July 15, that is, on the morrow of Bastille Day: The choice of date may have been sheer coincidence.
¹⁷

On March 6, the new pontiff had announced his election to Hitler (as was the custom) in a particularly long letter originally written in Latin, the German version of which he had manifestly reworked himself and signed (as wasn’t the custom).

The Nazi-Soviet pact, on the other hand, must have reinforced Pius XII’s personal lack of confidence in the Nazi leader; it may explain why the pontiff maintained brief contacts with German opposition groups planning an anti-Hitler coup in the fall of 1939. From the outset, however, the pope was faced with a very different and no less pressing issue: What should both his diplomatic and public reaction be in the face of ever more massive Nazi crimes?

Pius XII made it clear to his entourage that he would be personally in charge of relations with Hitler’s Germany. Intentionally, no doubt, the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Cesare Orsenigo was kept as nuncio in Berlin.
¹⁹
Regarding the entire gamut of Nazi crimes, Pius’s policy, during the first phase of the war, may be defined as an exercise in selective appeasement. The pope did not take a public stand regarding the murder of the mentally ill, but he made a plea for the “beloved Polish people” in his encyclical
Summi Pontificatus
of October 20, 1939 (although this appeared insufficient to the Polish episcopate and the Polish minister to the Vatican).
²⁰
Concerning both euthanasia and the fate of the Catholics in Poland, the Vatican also appealed to Berlin either via the nuncio (mainly about Poland) or in urgent pleas to the German bishops. In letters of December 1940 to both Cardinal Bertram of Breslau and Bishop Preysing of Berlin, Pius XII expressed his shock about the killing of the mentally ill.
²¹
In both cases and otherwise, however, nothing was said about the persecution of the Jews.

On June 11, 1940, the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant sent a letter from the Vatican, where he was residing, to his Paris colleague, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard. Although the letter should be read in its 1940 context, as France was collapsing and the day after Mussolini’s joining the war, it had an uncannily wider significance: “Our governments [the democracies] refuse to understand the true nature of the conflict and persist in imagining that this is a war like the wars of times gone by. But Fascist ideology and Hitlerism have transformed the consciences of the young, and those under thirty-five are willing to commit any crime for any purpose ordered by their leader. Since the beginning of November, I have persistently requested the Holy See to issue an encyclical on the duty of the individual to obey the dictates of conscience, because this is the vital point of Christianity…. I fear that history may have reason to reproach the Holy See with having pursued a policy of convenience to itself and very little else. This is sad in the extreme, particularly when one has lived under Pius XI.”
²²

II

German occupation differed from country to country. While Denmark kept a semblance of freedom until the summer of 1943, Norway and Holland—although countries of “related racial stock”—were governed by Nazi Party appointees,
Reichskommissare
, who were both satraps and ideological envoys. Belgium and northern France (north of the Loire River and along the Atlantic coast) remained under the authority of the Wehrmacht, and two French departments along the Belgian border were put under the authority of the military command in Brussels. The central and southern parts of France, on the other hand, were granted a measure of autonomy under Marshal Pétain’s leadership, becoming “Vichy France.” Germany de facto annexed Luxembourg and the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. A southeastern part of France was occupied by the Italian army, as a reward for Mussolini.

Occupied Europe was dominated by a whole array of German agencies and appointees, independent of one another but fully subservient to the single central authority of the Führer. In a maze of institutional power attributions, no agency was solely in charge of the Jewish question either in 1940 or later. And, as in all domains since early 1938, state agencies were increasingly shunted aside to subordinate positions by the party and its organizations. The dominance of party old-timers (from Germany or former Austria) in all matters related to occupation or anti-Jewish policies was all-pervasive. Only the military, by dint of wartime circumstances, kept a somewhat undefined position. Whereas in Poland, as we saw, the Wehrmacht had been divested of its control over civilian matters soon after the end of the campaign, it nonetheless remained the dominant authority for imposing anti-Jewish measures in several occupied Western European countries. It would also actively participate in the oppression and mass killings in the occupied Soviet Union and the Balkans.

Otherwise, in
territorial as well as in functional terms
, the party and its organizations had almost all power in its hands. Hans Frank held sway in the General Government; Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau; Arthur Seyss-Inquart in Holland; Konstantin von Neurath (the only initial exception), then Reinhard Heydrich, and finally Hermann Frank in the Protectorate; Josef Terboven in Norway; later Hinrich Lohse in the “Ostland,” and Erich Koch in the Ukraine. All of them were party stalwarts. In
functional terms
Hermann Göring oversaw economic exploitation and expropriation, Fritz Sauckel and Albert Speer would handle foreign labor; Alfred Rosenberg looted art and cultural assets (he later would be in charge of the civilian administration of the “occupied eastern territories”); Joseph Goebbels, of course, orchestrated propaganda and its multiple ramifications; Joachim von Ribbentrop dealt with foreign governments, while Heinrich Himmler and his minions controlled population transfers and “colonization” as well as arrests, executions, deportations, and extermination.
²³

Throughout the Continent German domination could rely on a collaboration that was in part determined by “rational” calculations but often was also a willing or even an enthusiastic embrace of Germany’s supremacy on assorted ideological and power-political grounds. Such a collaboration involved national and regional agencies and institutions, auxiliaries of all hues, political support groups, and independent agents, ranging from politicians to civil servants, from intellectuals to police forces and railway administrations, from journalists to industrialists; from youth movements to peasant leagues, from clergy to universities, from organized to spontaneous killer gangs. And, as the war became fiercer and resistance movements more active, the dyed-in-the-wool collaborators turned more savage in their hunting down of Germany’s enemies and of Germany’s victims.

At the time of Hitler’s triumph in the West, the Nazi terror system controlled directly (or with the assistance of its satellites) around 250,000 to 280,000 Jews remaining in the Greater Reich, 90,000 in the Protectorate, 90,000 in Slovakia, 2.2 million in the German-occupied or -annexed parts of ex-Poland, 140,000 in Holland, 65,000 in Belgium, about 330,000 in both French zones, between 7,000 and 8,000 in Denmark, and 1,700 in Norway. Thus, at the beginning of the summer of 1940, a total population of almost 3,200,000 Jews was, to all intents and purposes, already caught in Hitler’s clutches.
²⁴

Among the Jews of Europe, Hitler’s new victories triggered a wave of fear. “On the Eiffel Tower, the swastika,” the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian noted in his diary two days after the fall of Paris. “At Versailles, German sentries. At the Arc de Triomphe, the ‘Unknown Soldier’ with a German ‘guard of honor.’ But the terrible things are not the trophies or the acts of provocation: they could even arouse and maintain a will to survive among the French population. What scares me more is the ‘harmony’ operation that is about to follow. There will be newspapers, declarations and political parties that present Hitler as a friend and sincere protector of France. When that time comes, all the panic and all the resentments will find release in one long pogrom. Where can Poldy [Sebastian’s brother, who lived in Paris] be? What will he do? What will become of him? And what of us here?”
²⁵