The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (32 page)

As the news of the death of this first group of Amsterdam Jews was trickling back to Holland, an attack on the Luftwaffe telephone exchange at Schiphol Airport on June 3, 1941, seriously wounded one of the soldiers. In retaliation the Germans tricked council members Cohen and Gertrud van Tijn into giving them the addresses of two hundred young German Jewish refugees. These were arrested together with other young Amsterdam Jews, sent to Mauthausen, and murdered.
²⁰¹

What should the council do? In a crisis meeting on June 12 Asscher proposed collective resignation; Cohen, fearing further German reprisals, demurred. If the council resigned, he argued, who would be left to help the community?
²⁰²
Was there any possibility that behaving differently—disbanding the council, for example—would have hampered the Germans or helped the Jews?

Etty (Esther) Hillesum was still a young woman student in Slavic languages at Amsterdam University during these spring months of 1941. For years Etty’s father had been the headmaster of the municipal gymnasium in Deventer (a midsize city in eastern Holland); her mother, it seems, introduced a tempestuous Russian Jewish personality into the staid Dutch bourgeois environment. Etty’s two brothers were unusually gifted: the older, Mischa, as a brilliant concert pianist from age six, and the younger, Jaap, as a budding biochemist who discovered a new vitamin at age seventeen. As for Etty, she was a born writer and a free spirit. In the Amsterdam house that she rented with several other Jewish friends, she launched into a complicated love life, branching out into several simultaneous directions, and started on an idiosyncratic spiritual path tinged with Christianity and some esoteric and mystical components. And she began keeping a diary.
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“Sometimes when I read the papers or hear reports of what is happening all around,” Etty noted on March 15, 1941, “I am suddenly beside myself with anger, cursing and swearing at the Germans. And I know that I do it deliberately in order to hurt Käthe [the German cook who lived in the house], to work off my anger as best I can…. And all this when I know perfectly well that she finds the new order as dreadful as I do, and is just as bowed down by the excesses of her people. But deep down she is of course one of her people, and while I understand, I sometimes cannot bear it. The whole nation must be destroyed root and branch. And now and then I say nastily, ‘They are all scum,’ and at the same time I feel terribly ashamed and deeply unhappy but cannot stop even though I know that it’s all wrong.”
²⁰⁴

The peace of mind that Etty was arduously trying to acquire in the midst of the growing turmoil was badly shaken by the new arrests: “More arrests, more terror, concentration camps, the arbitrary dragging off of fathers, sisters, brothers,” she noted on June 14, “Everything seems so menacing and ominous, and always that feeling of total impotence.”
²⁰⁵

The setting up of the Jewish Council, the Aryanization drive, and the two waves of arrests were but one aspect of the German terror campaign; the other aimed, steadily and systematically, at cutting off the Jews from the surrounding Dutch population—at increasingly isolating them—even if publicly marking them was still a year away. At the end of May 1941, as the hot weather was starting, the Germans not only barred all Jews from parks, spas, and hotels but also from public beaches and swimming pools. Shortly afterward Jewish elementary and high school students were ordered to fill out special registration forms. Soon they were excluded from Dutch schools and allowed to attend only Jewish schools.

After fleeing with his parents from The Hague to Brussels, fifteen-year-old Moshe Flinker reminisced, in the opening pages of his diary, about his last term of the school year in Holland: “During the last year I attended [the Jewish school in The Hague] the number of restrictions on us rose greatly. Several months before the end of the school year we had to turn in our bicycles to the police. From that time on, I rode to school by streetcar, but a day or two before vacations started Jews were forbidden to ride on streetcars. I then had to walk to school, which took about an hour and a half. I continued going to school during those last days,” Flinker added, “because I wanted to get my report card and find out whether I had been promoted to the next class. At that time I still thought I would be able to return to school after vacations; but I was wrong. Even so, I must mention that I did get my promotion.”
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Anne Frank; her sister, Margot; her father, Otto; and her mother, Edith, had emigrated from Frankfurt to Amsterdam during the second half of 1933. The father had the franchise for a jelling agent, pectin, from the Pomosin-Werke in Frankfurt. Over time Frank’s modest dealership at 263 Prinsengracht reached a measure of stability, thanks to a small group of devoted Dutch employees.

Commenting on the prohibition to use swimming pools, twelve-year-old Anne Frank wrote to her grandmother, who lived in Basel: “We’re not likely to get sunburned because we can’t go to the swimming pool…too bad, but there is nothing to be done.”
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VIII

The official positions of the national Catholic churches throughout the Continent and those of the Vatican were not essentially different regarding the increasingly harsh anti-Jewish measures. In France, as we saw, in August 1940 the assembly of cardinals and bishops welcomed the limitations imposed on the country’s Jews, and no members of the Catholic hierarchy expressed any protest regarding the statutes of October 1940 and June 1941. In neighboring Belgium, Cardinal Joseph-Ernest van Roey, archbishop of Malines, remained equally silent about the anti-Jewish edicts of 1940 and 1941 (in fact van Roey did not speak up until 1943); in so doing the cardinal was in step with the upper echelons of his church and neither able nor willing to oppose the militant Catholic-nationalist anti-Semitism of the Flemish radical Right, mainly active in Antwerp.
²⁰⁸

In east central Europe, pride of place has to be granted to the Polish Catholic Church. The anti-Semitism of the great majority of Polish Catholics had been notorious before the war, as we saw; it grew fiercer under German occupation. During the preextermination period, the Polish clergy, more often than not, stoked the anti-Jewish fires.

A report originating with the Polish church itself, covering the six-week period between June 1 and July 15, 1941, was transmitted to the government-in-exile in London by the
delegatura.
In its own extremism the report did not represent the general attitude of Polish Catholics toward the Jews, yet its quasiofficial nature indicated some measure of concurrence among underground leadership in the opinions expressed: “The need to solve the Jewish Question is urgent,” the report stated. “Nowhere else in the world has that question reached such a climax, because no fewer than four million [
sic
] of these highly noxious and by all standards dangerous elements live in Poland, or to be more precise, off Poland.”

As quoted and translated by Gutman and Krakowski, the report continued in the same vein: “As far as the Jewish Question is concerned, it must be seen as a singular dispensation of Divine Providence that the Germans have already made a good start, quite irrespective of all the wrongs they have done and continue to do to our country. They have shown that the liberation of Polish society from the Jewish plague is possible. They have blazed the trail for us which now must be followed: With less cruelty and brutality, to be sure, but no flagging, consistently. Clearly, one can see the hand of God in the contribution to the solution of this urgent question being made by the occupiers.” The report then expanded upon the harm done by the Jews to Polish and Christian society. After a lengthy litany of horrendous Jewish deeds, the report turned to the future. First it encouraged the departure of the Jews from the country, but “as long as this cannot be achieved, a far-reaching isolation of the Jews from our society will be mandatory.” Segregation measures were enumerated, yet the authors did not underestimate the difficulty of this challenge: “All this will be very difficult. Friction can be expected on this score between the government-in-exile, which is rather exposed to Freemason and Jewish influence and the people in the country who already today are organizing themselves. But the health of our Fatherland, restored with God’s help, depends to a very great extent on such measures.”
²⁰⁹

If one disregards its specific expression of extreme anti-Jewish hatred, the Polish church report had a common denominator with Western Catholicism and with what seems to have been the attitude of the Vatican: The Jews were once more to be partly segregated from Christian society, according to each country’s regulations.

Two documents belonging to the first half of 1941 may add some insight regarding the pope’s own attitude at that time and regarding the views apparently shared by some of the Vatican’s most authoritative personalities about the anti-Jewish measures. “Your Holiness is certainly informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany and in the neighboring countries,” Bishop Preysing of Berlin wrote to Pius XII on January 17, 1941. “Merely wishing to report,” the bishop went on, “I would like to mention that I have been asked by Catholics as well as by Protestants whether the Holy See couldn’t do something in this matter, issue an appeal in favor of these unfortunate people?” [
Ob nicht der Heilige Stuhl in dieser Sache etwas tun könnte, einen Appell zugunsten der Unglück-lichen erlassen?
]
²¹⁰

On March 19 the pope answered several of Preysing’s letters and particularly praised the Berlin bishop for his denunciation of euthanasia in a March 6 sermon at Saint Hedwig Cathedral. The pontiff also commented at some length about two conversions to Catholicism that Preysing had written about: The church opened its arms to converts. Not a word, however, alluded to Preysing’s unmistakable plea for a papal reaction to the persecution of the Jews.
²¹¹

The second document was no less telling in many ways; it confirmed that the Vatican and national episcopal assemblies, particularly the French assembly of cardinals and bishops, shared a similar view of the ongoing measures taken against the Jews. In response to an inquiry ordered by Pétain in August 1941, Leon Bérard, Vichy’s ambassador to the Vatican, provided an exhaustive answer on September 2. First the French diplomat informed the maréchal that although there existed a fundamental conflict between racial theories and church doctrine, it did not follow that the church necessarily repudiated every measure taken by particular countries against the Jews. The fundamental principle, Bérard indicated, was that once a Jew was baptized, he ceased to be a Jew. However, the ambassador added, the church recognized that religion was not the only special characteristic of Jews and that there were also certain ethnic—not racial—factors that set them apart. Historically the church’s practice and feeling over the centuries had been that Jews should not have authority over Christians. It was legitimate, therefore, to exclude them from certain public offices and to restrict their access to universities and the professions. He recalled also that ecclesiastical law had required the Jews to wear distinctive garb.

One of the major problems, the ambassador continued, was that of marriages. The new racial legislation in Italy and elsewhere prohibited marriages between Christians and Jews. The church felt that it had the authority to perform such marriages if the Jewish partner had been baptized or if an ecclesiastical dispensation had been obtained. In France, Bérard believed, there would not be similar problems because the circumstances were different (marriages between Jews and non-Jews had not been prohibited on racial grounds). For Pétain, Bérard’s report must have been reassuring.
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In its main points Bérard’s report was probably reliable. In other words, a few months before the onset of the “Final Solution,” the exclusionary postulates of a conservative tradition dominated the attitudes of European Catholicism toward the Jews, while the rights of converted Jews were to be defended. The decisive issue, however, still lay ahead: How would the Holy See respond to and eventually influence the various national churches and tens of millions of church-going Catholics in the face of the extraordinary challenges that were about to arise?

IX

The violence unleashed by the Germans on the Jews under their domination, mainly in former Poland, may appear, in hindsight, as the beginning of a seamless process leading from the first days of the war to the “Final Solution.” The murderous forays of the
Einsatzgruppen
at the outset of the Polish campaign and the ongoing terror that followed appear to underscore this sense of continuity.
²¹³
Yet simultaneously, as we saw, no clear plan indicating the fate that would befall the Jews under German domination had been outlined, let alone elaborated in its details. In his instructions to the
Einsatzgruppen,
on September 21, 1939, Heydrich had mentioned a “final goal” but left it undetermined. Almost two years later that final goal still remained elusive, although Hitler made amply clear that the Jews had “to disappear from Europe.”

The first “territorial plans” (Lublin and Madagascar) were too obviously unrealistic to have been considered for any length of time. The third plan—the deportation of the Jews of Europe to northern Russia—seemed more concrete but depended upon the outcome of the campaign in the East. No go-ahead that we know of was given before June 1941, but the “territorial plans” were undoubtedly meant to bring about the extinction of the Jewish populations expelled from European space, after victory.

This absence of any precise plan and the somewhat dampened perception of the Jewish world threat are indirectly reflected in Hitler’s merely sporadic rhetorical outbursts regarding the “Jewish question” during this first phase of the war. It also appears in the concrete measures taken in the occupied and satellite countries. These measures replicated (with somewhat lesser brutality in the West, with utter brutality in the East) the entire gamut of anti-Jewish steps developed in the Reich between the first days of the new regime and the early phase of the war. In other words the “holding pattern” of Nazi anti-Jewish policy throughout the occupied countries did not initiate radically new steps but led, in the meantime, to the extension of the “Reich model” on a European scale.