The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (67 page)

The steady expansion of deportations and killings from the early summer of 1942 on was enabled by the activation of further extermination facilities: “Bunker 2” at Auschwitz-Birkenau; and Belzec, Sobibor as previously, and also at Treblinka. Thus while most of the Jewish populations from the General Government were deported to Belzec and Sobibor, the first victims of Treblinka would be the Warsaw Jews. Simultaneously the deportees from the Reich, Slovakia and the West would increasingly be directed to Auschwitz-Birkenau (and, for a time, from Holland to Sobibor, due to a typhus epidemic in Auschwitz).

Although Himmler’s supervision of the entire system remained necessary and his interventions regarding transportation and slave labor allocation (or extermination) guided the rhythm and implementation of the killings, Hitler himself kept regularly abreast. As we shall see, within a few months he would be given the most updated progress report and would intervene personally to push for or decide on the deportations, which had not yet started (Hungary, Denmark, Italy, and again Hungary). Otherwise the “Final Solution,” despite all unforeseen political, technical, and logistic problems, had turned into a smoothly running mass-murder organization on an extraordinary scale. In regard to control over various aspects of the extermination whatever the feuds between various agencies and individuals within the SS or between the SS and party officials may have been, nothing indicates that these tensions had any impact on the overall progress of the campaign, on its unfolding, or on the ultimate distribution of the spoils.

As for the attitude of the surrounding populations and their social, political, or spiritual elites, throughout the Continent, although some small groups were ready to help Jews once the deportations started, in general only very rare gestures of solidarity with the victims occurred on a collective scale. And, in their vast majority, the Jews did not understand the fate that awaited them.

The Jews whose murder Himmler had watched were probably the deportees of the first transport that had left the Netherlands for Auschwitz, on July 14. The meticulous registration work accomplished by the Dutch census office, the German Central Emigration Office (
Zentralstelle
), and the Jewish Council allowed for summons to be sent on July 4 to 4,000 (mainly refugee) Jews chosen from the updated lists. To fill the quota the Germans organized a sudden police raid in Amsterdam on July 14; it netted 700 more Jews.
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The Dutch police outdid German expectations: “The new Dutch police squadrons are performing splendidly as regards the Jewish question and are arresting Jews in the hundreds, day and night,” an obviously elated Rauter reported to Himmler on September 24.
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Indeed the Amsterdam police performed magnificently; and Sybren Tulp personally participated in every roundup.
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Secretary-General of the Interior Fredericks feebly tried to shield the municipal police from participating in the roundups, but in vain. Rauter insisted on the involvement of all Dutch police forces, and all took part.
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Dutch detectives were attached to the German Security Police. Moreover, in May 1942, a unit of “Voluntary Auxiliary Police” had been created, comprising some 2,000 men belonging either to the NSB “storm detachments” or to the Dutch SS.
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These local police collaborators vied with the Germans in sheer sadism and brutality; most of the spies who obtained handsome profits from denouncing Jews in hiding came from their ranks.
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The German staff in charge of the “Final Solution” in Holland was small. According to Harster’s testimony in 1966, “Some 200 employees worked for Section IV [the Security Police] in the whole country.” The Jewish section at The Hague headquarters, under the command of Willi Zöpf, employed no more than thirty-six officials.
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In his computation Harster did not include the Amsterdam “annex” of Zöpf ’s IVB4 office. This “annex,” the
Zentralstelle
, headed by Willi Lages and Aus der Fünten, steadily grew in importance until, in July 1942, it was put in charge of organizing all the deportations from Amsterdam to Westerbork. By then its staff, partly German but mainly Dutch, had grown to about one hundred employees.
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According to historian Louis de Jong, the Germans had informed the Jewish Council as early as March 1942 that Jews would be sent to labor camps in the East. The council believed that the deportees would be German Jews only and thus “took no action; it even refrained from warning those representatives of the German Jews with whom it was in touch.”
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It was shocked in late June when informed that Dutch Jews would be included in the deportations.
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Lages and Aus der Fünten then chose the usual method: Some Dutch Jews would not be sent away (for the time being), and the council was allowed to distribute exemption certificates that, quite naturally, offered the hope of reprieve. The Germans knew they could rely on the docility of the people not immediately threatened.

The general secretary of the council, M. H. Bolle, established several categories of Jews (identified by numbers) and compiled the list of the 17,500 privileged ones whom the council could exempt: These Jews had special stamps affixed to their identity cards, the “Bolle stamps.” According to a member of the council, Gertrud van Tijn, when the first exemption stamps were issued, the scenes at the Jewish Council were quite indescribable. Doors were broken, the staff of the council was attacked, and the police had often to be called in…. The stamps quickly became an obsession with every Jew.”
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More often than not the decisions of the “exemptions’ committee” were influenced by favoritism and corruption.
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“The Jews here are telling each other lovely stories: They say that the Germans are burying us alive or exterminating us with gas. But what is the point of repeating such things, even if they should be true?”
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This July 11 entry in Etty Hillesum’s diary shows that ominous rumors about “Poland” were circulating in Amsterdam as the deportations started; it also shows that neither Hillesum nor most of the other Jews really believed them. Etty had been advised to seek a job with the council as a possible way of escaping immediate danger. “My letter of application to the Jewish Council…has upset my cheerful yet deadly serious equilibrium,” she noted on July 14, 1942, “as if I had done something underhanded. Like crowding onto a small piece of wood adrift on an endless ocean after a shipwreck and then saving oneself by pushing others into the water and watching them drown. It is all so ugly. And I don’t think much of this particular crowd either [the council].”
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The next day she was hired as a typist at the Cultural Affairs department of the council; she became (briefly) one of the privileged Amsterdam Jews.

A few days later Etty wrote the most concise and damning two sentences about what she perceived as the council’s overall behavior: “Nothing can ever atone for the fact, of course, that one section of the Jewish population is helping to transport the majority out of the country. History will pass judgment in due course.”
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On July 29, shortly after her guru and lover, Hans Spier, suddenly fell ill and died, Etty volunteered to work for the council at Westerbork.
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Immediate deportation threatened foreign refugees such as the Franks. On July 5, Margot, Anne’s elder sister, received a summons to report to the assembly center. On the next day, assisted by the faithful Dutch couple Miep and Jan Gies, the Franks were on their way to a carefully prepared hiding place, an attic in the building where Otto Frank’s office was located. Margot and Miep left first, on bicycles. Anne made sure that her cat would be taken in by neighbors, and on July 6, at seven-thirty in the morning, the Franks left their home. “So there we were,” Anne noted on July 9, “Father, Mother, and I, walking in the pouring rain, each of us with a schoolbag and a shopping bag filled to the brim with the most varied assortment of items. The people on their way to work at that early hour gave us sympathetic looks; you could tell by their faces that they were sorry they couldn’t offer us some kind of transportation; the conspicuous yellow star spoke for itself.”
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The relations between council members and Aus der Fünten seem to have been almost cordial at times, and the Hauptsturmführer did apparently convince David Cohen, council official Leo de Wolff, and others that he was fulfilling his task against his will.
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Jacob Presser believed that the SS officer’s protests were genuine, and yet, in his postwar history of the destruction of Dutch Jewry, he described an event in which he was involved, when Aus der Fünten—obsequiously attended by de Wolff—displayed prime sadism.

On August 5, 1942, a hapless crowd of some 2,000 Jews had been kept overnight in the yard of the
Zentralstelle
. The following day, after a short interview, individuals would be waved to the left (reprieve) or to the right (Westerbork). Aus der Fünten intentionally kept the majority waiting almost to the end of the selection (five p.m.). Those who had not been interrogated by then were automatically sent to Westerbork: “The tension became unbearable in the afternoon,” Presser wrote. “There we were, hundreds of us, anxiously watching the clock.” At ten to five, at what turned out to be the last muster, the writer and his wife came face-to-face with Aus der Fünten, who looked at their papers, waved him to the left and then, turning to de Wolff, said: ‘She’s still very young.’ What de Wolff replied, I cannot say, but my wife was waved to the left as well. A moment later we were in the street with ordinary people and children playing…. Some 600 were sent to Westerbork and on.”
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On September 18, 1942, at a special meeting of the council, both Cohen and Asscher expressed their belief that cooperation with the authorities was necessary. According to the minutes of the meeting, David Cohen affirmed that, “in his opinion, it was the bounden duty of community leaders to stay at their post; indeed it would be criminal to abandon the community in the hour of its greatest need. Moreover, it was imperative to keep at least the most important men back [in Amsterdam] for as long as possible.”
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At the end of that same meeting Cohen made a terse announcement: “Finally, the first report of a case of death in Auswitz [
sic
] is received by the meeting.”
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While transports of Jews were leaving Amsterdam for Westerbork, Jews from the provinces were steadily being moved to Amsterdam. The Wessels family, who lived in the village of Oostvoorne, was transported to Amsterdam in October 1942 (the eldest son had already been deported to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz, in August); they remained in the city for almost a year. The younger son, Ben—whose letters to Oostvoorne friends have been saved—was sixteen in October 1942: He was first employed as a “courier” for the Jewish Council, then as an elevator boy in the building of the German police.

One of Ben’s initial letters from Amsterdam indicates how thoroughly the Wehrmacht officer and the soldiers who arrested him in Oostvoorne took care of every small detail. “I guess you mustn’t mind the pencil writing,” Ben informed his friends on October 15, 1942. “My fountain pen was taken away…. My entire equipment with backpack and six woolen blankets is gone…. That pocket flashlight, the one with the battery they also took from us, there, opposite the bandstand in Oostvoorne. We were frisked completely, and whatever they could use, money, in fact everything, they took from us. That day, Mother had already been picked up in the afternoon. That night was frightful…. The family van Dijk [the only other Jewish family in Oostvoorne], we were with them, they are going on to Poland….”
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Much of the outrage expressed by the Dutch population at the German persecution of the Jews during the first year of the occupation had turned into passivity by 1942. The Dutch government-in-exile did not exhort its countrymen to help the Jews when the deportations started, although on two occasions, at the end of June and in July 1942, “Radio Oranje” did broadcast information previously aired by the BBC about the exterminations in Poland. These reports did not make any deep impression on either the population or even the Jews. The fate of Polish Jews was one thing; the fate of the Jews of Holland quite another; this was common belief even among the leaders of the council.
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Two young Dutch political prisoners who had witnessed the earliest gassings in Auschwitz (those of Russian prisoners and small groups of Jews) were released from the camp and, on their return to Holland, attempted to convince the leadership of the Dutch churches of what they saw: to no avail.
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Letters sent home by members of the Dutch Waffen SS described in detail and with pride their participation in the massacre of Jews in the Ukraine, but the information was either taken in stride or, as one of the authors intimated, considered as a portent of things to come once men like himself returned to the home country.
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Some protests against the deportations nonetheless did take place. On July 11 all major church leaders signed a letter addressed to Seyss-Inquart. The Germans tried conciliation first: They promised exemptions for some baptized Jews (but not for the Jews baptized after the occupation of the country). At first the churches did not give in: The main Protestant church (Herformde Kerk) proposed having the letter publicly read on Sunday, July 26. The Catholic and Calvinist church leaders agreed. When the Germans threatened retaliation, the Protestant leadership wavered; the Catholic bishops, led by the archbishop of Utrecht, Jan de Jong, decided to proceed nonetheless, and they did. In retaliation, during the night of August 1–2, the Germans arrested most Catholic Jews and sent them to Westerbork. According to Harster’s postwar testimony, Seyss-Inquart’s retaliation stemmed from the fact that the bishops had protested against the deportation of all Jews, not that of converted Jews only. Ninety-two Catholic Jews were ultimately deported to Auschwitz, among them the philosopher, Carmelite nun, and future Catholic saint, Edith Stein.
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