The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (2 page)

These different levels of anti-Jewish ideology could be formulated and summed up in the tersest way:
The Jew was a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race and to the German Volk.
The emphasis is not only on “lethal” but also—and mainly—on “active.” While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, “asocials” and homosexuals, “inferior” racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially
passive
threats (as long as the Slavs, for example, were not led by the Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and maneuvered to subdue all of humanity.

This anti-Jewish frenzy at the top of the Nazi system was not hurled into a void. From the fall of 1941, Hitler often designated the Jew as the “world arsonist.” In fact the flames that the Nazi leader set alight and fanned burned as widely and intensely as they did only because, throughout Europe and beyond, for the reasons previously mentioned, a dense underbrush of ideological and cultural elements was ready to catch fire. Without the arsonist the fire would not have started; without the underbrush it would not have spread as far as it did and destroyed an entire world. It is this constant interaction between Hitler and the system within which he ranted and acted that will be analyzed and interpreted, as it was in
The Years of Persecution
. Here, however, the system is not limited to its German components but penetrates all the nooks and crannies of European space.

For the Nazi regime the anti-Jewish crusade also offered a number of pragmatic benefits at a political-institutional level.
For a regime dependent on constant mobilization, the Jew served as the constant mobilizing myth
. The anti-Jewish drive became ever more extreme along with the radicalization of the regime’s goals and then with the extension of the war. It is in this context that we shall be able to locate the emergence of the “Final Solution.” As we shall see, Hitler himself modulated the campaign against the Jew according to tactical goals; but once the first intimations of defeat appeared, the Jew became the core of the regime’s propaganda to sustain the
Volk
in what soon appeared as a desperate struggle.

As a result of the mobilizing function of the Jew, the behavior of many ordinary German soldiers, policemen, or civilians toward the Jews they encountered, mistreated, and murdered was not necessarily the result of a deeply ingrained and historically unique German anti-Jewish passion, as has been argued by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen;
⁷
nor was it mainly the result of a whole range of common social-psychological reinforcements, constraints, and group dynamical processes, independent of ideological motivations, as suggested by Christopher R. Browning.
⁸

The Nazi system as a whole had produced an “anti-Jewish culture,” partly rooted in historical German and European Christian anti-Semitism but also fostered by all the means at the disposal of the regime and propelled to a unique level of incandescence, with a direct impact on collective and individual behavior. “Ordinary Germans” may have been vaguely aware of the process or, more plausibly, they may have internalized anti-Jewish images and beliefs without recognizing them as an ideology systematically exacerbated by state propaganda and all the means at its disposal.

Whereas the essential mobilizing function of the Jew was manipulated by the regime and its agencies, a second function—no less crucial—was more intuitively furthered. Hitler’s leadership has often been defined as “charismatic,” as based on that quasiprovidential role attributed to charismatic leaders by the populations that follow them. We shall return throughout the following chapters to the bond between the Nazi leader, the party, and the
Volk
. Suffice it to mention here that Hitler’s personal hold on the vast majority of Germans stemmed from and expressed, as far as the content of his message went, three different and suprahistorical salvation creeds: The ultimate purity of the racial community, the ultimate crushing of Bolshevism and plutocracy, and the ultimate millennial redemption (borrowed from Christian themes known to all). In each of these traditions the Jew represented evil per se. In that sense Hitler’s struggle turned him into a providential leader as, on all three fronts, he was fighting against the same metahistorical enemy: the Jew.

Within the German and European context (dominated by Germany), institutional struggles for power, generalized scrambling for spoils, and the impact of socially embedded vested interests mediated the ideological fervor. The first two elements have often been described and interpreted in any number of studies, and they will be thoroughly integrated in the forthcoming chapters; the third, however, less frequently mentioned, appears to me to be an essential aspect of this history.

In the highly developed German society and at least in part of occupied Europe, even Hitler’s authority and that of the party leadership had, in the implementation of any policy, to take into account the demands of massive vested interests, whether those of party fiefdoms, industry, the churches, peasantry, small businesses, and the like. In other words the imperatives of anti-Jewish ideology had also to be attuned to a multiplicity of structural hurdles deriving from the very nature and dynamics of modern societies as such.

Nobody would dispute such an obvious point; its significance derives from an essential fact. Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews (some of the Christian churches declared that converted Jews were part of the flock, up to a point); to the contrary, many social constituencies, many power groups were directly involved in the expropriation of the Jews and eager, be it out of greed, for their wholesale disappearance. Thus
Nazi and related anti-Jewish policies could unfold to their most extreme levels without the interference of any major countervailing interests.

III

On June 27, 1945, the world-renowned Jewish Austrian chemist Lise Meitner, who in 1939 had emigrated from Germany to Sweden, wrote to her former colleague and friend Otto Hahn, who had continued to work in the Reich. After mentioning that he and the scientific community in Germany had known much about the worsening persecution of the Jews, Meitner went on: “All of you have worked for Nazi Germany and never tried even some passive resistance. Certainly, to assuage your conscience, here and there you helped some person in need of assistance but you allowed the murder of millions of innocent people, and no protest was ever heard.”
⁹
Meitner’s cri de coeur, addressed through Hahn to Germany’s most prominent scientists, none of them active party members, none of them involved in criminal activities, could have applied as well to the entire intellectual and spiritual elite of the Reich (with some exceptions, of course) and to wide segments of the elites in occupied or satellite Europe. And what applied to the elites applied more easily (again, with exceptions) to the populations. In this domain, as already mentioned, the Nazi system and the European context were tightly linked.

Regarding the attitudes and reactions of bystanders, the answers to some fundamental issues still remain partly unclear due either to the very nature of the questions or to the lack of essential documents. The perception of the events among the various populations of bystanders, for example, still remains elusive in part. Yet a vast amount of documentary material will show that while in Western Europe, in Scandinavia, and in the Balkans perceptions concerning the fate of the deported Jews may have been hazy until late 1943 or even early 1944, this was not the case in Germany itself and of course not in Eastern Europe either. Without preempting the forthcoming interpretations, there can be little doubt that by the end of 1942 or early 1943 at the latest, it became amply clear to vast numbers of Germans, Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Balts that the Jews were destined for complete extermination.

More difficult to grasp is the sequel of such information. As the war, the persecution, and the deportations moved into their ultimate phase, and as knowledge of the extermination spread ever more widely, anti-Semitism also grew throughout the Continent. Contemporaries noted this paradoxical trend, and its interpretation will become a dominant issue in part 3 of this volume.

Notwithstanding all the problems of interpretation, the attitudes and reactions of bystanders are amply documented. Confidential SD reports (by the Security Service, or
Sicherheitsdienst
, of the SS about the state of public opinion in the Reich) and reports of other state or party agencies offer an altogether reliable picture of German attitudes. Goebbels’s diaries, one of the main sources concerning Hitler’s constant obsession with the Jews, also deal systematically with German reactions to the Jewish issue as seen from the top of the regime, while soldiers’ letters give a sample of the attitudes expressed at the bottom, so to speak. In most occupied or satellite countries, German diplomatic reports offered regular surveys concerning the state of mind of the populations in the face of the deportations, for example, as did official sources from the local administrations, such as the
rapports des préfets
in France. Individual reactions of bystanders, also as noted by Jewish diarists, will be part of the overall picture, and at times local diaries, followed throughout an entire period, as in the case of the Polish physician Zygmunt Klukowski, offer a vivid picture of an individual’s insights into the changing overall scene.

Among the questions about the bystanders that continue to elude us as a result of the unavailability of essential documents, the attitude of the Vatican and, more specifically, that of Pope Pius XII remain to this day at the top of the list. Despite a vast secondary literature and the availability of some new documents, historians’ inability to get access to the Vatican archives represents a major constraint. I shall deal with the pope’s attitude as thoroughly as present documentation allows, but historians face an obstacle that could have been yet has not been eliminated.

In its own framework, separate from the detailed history of German policies and measures or from a recounting of the attitudes and reactions of bystanders, the history of the victims has been painstakingly recorded, first during the war years and, of course, since the end of the war. Though it did include surveys of the policies of domination and murder, it did so only sketchily. The emphasis from the outset aimed at the thorough collecting of documentary traces and testimonies regarding the life and death of the Jews: the attitudes and strategies of Jewish leadership, the enslavement and destruction of Jewish labor, the activities of various Jewish parties and political youth movements, the daily life in the ghettos, the deportations, armed resistance, and mass death in any one of the hundreds of killing sites spread throughout occupied Europe. Although soon after the war contentious debates and systematic interpretations became, together with the ongoing collection of traces, an integral part of this historiography, the history of the Jews has remained a self-contained world, mostly the domain of Jewish historians. Of course the history of the Jews during the Holocaust cannot be the history of the Holocaust; without it, however, the general history of these events cannot be written.
¹⁰

In her highly controversial
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, Hannah Arendt put part of the responsibility for the extermination of the Jews of Europe squarely on the shoulders of the various Jewish leadership groups: the Jewish Councils, or
Judenräte
.
¹¹
This largely unsubstantiated thesis turned Jews into collaborators in their own destruction. In fact any influence the victims could have on the course of their own victimization was marginal, but some interventions did take place (for better or worse) in a few national contexts. Thus, in several such settings, Jewish leaders had a limited yet not entirely insignificant influence (positive or negative) on the course of decisions taken by national authorities. This was noticeable, as we shall see, in Vichy; in Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia; possibly in Bratislava; and of course in the relations between Jewish representatives and the Allied and neutral governments. Moreover, in a particularly tragic way, Jewish armed resistance (at times Jewish communist resistance groups, such as the small Baum group in Berlin), be it in Warsaw or Treblinka and then in Sobibor, may have brought about an accelerated extermination of the remaining Jewish slave labor force (at least until mid-1944) despite the acute need for workers in the increasingly embattled Reich.

In terms of its basic historical significance, the interaction between the Jews of occupied and satellite Europe, the Germans, and the surrounding populations took place at a more fundamental level. From the moment the extermination policy was launched, any steps taken by Jews in order to hamper the Nazi effort to eradicate every single one of them represented a direct countermove, be it on the tiniest individual scale: Bribing officials, policemen, or denouncers; paying families in order to hide children or adults; fleeing to woods or mountains; disappearing into small villages; converting; joining resistance movements; stealing food—anything that came to mind and led to survival meant setting an obstacle in the path of the German goal. It is at this microlevel that the most basic and ongoing Jewish interaction with the forces acting in the implementation of the “Final Solution” took place; it is at this microlevel that it mostly needs to be studied. And it is at this microlevel that documents abound.

The history of the destruction of the European Jews at the individual level can be reconstructed from the perspective of the victims not only on the basis of postwar testimonies (court depositions, interviews, and memoirs) but also owing to the unusually large number of diaries (and letters) written during the events and recovered over the following decades. These diaries and letters were written by Jews of all European countries, all walks of life, all age groups, either living under direct German domination or within the wider sphere of persecution. Of course the diaries have to be used with the same critical attention as any other document, especially if they were published after the war by the surviving author or by surviving family members. Yet, as a source for the history of Jewish life during the years of persecution and extermination, they remain crucial and invaluable testimonies.
¹²