The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (77 page)

In fact, since the beginning of 1942, news about the extermination of the Jews were reaching the Vatican from the most diverse sources. As previously mentioned, in February 1942 German prelates were already informed about the mass murder of Jews in the Baltic countries. On March 9 Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican’s chargé d’affaires in Bratislava, sent a particularly ominous report. After having previously warned of the imminent beginning of the deportation from Slovakia to Poland and after stating in his March 9 telegram that the intervention with Tuka to have deportations postponed had failed, Burzio ended his communication with a sentence that has become an indelible part of the events: “The deportation of 80,000 people to Poland, at the mercy of the Germans, is equivalent to the condemnation of a majority to a certain death” [
La deportazione di 80,000 persone in Polania alla merce’ dei tedeschi equivale condannare la gran parte a una morte sicura
].
²⁶³

In May the Italian abbot Piero Scavizzi, who frequently traveled to Poland, officially with a hospital train but possibly on secret missions for the Vatican, sent the following report directly to Pius XII: “The struggle against the Jews is implacable and constantly intensifying, with deportations and mass executions. The massacre of the Jews in the Ukraine is by now nearly complete. In Poland and Germany they want to complete it also, with a system of murders.”
²⁶⁴

Among the messages that continued to arrive at the Vatican during the following months, one carried particular weight due to the standing of its author and his direct witnessing of the events: It was the letter sent on August 31, 1942, by the spiritual leader of the Uniate Catholic Church in Lwov, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyskyi. The letter’s importance could not have escaped the pope or Sheptyskyi’s friend at the Vatican, the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant. The metropolitan, although known for his personal friendship for Jews, did repeatedly condemn “Judeo-Bolshevism” in letters to the Vatican during the Soviet occupation of eastern Galicia and, like most nationalist Ukrainians, enthusiastically greeted the Germans when they entered eastern Poland.
²⁶⁵
Thus the author’s credentials were impeccable. His letter was written after the deportation of some 50,000 Jews from Lwov.

“Liberated by the German army from the Bolshevik yoke,” the metropolitan wrote, “we felt a certain relief…. [However], gradually the German [government] instituted a regime of truly unbelievable terror and corruption…. Now everybody agrees that the German regime is perhaps more evil and diabolic than the Bolshevik. For more than a year, not a day has passed without the most horrible crimes being committed. The Jews are the primary victims. In time, they began to kill Jews openly in the streets, in full view of the public. The number of Jews killed in our region has certainly surpassed 200,000.”
²⁶⁶
Although the pope answered the metropolitan’s letter, not a single word addressed the Jewish issue. In the meantime the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto was known to all, and week after week the deportations from the West were carrying their loads of Jews to “unknown destinations,” by then well known to the Vatican.

On September 26, 1942, the American minister to the Holy See, Myron C. Taylor, delivered a detailed note to Secretary of State Maglione: “The following was received from the Geneva Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine in a letter dated August 30, 1942. The office received the report from two reliable eyewitnesses (Aryans), one of whom came on August 14 from Poland. (1) Liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the Ghetto in groups and shot…. (2) These mass executions take place, not in Warsaw, but in especially prepared camps for the purpose, one of which is stated to be in Belzek…. (3) Jews deported from Germany, Belgium, Holland, France and Slovakia are sent to be butchered, while Aryans deported to the East from Holland and France are genuinely used for work.” Taylor’s note ended as follows. “I should much appreciate it if Your Eminence could inform me whether the Vatican has any information that would tend to confirm the reports contained in this memorandum. If so, I should like to know whether the Holy Father has any suggestion as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities.”
²⁶⁷

The cardinal secretary of state’s answer was handed to the American chargé d’áffaires, Harold Tittman, who, on October 10, cabled the gist of it to Washington: “Holy See replied today to Mr. Taylor’s letter regarding the predicament of the Jews in Poland in an informal and unsigned statement handed me by the Cardinal Secretary of State. After thanking Ambassador Taylor for bringing the matter to the attention of the Holy See the statement says that reports of severe measures taken against non-Aryans have also reached the Holy See from other sources but that up to the present time it has not been possible to verify the accuracy thereof. However, the statement adds, it is well known that the Holy See is taking advantage of every opportunity offered in order to mitigate the suffering of non-Aryans.”
²⁶⁸

The British minister to the Vatican, Francis d’Arcy Osborne, confided his bitterness about the pope’s obstinate silence in private letters and in his diary: “The more I think of it,” he wrote in his diary on December 13, “the more I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish race on the one hand and, on the other, by the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation with the…possibilities of the bombardment of Rome.” A few days later Osborne wrote to the cardinal secretary of state that “instead of thinking of nothing but the bombing of Rome, the Vatican should consider its duties in respect of the unprecedented crime against humanity of Hitler’s campaign of extermination of the Jews.”
²⁶⁹
The Vatican’s answer, as conveyed by Maglione, was brutal: “The pope could not condemn ‘particular atrocities’ or verify the numbers of Jews killed that had been reported by the Allies.”
²⁷⁰

In the Vatican’s view the pope did speak up in his Christmas Eve message of 1942. On page 24 of the twenty-six-page text, broadcast on “Radio Vatican,” the pontiff declared: “Humanity owes this vow to lead humanity back to divine law to hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or their race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.” And Pius XII then added: “Humanity owes this vow to the thousands upon thousands of noncombatants—women, children, the sick and the aged; those whom the air war—and we have, from the outset, often denounced its horrors—has deprived, without distinction of life, possessions, health, homes, refuges and places of worship.”
²⁷¹

Mussolini scoffed at the speech’s platitudes; Tittman and the Polish ambassador both expressed their disappointment to the pope; even the French ambassador was apparently perplexed.
²⁷²
It seems that most German officials also missed the portent of the papal address: Ambassador Bergen, who, at the Vatican, followed every detail of Pius’s policy, did not refer to the speech at all. As for Goebbels, the master interpreter of any propaganda move, his opinion of the papal speech was entirely dismissive: “The Christmas speech of the pope is without any deep significance,” he noted on December 26. “It carries on in generalities that are received with complete lack of interest among the countries at war.”
²⁷³
The only German document that interpreted the speech as an attack on the basic principles of National Socialist Germany and also on its persecution of Jews and Poles was an anonymous RSHA report, whose date is unclear, although it must have been drafted between December 25, 1942, and January 15, 1943, when it was addressed to the Foreign Ministry.
²⁷⁴

The pope was convinced that he had been well understood. According to Osborne’s January 5, 1943, report to London, the pontiff believed that his message “had satisfied all demands recently made on him to speak out.”
²⁷⁵

In early July 1942 Henry Montor, the president of the United Palestine Appeal in the United States, asked Lichtheim to send him a 1,500-word article reviewing “the position of Jews in Europe.” “I feel at present quite unable to write a ‘report,’” Lichtheim answered Montor on August 13, “a survey, something cool and clear and reasonable…. So I wrote not a survey but something more personal—an article, if you like—or an essay, not of 1,500 words, but of 4,000, giving more of my own feelings than of the ‘facts.’” The letter concluded with “all good wishes for the New Year to you and the happier Jews of ‘God’s own country.’” Lichtheim titled his essay “What Is Happening to the Jews of Europe”:

“A letter has reached me from the United States, asking me ‘to review the position of Jews in Europe.’ This I cannot do because the Jews are today no more in a ‘position’ than the waters of a rapid rushing down into some canyon, or the dust of the desert lifted by a tornado and blown in all directions.

“I cannot even tell you how many Jews there are at present in this or that town, in this or that country, because at the very moment of writing thousands of them are fleeing hither and thither, from Belgium and Holland to France (hoping to escape to Switzerland), from Germany—because deportation to Poland was imminent—to France and Belgium, where the same orders for deportation had just been issued. Trapped mice running in circles. They are fleeing from Slovakia to Hungary, from Croatia to Italy. At the same time, thousands are being shifted under Nazi supervision to forced labor camps in the country further east, while other thousands just arrived from Germany or Austria are thrown into the ghettos of Riga or Lublin.”

As Lichtheim was writing his “essay,” information was reaching Allied and neutral countries from increasingly reliable sources about what was really happening to the European Jews, as we saw. And yet, even without indications about the extermination, Lichtheim’s letter conveyed his anguish in sentences that, decades later, can sear the reader’s mind: “I am bursting with facts,” he went on, “but I cannot tell them in an article of a few thousand words. I would have to write for years and years…. That means I really cannot tell you what has happened and is happening to five million persecuted Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Nobody will ever tell the story—a story of five million personal tragedies every one of which would fill a volume.”
²⁷⁶

CHAPTER VIII

March 1943–October 1943

“My dear little Daddy, bad news: After my aunt, it’s my turn to leave.” Thus began the hasty pencil-written card sent on February 12, 1943, from Drancy by seventeen-year-old Louise Jacobson to her father in Paris. Both Louise’s parents—divorced in 1939—were French Jews who had emigrated from Russia to Paris before World War I. Louise and her siblings were born in France and all were French citizens. Louise’s father was a master cabinetmaker; his small business had been “Aryanized,” and, like all French Jews (naturalized or not), he was waiting.

Louise and her mother had been arrested in the fall of 1942, following an anonymous denunciation: They were not wearing their stars and supposedly were active communists. On a demand from the SD, French police officers searched their home and indeed discovered communist pamphlets (belonging in fact to Louise’s brother and brother-in-law, both prisoners of war). A neighbor must have seen Louise’s sister hiding the subversive literature under a stack of coal, in the cellar. While her mother remained in a Paris jail, Louise was transferred to Drancy in late 1942 and in February 1943, slated for deportation.

“Never mind,” Louise went on. “I am in excellent spirits, like everybody else. You should not worry, Daddy. First, I am leaving in very good shape. This last week I have eaten very, very well. I got two packages by proxy, one from a friend who was just deported, the other from my aunt. Now your package arrived, exactly at the right moment.

“I can see your face, my dear Daddy, and, that’s precisely why I would like you to have as much courage as I do…. You should send the news to the Vichy zone [to her sister, among others] but carefully. As for Mother, it would probably be better if she knew nothing. It is entirely unnecessary that she be worried, mainly as I may well be back before she gets out of jail.

“We leave tomorrow morning. I am with my friends, as many are leaving. I entrusted my watch and all my other belongings to decent people from my room. My daddy, I kiss you a hundred thousand times with all my strength. Be courageous and see you soon [
Courage et à bientôt
], your daughter Louise.”
¹

On February 13, 1943, Louise left for Auschwitz in transport number 48 with one thousand other French Jews. A surviving female friend, a chemical engineer, went through the selection with her. “Tell them that you are a chemist,” Irma had whispered. When her turn arrived and she was asked about her profession, Louise declared: “Student”; she was sent to the left, to the gas chamber.
²

I

Five months after Stalingrad, the last German attempt to regain the military initiative failed at the decisive battles of Kursk and Orel. From July 1943, the Soviet offensives determined the evolution of the war on the Eastern Front.
³
Kiev was liberated on November 6, and in mid-January 1944 the German siege of Leningrad was definitively broken.

In the meantime the remnants of the Afrika Korps had surrendered in Tunisia, and in July 1943, while the Germans were being battered on the Eastern Front, British and American forces landed in Sicily. Before the month was over the military disasters swept the
Duce
away. On July 24, 1943, a majority of the Fascist Grand Council voted a motion of no confidence in their own leader. On the twenty-fifth, the king briefly received Mussolini and informed him of his dismissal and his replacement by Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new head of the Italian government. As he left the king’s residence the Italian dictator was arrested. Without a single shot being fired, the fascist regime had collapsed. The former
Duce
was moved from Rome to the island of Ponza and finally imprisoned at Gran Sasso, in the Appenines. Although German paratroopers succeeded in liberating Hitler’s ally on September 12, and the Führer appointed him the head of a fascist puppet state in northern Italy (the “Italian Social Republic”), a broken and sick Mussolini regained neither popular acceptance nor power.

English and American troops landed in southern Italy on September 3, and on the eighth the Allies announced the armistice secretly signed by Badoglio the day of the landing. The German reaction was immediate: On the ninth and the tenth the Wehrmacht, which had been moving troops to Italy for several weeks (also from the Eastern Front), occupied the northern and central parts of the country and seized all Italian-controlled areas in the Balkans and in France. The Allies remained entrenched in the south of the peninsula; over the coming months their northward advance would be slow.

The Allied successes on land were compounded by the steadily fiercer bombing campaign against both German military targets and cities. The July 1943 British bombing of Hamburg and the resulting “firestorm” caused the death of some thirty to forty thousand civilians. The nighttime raids were British, the daytime operations American.

Despite the uninterrupted series of military disasters and the increasing vacillation of “allies” such as Hungary and Finland, Hitler was far from considering the war lost in the fall of 1943. New fighter planes would put an end to the Anglo-American bombing campaign, long-range rockets would destroy London and play havoc with any Allied invasion plans, newly formed divisions equipped with the heaviest tanks ever built (just rolling out of the factories) would stem the Soviet advance. And if a military stalemate was achieved for some time, the Grand Alliance would crumble, due to its inherent political-military tensions.

However, such optimistic forecasts could not alter the unmistakable sense of crisis that had been spreading both in the German population and among the Reich leadership since the outset of 1943. Though Hitler’s authority was not in question, and no major step could be taken without his approval, the Nazi leader’s increasing obsession with every detail of the military situation (due in part to his endemic lack of confidence in his generals) interfered with the rational running of operations. His growing reluctance to speak in public created further uncertainty among the population and may have weakened the quasi-religious confidence that, until then, had set him beyond any criticism.

In early 1943 Hitler appointed a “Committee of Three”—Lammers, Bormann, Keitel—to achieve some coordination among the overlapping and competing state, party, and military agencies. Yet within a few months the committee’s authority dwindled, as ministers intent on defending their own power positions steadily undermined its initiatives. Only Bormann’s influence kept growing: Above and beyond his control of the party, he had become the “Führer’s secretary,” and Hitler increasingly relied on him. Independently Himmler’s power reached new heights when, in August 1943, he replaced Frick as minister of the interior. Goebbels, on the other hand, as clever an intriguer as he was, reaped no added power from preaching the “total war” effort, at least not in the immediate future; nor did he succeed, despite Speer’s support, in reviving Göring’s authority as head of the ministerial committee for the defense of the Reich (established at the beginning of the war) to counter the Committee of Three, due to Hitler’s fury at the repeated failures of the Luftwaffe.
⁴

Whipping up anti-Jewish frenzy was, in Hitler’s imagination, one of the best ways to hasten the falling apart of the enemy alliance. If the Jews were the hidden link that held capitalism and Bolshevism together, a deluge of anti-Jewish attacks endlessly repeating that the war was a Jewish war launched only for the sake of Jewish interests, could influence foreign opinion and add momentum to the antagonism between the West and the Soviet Union. Moreover, at this time of peril for Fortress Europe, stamping out all remnants of the internal foe remained of the highest importance. Jews were—and Hitler kept harping on it—the subterranean communication line between all enemy groups; they spread defeatist rumors and hostile propaganda, and they were the ferment of treason in countries that Germany had not yet set under its heel. The renewed ferocity of the anti-Jewish campaign after Stalingrad had its inner logic.

A few days after the surrender of the Sixth Army, Goebbels opened the floodgates of German rage: The minister’s “total war” speech, delivered at the Sportpalast on February 18, was in many ways the epitome of the regime’s propaganda style: the unleashing of demented passion controlled by the most careful staging and orchestration. The huge crowd packing the hall had been carefully selected to represent all parts of the
Volk
, to be ideologically reliable, and thus ready to deliver the expected response. The event was broadcast on all German radio stations to the nation and the world. And, as Goebbels’s speech was meant to mobilize every last spark of energy, it had to brandish
the
mobilizing myth of the regime:

“Behind the onrushing Soviet divisions we can see the Jewish liquidation squads—behind which loom terror, the spectre of mass starvation and unbridled anarchy in Europe. Here once more international Jewry has been the diabolical ferment of decomposition, cynically gratified at the idea of throwing the world into the deepest disorder and thus engineering the ruin of cultures thousands of years old, cultures with which it never felt anything in common…. We have never been afraid of the Jews and today we are less afraid of them than ever. We have unmasked Jewry’s rapid and infamous maneuvers to deceive the world in fourteen years of struggle before the accession to power and in a ten years’ struggle afterwards. The aim of Bolshevism is the world revolution of the Jews…. Germany in any case has no intention of bowing to this threat, but means to counter it in time and if necessary with the most complete and radical extermi—[correcting himself]—elimination” [
Ausrott—Ausschaltung
] [Applause. Shouts of “Out with the Jews.” Laughter].

The lengthy speech reached its climactic finale in the paraphrase of a verse written by poet Theodor Körner at the time of the national uprising against Napoleon, in 1814: “Und jetzt Volk, steh auf! Und Sturm brich los!” (“And now people, stand up and storm, break loose!”).
⁵
Wild cheering greeted the apocalyptic outburst, with its litany of Sieg Heils and the singing of the anthem. Tens of millions of Germans, glued to their radios, were engulfed in a rhetoric of rage and vengeance. Most of them probably caught the “
Ausrott—Ausschaltung.
” In the hall, as we saw, it was greeted with applause and laughter. Simply put, the extermination of the Jews was no secret unveiled amid shock and stony silence.

“A few hours ago,” Moshe Flinker recorded, “I heard a speech made by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. I shall try to describe the impression this speech made on me and the thoughts it aroused in me. First of all I heard what I could have heard any number of times—unlimited anti-Semitism. One whole section of his speech he addressed to the great hatred he and nearly all Germans have for our people, the reasons for which to this day I cannot understand. A thousand times I have heard from the German leaders angry words against the Jews, accompanied by the epithets ‘capitalist’ or ‘communist,’ but I doubt very much if they themselves believe their own words. On the other hand, however, they pronounce these words with so much excitement that I can almost believe they are sincere. Apart from their excitement and emotion, there is other evidence for their sincerity. It should be remembered that now, when Germany is receiving blow after blow from all sides and when she is compelled to abandon one Russian city after another, they never forget the people they have already so tortured and crushed, nor do they let the slightest opportunity pass to shame or humiliate them. In these very days, which are times of trouble for Germany, the Propaganda Minister considers it to be the right moment to abuse us and blaspheme our people even more violently. Maybe it is that the wild, primitive hatred which exists in almost all peoples appears in the Germans more clearly and openly and with more consequence for us…. But from their actions we see that this war must end in the solution of the Jewish problem (speaking from the Orthodox Jewish point of view, I would say in the redemption of the Jews) because, as far as I know, the hatred of the Jews has never been as widespread or poisonous as it is now.”
⁶

In Bucharest, Sebastian had also heard the Goebbels speech: “Goebbels’ speech last night,” he noted, “sounded unexpectedly dramatic…. The Jews are once more threatened with extermination.”
⁷
The next day Klemperer got the text of the speech at the Jewish cemetery where he was working: “The speech contains a threat to proceed against the Jews, who are guilty of everything, ‘with the most draconian and radical measures’ if the foreign powers do not stop threatening the Hitler government because of the Jews.”
⁸

In his two-hour-long address to the
Reichsleiter
and
Gauleiter
assembled at Rastenburg on February 7, 1943, Hitler repeated once again that Jewry had to be eliminated from the Reich and all of Europe.
⁹
On the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, March 21, the same threat reappeared with the extermination prophecy added for good measure. And, as constant repetition was of the essence, Hitler unleashed the traditional anti-Jewish torrent of invectives: “The driving force [behind capitalism and Bolshevism] is anyway the eternal hatred of that accursed race which for thousands of years punishes the nations like a true scourge of God, until the time comes when these nations will get back to their senses and arise against their tormentors.”
¹⁰
The order of the day was anti-Jewish propaganda and ever more anti-Jewish propaganda. “The Führer issues instructions to set the Jewish question once more at the forefront of our propaganda, in the strongest possible way,” Goebbels noted on April 17.
¹¹

The propaganda minister did not miss the benefits of linking “Katyn” (the discovery of a mass grave in the eastern Polish Katyn Forest with the bodies of more than four thousand Polish officers shot by the NKVD about a year before the German attack against the USSR) and the “Jewish question.”
¹²
In other words the Jews, always held responsible for all Soviet crimes, could now be denounced as the instigators and perpetrators of this major Bolshevik atrocity.