The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (44 page)

XII

After the proclamation of the new statute of June 1941, the Vichy government forged ahead: On July 22, “Aryanization” was introduced in the nonoccupied zone according to the same criteria and methods used in the north. Businesses were liquidated or put under “French” control, assets were seized, and the proceeds were deposited in a special government bank, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.
²²⁵

For Darlan and Vallat this did not suffice. On the day the June statute was published, the registration of all Jews (according to the new definition) in the Vichy zone was mandated. According to Vallat’s estimate, approximately 140,000 Jews had been registered by the spring of 1942, although the head of the national office of statistics, René Carmille, had reached the much lower total of 109,000.
²²⁶
The exact number of Jews living in the Vichy zone at that time is not clear.
²²⁷
More immediately ominous was Darlan’s order of December 1941, to register all Jews who had entered France after January 1, 1936 (even those who had in the meantime acquired French citizenship); this identification was to become an essential element of the Franco-German agreements concerning the round-ups and deportations that were to come.
²²⁸

On the morrow of the June statute, Lambert noted that Pétain had met Helbronner and told him that all the measures had been ordered by the Germans. The marshal supposedly commented: “These are horrible people!” (
Ce sont des gens épouvantables!
)
²²⁹
After some further remarks about the new measures, Lambert naively added: “One gets the feeling that even the details of the law have been inspired or dictated by the German authorities—as the Reich now considers the way France will solve the Jewish question as a test of its sincerity in the policies of collaboration.”
²³⁰
Lambert did not yet dare to acknowledge that the initiative was French and the anti-Jewish decrees were indeed meant as a proof—but one volunteered by Vichy—of its will to collaborate.

And while, during the summer and fall of 1941, the situation of the Jews in France looked more precarious by the month, the Germans made further attempts to convince the French population that the struggle against Jewry was a vital necessity. On September 5 a major anti-Semitic exhibition opened its doors in Paris. Officially it was organized by Sézille’s “Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions”: Thus, it appeared as a French exhibition organized by a purely French institution. On the seventh Biélinky commented: “An anti-semitic exhibition has just opened at the Palais Berlitz, on the Boulevards; a blustering advertisement campaign promotes it in the newspapers and on the walls. A Jewish female friend who does not look semitic went to the opening and heard in the crowd: ‘here at least, one is sure not to meet any Jews.’”
²³¹
The exhibition remained open through January 3, 1942, and drew more than three hundred thousand visitors (most of whom had to buy tickets), with indeed a few Jews among them. Apparently some of the Jewish visitors even dared to express open criticism.
²³²

The Germans however, did not keep at propaganda campaigns. On August 20, 1941, on German instructions, the Paris police arrested a further 4,230 Jews, mainly in the eleventh arrondissement; they were sent to Drancy, the newly established concentration camp near the French capital. This second roundup was probably undertaken in reprisal for the anti-German demonstrations organized in the city on August 13 by communist youth organizations; the police had supposedly noticed a substantial number of Jews among the demonstrators (the French police had ready lists of these Jews, as many had served in the French army in 1939–40). This time some French Jews, mainly communists, were also arrested.
²³³

In the autumn further attacks against German military personnel drew reprisals, but mainly against communists (Jewish or not) at first. Even the execution of fifty hostages after the killing of the field commander of Nantes, Lt. Col. Karl Holtz, on October 20, 1941, did not specifically target Jews.
²³⁴
For Heydrich, Stülpnagel’s anti-Jewish reprisals were too mild, and it is against this background that French pro-Nazi militants perpetrated bomb attacks against three Paris synagogues on October 3, on Knochen’s instigation.
²³⁵
Stülpnagel, soon informed of the origin of the attacks, lodged a complaint with the OKH against Heydrich, but to no avail. The commander in chief had no choice but to escalate his own anti-Jewish reprisals.

On November 28, 1941, another attack against German soldiers took place. This time Stülpnagel proposed to the OKH that, henceforth, the reaction should be the mass arrest of French Jews and their deportation to the East. On December 12, 743 Jewish men, mainly French and mostly belonging to the middle classes, were seized by the German police and sent to Compiègne, a camp under direct German command. Their deportation was scheduled for the following weeks; it was delayed until March 1942, when this group and additional Jewish prisoners (1,112 in all) were deported to Auschwitz.
²³⁶
Thus, in France, it was the Army High Command that put into effect increasingly drastic anti-Jewish measures. While the execution of French hostages caused qualms, the deportation of Jews to their death (a fate increasingly known by the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht in Paris)
²³⁷
was taken in stride and implemented by the largely non-Nazi military elite.

Simultaneously with the multiplication of anti-Jewish measures, with the arrests and the early deportations, Dannecker exercised growing pressure on the Jewish organizations to transform the “coordination committee” into a full-fledged Jewish Council. The Germans expected Vichy to take the initiative of imposing the new institution.
²³⁸
In the fall of 1941 it became obvious to the Jewish leaders, natives and foreigners alike, that they would have to accept the
Diktat
. Yet, the common fate imposed upon all did not heal the rift between the two communities.
²³⁹
Against this background of internecine squabbles, a group of French Jewish personalities—among whom Lambert came to play an increasingly important role—decided to go along with Vichy’s decisions and to participate in repeated consultations with Vallat, against the will of the Consistoire and that of the more activist elements of the “Federation.”
²⁴⁰
On November 29, 1941, Vallat signed the decree establishing the Union Générale des Israélites de France. On January 9, 1942, the executive boards of the UGIF-North (occupied zone) and UGIF-South (Vichy zone) were officially appointed. De facto, Lambert became the dominant personality of UGIF-South.

It has been argued that anti-Jewish measures were less readily applied in the countries and areas of Western Europe under direct German military authority than in those under civilian Nazi rule. While this was not the case in occupied France, it seems that in Belgium the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht, Gen. Alexander von Falkenhausen, was indeed reticent in regard to measures that could create unrest in the population. Yet the usual anti-Jewish measures enacted in Holland and in France were imposed in Belgium at approximately the same time.

Thus, on October 28, 1940, the military administration imposed a “Statut des juifs,” similar to the French and Dutch ones, on the 65,000 to 75,000 Jews living in Belgium at the time.
²⁴¹
Registration was ordered, identity cards marked, Jewish businesses listed, Jewish officials dismissed, Jews expelled from the legal professions and from journalism, as elsewhere in the West. In the spring of 1941 the registration of all Jewish property followed, as well as further segregation measures as implemented in neighboring Holland, and approximately at the same time. In the fall of that same year a Jewish Council, the Association des Juifs en Belgique (AJB), was imposed; a few days later the UGIF was established in France.
²⁴²

There were some differences, however, between the situation of the Jews of Belgium and those of Holland and France. Whereas two-thirds of the Jews of Holland and half of the Jews of France were native or naturalized citizens in 1940, only 6 percent of the Jews of Belgium were Belgian citizens. Whereas in the three Western countries, small pro-Nazi movements had damaged Jewish property and attacked individual Jews once German presence eased the way, only in Belgium did large-scale pogromlike riots take place, on April 14 and 17, 1941. In Antwerp, several hundred militants of the VNV [Vlaamsch National Verbond] set fire to synagogues and to the chief rabbi’s house on Easter Monday after attending the screening of
Jud Süss
. And, as 1941 was coming to an end, neither the Belgian church dignitaries nor the resistance movements took a strong stand against the German anti-Jewish measures or against the violence of the Belgian (mostly Flemish) extreme Right. A liberal underground publication did protest against the Antwerp riots, concluding: “Dear readers—Do not think that we Belgians are pro-Jewish. No, far from it. Yet, even a Jew is a human being.”
²⁴³

After the end of the Babi Yar massacre, a few elderly Jews (witnesses mention that there were nine of them) returned to Kiev and sat by the Old Synagogue. Nobody dared to approach or leave food or water for them, as this could mean immediate execution. One after another the Jews died until only two remained. A passerby went to the German sentry standing at the corner of the street and suggested shooting the two old Jews instead of letting them also starve to death. “The guard thought for a moment and did it.”
²⁴⁴

CHAPTER V

September 1941–December 1941

On November 12, 1941, Himmler ordered Friedrich Jeckeln, the HSSPF Ostland, to murder the approximately 30,000 Jews of the Riga ghetto.

On the eve of the operation, on November 29, the able-bodied Jews were separated from the bulk of the ghetto population.
¹
On November 30, in the early-morning hours, the trek from the ghetto to the nearby Rumbula forest began. Some 1,700 guards were ready, including around 1,000 Latvian auxiliaries. In the meantime several hundred Soviet prisoners had dug six huge pits in the sandy terrain of Rumbula.
²

Jews trying to escape the evacuation were killed on the spot—inside houses, on stairways, in the streets. As, group after group, the ghetto inhabitants reached the forest, a tightening gauntlet of guards drove them toward the pits. Shortly before approaching the execution site, the Jews were forced to dispose of their suitcases and bags, take off their coats, and finally remove their clothes. Then the naked victims descended into the pit by means of an earthen ramp, lay facedown on the ground, or over the bodies of the dying and the dead, and were shot in the back of the head with a single bullet from a distance of about two meters.

Jeckeln stood on the edge of the pits surrounded by a throng of SD, police, and civilian guests.
Reichskomissar
Lohse paid a short visit, and some police commanders were brought from as far away as the Leningrad front.
³
Twelve marksmen working in shifts shot the Jews throughout the entire day. The killing stopped sometime between five p.m. and seven p.m.; by then about fifteen thousand Jews had been murdered.
⁴

A week later, on December 7 and 8, the Germans murdered almost the entire remaining half of the ghetto population. The RSHA’s report no. 155 of January 14, 1942, summed up the overall outcome: “The number of Jews who remained in Riga—29,500—was reduced to 2,500 as a result of the
Aktion
carried out by the Higher SS and Police leader Ostland.”
⁵

The historian Simon Dubnow, who lay ill, had been overlooked during the first massacre. The second time he was caught in the dragnet. The sick and feeble ghetto inhabitants were brought to the execution area in buses; as Dubnow could not board the bus fast enough, one of the Latvian guards shot him in the back of the head. The next day he was buried in a mass grave in the ghetto. According to rumor—fast turning into legend—on his way to the bus, Dubnow repeated: “People, do not forget; speak of this, people; record it all.”
⁶
A few months later, on June 26, 1942, SS Obersturmführer Heinz Ballensiefen, head of the Jewish Section of Amt VII (research) in the RSHA, informed his colleagues that in Riga his men had “secured” (
sichergestellt
) “about 45 boxes containing the archive and library of the Jewish historian Dubnow.”
⁷

Himmler continued to worry about the heavy stress that these mass killings imposed upon his men. On December 12, 1941, he once again issued secret instructions in this regard: “It is the sacred obligation of the higher SS leaders and commanders to see to it personally that none of our men who have to fulfill this heavy duty, become brutalized…. This will be achieved by keeping the strictest discipline in the performance of the official duties and by comradely evening gatherings after days filled with these difficult obligations. However, these comradely gatherings should never end with abuse of alcohol. During such evenings, as far as conditions allow, one should sit together around the table and eat in the best German domestic tradition; moreover, these evenings should be devoted to music, to lectures and to introducing our men into the beautiful domains of German spiritual and emotional life.”
⁸

On the day of the first massacre of the Riga Jews, in the early-morning hours, a transport of 1,000 Jews from Berlin had arrived at a suburban railway station. Jeckeln did not deem it appropriate to send these new arrivals into a ghetto in full upheaval, from where the trek to Rumbula would be starting at any moment. The solution was at hand: The Berlin Jews were transported straight from the station to the forest and killed on the spot.

The deportees transported from the Reich to Riga were but one group among others who, since October 15, following a sudden decision taken by Hitler, were being sent off from cities in Germany and the Protectorate to ghettos in former Poland or the Ostland. Just a month earlier, Hitler had told Goebbels that the deportation of the Jews of Germany (and, implicitly, of all European Jews) would take place after the victory in Russia and would be directed to the Russian Far North. What could have triggered the Nazi leader’s sudden initiative?

I

The precise date of Hitler’s decision about the deportation of the Jews from Germany remains undetermined. Some historians have argued that Hitler reached his decision on September 17. The following day, in a letter to Greiser, with copies to Heydrich and to Wilhelm Koppe, the HSSPF in the Warthegau, Himmler summed up the “Führer’s wish”: “The Führer wishes the Altreich and the Protectorate to be cleared of and freed from Jews from west to east as soon as possible. Consequently, I shall endeavor, this year if possible and initially as a first stage, to transport the Jews from the Altreich and the Protectorate to those eastern territories that became part of the Reich two years ago and then deport them even farther eastward next spring. My intention is to take approximately 60,000 Jews of the Altreich and the Protectorate to spend the winter in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, which, I have heard, still has available capacity. I ask you not only to understand this step, which will certainly impose difficulties and burdens on your Gau, but to do everything in your power to support it in the interest of the Reich. SS Gruppenführer Heydrich, whose task is to carry out the transfer of the Jews, will contact you in good time, directly or through SS Gruppenführer Koppe.”
⁹

Himmler’s letter to Greiser demonstrates that Hitler’s decision was sudden and that nothing was ready for its implementation. To deport 60,000 to 80,000 Jews to the overcrowded Lodz ghetto was manifestly impossible. The promise that these Jews would be sent farther eastward in the spring was clearly an improvised commitment, devoid of practical significance, meant only to preempt any protests from Greiser or from the Lodz authorities. Thus the immediate context of the Nazi leader’s decision becomes even more puzzling.

Starting the evacuation in the West of the Reich points to one of Hitler’s possible motives: persistent demands from the
Gauleiter
of western and northwestern Germany for housing, as a result of the damages inflicted by British bombings. A particularly pressing request was addressed directly to Hitler by Hamburg Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann on September 16 after a heavy British raid on the city, on the previous day.
¹⁰
Such demands were reinforced by Goebbels’s constant insistence upon “cleansing Berlin of its Jews.”

Hitler’s sudden decision has mainly been attributed to information about Stalin’s order to deport the entire population of Volga Germans to Siberia.
¹¹
Rosenberg’s adjutant, Otto Bräutigam, who brought the news to Hitler’s headquarters on September 14, was told that the Führer attached the greatest importance to this information.
¹²
After consulting with Ribbentrop on September 16, Hitler—according to this interpretation—made up his mind on the seventeenth. Yet we know that six days beforehand Goebbels had already mentioned Stalin’s order in his diary, and, on the following day, the propaganda chief recorded the worldwide echo stirred by the deportation.
¹³
Thus Hitler could hardly have been impressed on September 14 by information he undoubtedly received nearly a week earlier and to which, until then, he had not reacted. Moreover, he certainly knew that deporting the Jews of Germany to avenge the Volga Germans would hardly impress somebody of Stalin’s ilk. The Volga Germans could, of course, have been a convenient pretext for a decision taken earlier for an entirely different reason: Roosevelt’s steady efforts to involve the United States in the war.

The Nazi leader had more than enough information concerning the direct assistance Roosevelt was providing Great Britain; the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting in August 1941 underscored the foundations of what had virtually become an alliance. And Berlin was following with no less concern Roosevelt’s determination to keep Stalin willing and capable to fight on. The Germans knew of Roosevelt’s unofficial envoy Harry Hopkins’s mission to Moscow and of Roosevelt’s decision to send planes and tanks directly from American assembly lines to the Soviet forces, even before filling the U.S. Army’s immediate needs.
¹⁴
All this unquestionably tallied with Hitler’s belief that the Jews were the threatening force behind Roosevelt. How else could one explain the readiness of the leader of world capitalism to rush aid and assistance to the threatened fortress of Bolshevism?

In January 1939 Hitler had threatened the Jewish “warmongers” in Paris, London, and mainly Washington with his notorious “prophecy” in order to dissuade the democracies from intervening in the incipient Polish crisis. In January 1941 the Nazi leader took up his prophecy again (albeit in slightly different terms), possibly as a reaction to Roosevelt’s reelection and mainly to his fireside chat about the United States becoming “the great arsenal of democracy.” As speeches and threats did not seem to deflect the American president from his course, the Nazi leader may have thought that direct and highly menacing steps against a closely scrutinized Jewish community, the Jews of Germany (with any number of American correspondents posted in Berlin), would have some effect on Roosevelt’s “Jewish entourage.” The German Jews became, concretely and visibly, hostages on the brink of a dire fate if the United States moved further toward war.

In July 1940 Fritz Rademacher of the Foreign Ministry had expressed the same idea regarding the Madagascar plan: “The Jews [in Madagascar] will remain in German hands as a pledge of the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.”
¹⁵
In March 1941, the Foreign Ministry once again linked measures against Jews in Germany to American policy; it demanded that a new decree (then in preparation) about the loss of citizenship and expropriation of Jews leaving the Reich be announced on March 26, the day the Lend-Lease Bill was to take effect.
¹⁶

The need to put pressure on Roosevelt may have seemed increasingly urgent to Hitler during the first days of September 1941. On September 4, a German submarine,
U-652
, dangerously trailed by the U.S. destroyer
Greer
—and attacked by British aircraft guided by the
Greer
—attempted to torpedo the American vessel. Both the
Greer
and
U-652
escaped unharmed, but a week later, on September 11, Roosevelt gave a distorted account of the incident and announced the “shoot-on-sight” policy, a major American step on the path to war with Germany.
¹⁷
“The time for active defense has come,” the president declared in a radio speech, and two days later American naval forces received the order to shoot on sight at all Axis ships encountered within the American “neutrality zone” (unilaterally defined by the United States and extending to the mid-Atlantic).
¹⁸

One may assume that, in Hitler’s mind, the counterthreat could work both ways: Either the fate menacing the Jews of Germany would eventually stop Roosevelt in his tracks (due to Jewish pressure)
or
, if Roosevelt and the Jews were bent on war with the Reich—that is, if total war was in the offing—the most dangerous internal enemy would already have been expelled from German territory.

Hitler’s decision may, in fact, have been taken in the early days of September. On September 2, Himmler was the Nazi leader’s guest for lunch. Other issues were on the agenda, but later that same day, the Reichsführer met his delegate in the General Government, Krüger, and discussed with him the deportation of Jews from the Reich (“
Judenfrage-Aussiedlung aus dem Reich
”). Two days later, as the
Greer
incident was unfolding, the Reichsführer again met with Hitler and, later in the evening, had a discussion with Koppe, his man in the Warthegau.
¹⁹
The main practical obstacles were Frank’s uncompromising opposition to further transports of Poles and Jews into the General Government, and the overcrowding of the Lodz ghetto.
²⁰

Hitler hesitated for some three additional weeks, as the attack against Moscow unfolded, probably in order to assess the difficulties that the deportation trains could be adding to the already overburdened supply routes from the Reich to the East. In early October, after the German victories in Vyasma and Briansk, the decision was finalized: The deportations could begin.
²¹
When the president of the Lodz district, Friedrich Uebelhoer, prodded by the city mayor, Werner Ventzki, dared to protest to Himmler against the forthcoming influx of Jews and even accused Eichmann of providing false information about the situation in the ghetto, Himmler sent him a sharp rebuff.
²²

On October 15, the first transport left Vienna for Lodz; it was followed by transports from Prague and Luxembourg on the sixteenth, and from Berlin, on the eighteenth. By November 5 twenty transports carrying 19,593 Jews completed the first phase.
²³
In the meantime, on October 23, Eichmann and his men reviewed the reports about the first deportations and added some administrative steps and practical measures to the existing procedures.
²⁴
Then, on November 8, the second phase started and lasted until mid-January 1942. This time twenty-two transports with some 22,000 Jews in all were headed further east, to the Ostland, to Riga, Kovno, and Minsk (upon Heydrich’s suggestion, as we shall see further on).
²⁵
Of the transports destined for Riga, five were rerouted to Kovno; none of these 5,000 deportees ever set foot in the ghetto: Upon their arrival, they were immediately transferred to fort IX and shot in two batches on November 25 and 29.
²⁶
A month beforehand, on October 28, approximately 10,000 inhabitants of the Kovno ghetto had been murdered. In Minsk 13,000 local Jews were exterminated on November 7, and a further group of 7,000 on November 20. Clearly the mass slaughters of October and November 1941 were intended to make space for the new arrivals from the Reich. And, as we saw, at times some of the new arrivals were killed on reaching their destination.