The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (23 page)

On October 21, 1940, the registration of Jewish businesses began. It was followed on January 10, 1941, by the compulsory registration of the Jews themselves; nearly everyone complied. In the Netherlands, moreover, personal identification had become an unusually precise and foolproof system, “improved” even further regarding Jews (after the German registration order) due to the zeal and talent of the head of the “State Inspectorate of Population Registers,” Jacob Lentz. The forging of identity papers became almost impossible until the very last year of the war.
²³³

In Amsterdam the city council and the municipal personnel at first went beyond the call of duty in obeying German demands: Although Dutch law did not compel them to fill out declarations of Aryan descent, all volunteered to do so in January 1941.
²³⁴
Yet when the Germans mentioned the possibility of establishing a ghetto in the city, the council expressed its opposition. In the meantime, however, a situation was developing that in principle should have helped the German plans. Mussert’s Dutch Nazis, encouraged by the Germans, particularly by Seyss-Inquart’s delegate in Amsterdam, Dr. H. Böhmcker, initiated scuffles in the Jewish area of the city. On February 19, 1941, the owners of the Koco (Kohn and Cahn) ice-cream parlor in south Amsterdam mistook a German police unit for Dutch Nazis and sprayed them with ammonium gas.
²³⁵
Three days later the Germans sealed off the Jewish quarter of the city and arrested 389 young Jewish men, whom they deported to Buchenwald and then to Mauthausen: One survived.

On November 26, 1940, shortly after the dismissal of all Jewish civil servants, Professor R. P. Cleveringa, the dean of the Law School at the University of Leiden, the oldest Dutch university, addressed a meeting in the main auditorium, so packed with faculty and students that the speech had to be transmitted by loudspeaker to an adjacent hall. He spoke in honor of his Jewish colleague, Professor E. M. Meijers, who, like all other Jewish civil servants, had been dismissed on German orders on November 15. “Their [the Germans’] actions are beneath contempt,” Cleveringa declared. “All I ask is that we may dismiss them from our sight and gaze instead at the heights, up to that radiant figure in whose honor we are assembled here…. This noble son of our people, this man, this father to his students, this scholar, whom usurpers have suspended from his duties…. A man who, as all of us know, belongs here and, God willing, shall return to us.”
²³⁶
On the afternoon of that day the students in Leiden and Delft started a strike. Both universities were closed on German orders on November 29, 1940, and some of the protesters, including Dean Cleveringa, were arrested.
²³⁷

The Germans had their own way of explaining the situation. In a report of January 16, 1941, on the situation in the Netherlands, the representative of the Foreign Ministry in The Hague, Otto Bene, sent a description of the events in the universities to the Wilhelmstrasse: “Introduction of the anti-Jewish laws has provoked considerable unrest, owing to the strong influences of the Jews on the intellectual life of the Netherlands, especially in the university cities of Leiden and Delft, where students under the leadership of Jewish students and probably, as a result of behind-the-scenes manipulations of the Jewish professors affected, allowed themselves to be carried away to stage demonstrations which resulted in the closing of the two universities.”
²³⁸

But protest was not limited to the academic elites. A month before the manifestations in Leiden, the Dutch Protestant Churches (Reformed Churches) and the Mennonites—with the telling exception of the small Lutheran Church of the Netherlands (that is, the same denomination as that of the vast majority of German Protestants) and the Dutch Catholic Church—addressed a jointly signed letter to Seyss-Inquart. After evoking Christian charity and the issue of converted Jews, the letter continued: “Finally, this issue [the statute about the Jews and the expulsion of Jews from public service] has also brought profound dismay because it applies to the people from which the Savior is born, the object of the prayers of all Christians and the one they recognize [as] their Master and King. For all these reasons, we turn to your Excellency, with the urgent request to take the necessary steps to cancel the aforementioned measures.”

The last sentence may have been particularly galling for the Reichskommissar: “Besides, we wish to recall the solemn promise given by your Excellency to respect our national identity and not to impose on us a way of thinking that is foreign to us.”

The text of the letter was read from the pulpits of all Reformed temples on the following Sunday.
²³⁹
Simultaneously the first protest articles appeared in the Dutch clandestine press. Thus a December 1940 issue of the pro-Communist
De Waarheid
(Truth) did not mince words: “Dutch workers and all freedom-loving Dutchmen should fight this imported poison of hate against the Jews.”
²⁴⁰
A few months later, in February 1941,
Het Parool
joined the protest and so, one after another, did all major clandestine publications in Holland.
²⁴¹
And, as we shall see in the next chapter, in February 1941 Dutch workers would go on strike in Amsterdam and other cities to protest German anti-Jewish brutality.

Historically puzzling is the fact that almost
none
of this occurred in France. From the reports sent by the directors of
lycées
(high schools) to the Ministry of Education it appears that all Jewish professors left “without incident”—that is, without any public manifestation of sympathy or open protest by either colleagues or students.
²⁴²
French academic institutions of higher learning preempted both Vichy and the Germans in expelling their Jewish faculty members, as we saw; publishers and publications vied for German or Vichy authorizations to resume their activities and showed open readiness for “self-censorship.” And, as we also noted, the assembly of French cardinals and archbishops favored the limitation of Jewish rights even before Vichy introduced its statute. The French student unions did organize a pro–de Gaulle rally in Paris, on November 11, 1940, but in the leaflets distributed during the demonstration, not a word appeared regarding the measures taken against the Jews in both zones of the country.
²⁴³

IX

When, in May 1940, the Klemperers were forced to move into a “Jews’ house,” Victor commented: “It is still quite impossible to know whether a tolerable existence can be established here.”
²⁴⁴

In that summer of 1940, “tolerable” had a very different meaning for the inhabitants of the Jewish quarters or ghettos in former Poland; it had a different meaning for various categories of Jews in the Reich—and, for those among them who, although having been identified as full Jews, lived in “privileged mixed marriages,”
²⁴⁵
or again for mixed breeds of the first or second degree; it had a different meaning for the Jews in Western countries who lived under direct German control and for those who lived in Vichy France, or, for the most favored of all, those who had managed to settle in the Italian-occupied zone in southeastern France. For all, however, growing isolation, anxiety regarding ever-darker prospects, and complete uncertainty about what the future held in store seeped into everyday life.

Increasingly the Jews of occupied Eastern Europe would be convinced that nobody cared about their fate. Thus, in a letter sent from Warsaw in December 1940 to members of her movement in Eretz Israel, Zivia Lubetkin—who some two years later was to become one of the organizers of the Warsaw ghetto uprising—expressed her growing despair about this abandonment: “More than once, I have decided not to write to you anymore…. I will not describe here what I am going through, but I want you to know that even one word of comfort from you would have sufficed…. To my regret, however, I have to accept your silence, but I will never forgive it.”
²⁴⁶

The same uncertainty, the same dread about what the future held in store, the same feeling that the closest friends living peacefully in the free world were not doing enough, if anything at all, recurred as a constant yet restrained leitmotif in the letters that the German philosopher and literary scholar Walter Benjamin was sending from France. After the Germans occupied Paris, he had found a temporary refuge in the small pilgrimage town of Lourdes, near the Spanish border.

“My dear Teddy,” he wrote on August 2, 1940, to his longtime friend, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had emigrated from Germany to New York via Paris, “The total uncertainty about what the next day, the next hour is about to bring has dominated my existence for several weeks. I am condemned to read each newspaper (they are published on one single page) as a notification addressed directly to me and to perceive in each radio broadcast the voice of a messenger of misfortune. For some time now it has been impossible for a foreigner to obtain permission to change location. Therefore, I entirely depend on what you will be able to achieve from the outside…. My fear is that the time at our disposal could be much more limited than we supposed.”
²⁴⁷

Benjamin received an American visa from the consulate in Marseilles, probably within the nonquota category established by the Emergency Rescue Committee. He also had possession of a transit visa through Spain to Portugal. Normally he would have had no difficulty in crossing the French-Spanish border, notwithstanding the refusal of French authorities to grant exit visas. But by sheer bad luck, on September 26, 1940, the day on which Benjamin and his group arrived at the border, at Port Bou, the Spanish guards refused to recognize visas issued by the American consulate in Marseilles.

In January 1940 a still-defiant Benjamin was urging his friend, the historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, to publish the lectures he was giving at the time in New York: “Every line that we publish nowadays—as uncertain as the future to which we transmit it may be—is a victory forced upon the powers of darkness.
²⁴⁸
At the Spanish border, carrying an unpublished manuscript in a briefcase that was never found, too ill, too exhausted, and mainly too desperate to try and cross the border once again, Benjamin killed himself.
²⁴⁹

CHAPTER III

December 1940–June 1941

On June 15, 1941, in the afternoon, a week before the beginning of the German assault against the Soviet Union, Goebbels was summoned to the Reich Chancellery: Hitler, it seems, wished to get the right support from his most fanatically devoted underling.

The Nazi leader’s ruminations were first and foremost an exercise in self-reassurance: “The most powerful attack that history had ever seen,” the minister recorded. “What happened to Napoleon would not repeat itself…the Führer estimated that the entire campaign would take approximately 4 months; I think it will be much less. We stand on the eve of an unparalleled victory.” In Goebbels’s view, the attack was a vital necessity for global strategic reasons and no less so on ideological grounds: “It is not Czarism that will be brought back to Russia; an authentic socialism will replace Judeo-bolshevism. Every old Nazi will rejoice at the opportunity of witnessing these events. The pact with Russia was in fact a stain on our shield…what we have fought against throughout our life, we shall now exterminate. I say this to the Führer and he completely agrees with me.”
¹

Suddenly Hitler added a comment as unexpected as it was atypical: “The Führer says,” Goebbels recorded, “whether we are right or wrong, we must win. This is the only way. And it is right, moral and necessary. And once we have won, who will ask us about the methods. In any case, we have so much to account for that we must win; otherwise our whole people—and we in the first place, and all that we love—would be erased” [
Wir haben sowieso soviel auf dem Kerbholz, dass wir siegen müssen, weil sonst unser ganzes Volk, wir an der Spitze mit allem was uns lieb ist, ausradiert würde
.]
²
From that point on, in other words, there was no way back.

I

Whether in the summer of 1940 Hitler had ever seriously considered the invasion of the British Isles (Operation Sea Lion) remains a moot question. Throughout those same months the onslaught of the Luftwaffe against Britain’s coastal defenses did not achieve the essential precondition for a landing: control of the skies over southern England. The massive bombing of cities that followed, mainly the raids on London (the Blitz), did not break the population’s morale, and in the fall the Battle of Britain was turning to the advantage of the Royal Air Force.

At the same time Hitler was considering his alternative strategy. After the defeat of France and the British rejection of his “peace proposal,” the Nazi leader mentioned the global strategic impact of an attack against the Soviet Union on several occasions, particularly in the course of the military conference at the Berghof, on July 31, 1940. According to Halder’s notes, Hitler’s argument ran as follows: “England’s hope is Russia and America. If hope in Russia is eliminated, America also is eliminated, because enormous increase in the importance of Japan in the Far East will result from the elimination of Russia.”
³

The overall strategic framework was of course indissolubly linked, as we shall see, to Hitler’s unchanged ideological hatred of Bolshevism (of Judeo-Bolshevism, as he would mostly perceive it) and to the more traditional German aspiration to dominate the spaces of the East and their boundless reserves of raw materials. Only control of this economic potential would turn the Reich into an unassailable power, poised to dominate the world.

The Tripartite Pact, signed on September 27, 1940, between Germany, Italy, and Japan, was meant as a warning to the United States no less than to the Soviet Union.
⁴
But when, in mid-November 1940, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, arrived in Berlin for negotiations and Hitler suggested a common front against Great Britain and the United States by turning the Tripartite Pact into a “Quadripartite” one, the Nazi leader had probably already made up his mind. In any case Molotov steadily brought the discussions back to concrete issues: the full implementation of the 1939 agreement about the Soviet “sphere of interest,” mainly in the Balkans (Bulgaria) and regarding Finland.

Molotov’s adamant stand reflected Stalin’s belief in the possibility of a German attack and thus in the necessity of a westward expansion of Soviet strategic defenses, particularly after the unforeseen collapse of France. Soviet determination could but confirm Hitler in his own decision to eliminate the Eastern colossus. On December 18, 1940, the Nazi leader signed directive no. 21 and changed the previous code name of the attack on the Soviet Union from Fritz to Barbarossa. The assault was to start on May 15, 1941.

There was, in Berlin, another reason for acting rapidly. In November Roosevelt had been reelected for a third term. On December 14, in a press conference, the president used the garden hose metaphor: If a neighbor’s house is on fire, the man who owns a hose does not say: “My garden hose costs fifteen dollars and you must pay me this sum before you can have it.” He simply lends his hose, helps to put out the fire, and then takes the hose back. America, Roosevelt said, would in the future lend some nations the equipment they needed for defending their lives and their freedom.
⁵
On December 17, on the eve of signing directive no. 21, Hitler told Gen. Alfred Jodl, deputy chief of staff of the OKW, that Germany should solve all continental problems in 1941, “because in 1942 the United States will be ready to intervene.”
⁶
And, more than ever, in the Nazi leader’s view, the policy of the American president was dictated by the Jews.

Unexpected events modified the schedule set for the eastern campaign. On March 27, 1941, two days after Yugoslavia had adhered to the Tripartite Pact, a military coup unseated the pro-German government in Belgrade. Hitler ordered immediate retaliation: Belgrade was bombed to rubble, and the Wehrmacht rolled south. Yugoslavia and Greece were occupied, Bulgaria joined the Axis, and the British forces that had landed in Greece were driven from the Continent and from the island of Crete. However, the attack against the Soviet Union had to be postponed by several weeks. The date now set was June 22, the longest day of the year.

Murderous steps were planned against the Jews on Soviet territory during the preparatory stage of the campaign, yet these steps appear at first as additional ways of destroying Soviet resistance and accelerating the collapse of the Soviet system as a whole, in line with the Nazi identification of Bolshevism, its elites, and its structures with the omnipresence of Jews in power positions. Otherwise Hitler’s public declarations during the first half of 1941 do not indicate that the anti-Jewish dimension of the campaign was a goal in itself.

In his annual Reichstag speech of January 30, 1941, the Nazi leader had returned to his dire prophecy of January 1939 regarding the ultimate fate of the Jews of Europe. But this time—whether the change of vocabulary was intentional or not—instead of explicitly mentioning extermination, he prophesied that the war would “put an end to Jewry’s role in Europe.”
⁷
His words could have meant complete segregation, deportation—or indeed total extermination. In Hitler’s meetings with foreign statesmen or in speeches made throughout the last months of 1940 and during the military buildup period preceding June 22, 1941, his allusions to the Jews appeared to be rather perfunctory and generally remained very brief.

Nonetheless, on March 3, 1941, Hitler sent back a first draft of the campaign guidelines prepared by the OKW, adding, among other points, that “the Jewish Bolshevik intelligentsia, as the oppressor of the past, had to be liquidated.”
⁸
The gist of the Nazi leader’s notorious speech to his most senior generals, on March 30, was basically identical, but the Jews were not mentioned as such. “
Struggle of two worldviews
” [emphasis in original], Halder, the chief of staff of the army, summed up: “Devastating judgment about Bolshevism: Nothing else but asocial criminality. Communism, enormous danger for the future. We have to abandon the notion of soldiery camaraderie. The Communist is no comrade before [the battle] and no comrade afterward. This is a war of extermination. If we don’t consider it as such, we will achieve victory over the enemy now, but in thirty years the Communist enemy will again stand against us. We do not wage the war to spare the enemy…. The Bolshevik commissars and the Bolshevik intelligentsia have to be exterminated…. The struggle must be aimed at the poison of disintegration. It is not a matter for military courts. The officers must know what is at stake…. The soldiers must defend themselves with the means utilized to attack them…. The fighting will be very different from that in the West.”
⁹

Hitler’s address demonstrated to anyone who had been fooled by the 1939 treaty with the Soviet Union that his anti-Bolshevik fervor remained uncompromising. In its scale and ruthlessness, the forthcoming “war of extermination” represented, above and beyond its strategic goals, an ideological crusade and a “
Volkstumskampf
,” unprecedented in the annals of modern Europe. Moreover, for Hitler the destruction of Soviet power could not but mean the destruction of Jewish power; the struggle was one and the same.

In 1923 Dietrich Eckart, Hitler’s ideological mentor in many ways, had stressed the inherent link between Bolshevism (in its various guises) and the Jews in a pamphlet titled “Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue Between Hitler and Myself.”
¹⁰
In
Mein Kampf
, in his “Second Book” (an untitled Hitler manuscript, written in the late 1920s and published only after the war), and in countless speeches, Hitler had rehashed the same theme: The Slav populations of the Soviet Union were an inferior mass that, before the revolution, had been led by a Germanic elite; Jewish Bolsheviks exterminated this traditional ruling class and became the masters of the huge country as a first stage on the road to world revolution and domination.
¹¹
For the Nazi leader the murder of the “Soviet intelligentsia” and of the political commissars meant the extermination of this Jewish ruling elite; without its grip the Soviet system would unravel and collapse.
¹²

Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik creed quite naturally merged, let us recall, with a no less cardinal theme inherited from pan-Germanism: the need for the
Volk
to control as vast an eastern
Lebensraum
(vital space) as racially and strategically necessary, possibly all the way to the Urals. The conquered space would be open to Germanic colonization and would supply the Reich with all the raw materials and food it needed. As for native populations, they would be enslaved, partly decimated, or deported into Siberia (this was the
Volkstumskampf
part of the campaign). With victory over the Soviet Union, huge eastern colonization projects could be launched.

Hitler, as we saw, decided to change the code name of the campaign from Fritz (presumably referring to the king of Prussia, Frederick the Great) to Barbarossa (the common appellation of the twelfth-century Emperor Frederick I of the Hohenstaufen dynasty); the Nazi leader probably wished to evoke Barbarossa’s history and legend.
¹³
The Hohenstaufen emperor had embarked on a crusade in the East against the infidels; and, over time, the Germans had turned Barbarossa into a mythic figure: He was the secret savior, asleep in the Kyffhäuser mountain range in Thuringia, who would arise at the time of his people’s greatest need and lead them to victory and redemption.

Thus, the change of code name pointed to the quasi-mythic dimension of the forthcoming campaign in Hitler’s mind, and to his own saviorlike role at this dramatic juncture in the history of Germany. Why Hitler chose the name of an emperor whose crusade failed when he drowned in the Saleph River in Asia Minor is as mysterious as his predilection for Wagner’s opera
Rienzi
, telling the story of a late-medieval Roman tribune whose rebellion in the name of the people was crushed and who died a violent death in a fire set to his palace.

On March 26, 1941, at Hitler’s command, Heydrich and the quartermaster general of the armed forces, Gen. Eduard Wagner, drafted an agreement (issued as an order by Keitel on April 28), granting the SS full autonomy for maintaining the security behind the front, in the newly occupied territories.
¹⁴
On May 13 Keitel signed the order limiting the jurisdiction of military courts over means used by the troops in their fight against the enemy. The execution of suspects thereafter depended on decisions taken by units in the field.
¹⁵
On May 19 the OKW chief issued guidelines regarding the behavior of the troops in Russia [
sic
] that ordered officers and soldiers to take “ruthless action” against the carriers of Judeo-Bolshevik ideology.
¹⁶
The Jews were twice mentioned in the guidelines as political targets of these “ruthless” measures; the instructions were distributed to divisional level on June 4 and to all units as the attack started.
¹⁷
Finally, on June 6, “the guidelines for the treatment of political commissars” (the “commissar order”) were issued under the signature of General Alfred Jodl, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the OKW: The commissars were to be shot.
¹⁸

To these guidelines the army added high doses of propaganda that left nothing to the soldiers’ imagination. In the June 1941 issue of
Mitteilungen für die Truppe
(Information for the Troops), for example, the soldiers were told: “What the Bolsheviks are must be clear to anybody who ever set sight upon the face of a Red Commissar. Here no theoretical explanations are necessary anymore. To call beastly the traits of these people, a high percentage of whom are Jews, would be an insult to animals…. In these Commissars we see the uprising of subhumans against noble blood.”
¹⁹
These
Mitteilungen
were produced by the propaganda section of the OKW; they were part of standard troop indoctrination in preparation for the war of extermination.
²⁰