The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (68 page)

As months went by, the Germans had every reason to be satisfied. On November 16, Bene, Ribbentrop’s representative in The Hague, sent a general report to the Wilhelmstrasse: “The deportation has been going on without difficulties and incidents…. The Dutch population has gotten used to the deportation of the Jews. They are making no trouble whatsoever. Reports from Rauschwitz [
sic
] camp sound favorable. Therefore the Jews have abandoned their doubts and more or less voluntarily come to the collecting points.”
⁴³

Generally speaking Bene wasn’t wrong, as we know, although some details of the overall picture manifestly escaped him, as they escaped Harster’s and Tulp’s men. Soon after the beginning of the deportations, children were moved from the main assembly and processing hall, the Hollandsche Schouwburg (renamed Joodsche Schouwburg), to an annex on the opposite side of the same street (the Crèche), a child-care center mainly for working-class families. At that point two members of the Jewish Council, Walter Süskind and Felix Halvestad succeeded in gaining access to some of the children’s files and destroying them.
⁴⁴
Thus bereft of administrative identity, children were sporadically smuggled out of the Crèche with the help of the Dutch woman director, Henriette Rodriguez-Pimental; they were passed on to various clandestine networks that usually succeeded in finding safe places with Dutch families.
⁴⁵
Hundreds of children—possibly up to one thousand—were saved in this way.
⁴⁶

Jewish adults encountered much greater difficulties in hiding among the population. The refusals (or the inaction) they encountered could have resulted from fear, distaste for Jews, traditional anti-Semitism and “civic obedience,” although—regarding the last—when in the spring of 1943, the Germans used utter brutality against any assistance to Dutch men hiding from work in the Reich, the readiness for illegal initiatives grew all around. From the outset, however, small networks of people who knew and trusted one another and mostly shared a common religious background (Calvinist and Catholic) did actively help Jews, notwithstanding the risks. The limited scope of the grassroots actions has been attributed to the absence of hands-on leadership from the hierarchy of all Dutch Christian churches, despite some of the courageous protests, particularly of Archbishop de Jong.
⁴⁷

At the beginning of 1943 the Germans started rounding up the approximately eight thousand Jewish patients in various hospitals, and among them the psychiatric inmates of Het Apeldoornse Bos. The raid on this largest Jewish mental institution was conducted on the night of January 21 by a Schutzpolizei unit under the personal command of Aus der Fünten. The patients were ferociously beaten and pushed into trucks. “I saw them place a row of patients,” an eyewitness declared, “many of them older women, on mattresses at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human bodies on top of them. So crammed were these trucks that the Germans had a hard job to put up the tail-boards.”
⁴⁸
The trucks carried the patients to the cordoned-off Apeldoorn railway station.

According to the station master’s report, when he tried to activate the ventilation system in the wagons, the Germans closed them. The report then continued: “I remember the case of a girl of twenty to twenty-five, whose arms were pinioned [in a straightjacket] but who was otherwise stark naked…. Blinded by the light that was flashed in her face, the girl ran, fell on her face and could not, of course, use her arms to break the fall. She crashed down with a thud…. In general, the loading was done without
great
violence. The ghastly thing was that when the wagons had to be closed, the patients refused to take their fingers away. They simply would not listen to us and in the end the Germans lost patience. The result was a brutal and inhuman spectacle.”
⁴⁹
Some fifty (Jewish) nurses accompanied the transport.

A Dutch Jew described the arrival of the transport in Auschwitz: “It was one of the most horrible transports from Holland that I saw. Many of the patients tried to break through the barrier and were shot dead. The remainder were gassed immediately.”
⁵⁰
There are diverging accounts of the fate of the nurses, none of whom survived. Some declare that they were sent to the camp; others that they were gassed; according to another witness “some of them were thrown into a pit, doused with gasoline, and burned alive.”
⁵¹
Aus der Fünten had promised them that they could return immediately after the trip or work in the East in a thoroughly modern mental institution.
⁵²

In early 1943 the Germans established the Vught labor camp, which supposedly would allow Jews to remain as forced laborers in Holland. It was a sophisticated “legal” option to avoid deportation; the council strongly encouraged it, and the obedient Dutch Jews went along. Of course it was one further German scam, and the Vught inmates were systematically transferred to Westerbork or, on several occasions, deported directly to the East.
⁵³

Between July 1942 and February 1943, fifty-two transports carrying 46,455 Jews left Westerbork for Auschwitz. Some 3,500 able-bodied men were redirected to the hydrogenation plant in Blechhammer (later Auschwitz III–Monowitz and Gross Rosen). Of the workers’ group, 181 men survived the war; of the remaining 42,915 from the 1942 and early 1943 transports, 85 remained alive.
⁵⁴
The deportations went on.

III

“The papers announce new measures against the Jews,” Jacques Biélinky recorded on July 15, 1942: “They are forbidden access to restaurants, coffeehouses, movie theaters, theaters, concert halls, music halls, pools, beaches, museums, libraries, exhibitions, castles, historical monuments, sports events, races, parks, camping sites and even phone booths, fairs, etc. Rumor has it that Jewish men and women between ages eighteen and forty-five will be sent to forced labor in Germany.”
⁵⁵
That same day the roundups of “stateless” Jews started in the provinces of the occupied zone, on the eve of the operation in Paris.

According to a July 15 report from the police chief of the Loire-Inférieure, French gendarmes were accompanying German soldiers on their way to arrest Jews in the department; according to another report of the same day, the French authorities were providing police officers to guard fifty-four Jews on the request of the SS chief of Saint-Nazaire. Jews arrested throughout the west of the country—among them some two hundred arrested in Tours, again on July 15—were taken to an assembly point in Angers (some were selected from French camps in the region) and, a few days later, a train carried 824 of them directly from Angers to Auschwitz.
⁵⁶

On July 16, at 4:00 a.m., the Germano-French roundup of 27,000 “stateless” Jews living in the capital and its suburbs began. The index cards prepared by the French police had become essential: 25,334 cards were ready for Paris, and 2,027 for the immediate suburbs.
⁵⁷
Every technical detail had been jointly prepared by French and German officials in their meetings on July 7 and 11. On the sixteenth fifty municipal buses were ready, and so were 4,500 French policemen.
⁵⁸
No German units participated in the arrests. The manhunt received a code name:
Vent printanier
(Spring Wind).

As rumors about the forthcoming raids had spread, many potential victims (mostly men) had gone into hiding.
⁵⁹
The origins of these rumors? To this day they remain uncertain, but as historian André Kaspi noted, “a roundup such as had never taken place in France, could not remain secret for long.”
⁶⁰
UGIF employees, resistance groups, police personnel must all have been involved in some way in spreading warnings.

Nine hundred groups, each including three police officials and volunteers, were in charge of the arrests. “Suddenly, I heard terrible banging on the front door…,” Annette Müller, then nine years old, recalled. “Two men entered the room; they were tall and wore beige raincoats. ‘Hurry up, get dressed,’ they ordered, ‘we are taking you with us.’ I saw my mother get on her knees and embrace their legs, crying, begging: ‘Take me but, I beseech you, don’t take the children.’ They pulled her up. ‘Come on, madam, don’t make it more difficult and all will be well.’ My mother spread a large sheet on the floor, and threw in clothes, underwear…. She worked in a panic, throwing in things, then taking them out. ‘Hurry up!’ the policemen shouted. She wanted to take dried vegetables. ‘No, you don’t need that,’ the men said, ‘just take food for two days; there, you will get food.’”
⁶¹

By the afternoon of July 17, 3,031 Jewish men, 5,802 women, and 4,051 children had been arrested; the number of Jews finally caught in
Vent printanier
totaled 13,152.
⁶²
Unmarried people or childless couples were sent directly to Drancy; the others, 8,160 men, women, and children, were assembled in a large indoor sports arena known mainly for its bicycle races, the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel d’Hiv).
⁶³

At the Vel d’Hiv, nothing was ready—neither food, water, toilets, nor beds or bedding of any sort. For three to six days, thousands of hapless beings received one to two portions of soup per day. Two Jewish physicians and one Red Cross physician were in attendance. The temperature never fell below one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Finally, group after group, the Vel d’Hiv Jews were temporarily sent to Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps just vacated by the inmates deported in June.
⁶⁴

Vent printanier
had not achieved the expected results. In order to keep Drancy stacked with Jews ready for deportation, the arrests of stateless Jews had to extend to the Vichy zone, as agreed by the French government. The major operation, again exclusively implemented by French forces (police, gendarmes, firemen, and soldiers), took place from August 26 to 28; some 7,100 Jews were seized.
⁶⁵
Although Laval had promised in early September to cancel the naturalization of Jews who had entered the country after January 1933, the roundups in the Vichy zone were aimed at filling the German quotas without having to start denaturalizing French citizens.
⁶⁶
By the end of the year 42,500 Jews had been deported from France to Auschwitz.
⁶⁷
On July 22 Biélinky noted: “My shoemaker of the rue Broca, a Polish Jew, has been arrested with his wife. The pair of shoes that I left with him for repair remained at his home. And, his house is closed as he had neither children nor parents.”
⁶⁸

Until mid-1943 Drancy remained under French authority. The main goal for the camp administration remained filling the quotas imposed by the Germans for each departing transport. “Under our current obligation to come up with one thousand deportees on Monday,” a French police officer noted on September 12, 1942, “we must include in these departures, at least in reserve, the parents of sick [children] and advise them that they could be deported without their children remaining in the infirmary.”
⁶⁹

On August 11 Untersturmführer Horst Ahnert, from Dannecker’s office, informed the RSHA that due to the temporary halt in the roundups, he planned to send the children assembled in the camps Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers to Drancy, and asked for Berlin’s authorization.
⁷⁰
On the thirteenth, Günther gave his approval but warned Ahnert not to send transports filled with children only.
⁷¹

It was probably the arrival of these children, aged two to twelve, that Drancy inmate George Wellers described after the war: “They were disembarked from the buses in the midst of the courtyard like small animals…. The elder children held the younger ones and did not let go of them until they reached their allocated places. On the stairs the bigger children carried the smaller ones, panting, to the fourth floor. There, they remained fearfully huddled together…. Once the luggage had been unloaded the children returned to the courtyard, but most of the younger ones could not find their belongings; when, after their unsuccessful search they wished to get back to their rooms, they could not remember where they had been assigned.”
⁷²

On August 24, transport number 23 left Drancy for Auschwitz with its load of 1,000 Jews, including 553 children under age seventeen (288 boys and 265 girls). Among the children, 465 were under twelve, of whom 131 were under six. On arrival in Auschwitz, 92 men aged from twenty to forty-five were selected for work. All the other deportees were immediately gassed. Three Jews from this transport survived the war.
⁷³

As a result of the only petition sent to Vichy by UGIF-North shortly after the Paris roundup, some relatives of war veterans and some “French children of foreign parents” (these were the words used in the petition) were released. André Baur, the president of UGIF-North, thanked Laval for his gesture.
⁷⁴

On August 2 Lambert met Helbronner. Despite the ongoing roundups and deportations, the head of the Consistoire was not ready to share his contacts at Vichy with any member of UGIF nor to tell Lambert that in fact Laval was refusing to see him. In the course of the conversation, Helbronner declared to a stupefied Lambert that on August 8 he was going on vacation and that “nothing in the world would bring me back.”
⁷⁵
This declaration, quoted by Lambert only, has to be taken guardedly given the tense relations between the author of the
Carnet
and the Consistoire. “The president of the Consistoire seems to me to be more deaf, more pompous and older than ever. The fate of the foreign Jews does not touch him at all,” Lambert added on September 6, describing another meeting with Helbronner, on July 30.
⁷⁶
The remark about Helbronner’s attitude toward
les juifs étrangers
was probably on target.