Hitler and the Holocaust (26 page)

To no other living statesman did Hitler feel a comparable sense of loyalty or reverence. During the Duce’s visit to
Berlin at the end of September 1937, Hitler had acclaimed his Italian visitor as one of those “lonely men of the ages on whom history is not tested, but who themselves are the makers of history.” Unlike other leading Nazis, Hitler never seemed to fully grasp the ideological gulf separating his own movement and outlook from Mussolini’s fascism, despite many outward similarities. For example, “race” for most Italian fascists was not a biological concept but tended to be synonymous with the nation. Until the mid-1930s, Mussolini treated the Germanic version of “Nordic” racism as pretentious, pseudoscientific nonsense offensive to a sophisticated Mediterranean people. Similarly, he regarded the persecution of the Jews as an embarrassing mark of Nazi “immaturity,” although in his own party he still tolerated fanatic Jew-baiters like Giovanni Preziosi and Roberto Farinacci. In periodic outbursts of anti-German resentment, he could be particularly scathing about Hitler and his quirks. In November 1934, he told the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: “I know Herr Hitler. He is an idiot, a rascal, a fanatical rascal, an insufferable talker. It is a torture to listen to him. You are much stronger than Herr Hitler. When there is no trace left of Hitler, the Jews will still be a great people.”
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The Duce knew perfectly well that the forty-five thousand Jews in Italy were model patriots, thoroughly integrated into Italian society. They had blended easily enough into the Italian population, and they were little different from their neighbors, apart from their religion. Since the Risorgimento in the mid-nineteenth century, Italian Jewry had played a prominent part in economic life (especially banking, business, and insurance), and in journalism, education, the sciences, the arts, and literature. They had produced (despite the small size of the community) two prime ministers, a defense minister, and fifty generals—a record unmatched in Europe. Assimilation was a reality in Italy, not a mere ideology, myth, or self-deception, as it often proved to be elsewhere. There was no “Jewish question” in Italy, and no political anti-Semitism
comparable in severity to that in France, Germany, Austria, or eastern Europe.

The Italian Jewish community did not suffer any serious harassment or persecution for sixteen years after the fascist seizure of power in 1922. Jews, like other Italians, flocked into the fascist movement without encountering any popular opposition. Mussolini himself acknowledged their patriotism, and his official stance was to encourage intermarriage and integration. This was the exact opposite of Nazi policy. Hence, the new race laws of 1938 stunned public opinion and were immediately unpopular, both with the established elites and with ordinary Italians, as well as in the Catholic Church. The legislation was widely seen by many Italians as a somewhat ridiculous kowtowing to Nazi Germany, a pathetic attempt by Mussolini to ideologically and politically align himself with Hitler, though this lack of popular enthusiasm was small consolation for Italian Jewry. Nevertheless, Italian policy continued to deviate considerably from the German pattern. There were numerous exemptions—for example war veterans, Jews decorated for their services to the state, and former members of the Fascist Party, including their parents, grandparents, wives, children, and grandchildren. The “Aryanization” policies in Italy were also far more liberal than those in Germany or Austria. Even more important, the Italians after 1939 defended foreign Jews as well as their own nationals, not only in Italy but also in southern France, Tunisia, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia.
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It is a striking fact that wherever the Italian Army was in occupation during the war years, the Jews did not come to any serious harm.
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For example, when they left France in 1943, the Italian military helped to transport Jewish refugees across the mountains; while in those parts of Yugoslavia occupied by Italy, Jews fleeing from the Croatian Ustashe and the Nazis were helped by Italian soldiers, who were appalled by the atrocities inflicted upon them. Many were taken on Italian Army trains, dressed in military uniforms, and brought to
Italy, where they were concealed. One can hardly fail to notice the chasm separating the ruthless German military, with its rigid discipline, obedience, and clockwork efficiency, from the Italian Army, which, though stunningly ineffective as a fighting force, showed mercy and compassion in many instances. The Wehrmacht and the German Air Force were responsible for the massive destruction of whole cities, small towns, and villages, the uprooting of populations, and repeated cold-blooded murders of Jewish civilians in Russia, the Ukraine, Serbia, and other areas in the east. While the Italian military’s record toward colonial populations was far from exemplary, it often behaved with impeccable humanitarian sensitivity toward Jewish refugees who were complete strangers. As Jonathan Steinberg has pointed out, even stereotypical Italian vices of laziness, corruption, inefficiency, and chaotic indiscipline became virtues in the context of the Holocaust, allowing rules to be constantly bent in the name of common humanity. On the other hand, Prussian military virtues of punctilious order, sense of duty, blind obedience, and rigid perfectionism turned into fearsome tools of destruction when hooked up to the dictates of Hitler’s racial war.
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Mussolini after 1940 was certainly guilty of cooperating fully with Hitler in the prosecution of war. Even before then, he had implemented his own version of anti-Semitism through the Italian educational system, in the press, on the radio, and throughout cultural life. Most Italian Jews were shattered by the shock of their sudden social exclusion, having been robbed of their citizenship and deprived of their livelihoods in a nation that they had served loyally and well. But inexcusable though these actions were, their impact was partially mitigated by the scale of the exemptions, the resourcefulness of the Italian Jews themselves, and the help they received from their neighbors.
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Even Italian government officials and some veteran fascists seemed to be infected by this popular mood and a general unwillingness to toe the
Nazi line. The Germans were well aware of the “lack of zeal” shown by Italian officials in the implementation of anti-Jewish measures. On 13 December 1942, Goebbels noted in his diary: “The Italians are extremely lax in the treatment of Jews. They protect the Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and will not permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David. This shows once again that Fascism does not really dare to get down to fundamentals but is very superficial regarding problems of vital importance.”
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On 23 June 1943, after a conversation with Hitler, Goebbels recorded that the Führer apparently expressed dissatisfaction with the Italians for failing to deal radically with the Jewish question. Mussolini, he reportedly said, was no revolutionary like himself or Stalin. Despite these private criticisms, Hitler’s loyalty to his ally still remained intact.

On 25 July 1943, the Duce was summoned by King Victor Emmanuel III to his villa and arrested. Not long afterward, the Italian Army surrendered to the Allies. Mussolini was nonetheless rescued by the Nazis and set up the Italian Social Republic of Salò in northern Italy. The Duce quickly issued a manifesto declaring Jews to be “enemy aliens” and had an anti-Jewish law passed that dissolved the Jewish communities and charitable institutions and also confiscated their property. German troops invaded Italy, and the SS began to subject Italian Jews to deportation, including the seizure of more than one thousand Jews from Rome in mid-October 1943. This was to be the blackest period in the history of Italian Jewry, when the most fanatical elements in Italian society surfaced to terrorize the Jews, kill partisans, and execute German orders. Some had their hiding places betrayed by Italian citizens, usually motivated by greed. Thousands of Jews were arrested and interned, many ending up in concentration camps near the Austrian border. The most notorious of these camps was established in October 1943 at La Risiera di San Sabba, near Trieste, and had a gas chamber and crematorium.
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About five thousand Jews, as well as Italian antifascists
and Slovenian partisans, were killed there. However, several thousand foreign Jews (and some native Italian Jews as well) who were interned at the Ferramonti-Tarsia concentration camp in southern Italy, occupied by the Allies in 1943, were able to survive the war.

In the spring of 1944, the Germans broke an earlier promise and began transporting Jews from Italy to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Altogether, some eight thousand Jews died as the Holocaust descended upon northern Italy with unexpected force, bringing death and destruction to about 15 percent of Italian Jewry. The casualties would certainly have been far higher without the humanity shown by many ordinary Italians, whether clerics or laypersons, resisters or nonresisters, soldiers or civilians, nominal fascists, liberals, or communists. Jews found hiding places in the cities and the countryside, in the hills and on farms, in convents and monasteries, and a few were even concealed in the Vatican. They were received and spontaneously assisted, despite the risks involved, because they were seen as human beings with an equal right to live. The history of collaboration in the Holocaust was all too often a story of indescribable cruelty, callousness, indifference, and insensitivity. But there were also islands of charity and simple human decency that stand out all the more sharply as testaments of hope in the prevailing darkness.

7

BRITAIN, AMERICA, AND THE HOLOCAUST

Let my death be an energetic cry of protest against the indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people without taking any steps to prevent it.

SHMUEL ZYGELBOYM, Bundist deputy to the exiled Polish National Council in London, shortly before his suicide on 12 May 1943

[The guilt] lies with the Nazis.… But can we escape blame if, having it in our power to do something to save the victims, we fail to take the necessary action, and take it swiftly? … If the British and American Governments were determined to achieve a programme of rescue in some way commensurate with the vastness of the need, they could do it.

GEORGE BELL, BISHOP OF CHICHESTER, 18 May 1943

What have you done to us, you freedom-loving peoples, guardians of justice, defenders of the high principles of democracy and the brotherhood of man? What have you allowed to be perpetrated against a defenseless people while you stood aside and let them bleed to death? … If instead of Jews, thousands of English, American, or Russian women, children, and the aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers—would you have acted in the same way?

DAVID BEN-GURION, speech on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, 10 July 1944

T
he Allied response to the Holocaust has been overladen with charges of “complicity,” “abandonment,” and culpable indifference to the unfolding Jewish tragedy. Some historians have implied that the American and British governments could have saved hundreds of thousands of Jews with a more energetic rescue policy. David Wyman, for example, believes that President Roosevelt, though well informed about the murder of the Jews, was not prepared to take any risks for them and that this indifference was “the worst failure of his presidency.”
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Political expediency largely determined his policy, but like most other Allied decision makers he had only the most superficial understanding of Jewish issues. Roosevelt most probably did not think much about what was happening to the Jews in the midst of the gigantic global confrontation in which the United States was engaged, except when specific Jewish requests were made. Then, the standard answer that the Americans (like the British) gave to such pleas was: the only way to help the Jews is to win the war as swiftly as possible. But while no serious historian would deny that there were strategic realities that limited the chances of rescue, reluctance to help Jews or open doors to them suggested to perpetrators, bystanders, and victims alike that Jews were expendable, an idea that encouraged Hitler in his belief that the world would not seriously obstruct his desire to destroy them.

The criticism directed at the United States (and to a large extent Great Britain) usually contains a triple indictment. First, the American government adopted a highly restrictive immigration policy (which was never modified between 1933 and 1945) and did so in response to racist and xenophobic
pressures in American society, which it was unwilling to seriously confront.
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Second, it refused or obstructed (knowingly in the case of the State Department) German offers of negotiation or other possibilities to remove Jews from Hitler’s clutches. Finally (and again like the British), the U.S. Air Force was unwilling and not instructed to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau or to destroy the extermination facilities within the camp itself.
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Of these indictments, the best documented is the general hostility in the interwar period toward an “alien” influx into American society.
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There is no doubt that the passage of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which set tight quotas by country of origin with a particular bias against eastern and southern Europe, was aimed at excluding as many Jewish, Slavic, and Italian immigrants as possible. Its underlying assumptions of “Nordic supremacy,” while not driven exclusively by anti-Semitism, were analogous to Hitler’s notions of racial purity. A xenophobic climate of opinion in the aftermath of the First World War had favored racist and anti-Semitic organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, which reached the peak of its influence in the 1920s. It was also a decade that witnessed the efforts of automobile millionaire Henry Ford (much admired by the Nazis) to spread his fantastic anti-Semitic theories about a worldwide Jewish conspiracy via the
Dearborn Independent
.
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There were evangelical fundamentalist preachers such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Gerald Winrod who peddled anti-Semitism, as did William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts and Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund in the 1930s.
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As the Great Depression deepened, the receptivity toward such bigotry broadened considerably in America, as evidenced by the impact of Catholic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, who reached an audience of millions with his ranting against the New Deal and the Jews in the late 1930s.
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Particularly worrying for American Jews was the developing link between powerful isolationist currents and anti-Jewish sentiments as the European war approached. In
September 1941 (three months before America’s entry into World War II), the aviator hero Charles Lindbergh—a longstanding admirer of Hitler—made the connection fully explicit. In a notorious speech on behalf of the America First Committee, he warned that Jews should not push the United States into war (they did indeed tend to be strong supporters of intervention) because they would be the first victims.