Hitler and the Holocaust (22 page)

6

COLLABORATION ACROSS EUROPE

It takes a lot of imagination to find something new. In fact, after the expro priation of real estate, after the deportations and assassinations—all the rest becomes grotesque.… Sometimes there is something diabolic in anti-Semitism, but now, when we don’t swim in blood, we are splashing through muddy, petty theft.

Journal of Mihail Sebastian
, Bucharest, 12 November 1941

Hitler, keep your dirty hands
off our dirty Jews!

Wartime graffiti in Amsterdam

The immediate factors favourable to Jewish rescue during the Holocaust must be placed in the context of the customs and traditions of individual countries. The most pertinent tradition, of course, is the existence or absence of anti-Semitism. For many reasons, modern Italy lacked an anti-Semitic tradition.

SUSAN ZUCCOTTI,
The Italians and the Holocaust
(1987)

T
he Nazi Holocaust had begun on Soviet soil and was directed initially at the three and a half million Jews living there, including the recently annexed Baltic states. One of its most striking features there was its openly public character, so different from the secretive way gassings were later conducted in the death camps of Poland. As the Wehrmacht struck more deeply into the Soviet Union, the Jewish death toll mounted rapidly.
¹
According to Raul Hilberg, by the end of 1943 the Germans had succeeded in killing close to two million Jews within the Soviet Union, mostly by shooting them in pits close to their homes. Only in the Soviet Union did the Germans and their helpers repeatedly shoot down hundreds of thousands of unarmed Jewish men, women, and children in broad daylight. Despite this high visibility, the Soviet regime was not interested in publicizing more than the barest details, as it was determined to cover up the evidence of extensive collaboration with the Nazi invaders by “peaceful Soviet citizens.”

The example of the Ukrainians is particularly pertinent since their “collaboration” with the Germans assumed such a wide-ranging character. In the Ukraine, local police zealously rounded up Jews and herded them into ghettos, isolating them from their neighbors and weakening their physical and psychological resistance. When the mass shootings began in the late summer of 1941, it was they who took Jews to the killing sites, seeing to it that they would not escape. Although the Germans always directed and coordinated the killing of Jews through their regional SS and police leaders, the security police, and units of the mobile order police, recent research has confirmed the vital auxiliary role of the indigenous
local police collaborators (
Schutzmannschaft
).
²
Together with the German gendarmerie, Ukrainian police were not only responsible for the roundups but on occasion participated directly in the pit shootings.

In the Ukraine and western Byelorussia, the
Schutzmannschaft
specialized above all in search-and-kill operations, looking for Jews still hidden in the ghettos or who had fled to the neighboring forests.
³
The local police were especially dangerous since they were often the only people able to clearly identify their former Jewish neighbors. In the areas under German civil administration, more than twenty-five thousand men volunteered in the first few months of the occupation for service in the
Schutzmannschaft.
In the rural districts of the Ukraine and Byelorussia at the time of the 1942 ghetto “liquidations,” these local policemen often outnumbered the German gendarmes by a ratio of more than five to one. Thus not only were the German order police the “willing executioners” in the face-to-face killing process described by Daniel Goldhagen. Indeed, some of the more zealous perpetrators, who sought to win promotion through their prowess as murderers, were later described by eyewitnesses as even more callous toward Jewish women and children than were the Germans themselves.

The local perpetrators included a mixture of nationalist activists, brutal anti-Semites, rank opportunists, former criminals, and simple peasants looking for a more secure source of income. Their motives were equally mixed. Some were primarily influenced by sheer personal greed, others driven by alcoholism, careerism, or peer-group pressure, and others by a vicious anti-Semitism and a burning hatred of the Soviet regime.
⁴
Ukrainians had not, for example, forgotten Stalin’s deliberately induced “terror famine” in their land, which had led to four million deaths in the early 1930s during the forced collectivization of agriculture. Although the Stalinists no more than the Nazis could realistically aim at wiping out all
thirty-six million Ukrainians, both sought to break the back of their tenacious nationalism.
⁵
As had happened elsewhere in eastern Europe, Ukrainian nationalists in the 1930s frequently identified Jews with the hegemonic oppressor—in this case, the Russians. As in Germany, this “Judeo-Bolshevik” amalgam fatally intensified the anti-Semitism woven deep into the fabric of Ukrainian popular consciousness since the seventeenth century—an ethnic and socioeconomic hatred that periodically erupted into bloody pogroms in 1881, 1905, and again during the Russian civil war.
⁶

Collaboration with the Nazi invaders, welcomed by many Ukrainians as a “liberating” force from Soviet Communism and the Jews, was all too common in the early stages of the German occupation. Such cooperation would have assumed much greater proportions were it not for the unbounded racial hubris and folly of the German conquerors, who treated millions of their Ukrainian subjects as if they really were Slavic
Untermenschen
—exploiting and killing them in large numbers.
⁷
Yet in the initial euphoria of the German invasion, there had been no shortage of Ukrainians who seized Jewish possessions and occupied their homes.

In Lithuania, too, the Germans and their local collaborators had begun to murder Jews systematically, almost immediately after the invasion. Reinhard Heydrich’s instructions to the Einsatzgruppen had been to encourage the local population “to act spontaneously” against the Jews. In the event, Lithuanians needed no prompting, such was the zeal and frenzy with which they carried out pogroms. The first killings of 1,500 Jews in Kovno on the night of 25–26 June 1941 were perpetrated by Lithuanians with a bestial savagery that surprised the Germans themselves.
⁸
It was the ultranationalist, anti-Soviet Lithuanian “partisans” who volunteered most eagerly to kill many thousands of Jews in Kovno, Vilna, and the numerous
shtetlach
in the Lithuanian provinces. In these
Aktionen
, they outstripped the Germans both in the scale and intensity
of their involvement and in the number of victims they wiped out. Perhaps as much as two thirds of Lithuanian Jewry were extinguished by local units.

Altogether, more than 90 percent of Lithuanian Jewry was killed in the Holocaust, the highest single death rate for any major Jewish community in Europe. The great majority were murdered very swiftly indeed, in the five months between the end of June and December 1941. None of these horrors would have been possible without what Dina Porat has described as “a fatal combination of Lithuanian motivation and German organisation and thoroughness.”
⁹
She points out that though the Germans provided the framework and “legitimacy” for the killings, Lithuanian national aspirations and hatred for Communism were the fuel driving the murder machine. Feelings that had been bottled up during the oppressive Soviet rule of Lithuania (1940–1941), when its indigenous citizenry saw their independence erased, exploded into a crazed anti-Semitic fury once the Germans arrived. Though they had no pogrom tradition analogous to those of Poland, the Ukraine, Romania, or Russia, Lithuanians proved to be highly proficient in face-to-face killing. Once local police battalions (numbering about 8,500 people) were close to completing their macabre work, some of them were sent to Byelorussia and Poland to continue their murderous activities in small towns, camps, and ghettos. Their members could also be found as guards in death camps such as Treblinka or Majdanek and as auxiliaries assisting General Stroop’s forces in crushing the Warsaw ghetto uprising. As hangmen and sadists, their reputation was second to none.

Croatia stands out as another place where human bestiality became closely allied to fanatical nationalism. The ruling clique under Pavelić required no encouragement from the Germans to kill Jews and even less to murder almost half a million Serbs. Here, too, the German Army was momentarily taken aback (despite its own appalling record in Serbia) by the bloody fury of the Ustashe fascists who had come to
power in April 1941.
¹⁰
For the Croats, the prime enemy remained the Christian Orthodox Serbs, who were designated to be exiled, killed, or returned to Catholicism—allegedly the “true faith of their fathers.” The “new Croatia” did indeed forcibly convert hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Serbs at gunpoint, amply confirming Jonathan Steinberg’s description of it as “the only Axis satellite to have murdered more non-Jewish than Jewish civilians.”
¹¹
Genocide was official, state-directed policy in wartime Croatia, and it did not spare thirty-eight thousand Jews and twenty-seven thousand Gypsies.
¹²
Within three weeks of coming to power, the new regime had passed anti-Jewish race laws that prohibited intermarriage, removed Jews from the civil service and professions, forced them to register their property, marked their stores, and “Aryanized” their capital. Following the example of the Nuremberg Race Laws, Jews were forbidden to employ “Aryan” female servants. Soon, the bulk of Croatian Jews was sent to the notorious Ustashe concentration camps, while seven thousand of them were deported by the Croats at German request.
¹³
In the summer of 1943, Archbishop Stepinac deplored the “inhumane and brutal treatment of non-Aryans during the deportations and at the camps, and even worse, that neither children, old people nor the sick are spared.”
¹⁴
Pavelić did not even respect the human rights of Jewish converts to Catholicism, much to the dismay of Stepinac and an accredited apostolic visitor, Msgr. Marcone.
¹⁵

Romania was another example of primitive, Balkan-style ferocity, where once again, to quote Hannah Arendt, “even the SS were taken aback, and occasionally frightened by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale.”
¹⁶
In the nineteenth century, Romania had rivaled tsarist Russia in its persecution of Jews and intransigent insistence on regarding them as aliens. Under enormous pressure from the Western Allies, it had grudgingly granted citizenship to its Jewish minority after the First World War, a step the Romanian government canceled in December 1937. At
that time, Romania had a very large Jewish population of 750,000. By 1940, several hundred thousand Jews had lost their civil rights, possessions, and jobs. Neither the Romanian government nor the fanatical ultranationalists in the fascist Iron Guard movement needed any prodding from Nazi Germany. Romanian nationalism had become almost synonymous with anti-Semitism and slogans connecting the Jews with Communism, capitalism, and plutocracy fell on fertile soil.
¹⁷
The Iron Guard won 15.5 percent of the vote in the 1937 elections, and the more moderate forces in Romania felt obliged to engage in racist and xenophobic rhetoric simply to keep it in check.
¹⁸
In August 1940, the head of the new Iron Guard dictatorship, Ion Antonescu, declared almost all Romanian Jews stateless (only about ten thousand Jews were exempt), initiating some of the harshest anti-Jewish legislation hitherto seen in Europe. This step prompted Hitler to remark that “Antonescu proceeds in these matters in far more radical fashion than we have done up to the present.”
¹⁹

In January 1941, the Iron Guard carried out a savage pogrom in Bucharest in which 170 Jews were murdered. The following month, Romania entered the war, and its legions were soon involved in horrific massacres of Jews in the east, especially in the Crimea and southern Ukraine. In Odessa alone, Romanian troops butchered about thirty thousand Jews with unsurpassed cruelty. Even after the Iron Guard left the government, the slaughter continued unabated in the summer of 1941. Romanian troops were further used to send thousands of Jews on forced marches into designated killing areas, to drown them in the Dniester, or push them into the German zone of the Ukraine. The deportations of nearly 150,000 Jews to the newly annexed province of Transnistria were especially horrific. The Jews were herded into freight cars and often died of suffocation as the trains traveled through the countryside for days on end. The ghettos and concentration camps in Transnistria were as horrible as anything
in the German Reich. Not surprisingly, three quarters of the Jews in Transnistria perished.

Although Antonescu’s government acted with complete ruthlessness against the nonassimilated and non–Romanian speaking Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina (seized from the Soviet Union in 1941), it was much less inclined to cooperate with German demands to deport to the east the accultu-rated Jews of the Romanian heartland.
²⁰
Antonescu made no secret of his opposition to any encroachment on his national sovereignty. Probably he also felt that Romania had already achieved its territorial ambitions by the autumn of 1942 and was better off disengaging itself from Nazi Germany. His regime had already killed about one quarter of a million of its own Jews, mostly without German assistance. But as the tide of war turned against Germany, Antonescu preferred to hedge his bets, maintaining his channels to the West and gradually distancing himself from Hitler’s “Final Solution.”