Hitler and the Holocaust (5 page)

Almost simultaneously with the Bolshevik triumph in Russia, the British government (through its foreign secretary, Lord Balfour) issued on 2 November 1917 what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. The announcement that the British government publicly favored “the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” had coincided with the conquest by British troops of Palestine, formerly held by the Ottoman Turks. It laid the foundations for what would officially become the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922 and eventually the State of Israel in 1948. Through the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist movement gained its greatest success yet on the international stage, achieving political recognition by what was then the leading imperial power in the world. Ironically, this anticipation of a restored Jewish statehood for the first time in nearly two thousand years occurred at the same historical moment when unprecedentedly large numbers of Jews were killing one another in the trenches of the First World War. Zionism, however, offered the prospect of a new centripetal force that might yet transcend the centrifugal and disintegrating influences of modernization on traditional Jewish society.

The attitude of Nazis, nationalists, and anti-Semites in Germany and elsewhere to the Zionist experiment was more ambivalent than it was toward Communism. At one level, Zionism could appeal to anti-Semites as a movement that would encourage Jewish emigration. Palestine even appeared to be a convenient dumping ground for unwelcome Jews, in the eyes of the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1939. However, there was also a more sinister view of Zionism as a political tool in the Jewish bid for “world domination,” put forward in the 1920s by Hitler and the leading Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg.
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Thus, Zionism also reinforced anti-Semitic notions of Jewish dual loyalties and fed the conspiracy myth of an insatiable Jewish lust for domination.

After 1918, with the breakup of the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires, the map of Europe changed irrevocably. Independent nation-states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, and the Baltic states emerged or were restored. Most of them contained numerous ethnic and religious minorities as well as sizable Jewish populations. These nations spawned fiercely
exclusivist ethnic nationalisms and increasingly illiberal authoritarian regimes, deeply suspicious of Jews as “outsiders.” Not only were Jews still regarded as “different” and as having group loyalties of their own, but they were seen either as unwelcome economic competitors or as dangerously subversive radicals. In Poland, Romania, and Hungary (which between them contained 4.5 million Jews in the 1930s), harsh quotas were soon introduced to restrict Jewish attendance at universities. Jews found themselves squeezed by government fiscal policy, subject to discrimination in employment, and vulnerable to the effects of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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The subsequent impoverishment of the Jewish masses reinforced the effects of hostile legislation and nourished the increasingly nationalist and anti-Semitic climate that sought to exclude the Jews as much as possible from economic life.

Among the nations in interwar Europe most eager to encourage a massive removal of Jews from their midst was Poland. Biological and racist anti-Semitism of the pseudosci-entific kind was admittedly less prevalent in Catholic Poland than in neighboring Nazi Germany. Equally, violence against the Jews was frowned upon. But once Hitler had come to power in 1933, the mood against Jews in Poland became more bellicose, especially on the nationalist right (among the “National Democrats” or Endecja) and in the ranks of its fascist hooligan offshoots.
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By the late 1930s there were mini-pogroms in the countryside, and “ghetto benches” reserved for Jewish students at Polish universities.
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Worse still, there was a growing competition among Polish politicians to see who could propose a more far-reaching solution to the “Jewish question” whether through economic boycott, social exclusion, legal discrimination, or mass expulsion. In October 1938, the Polish ambassador to Great Britain proposed that Polish Jews be allowed to go to Northern Rhodesia and similar colonies at a rate of one hundred thousand a year; otherwise, he declared, the Polish government would feel itself
“inevitably forced to adopt the same kind of policy as the German government.”

Polish anti-Semitism, despite some similarities, did in fact differ from the Nazi variety in a number of significant ways. In the first place, the “Jewish question” existed in Poland as a genuine minorities problem in an insecure, multiethnic state where in 1931 Poles made up less than 65 percent of the population.
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Furthermore, threatened by such powerful neighbors as Germany and Bolshevik Russia, many Poles developed decidedly paranoid sentiments about ethnically non-Polish groups in their recently restored state, viewing them as a potential fifth column. Jews, who accounted for between one quarter and one third of the population in the large cities of Warsaw, Lódz, Lwow, Cracow, and Lublin, were particularly suspected of disloyalty or indifference to Polish national interests.
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To the nascent Polish middle class, the Jews were dangerous business competitors; in the eyes of the dominant conservative and clerical elites, they were invariably seen as crypto-Bolsheviks; to the peasantry and small traders, they were alien exploiters.
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For the Primate of Poland, Cardinal August Hlond (speaking in 1936), it was allegedly a fact that “Jews oppose the Catholic Church, are steeped in free-thinking, and represent the avant-garde of the atheist movement, the Bolshevik movement and subversive action.” Nor did Cardinal Hlond fail to mention the classic allegation that Jews engaged in “white slavery,” dispensed pornography, committed fraud and usury, as well as undermining Christian morality in general.
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Not only in Poland but also in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and even in Italy in the late 1930s, steps were being taken to restrict Jews in the professions and reduce them to second-class citizenship. This was an ominous sign of things to come. The Jews found themselves increasingly powerless against this pan-European trend to strip them of their hard-won civic and political rights. Massive pressure was building to impose a sweeping
numerus clausus that
would block their educational
and economic opportunities, effectively forcing them to emigrate in large numbers.

The relative feebleness of the Jewish response reflected a long-standing disinclination and inability to act politically in an organized and effective way to defend their vital interests as a group. In the West, the politics of the emancipation contract (and subsequently of assimilation) permitted individual lobbying and philanthropic activity but no self-assertive ethnic politics. The Jewish national movement, which advocated precisely such a course, remained a minority force in the Jewish world, at least until the success of Hitler began to vindicate many Zionist arguments. By then, however, it appeared to be too late to do anything positive beyond desperately organizing a legal (or illegal) immigration to British-controlled Palestine. Decision-making in the Middle East still rested, however, in the hands of a British elite preoccupied with its own considerations of imperial expediency.
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They were faced in Palestine with a well-organized Jewish community, but one which still lacked a sovereign state, army, or clearly agreed set of political objectives. The Palestine Yishuv (Jewish community) was numerically small, economically weak, divided into warring political factions, dependent on British goodwill, and facing a hostile Arab majority.

Even American Jewry, though by 1939 the richest, largest, and strongest Jewish community in the world, was still far from being the organized, vigorous, disciplined, cohesive lobby of the postwar era, able to influence the foreign policy of the U.S. government. On the contrary, it was so lacking in unity or self-confidence and seemingly so cowed by the rise in American anti-Semitism during the Depression years that it was unable to seriously challenge the draconian immigration restrictions that helped to seal the fate of European Jewry.
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Much the same could be said of the smaller Anglo-Jewish community (330,000), even though a few individual Jews did achieve prominence in British public life during the interwar years.
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Equally powerless were the more than three million Polish Jews, despite their organized representation at local and national parliamentary levels in Polish society. Polish Jewry was a microcosm of the wider Jewish world with its turbulent, fractious, ideologically polarized politics—replete with internecine quarrels between right and left, religious and secular, Zionist and anti-Zionist extremes. The “nationality” politics of Polish Jews had little effect in the face of Gentile hostility, though there was an energetic defense against anti-Semitic violence by the Jewish Socialist Bund.
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But whether they were law-abiding or revolutionary, nationalist or integrationist, central and eastern European Jews before 1939 had little chance of warding off the rising anti-Semitic tide. After 1939, the unequal struggle became increasingly hopeless, with one side (the Germans) heavily armed and the other (the Jews) essentially defenseless. This huge disparity in strength, if anything, increased the sadism of the Nazis, who claimed to be fighting against an omnipotent enemy, yet one that was manifestly not equipped to protect itself.

The powerlessness of the Jews was exacerbated after 1939 by the hostility of local populations, especially in eastern Europe, and their readiness to collaborate with the Germans in the “solution to the Jewish question.” This was true even in Poland, which fought the Nazis from the first to the last day of the war, produced no Quislings, and developed the largest resistance movement in Europe. There were some Polish anti-Semites who not only fought against Hitler but even rescued Jews, though this was an act punishable by death. But though the scale of Polish suffering was second only to that of the Jews under Nazi occupation, the Poles, too, were hostile, indifferent, or else committed hideous acts against their Jewish neighbors—as did Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Romanians, Hungarians, and many other Europeans.

Writing in 1944, while hiding on the “Aryan” side of the Warsaw ghetto, the Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblim
bitterly observed: “Last summer, when carts packed with captive Jewish men, women and children moved through the streets of the capital, was it really necessary for laughter from wild mobs to resound from the other side of the ghetto walls … ?”
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Already in October 1940, he had confided to his diary that there were “a considerable number of anti-Semitic elements who collaborated with the Germans in waging war on the Jews.”
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The German-controlled radio, public-loudspeaker system, special exhibitions, brochures, leaflets, and posters spread a message of hate that struck a powerful chord with the local population, already intoxicated by the anti-Semitism of the Polish-language “reptile press.”
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Mordekhai Tenenbaum, commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Bialystok ghetto, was even more critical about Polish behavior as the death trains rolled to Treblinka and other places of slaughter. Had it not been for the passive and active aid of Poles, he maintained, “the Germans would never have been as successful as they were” in locating Jews. “It was the Poles who called out ‘Yid’ at every Jew who escaped from the train transporting him to the gas chambers, it was they who caught these unfortunate wretches and who rejoiced at every misfortune.”
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The Polish Catholic courier Jan Karski, in a report to the Polish government-in-exile, had observed in 1940 that the “Jewish question” was like “a narrow bridge upon which the Germans and a large part of Polish society find themselves in agreement.”
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Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a Catholic member of the Council For Aid to the Jews (Zegota) founded in late 1942, was profoundly shocked by the demoralization created in Polish ranks by the “universal, ominous silence” surrounding the massacre of millions of Jews. She also noted with horror the lack of protests in England, in America, in the international Jewish organizations, and in the Catholic Church, but it was above all for the soul of Poland that she worried. “The compulsory participation of the Polish nation in the bloody spectacle that is taking place on Polish soil can easily breed
indifference to crime, sadism and above all the perilous conviction that it is possible to murder one’s neighbour without punishment.”
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Murder most foul is exactly what the Polish population of Jedwabne (about one hundred kilometers from Bialystok) perpetrated against nearly all of their 1,600 Jewish neighbors on 10 July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. While the Germans looked on and limited themselves to filming the proceedings for propaganda purposes, the Polish villagers slaughtered Jews with axes, poles, knives, and nail-studded clubs. Men had their tongues or eyes cut out, women were raped and murdered, babies were thrown to the ground and trampled to death. Jews, after being savagely beaten, were lined up in the market square and forced to sing that they “had caused the war”; other groups of Jews were forced to undress, sing, dance, and perform “insane exercises” while Polish peasant onlookers, including women and children, applauded. A group of young Jews was ordered to lift a giant statue of Lenin (from the time of the Soviet occupation) and drag it to the Jewish cemetery, where they were promptly butchered. All the remaining Jews, reeling from savage blows, were then forced into a nearby barn, which was set alight with kerosene, so that they burned alive.
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