Otto Abetz was the German ambassador to Vichy France during World War II. Abetz was born on March 26, 1903, in Schwetzingen, Baden-Württemberg. His father, an estate manager, died when Abetz was only 13. Matriculating in Karlsruhe, he became an art and biology teacher at a girls’ school, and with an interest in French culture, he founded a Franco-German cultural youth group, the Sohlberg Circle, consisting of a hundred German and French youth from all walks of life.
Abetz joined the Hitler Youth, befriending Joachim von Ribbentrop, and pledged allegiance to the Nazi Party in 1931. In 1932, he married his French secretary, Susanne de Bruyker, and in 1934, the Sohlberg Circle transformed into the Franco-German Committee.
Abetz joined the German Foreign Office in 1935 as a French expert. He only joined the Nazi Party in 1937, the same year he applied for the German Foreign Service. In the latter capacity, as a German representative in Paris, he attended the Munich Conference in September 1938.
In June 1939, Abetz was forced to leave France owing to agitation from the French fascist Cagoulard movement. This was for allegedly bribing two French newspaper editors to publish pro-German articles and for allegedly bribing French foreign minister Georges Bonnet.
Abetz worked as a translator on Adolf Hitler’s team during the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Returning to France in June 1940, Abetz was assigned by Ribbentrop to the German Embassy in Paris, a post he held until July 1944. He was given responsibility for handling political matters in both the occupied and unoccupied zones of France, providing counsel to the German military and the administration of the Paris police. Because there was never a peace treaty between Germany and France—only an armistice—Abetz was not formally accredited as ambassador, but he acted with the full powers of one. In May 1941, he negotiated the Paris Protocols to expand German access to French military facilities.
In August 1940, Abetz was named ambassador to the Vichy government of Philippe Pétain, a position he held for four years. He worked and resided in Paris rather than Vichy and visited the collaborationist capital when he had to deal with Pétain’s government in person. Pétain and his representatives, on the other hand, were not authorized to journey to Paris.
Following a directive from Hitler dated June 30, 1940, Ribbentrop assigned Abetz the project of “safeguarding” all objects of art, public, private, and especially Jewish owned. Abetz informed the Wehrmacht that the embassy had been “charged with the seizure of French works of art . . . and with the listing and seizure of works owned by Jews.” Pétain’s government protested in late October but could not stop the German plunder; by the end of October 1940, so much confiscated material had accumulated at the Louvre that the embassy had to rent outbuildings to house the items prior to their transportation by train to Berlin. Many of the stolen pieces were hung in Abetz’s residence, as well as inside Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office.
Abetz presented a German cultural face to the French by establishing the German Institute in late 1940. Thirty thousand people signed up for the institute’s German language courses, but the concerts featuring Germany’s best musicians, including Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, were much more popular.
Abetz was also head of the French fifth columnists through a special unit established by Ribbentrop. His primary objective was to secure complete collaboration from the French through negotiations with Prime Minister Pierre Laval and Admiral François Darlan. In 1942, Abetz was appointed as SS-Brigadeführer.
Abetz himself held antisemitic beliefs, which was one of the reasons he was recruited, personally, by Adolf Hitler. It was he who proposed deporting stateless Jews to France’s unoccupied zone and from there to extermination camps in the East. He took a large role in the deportation of both foreign Jewish refugees and French-born Jews, especially after Germany occupied southern France in the fall of 1942. On July 2, 1942, Abetz advocated in a telegram for the deportation of 40,000 Jews from France to Auschwitz, claiming that all measures should be taken to remove them within both the occupied and unoccupied zones.
Following the occupation of Vichy on November 11, 1942, Abetz was ordered back to Germany for a year, as his political rivals in the Foreign Ministry were displeased with the influence he had accrued while in France. In 1943, he returned and was reinstated as ambassador in Paris. With the advance of the Allies following the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944, and the resulting retreat of German troops, Abetz fled with Pétain to Sigmaringen, Germany. Dismissed as German ambassador, he retired to his villa in Baden-Baden with his collection of stolen art, gold, and money. He then attempted to go into hiding, but on October 25, 1945, he was arrested in Todtmoos and sent to Paris for trial by a military tribunal.
Abetz denied participating in the murder of French Jews, even though he was aware of the Final Solution while it was happening. In July 1949, he was convicted by a French court for crimes against humanity, especially for his part in the deportation of French Jews from Drancy to Nazi extermination camps. Sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment, he was released on April 17, 1954, from Loos prison, having served only 5 years.
Abetz and his wife died together on May 5, 1958, in Langenfeld, on the Cologne-Ruhr motorway, when his car ran off the road and caught fire. Rumor has it that the car he was driving, which had recent steering damage, was provided to him by a Frenchman as an act of revenge.
AL-HUSSEINI, HAJ AMIN (1895–1974)
Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in what was to become Mandated Palestine. He was born in Jerusalem in 1895, the son of Mufti Tahhir al-Husseini and scion of a family of wealthy landowners claiming direct descent from the grandson of the Prophet. He received his education in an Islamic school; an Ottoman school, where he learned Turkish; and a Catholic school, where he learned French. Sent to Cairo for his higher education, he studied Islamic jurisprudence at Al-Azhar University and then at the Cairo Institute for Propagation and Guidance. He went on to the College of Literature at Cairo University and then the Ottoman School for Administrators in Istanbul, which trained future leaders of the Ottoman Empire. In 1913 he made pilgrimage to Mecca, earning his honorific “Haj.”
Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and mufti of Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine before and during World War II. A passionate antisemite, he became a key ally of Adolf Hitler in endorsing the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, at the same time vetoing attempts to rescue Jews (particularly Jewish children) and trying to convince the Nazis to bomb Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. (Hulton Archive/Keystone/Getty Images)
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he joined the Ottoman army as an artillery officer assigned to Izmir. After the war, he moved to Damascus as a supporter of the Arab Kingdom of Syria, but with the collapse of Hashemite rule in Damascus, he moved back to Jerusalem.
On the death of the mufti of Jerusalem on March 21, 1921, elections were held to choose a successor. Although al-Husseini only came fourth in the votes, the British governor, Sir Herbert Samuel, appointed al-Husseini as the new grand mufti in order to maintain the balance of power between the rival elite Husseini and Nashashibi clans.
Al-Husseini’s preaching of anti-Jewish hatred led to him making a speech on August 23, 1929, which generated riots that killed 133 Jews and wounded 339 more. As a demonstration of his authority, he later played a role in pacifying rioters and reestablishing order.
On March 31, 1933, al-Husseini met with the German consul general in Jerusalem, who advised Berlin that the mufti was an excellent ally in Palestine. He identified that the mufti aimed to terminate Jewish settlement in Palestine and saw that a holy war of Islam, in alliance with Nazi Germany, would remove the Jewish problem everywhere.
In 1936, the Peel Commission arrived in Palestine to investigate the establishment of a two-state solution for the mandate. Arab anger against the proposal resulted in riots against Jews breaking out in Jaffa on April 19, 1936. Before and after these riots, which continued through to 1939, al-Husseini was establishing Nazi connections, and later he indicated that without funding from Germany, the riots could never have been engineered.
By 1937, al-Husseini oversaw a youth group, the Holy Jihad, inspired by the Hitler Youth. British police tried to arrest al-Husseini in July 1937 for his part in the Arab rebellion, but he managed to escape to the sanctuary in the Muslim area on top of the Temple Mount.
Al-Husseini’s lobbying in response to the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt resulted in the British white paper of May 17, 1939, approved by the House of Commons on May 23, 1939. It called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in an independent Palestinian state within 10 years, rejecting the creation of a Jewish state and the partitioning of Palestine. It also limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for 5 years. Additional immigration was to be determined by the Arab majority. This created huge problems for Jews because of their increasing suffering in Nazi Germany since 1933 and the Evian Conference’s failure to find a resolution to the settlement of Jewish refugees.
In a letter of June 21, 1939, to Adolf Hitler, al-Husseini wrote of Arab readiness to rise against the common enemy, Anglo-Jewry, and once war broke out, he went to Iraq and set up his base of operations there on October 13, 1939. On April 3, 1941, he attempted a takeover of the Iraqi government with Nazi support. In the resultant pogrom, 600 Bagdadi Jews were killed, 911 Jewish houses were destroyed, and 586 Jewish businesses ransacked. When Britain suppressed the takeover, al-Husseini blamed the failure of the Nazi takeover on the Jews.
On July 22, 1941, al-Husseini fled to Teheran. After the Allied occupation of Iran on October 8, 1941, and the new Persian government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi severed diplomatic relations with the Axis powers, al-Husseini was taken under Italian protection and smuggled through Turkey to Italy in an operation organized by Italian military intelligence. He arrived in Rome on October 10, 1941.
He then began serious discussions with the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. He secured an agreement with the Italians that in return for Axis recognition of a fascist Arab state encompassing Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan, he would agree to support the war against Britain. The Italian foreign ministry also urged Mussolini to grant al-Husseini 1 million lire.
Over the next few days, al-Husseini drafted a proposed statement of an Arab-Axis cooperative effort by which the Axis powers would recognize the right of the Arabs to deal with Jewish elements in Palestine and approve the elimination of the Jewish National Homeland in Palestine. Mussolini approved the declaration and sent it to the German Embassy in Rome. Al-Husseini was invited to Berlin as a guest of the Nazi regime, which gave him a luxurious home on a fashionable street, a full staff of servants, a chauffeured Mercedes, and a monthly stipend of $10,000. He remained headquartered in Berlin until May 1945. Then on November 28, 1941, he met with Adolf Hitler, concluding afterward that Nazis and Arabs were engaged in the same struggle to exterminate the Jews.
From the mid-1930s, al-Husseini had been friends with the SS officer Adolf Eichmann. When he visited Eichmann’s office at the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942, he was briefed on the Nazis’ Final Solution. His involvement with the Holocaust saw him allegedly visit Auschwitz and Majdanek; he was on close terms with Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess and the commandants of Mauthausen, Theriesenstadt, and Bergen-Belsen. He also organized antisemitic Arab radio propaganda, espionage in the Middle East, and the establishment of the Arab Legion and the Arab Brigade, Muslim military units that fought for the Nazis. He had at his disposal six radio stations (Berlin, Zeissen, Bari, Rome, Tokyo, and Athens), from which he urged Muslims to kill Jews everywhere.
As early as January 1941, the mufti traveled to Bosnia to convince Islamic leaders that a Muslim Waffen-SS division would bring honor and glory to Muslims, claiming that they shared four principles: family, order, the leader, and faith. As many as 100,000 Muslim fighters were thereby recruited and fought for the Nazis.
In January 1942, al-Husseini discussed with German leaders the formation of a German-Arab military unit, and on May 3, 1942, he sought from the Italian and German governments another declaration supporting, among other things, the liquidation of the Jewish national home in Palestine. In consultation with the mufti, Eichmann had created an Einsatzgruppe Ägypten (Einsatzgruppe Egypt), ready to disembark for Palestine.
In July 1942, al-Husseini and the Iraqi Rashid Ali broadcast that it was the duty of Egyptian Muslims to kill the Jews before the Jews killed them, as the Jews were preparing to violate their women, kill their children, and destroy them completely. On December 11, 1942, the mufti urged Arab Muslims to “martyrdom” as allies with the Nazis, as “the spilled blood of martyrs is the water of life.”
In late 1942, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler gave his permission for 10,000 Jewish children to be transferred from Poland to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, with the eventual aim of allowing them to go to Palestine in exchange for German civilian prisoners. The plan was abandoned, however, because of al-Husseini’s protests. In all likelihood, these children were murdered subsequently in Auschwitz.
In a speech delivered to the SS on January 11, 1944, SS leader Heinrich Himmler argued that the bond between Nazism and Islam was built on enduring common values. Inspired by his words, the Waffen-SS Handschar Division went into action in February 1944. The division played a major role in rendering the Balkans Judenrein (Jew-free) in the winter of 1943 to 1944, cutting a path of destruction across the Balkans that encompassed a large number of Catholic parishes, churches, and shrines and that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Catholics as well as all Jews they could find. By the end of the war, al-Husseini’s fanatical soldiers had killed over 90 percent of the Jews in Bosnia.
In the spring of 1943, al-Husseini learned of negotiations between Germany’s Axis partners with Britain, Switzerland, and the International Red Cross to transport 4,000 Jewish children to safety in Palestine. Al-Husseini sought to prevent the rescue operations with protests directed at the Germans and Italians, as well as at the governments of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Demanding that the operations be scuttled, he suggested that the children be sent to Poland, where they would be subject to “stricter control” (exterminated). They were duly sent to a concentration camp, meeting al-Husseini’s demand that they be killed in Poland rather than transported to Palestine.
In September 1943, intense negotiations to rescue another 500 Jewish children from the Arbe concentration camp in Italy collapsed due to an objection from al-Husseini, who blocked their departure to Turkey because they would end up in Palestine.
In 1943, al-Husseini organized a chemical attack on Tel Aviv, but the five parachutists sent on the mission were captured near Jericho before they could complete their task. Their equipment, found by the British, consisted of submachine guns, dynamite, radio equipment, £5,000 cash, a duplicating machine, a German-Arabic dictionary, and enough toxin to kill 250,000 people by poisoning water.
The mufti also tried to convince the Nazis to bomb Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Concerned over the turning tide of war, he wrote to Himmler on June 5, 1944, and July 27, 1944, asking him to do all he could to complete the extermination of the Jews.
After the war, Britain, France, and the United States refused to prosecute the mufti as a war criminal, even though Yugoslavia had placed him on a list of war criminals. He attempted to obtain asylum in Switzerland, but his request was refused. Taken into custody by French occupying troops at Konstanz on May 5, 1945, he was transferred to the Paris region on May 19 and put under house arrest. French authorities hoped that his presence could lead to an improvement in France’s status in the Arab world and accorded him special detention conditions and other benefits as a result. Satisfied with his situation in France, al-Husseini stayed for a full year.
He arrived in Egypt on June 20, 1946, where King Farouk provided him with sanctuary. Even with the fall of Farouk and the rise of Gamal Abdel-Nasser as head of Egypt in 1952, al-Husseini remained safe. His last public appearance came in 1962, when he delivered a speech to the World Islamic Congress. He used this final opportunity to address the world to call for the ethnic cleansing of the Jews.
The grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, died in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1974.
Romanian marshal and dictator Ion Antonescu was born into a Romanian Orthodox military family in Pitesti on June 14, 1882. During his childhood, his father divorced his mother to marry a woman who was a Jewish convert to Romanian Orthodox Christianity. This breakup was traumatic for the young Antonescu, and he disliked his stepmother, identifying her as a femme fatale who had destroyed his parents’ happy marriage.
Antonescu graduated as a captain from Romanian military schools in Craiova in 1902 and Iaşi in 1904. A cavalry lieutenant during the 1907 Peasant Revolt, he fought in the Second Balkan War (June 16, 1913–July 18, 1913). Romania entered World War I in 1916 on the side of France, Britain, and Russia, and Antonescu served as an operations officer. From 1922 to 1927, he was Romanian military attaché in Paris, Brussels, and London. In 1923, he married Rachel Mendel, a Jewish woman, whom he divorced in 1926. He was married to Maria Antonescu from 1928 until his death in 1946. Antonescu was chief of the army general staff in 1933 and 1934.
Ion Antonescu, dictator of Romania from 1940 until August 1944, meets with Hermann Göring in Vienna in 1941. Antonescu’s fascist regime was responsible for the death of more than 250,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews and Roma as a result of its “Romanization” policies, despite the country’s refusal to formally join with Germany in pursuing the latter’s Final Solution. (Library of Congress)
Antonescu was an anticommunist and antisemite who favored British and French political influence and was never a Germanophile. He monitored closely both the flourishing of the Third Reich and the looming threat of the Soviet Union, and he pragmatically favored political association with Germany. Named minister of defense in 1937, he protested King Carol II’s establishment of the Royal Dictatorship and his suppression of the fascistic Legion of Saint Michael (the Iron Guard). Antonescu defended the Iron Guard’s leaders in court, was ousted from government and briefly jailed, and was sent into a kind of internal exile to Kishinev (Chişinău) near the Soviet border.
From June to September 1940, one-third of Romanian territory was partitioned between the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The area occupied by the Soviet Union (Bessarabia) was ceded to Hungary in the summer of 1940. On September 4, 1940, King Carol appointed Antonescu as prime minister with absolute powers, prior to the king abdicating under pressure in favor of his 19-year-old son, Michael. Antonescu’s title, conducator, was the Romanian equivalent of duce or führer, and he used his broad powers to oust the Iron Guard from government in January 1941.
In June 1941, he assigned 14 Romanian divisions to Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. As a reward for reclaiming Romanian lands from the Soviets, Antonescu was proclaimed marshal by the young King Michael on August 23, 1941, during which time he continued to supply the German war effort with troops in exchange for German military favors. Ultimately, Romania lost substantially more men in the war on the Eastern Front than did Italy, while at home Antonescu struggled to control Germany’s appetite for Romania’s oil and agricultural bounty.
On Romania’s Jewish question, Antonescu preferred his own solution to anything dictated by Berlin. He employed policies that officially allowed Jews to emigrate in exchange for payment, or they would face deportation to Romanian-administered work camps in the Ukrainian region of Transnistria. He sent tens of thousands of Jews to their death in Transnistria, and yet he refused to send other Romanian Jews to the death camps in Poland.
Nonetheless, Antonescu’s regime was responsible for the deaths of more than 250,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews and Roma as a result of its “Romanization” policies during 1940 to 1944, despite the country’s refusal to join formally with Germany in pursuing the latter’s Final Solution. Although he was unquestionably an antisemite, ironically more Jews survived under his rule than in any other country within Axis Europe.
Antonescu was deposed by King Michael on August 23, 1944, and turned over to the occupying Soviet forces. His trial for war crimes, held in Bucharest across the period May 4 to 17, 1946, led to his conviction and execution on June 1, 1946.
Viktors Arājs was a Latvian collaborator who participated in the Holocaust during the German occupation of Latvia and Belarus as leader of the Arājs Kommando, a unit that murdered about 26,000 Latvian Jews.
Viktors Bernhard Arājs was born on January 13, 1910, in Baldone, Latvia. His father was a blacksmith, and his mother came from a well-off Baltic German family. Arājs attended Jelgava Gymnasium, which he left in 1930 to undertake his national service in the Latvian army. In 1932, he commenced studying law at the University of Latvia, in Riga. He joined the student fraternity Lettonia, which helped him obtain employment with the Latvian police, and he remained there until he left the service in 1938. Arājs completed his law degree in 1941.
When war between Germany and the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, the Red Army retreated from Riga. Franz Walter Stahlecker, head of the SiPo and Einsatzgruppe A, needed Latvian militia cooperation when conducting pogroms so that locals could be identified with Aktions against the Jews rather than such measures being viewed as wholly German. Stahlecker had already found such assistance in Lithuania through Algirdas Klimaitis; now he sought a Latvian collaborator. A Latvian translator, Hans Dressler, whom Arājs had known in high school and during his army service, introduced Arājs to Stahlecker.
On July 2, 1941, Stahlecker ordered Arājs to instigate a pogrom that had to appear as if it were Latvian in origin, spontaneous, and not associated with the German occupiers. Arājs had earlier taken over an empty police post at 19 Valdemāra Street and had started organizing recruits from his student fraternity and Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross), an ultranationalist, anti-German, and antisemitic political party.
On July 4, 1941, the Germans placed a recruitment notice in the German-controlled Latvian language newspaper Tēvija (Fatherland), stating, “all patriotic Latvians, Pērkonkrusts members, Students, Officers, Militiamen, and Citizens, who are ready to actively take part in the cleansing of our country of undesirable elements” should enroll themselves at the office of the Security Group at 19 Valdemara Street. Pērkonkrusts members, as it turned out, were banned from participating after August 25, 1941, due to what the Germans considered to be an unacceptable level of nationalism.
On July 4, 1941, the Security Group Arājs, known generally as the Arājs Kommando, consisted of some 500 volunteers. They started their Aktion by trapping some 20 Jews in the Riga Synagogue on Gogola Street. There, the Jews were burned alive while hand grenades were thrown through the windows; any who attempted to break out were shot down by Arājs’s adjutant, Herberts Cukurs. Stahlecker filmed and photographed the scene as evidence that the first spontaneous executions of Jews and communists in Latvia were carried out by locals.
After these initial murders, the remainder of the Riga Jews were rounded up and put into ghettos. To make room for the anticipated arrival of German Jews, the remaining Jews in Riga were taken from the ghetto to the Rumbula forest between November 30 and December 8, 1941, and shot. The Arājs Kommando was involved extensively in these mass shootings. It is estimated that they killed at least 26,000 Jews, Roma, and other “undesirables,” first in Latvia and then in Belarus.
The Arājs Kommando was also notorious for its ill-treatment of women. It was known that Viktors Arājs raped a Jewish woman, Zelma Shepshelovitz, during the war; her evidence later served a vital part in his trial.
As the war progressed, Arājs was upgraded to police major in 1942 and then, in 1943, to SS-Sturmbannführer. Before the Soviets returned, Aktions resulted in all Jews under 18 years or over 30 years of age being shot, with the 18- to 30-year-olds being moved to the Stutthof concentration camp. Overall, during the Nazi occupation of Latvia, some 90,000 people were killed in Latvia, including 70,000 Jews and 20,000 Roma.
Until 1949, Arājs, whose paramilitary group was involved in so many killings in Latvia, was held in a British internment camp in Germany. He worked as a driver for the British armed forces under the military government in Delmenhorst and then in the British Zone of Occupation. With assistance from the Latvian government in exile in London, he took on the alias of Victor (Viktors) Zeibots, working in Frankfurt am Main as an assistant at a printing company.
On December 21, 1979, Arājs was found guilty in the State Court of Hamburg. On December 8, 1941, the court determined that he had conducted the Jews of the greater Riga ghetto to their deaths by the mass shootings in the Rumbula forest. For his participation in the murder of 13,000 people, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died on January 13, 1988, in Kassel, Germany, imprisoned in solitary confinement.
Arājs’s adjutant, Herberts Cukurs, was accused of involvement in several killings; in his defense, he claimed that he had worked as head of vehicle maintenance in Arājs’s unit. After the war, he moved to South America and was assassinated by Mossad agents in 1965. Another Latvian involved in the Arājs Kommando killings, Kārlis Lobe, fled to Sweden and remained there until his death in 1985. Yet another Latvian involved in the Arājs Kommando, Konrāds Kalējs, lived in Denmark after the war, then in Australia, and afterward in the United States. In 1984, after attempting to reenter the United States, Kalējs was deported to Australia. The Latvian government opened proceedings against Kalējs in 2000, which were delayed by his ill health. He died in Melbourne in 2001; in a final interview on Australian television, Kalējs admitted his involvement in the killings in Latvia.