The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (62 page)

On March 29, 1942, for example, the main office of the association in Baden-Westphalia [located in Karlsruhe] wrote to its Mannheim branch concerning the 125 Jews of Baden whom they had to inform “on instructions from the authorities” that they were to get ready for deportation. The list of those to be sent away was attached. “We ask you,” the main office wrote to the Mannheim employees, “that you visit the persons who are going to take part in the journey as soon as possible and extend to them advice and assistance.” Given the number of those involved, Karlsruhe suggested finding “tactful” volunteers to assist the deportees. The volunteers did not have to be members of the Reichsvereinigung, but, obviously, they had to belong to “the Jewish race.” As time was very short, employees and volunteers had to be available “in the coming days” to stand by those to be evacuated. The Karlsruhe office added that if one of the persons designated was totally unable to travel for health reasons, a medical certificate should immediately be sent to them and they would submit it to “the authorities.” “However,” the letter ended, “we cannot foresee how far the authorities will be ready to change their orders in these cases.”
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It was probably in regard to the same transport that, on April 4, Frau Henny Wertheimer, an employee of the Reichsvereinigung in Offenburg, wrote to Dr. Eisenmann, head of the Karlsruhe office. She informed him first that Joseph Greilsheimer from Friesenheim, one of the people designated for deportation, had hanged himself. “It is naturally difficult for the wife who must now move away [
abwandern
] alone. It is good that the mother is with her.” More difficulties in Schmieheim: “Old Frau Grumbacher is in bed with some sort of flu; if I only knew what to do with the old lady and with paralyzed Bella and how I could transport the sick from Schmieheim.” Frau Wertheimer inquired at the Gestapo and was told to use an ambulance to bring the sick to the local railway station and from there by train to Mannheim [the ambulance had to be paid by the Reichsvereinigung]. She added a postscript: “I also have to ask for a few more stars to sew on the clothes.”
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Eisenmann had more problems on his hands: what, he asked the local Gestapo, was to be done with the seventy inmates of the sick ward of the Jewish old people’s home in Mannheim, as the staff of the institution was being deported and as the mayor had rejected a demand to transfer these elderly invalids to a municipal institution.
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We can surmise the Karlsruhe Gestapo’s answer to Eisenmann’s query.

While the deportations from the Reich were engulfing all segments of the Jewish population, a few small groups of Germans, mainly in Berlin, offered their help; they hid Jews on the run, they produced forged identity papers, fake draft deferrals, food ration cards, and the like. And, beyond the immediate practical help, they offered humaneness and some hope. Of course there was only so much that two or three dozen anti-Nazis determined to help Jews could do, mainly in 1942 or 1943. In her diary Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist, bestselling writer, and the driving force behind the “Uncle Emil” group, admits to many a tragic failure in this first half of 1942.

Margot Rosenthal, one of the Jewish women whom the group was hiding, was denounced by her concierge as she briefly slipped back into her apartment. On April 30, 1942, Ruth and her friends received a piece of tissue paper: Margot and 450 other Jews were about to be sent away: “knapsack, blanket roll, and as much baggage as one can carry. I can’t carry anything, and so shall simply leave everything by the roadside. This is farewell to life. I weep and weep. God be with you forever, and think of me!”
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One after another most of Ruth’s Jewish friends were caught: “Heinrich Muehsam, Mother Lehmann, Peter Tarnowsky, Dr. Jakob, his little Evelyn, his wife and the Bernsteins, his father- and mother-in-law.”
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Some other hiding strategies would have to be devised, for the few and by the few.

VIII

The first transport of Jewish deportees from Slovakia left for Auschwitz on March 26, 1942. It carried 999 young women. Tiso’s country thereby acquired the doubtful distinction of immediately following the Reich and the Protectorate in delivering its Jews to the camps. The deportation was not the result of German pressure but of a Slovak request. The Slovak initiative had its own rationality. Once the Aryanization measures had despoiled most Jews of their property, getting rid of this impoverished population followed strict economic logic. In early 1942 the Germans had demanded 20,000 Slovak workers for their armament factories; Tuka’s government offered 20,000 able-bodied Jews. After some hesitation Eichmann accepted; he could use young Jewish workers to accelerate the building of Birkenau after Soviet prisoners had almost all died, as we saw; he could even take their families along. The Slovaks would pay 500 reichsmarks per deported Jew (to cover German expenses), and in exchange the Reich allowed them to keep the deportees’ property. Moreover, they received the assurance that the deported Jews would not return. This was the “Slovak model” Eichmann hoped to apply elsewhere over time.

By the end of June 1942, some 52,000 Slovak Jews had been deported, mainly to Auschwitz and to their death. Then, however, the deportations slowed to a standstill.
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Tuka insisted on forging ahead, but Tiso hesitated. The intervention of the Vatican, followed by the bribing of Slovak officials on the initiative of a group of local Jews, did eventually play a role.

Vatican Secretary of State Luigi Maglione twice summoned the Slovak minister between April and July 1942. However, as the second intervention took place in April, while the deportations went on until July (to be briefly resumed in September), it is doubtful that a mere diplomatic query—and Maglione worded his protest as such—unknown to the Slovak public and to the world—did suffice.
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Moreover, the attitude of the Slovak church remained ambiguous at first. A pastoral letter issued in April 1942 demanded that the treatment of Jews remain within the limits of civil and natural law but deemed it necessary to berate them for rejecting Christ and for having prepared an “ignominious death for Him on the cross.”
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There were however dissenting attitudes, such as that of Bishop Pavol Jantausch of Trnava and also of the small Slovak Lutheran Church, which issued a courageous plea in favor of the Jews “as human beings.”
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Once the devoutly Catholic populations became fully aware of the mistreatment of the Jews by the Hlinka guard and by Slovak ethnic Germans, on hand to help the guard in loading the deportees into cattle cars, the atmosphere started to change; even the local church would modify its stance, as we shall see.
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On June 26, 1942, the German minister to Bratislava, Hans Ludin, informed the Wilhelmstrasse: “Evacuation of Jews from Slovakia has reached deadlock. Because of clerical influence and the corruption of individual officials, 35,000 Jews have received special consideration on the basis of which they need not be evacuated…. Prime Minister Tuka wishes to continue the deportations, however, and requests strong support by diplomatic pressure on the part of the Reich.”
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On June 30, Ernst von Weizsäcker, state secretary of the Foreign Ministry, responded: “You can render the diplomatic assistance requested by Prime Minister Tuka by stating that stopping the deportation of the Jews and excluding 35,000 Jews would cause surprise [the initial formulation “would leave a very bad impression” was crossed out and replaced by “would cause surprise”] in Germany, particularly since the previous cooperation of Slovakia in the Jewish question has been much appreciated here.”
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The “corruption of individual officials” referred to by Ludin was almost certainly the bribing operation initiated by the “Working Group,” led by the ultra-Orthodox rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissmandel, a Zionist female activist, Gisi Fleischmann, and other individuals representing the main segments of Slovak Jewry. The “Working Group,” thoroughly researched by historian Yehuda Bauer, also made substantial payments to Eichmann’s representative in Bratislava, Dieter Wisliceny.
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That bribing the Slovaks contributed to a halt in the deportations for two years is most likely; whether the sums transferred to the SS had any influence remains an open question. Completing the deportations from Slovakia was not a German priority, as we shall see; this may have allowed the SS to trick the “Working Group” into paying much needed foreign currency in the belief that they were helping postpone the dispatch of the remaining Slovak Jews, and possibly of other European Jews, to their death.

The major operational decision regarding the deportations from France, Holland, and Belgium was taken after Heydrich’s death, at a meeting convened by Eichmann at the RSHA on June 11. Present were the heads of the Jewish sections of the SD in Paris, Brussels, and The Hague. According to Dannecker’s summary of the meeting, Himmler had demanded the increase of deportations either from Romania or from the West, due to the impossibility—for military reasons—of continuing deportations from Germany during the summer. The deportees, both men and women, were to be between ages sixteen and forty, with an additional number (10 percent of Jews unable to work. The plan was to deport 15,000 Jews from Holland, 10,000 from Belgium, and a total of 100,000 from both French zones. Eichmann suggested that, in France, a law similar to the Eleventh Ordinance be passed; thereby French citizenship of any Jew having left French territory would be abolished, and all Jewish property would be transferred to the French state. In the same way as in Slovakia, the Reich would be paid approximately 700 reichsmarks per deported Jew.
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Clearly Himmler wanted a regular inflow of Jewish slave labor during the summer months, while masses of Polish Jews unfit for work would fill the extermination centers to capacity. The Reichsführer’s instructions predated the radical change of policy that was about to take place regarding Jewish workers. During the second half of June it became obvious to the Germans that they would not be able to arrest and transport more than 40,000 Jews from France during a first three-month phase; to make up for the loss, the number of deportees from Holland, where direct German domination simplified matters, was raised from 15,000 to 40,000.
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The Germans could rely upon the subservience of the Dutch police and of the civil service; the grip on the country’s Jews progressively tightened. On October 31, 1941, the Germans appointed the Amsterdam Jewish Council as the sole council for the whole country.
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Soon thereafter the deportation of Jewish workers to special labor camps started.
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On January 7, 1942, the council called on the first contingent of workers: unemployed men on public welfare. Over the following weeks the German demands for laborers steadily increased, and the array of those being called up grew.
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Although the council operated in coordination with the Amsterdam and The Hague labor offices, the admonishments to report originated essentially from Jewish leaders. Historian Jacob Presser, no admirer of the council, emphasized the role of Asscher, Cohen, and Meijer de Vries in their relentless recruitment campaign.
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What the alternative might have been, apart from disbanding the council, remains unclear.

The labor camps—in fact concentration camps using Jewish and non-Jewish forced labor, such as, over time, Amersfoort, Vught (near ’s-Hertogenbosch), as well as smaller camps—were mainly staffed by Dutch Nazis who often outdid the Germans in sheer sadism. Westerbork (from July 1942 on, the main transit camp to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Bergen Belsen, and Theresienstadt) had been a camp for a few hundred German Jewish refugees since the beginning of the war; by 1942 they had become “old-timers” and de facto ruled the camp under the supervision of a German commandant. In early 1942 transports of foreign Jews were increasingly sent to Westerbork, while Dutch Jews from the provinces were being concentrated in Amsterdam. Dutch police supervised the transfer operations and access to vacated Jewish homes. The Germans dutifully registered furniture and household objects, which
Einsatzstab
Rosenberg then carted off to the Reich. During the same months a Dutch equivalent of the Nuremberg laws, prohibiting marriage between Jews and non-Jews (among other things), became mandatory.

All of this still remained less important for Etty Hillesum than her intense love affair with a German Jewish refugee, Hans Spier, a spiritual guide of sorts and a highly idiosyncratic psychotherapist. The German measures did not spare her, of course. “Yesterday Lippmann and Rosenthal [to hand over assets],” she noted on April 15, 1942, “Robbed and hunted.”
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Yet she perceived most of the measures through the prism of her emotions: “I am so glad that he [Spier] is a Jew and I am a Jewess,” she wrote on April 29. “And I shall do what I can to remain with him so that we get through these times together. And I shall tell him this evening: I am not really frightened of anything, I feel so strong; it matters little whether you have to sleep on a hard floor, or whether you are only allowed to walk through certain specified streets, and so on—these are only minor vexations, so insignificant compared with the infinite riches and possibilities we carry within us.”
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On June 12 Etty’s notes dealt again with the everyday persecution: “And now Jews may no longer visit greengrocers’ shops, they will soon have to hand in their bicycles, they may no longer travel by train and they must be off the streets by 8 o’clock at night.”
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On Saturday, June 20, less than a month before the beginning of the deportations from Amsterdam to Westerbork and from Westerbork to Auschwitz, Etty directed her thoughts to Jewish attitudes and responses: “Humiliation always involves two. The one who does the humiliating and the one who allows himself to be humiliated. If the second is missing, that is if the passive party is immune to humiliation, then the humiliation vanishes into thin air…. We Jews should remember that…they can’t do anything to us, they really can’t. They can harass us, they can rob us of our material goods, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance. By our feelings of being persecuted, humiliated and oppressed…. Our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves.”
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