Hitler and the Holocaust (24 page)

In his study of the subject, Michael Bar-Zohar gives special credit to the efforts of Dimiter Peshev, the vice president of the Bulgarian parliament, who with forty-two MPs pressured the prime minister to save the Jews. He also reveals the intense lobbying by the Bulgarian Jews themselves and the secret action of Belev’s secretary, who warned a leading member of the Jewish community when the first deportations were imminent. As a result of the rescue action, local German officials
became unsure of themselves. The German ambassador in Sofia wrote in June 1943 to his foreign minister that the situation was hopeless: “There is no point in pressing Bulgaria any further to hand over their Jews for deportation because the Bulgarians do not have the same concept and ideas about the Jews as prevail in Germany. The Bulgarians have been accustomed to living for centuries in harmony with their minorities of Turks, Jews, Gypsies, Armenians
etc.
Simply because no distinct differences in characteristics separate them, as in other countries.”
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The Germans soon abandoned their efforts, and not a single native Bulgarian Jew was deported during the war. But the 11,363 Jews living in the newly occupied territories of Macedonia and Thrace were deported by the Germans with the help of Bulgarian police units under their command. The sovereignty of the occupied territories had not yet been determined, and possibly there was not much that King Boris or the Bulgarian state could have done. But unlike the case of Denmark (of which Bulgaria is reminiscent in other respects) there is no evidence of any action planned or undertaken to rescue the Jews of these territories.

Denmark was the one country in Nazi-occupied Europe where the entire Jewish community was saved as a result of massive popular opposition to Nazi policy.
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Although it had been conquered in April 1940, the country was treated by the Nazis as if it were a neutral state, retaining an independent government with which the Germans did not interfere until the fall of 1943. Unlike in neighboring Norway, there were no enthusiastic collaborators organized into a serious fascist or Nazi movement. In contrast to Germany itself, the Lutheran tradition had spawned no significant religious anti-Semitism, and Protestant pastors were in the forefront of protests on behalf of the Jews. Like Bulgaria and Italy, Denmark was relatively immune to Judeophobia, but it did not go through any complex contortions and double-dealing to rescue its Jews. In Denmark, the Germans did not even introduce their ploy of
softening resistance by distinguishing between the 6,400 native Jews and the 1,400 “stateless” refugees from Germany, who had been given asylum before the war.

Not only was the Jewish community in Denmark small, relatively homogeneous, and highly assimilated, it had the good fortune of being in a country where a democratic civic consciousness extended through all of society.
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This seemed to have an influence even on some of the German occupiers themselves, including the military commander, General Hermann von Hannecken. The German plenipotentiary, Dr. Werner Best, also played a somewhat ambiguous role in Denmark after November 1942. Despite his fearsome record as a “desk murderer” and close collaborator of Heydrich, there is evidence that he helped to sabotage Himmler’s orders to deport Danish Jews. No more than 477 out of more than seven thousand Jews were finally rounded up by German troops, who were forbidden by Best to break into Jewish apartments. Jewish leaders, who had been tipped off by Danish government officials about the deportation plan, which had been set for 1 October 1943, communicated the news in the synagogues during New Year services, which allowed just enough time for Jews to go into hiding. Here, too, they were fortunate that their Danish neighbors stood ready to receive them. Through October, the Jews were ferried across the narrow strip of water to neutral Sweden, where even the non-Danish Jews were given permission to work. The Danish fishing fleet helped with the transportation, and the costs were largely borne by wealthy Danish citizens. This generosity stood in stark contrast to conditions in many other countries, where Jews often had to pay extortionately large sums simply to obtain exit permits. The open resistance demonstrated by Denmark to Nazi Jewish policy during the Holocaust was in fact unique, though it was much helped by having an understanding neighbor in Sweden, one by no means immune to anti-Semitism but willing to take in Danish Jews without conditions.
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Finland, too, which categorically refused even to discuss with Nazi officials the deportation of its two thousand Jews, proved that resistance to German demands was feasible. Ironically enough, the Nazis experienced their biggest failure on the “Jewish question” among their Scandinavian “blood brothers.” With rare exceptions, their fellow Nordics proved most unhelpful, whereas all too many of the so-called
Untermenschen
of the east, reviled by the Nazis, collaborated with alacrity in the despoliation and murder of their Jewish neighbors.

Holland shared with the Scandinavian countries a fairly modest level of anti-Semitism (though German Jewish refugees before 1939 had not received especially warm welcomes), and there was widespread hostility to the anti-Jewish measures imposed under the German occupation. Support and assistance for Jews was particularly prevalent among Dutch Calvinists. Equally, Catholic Archbishop de Jonge of Utrecht forbade his constituents to assist Germans in rounding up Jews.
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In February 1941, after widespread arrests of Jews and outbursts against them by the local Nazis, workers called for a general strike in Amsterdam, which lasted for two days. This was the first public demonstration against Nazi Jewish policies anywhere in wartime Europe. But the Nazis were able to crush most of the local Dutch resistance with comparative ease, not least because of the flat, open terrain that made guerrilla warfare unfeasible. The Germans also learned a lesson from the public protests by halting police raids in the streets and subsequently carrying out their persecution of Jews through decrees published in official newspapers. They had Dutch helpers, too. They could, for instance, rely on Anton Mussert’s National Socialist Movement, which was relatively strong in the Netherlands. Though it was not notably anti-Semitic before 1939, it later proved more than willing to help ferret Jews out of their hiding places. Still more important was the assistance given by
the Dutch bureaucracy, with its meticulously precise information about the Jews’ addresses, jobs, and personal backgrounds.

The Dutch police, too, played a crucial and deliberate part in collaborating with the SS in the removal of the Jews. Much of the blame can be attributed to the charismatic wartime superintendent of the Amsterdam police, Sybren Tulp, a fervent admirer of Hitler. Because Amsterdam contained the majority of Holland’s 140,000 Jews (especially after other Dutch Jews were forced to move there in 1942), his influence was especially disastrous.
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Only twenty-five thousand Dutch Jews were able to hide successfully from the police, though this might be regarded as a relatively high figure for a small country without mountains or big forests. Nevertheless, 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported, and less than five thousand returned after the war.
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This was a catastrophe unparalleled in any other western European country, with more than 80 percent of the Dutch Jews ending up in the death camps of Poland. The gullibility of the Dutch Jewish leadership was, unfortunately, a factor in this disaster.

The Dutch Jews had been organized by the Germans into a Joodse Raad (Jewish Council), which published the Nazi anti-Jewish ordinances in its newspaper, distributed yellow badges, and generally enjoyed a “privileged” status. It assisted in deportations, avoided any resistance, and even handed over the names of seven thousand council members to the Germans. The leaders of the Joodse Raad persisted for a long time in believing that only German Jewish refugees or other “foreigners” would actually be deported. Perhaps they simply refused to believe the worst, naïvely trusting in universal respect for the law and something they called “civilization.” Perhaps there was little that they could do to avert the “evil decrees,” but a less benign interpretation would say that, as happened elsewhere, they allowed themselves to become part of the machinery of destruction, with particularly disastrous results.
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In Belgium, the situation of the Jews was different in virtually every respect. Before the war, there had been about ninety thousand Jews, of whom one third were German Jewish refugees, while an even higher number came from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. By the end of 1942, nearly forty thousand Jews had fled (including the most prominent leaders), and there were barely five thousand native-born Belgian Jews among the fifty thousand still remaining in the country.
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The majority of stateless or recently naturalized Jews were easily identifiable, and it was difficult to hide in such a small, highly urbanized, and industrialized country. By the end of 1942, about fifteen thousand of these Jews had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. But when the Germans began to round up native Belgian Jews in 1943, there were public protests, which led to the release of some of the internees. What helped in this and other cases was the attitude of the top German military authorities: Governor General Alexander von Falkenhausen (later involved in the 1944 conspiracy against Hitler) and Brigadier General Eggert Reeder. Both had opposed the imposition of the yellow star in Belgium and successfully restricted the authority of the SS and Gestapo. It was also significant that (unlike in Holland) the Belgian police chose not to cooperate with the Nazis, and railway workers were at times deliberately lax with the deportation trains, permitting some Jews to escape. In Belgium, there were relatively few collaborators with the Germans, except among the Flemish-speaking population. Even the fascist Rexist Party headed by Léon Degrelle (which lost influence after 1939 among the French-speaking Walloons) was much less collaborationist than Mussert’s National Socialist Movement in Holland. As a result of these factors, the death count—about twenty-five thousand Jews in Belgium (44 percent)—was considerably lower than in Holland.
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France, on the other hand, had both the largest Jewish community in western Europe and an indigenous tradition of
anti-Semitism, unrivaled in its literary brilliance by that of any other nation in Europe.
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At the same time, it had been the cradle of European Jewish emancipation—an achievement that remained intact for 150 years until the fall of France in 1940. The Jews of France were already well integrated into French society, culture, and politics under the Third Republic. In the 1930s, however, the earlier climate of tolerance had become frayed, as thousands of refugees (many of them Jewish) entered the country. In 1940, it was estimated that of the 330,000 Jews in France about 195,000 were native French. It is undoubtedly significant that about 50 percent of the foreign Jews were deported to their deaths, as opposed to roughly 10 percent of the
israélites français.
Altogether, eighty thousand persons (one quarter of all French Jews) died in the Holocaust, which was a terrible stain on modern French history but a relatively low body count in the larger European chamber of horrors.

The military debacle of June 1940 and the subsequent German occupation was the prerequisite for the institution of Marshal Pétain’s “national revolution” and the Vichy regime in the southern half of the country. The French government, as a result of the armistice, retained some attributes of sovereignty and in their own zone could limit German intervention on the “Jewish question” and on many other domestic matters. Thus, for example, the yellow star, which had been decreed in the German-occupied zone after 7 June 1942, was not introduced in Vichy.
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On the other hand, the French government did energetically persecute the Jews during the war years; indeed, it passed anti-Semitic laws on its own initiative that were as severe as anything the Germans had yet concocted. This autonomous legislation was based on a homegrown French combination of traditional Catholicism, xenophobia, exclusivist nationalism, and racist assumptions about Jewry.
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The law of 4 October 1940 authorized prefects (as agents of the French state) to intern foreign Jews in “special camps” or to place them under police surveillance
in remote villages. On 7 October 1940, the French state summarily deprived the Jews of Algeria of the French citizenship that they had possessed for seventy years.

The Vichy
statut des Juifs
spoke explicitly about race. It classified persons with only two grandparents “of the Jewish race” as being Jews if they had a Jewish spouse—a definition that was harsher than the existing German legislation. The Vichy government was especially concerned to prevent further immigration of Jewish refugees and to promote the reemigration of those already in France. It was determined that everything foreign, “non-French,” and “unassimilable” had to be driven out of French culture. Already, Vichy laws had sealed off public service and certain professions from those not born of a French father. A quota on Jews in the professions soon followed. There can be no doubt that the Vichy regime was thoroughly permeated by anti-Semitism. It even established a special department for Jewish affairs, headed first by the more traditional conservative Catholic nationalist Xavier Vallat and then by the fanatically racist and anti-Semitic Louis Darquier de Pellepoix.
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It was self-evident for Vallat that Jews were dangerous, unassimilable foreigners “whose implantation tends to form a state within a state.” At the same time, he favored a more moderate “state anti-Semitism” in the tradition of the right-wing
L’Action Française
that would drastically reduce Jewish numbers and influence while avoiding the more extreme positions of the Nazis and the pro-German French collaborationists.