The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (89 page)

In terms of the Reich’s history and that of the extermination of the Jews, the crucial question is not only that of the Reichsführer’s power within the system but of how subservient he still was to his Führer. Mainly, was Himmler extending feelers for potential contacts with the Western Allies, without Hitler’s knowledge? This issue has exercised historians for decades, as no documents allow for any conclusive answer, and as postwar testimonies and memoirs are only partly reliable and lead in different directions; circumstantial evidence is no more conclusive. The “Final Solution” is at the very core of this debate. Is there any indication that, in order to become an acceptable partner to the West Himmler attempted to slow down the rhythm of the extermination or allowed German offers secretly to free Jews to be made? Despite arguments to the contrary, nothing of the kind appears convincing in late 1943 or early 1944. The situation will become more confusing after the German occupation of Hungary, in March 1944, as we shall see in the last chapter.

II

While the deportation and extermination of the tens of thousands of Jews from Salonika, in the spring of 1943, demanded German planning at every stage, including the availability of trains and of sufficient space in the barracks and gas chambers of Birkenau, deporting the eight thousand Jews of Denmark depended essentially on the right political circumstances in the framework of a unique arrangement.

The Germans had allowed a semiautonomous Danish government to stay in place, and their own presence as occupiers was hardly felt. Hitler had decided on this peculiar course to avoid unnecessary difficulties in a country strategically important (the passage to Norway and Sweden and the proximity of the English coast), “racially related” to the community of Nordic peoples, and mainly an essential supplier of agricultural products (more than 15 percent of Germany’s needs by 1941).
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Until September 1942, a professional diplomat, Cecil von Renthe-Fink, ably represented this policy in Copenhagen. At that point, however, Hitler, irked by King Christian X’s laconic response to the birthday congratulations he had sent him, ordered Renthe-Fink’s recall and, more generally, demanded a harsher policy against the Danes.
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Werner Best, who had left his position in Paris a few months beforehand and had been attached to the Foreign Ministry, was appointed to Copenhagen in late October, 1942. Hitler’s orders to Best, whom he summoned to Vinnytsa were by then somewhat more moderate than those he had imparted a few weeks earlier to the new military commander in Denmark, Gen. Hermann von Hanneken.
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In fact, during the first nine months of his tenure as Reich plenipotentiary (
Reichsbevollmächtigter
), Best pursued his predecessor’s policy.

From April 1940 to the late summer of 1943, the persecution of the Jews of Denmark had remained minimal; even Best urged caution, notwithstanding some pressure from the RSHA. The leaders of the Jewish community went along, so to speak, and agreed to the minor discriminations imposed by Prime Minister Eric Scavenius’s government.
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In late July 1943, the situation began to change. Mussolini’s fall, the Allied landing in Sicily, and the massive bombing of Hamburg convinced most Danes that Germany’s defeat was approaching. Sabotage, limited until then, grew; strikes erupted in several cities. The Scavenius government was losing its grip. For Best a change of policy appeared unavoidable, as he wrote to Himmler on August 22. Indeed, two days later Hitler ordered sharp countermeasures, and on the twenty-ninth the Germans imposed martial law. It was then, on September 8, as martial law was in force and anti-German demonstrations could be quelled immediately, that in a cable to Berlin, Best demanded that the “Jewish question” be solved. On September 17 Hitler gave his authorization.
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That same day Best ordered the seizure of the membership lists from the Jewish community office.
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On September 22 Ribbentrop asked Hitler about the advisability of the deportations of the Danish Jews in view of the troubles that could follow: the Nazi leader confirmed his previous decision.
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The date of the operation was set for October 2, although both the army and the navy commanders made it clear that their units would not participate. In fact in Best’s entourage skepticism about the planned round-up was widely shared. Sometime at the end of September, the embassy adviser on shipping matters, Georg F. Duckwitz, disclosed the date of the
razzia
to one of his Danish friends.
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Thereupon the Swedish government, informed of the forthcoming operation by its ambassador in Copenhagen, made an offer to Berlin to take in all of Denmark’s Jews. Moreover, Stockholm broadcast its offer, thus informing the endangered Jews that they could find asylum in Sweden.
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There is no basis to the widespread interpretation that Best himself, after initiating the deportations, actively engineered their failure by letting Duckwitz inform his Danish counterparts. Still, most likely the
Reichsbevollmächtigter
was not unhappy that, on the eve of the German move, around 7,000 Jews were ferried over to Sweden in a coordinated operation supported by the vast majority of the Danish population. Some 485 Jews were seized and, after Best’s intervention with Eichmann, deported to Theresienstadt, where most of them survived the war.
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III

By September 29, 1943, Amsterdam was “Jew free.”
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In the previous months, as we saw, some 35,000 Jews from Holland had been rerouted from Auschwitz to Sobibor, as the Auschwitz gas chambers were out of service for a while due to a typhus epidemic in the camp. Nineteen of these Dutch deportees survived. In the meantime deportations from France and Belgium had been temporarily discontinued.
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During the last months of their anti-Jewish campaign in Holland, the Germans went beyond the call of duty. When the hundreds of Jews of Portuguese descent claimed that due to centuries of intermarriage with the local population, they could not be regarded as Jews, the Germans launched a systematic investigation of their racial background; it went on, as we shall see, until early 1944. Mixed marriages represented another difficult problem. Seyss-Inquart suggested sterilization of the Jewish partners as a reprieve from deportation, thereby preempting steps that had been merely discussed but not implemented in the Reich. Some 2,500 Jews (men and women) were ultimately sterilized as a result of the Reichskommissar’s initiative.
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“The partners of mixed marriages have been told that they could postpone their decision about sterilization until next Thursday,” Philip Mechanicus, a Dutch Jewish journalist and inmate of Westerbork from May 1943 to March 1944, noted in his diary on Tuesday, June 15, 1943. “Before then two Jewish doctors will explain to them the significance and consequences of sterilization. Yesterday a typed notice to that effect was put up in the vestibule of the Registration Hall.”
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The next day, according to Mechanicus’s entry, the debate became quite heated: “A storm of criticism and indignation descended this morning after breakfast upon the young man who had decided to let himself be sterilized. ‘You are a coward!’ ‘You’ve no strength of character.’ ‘No proper man would do that.’ ‘I am doing it for my wife.’ ‘Your wife wouldn’t want that…. What a joke—a sterilized man!’ ‘Do you know for sure that you won’t be sterilized as soon as you get to Poland? I don’t. Better have it done right away here. And stay with my wife.’
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And as these futile debates were going on and the daily hurdles of the Westerbork routine filled the inmates’ lives, transports were bringing in more Jews from all parts of Holland and from the labor camps. Then, with absolute regularity, every Tuesday, another transport loaded its cargo of between 1,000 and 3,000 Jews and departed for “Poland.” By the end of the war, more than 100,000 Jews had transited through Westerbork alone, mostly on their way to extermination.

In the camp, as already mentioned, the old-timers were the German Jews, and under the control of the German commandant and his small staff, they lorded it over the mass of Dutch Jews. Mechanicus was an acerbic observer, somewhat in Kaplan’s style, or maybe in the Klemperer vein: “The German Jews have undeniably abused their position of supremacy and continue to do so,” he noted on June 3, 1943. “They form, as it were, an almost exclusive association for the protection of the interests of German Jews. As individuals and acting together they do their best to save all German Jews brought here from being deported and endeavor to keep them here. They have done this from the time that Dutch Jews began arriving at Westerbork. In this way they have, in point of fact, handed over the Dutch Jews to the Germans to suit their own convenience. Wherever possible they have pushed the Germans into jobs and have kept the Germans here. The Registration Department with Kurt Schlesinger at its head has been able to do this. For example, during the seven months that I have been in the hospital, it has
nearly
always been Dutch Jews that have been deported.”
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Mechanicus explained part of the existing supremacy of German Jews by the simple fact that the Germans in command preferred to work with German rather than with Dutch Jews: “They are closer together and understand one another better, both psychologically and as far as language and ways of behavior are concerned…. The last commandant mentioned [Commandant Albert Gemmeker] even has a Jewish adjutant in the person of Herr Todtmann who forms the link between the commandant and the Registration Department. The adjutant wears a service uniform. He, Gemmeker, has awarded the now famous red stamps to German Jews” [stamps that, in principle, protected one from deportation—for a while].
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Mechanicus reserved his sharpest barbs for the former members of the Jewish Council. The council was officially disbanded on July 5, but, on that same day, its former members were granted various privileges for themselves and their families, including the “red stamp.” “It is in reality a fiendish tribute,” Mechanicus commented, “from the representatives of a regime which used Jews to catch Jews and hand over Jews and guard Jews. It was the desire to have a safe stamp, the longing to save their own skins that induced these Jews to perform the grisly services that their tormentors demanded and exacted from them…. Now that they have a respite from the breathless chase and the evil frenzy, they should dig down into their consciences, if they have a conscience at all.”
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Nothing changed the German routine in the end. Even a few hundred privileged Jews who had been sent from Amsterdam to a castle at Barneveld with full assurance that they would stay there to the end of the war were suddenly moved to Westerbork in the summer of 1943, albeit with Theresienstadt as their final destination. For the immense majority, however, the ripples on the surface of Westerbork life did not make any difference in regard to the final outcome.

“It will be my parents’ turn to leave soon,” Etty Hillesum recorded on July 10, 1943. “If by some miracle not this week, then certainly one of the next. Mischa [Etty’s brother] insists on going along with them, and it seems to me that he probably should; if he had to watch our parents leave this place, it [would] totally unhinge him. I shan’t go. I just can’t. It is easier to pray for someone from a distance than to see him suffer by your side. It is not fear of Poland that keeps me from going along with my parents, but fear of seeing them suffer. And that, too, is cowardice.”
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A month earlier, on June 8, Etty had described the departure of the weekly transport. “The people have already been loaded into the freight cars; the doors are closed…. The quota of people who must go is not yet [filled]. Just now I met the matron of the orphanage, carrying a small child in her arms who has also to go, alone. I climbed on a box lying among the bushes here to count the freight cars. There were thirty-five, with some second-class cars at the front for the escorts. The freight cars had been completely sealed, but a plank had been left out, here and there, and people put their hands through the gaps and waved as if they were drowning.”
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While Etty, still manifestly uncertain about the fate of the deportees, was watching the transports leaving Westerbork, for Anne, life in hiding was replete with small miseries, but nonetheless it was also increasingly dominated by her first teenage love. The Annex sheltered the Franks, the van Daans, and a Mr. Dussel. Anne would turn fifteen in 1944, and Peter van Daan seventeen. On February 16 Anne recorded some of the topics they had been discussing: “He [Peter] talked about the war, saying that Russia and England were bound to go to war against each other, and about the Jews. He said life would have been much easier if he’d been a Christian or could become one after the war. I asked if he wanted to be baptized, but that wasn’t what he meant either. He said he would never be able to feel like a Christian, but that after the war he would make sure nobody would know he was Jewish. I felt a momentary pang. It’s such a shame he still has a touch of dishonesty in him.”
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In the meantime Rosenberg’s looting agency was sending the furniture stolen from Dutch Jewish homes to the Reich but also, as we saw, to German officials and agencies in the East. On April 30, 1943, the Jews of Holland unexpectedly surfaced in Kruk’s diary: “We have already written about the packing up of 130,000 Jews from Holland and their transport to the East. We have also mentioned that carloads filled with goods from the Dutch Jews are in the Vilna railroad station. Now an issue that clears it all up—beautiful old furniture has been brought here, to our joiners’ workshop, to be repaired. In the drawers people find Dutch documents, including documents from December 1942, which means that ostensibly, the Dutch were not taken to the East before January or February. Thus the Jews [there]…did not know they were going to be exterminated…. In our area, dozens of railroad cars are scattered filled with Jewish junk, remnants of the former Dutch Jewry.”
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