The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (90 page)

In order to increase the number of deportees from France, the Germans were now pushing Vichy to adopt a law revoking the citizenship of Jews naturalized since 1927. But, after seemingly going along with the German scheme in the early summer of 1943, Laval rejected the new demand in August. Reports from the prefects had convinced the head of the Vichy government that public opinion would resent the handing over of French citizens (even recently naturalized ones) to the Germans.
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Due to the importance of the issue, Laval informed Eichmann’s men, the decision would have to be taken by the head of state himself. Pétain was of course aware of the possible reactions of the population. Moreover, he had been warned by the delegate of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops, Henri Chappoulie, that the church would react negatively to any collective cancellation of the naturalization of Jews who had become French citizens after 1927.
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Finally it is likely that by August 1943, when Pétain and Laval rejected the German demand, both—like everybody else beyond the borders of the Reich—simply perceived that the Germans were undoubtedly losing the war.

It is hard to assess which of these elements played a decisive role in determining Vichy’s decision. A public opinion poll completed by the CGQJ in the spring of 1943 on the demand of the government pointed to the existence of an absolute majority (more than 50 percent) of anti-Semites in the country.
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These results, which may have been manipulated by the Commissariat, have of course to be regarded cautiously; they did, however, confirm trends previously mentioned, although they did not tally with the prefects’ reports about potential reactions to the cancellation of naturalizations.

The Germans were not deterred: They would start the deportation of French Jews. To that effect, Dannecker’s successor, Obersturmbannführer Heinz Röthke, got reinforcement: Eichmann’s special delegate, Aloïs Brunner, arrived directly from Salonika, where, as we saw, the deportation of almost the entire Jewish population had just been successfully completed. Accompanied by a special group of some twenty-five SS officers, Brunner would be in direct contact with Berlin. He immediately replaced the French officials in charge of Drancy with his own men and ordered UGIF-North to take over the internal administration of the camp.
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In the face of the unremitting German determination, both UGIF-North and South were helpless. André Baur, the head of UGIF-North, refused to go along with Brunner’s plan to entice Jews who had not been arrested to join their families in Drancy (the “Missionary Plan”). When, in desperation in the face of Brunner’s relentless pressure, Baur demanded a meeting with Laval, Eichmann’s delegate had him arrested (on the pretext that two Drancy detainees, one of them Baur’s cousin, had escaped).
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Brunner’s intention to decapitate UGIF-North in order to have an entirely submissive Jewish leadership in hand became even clearer when, after Baur’s arrest, the Germans raided various UGIF offices and, using the flimsiest pretexts, sent other UGIF leaders to Drancy. Within a few months the Gestapo envoy had achieved this particular aim: UGIF-North continued to exist (which was all to German advantage as long as tens of thousands of Jews were still residing in the northern zone and children’s homes remained under the control of the organization), but its new leaders were now the subservient Georges Edinger and somebody later never entirely cleared of the suspicion of having played a dubious role, Juliette Stern.
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In the meantime, however, still under Baur’s stewardship and more actively so later on, UGIF-North was ready to cooperate in a German scheme whose intention must have been obvious from the start. Some Jewish children would be released from Drancy and, together with others already in UGIF’s care, they would be kept out of the camp on condition that all be sent to designated homes, under the responsibility of the organization. It meant, in other words, that the children were a captive group whom the Germans could seize whenever they wished. In the meantime UGIF would have to take care of them. Foiling the German plan became an increasingly urgent task for some members of UGIF itself, the semiclandestine Children’s Relief Committee (OSE), the officially disbanded Jewish Scouts organization, and the communist “Solidarity” welfare association. All attempted to transfer children from the UGIF homes to foster families, Christian institutions, and OSE safe havens. Yet, as we shall see, when, shortly before the liberation of Paris, the Germans pounced on the UGIF homes, many of the young charges were still there.
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In the southern zone the German-French roundups continued to encounter Italian obstruction during the last months of the Mussolini regime and during Badoglio’s brief rule. On February 25, 1943, Ribbentrop had traveled to Rome to confront Mussolini personally. The
Duce
tried to avoid a clash by declaring that his men were arresting the Jews in their zone, a statement that both he and Ribbentrop knew to be false. In fact, in early March, the Italian military commander in France ordered the local French authorities to release immediately the Jews they had arrested in some of the cities under Italian control.
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As news about the Italian attitude spread, Jews fled in ever-greater numbers to this paradoxical safe haven and, by March 1943, some 30,000 of them lived under “fascist” protection in southeast France.

To assuage the Germans, Mussolini announced new measures. The inspector general of the Italian police, Guido Lospinoso, was sent to France to implement the
Duce
’s decision to cooperate with his Axis partner. With the help of the army and some advice from the Italian Jew Angelo Donati, Lospinoso started the transfer of Jews from the Côte d’Azur to hotels in the alpine resorts of the Haute-Savoie.
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In these rescue efforts the somewhat mysterious Donati played a crucial role. No less essential was the assistance he received from a French Capuchin priest, Father Pierre Marie-Benoît, who on his own had already actively helped Jews in the southern zone for two years, mainly by providing them with false identity papers and by finding hiding places in religious institutions. During the summer of 1943, under the Badoglio government, Donati and Marie-Benoît went one step further and planned the transfer of thousands of Jews from the Italian zone via Italy to North Africa. Four ships had even been leased with the financial support of the Italian (Jewish) association for helping refugees, Delasem, and groups of Jews were being moved toward the French-Italian border when the Italian armistice was announced and the peninsula occupied by the Wehrmacht.
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No sooner had the Germans moved into Rome, and into Nice and its surroundings, than Brunner and Röthke arrived on the Côte d’Azur: The hunt for the Jews residing in the former Italian zone started. The Germans were ready to pay 100, 1,000, and at times 5,000 francs per individual to professional denouncers who specialized in identifying Jews on the streets.
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They also received other well-remunerated help, that of a “society lady,” for example, who delivered seventeen of her clients to the Gestapo.
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The overall results were disappointing nonetheless. By mid-December 1943, when Brunner returned to Drancy, barely 1,819 Jews had been caught and deported. The partial German failure may have been the result of the nonparticipation of the French police in the operations, and of the greater readiness now shown by the population and by religious institutions to hide the mostly French Jews. And, as the Wehrmacht also refused to take part in the roundups, the Gestapo was essentially left to its own devices.
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In other regions of France the German anti-Jewish drive also ended in mixed results during the last months of 1943, despite the ultra collaborationists’ rise to greater power. In early 1944, the chief of Vichy’s anti-Resistance squads, the Milice, Joseph Darnand, the Gestapo’s man, replaced Bousquet at the head of the French police. And, at the head of the Commissariat Général, Darquier, incompetent and corrupt, was succeeded by the even more incompetent Charles du Paty de Clam, and, shortly thereafter, by yet another outright accomplice of the Germans, Joseph Antignac.

Brunner’s growing frustration led to repeated shows of Gestapo strength in the liquidation of the leadership of French Jewry. As we saw, Baur and several other leaders of UGIF-North had been arrested with their families in the early summer of 1943. In the meantime, in the South, Lambert seemed impervious to the growing threat. “Days go by,” he noted on July 9, “without the events we hoped for having happened…. However, everybody believes that the war will end before the winter. I aspire to it with all my strength, as I doubt whether I shall be able to escape enslavement for more than six months…. Nonetheless some instinct tells me to be confident. I remember how calm I was as a soldier in 1916, during the terrible offensive of April when I underwent my baptism of fire.
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Despite some nervousness, Lambert kept to his routine: much traveling, even some short vacations (two days with his family), and extensive reading (as usual, he noted all titles and wrote some comments about most of the books.) When, on August 17, he was informed of the “huge Russian offensive,” he added: “I believe that we will be in Paris for Christmas.”
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Lambert recorded his last diary entry on August 20, 1943; there he summed up the sharp criticism of the Consistoire people that he had meant to write in 1941: “They preferred their own well-being to uncertainty and to the heroism of fighting…. We [UGIF] chose the heroism of doubt and action, the reality of striving.”
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It sounded strangely like an epitaph.

On August 21 Lambert, his wife, and their four children were arrested and sent to Drancy; on December 7 they were deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Helbronner’s turn followed. On October 28 the Gestapo arrested the president of the Consistoire, Petain’s and Gerlier’s friend, the most thoroughly French of all French Jews. Vichy was immediately informed, and so was Cardinal Gerlier. Helbronner and his wife were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz in transport number 62 that left French territory on November 20, 1943; they were gassed on arrival. Between October 28 and November 20, neither the Vichy authorities nor the head of the French Catholic Church intervened in any way.
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That Pétain did not intervene isn’t astonishing; that Gerlier abstained demonstrates that to the very end the leaders of the French church maintained their ambiguous attitude even toward those French Jews who were the closest to them.

Leo Baeck, Paul Eppstein, David Cohen, and Abraham Asscher, Zwi Koretz, and other Jewish leaders had been deported to Theresienstadt or Bergen Belsen, and most of them survived the war. Why Baur, Lambert, and Helbronner were sent to immediate death in Auschwitz remains unexplained.

As the leaders of French Jewry were being murdered, none of the council heads appointed by the Germans (or by Vichy) at the outset of the war or in the course of the expanding occupation were in office any longer, with the exception of Rumkowski. In a study dealing with former Poland, and comparing a first wave of 146 heads of councils and a second or third one of 101 appointees, historian Aharon Weiss concluded: “Most of the first chairmen managed to defend the interests of their communities. The majority of these [chairmen] were liquidated or removed. The patterns of behavior in the later terms changed greatly. The most striking fact emerging from this summary is the steep rise in submissiveness and yielding of the
Judenräte
to German pressure in the last period. Responsible leaders were replaced, often with German support, by people less attuned to the interests of the community; during the stages of mass extermination and brutal terror they carried out the Nazi orders.”
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Although it is difficult to compare the Jewish leadership in occupied Poland with Jewish leaders in the Reich, the West, the Baltic countries, the Balkans, and the more ephemeral ghettos of the occupied Soviet Union, the correlation between the passage of time and growing submissiveness is substantiated, but not only, so it seems, for the reasons adduced by Weiss. The passage of time meant moving from the predeportation phase to that of systematic deportations and extermination. In other words, while during the earlier phase Jewish leaders were faced with the practical difficulties of survival, albeit under dire circumstances, in the later period they were faced with mass murder. Such would also be the case in 1944 regarding remnants of all Western communities and mainly regarding Hungarian Jewry. There was no Jewish Council in Budapest before March 1944, but no leadership would be more submissive than this first and only batch of appointees.

In fact from the beginning of systematic mass murder, even the Jewish leaders appointed at the outset of the occupation discovered no other way of facing the German demands (except by committing suicide) than delivering the weakest segments of the community (including, of course, the foreigners)
in order to “gain time” and attempt to safeguard the “most valuable” elements
(emphasis added). In Cohen and Asscher’s views, the most valuable Jews were a small group of middle-class Amsterdam Jews; for Helbronner, the most valuable elements were the
French
Jews (the Consistoire should be included in the leadership groups, on par with the UGIF); for Rumkowski, only working—mostly local—Jews would eventually be saved. Once the deportations started, Helbronner and Lambert were as compliant as Cohen and Asscher. Rumkowski, for all practical purposes the first major ghetto leader and the last to stay in office, was possibly more compliant than any of the other leaders, east and west, and the remnants of the Lodz ghetto would “almost” be saved, as we shall see.

In other words compliance was not a function of the time spent as head of council, but rather of the phase during which the head of council negotiated with the Germans. During the extermination phase none of the strategies devised by the councils or any other Jewish leader to counter the German drive did work; larger or smaller numbers of Jews remained alive by pure chance and as a result of entirely independent circumstances: the readiness of local authorities, populations or resistance movements to help, or not. Armed Jewish resistance, as important as it was in symbolic terms, did not save lives but accelerated the rhythm of extermination. The council’s interference with armed resistance, as in Vilna, did not save the community either.