The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (22 page)

As a result of the Vichy laws of the summer and fall of 1940, 140 faculty members of Jewish origin, around 10 percent of the teaching body nationwide, were banned from the universities. Fourteen particularly eminent Jewish scholars were exempted from the ban on condition that they continue teaching in the Vichy zone only. The French academic community acquiesced.
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At the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic institution in the country, its four Jewish professors were dismissed, according to the new regulations.

The director of the Collège, Edmond Faral, had not waited for the new laws. In a January 1941 report to Vichy’s delegation in occupied France, Faral eagerly mentioned his own initiative: “The Jewish question: no Jew has taught at the Collège de France since the beginning of the academic year. That decision was taken even before the law of October 3, 1940.” In the draft of the report, the last sentence, later deleted, read as follows: “The administration had taken that decision.”
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When the Jews were no longer allowed to teach at the Collège, none of their “Aryan” colleagues protested.
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The same happened in all French institutions of higher learning. At the prestigious Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, the assistant director, Roger Seydoux, expelled all Jewish professors when asked to do so by Karl Epting, the head of the cultural section of the German embassy in Paris. No attempts were made to obtain exemptions.
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The two main figures of the community, the head of the Consistoire Central, French Jewry’s traditional representative body, and the head of the Consistoire de Paris, Édouard and Robert de Rothschild, fled the country in June 1940.
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They left a Jewry in complete disarray in the feeble hands of the newly elected chief rabbi of France, Isaie Schwartz, and the remaining members of the Consistoire, most of whom had sought refuge in the nonoccupied part of the country.

Even before the armistice became effective, the chief rabbi received a first intimation of things to come: On June 20 the archbishop of Bordeaux broadcast an address to the Catholics of France: on the twenty-third Pastor Boegner spoke to the Protestant community. Schwartz should have been next, but no invitation came; in response to his query he was told that from then on the Jewish religious program would be taken off the air.
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Vague forebodings spread among native French Jews and, even more so, among the foreign Jews, whether they lived in the occupied or the nonoccupied zone. In fact nobody knew, in the summer of 1940, what to expect and what to fear. Two very different chroniclers recorded the events from “opposite” perspectives. The first, Raymond-Raoul Lambert, was a native French Jew belonging to an old Alsatian Jewish family; the other, Jacques Biélinky, was born in Vitebsk and, after having experienced the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and then being jailed in Russia for clandestine socialist activities, he arrived in France in 1909 as a political refugee. For the Germans and for Vichy—both were first and foremost Jews. Lambert was French to the core: French schools, decorated frontline officer during World War I, briefly appointed to the Foreign Ministry, yet also consciously Jewish, even actively so: He organized the assistance to German Jews after 1933 and simultaneously was appointed editor in chief of
L’Univers Israélite
, the main periodical of the Consistoire. When the war broke out, Lambert donned the uniform once again, this time as a reserve officer.

Biélinky had been naturalized in 1927, and thus, belonged to his adoptive France as much as Lambert. During the coming events, however, Biélinky’s voice would be that of a foreign Jew, of an
Ostjude
, to a point. He had worked as a journalist for various Jewish newspapers, and although his formal education had stopped with the
cheder
[the traditional Jewish religious elementary school], he acquired a solid knowledge of painting, and it was as a reporter dealing with the Parisian artistic scene that he signed many of his articles. Between 1940 and 1943 Lambert’s path would not be the same as Biélinky’s; their fates would, however, be identical in the end.
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“French Jewry lives in a particular state of anxiety,” Lambert, still in the army, recorded on July 14, 1940. “It accepts the suffering shared by all, but fears the possibility that the enemy will demand further discrimination. This anxiety makes my future and that of my sons appear especially threatened, but I am still confident. France cannot accept everything, and it is not for nothing that for more than a century my ancestors have been buried in its soil, that I fought two wars. I cannot imagine for myself, my wife and my sons, the possibility of life under another sky, an uprooting that would be worse than an amputation.”
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In fact during the summer and fall of 1940, Jewish life seemed at first to return to a measure of normalcy, even in Paris under direct German occupation. As early as October 1940, all communal welfare offices had resumed their activities and, at this stage, they were able to face the needs of a substantial part of the immigrant community. The French Jews turned to the Consistoire, and, in August, Paris’s chief rabbi, Julien Weill, returned to the French capital. Among French Jews anxiety about the future seemed to be on the wane. The respite was short-lived.

On October 2, 1940, Lambert got an inkling of the forthcoming
Statut
from early indications in the newspapers. “It is one of the saddest memories of my life,” he noted in his diary. “Thus it can be that in a few days I shall be a second-class citizen, that my sons, French by birth, culture, and faith will be brutally rejected from the French community…. Is it possible? I can’t believe it. France is not France anymore.”
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A few weeks later, the pain was no less intense but saving formulas were emerging: “A friend writes to me: One does not judge one’s mother when she is unjust. One suffers and one waits. Thus we Jews of France have to bend our heads and suffer,” Lambert noted on November 6 and added: “I agree!”
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Biélinky, who continued to live in Paris, noted the announcement of the
Statut
almost laconically. Two days later, on October 4, after attending the Rosh Hashanah prayers, he mentioned the large number of worshippers and the presence of police forces around the synagogue; as for troublemakers, there weren’t any. After the service he entered a coffee shop. The owner, “a Catholic one hundred percent, loudly expressed his indignation against the persecution of the Jews. He [the owner] declared that the local population, very French and very Parisian, is indifferent to the fate of the Rothschilds, but otherwise it would openly support the Jewish population of modest condition.”
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Among the official leaders of French Jewry, the first to respond to the statute was Chief Rabbi Schwartz. In a letter to Pétain on October 22, 1940, he reminded the chief of state that the French Jews, now excluded from all public office, had always been “the faithful servants of the fatherland [
la Patrie
]…. We always called in our prayers for the glory and greatness of France…Frenchmen, who do not separate the religion of our fathers from the love of our homeland [
sol natal
], we will continue to obey the laws of the State…. To a law of exclusion [
loi d’exception
], we will answer with unfailing devotion to our fatherland.” Pétain’s curt answer praised “obedience to the law.”
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In the meantime Eichmann’s envoy in Paris, the SD officer in charge of Jewish affairs, Theodor Dannecker, was taking the first steps to establish a nationwide Jewish Council. Rather than impose the council by a simple
Diktat
, the sly German used a roundabout way: He persuaded both the Consistoire and the organizations of foreign Jews to coordinate their welfare agencies in a single framework that (so he promised) would not be interfered with by the Germans. They agreed.

On January 30, 1941, the Comité de Coordination was established. Most Jews did not yet understand Dannecker’s tactics. However, even those credulous enough to believe Dannecker’s promises of nonintervention felt an imminent threat when Eichmann’s delegate brought in two former members of the Vienna
Judenrat
, Israel Israelowitz and Wilhelm Bieberstein, and imposed them as “advisers” to the committee. In April 1941 the first issue of
Informations Juives
, written almost entirely by the two Austrian Jews—“in poor French” according to Biélinky—was published.
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It was becoming increasingly clear that Dannecker’s Jewish agents were in Paris to take charge of the new organization.
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VIII

As the Wehrmacht broke through the Dutch lines, a wave of panic engulfed the country’s 140,000 Jews: On May 13 and 14, thousands rushed to the North Sea coast in the hope of finding some way to reach England:
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their fear found its hateful echo in the letters of German soldiers. Cpl. HZ described, in a letter of June 2, 1940, an incident that must have taken place in Belgium or in northern France: “You should have seen the Jews, as the Germans were advancing. I saw a Jew with luggage standing by a taxi and offering the driver 6,000 Frs (600 RM) if he could take him to the coast, so that he still could catch a boat to England. Just then, a second Jew arrived and offered 7,000 Frs for the same ride; then came a third one, completely distraught, with trembling knees: please, please, take me along, I shall give you 10,000 Frs.”
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In Amsterdam the number of suicides increased threefold from 1939 to 1940: Most of those who killed themselves were probably Jews. According to various estimates, some two hundred Jews committed suicide during the week starting May 15.
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In two ways the situation of Dutch Jewry was different from that of other Western countries at the onset of the German occupation. Whereas the Jews of Belgium were predominantly foreign and one-half of the French community was not native, in the Netherlands the twenty thousand foreign Jews represented only one-seventh of the Jewish population in May 1940. Moreover, even if some measure of traditionally religious anti-Semitism lingered in the rural areas of Holland, in Amsterdam—where half the Jews of the country were concentrated—and in larger cities in general—anti-Jewish feelings did not lead to public intolerance, although traditional religious anti-Judaism persisted among a majority of Dutch Protestants and Catholics. Even Anton Mussert’s Dutch Nazi Party counted some Jewish members (about one hundred) before the Germans arrived.
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During the first months of the occupation, German domination seemed relatively mild. The Dutch were considered a kindred race and, ultimately, they would be integrated in the greater community of Nordic nations. The two top Nazi envoys to Holland, both Austrians, Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Higher SS and Police Leader Hanns Albin Rauter (Himmler’s delegate in The Hague), did not foresee any major difficulties in handling the Dutch population and its Jews. Queen Wilhelmina and the government had fled to London, but current affairs were impeccably run by a model bureaucracy under the guidance of the so-called College of the Secretaries-General (the highest-ranking officials in every ministry), with the help of an obedient and zealous civil service, an efficient police force, and the full cooperation of all local authorities. The Germans became the supervisors of a smoothly working administrative system.
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The Dutch political scene was not unfavorable to the occupiers either. Mussert’s party (NSB) never became a significant political force; it was vocal, it supplied henchmen to the Germans, but all in all it remained peripheral, somewhat like the collaborationist parties in occupied France. Yet, soon after the defeat, a new party, the Dutch Union (Nederlandse Unie), gained wide support among the population received tentative acceptance from the Germans and initiated a policy of moderate collaboration not very different from the Vichy line.

It was in this “conciliatory” climate that the first anti-Jewish measures were imposed by the Germans throughout the summer of 1940. They did not seem ominous: air raid protection teams would no longer include Jews: Jews were forbidden to work in Germany; Jews in the civil service could not be promoted, and no new appointments of Jews were allowed. But in October the first standard German steps were taken: By the middle of the month all civil servants had to fill out forms about their racial origin. On October 22, 1940, the edict defining Jews was proclaimed.
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The definition of who was a Jew was essentially identical to that of the Nuremberg laws, except in regard to the cut-off date for mixed breeds: A person was considered Jewish if descending from three or more grandparents of the Jewish religion. A person descending from two Jewish grandparents was considered a mixed breed of the first degree if not married to a Jewish spouse or belonging to the Jewish faith on May 9, 1940 (the eve of the German attack in the West); otherwise that person was Jewish.

From this early stage the secretaries-general and the civil service as a whole displayed the compliance that would later have fateful consequences. Although some civil servants had qualms about the anticonstitutional aspect of the forms regarding their racial origin, the highest officials of the land decided to accept them. The secretary-general of the Department of the Interior, K. J. Fredericks, led the way: Out of some 240,000 civil servants, apparently fewer than 20 refused to fill out the questionnaire.
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By mid-November all Jewish civil servants had been dismissed, and the Dutch Supreme Court voted by a majority of 12 to 5 to dismiss its own president, the Jew Lodewijk E. Visser.
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